TEterhechte·Feb 3, 2023
Well, there is a Wayland Compositor for macOS:
https://github.com/owl-compositor/owl
It still lacks a lot of features though (I think, I never tried it out)
In Blink virtual machine now supports running GUI programsowl-compositor
owl
Objective-C2021–2023
owl-compositor / owl
owl
The portable Wayland compositor in Objective-C
3Distinct people
3Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
218GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
The portable Wayland compositor in Objective-C
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by month3 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2021-11-12 21:31:23 UTC to 2023-02-03 10:01:02 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 2021 | 2021-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| Dec 2021 | 2021-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jan 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Feb 2022 | 2022-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Mar 2022 | 2022-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Apr 2022 | 2022-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| May 2022 | 2022-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jun 2022 | 2022-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jul 2022 | 2022-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aug 2022 | 2022-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 2022 | 2022-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 2022 | 2022-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Nov 2022 | 2022-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Dec 2022 | 2022-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jan 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Feb 2023 | 2023-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
3 sources> X runs on so many more platforms than Wayland [...] Python3 is strictly an improvement on every platform, I don't think they're analogous because there really is no good reason to keep Python2 around
X runs on more platforms than Wayland because...it was ported to them. Just like things use Python 3 because they were ported to it.
This is also understating the reach of X I think: it's widely used in the embedded world, is seeing increasing support in BSDs, and has even been used on macOS (https://github.com/owl-compositor/owl). People have even used it to embed an entire compositor inside a GTK app (https://github.com/alexlarsson/wakefield).
That isn't to say that libwayland has a lot of Linux-isms in it, but afaik they're not really structural as much as there is lack of interest to generalize things more. Heck, the protocol-oriented a
Read the rest
rchitecture would even make it easier for anything Linux-esque to be removed in favor of alternative protocols.
Owl: A WIP portable Wayland compositor written in Objective-C
3 points · Open discussion