Separating the Wayland Compositor and Window Manager
K.4.601 | Day 2 | 14:30 - 14:55 | Speakers: Isaac Freund
Abstract
Current Wayland compositor implementations handle window management and compositing in the same monolithic process. Wayland does not however force this architecture.
I am the author of the river Wayland compositor. It supports a custom Wayland protocol, river-window-management-v1, which allows a special "window manager" Wayland client to handle all window management policy, draw server side decorations, setup keybindings, and more.
My goal with this work is to make hacking on Wayland window managers significantly more accessible and promote ecosystem diversity. There is already a growing list of window managers developed for the new protocol.
This talk will give an overview of this new protocol and the advantages/disadvantages of separating the Wayland compositor and window manager. There will also be a brief demo.
Attachments
Speakers
Hello, I'm Isaac Freund. I create things, the most public of which are currently my free and open source software projects.
My largest project is currently the river Wayland compositor. I also spend significant time on the upstream projects river depends on, I'm a wlroots developer and Zig core team member.
Outside of my software projects I spend my time playing double bass, bass guitar, and clarinet as well as bouldering, hiking, reading, and occasionally writing poetry.
I can be reached by email (PGP key) and can also be found with the username "ifreund" on mastodon and various IRC networks.
The source code for my software projects is hosted on codeberg with mirrors on github and sourcehut.
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External Links
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