 So, I have been using Hyperland now off and on for the last couple of months and it is a good Weyland compositor, or window manager as I prefer to call it. It is probably the most popular Weyland compositor out there right now, and I would say that's by far. Now, the other big one out there is Sway and that was first. It came along, I don't know about first, but it definitely was the most popular one before Hyperland, and a lot of people still use that, but it doesn't feel like it's as big as Hyperland is now. Some of that is because Hyperland is more flashy, some of it is because Sway is more based on I3 than we like to admit, although it's not really based on I3, it's a very confusing situation there, but it's basically a Weyland version of I3. Some of it is because manual Tyler's seem to be less popular than dynamic Tyler's. There's a whole bunch of different reasons why I feel like Hyperland is the Weyland compositor and Sway is kind of like number two. The point of today's video, though, isn't to talk about which one's better or any of that stuff, instead it's to complain and rant like I normally do, and what I want to complain and rant about today is the state of Weyland compositors, and basically the state of Weyland itself. Now, I have ranted and raved about Weyland many times on this channel, I'm well known for it, and I've made a video probably three or four months ago talking about Weyland is ready, but not for everyone. And in that video, I talked about how I still had a lot of problems when it came to content creation on Weyland. Now, a few months removed from that, and a couple of months solid of using Weyland full time, I can finally say that Weyland is ready for me. I think I've even talked about this on a podcast, maybe in a video. I don't even really need to talk about that again because I've talked about it many times before, but needless to say, Weyland is fully functional for me, and my purpose is now. That's great. I can stop complaining about Weyland, I can stop talking about how I'm going to hold on to Xorg until they pry it out of my cold dead fingers. I don't need to make any of those statements anymore. I'm on Weyland and I'm fairly happy now. Am I saying that Weyland is perfect? No, I am definitely not saying that there are still bugs here and there. There are still holes missing that need to be fixed, but from a usability standpoint, Weyland is ready for me. Now I say that while also saying what I'm about to say next, because it is important and both can exist at the same time. Weyland compositors aren't ready. Weyland window managers, if you will, are not ready. Hyperland is fantastic. Like I said, it has a lot of features. It does a really good job of configuration. The developers and the developer, I should say the developer and the team that kind of surrounds it, very, very good, very responsive to both bugs and adding new features. Very, very good. Sway, similarly, I've used it a couple of times. It's basically I3. I've kind of fallen out of love with I3 simply because I've fallen away from manual Tyler's and preferred dynamic, but Sway is a very good window manager. But both of them are buggy, buggy buggy. Here's the thing when it comes to Weyland compositors that I feel that isn't talked about enough. Weyland, unlike Xorg, is a piece of software that requires a lot of tooling to get right into function properly. So you need portals, and you need the compositor, and you need all these little pieces and libraries and stuff that go in to making the experience very, very good. That's why both GNOME and KDE do such a good job of Weyland, but they do it in different ways. So they have adopted Weyland, both of them, full-time as the default thing now, both GNOME and KDE have done so. But they've done so in a different way from each other. They have different ways of supporting the Weyland protocols and the Weyland libraries and whatnot. So if you were to look and understand how they have done that, you would see that they've done so in slightly different ways. Weyland compositors are similar in that fashion is that every compositor has done things in different ways. So HyperLand does things in one way, and Swift does things in another way. Now, they all tend to gravitate around WL routes, or at least the vast majority of the compositors that are out there. But even then, they take WL routes and they do things with it in different ways than the other compositors do. My point is here is that the compositors themselves, because they're all so disparate, I think that's the right word. I just realized that maybe I don't know what that word actually means. I'm just, it seems weird. Anyways, I'll look it up later. I'm sure it's fine. But because they do things in such different ways from each other, their development tracks are completely different. And while the speed there is obviously going to be part of it, like HyperLand seems to develop faster than Swift does, but that's not even the real big thing. The big thing is that because they do things differently, they can't really cooperate and steal things from each other very well. And it means that they're basically starting from scratch. They're doing their own thing. And the biggest takeaway I have from that entire situation is that it leads to the compositors feeling very, very unfinished. It makes them feel beta software. And it's hard to say that when HyperLand is so good as it is. And it's way better than it used to be. But you can't count on a HyperLand update not killing your HyperLand install. You can't count on it because something may happen. Now, the developer is very, very good at fixing those and catching those things. Also, when things pop up, usually it's fixed in the next push, sometimes the