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Pure Wayland anyone?

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bedtime
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Pure Wayland anyone?

#1 Post by bedtime »

Anyone just running Wayland and not X? I'm talking about running Wayland with no Xorg on the system, and no xwayland.

Currently, I have this installed:

sway window manager (a Wayland version of i3)
firefox (which can be run under pure Wayland)
mpv (to play videos)
aria2 (cli torrent)
foot (terminal)
iwd (internet)

I'm quite new to this experience, so I'd like to know what other people are doing with it and what one can run on it.

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Re: Pure Wayland anyone?

#2 Post by canci »

I'm planning on migrating soon.
Current showstoppers for me:
Gimp still being compiled with GTK2 plus some custom scripts using X tools for pasting into the clipboard.
Other than that, I'm good to go. It's probably going to be Sway.
Pitty the Waybox window manager is still early days. I'd love to continue using Openbox.
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Re: Pure Wayland anyone?

#3 Post by bedtime »

canci wrote: 2021-11-30 11:28 I'm planning on migrating soon.
Current showstoppers for me:
Gimp still being compiled with GTK2 plus some custom scripts using X tools for pasting into the clipboard.
Other than that, I'm good to go. It's probably going to be Sway.
Pitty the Waybox window manager is still early days. I'd love to continue using Openbox.
One good thing is that I think almost all the new gnome apps are compatible with wayland.

If anyone knows of a decent, simple, pic viewing app, such as feh, which can be used under wayland, that would be cool.

...

*** EDIT ***

Found a wayland image program:

Code: Select all

apt install imv
And run with:

Code: Select all

$ imv-wayland /mypicdir/*

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Re: Pure Wayland anyone?

#4 Post by canci »

Thanks for the tip for imv. :)

So, I've made the plunge a couple of weeks ago. I'm really pleasently surprised! sway is rock solid. It's a much different experience than using Gnome on Wayland. It's basically i3 with a few differences. I've also removed xwayland in order to easily spot all the GUI stuff that I had to change.

Some notes:
  • I've had this annoying bug where playing Youtube on mpv would crash the entire X Server. That's gone now! I can finally watch online streams again without using a browser. Videos never drop frames or cause screen tearing and there isn't this milliseconds long freeze when going fullscreen in a video.
  • Everything that's written in Qt5 will just work with Wayland as long as qtwayland5 is installed
  • Surprisingly, some GTK3 apps won't work. For instance, some of those written for the Mate desktop.
  • I don't have a decent run dialogue any more. dmenu uses Xwayland, which I want to avoid and wofi just isn't as good as rofi. Any tips there?
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Re: Pure Wayland anyone?

#5 Post by bedtime »

So, I've made the plunge a couple of weeks ago. I'm really pleasently surprised! sway is rock solid. It's a much different experience than using Gnome on Wayland. It's basically i3 with a few differences. I've also removed xwayland in order to easily spot all the GUI stuff that I had to change.
I found a couple of bugs in i3. One is that I cannot set up mouse clicks to run commands, such as WIN+<left mouse click> to close a window. Another bug is with firefox menus flickering. This bug has been around for about a year, so I'm not holding my breath.
I've had this annoying bug where playing Youtube on mpv would crash the entire X Server. That's gone now! I can finally watch online streams again without using a browser. Videos never drop frames or cause screen tearing and there isn't this milliseconds long freeze when going fullscreen in a video.
I'm on bullseye, and my mpv player will not play youtube videos with yt-dlp. Apparently, the version of mpv is too old. Tried installing via backports, but that didn't help either as the version is still not recent enough.
I don't have a decent run dialogue any more. dmenu uses Xwayland, which I want to avoid and wofi just isn't as good as rofi. Any tips there?
Wofi doesn't seem to have all the options, but I find it works well enough for me for now. Maybe you can submit a feature request?

Anyways, I'm still using pure wayland as it offers me just what I need. Also, you can do screen recording with wf-recorder.

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Re: Pure Wayland anyone?

