labwc
More info
- Creator
- Johan Malm
- Released
- Type
- Wayland compositor
- License
- GPL 2
- Source
- github.com/labwc/labwc
Openbox for Wayland — a stacking compositor that reads Openbox's config files, draws title bars on the server side, and in 2024 became the default desktop of Raspberry Pi OS.
When tiling compositors got Sway and GNOME and KDE rewrote their own, anyone who wanted a plain stacking desktop with windows to drag around had nothing on Wayland. Johan Malm started labwc — "Lab Wayland Compositor" — in 2019 on top of wlroots with an explicit model: Openbox, the window manager that for fifteen years had sat under LXDE and countless home-grown desktops. Configuration is rc.xml and menu.xml in the same format, themes are read from Openbox's themerc, and key and mouse bindings are written as before. Decorations are drawn by the compositor, so GTK programs without title bars of their own look like everything else.
Like its model, labwc does nothing beyond window management: no panel, no wallpaper, no lock screen — all of that comes from layer-shell clients such as Waybar or swaybg, which is the whole idea. What lifted the project out of its niche was Raspberry Pi: the foundation had moved to Wayland with Wayfire in Bookworm in 2023, found labwc a better fit for its less powerful boards, contributed code, and made it the default in October 2024. It has since run on more machines than most people suspect, without any of their users needing to know its name.