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.
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.
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.
You can disable animations in Niri, which makes switching instantaneous. Since switching from sway to niri (with a minor detour via hyprland), I found that Niri's scrolling tiling matches much more closely how I work with windows.
As a side note, I found that Niri uses less battery for me than both sway and hyprland.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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() }".
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.
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.
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Sadly I can't seem to find a config I like for waybar, if anyone has any tips or dotfiles please share them!
As a side note, I found that Niri uses less battery for me than both sway and hyprland.
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.
(i used dwl for quite a while. strong recommend.)
That is very nice!