exact same day. And usually it's not in game breaking, you know, bugs or whatever there. Like when I first started using HyperLand, one of the things that came down in the Git version was, for some reason, the mouse sensitivity was all off. I filed a bug report, several other people saying, yeah, I got this too. It was fixed within, you know, 20, 30 minutes. It was it was very impressive. But because it's so highly developed, very, very fast, you're going to get those types of bugs a lot. And that's what happens with software that is still very early in its development. It's not BSPWM, which hasn't had very many updates in the last three or four years. There's like, if you go look at the kick, the commits on BSPWM, it's basically completed software. They have like four or five commits in like three years. That's it. DWM was on version 6.1, I think, for like years. Now, they've since updated that several times in like last year, which is very out of character for them. But they don't put a lot of game changing changes in their code. DWM doesn't, you know, awesome. Also still developed, but it's very slow and well regulated and maintained, right? You're not going to see them update things very, very fast. Same thing with Xmonad. You guys get the idea that window managers on the XORG side that have been around for a very long time are very stable, even if they are still well developed on hyperland. Because everything's so new and because things are moving a pace very fast, things tend to break more often. And I think that my biggest takeaway from two months on hyperland is is that I wish there were more. Because when hyperland has a game breaking bug or something that just doesn't isn't working for me, I would love to be able to go use something else when it comes to Wayland. You know, right now, there are three things on Wayland that I can use. OK, there's hyperland, there's Sway and there's Qtiles Wayland version. Both all three of those things work. OK, on open suzer for whatever reason, on my install of open suzer, at least Sway is. Halfway functional. It does some really weird things. And besides, I'm not big on the manual tiling space any longer. So Sway is kind of out of it. Qtile is buggy on the XORG side. A lot of the times they break stuff constantly because it's based on Python. A lot of the Python stuff changes. They add a lot of stuff to the bars. They make changes to the bar, all the stuff. It's not uncommon for the XORG version of Qtile to break during after an update. It's even more so on the Wayland side. Things are changing there quite often as well. And there's a lot. They have if you go to the GitHub page for Qtile and search for their Wayland core, you'll find that they have a ton of to-do lists and a ton of bugs reported there, which is good because you need to report those bugs, but they have a long way to go before that's really stable. And that's kind of my point is that the Wayland stuff of the compositors that exist are still very much in their early days. I think a year from now, two years from now, we're going to look back on this video and say, you know, Matt, you complained about nothing as usual. And, you know, you should have just been more patient. And really, that's what's going to be required here. Is that we're going to, if you're in my position, you're going to require more patience or I'm going to require more patience in this case. I guess eventually the compositors that are around will become more stable. Eventually there will be more compositors. You know, as we go along this Wayland ride, you know, 10 years from now, there'll probably be 20 compositors that we can choose from. Hopefully by that time we'll call them window managers, but you know, whatever, right? So I think that in time, my complaints that I have right now about hyperland and sway and cutile will be resolved. Things will become more stable. There'll be more options for when you do have to move away from one. Now I will 100% fess up. And you guys have heard me talk about this in a video that I like to window manager hop a lot. So it's not unusual for me when I'm bored or having an ADD attack to move between three or four different window managers in a day. Not normal behavior for anyone, right? So I understand when I talk about this stuff that my perspective on this isn't the same perspective that everybody else has, but I do think that people who come along and use hyperland or sway or cutile Wayland for the first time and they experience problems. They're experiencing just a small slice of what it is to use those things for a long period of time because those problems do keep popping up. They're usually different problems, but things do happen. So like, for example, right now, I'm having this problem where when I wake my computer up from sleep, if my external hard drive decides to spool up, the whole thing, the whole hyperland system just completely freezes after I after I disable sway lock. Don't know what's going on there. If I wait for the hyper for the hard drive to spool up and just kind of steady out and then unlock the machine, it works fine. Now, I've said I've sent in the bug reports and all that stuff and it's there, but or at least I commented on someone who's having the same problem. And, you know, it's just those kind of little things that pop up from time to time as hyperland is developed. Things break. And that's fine. It's there's not. I know a lot of this is coming across as me bashing hyperland. I'm not hyperlands. Fantastic. And I think that the developer does a fantastic job of fixing the bugs as they pop up. But it is a project that is developed so fast and is still fairly small in terms of developer resources, like Vaxry seems to do basically everything