Xmonad seeking help for Wayland port (2023)

As a FVWM daily driver, it's amazing to see it's has gone from "it's the niftier-than-twm baseline that's installed by default in your 2.0-kernel Slackware or RedHat distro, but you'll probably install something trendy like AfterStep/WindowMaker/Enlightenment" to "It Has Powers That Cannot Be Recreated In The New Magic."

For me, the winning feature is FvwmButtons. Long before we had system trays and notification busses, if you wanted to put a media player, a clock, some stat counters, or a full-blown xterm, in a little desktop dock, you just captured a regular window. You didn't have to invent an entirely new category of "software designed to live as an icon inside someone else's ecosystem." I'm not aware of any compositor that offers anything like it-- it seems like the best we get now are ugly bars with a limited vocabulary of "we can integrate over some signaling bus with these three specific programmes and that's it".

I'll also lament the loss of bold, opinionated design. "Modern" compositors are either minimal to the point of nothingness, or insipid and generic. They don't look like the awesome UIs you'd see in old hacker movies, or the classic systems that were backed by 500 page HCI standards guides, they just look like the sort of UI you'd use in an textbook where you wanted to imply a GUI without anything specifically branded.

> I'll also lament the loss of bold, opinionated design. "Modern" compositors are either minimal to the point of nothingness, or insipid and generic. They don't look like the awesome UIs you'd see in old hacker movies, or the classic systems that were backed by 500 page HCI standards guides, they just look like the sort of UI you'd use in an textbook where you wanted to imply a GUI without anything specifically branded.

On Mastodon I follow a bot that posts screenshots of old Mac Kaleidoscope schemes and the creativity on display both leaves me in awe and makes me sad that no modern windowing system can hold a candle to it. With Kaleidoscope there were no rules. You could do a hacker OS[0], or game UI[1], or titlebars on the left[2] or underneath[3], or non-rectangular and chrome[4], or made of denim[5], and those are just a few of the thousands of wildly different themes[6].

Nothing on modern Linux comes close. Even if you seek out third party themes all you find are dozens of minor permutations on popular flat themes like Material and Nord. It's so dull.

[0]: https://macthemes.garden/themes/24c0f39f11eb-net-ghost/ [1]: https://macthemes.garden/themes/8f7b145a33f3-Millenniac [2]: https://macthemes.garden/themes/95203ae3bfe0-my-sidewyas-os/ [3]: https://macthemes.garden/themes/6da656d65263-modulus/ [4]: https://macthemes.garden/themes/7e008718df3c-dt-chromxium-tw... [5]: https://macthemes.garden/themes/0305d1075f5e-dt-denim/ [6]: https://macthemes.garden/

This reminds me of LiteStep, which was super cool in the 00s, but to be fair, it got boring fast.

Alas, wasn't something like this also possible with enlightenment on Linux? I think there's experimental Wayland support.