[SOLVED] Weston - simple taskbar ?

ua4000 · 2018-05-21 13:58:34

I followed here the Wayland wiki and installed Weston, also creating a simple weston.ini to launch some few programs.

I start westen with weston-launch, new desktop works fine (xwayland=true), except I'm missing a simple taskbar.
In LXDE I used lxpanel.

Did i miss something in the wiki, or has westen package no simple native taskbar included ?
Is there another minimalist taskbar for wayland/weston out there ?

Thanks!

Last edited by ua4000 (2018-05-22 08:03:50)

seth · 2018-05-21 14:04:44

weston is a minimal implementation of the wayland protocol. Try eg. sway instead.

ua4000 · 2018-05-21 14:22:20

Did I see right, on the project page http://swaywm.org/ there is a short video - sway is only tiling ?
Also I saw no taskbar...

seth · 2018-05-21 14:37:16

sway is basically i3wm, so if you're actually after a "taskbar-taskbar" (not a "panel-taskbar" ;-) then it's probably not what you want.
Atm. you'll probably have to choose bewteen enlightenment and gnome (not sure about the KDE/wayland status)

Edit: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Wa … ompositors

Last edited by seth (2018-05-21 14:38:52)

Trilby · 2018-05-21 14:52:51

Wayland works in a fundamentally different way that X11.

With X11, you run a server, and any number of clients. One of those clients might be a window manager, another might be a panel or taskbar, others would be web browsers, file managers, text editors, etc. You don't really need a window manager to run an X server and any number of other client programs: the taskbar doesn't really need to talk to the window manager, it can just talk to the server. So you can mix and match window managers and taskbars all you want.

In contrast under wayland (AFAIK) things are entirely different. There really is no analog to "window manager". People seem to say that your compositor (like sway, gnome, or enlightenment) is the window manager, but this really doesn't fit. You cannot mix and match: any taskbar under wayland is (and I believe by design must be) part of a compositor. So you can use gnome and get a taskbar, or you can use enlightenment and perhaps get it's taskbar, but you cannot use one compositor for most compositor things and add a separate independent taskbar.

Caveate, that this is based on knowledge gained about wayland quite some time ago. But as I learned about it my reaction was basically "are you f****ing kidding me" and I stopped learning any more.

Last edited by Trilby (2018-05-21 14:53:18)

seth · 2018-05-21 15:10:53

There's the subcompositor API, but I'll chime in my worries about the fraction-prone approach wayland at least seems to have become.
It's not only the high integration of display server, WM and desktop shell, but afaics the compositors increasingly add "proprietary" extensions which are not coherently supported by the client (libraries)
On top of that the mandate over the window decoration (titlebar) side.

X11 has really become the thing that everybody works around, so a more modern protocol (X11 was drafted for an entirely different time, really) is overdue, but right now I increasingly feel wayland is not the final step.
(Just ftr, there have been several approaches to replace X11 over the years. Berlin, Fresco, X12 and Y from the top of my head - they all failed)

ua4000 · 2018-05-22 08:03:39

thanks for the infos!!!

ThePirate42 · 2020-12-11 15:57:05

With wlroots based compositors you can use waybar

Arch Linux

#1 2018-05-21 13:58:34

[SOLVED] Weston - simple taskbar ?

#2 2018-05-21 14:04:44

Re: [SOLVED] Weston - simple taskbar ?

#3 2018-05-21 14:22:20

Re: [SOLVED] Weston - simple taskbar ?

#4 2018-05-21 14:37:16

Re: [SOLVED] Weston - simple taskbar ?

#5 2018-05-21 14:52:51

Re: [SOLVED] Weston - simple taskbar ?

#6 2018-05-21 15:10:53

Re: [SOLVED] Weston - simple taskbar ?

#7 2018-05-22 08:03:39

Re: [SOLVED] Weston - simple taskbar ?

#8 2020-12-11 15:57:05

Re: [SOLVED] Weston - simple taskbar ?

Board footer