#6 Post by steve_v »

I haven't tried it on Debian, but I did try switching my Gentoo (plasma 5.23.4) desktop over to pure wayland just last week...
It's still a mess, even on the bleeding edge.

Session restore doesn't work.
Window management glitches and rendering problems all over the place.
Applications that need to manipulate their own window state (e.g "request attention" or raise themselves from minimized on an event) can't. Likewise when one app wants to activate another.
Support for Nvidia drivers is still borked in too many ways to list.
Font management doesn't work.
Gamma controls don't work.
Drag-and-drop (and in many cases the clipboard as well) is a complete garbage fire.

That's just what I noticed in the first 10 minutes trying to use it, but the real showstopper is that ~60% of the applications I use regularly don't work at all on pure wayland, and some of them don't work properly even with xwayland.


I'm sure this thing is fun for the early-adopters, but trying to get any real work done on a wayland desktop is still a complete joke. It's taken 10 years to go from vaporware to tinkerers toy, so maybe wake me up in another decade when we get to "widely supported".
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Re: Pure Wayland anyone?

#7 Post by canci »

>tinkerers toy

Wayland isn't a tinkerer's toy just because KDE hasn't implemented their stuff properly yet. Same goes for all the programmes that haven't moved to standard GTK3 or Qt5 without obscure direct ties to Xorg.

It really depends what workflow you have, but I guess a lot of people will have a similarly hard time like you, because popular tools like Gimp still use gtk2 or they might be proprietary stuff that depends on deprecated Ubuntu stuff like libappindicator or some similar stuff. A similar problem exists for Gaming where a lot of tools like Wine still are written with Xorg in mind.That's more a symptom of general lack of focus or resources in free software. If you use sway or more recent versions of Gnome, the experience is much different than with KDE.
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Re: Pure Wayland anyone?

#8 Post by steve_v »

canci wrote: 2021-12-29 15:37Wayland isn't a tinkerer's toy just because KDE hasn't implemented their stuff properly yet. Same goes for all the programmes that haven't moved to standard GTK3 or Qt5 without obscure direct ties to Xorg.
Sure, you're absolutely correct, in a technical sense. From a practical "I need to do work with my PC" point of view though they're pretty much the same thing. Doubly so if you don't like or don't use GNOME.
Whatever it's technical merits, a platform that can't run the software you need isn't very useful. Wayland can't run a bunch of software I need, so for my use case (and I doubt it's a particularly unusual one), wayland is still a toy, not a tool.
canci wrote: 2021-12-29 15:37If you use sway or more recent versions of Gnome, the experience is much different than with KDE.
I can't comment on sway, but I absolutely agree about recent GNOME versions... the experience is far, far more unpleasant than even the most broken KDE install. :P
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Re: Pure Wayland anyone?

#9 Post by canci »

No, you said a statement about Wayland that's factually incorrect and which potentially gives people the wrong idea about it. You're welcome to conflate apples and oranges because you feel left out, but a more practical approach would be to name the fact that KDE just didn't get around to implement Wayland yet or that favourite app foo still uses gtk2 or some 1980s Xorg bitrot. For you, Wayland isn't there yet, but I can get work done in it. There's a huge difference in Wayland doesn't do x vs KDE doesn't do x.
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Re: Pure Wayland anyone?

#10 Post by steve_v »

canci wrote: 2021-12-29 16:15you said a statement about Wayland that's factually incorrect and which potentially gives people the wrong idea about it.
Well, It's exactly the same idea anyone trying to use any one of a still embarrassingly long list of software on wayland will undoubtedly form quite independently.

