Stay on X - Sacrifice Nothing

Since wayland has became a new hot and usable thing I've made multiple attempts to switch. Alas, at least for now I'm incompatible with the future.

By Pipe | 2023-11-05

Overview

• Suckmore
• "Clone Wars" or The Tools Suck Too
• Terminal Reality
• What We Do Is Go Back... or do we?

Suckmore

Out of the box dwl window manager, a supposed suckcessor to dwm provides no status bar of it's own. It cannot communicate with any third-party bar either unless you patch it.

dwm-like bars of which there are few have to be patched as well - separately.

As of now, the patch for dwl breaks and I have zero mental power to resolve that issue. So I've continued my search and tried hyprland, sway, and river.

The last one is almost perfect but it does not matter.

"Clone Wars" or The Tools Suck Too

Here are some tools I use on a regular basis:

• urxvt
• dmenu
• xdootool
• sxiv
• setxkbmap
• xcape
• xbindkeys

The issue is that almost every wayland clone is written in some soy language, adds bloat, has design issues or does not exist.

Oh, and did you know your status bar and program launcher need CSS?

Me neither.

Terminal Reality

The situation on the terminal front is bad. You are basically locked between two GPU-accelerated terminals:

• Alacrity
• and Kitty

The only lightweight option at the moment is foot.

Linux is all about choices.

What We Do Is Go Back... or do we?

Here are two entries about one possible solution - use tmux/emacs as a main workspace.

A few years back I've tried to live in Emacs and dabbled a little in tmux. But the truth is most of us nowadays live in the browser. That aside both emacs and tmux lack the greatest feature of dwm - tags.

The better solution is to stay on X and sacrifice nothing.

───

By Pipe | 2023-11-05