Xmonad and xmonad-contrib 0.17.0 are available

Announcements
#1

New versions of xmonad and xmonad-contrib have been released. Check out our download page for instructions on where to get them.

It’s been a little over 3 years since xmonad 0.15, and a little over 2 years since xmonad-contrib 0.16. A lot has happened. This post is an overview of the most important changes. To celebrate this milestone, we announce a contest for a new xmonad logo.

Last but not least, we’re looking to raise funds to keep the XMonad project and community alive and relevant in the next decade. With the final X.Org Server 21.1 release being announced today, there are some obvious challenges ahead of us.

See https://xmonad.org/news/2021/10/27/xmonad-0-17-0.html for the full announcement.

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#2

It seems Wayland is becoming more and more popular with some distributions using it by default and nvidia recently adding support if I understand it correctly. Do you think X will stay relevant in the future?

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#3

Xorg as a display server is unlikely to stay relevant for long, as its development is somewhere between maintainance mode and abandonware. X as a protocol may survive a bit longer to keep existing apps working.

Personally, I don’t feel ready to switch to Wayland yet. I’ve tweaked my xmonad setup to near perfection, and achieving the same with Wayland would be a lot of work. You could argue that investing into xmonad (for X) at this point is silly, and I must admit I’m not entirely sure where the breaking point is exactly. I feel working on xmonad for X for a while is necessary to be qualified to potentially work on xmonad for Wayland. Also, there are lots of users who report issues and contribute fixes/features, so it’s easy to forget about Wayland and just keep being busy fixing the existing stuff. But yeah, you’re absolutely right that this is an issue we need to keep in mind.

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#4

Speaking frankly (and perhaps naïvely): I don’t think X will become
irrelevant in the next 5 or even 10 years. Taking the high estimate,
that’s just a few years shy of how long xmonad has been around—plenty of
time for it to evolve further and to start planning the jump to Wayland.

I’m also in the boat that I don’t think Wayland is quite mature enough
yet (which really is quite surprising to me, given how long it’s been in
development at this point) and also xmonad does everything I want
really well. I think everyone working on the project asked themselves
a question along the line “is this really worth it or should we
concentrate all of our efforts elsewhere instead?” at some point. The
fact that we are all still here speaks for itself, I suppose :slight_smile:

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