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[NixOS] [niri] no bars needed (lemmy.ml)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/unixporn@lemmy.world
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[–] 1 point 5 months ago (4 children)

Sway and River both use wm as part of their URL: swaywm (see https://swaywm.org/) and riverwm (see https://github.com/riverwm). Calling them only one or the other is wrong, they’re both compositors & window managers.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (2 children)

    Yes they do but that's likely a vestigial remnant of X11 naming schemes. I could point out labwc, xfwl, hyprland, dwl, etc for counter examples. Yes compositors manage windows, they are not called window managers by the spec.

    From the Wayland website

    A Wayland server is called a "compositor".

    Additionally, there are compositors that leave window management out of their job description, I believe there are a few but the one I remember most is kiwmi which left window management to lua scripts.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (1 child)

    Honestly I don’t really understand what’s wrong about calling them that, I do prefer calling them compositors as well, but to the untrained eye window manager is much more clear, and it’s the existential goal of a compositor anyway (in most cases at least). Just because a spec sheet doesn’t call a game engine a 3D renderer doesn’t mean a game engine is not a 3D renderer, because unless it only renders 2D, it is also a 3D renderer, if you get what I mean.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    I guess what I'm trying to get at is, a game engine contains a 3D (or 2D) renderer, but that's not its sole focus. There are other projects which are just that, a game engine is a lot of other things too, physics simulator, audio engine, UI framework, etc. A compositor is similar, it's a compositing window manager, a Wayland display server, an input handler, etc. It does far more than manage windows. When we look at X11 all a window manager does is manage windows, composition was a separate application, although sometimes the window manager would handle it, input handling was managed directly by the X server. Basically a Wayland compositor is a compositing window manager, and display server combined into one, it's like a game engine, calling one a 3D renderer is missing out on the vast array of other responsibilities.

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