The New Redpill for Desktop Minimalism 

Fun fact, I switched to Wayland totally on accident. Moved from Endeavour to Silverblue, didn't even notice that Wayland was the default for like a month. 10/10

Can we just spare a moment to admire the Code Wizards that maintain the beast that is X11. It is only because they have maintained that unwieldy monster for this long that we will eventually be able to leap over to Wayland once it is fully mature.

You upload this video just as I downgraded from 3 monitors down to 1.

Whenever I watch your videos, I am always surprised how similar we Linux minimalists are. I have been using Wayland for 2 years, since the release of SwayWM and then Hyprland and it’s cool now that you have made a video on it by your own. Lovely ❤ Edit: The coolest thing about Hyprland is the native backdrop blur effect just like with i3wm with picom compositor installed on X11. It’s simply amazing!

wayland + hyprland has been a great mix of eye-candy and performance on my gaming system

Speaking as someone who resisted getting win95 until I realized I couldn't play Warcraft II on DOS, I approve.

Very great video, you're a true genius pointing stuff out like this. It's greatly appreciated.

Thank you Kenny for continuing to educate us Windows/Mac plebs about the intricacies of Linux environments. I really appreciate all the effort and research you put into these ✨🙏

تسلسل أفكارك رائع و بحثك ممتاز ... مشكور أخي الكريم

Xfce isn't Wayland-ready yet, the devs just *announced* its initial support for version 4.20. And considering how long it usually takes them to release a new version, one would be better off using something like GNOME, KDE or heavily riced Sway.

I use DEs that have Wayland just for the simple fact that I am a gamer and screen tearing is basically nonexistent on Wayland. I've always had weird issues with getting screen tearing to go away under X11. I'm glad KDE is getting better Wayland support as well since I much prefer that over GNOME personally.

I can't nag the feeling that one day, we'll miss X for its ability to run remote desktop environments. That is, having a thin client and all processing to be done on the server. That is still a thing today and will surely continue to be.

I've never had an issue with x11 other than framerates with multiple monitors. When I switched over to Wayland, I had encountered so many bugs it was unbelievable. I'm gonna keep using X11 until they actually fix their shit

The only thing that I dislike about Wayland is that they are really close to GNOME, and with the same philosophy as them, that their philosophy is the only right one and even the users' ones are wrong, after that, Wayland is practically perfect lol

I switched to Wayland today because of you (well I've been meaning to do this for a while but this was what I needed)

I found this video as I’m decluttering my entire computer. Got tired of seeing the same folders and files scattered everywhere, so I start organizing and deleting. Had autoplay on RU-vid and come to find this gem. Beautiful

I switched from Windows 10 to Arch+dwm and don't look back. I was clinging to Windows because I thought gaming was much more shit on Linux, but actually all the games I like (CSGO, Hades, Factorio, Terraria etc.) run exactly the same (or better, because my RAM and CPU usage is much lower) than on Windows. I'm using proprietary nvidia drivers but my next card will probably be AMD. I think that many people are scared of moving to Linux, because they're scared they will have to sacrifice something. But in my experience I gained a lot switching to Linux and using Windows would now feel limited. There's more software on Linux, it's easier and faster to install. You need some time to learn Linux but it was the same with Windows tbh, except people have been using it for years so they're familiar with it. The only reason not to switch to Linux is if you're a big artist using Photoshop and doing nothing else on their computer.

I've been using Hyprland with Wayland for quite a while now and I love it!

Guy with an old Nvidia mobile card here: Wayland is not in my future for at least a few years (until I upgrade). Even so, I look forward to when I can eventually run Wayland.

