Dwl: Dwm for Wayland
77 comments
·July 25, 2025exiguus
IgnaciusMonk
RHEL and friendly clones like Alma linux do run totally without X11 already !! Only wayland. so no need to remove x11 after installing distro. (on some distros it is not even possible, distro will break.) so finally we can have "clean" distros. it can provide nicer experience.
xwiz
Looks like a great project. I'm a big TWM fan, so I would also like to direct attention to my daily driver, Niri. https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri
stevefolta
Another interesting one is Scroll, a scrolling-tiling fork of Sway: https://github.com/dawsers/scroll/
christophilus
Niri has been my daily driver for a while now. It’s excellent and keeps getting better.
aquariusDue
Same here (on Fedora), coupled with Kando (which recently got Niri support) for mouse gestures, shortcuts and macros it's a total powerhouse.
Sadly I can't seem to find a config I like for waybar, if anyone has any tips or dotfiles please share them!
VTimofeenko
I never found a config either and decided to go without any sort of a bar. That was two years ago and seems to be working fine for me.
I wrote a couple of tiny IPC watchers that send notifications on workspace change and whatnot. The rest is handled by centerpiece:
lll-o-lll
Niri is pretty, but I find sway to be faster. Hotkeys and instant switch is just better (for me). I will continue to experiment, but sway feels more productive currently.
the_gipsy
I feel the opposite! Everything just works, and so ever fast!
Babkock
Niri is awesome!
theycallhermax
niri's nice too. I used to daily drive it, but I don't remember why I stopped using it. Nowadays, I just WM hop, I've used Hyprland, labwc, and Pop Shell with GNOME so far, but dwl looks promising to me.
jauntywundrkind
Pretty awesome that this is a 3200 line single .c file implementation, atop wlroots and it's newer scene graph API. It is not hard to build a good Wayland impl at this point!
alex-moon
Big big fan of dwm, but this wasn't mature when I tried it. I switched to Hyprland and I have to say it has many improvements over dwm.
cnity
I wonder if it was considered to submit this as a dwm patch instead.
mort96
An X window manager and a Wayland compositor are so radically different beasts that it would probably require a monumental refactor of DWM to make it capable of having an X back-end and a wlroots back-end. Probably easier to just re-create DWM's interface on top of wlroots, like what Sway did with i3.
Also, DWM has an explicit goal of being minimal and to not grow too big. There's no way in hell that Suckless would accept a patch which makes the code way more complex and over 2x larger to make DWM work as a Wayland compositor.
bravetraveler
Suspect you're right, from Acknowledgements:
dwl began by extending the TinyWL example provided (CC0) by the sway/wlroots developers. This was made possible in many cases by looking at how sway accomplished something, then trying to do the same in as suckless a way as possible.kelvinjps10
[dead]
woodrowbarlow
i think fork was the correct approach -- it was written in such a way that many of the popular dwm patches can be applied cleanly to dwl.
(i used dwl for quite a while. strong recommend.)
arp242
It's not really a fork in any meaningful sense, because rewriting dwm (or any other X11 WM) to Wayland means re-doing almost all code. A "dmw with Wayland" would basically be "if (x11) { x11_code() } else { wayland_code() }".
cnity
> it was written in such a way that many of the popular dwm patches can be applied cleanly to dwl.
That is very nice!
ivanjermakov
Implementation difference is so big that is makes no sense. Also, Wayland support is obviously out of scope for dwm.
epr
I guess people downvoting this don't get the joke?
Philpax
What's the joke?
epr
dwm and the community around it tend to use patches for absolutely everything, unlike most other projects. For most projects/codebases, maintaining patch sets is done for security, customizations, etc., but rarely are users expected to configure their window manager by modifying the source code. dwm is well known for being very minimalist, with many features people would expect from other window managers not being included out of the box. To get something more fully featured, users are meant to cobble together their own version of dwm with multiple patches. I'm not saying this workflow doesn't work for dwm and other suckless software projects, it's just that it's pretty out of the ordinary.
