Does anybody know how to set a window always on bottom in rust gtk4? set_type_hint() does not exist.
You’ll have to look into GTK’s Layer Shell implementation.
Look at the source of Eww. It’s written in Rust, it uses GTK (or GDK?), and it has a config option that opens the windows in the bottom layer.
So, as far as I understand, this works with gtk3, which will still work with Xwayland, but will eventually be phased out? Anyway, I think I will just use gtk4 layer shell and hope it supports all compositors eventually
It looks like GNOME is the only compositor that doesn’t support the
wlr_layer_shellprotocol, which is anything but surprising. Smithay works (Cosmic and Niri), wlroots works, Kwin and Mir work, Aquamarine (Hyprland) is not listed, but I know that it works.
Linux gives users the freedom to keep using x11 :p
They are even free to thanklessly maintain X11 for all the other contrarian fossils, because the developers sure aren’t doing it anymore.
Keep angrily gaslighting. Surely you’ll EVENTUALLY shame veterans who have been using Linux productively for decades into joining the cult of security over function.
You come into MY home, into MY workflow, take features away from me that have been there ignoring all protests, then have the sheer unmitigated GALL to mock me when I dare to complain?
Dude, I am using Linux since 25 years.
Just because you like it so much does not mean that anybody will maintain Xorg for you. Feel free to do it yourself.
I chose Wayland. Not because security, but because I have a primary HDR ultrawide and an old secondary monitor.
Running variable refreshrate does not work with this configuration on Xorg.
HDR does not exist in Xorg.
And never will be.
Just keep in complaining just because someone points out that Xorg is dead.
Xorg is dead! That is not gaslighting, this is a fact
I WILL continue to use Xorg. My workflow requires it. If that means I have to use an unmaintained window manager forever, so be it.
None of this would be an issue if the Wayland developers weren’t so pigheaded that they insist upon forcing their pure, untainted design philosophy onto the project rather than building an inclusive model that allows for backwards compatibility with the system it’s meant to replace.
I will concede that not every obscure feature has been kept but the vast majority of users are now better served by wayland compositors. I have no idea what you mean by “project”, but if they had no concerns for backwards compatibility, then XWayland wouldn’t exist.
Stopping work on X11 because it’s been an unmaintainable mess for ages doesn’t really count as “forcing” anything upon anyone. I won’t pretend that Wayland protocol development hasn’t seen plenty of disagreements, but it is still a collaborative process.
Your disagreements seem fairly vague to me and I can’t help but think that the “pigheaded” label is somewhat ironic, after your first paragraph.
There is currently one major Usecase that does not work yet with Wayland. Multiwindow positioning through the application.
In science, and some stuff like KICaf or Gimp use this feature excessively. And as someones that relies on KiCad, it is a fucking pain.
But, solutions are being discussed and implementations will follow
I am not better served. I am now in the quite new position where I’d have to rewrite some of my own personal software if i simply just decided to change DE
That sounds like a fairly niche problem to have.
The “forcing” was in making Wayland shit, rather than replacing it with something with at least the same capabilities as X11 (even if they are now guarded by granular permissions).
building an inclusive model that allows for backwards compatibility with the system it’s meant to replace.
That’s honestly a terrible approach and defeats the porpoises. For example, screen recording. You can’t be “backwards compatible” (aka any app can record at any time) and have them ask for permission (the honestly better way to go).
Bear in mind, Wayland devs didn’t force anything. They offered an alternative to X and the distros chose that after evaluating pros and cons.
Pick a distro that aligns with your needs like we all do.
You do realise that the Wayland devs are the X11 devs, right? They were sick of X11 and started developing a new one.
i’m just curious what is the feature you are using in xorg you can’t replicate in wayland?
Not who you asked, but:
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sxkhd: no global hotkey daemons allowed except the compositor
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i3wm inside of xfce/plasma: every compositor is implemenyed as a monolithic DE, fuck modularity
I still switched to Wayland, but can’t be bothered to customise a new wm
Can you use Sway instead of i3wm in plasma?
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Then, build your own replacement! If it is do dinpley, fork Wayland, add what you need.
No-ones taking features away from you, they just decided they don’t want to be putting a ton of effort into something 2 people care about.
The beauty of FOSS is devs are free to make these decisions just like you’re free to develop what you need.
Removed by mod
To be fair… XLibre is doing that.
badly though from what i hear.
Quote from their readme:
It’s explicitly free of any “DEI” or similar discriminatory policies.
Together we’ll make X great again!I’ll pass.
It sounded quite bad until I took the time to visit the website and read the entire text:
Xlibre is a fork of the Xorg Xserver with lots of code cleanups and enhanced functionality.
This fork was necessary since toxic elements within Xorg projects, moles from BigTech, are boycotting any substantial work on Xorg, in order to destroy the project, to eliminate competition of their own products. Classic “embrace, extend, extinguish” tactics.