Nice to see some Wayland appreciation, I recently switched from dwm using modified larbs config to hyprland. I don't know if it can be called minimalistic as it eats 500MB more ram on startup but I must say that so far (2 months) Wayland didn't give me a single headache and it seems like it's the most "it just works" thing I've encountered on Linux besides AMD drivers. If you're a zoomer like me and you like flashy stuff I would recommend hyprland as well. Configuring it is a pure joy and the fact you don't have to compile it each time you edit stuff and it just realtime refreshes your edits is really helpful. Good video as always

Wayland may be simpler and faster, but I really do like the idea of forwarding X windows remotely as I often do away from home, or even being able to run multiple X servers on multiple monitors in an over-engineered setup of my own design - something no windows user could even _begin_ to imagine. I'm all for minimal software (I use DWM myself) and would love to see a rewrite for X11, but Wayland is cutting out way too many handy features just because _most_ people don't use them. I've already gotten around issues like screen tearing by enabling something-or-other in its config files, so until Wayland develops at least all the same functionality, I'm sticking to 'ol reliable.

Swapped over to daily driving EndeavorOS recently and ended up settling on xfce as a DE. It's customizable without getting in my way. Hell, if I really wanted, I could very easily rice it to look exactly like Win10. Also, multimonitor background spanning actually works.

The lines of code comparison is a bit deceiving. Wayland's code there is just for the protocol stuff and speaking the wire format. The compositors can easily push an extra 50k lines once you include things like wlroots into the count.

I just bought an "old" x1 carbon for cheap and installed arch with hyprland. It fits perfectly and I never miss X11

The jojo meme is spot on: "FOOLS!!!! German Engineering is superior!!!!"

I don't like suckless much. No comments, limiting code size by number of lines, no config files. I don't like that. However that does not mean there isn't good stuff on them. dmenu is their best invention and just fantastic. I just don't think Minimalism should be taken over quality, when it hurts the programs.

You're here Dektop Minimalising while i'm out here desktop Maximalising 💪 Running X though WSL with powertoys and ahk

Hyprland is a great Wayland experience. I've been using it as daily driver for a few weeks now. No complaints!

One thing I bloody hated about Wayland is the forced vsync, and their response was infuriating. They are implementing a protocol for letting me choose to turn it of, so I hold no grunges and forgive their former transgressions against the end user, also bringing HDR and KDE havin global shortcuts means I can make my krita drawings as colorful as I can possibly be

Woo! Finally, Kenny makes a Wayland video! Also, slight correction: Xfwm4 does not run under Wayland, nor do some of XFCE's components. Screenshooter is a big one, and that's due to Wayland preventing screen capture natively (instead requiring an XDP backend).

Just made the switch to Wayland and Sway WM, it feels so good

In their manifest, they state that code complexity is a function of number of lines of code. Code complexity could be caused by other things. Most software isn't written from scratch, therefore abstraction over libraries have to take care of library edge cases. Most programs are not written from a functional perspective so managing state especially underlying state of libraries is difficult. Most systems try to be backward compatible. Some systems are experiments that become popular e.g., PHP and therefore takes a long time before they suck less as they were not developed for the 200 different problems the original dev didn't have. To blame everything on LoC is telling a one-sided story.

The main problem with Wayland is that there's no "xbindkeys" alternative. It sucks a lot not having that.

Wayland is not minimal considering everything is built for X so you have to run an entire X server too just for xwayland compatibility

I partially agree with x11 being bloat. But your comparison is not that good. You can't really compare x11 with wayland in that way because x11 includes a full display server. Wayland is just the IPC protocol, the compositor developers have to write the server

I’ve gone as mouseless as possible. My arm and especially wrist has thanked me. Then I still use my mouse for gaming and so on.

Your video titles, alone, are Top-Tier! Love it.

Graphics is bloat. Just use a tty.

migrated to wayland 7 months ago with hyprland. endured a lot of nasty and obnoxious bugs but also reported them. these last two months i can finally say it's as stable as my bspwm config. since i'm a fullstack dev i also use the mouse a great deal. shoutout to waylanders!

Plasma just had a huge update to improve and officially support wayland and I just switched a few days ago. So far so good.

