> The problem is that none of these pieces ship in place.
Sway is not a desktop environment. What you are describing is a desktop environment. I too would like a sway-based desktop environment. Let's stop complaining that sway is not what it is or that somehow this is related to wayland. This whole thing is just a consequence that writing cohesive graphical/desktop software is tedious and that tinkerers cannot rely on the myriad of Xorg desktop environment, in particular the modular ones like lxde/xfce to mix and match components.
> Then you complain and the answer is that you’re supposed to write your own
Yes, obviously. No-one is saying this would be a bad project. And if you blatantly misunderstand their project's scope it's no wonder you're getting dry responses.
I think gp and gggp are arguing that the diffusion of responsibility means that nothing takes responsibility for baseline functionality, and as such there are huge gaps.
With X all these things are in X or the single shared X compositor itself. Yes, it's bloated and sometimes lacks flexibility in configuration or doesn't work perfectly, but there's no gaps.
I don't think the author is saying these individual projects should do these things, but if they don't, who does? It means that everyone using wayland effectively is using dwm, and dwm isn't for everyone (or even most people?). It feels like you're saying users should suck it up and learn to love the dwm philosophy, C and all, which doesn't seem quite right to me.
In practice, Linux distributions have been the system integrators that pull these things together and handle the gaps. That's really the value of a distribution - pulls a set of components together in a way that works.
In this case, I use Fedora (Gnome). Most things are on Wayland and it works pretty well.
I am not saying sway isn’t allowed to do what they did. But the normal approach is for the 1st party dev to also provide reference implementations of supporting/complementing utilities to smooth adoption.
No one is saying they have to be shipped as part of the compositor, obviously.
Says who? You're getting software for free, from someone who is not beholden to you for anything. Either you accept it as it is, or you fix it; that's the nature of open source. Whining about it on the internet is rude and disrespectful.
If you can't be bothered, and want all this stuff included, or at the very least recommended or installed automatically on the side, switch to something else that does that for you.
The alternative to taking a piece of open source as-is isn't "complain to the maintainer until they fulfill your wishes". That kind of thing is why open source maintainers burn out. You are not entitled to anything from them; the alternative is that the software doesn't exist at all.
It is not the normal approach for a project author to write a whole ecosystem.
If you want the Desktop Environment experience, pick a Desktop Environment. This can be based on sway (e.g. Manjaro spins), but sway is not more a desktop Environment than the Linux kernel is an operating system.
I don't see how being "just a compositor" has to do anything to "has to bundle complementing utilities", without mucking the whole thing and turning it into a desktop environment.
Thought I agree that for most people, a desktop environment, "everything integrated, just change this specific thing" instead of "let me just DIY my entire environment from those separated parts" makes more sense.
Sway is not a desktop environment. What you are describing is a desktop environment. I too would like a sway-based desktop environment. Let's stop complaining that sway is not what it is or that somehow this is related to wayland. This whole thing is just a consequence that writing cohesive graphical/desktop software is tedious and that tinkerers cannot rely on the myriad of Xorg desktop environment, in particular the modular ones like lxde/xfce to mix and match components.
> Then you complain and the answer is that you’re supposed to write your own
Yes, obviously. No-one is saying this would be a bad project. And if you blatantly misunderstand their project's scope it's no wonder you're getting dry responses.