Lainchans thoughts on Wayland...

So I've just started my journey into Linux because I love the idea of a super minimal OS and workflow. Currently running Void Musl as my first distro if anyone actually cares. But I'm using Xorg, I've been reading a bit about Wayland recently and just wanted more opinions on it really - I want to move to it since all I really need from my machine is a browser and vscode... maybe Runelite but its not a deal breaker basically is Wayland a meme or is it the future for low bloat graphical session protocols? (genuinely don't know what its called sorry)

Wayland is just slightly better X11 in a way. But Xorg is not going to die anytime soon (and it's not entirely impossible that something else replaces it than Wayland). The benefits of Wayland are that there is no screen tearing and programs can't listen to each other (I heard that Xephyr could be used to get input isolation under X11). Sway is the most usable Wayland compositor (I guess KDE/KWin could also work). Labwc is okay-ish stacking/floting Wayland compositor (it's a clone of OpenBox). I had to set 2 environment variables: MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 and XKB_DEFAULT_LAYOUT=eo to get Firefox working and to set the keymap. I used Wofi as replacement for Rofi. Also, one of problems with a Wayland compositor called "Hikari" is that it uses libucl, which has a possible memory corruption bug: https://github.com/vstakhov/libucl/issues/255 and the Hikari AUR package contains 1 executable with SUID enabled: /usr/bin/hikari-unlocker (even though the PKGBUILD should build Hikari without SUID bits). Links > https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Wayland_Desktop_Landscape > https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Wayland#Compositors > https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dotfiles#User_repositories (a page where you can steal config files) > https://wayland-book.com/ > X11 and Wayland: A tale of two implementations Implementing the hikari window manager/compositor: https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=8E0SOWo-Gsg The problems with Wayland are fragmentation (wlroots didn't exist in the beginning!) and the fact that a ton of programs require Xwayland. Portability to other operating systems is also a problem: >https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/issues/14 >https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/issues/39 >https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/issues/214

>>61910 thanks for all the info :) Wayland seems like the better option to me and I still use Windows as my daily driver (I need Adobe products for work and messing with a VM doesn't seem worth it IMO) so not being able to do absolutely everything right now doesn't matter much. I read about the Firefox stuff in the void manual but its the first time I've heard of wofi which is good because I'm using awesomewm with rofi currently

>>61908 wayland is pretty much the future, the people who were maintaining X have pretty much completely moved on. this is like kicking dead whales down the beach in a number of ways (it's bad for the BSDs that don't support wayland, iirc, for instance.) but all in all I would recommend using Wayland if you're a first time linux user. there's no real sense in getting used to X only to swap in a few years. if you like things to be super minimal I believe there's a dwm fork for wayland. if you don't mind something heavier, KDE plasma on wayland is what I use and the issues have really been disappearing over the past year or so. (the clipboard is still a little janky, for instance.) if you require fractional scaling (read: if you have a 4k monitor) then wayland is still fuarrrked in that department. if you have two monitors with different refresh rate, X is fuarrrked in that department.

Yeah, I noticed that games stopped sucking on wayland a while ago so it's probably not that bad.

>>61917 Good to hear, I'll be making the move over the weekend when I have some free time I do have a 4k monitor on my laptop but its 13 inch and I can't see soykaf on it so I've just added the xrandr command to change to 1920x1080 in my start up. I know Wayland has similar feature so that's one thing I'll need to test before fully making the move. DWM is something I wanted to use but got a little scared when it came to the patching but I'm getting more comfortable with these things now anyway

Anyone have experience with a tiling window manager like i3? I've heard some say wayland is only useful with DEs. I expect to encounter some trouble switching to it, but if it's too much of a hassle, maybe it'd be better to wait.

>>61926 Im pretty sure sway has tiling, River also has tiling and one of them can even use i3 config files... I just can't remember which one

>>61927 sway still doesn't have a workable input method. Tried ibus and fcitx5, none of them works.

A blog post about Xorg input isolation issue: https://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2011/04/linux-security-circus-on-gui-isolation.html Also note that Wayland can have awful performance on low-end hardware. >>61917 >this is like kicking dead whales down the beach in a number of ways (it's bad for the BSDs that don't support wayland, iirc, for instance.) More like Wayland won't support *BSD. Perhaps the *BSD will adopt OpenBSD's fork of Xorg (Xenocara & Xenodm). >>61926 Sway is tiling Wayland compositor (= WM) and it was pretty much the first usable Wayland compositor (according to some, Sway is still the only usable Wayland compositor). Sway is a clone of i3/i3-gaps, so you would feel at home if you switched to it (I highly encourage you to test it!). >>61939 I used GNU Emacs + M-x set-input-method to write Japanese but it can be hard to use if you want to do something else than writing text files.

i've daily driven wayland with sway for two years and recently switched back to x11 and dwm so i'll leave my two cents wayland is pretty cool and works really well, ignore people saying that it isn't stable/mature enough because it works just fine for most people. however i had problems. ime support kinda is like kicking dead whales down the beach and this is a side effect of how wayland is structured. sway, while stable enough for daily use, had this bad habit of just dying on me. xwayland is okay if you have to use it but the menus can get in your way. i needed fractional scaling (1080p, 14" screen) and yeah that doesn't work well. you'll have to set environment variables regarding font size in gtk and qt, don't bother with it anywhere else. it also makes xwayland look awful. as previously mentioned, portability is a concern. i think only linux and freebsd support it? while x11 works pretty much everywhere however, asides from all of this, and you don't happen to fall under any of these areas of concern, it's damn fine and works extremely well. >>61927 sway is the most major one that is relatively compatible with i3(-gaps), there's dwl too if you liked dwm >>61939 funny, i used fcitx5 for the two years i used sway and it worked okay. in graphical applications anyway. it will work in most other places however you will not have a completions prompt

I've been using a Wayland compositor for the past couple years. I've been studying it in my free time so that I can make support for it to promote adoption, and I like the layout under the hood & its effects, however there are currently a few legitimate issues end-users have with Wayland. For advantages as it stands right now, it tends to fail better than Xorg by itself. Misbehaving programs that I was stuck with would freeze an entire Xorg window manager, but the Wayland compositor would keep chugging along in the same situation. As it stands right now, XWayland breaks some backwards compatibility for apps with desktop sharing, window/border/screen/geometry capture, and the like. The protocols are all there, and some apps like Firefox are able to find it -- but not all programs see it. I recommend playing around with Wayland and seeing how it plays out. There are some really promising features (such as Wayland clients being compositors themselves, able to embed e.g. HTML previews or a graph viewer of some code snippet in an IDE) that I'm itching to try out, or see other desktop apps experiment with!

Food for thought: https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/posts/2022-06-10-wayland-xorg/wayland-xorg.html

>>61959 >There are some really promising features (such as Wayland clients being compositors themselves, able to embed e.g. HTML previews or a graph viewer of some code snippet in an IDE) aka Xembed.