himself. There's a few people to help, but he does all the commits and he's like the big kahuna there, right? And because that's true, you know, it's kind of hard to keep up with something that is that big and is moving that fast. And when that's that's true, it just means that things break a lot more often than what you'd hope them to be in this current situation. When it comes to Wayland itself, Katie and GNOME are 100 percent ready. I'm I'm at the point where I say for the vast majority of people, Wayland on Katie and GNOME are ready, even if you're using Nvidia. Now, I'm not saying that on outside cases, things are perfect or even on regular cases, things are perfect. So even on an all AMD system, I still have some problems with the portal and KDE plasma, where for whatever reason, OBS won't select one of my monitors and I have to restart the portal. It happens. There are certain situations where games don't play as well on Wayland because of ex-Wayland bugs and stuff like that as they did on Xorg. So there are situations where Wayland on those two aren't as isn't as ready as, you know, some people say they are. But I think that for the vast majority of people, they're there. Now, I know that some people still have experiences where it's not ready. So me generalizing and saying that it's ready for everyone, it's it's not going to include actually everyone. There's still quite a few people that are do have problems with it because they have specialized hardware or they have, you know, the accessibility thing is still a big, big deal on Wayland. It's just not there yet. Hopefully it will get there. But if you have accessibility tools that you use and all that stuff is available on Xorg, but it's not available or working on Wayland, you know, it's not ready for you. And that's a problem that they're going to have to fix. But for a lot, you know, a lot of people at Wayland is much more ready today than it was a year ago or two years ago. And I think that that's great. But in terms of compositors, it's still very, very early days, even though Hyperland is very good and it does a lot of stuff spectacularly right. And it's very pretty and has a lot of shiny bells and whistles that just kind of speak to the nerd in you. It's not a piece of software that you can say, you know, that's going to work 100 percent of the time and I can rely on it as a daily driver, you know, I mean, you can, of course, do that. You can say that, but you're going to know in your head that somewhere along the line of an update is going to cause something to go a little sideways, whether that's, you know, game breaking or not, you know, it may or may not be. But you as you use Hyperland more and more, I think that most people who have this, who use it, have this experience as you use it for the longer you use it, the more you experience things every once in a while, just breaking. Now they get fixed very, very fast. And like I said, the developer does a very good job of finding those and fixing those things. But because it's developed in such a fast pace, things break, things get fixed, things change a lot. You can pull Hyperland down several times a day from the get repository and build it. And it's kind of, it's going to have several commits every time you do that. It's kind of like using Arch Linux as a distro. You can do an update three or four times a day, basically, is what I'm saying. So for me personally, Wayland compositors are the sticking point when it comes to Wayland because I'm a window manager guy, but I just am. I prefer tiling window managers. I have, I'm very particular in how my window managers work. I've come to adore dynamic tiling window managers over manual Tyler tiling window managers is just the way that I like to do things. I have certain specific requirements about how my workspaces work on multi monitor setups. So I'm very picky. And honestly, if Hyperland was very, very stable, it'd be damn near perfect for me now because they've instituted a way to make the workspaces work that they want to work. I've got scratch pads working the way that I want them to work. I wish the bar situation on Wayland was better. I know that there are a few different bars. So there's a couple that are based on GTK. There's Waybar, which I also actually think this is based on GTK. I might be wrong about that, but there's Waybar, which seems to be the most popular. There's EWW, which I've still never managed to get my head wrapped around. You know, there's a few bars available for Wayland compositors. None of them are the best, I would say. I'm trying to be nice about it. Waybar seems to be the one that I've settled on. It's the one that I've kind of gotten my head wrapped around and that I can actually do. It got me back into learning some CSS, which I've abandoned for about 15 years or so. And, oh boy, if you if you take 15 years away from a coding language that moves like CSS does, you're going to lose a lot of stuff. I learned that CSS has changed a lot in the last 15 years. I didn't and I didn't even realize it. Now, a lot of the stuff is still there. Like you can still links are still the same. But a lot of the other stuff has changed. Like I was a little lost. So it took me a while to get Waybar, you know, the way that I wanted to do. But none of them are like if you're going to use BSPWM, you have options for bars, but you're probably going to go with Polybar. And Polybar is old hat. It's been around for a very long time. It's very stable. If you're using it, you know what you're going to get into the configuration files. Very user friendly, very human readable. It has a ton of modules. If you doesn't have a module that you're looking for, it's very easy to create a module. When I came to a Waylon compositor