So, having some experience with the project and how different x and wayland are, when I saw this commenter had brought up the idea of making the switch from x to wayland a patch, it made me laugh out loud. The idea of leaning even further into the borderline degenerate amount of patching already done with suckless software to the point where you're practically rewriting the majority of it was very funny, and so I was confused about the downvotes.
gundamdoubleO
Used dwm for so long it was basically the only reason I didn't switch to Wayland. Very happy with dwl since I found it, made the switch (almost) painless.
mosquitobiten
You coul say the switch was suckless.
dannyobrien
See also https://github.com/engstrand-config/dwl-guile -- a fork with Guile Scheme support.
chiffre01
I want to like Wayland...
snvzz
hopefully with utf-8 support?
ivanjermakov
What do you need Unicode for in a WM?
pm215
In an X11 window manager, the classic use case is "printing the title of the window in its titlebar". Programs like Firefox put the current tab's title in the titlebar text, which can have any random unicode in it.
yjftsjthsd-h
Actually, that's an interesting question - in wayland, I think it's common to just say that windows have to draw their own ("client-side window decorations"), so the compositor could just... not handle the window titles at all?
zhengyi13
Window titles come immediately to mind.
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dodomodo
[flagged]
dang
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
dodomodo
I was wrong to word myself the way I did, but my comment is simple not shallow, what I'm trying to say is that the amount of work done is not worth the architectural advantages of Wayland. It's a simple argument that people in the replies didn't fail to understand, but did fail to have a good response too. My real violation of the guidelines is this in my opinion: "Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes."
dang
Thanks for that! I appreciate the guideline swap, and also your original intention.
Btw, it's not uncommon that a commenter (you in this case) will respond to a mod (me in this case) with substantive information that they didn't include in their original comment, which explains what they really meant to say. We call this the 'rebound' phenomenon (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).
It's a pity that the comment doesn't come out this way to begin with! But it's hard to remember that the state in one's head isn't transmitted automatically, and also hard to figure out which bits of it need to be put into a comment. Something about getting resistance (like a mod reply) stimulates this process. Maybe someday we'll figure out how to activate it more proactively.
temp0826
Wayland has been around for 15+ years now and I've been using it daily for probably 10. At this point I have to assume comments like this are unserious.
hodgehog11
Good for you. Meanwhile, many other people have been encountering _serious_ issues for much of those 10 years. This is well documented. Downplaying the issues of other users is a great way to make people dislike the product.
mort96
And I encounter _serious_ issues when I use X. Neither is perfect, but this insistence that Wayland is "not ready" because it doesn't have certain people's pet features ignores the silent majority for whom it just works and works better than X ever did.
This is not me downplaying those issues some people encounter in Wayland. But I think you're sort of doing the opposite.
(And, Wayland is not a "product".)
exiguus
What are this issues beside VNC or ssh -X does not work? Or my Software Y (still) does not support Wayland?
null
zveyaeyv3sfye
Link to any open issue you are encountering so we can discuss it then.
gen2brain
Protocol, maybe, and there was no "Wayland"; there was Gnome and KDE. I was only recently able to try Labwc with LxQt, and I occasionally try to see if there are some improvements because it is not usable currently. The biggest issue is that every implementation is different; there is not even a shared common library. If Xorg developers are now working exclusively on Wayland, when are they going to start programming?
dodomodo
You have to understand that I don't really care about the internals of my DE. The same of true for 95% of Linux users and 99.999% of general computer users, so when I see a huge amount of effort goes into basically seemingly pointless refactoring, instead of tackling issues that are actually important to users, it is disappointing to me. I just installed KDE Manjaro and guess what? It stills uses X, and no one has an answer to what benefit Wayland has for me.
yyyk
Software bitrots. Sometimes it's compiler stuff, sometimes the very usecase changes (few used the network design of X, or server-side fonts, etc. etc.). The way X got no 'attention' (so to speak) made the new technical design (passing away responsibilities) inevitable. It would have just happened slower had Wayland not existed.
simlevesque
Security.