Right after journalists first began covering the planned fork Xlibre, on June 6th 2025, Redhat employees started a purge on the Xlibre founder’s GitLab account on freedesktop.org: deleted the git repo, tickets, merge requests, etc, and so fired the shot that the whole world heard.
This is an independent project, not at all affiliated with BigTech or any of their subsidiaries or tax evasion tools, nor any political activists groups, state actors, etc. It’s explicitly free of any “DEI” or similar discriminatory policies. Anybody who’s treating others nicely is welcomed.
It doesn’t matter which country you’re coming from, your political views, your race, your sex, your age, your food menu, whether you wear boots or heels, whether you’re furry or fairy, Conan or McKay, comic character, a small furry creature from Alpha Centauri, or just a boring average person. Anybody who’s interested in bringing X forward is welcome.
Together we’ll make X great again!
It seems to me this person is a bit of a conspiracy theorist and simply has a different understanding of what DEI means. Maybe an important lesson is not to believe everything you read on the internet.
Likewise, but claiming no-one has forked Xorg is dishonest, IMO.
There’s nothing contrarian in using software that works and and fulfills all your needs.
It brings back your loved ones.
That’s not the same thing as shitposting online about your grievances with Wayland.
It’s not.
I gladly accept the fossil label, but there’s no contrarian sentiment behind it … I just never felt any pain staying with X11.
Also, the window manager I use is developed by a friend who lives 10min away and texts me every time he has an update, and I love it … doesn’t work on Wayland, though …
Getting comfortable with legacy software is completely valid as long as you’re aware of the potential disadvantages. Shitposting online about it or worse being wrong on the internet are different stories.
Wayland doesn’t work for me, I rely on a tablet in lieu of a mouse and under Wayland it’s unusable. I tried hard
Under an X session it behaves flawlessly
Did you try it that with Gnome? I heard that some input methods suffered with the wayland transition because mutter makes some weird choices. From my personal experience, libinput works great with a wacom tablet, so I’m assuming you ran into an issue with a specific DE.
I think I tried only Plasma. I will try Gnome thanks for the suggestion
This is the way…
ugh I wish I could but my Laptop set up says “no, you can’t.” discrete Nividia GPU with onboard AMD GPU and gaming on x11 is a no go for me. So my only choice is wayland :/
I once heard about someone accidentally pouring tea from a teapot into a mug with instant coffee in it rather than hot water.
Your laptop has the GPU equivalent of that drink.
ugh I know. In hindsight I would have never bought it.
Is it something specific to a particular model or combination of those? Because I run a laptop with amd integrated GPU and discrete nvidia GPU (not that rare, actually) and Wayland works flawlessly. Games use xwayland without any issues when necessary.
I used to have my reservations a year or so ago, but Wayland has grown in leaps and bounds over the last couple of years. It is much more ready now.
yeah it works flawlessly on Wayland, that wasn’t what I was saying. I’m saying on x11 it doesn’t work for gaming because of the setup. Say I want to use I3 or Herbstfluftwm. If I open a game and ONLY stay on that game it’s fine. but if I navigate away from it to look at a web browser or check discord and then toggle back to the game it results in a black screen or simply shows the desktop and the game is unresponsive. And from what I was able to find online the consensus seems to be it’s because x11 doesn’t play well with integrated and discrete dual GPUs.
Oh, my bad. Misread it the other way around. Disregard the comment then. That said. I disagree with the other commenter. Such a combination of GPUs is not rare at all. It was even recommended frequently to PC builders about 5+ years ago.
I wonder if we’ll find anything to replace it some day, it’s not a good protocol.
Maybe someday someone will develop a better replacement, but so far no one has.
Missing feature != Inability to customize
missing feature that used to be there but has been removed in the name of protecting me from myself, is an inability to customize.
Which one are you talking about?
Alright then, since everyone assumes I’m here to participate in this shitty flamewar instead of genuinely asking what someone is talking about: the article does a pretty good job of explaining what the idea is behind not giving applications absolute coordinates to position their windows in. If that isn’t enough and you’re one of those people who insist that it must be those evil Wayland devs pushing their security agenda down everyones throats, then you might consider how much of a pain this was for any WM that wanted to do something like scrollable workspaces or managing a device that doesn’t have a standard screen shape. If anything, giving apps access to global coordinates the way X did, just makes them less portable to other environments. There are trade-offs here and you might disagree with the compromise we landed on for now, but all of this has already been discussed for years so at this point I really don’t care for snarky commentary from people who aren’t willing to contribute towards the changes they want to see.
I am not mad at the Wayland devs, it’s just unfortunate.
I wasn’t really asking you but thanks for chiming in I guess.
First day on a public forum?
If that was the case then maybe I’d have more patience for disingenuous shit like this.
You could just use X11
“these new cars have a teeny tiny fuel tank with a tiny range! They used to have a bigger tank!”
“Drive an old car”
In this case the new car is objectively inferior, and I can’t buy a new old car anymore.
