Cairo-Dock 3.4 Shows A Lot Of Progress, Works Toward EGL/Wayland Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Cairo-Dock 3.4 Shows A Lot Of Progress, Works Toward EGL/Wayland Support

It's been about one year since last hearing any Cairo-Dock news, but this evening there's a new release! Cairo-Dock has various improvements to its desktop interface offering that continues to work in replace of -- or in addition to -- the standard Linux desktop environments...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTgyMDY

[Ancurio]

What does that even mean, "Wayland support"? Did they finally recognize that in order for this to work correctly, they have to write their own compositor?

[Nobu]

What does that even mean, "Wayland support"? Did they finally recognize that in order for this to work correctly, they have to write their own compositor?

A dock is basically a special window that stays at the bottom (or top, or side) of the screen, and may hide or not. It doesn't need to be it's own compositor, but to work as expected it needs a compositor (or window manager) that can recognize it as this special window type. This can be done by implementing a plug-in interface in the parent compositor (kde widgets, for example, are special "windows"), or through a standard (cross-desktop) api (like xwindow properties, but we obviously can't exactly use that, since we're not necessarily using X here), which tells the parent compositor what type of window to expect, and lets it handle that window appropriately.

Either way, both parent and child have to agree on what a "dock window" is, or else "bad stuff" might happen.