I just want to take a moment of silence for all the old window managers that are still around that use x11, things like fvwm, icewm, and fluxbox, I have yet to see a wayland implementation that uses those design philosophies.

I agree, & I have the exact the same issues with fluxbox, which is also a minimalist desktop environment, except to wayland support on the horizon whatsoever.

Should be called featureless

I've been using wayland on my laptop for about 3 months and it's worked great!

To be honest, if more and more normie windows laptop users are gonna be switching to linux, wayland is a must have. For example, my sister who is the definition of the casual user, always wants to pinch to zoom, and when i was using xorg, she was surprised it didnt work. And I know there is libinput gestures, but a normie is scared to touch that. One key feature wayland needs to implement is screen sharing in xorg applications. that's usually the biggest concern for people switching to wayland, except those who use an nvidia card.

Man 2GB/128GB gotta be the most linux thing I have ever seen

But there's a catch: Wayland is just a protocol, and to really compare the size of it to X11 you have to take into account also a code necessary to build a full-fledged Wayland compositor.

Read the book "Why Software Sucks" by David Platt

this was a rare factual and well research linux video from mental outlaw

X11 is the only thing holding me back

man, have you ever checked out the source code for some of the suckless projects? something like that becoming the main thing in IT would mean no reusability when new code needs to be written, because seriously they obfuscate their code and dont put comments with the sole purpose of reducing lines of code

Great video! I believe an important distiction is that Wayland itself isn't a display server per say. Xorg is a process itself (display server) to which WM/DE sends signals. Wayland is a collection of patterns to use when developing a display server. Sway is the display server (and compositor).

Talking about better software, I recently realized that Plan9 (an OS written after Unix by the original authors of Unix and the current authors of Docker), sucks less than Unix. In fact, I realized that it is an OS that actually implemented the “everything is a file” philosophy; eg it does not use sockets for networking but files! Not just that, instead of having one view of the file system per machine, Plan9 has a one view per process! A view that can be customized in the shell before running an executable, effectively isolating the process as much or as little as required. The Plan9 design looks like what I thought Linux and Unix were supposed to be. Plan9 has remained a research OS, but it’s open source and it seems simpler and more secure by design. I think we’ll benefit if more people knew about it!

I have been using dwm for years, the one thing keeping me on X11. I would love to use Wayland and sometimes I use it for one game which just runs better on it, but there is no substitute for dwm yet which you can run on Wayland. dwl does not have the same level, among other because it does not come bundled with a panel and systemtraypatch which are essential for me. Once that changes I might switch to dwl. One big limitation of X11 which drives me nuts: it forgets what you copied (ctrl+c) when you close the window, that bug or feature is caused by X11 being developed for server/client relations and not for the desktop.

unironically saying the words "German" and "superiority" in the same sentence could easily get you in demonetized 🤣🤣🤣 be careful lol

Funny enough, this is the first video of yours I'm watching on a wayland WM.

some suckless programs have no config files, are not in most repos, and aren't usuable by default without mods. E.g their terminal emulator had no scrollback for a long time and their irc client cant do encryption which is now standard everywhere.

whats weird is after all this time I knew about gentoo, I just right now was downloading it and flashing it to a usb to test it out on a spare computer right as you uploaded your video

I use arch by the way.

5-10 bugs per 1000 lines of code is probably true because software engineers are not expected to do things in proper manner but rush out products, and prioritize features over good code. This is a mentality throughout industries and why things like Microsoft word takes 10-30 seconds to open up and load a document. It’s a text processor so I can’t imagine why it takes so long honestly. I in my personal projects where I decide the rules very much came to same conclusion as suckless.