and saw Waybar, I assumed and I thought that it was going to be very similar to Polybar, but it's not. It's really not. It does have some similarities, but the configuration file itself is done in JSON, which is JSON is a really weird thing where everything is in quotation marks. I don't understand why everything is in quotation marks, because if everything is in quotation marks, then nothing needs to be in quotation marks. It's like, I don't even know what a good metaphor for that is. But if you put everything in quotation marks, then nothing else needs to be in quotation marks, because you can just assume that's in quotation marks. I'm assuming that there's a technological reason behind why everything in JSON has to be in quotes, but I don't know what that is. And until I do, I suppose I can just continue to complain about it. But it's it's a weird situation to have when everything is in quotation marks. And it just, it kind of looks like a Polybar configuration file because it has, you know, it has your module section. You can, you know, has some setting sections, but it's also quite different because it's an actual programming language because, you know, it's JSON or whatever. I don't even know if you consider that programming language, but whatever. It's just kind of like that. Right. And then the styling is all done in a separate file, which is all CSS. So maybe the CSS is why they prefer to have their configuration file in JSON. I don't actually know. But, you know, they're kind of separate. And whereas Polybars all in one file, or you can source them obviously, but it's all user. You know, my point is, is that I went into Weyland compositors and had this expectation that there'd be some bars that were at least equivalent to what Polybar is. And in terms of bars on Weyland, you're kind of in the same situation as you are in compositors. A lot of these things are still fairly early days. They're still being developed and they still have very, how should I say this, opinionated ways of doing their own things. Right. They all do things in a different way. They, none of them decided that they were just going to do the transition Polybar over into being a Weyland supported thing. Right. They didn't just take Polybar fork it and make it Weyland. I wish they would have done that because that would have been cool. Right. Would have all had all the modules and stuff that that you wouldn't had to start over from scratch, but it seems to be in traditional Linux fashion. Everybody decided they're just going to basically start over from scratch. So bars on Weyland compositors are also another thing that I had to ran about. So now that we're about 20 minutes into this, you guys can see that I have thoughts on Weyland still. I know that I disappointed a lot of people when I said I'm switching from Xorg to Weyland. I'm abandoning my stance of being Xorg only until I die. And, you know, I disappointed a lot of people when I when I transitioned over to Weyland, but I wanted to give it a full try. And I'm at the point now where, you know, I'm on Hyperland right now. You guys have been seeing B roll throughout this video and it works fairly well, but there are pain points there that don't exist on the Weyland window managers. But the reason why that's the case and this is the overall part point of this is that the Xorg stuff has been around for a very long time and it has, you know, people have been drowning away with it with sandpaper and it's very, very smooth and, you know, you just smooth sailing and the Weyland compositor stuff just not there yet. It's going to get there. It will get there, but I'm the least patient person in the world. I want to be ready now. Just please. I need to have things not be buggy. That's what I really want. So that's why I've been romancing KD Plasma lately. I'm going to do a long term review of Plasma 6 that should be posted here in the next couple of weeks. So that's in addition, but I wanted to try I wanted to try Weyland again on Plasma because I've heard that they did a lot of work there to make it more stable and they have. And if you are someone who wants to switch to Weyland and you want stability as much as possible, the desktop environment route is probably the way to go. So that's it for this video. If you have thoughts on this whole rambly nonsense that I just put out on video for the last 20 minutes, you can leave those in the comment section below. I'd love to hear from you. You can follow me on Massadon or Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon or Kofi or YouTube. All those links will also be on in the video description as well. Patreon is patreon.com slash the Linux cast or you can head on over to the store where I have a whole bunch of awesome merchandise, including desk mats and hats and hoodies and stickers and t-shirts and all sorts of stuff. That's all available to shop. The next cast or actually it's available at shop. The next cast or not the shop shop. The next cast or I'll put that as is a little thing here right here. So you guys can actually see what I'm supposed to be saying instead of what I've actually said. So that's it for this one. Thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon and YouTube. You guys are all absolutely amazing without you. The channel just went on many, many, many near where it is right now. My words always abandon me when the Patreon thing comes up. I don't know why. Anyways, thanks for everybody who does support me on Patreon and YouTube. You guys are awesome without you. The channel just would not be going as it now. So thanks again much for your support. I truly do appreciate it. Thanks to thanks for everybody for watching. I'll see you next time. I hope you have a wonderful week.