I am fully aware it's not waylands fault, but that doesn't change the end-user experience any more than "WONTFIX, blame nvidia" has improved GNU/Linux hardware compatibility over the years.
I'm into practical solutions to real problems, not attributing blame. Right now the solution to running several extremely popular software packages is "use X11, or use xwayland (may contain traces of jank)".

canci wrote: 2021-12-29 16:15You're welcome to conflate apples and oranges because you feel left out
I don't feel left out, not at all. You can keep your 20 or so applications that work properly on native wayland, and I'll keep trying it out every couple of years to see if the situation has improved.

canci wrote: 2021-12-29 16:15a more practical approach would be to name the fact that KDE just didn't get around to implement Wayland yet or that favourite app foo still uses gtk2 or some 1980s Xorg bitrot.
It would be, except that when we're talking about "pure wayland", without xwayland, (as per the OP) I'd have to name-drop something like 80% of all the GUI applications in the repos. I really don't have that level of motivation, and wearing a hair shirt so itchy it excludes the vast majority of available software is pretty impractical if your workflow extends beyond a web browser and a video player.

Much as it pains me to say it, one of the reasons Microsoft Windows has been so incredibly successful is it's outstanding backwards compatibility. Applications written 20 years ago will run with minimal changes (and often none at all) on bleeding-edge Windows...
But GNU/Linux? Not so much. GNU/Linux with "pure" wayland? Yeah, good luck.
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Re: Pure Wayland anyone?

#11 Post by canci »

>I'm into practical solutions to real problems

Not sure how practical a solution like blaming Wayland for the work KDE hasn't done is supposed to be. A more practical approach would be installing KDE Neon and bug reporting Wayland-related stuff once a week.

I understand that it's frustrating, but I also think you're being a bit dramatic with the 80%. I'm wondering where you get that number from.

Also, you have backward compatibility. Xorg is still maintained and works mostly OK. xwayland isn't perfect, but it works unless you need low level stuff.
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Re: Pure Wayland anyone?

#12 Post by steve_v »

canci wrote: 2021-12-29 17:55Not sure how practical a solution like blaming Wayland for the work KDE hasn't done
I'm not blaming anyone, I'm describing the current situation WRT native wayland support, and the practicality of running a pure wayland environment.
Outside the GNOME/Redhat ecosystem or running a bare WM and some carefully selected software, that situation is still a buggy, incompatible mess.


canci wrote: 2021-12-29 17:55Xorg is still maintained and works mostly OK. xwayland isn't perfect, but it works unless you need low level stuff.
Ahem:
bedtime wrote: 2021-11-28 20:03I'm talking about running Wayland with no Xorg on the system, and no xwayland.
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Re: Pure Wayland anyone?

#13 Post by canci »

OK. We can agree on that.

With Xorg, I was talking about backwards compatibility - both in the sense of running Xwayland or foregoing Wayland for the time being.
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Re: Pure Wayland anyone?

#14 Post by bedtime »

steve_v wrote: 2021-12-29 13:22Support for Nvidia drivers is still borked in too many ways to list.
Font management doesn't work.
I'm going to guess that this is a big part of why applications aren't working for you. Unfortunately, Nvidia sucks with Wayland at this moment.

...

But you guys remember the switch from 32bit to 64bit? Remember how buggy 64 bit was, and now 64 bit is almost all we use. After a certain threshold, I believe Wayland will just take off.

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Re: Pure Wayland anyone?

#15 Post by canci »

I sort of want to try KDE on pure Wayland now :)
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Re: Pure Wayland anyone?

#16 Post by ahmadraniri »

I'll go with sway, bar : yambar or sfwbar. To manage opened windows, there is swayr, really great for floating windows.

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Re: Pure Wayland anyone?

#17 Post by argentwolf »

The watermark for me will be when Xfce 4.18 is released in Debian's stable...
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Re: Pure Wayland anyone?

#18 Post by canci »

argentwolf wrote: 2022-01-03 13:42 The watermark for me will be when Xfce 4.18 is released in Debian's stable...
Thanks, I didn't even know Xfce is already on it. 4.18 might be done for Debian 12.
https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap
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Re: Pure Wayland anyone?

#19 Post by argentwolf »

Huh! If I was a betting man, I'd put my money down on the divine magic number, Debian v13. 4+1+8=13 Wha? :shock:
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Re: Pure Wayland anyone?

#20 Post by canci »

Haha! I'd prefer it to be ready for Debian 12 though.
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