0:43 "We are a purely apolitical group"

As much as I love minimalist software, I think suckless is just dogmatic cargo-cult programming. Sure, packing in a bunch of useless features to satisfy the marketing department is bad engineering, but that's no worse than staunch adherence to LOC limits. It's autism for the sake of autism, and doesn't actually have any material improvements to user experience or security. Making user options like "window borders" a compile time constant doesn't confer any benefit, it just forces the user to recompile and precludes configuration via dotfiles. While it's true that fewer features means fewer attack vectors, it's an apples to oranges comparison. If those features are actually required, then the user has to patch them in themselves, thus reintroducing any vulnerabilities, and potentially creating new bugs if the user implements it incorrectly. It's a fair tradeoff for features that are only used by 0.01% of users, or features which are very heavyweight or insecure, but many suckless programs lack very basic functionalities out of the box for seemingly no reason. Regarding minimalism in the general sense, I disagree that it should become the prevailing design paradigm for most software. The average user doesn't care if a feature is present they don't use, but they absolutely do care if a feature they want is missing. The maintenance burden of piecing together a bunch of minimalist tools into a custom environment is beyond the tolerance of the average user... especially if we're talking all computer users and not just linux users. It's difficult to judge where the line between minimalism and bloat lies, but that's the job of good software maintainers. Going full minimalist is just as bad as going full bloat imo. Good engineering lies somewhere in the middle. TLDR: Minimalism is often cope. Suckless tries to spin their lack of features as an intentional design philosophy. They're just offloading their maintenance burden onto their users, and then adopting an air of superiority. This is wack and non-based.

Ditching the mouse isn't a sign of professional, it's a sign of an illness called vim/emacs userbase. The whole concept crumbles when it meets a simple web browser.

XFCE is the real OG of Desktops 💪😎

I’ve used dwl off and on for a couple years; the project itself is great, but the wlroots project it’s built on is a hot mess. They make breaking changes with every single update, every few months, and things are liable to stop working every time. The breaking changes force updates in dwl to use the new interfaces, which in turn means that everyone who maintains a patch has to update it, and users have to go through the entire process of patching their installs all over again. Wlroots really needs to stabilize their interfaces before dwl can be as straightforward to run and update as dwm.

Suckless developers are so great that they created an entire philosophy as an excuse for their inability to write fully featured programs.

Barebones dwm worked slower on my machine than a Guccied out XMonad btw 😸 Also, additional bling is fairly easy to bolt on top of XMonad, too, almost no Haskell knowledge is required. XMonad is the only reason I'm feeling X11-sick, lol

Wayland is not a display server, but a protocol, which defines how display servers (compositors) talk to their clients.

dwl is made possible by the wlroots compositor library, a tremendous andevior that probably required tens of millions of $ in man-hours

Very interesting software; will check it out when I have time. I would definitely love the see Wayland getting more mainstream support, but given how X was the standard for 40 years I guess it will still take some time.

I tried Hyprland with a very limited ability to properly run it (logged in via GDM, which apparently doesn't play nice with this compositor) and was very impressed with its performance. Very little memory footprint for what it's capable of.

Switched over to Wayland on KDE, seems to work fine for everything I use. Although AFAIK some apps might be using xwayland or something like that. One interesting thing: I think there has been some work for allowing some apps to use screen tearing. Sounds crazy, but there is a use case: Competitive games. Some gamers actually prefer to let the screen tear if it means they will see an updated image ever so slightly faster to give them a competitive edge. Depending on the design of the game, it might also mean reduced input latency (especially older games that might be single threaded).

That dev torch hike photo was a nice German touch

I know about 0.4% about linux (almost nothing in another words) But I LOVE IT

The Archwiki's Wayland page has a helpful list of compositors. I really enjoy Hikari.

Gentoo! :D After all these years

i like when kenny reads me the webpage that is on screen

I like wayland, but let's not kid ourselves. that isn't how the average wayland enjoyer looks

one to five per 1000 lines is crazy, I don’t wanna know the hell these guys work in.

