2y ago

Wayland is pretty good, actually

I started working on Flyaway with the intention of becoming familiar with Wayland, its protocols and extensions, and the wlroots library. Instead, I ended up genuinely liking all three.

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I'm thankful they're finally doing something about vsync, but I'm still going to need the option for preventing app sleep when outside of viewport. It sounds like an odd complaint, but it means not being able to have a game on one virtual desktop and its wiki on the other. It means not being able to let music run while I'm working on another computer. It's running better, and I'm glad to see it starting to play nicer with Nvidia, but not quite ready to make the leap 100%
- see it playing nicer with nvidia
  This may seem like a small nitpick, but the way you phrased this is backwards. Keep in mind that the problems with wayland on Nvidia cards is squarely to blame on Nvidia. Nvidia is finally playing nice with wayland, not the other way around.
  
  Very fair point
- What do you mean about app sleep? I'm doing these things you're listing all the time and haven't had any issues with it.
  
  Interesting! I wonder if it's a Wayland on KDE-specific thing. I'd read it as a security and efficiency feature of Wayland's, where it suspends applications that are not in the viewport. An example case is that I'm playing FFXIV on virtual desktop 1. On virtual desktop 2, I have whatever thing I'm looking up or collecting in the browser. While I'm on virtual desktop 2, it suspends the game on desktop 1, which wouldn't be a big issue in single player games as much, but in games that call to a server, like FFXIV or Overwatch, it disconnects you from the server.
  \ I was able to get around this by using Windowed Fullscreen and turning on Caffeine so that my computer wouldn't sleep, but the turn screen off feature also changes the viewport, so I've had to disable that feature entirely.
  \ Then I work from home, my home computer is hooked up to the sound system, so I'll play music through it, but then be on my work computer next to it. I'd like my computer to still black the screen and lock, but the moment it does either, viewport changes, music cuts off.
  \ If it's viewed as a security feature, then the fix should not to have to be preventing your screen from going off or locking. I'd loooove the ability to set certain apps from suspending when not in the viewport. Bonus points if it's one of the features added to gamemoderun
What I'm missing from wayland, it's not really something from wayland itself. Examples are several needed electron based applications, which some will refuse to properly work (for meetings, desktop sharing, etc), wine, gtk4 applications not respecting GDK_DPI_SCALE (not sure if already addressed) when not using gnome (wayfire being used as compositor), no proper support for conky (or eventually equivalent wayland functionality) yet, and several nuances with waybar, and some other tools. Major issue is my work dependency over some non floss electron binary blobs, like teams, slack, and so on, which particularly for desktop sharing and meetings don't yet work properly, no matter the electron options one can use for them, and some floss I use like signal, freetube, jitsi. Wine has a horrible hack, which I might live with, but it's horrible...
So I'll have to wait further for non wayland stuff to truly support wayland, and it has taken ages for that to happen, :(
I haven't tried labwc, andit sounds interesting, though I don't like openbox configs, and I really love fluxbox ways, which are also text files, but I never got used to openbox configs, perhaps just because I got way too familiar with fluxbox, which is what I use with Xorg (fluxbox + picom + tint2 + conky).
- GTK does not use env vars for configuration, those are for development. There are some GSettings that control scaling like org.gnome.desktop.interface text-scaling-factor.
  Screen sharing also works once apps catch up.
  
  The env var works fine on Xorg though. And yeap, several applications need to catch up. That's what I meant when I said it's not wayland fault itself. However it's been years things have been trying to catch up. Every now and then I try, but a couple of months back I couldn't routinely use wayland, given all missing functionality plus additional nuances... The hard part is that if not using gnome, or plasma for that matter, getting things working take a lot of time, just to find out some things, I depend on for work, don't work yet. At any rate, I still pay attention as well, to forums like this, to see if there's some news that might trigger another retrial...
Anyone have a nice "Will Wayland work and how to switch" guide? I haven't used it ever, but the time will come soon enough.
- There's https://arewewaylandyet.com/
  
  I love those "are we (thing) yet" sites. They're amazingly helpful.
  
  Now that is useful. I see that I might indeed wait a little longer.
- On my system, Wayland KDE works perfectly while KDE X11 is buggy (Manjaro).
- I went from decade with dwm into Alpine + Sway and had zero issues. Actually the opposite, all the screen tearing and multi screen issues are now gone.
- What distro ?
  
  Right now, Alpine. I've gone over the Wiki and don't need to switch any time soon. It is more to have something bookmarked for later.
Can Wayland tunnel through ssh?
- https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe
- Ya since I also run xwayland :P
switched to sway on pinephone and main computer, and will never go back to xorg (i hope!)
Vamos
I didn't have an opinion on this until I tried to disable right click on a ubuntu machine with Wayland. It needs an xmodmap style tool.
- That's not a common thing people do tho
  
  True but it's something that can easily be done in xorg because it has almost 20 years worth of tools created for it.
It'd be pretty cool if they implemented HDR soon, my debian Kodi box can't display HDR movies correct on my TV.
I was recently trying to set up headless Wayland session with wayvnc and labwc but I really wish there was a more basic pre-configured out-of-the-box lightweight window manager like IceWM for Wayland...
so Budgie guys doing some work :)
Can't be that good. I did a kde archinstall on a friends desktop just last week, 2070super with proprietary drivers, and wayland crashes on login. T_T
I've been using wayland for years but I'm running AMD.
- Well yea it doesn't work on Nvidia very well
  
  The linux desktop experience in current day is honestly incredible to use. as long as you keep team green as far away from your hardware as possible. Not worth the headache to deal with Nvidia in my personal experience
As soon as Wayland supports muffin, I'll drop xorg like a bad habit.
- You mean, as soon as we get a Cinnamon on Wayland Session?
- Muffin?
  
  My understanding is that Muffin does not support Wayland. Is that the case?
I tried the Manjaro Sway image and liked it a lot. Felt much nicer than i3. But... there is no alternative to Barrier that works with Wayland and that forced me to go back to i3 and X. And please don't bother to list all Wayland alternatives for Barrier, because I tried them all and none is comparable.

42 comments