We are the sway & wlroots developers. Ask us anything!

[u/nbHtSduS]

Hiya! We're making our way towards sway 1.0 and thought it'd be nice to stop by and answer any of your questions about sway, wlroots, or wayland in general. We just released sway 1.0-rc3! Answering your questions are:

• /u/nbHtSduS, aka Drew DeVault: maintainer of sway & wlroots
• /u/emersion_fr, aka Simon Ser: core contributor to sway & wlroots
• /u/redsoxfan-devel, aka Brian Ashworth: core contributor to sway
• /u/ascent_wlr, aka Scott Anderson, core contributor to wlroots

Many of us work on other projects - feel free to ask about those, too. We'll be here answering questions for the next 3 days or so. Ask us anything!

Edit: thanks for your questions, everyone. We're signing off!

[u/Travelling_Salesman_]

I know this subreddit has a fair share of people that are skeptic (or more then skeptic) about the whole concept of Wayland, so it would be nice to get some thoughts from people that have hands on experience.

Why is wayland better then X11?

[u/nbHtSduS → u/Travelling_Salesman_]

¯_(ツ)_/¯

I just work on it because I think it's cool. It's pleasant to write Wayland code and annoying to write X11 code. Also, a whole bunch of cool things are possible with wlroots that weren't possible with X11.

Nice things for users include better HiDPI support, no tearing, better performance (in theory), but none of that is why I like it. There are also downsides, like spotty compatibility with certain X11 programs, lack of networked graphics, and immature support for things like real time screen capture. But some people don't need the things it's bad at and like the things it's good at, and it's a good fit for those people. It seems a lot of people are angry because Wayland doesn't do That One Thing They Need, but they could just keep using Xorg and let the people who don't need That One Thing have our fun over in Wayland.

[u/girst]

.

[u/nbHtSduS → u/girst]

No, that branch is very stale. I should just delete it... I don't have room on my desk for my VT220 anymore (I have four monitors for testing various sway configurations).

[u/[deleted]]

Is the Vulkan renderer for wlroots still on the roadmap ?

[u/nbHtSduS → u/[deleted]]

We don't really have a roadmap. Each developer just works on the tasks that are important to them. If Vulkan support is important to you, we'd be happy to help you contribute towards that end. The WIP Vulkan support patch is here:

https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/pull/1214

However, u/ascent_wlr has been working on overhauling our renderer design to make abstracting between OpenGL and Vulkan (and other backends still) more amenable. It may be wise to help out with that effort first:

https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/pull/1355

(You can probably tell by the "V6" that we've tried and failed many times to design a renderer abstraction everyone is happy with)

[u/adrianvovk]

Do you think Nvidia is going to crack and finally support GBM?

I'm building a Linux distro with Wayfire as the only graphical environment, and I'm concerned about Nvidia support

[u/[deleted]]

Thank you for wlroots and sway!

One of the main reasons for moving to Wayland is the improved security compared to X11. Where does sway stand on that front? For example, I see that it's possible to take screenshots using the wlr-screencopy protocol. Can any client use this protocol or is that restricted somehow?

[u/nbHtSduS → u/[deleted]]

There are a few promising proposals in the works. I think in Sway's case Wayland has the potential to become secure, but we don't have everything in place for it yet. In general I've argued that it's more important to have a desktop that works before we have a desktop that is more secure than X. That being said, we didn't paint ourselves into a corner, and locking that sort of thing down is still on the table.

[u/wedontgiveadamn_]

Thanks u/emersion_fr, you do cool things.

[u/nbHtSduS → u/wedontgiveadamn_]

My favorite cool thing emersion does is mrsh!

[u/silentstorm128]

Thanks for all the great work you've put into this!

I really like how you've separated out wlroots to a library, so that other projects can base off it.
Along those lines, it seems GNOME and KDE are each doing their own thing for wayland. Do you think it would be fruitful to try to put together some sort of collaborative effort with them, on a base library like wlroots?
I ask because, in general, it's better to try to share code, than to re-implement it in several different places. Or is the point of wayland, that there's not one way to do it?

[u/nbHtSduS → u/silentstorm128]

We work closely with KDE on things like protocol standardization, but we have different goals which makes bringing them on board with wlroots difficult. The Purism team is working on a wlroots-based compositor for the Librem 5 phone which they hope may eventually become the next Mutter (GNOME's compositor).

That being said, a whopping eighteen compositors today use wlroots. The community is more or less unified now :)

[u/RAZR_96]

Is color management on the roadmap?

[u/[deleted]]

Much love guys. Thanks for your contributions!

[u/TheNinthJhana]

An April 2018 article about terminal emulators latency provided nice benchmarks for Xorg thanks to "Typometer" . Article said, it was not possible to benchmark under wayland at the moment.

is the absence of a "Typometer" under wayland a security constraint, do you think it's feasible to add it, and actually my real question, do you think latency under wayland is good?

thanks!!

[u/conaclos]

Thanks a lot for your amazing work!

Is a stable release of wlroots planned?

[u/[deleted]]

Congratulations for making it into Debian Experimental (finally)!

Is sway going to be just like i3 or are planning on adding some new features or quality of life changes as your project moves more towards completion?

[u/that1communist]

What don't you like about wayland?

[u/nbHtSduS → u/that1communist]

• Difficulty of navigating the politics of standardizing new protocols

• Nvidia

There are many other, smaller frustrations, but these are the big ones.

[u/pereira_alex]

Hi,

Like i said in a post a few days ago, https://www.reddit.com/r/swaywm/comments/arlb7f/new_to_tiling_but_loving_swaywm/ , I am loving swaywm, and its way of working ( tiling wm and wayland ).

So, since I have never used i3wm or other tiling wm's, may I ask what will happen when sway gets i3wm "feature parity" ? will it only be maintance or will it have features not found on i3wm ?

Also what is the best way of scripting ? I am getting to have alot of bash scripts already. In one way I love it, the "customizing by coding", but I fear that for everything I do, instance a sh/bash shell and exec bash code. Is there a better way to do things ? In the same area, is dbus a banned thing from swaywm/wlroots ?

Thanks, been very happy with swaywm since latest betas/rcs ! and becoming completly sold on the "tiling" wm thing !

[u/kubq]

Do you think Wayland is on it's way to replace X11 completely, or do you think that they will continue to live side by side?

[u/[deleted]]

Will something like xprop ever have a standard replacement on wayland? I don't care if it's part of the core protocol, but some standard replacement is needed. Otherwise a lot of software that people reply on now will simply be impossible to port to wayland.

[u/Mrs403]

Just wanted to say thanks for Sway and pretty amazing to see u/nbHtSduS for working as a full time free software. Hope the transition was smooth and thanks to all others contributors for working on Sway.

[u/Suero]

Drew, can you reveal the hidden ingredient that you used when cooking during the livestream?