I need to be able to read input and output of all programs globally, which while is fine to be disabled by default on wayland, there literally isn't a way to re-enable it. This breaks many things because I need cursors position, keyboard, screens, etc. for a bunch of the programs i use

I have a NVIDIA card in my notebook and even on the OS of my notebook manufacturer, who still prefer X over Wayland at the moment, X sucks hard. It's unreliable. New NVIDIA drivers cause so often the slowdown of X that I need to shutdown some features of my Desktop environment to switch to Wayland. I don't understand why this happens. I only know that this is actually the normal behavior of X and Wayland while using just external monitor and running in Hybrid graphic mode, and that System76 is the only developer who try to fix it. It's so annoying.

Look at those city slickers with their fancy new window system.

Everybody forgets that X is not just a display server. It's EVERYTHING server. Screen, windows, keyboard, mouses, all this stuff. I imagine Wayland thrown all that away and just rendering windows. Is it a seamless process of migrating to Wayland, or I will be fucked because I can't just put that screen right-of that screen and rotate it through xrandr, and my touchpad synaptic drivers will stop work and the only thing I would be forced to use is libinput (which is sucks balls, because it has terrible defaults for my application where I use touchpad as precise and responsive pointer and not a shitty slow "smart"-ass pointer that tries to help grandma instead of just moving cursor where I need it).

The suckless philosophy is missing one crucial detail You can't use a minimalist Linux desktop without donning a cute anime waifu wallpaper That's against the order of nature

Yeah, gave wayland a spin. I did the same thing I did a decade ago, uninstalled it after a few hours. It's still not ready.

Simplicity is not only about how much code a software contains, but also about software architecture. A clean architecture with well defined interfaces, can also be good software despite a huge code base. And then there is technolgy. A Rust written software will be in average always more secure than a software written in C, because 70% of security flaws are memory bugs which in safe-Rust can't happen.

But what will i do with all that free disk space now that the 500GB of xorg dependencies are gone?

Finally the Gentoo Box again

For a project that calls itself "suckless" most of their software sucks a little too much. 😅

If a Threadripper running minimalist isn't the nerd equivalent of an exotic car, I don't know what is

Its a shame the Wayland implementations for Nvidia are so trash at the moment. Hopefully progress continues and I can rely on it for work. One huge drawback you didn't mention is the single only refresh rate for X. A ton of people run mixed refresh rate monitors so the stutters and tears and complete uselessness of X with a mixed refresh rate setup are an absolute deal braker for a huge amount of people that might want to give the Linux ecosystem a go

First Comment from Minimalist

my only beef with wayland as a systems admin is the assumption that we always want display servers to be local. with X you could set up an ssh session somewhere, carry across $DISPLAY and have the exact same application running somewhere else but rendered to your screen. It's not game breaking but its incredibly useful when working with multiple systems, not to mention this also in turn breaks a lot of functionality of remote support software/protocols i think the only people who seem to really give a shit about networked graphics are those in the IT industry, so pulling that away from wayland makes sense but we shouldnt be calling an X killer or X replacement.

I don't even know a word you're saying but still find it interesting Lol

I started using Wayland cuz gnome on X was more stutters than windows, and I’m not going to have windows be smoother! Now I’m on swaywm, my first tilingwm that I fully configured, and I’m loving it

The main issue I have with wayland is how backwards it can be at times. Not to mention how dickish some of the people on the project are

It might me minimal in terms of internal complexity, but it's definitely not minimal in terms of the investment of time and mental effort. If you ever have to so something really difficult, in academia for example, you'll just use whatever works and doesn't waste mental resources.

I've been using wayland on my nvidia gpu laptop for about 4 months now. I use xwayland for gaming applications, but apart from that it runs quite well. There are bugs related to restoring from sleep and screen off states though

Been a gnome on wayland user for about 5 years now. Things mostly work now, but sometimes I run into issues and have to revert to X. Last time I did, it was so I could run an emulator to play some classic Sonic :)

Heck yeah! Keep us posted!