labwc/labwc

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

2749 stars · 252 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Labwc is a lightweight, wlroots-based window-stacking compositor for Wayland, inspired by Openbox. It focuses on stacking windows well and rendering window decorations, relying on separate clients for panels, wallpapers, and screenshots to form a full desktop environment.

Use cases

• run an Openbox-like stacking window manager on Wayland
• build a minimal lightweight Wayland desktop environment
• replace X11 Openbox with a Wayland compositor
• use a low-resource compositor without GTK or Qt dependencies
• set up a gaming-friendly Wayland session
• theme a Wayland compositor with Openbox themes

When to choose

• you want an Openbox-style stacking workflow on Wayland
• you prefer small independent components over integrated desktop shells
• you value stability, simplicity, and low resource usage over animations and bling
• you want a compositor that only speaks standard wayland-protocols and wlr-protocols

When to avoid

• you need tiling features like sway/i3
• you want IPC or dbus control of the compositor
• you need built-in animations, panels, or screenshot tools
• you want a full integrated desktop environment out of the box

Facets

application · maturity active

gui graphics desktop-applications operating-systems cross-platform c wayland-compositor wlroots openbox window-manager stacking lightweight x11-replacement linux

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="labwc/labwc")