The path to sustainably working on FOSS full-time

This is an article I didn’t think I’d be writing any time soon. I’ve aspired to work full-time on my free and open source software projects for a long time now, but I have never expected that it could work. However, as of this week, I finally have enough recurring donation revenue to break even on FOSS, and I’ve started to put the extra cash away. I needed to set the next donation goal and ran the numbers to figure out what it takes to work on FOSS full-time.

Let me start with some context. I like to say “one-time donations...

Writing a Wayland Compositor, Part 2: Rigging up the server

This is the second in a series of articles on the subject of writing a Wayland compositor from scratch using wlroots. Check out the first article if you haven’t already. Last time, we ended up with an application which fired up a wlroots backend, enumerated output devices, and drew some pretty colors on the screen. Today, we’re going to start accepting Wayland client connections, though we aren’t going to be doing much with them yet.

The commit that this article dissects is b45c651.

A quick aside on the nature of these blog posts: it’s going to take a lot of these articles...

Writing a Wayland Compositor, Part 1: Hello wlroots

This is the first in a series of many articles I’m writing on the subject of building a functional Wayland compositor from scratch. As you may know, I am the lead maintainer of sway, a reasonably popular Wayland compositor. Along with many other talented developers, we’ve been working on wlroots over the past few months. This is a powerful tool for creating new Wayland compositors, but it is very dense and difficult to understand. Do not despair! The intention of these articles is to make you understand and feel comfortable using it.

Before we dive in, a quick note: the wlroots...

The last years

August 14th, 2019 PYONGYANG IN CHAOS AS PANDEMIC DECIMATES LEADERSHIP. Sources within the country have reported that a fast-acting and deadly infectious disease has suddenly infected the population of Pyongyang, the capital city of North Korea, where most of the country’s political elite live. Unconfirmed reports suggest that a significant fraction of the leadership has been affected.

The reclusive country has appealed for immediate aid from the international community and it is reported that a group of medical experts from Seoul have been permitted to enter via the Joint Security Area. Representatives from the United States Center for Disease Control and...

Introduction to POSIX shell

What the heck is the POSIX shell anyway? Well, the POSIX (the Portable Operating System Interface) shell is the standard Unix shell - standard meaning it was formally defined and shipped in a published standard. This makes shell scripts written for it portable, something no other shell can lay claim to. The POSIX shell is basically a formalized version of the venerable Bourne shell, and on your system it lives at /bin/sh, unless you’re one of the unlucky masses for whom this is a symlink to bash.

The “Bourne Again shell”, aka bash, is not standardized. Its grammar,...

2018-02-04

ii 1.8 released: download

Sway and client side decorations

You may have recently seen an article from GNOME on the subject of client side decorations (CSD) titled Introducing the CSD Initiative. It states some invalid assumptions which I want to clarify, and I want to tell you Sway’s stance on the subject. I also speak for the rest of the projects involved in wlroots on this matter, including Way Cooler, waymonad, and bspwc.

The subject of which party is responsible for window decorations on Wayland (the client or the server) has been a subject of much debate. I want to clarify that though GNOME may imply that a consensus has...

Learn about your package manager

Tools like virtualenv, rbenv, and to a lesser extent npm and pip, are occasionally useful in development but encourage bad practices in production. Many people forget that their distro already has a package manager! And there’s more– you, the user, can write packages for it!

Your distro’s package repositories probably already have a lot of your dependencies, and can conveniently update your software alongside the rest of your system. On the whole you can expect your distro packages to be much better citizens on your system than a language-specific package manager will be. Additionally, pretty much all distros provide a means...

fork is not my favorite syscall

This article has been on my to-write list for a while now. In my opinion, fork is one of the most questionable design choices of Unix. I don’t understand the circumstances that led to its creation, and I grieve over the legacy rationale that keeps it alive to this day.

Let’s set the scene. It’s 1971 and you’re a fly on the wall in Bell Labs, watching the first edition of Unix being designed for the PDP-11/20. This machine has a 16-bit address space with no more than 248 kilobytes of memory. They’re discussing how they’re going to support programs that...

wlroots whitepaper available

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