I’ve been using hyprland and it’s nice! I want something more customizable but with nice animations as well, and a good documentation to understand it.
Thanks in advance! 
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Hyprland is probably your best chance at the moment for a Wayland Compositor. There’s a list of the others at https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Wayland#Compositors
X11 has by far way more, mostly due to age and less complexity in writing them. Another Arch wiki link: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Window_manager#List_of_window_managers
More customizable? Than hyprland? With nice animations?
I’m not sure if that exists… Hyprland is pretty peak when it comes to customizable and nice animations… It’s also exceptionally well documented imo for a project that’s so constantly evolving it’s documentation is kept up to date very well.
Maybe you could try wayfire… It’s the only candidate I can think of that ticks both customization and animation boxes.
On X11 you won’t find anything with animations as nice as hyprland unless it’s kde or gnome, but they’re less customizable.
Thanks! I’ll try it
You might want to try Sway. Much more stable than hyprland with less catchy effects.
I wrote a few articles on Sway just in case 
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Thanks!
I have transitioned from X11 vs Wayland mentality and seeking to “get rid of X11 since it’s going away” (as I supposedly thought) to understanding that it’s not a competition in the way that it is often presented.
Xorg has been working with and embracing Wayland since 2014.
https://www.x.org/wiki/Other/Press/CFP2016/
https://wayland.freedesktop.org/docs/html/ch05.html
Xorg transitioned to modules
https://www.x.org/wiki/ModuleDescriptions/
Freedesktop.org is part of Xorg
Wayland is part of the xserver, xorg-xwayland is part of the transition path.
So much hype and drama with wayland and xorg. Great for clicks on youtube, but in reality this is simply a routine transition to improved windowing. Key points:
-
Wayland is not an enemy of xorg, xserver supports wayland
https://wayland.freedesktop.org/docs/html/ch05.html
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/tree/xwayland-24.1?ref_type=heads
freedesktop.org is part of xorg and embraces wayland as a growing part of the ecosystem.
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/ -
Wayland was started in 2008. Over 15 years later, the transition is still in progress.
-
Two things are happening simultaneously:
- Major window manager (e.g. Mutter and KWin) teams have the resources to use Wayland and flush out issues. This has been happening for over a decade.
- Lightweight window managers, especially those that are actively developed will run on xwayland if not already. This provides them a current path to stay on X11 while running on wayland and they can transition more fully to wayland gradually. E.g. pekwm (and others) may already run fairly well on xorg-xwayland (I think that I observed this myself recently, because I was running Sway then I installed pekwm and it may have automatically used xorg-xwayland since it was already the “active X layer”. I encourage others to look into this. inxi -Fxxxrz showed that xwayland [not xorg] was running my X11 window manager! [pekwm])
Bottom line: If you have a favorite window manager in X11, especially one that is actively developed, stay with it! It has a path to wayland and may already run on wayland using xwayland! xorg is still more mature than wayland, the lighter weight window managers will follow suit and integrate more directly with wayland while some parts of them use xwayland! They are not going away, and this is the fallacy that people can be relieved of!
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Technically not WM but do include one along with a easy to use system that is sort of familar (KWIN is KDEs WM and I think Mutter for GNOME but I could be thinking of something else)
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It is indeed not a competition, the simple thing is, X was mostly unmaintained for years, so some people made Wayland. They have done an absolutely terrible job, they are still doing a terrible job, their whole justification for wayland existing was “X is old and outdated, so we need smth new” and now that wayland has been around longer than X had when wayland was created, and wayland is still, ultimately, when you tally it all up; inferior to X…
It’s easy to laugh at wayland.
But ultimately the problem remains the same, X is almost completely unmaintained, Wayland is poorly designed to such an extreme degree that I cannot actually think of another software with worse design at all… But it is maintained.
X, meanwhile, hasn’t been maintained for like a decade at least, but is still superior in almost every imaginable way to wayland, which is why people are still using it even if it is unmaintained.
I think, if someone went and took a year or two to rewrite X from the ground up, but still staying mostly true to the original X’s design (just up to date), people would abandon wayland in droves instantly for it. Especially if it maintained backwards compatibility with X.
