NetBSD Project about changing the default window manager in an X11 session from on . CTWM is a fork of twm that forked in 1992 and evolved towards a lightweight and fully customizable window manager that allows you to change the look and behavior to your liking.
The twm window manager has been offered in NetBSD for the past 20 years and looks archaic in today's environment. The public backlash against the default twm prompted developers to rethink the default shell and use the more powerful CTWM window manager to create a user-friendly environment for users with experience on other operating systems.
CTWM supports virtual desktops, is actively developed, and comes under a NetBSD compatible license. Of the new features implemented on the basis of CTWM, an automatically generated application menu, useful keyboard shortcuts for full control without a mouse, adaptation to work with different screen resolutions (including HiDPI after adding large fonts), the ability to support both very slow and very fast systems with a single configuration file.
It was:
After:
Additionally a note on the status of the NetBSD composite server project based on the Wayland protocol. The port is not yet ready for everyday use, but is already suitable for experimenting and running applications using Qt5, GTK3 or SDL2. Of the problems, there is incompatibility with some applications, including Firefox, lack of support for running X11 applications, the ability to work only with Intel GPUs for which there is a driver for switching video modes at the kernel level.
One of Wayland's features that makes it difficult to port to NetBSD is the presence of a large amount of OS-specific code in composite managers responsible for screen, input, and window management. Wayland does not provide out-of-the-box protocols for features such as screenshots, screen locks, and window management, and so far lags behind the X server in areas such as portability, modularity, and standardization.
Additional features are implemented by the composite manager or through the definition of extensions to protocols. The Weston Composite Reference Server is heavily dependent on the Linux kernel API. For example, binding to the epoll I/O multiplexing mechanism needs to be reworked to support kqueue. Patches for using kqueue have already been prepared by the BSD system developers, but have not yet been accepted into the mainstream.
The code of the reference composite server was originally written with an eye only on Linux and does not take into account the features of other systems (for example, the code uses "#include ' and dependency on libinput). FreeBSD implements a clone of the Linux input API, but NetBSD uses a fundamentally different input management API, wscons. Support for wscons has now been added to swc and is planned to be ported to other composite managers.
NetBSD representatives intend to convince the Wayland developers not to use a hard link to epoll, but to switch to a universal layer such as libevent. Among the planned works, there is also an update of the DRM / KMS stack of the NetBSD kernel and graphics drivers, including porting code from the Linux kernel, as well as adding support for atomic switching of video modes, new versions of DRM and the Glamor API (to run X11 applications running xwayland) . Support for framebuffers is planned to be added to the Wayland-based composite server.
Source: opennet.ru