You said you did your research so I have to believe that you don't care about security.
But most people care.
gf000
Well, do you also second guess your surgeon? Why do you think you have enough domain and technical knowledge to consider your "seemingly pointless" to be relevant?
gosub100
> seemingly pointless refactoring, instead of tackling issues that are actually important to users
its not a dichotomy. Xorg was built on X11R6, a platform that was written circa 1993. You cannot "tackle issues important to users" based on an outdated stack. They were painted into numerous corners that only a rewrite would fix.
macawfish
It's probably a distro thing. I'm on a rolling release distro (arch) and I've been using wayland on arch and it's worked great. There are still some things I struggle with, but for ~7 years I've been using wayland without major issue. Things iron themselves out pretty quickly these days when you're using a rolling release distro. This is not so for popos/ubuntu/debian etc.
mystifyingpoi
I don't want to be rude, but "it's worked great" and "still some things I struggle with" need some clarification.
yyyk
X withering away was inevitable once you consider the 'economic' situation - very few people worked on it once the commercial Unix vendors went down. There was little practical enthusiasm for a common layer. Even before Wayland, its role was reduced more and more. Wayland is natural evolution of this where most of the work is offloaded to more resourced Desktop environments and the org mostly sets standards.
o11c
And X11 is all the better now that fewer people are working on it. I don't need new features in my windowing system, I just need it to stay out of my way.
fruitworks
At some point of development, the only way to progress without spiraling complexity is to break backwards compatibility. You might be interested in studying the internals of X11 and wayland to learn more.
In a commercial project like windows, this sort of project is a total no-go. However in a collaborative community project like linux userspace, developers have more freedom to make design decisions in spite of short-term consequences.
>The people that develop Linux desktop are deeply unserio
The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.
-Frank Herbert
Don't take yourself too seriously, it might ruin you!
vlovich123
In a commercial project like Windows this has been done many times - both Windows and MacOS switched to compositing window managers and have done deep surgery under the hood you never see. The difference is that internals can be mandated top down whereas in a bazaar model with lots of casual non interested observers throwing pot shots and no budget to support the work, relying on largely volunteer time, it’s much harder and takes longer to accomplish.
saidinesh5
> on largely volunteer time
Are Linux desktop projects still run mostly by volunteers these days anymore?
The kernel itself is heavily funded by, contributed to by so many large companies. A lot of user space projects are all maintained by companies or maintainers who work for companies like Redhat, Canonical, Suse etc ...
Didn't Wayland itself get popular during Nokia/Intel Meego days? I remember there being automotive compositors, Jolla Phone all using wayland.
asveikau
People do large rewrites that subtly break expectations and need to slowly add back features to get parity with the old thing at Microsoft all the time. Source: I worked there at the end of the 2000s.
Sometimes it's very visible, like they are pushing a new UI framework. Other times it's under the hood, like they changed how a lot of GDI works.
dodomodo
You got it backwards, once you have users, they are your "greatness", if you go to the path of self gratification, are are betraying your users. Of course some times sacrifices have to be made, but you have to understand the graveness of them. I don't like the current state of Windows, but Microsoft won't ever break such a huge portion of applications that run of Windows just for the sake of some refactoring.
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ongy
The core devs were all paid to work on it when I was still active.
Not sure how many of the gnome (mutter) people are paid. Last I checked, the nvidia support was donated by nvidia (paid) for both KDE and Gnome.
I think KDE got some work sponsored by valve (before gamescope), though I'm not quite sure on that.
Overall, outside the sway/wlroots group I was a part of at the time, people generally worked adjacent or directly on wayland for day jobs.
I am a big fan of dwm and have used it for years on all of my Free- and OpenBSD desktops before switching to sway. The suckless people clearly stated that they would not support Wayland on dwm. At the time, I considered sway as the successor to dwm, at least for me, because it already had an ecosystem around it, and its behavior could be configured similarly if it wasn't already. I also took a look at dwl at the time, I think it was three years ago. I am now happy to revisit it.