But that’s unfortunately not happening.
So wayland is the future that’s semi enforced on us (I say semi because nothing is stopping any of us from stepping up and making a proper X replacement; but you aren’t doing it, I’m not doing it, so here we are. Well, I suppose there is arcan… But it’s taking too long; even if it’s happening faster than wayland ever did.)
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It certainly is a betwixt and between situation. (I’m using X11 after my attempt to “discard X11 and embrace wayland” and I appreciate the maturity of X11 more than ever.) Mutter and KWin have probably done a good job but I like lightweight DEs. I do think wayland will get there but the current lack of wayland urgency with the lightweight X11 WMs, e.g. i3, pekwm, and even xfce, is a telltale message.
Part of the whole bigger picture is that Linux has a strong server market but the desktop gets a bit less attention but hopefully that is finally changing!
I discovered pekwm recently and now I use it. I recommend it for those who like lightweight desktops. It has such powerful out of the box (and configurable) keyboard support that it can be used as a pseudo-tiling WM while retaining a bit of the familiarity of floating WMs!
The year of the linux desktop is not here, i’m pretty sure by this point it’ll never be here, people have been saying ‘next year will be the year of the linux desktop’ since like 2003 or something lol.
Every single year. And it’s always (obviously) been wrong so far. Wayland was also supposedly ready in 2008 
and yet here we are.
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…On the wayland side (in further response to OP), I use Sway and it’s a an excellent tiling manager.
You can use Shift-WinKey-Minus to place one or more windows in a hidden “shelf / scratchpad”. These windows aren’t displayed, so it’s a wonderful means to move a window out of the way and have easy access to it using Shift-Minus. For multiple hidden windows, one can use Shift-Minus to cycle through them. To restore a window to tiling, simply use Shift-WinKey-Space. The tiling itself is powerful and this additional feature is very handy, and Sway has many other efficiency features. (And the keys are all configurable. Sway is very similar to i3 and is modeled after it).
Foot (Foo terminal) is a terminal emulator commonly used in Sway environment. Alacritty is another well-known and powerful terminal, and Alacritty is fully native wayland, and works very well in Sway.
So, for users who like clean lightweight desktops that they can add various bells and whistles onto themselves, I can recommend Sway for Wayland and pekwm for X or XWayland.
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Also worked with Plasma recently. Stunning desktop. Also important tip for plasma users;
thanks! ill check out sway
You’re saying “be realistic”? Then let’s be truly realistic. Yes, this may not be the year that Linux takes the majority of desktop market share. However, this is definitely the year where we can say that the die is cast that Linux on the desktop has more of a future and more momentum than Windows.
What do you think that Windows Subsystem for Linux is all about? I don’t think that most Linux enthusiasts are using that because I think that they use full Linux! WSL may help prepare for Windows UI layer and other aspects of the Windows API to use Linux. Microsoft also works on the Linux kernel now (probably for Azure). In the meantime, of course, a company will ride out the wave and take the income from whatever desktop market share they retain!
So yes be “realistic”. A fully unbiased objective view is that Linux has the momentum as the entire software industry is no longer accepting control of the base platform by one company -those days are over and so goes Windows with it eventually. So, this is “the year” to recognize that!
Sway on Wayland is one of the best windowing environments I have ever used!
Linux has the clear momentum now, even towards the desktop. This is not a " fantasy of Linux enthusiasts". This is a pure practical business reality. And Wayland is an excellent system and let no one tell you otherwise. Know the truth: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html
Microsoft working on the linux kernel is almost entirely just virtualization and wsl related stuff. Stuff to make it easier to run linux on top of windows one way or another.
Year of the linux desktop is a meme I’ve mostly really seen used a lot by people who haven’t been using linux for a very long time and therefore don’t know that it’s just not gonna happen. The linux desktop experience is always improving… And yet it’s never enough.
I am a linux enthusiast, i hope you realize (it’s by necessity but it is still so)… And as a linux enthusiast, I’m telling you, it’s gonna start sliding downhill at an ever increasing pace from now on. From 2025 onwards.
