Is there a discord or matrix community?

[mawev]

I love scroll and how far it has matured. But I assume a Linux noob, often have doubts or need reference to maintain my config or fix issues. I know githib community is open, but it seems a lot more restricted than having a discord or matrix channel. Something of a more open space would also help grow the community, where people could share suggestions and showcase their config. I only had seen 2 post related to scroll wm on r/unixporn.

It would be great to have an open community and I'd be glad to be a part of it, if someone could create and maintain it.

Thanks for the awesome wm, BTW!

[dawsers]

Thank you.

This makes sense, but unfortunately scroll has a too small user base to be able to support something like that for now. The most I can do is improve scroll, answer (and fix) issues and participate in discussions. If someone wanted to create a more interactive community, I would participate and try to help, but I cannot take that responsibility myself, because that would divert too much of my time from the main goal, which is to improve scroll and make it more mature.

scroll's lack of popularity is both a curse and a blessing, we don't get much help or visibility, but people who give it a chance is usually because they know what they are doing, and are looking for something specific that other WMs don't provide. Those people usually just need a little bit of help. People who are happy with Hyprland or Niri don't really need scroll, and I don't need to sell it to them. Most people new to Linux and tiling WMs are probably too overwhelmed by the amount of default key bindings. One needs to invest some time learning the bindings, going through the different features, and there is no point in doing that when you don't need it. Hyprland and Niri are both great projects with lots of features, and better QA through their big user base, so moving to scroll is only worth the risk when those compositors are missing something you think is important to your workflow.

All that said, I would love to have more users so things mature faster, and I don't leave silly bugs unfixed, but I also fear having too many users where many are just window shopping for the weekend, to later drop it; the amount of time spent hand holding them doesn't pay to the community, because they will move on as quickly as they arrived. I don't value my time more than other people's, I am always actively trying to fix issues and help, because I understand those people who encounter problems while using scroll have a genuine interest and their time is as valuable as mine. But when the user base grows because of "trendiness", that is usually no longer the case.

[mawev]

Yeah, it makes sense. But can we make a Discusssion thread here on github, to show each person's desktop and their config? Like how niri had one. It wouldn't be a huge mess at the end and still be maintainable.

[dawsers]

Of course, I think it is a good idea to have some place where people can share their workflow if they want to. That was the original intent of this Discussions board. It is here so anybody can always open new discussions about anything they want.