When something complains about very real problems due to missing functionality, the proper answer isn’t “fuck you, use the old stuff, or stop yearning for the functionality that te intentionally crippled”
You can still use X11 until Wayland has the functionality that you want.
that’s the thing… wayland has repeatedly said they will not reach feature parity. So from the word “until” onwards cad be deleted, back to the older comment
I chose wrong, must be linux’s fault.
Why so salty? I am making an app that I want to stick on the background, and would like it to be cross-platform. I mean, there should be some way to achieve something this basic right? Also, Wayland is going to become the default, and most distros will switch to it.
Then I’ll make my OWN distro. With blackjack. And hookers.
Seriously though… I will have NO desktop environment and run terminal only before I will accept Wayland. Either reach feature parity and stop gaslighting me about functionality that has been there in X11 for decades and is a necessary part of my workflow, or back off.
Out of curiosity, what features does x11 have that are essential to you?
Amen.
Any time you point out any flaw in linux the fanboys come out to have a screech and tell you how its all your fault actually. I’ve learned you just gotta ignore them.
If’s FOSS, don’t cry about it, implement the feature the way you think is best; just like every one else.
it will be refused in the name of security. Which is notreally a good argument. “it rather involved being on the other side of that airtight hatchway” type of thing
That’s how FOSS works. Good ideas get adopted, bad ideas lose adoption. Even I dropped Gnome because of their bike shedding. This is the way.
well that’s the problem. “I don’t use it therefore it must be a bad idea”
It is a design decision to have it implemented by each compositor. which means each one will implement it differently. Currently, the gtk4 layer shell supports some, like sway and hyperland, but not others, like gnome
Sounds like a good opportunity to add the features in the way you see fit.
Obviously, I can’t create the entire universe by my own, adding features in the way I see fit depends also on what others create. In this case, the app won’t be cross-platform, and users will complain when it doesn’t work properly on their distro. So I don’t see the issue with me complaining a bit as well.
And Linux people wonder why the year of the “desktop” never comes…
Gatekeep much?
You have the opportunity to be the change you want to see or make the change you want to see. Whining and crying about it doesn’t help anybody. It’s time you learned that.
Would you look at that? Heres one now.
You got me. Average FOSS user here. Be the change you want to see or make the changes you want to see. Stop whining and complaining. Pretty simple.
You just haven’t tried it with the latest release of this fork of Plasma.
Bold of you to assume Wayland devs do things like absolutely everything else, in fact the opposite is true. As a rule of thumb Wayland devs must always do everything completely differently from everyone else and if you dont like that feel free to ignore the less than 2% of people who use Linux.
You’re pigeonholing yourself into an environment which can’t support basic functions life þis. Use Xorg, and you’ll be able to do it.
I see this as a feature honestly. Screw apps who try to be different with their special little windows
Is it bottom layer in wayland terminology (the one for bars and stuff)? In that case I think gtk4-layer-shell is the answer.
I meant as in keep the always on the bottom/background (or at least move it to the back on launch). I tried gtk4-layer-shell, but unfortunately, it doesn’t support some desktop environments (like GNOME).
kwin supports this, gnome from my perspective is more about a cohesive experience you either love or don’t
why do you want to hide the window from the user in such a bizarre way? what’s the purpose?
The age of pop-under ads were truly the dark times.
Right? Why not just let the user position it where they want it? This seems like it can only be nefarious.
I guess stuff like desktop widgets might be a candidate. Not sure if there’s a specific framework for those, though
but that’s already a thing!
ok, on kde, no idea about others
Isn’t this what conky does? Puts it on the root layer?
I know this is pedantic but Linux does give users the free to do this. They just need to add a patch to their desktop and patch their app to make it so.
It gives you the freedom to do that, not the ability
Depends on the wm.
It is easy, just loop through all active windows and increase their layer by one, making yours the most bottom
You’re looking for gtk4-layer-shell (doesn’t work on gnome tho 'cos they hate you (only gnome is like this))
What actually bothers me is when a window opens and takes my keyboard focus away from where I was working. God, I hate what shit.
There was a time when Steam did that like four times.
Or even worse, a dialog window opens locking the rest of the application but it’s under other windows for some reason and I’m like wtf
Carpentry gives you the ability to make whatever furniture you want
Why dont you make a table that floats in the air with no legs?
Wayland is still too new for a lot of complex functionality. It works well enough for the vast majority of use cases, but X11 is still superior in terms of functionality. But like many systems, control means higher learning curve due to various quirks and complex configurations.
I don’t think there are any plans to add more functionality
Wayland is just a few years younger than X11… It was first released in 2008…
X11 was released in 1987. The original X Window System was released in 1984. That is not just a few years of difference.
If you meant the X.org implementation, then compare it to compositors, not to the protocol.
And xorg is older than it appears, as it was forked from the much older XFree86 over licensing disagreements. XFree86 started in 1991 according to Wikipedia.
X11 is way, way older than that. But it also was more actively developed for most of that time.