Right now as we speak open source projects are being invaded by malicious individuals who usually put themselves into positions like community manager or moderator, then wield codes of conduct like a bludgeon to remove all the top contributors from those projects (more often than not just inventing reasons too, like vaxry banned from freedesktop for something he didn’t say in a conversation he wasn’t a part of) to start off those project’s decline to irrelevance. It’s happening all over, but the most violent example is nixos. These aforementioned people somehow manged to write an resignation note for the creator of nixos and force him to sign it to push him out of his own project… There are many more examples to give but this is one of the crazier ones.
Imagine the effect this will have on linux, when many big projects are basically assassinated this way; it’s not an immediate effect, the project won’t just break down in a week from this happening it’ll take some months at least, possibly years, but it’s inevitable, projects that have gotten this treatment should be considered to be on life support. Sometimes they get saved by forks, but not always.
Then there’s the kernel itself, the linux foundation, a corrupt organization that barely spends any of it’s funding on linux at all, claims to be a non-profit organization when it’s a trade organization… That linux foundation still has control over the kernel, so 3 months ago they decided (didn’t have much choice really, joe biden forced them into it, but it exposes a glaring critical weakness in the infrastructure of the linux kernel, that a single country’s government has virtually full control over the kernel, makes you wonder what more they’ve done that we don’t get to know about…) that no russians would be allowed to work on the kernel from now on. That’s a very big chunk of maintainers and developers just forced out of the kernel. We’re going to see drivers (including the current ntfs driver for example, which was developed by russians…) unmaintained and degrading till they can’t be used because those people were volunteering to work on the kernel, and the linux foundation isn’t gonna just suddenly start paying people to fill the positions those russian devs were filling.
They’re gone, there’s a gaping hole in the kernel maintainer infrastructure, a lot of important developers just forcefully driven away.
The effect won’t be immediate, but the kernel is at the very top of a downward spiral right now. And as we get further down that spiral it’ll get steeper and steeper, Perhaps the most common terminology to describe the situation is snowballing, e.g. a snowball rolling down a hill of snow, except in this scenario the hill isn’t snowy, it’s covered with feces. We’re gonna end up with a ball of dung.
And the situation is the same for many other open source projects of varying levels of importance.
Things look super bleak for linux right about now. And I am mostly convinced that it’s big corporations like microsoft and apple that are really behind most of this. Because a lot of the ‘woke’ crowd tend to claim they’re anti-corporate rebels in the same sentence as they leap to the defense of a big corporation. It’d be comical if it wasn’t having a real effect. Which is why it’s hilarious in the gaming space. Not so funny here though.
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I respect that. I enjoy, admire, and respect your willingness to stand up for your reasoning and speak out strongly. That’s what Linux needs!
Keep in mind that for many people (like us), Linux is about freedom from tyranny and dictatorship. That’s a stronger force ultimately, and people who understand that dictatorship concept and have tasted the freedom on Linux, even if they end up working for major corporations, are still just a reminder of freedom away from what they remember about Linux and how they were “bought” to cooperate against the freedom. So, eventually, it’s a core cultural issue about freedom, and that, my dear friend, does not go away! And it can even become part of corporate culture and strategy, and I think that we see the beginnings of that, even in some major corporations. They still want to earn revenue, but they see that the freedom opens other avenues for revenue (e.g. Linux is a server option at web services/hosting companies).
I don’t even mind proprietary licenses. What I don’t like is one company controlling the platform. As long as we have a level playing field in a free market, I don’t mind paying a few $$ for software. E.g. I like Jetbrains IDEs (silly name for a company but different topic 
). So, we must work for and advocate for the free platform, that’s the key. Hopefully, those who do gain corporate wealth will fund Linux and put humanity above greed.
Yes, I think you have a good point there. It’s a concern, but keep in mind my other point about the moral/freedom aspect that stays with people.
Also, most phones (except Apple) run a customized Linux as do televisions etc. They have a vested interest.
Let’s keep our popcorn handy!
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