it saw another windows aero theme for kde. that's cute but it thinks gnome also deserves some love too

anyways here's a gnome desktop composited by the real aero dwm.exe from win7

(before anyone asks: these windows are actually managed by gnome and rendered by dwm.exe)

tl;dr of how this clusterfuck works: this is effectively just x11 forwarding an x server from windows to linux. the fun part is a) making gnome run with an already existing window manager (namely dwm.exe lol), b) making gnome run over x11 forwarding (it is Not a fan, last time it tried running gnome on windows this is what broke it and made it quit trying), and c) actually ripping out parts of the gnome compositor again to make dwm instead of gnome render window decorations to achieve ✨aero gnome✨

@49016 did this one ever tell of the kernel developer it knows who searched for a window manager for Linux and then found windows 11 (or was it 10?). He wrote some custom driver and all to make it fast. Sadly never got him to write a blog post about that project

cursed xD

also, to prove that yes, gnome really manages these windows: here's paperwm, the scrolling wm gnome extension, running on windows 7 (albeit really slow because starting paperwm completely jams the x11 tunnel for some reason lmao)

fixed a bunch of issues that made this extremely laggy and, uh, this just kinda works now

the entire "making a tiling window manager out of a desktop environment" is already cursed on linux, it gets really cursed when it goes paperwm -> gnome -> windows 7 dwm

this is surprisingly usable though

perfectly sane and normal desktop environment

oh no. horrible horrible idea

damn fedi really liked gnome being composited by win7 aero dwm. thats cute but it thinks gnome should also be allowed to do some compositing

anyways heres win7 aero dwm being composited by gnome

it is going fucking insane

• firefox and vscode are rendered by gnome
• the start menu and gadgets are rendered by dwm, and then composited by gnome
• ghostty, which literally goes above and beyond the gadgets (which you cannot do by just streaming one compositor to the other), is rendered by gnome
• and the cherry on top is gnome-control-center, which exclusively runs in gnome sessions, being managed by gnome, rendered by dwm, and composited by gnome again

this is powered by about 7 layers of duct tape and a couple hundred lines of the worst C the world has ever seen

@49016 Does this mean you managed to make server-side decorations work with GNOME? 😮

this is bashonubuntuonwindowsoncrack

@kloenk @49016 You might be interested to know that I actually got Wayland working too, using WSLg's codebase: https://github.com/nbdd0121/nix-collection/blob/trunk/pkgs/weston-rail/default.nix. (Also, the custom driver is for file system, not display, my original solution of using Windows 11 as DE is just X forwarding).

@kloenk @49016 This is a screenshot I captured earlier. Unfortunately due to Weston's lack of server-side decoration and RDP local move support, the experience is actually not as good as X forwarding. You certain won't get any nice Aero effect which requires DWM to do the window decoration!

@gary @49016 finally some public info about that project :)

But was the file system driver on the same machen so project, or was it something completely different?