Why is wofi recommended so much? - eviltoast

TL;DR: Wofi is unmaintained

Wofi is a launcher/menu for wlroots based compositors.

The description on the sourcehut says that it’s not actively maintained. Looking at the commits confirms this: The most recent commit was 4 months ago, and the 10th most recent 10 months ago. The creator also confirms this again in a reddit comment. (libreddit link)

Yet in most places I look (sway wiki 1, sway wiki 2*, hyprland wiki**, gentoo wiki, arch wiki sway, arch wiki hyprland, awesome hyprland**) it’s at least listed somewhere, often near or at the top, with no mention of the maintenance status. I also searched for comments on lemmy containing wofi and only one of them mentioned that it’s unmaintained, and that under a post that’s seemingly deleted.

*edited by me just now

**filing an issue (or maybe pr) tomorrow when I’m less tired

I guess it still works perfectly fine, and I’m ok with using unmaintained software (Android 9), but I’m sure there are people who would like to know that.

While I’m here, I’d like to highlight that there is an active rofi fork that supports wayland with full functionality, which is a great alternative to wofi.

  • driveway@lemmy.zip
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    10 months ago

    Yeah, using an unmaintained launcher and a mobile os that stopped getting security patches are not the same thing.

    • Strit@lemmy.linuxuserspace.show
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      10 months ago

      Correct. The OS will still function for a long while, because it provides all the basic stuff it needs. Wofi, on the other hand, could stop working for people tomorrow, because a dependency updated and Wofi has not been updated to support a new syntax or API.

      • fl42v@lemmy.ml
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        10 months ago

        Yes and no: an unmaintained android will have trouble running newer apps due to older versions of SDK, and you pretty much can’t do anything about it (AFAIK), but older software can be nixed/flatpaked or even statically compiled/appimaged (and we can pretty much expect no trouble on the kernel side due to their “not breaking userspace” mantra)

        • Strit@lemmy.linuxuserspace.show
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          10 months ago

          True, but when the android SDK gets to old, it’s been years since it was last released. Most apps these days still support Android 6. A thing depending on wlroots, will likely break on the next wlroots update. I do get your point though. Anything that is unmaintained is at risc of breaking at any point.