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Author here. Post is a bit rambling but I just wanted to document somewhere the things I encountered along the way with links to resources, to save someone havi

Author here. Post is a bit rambling but I just wanted to document somewhere the things I encountered along the way with links to resources, to save someone having to trawl the web for it next time.

intarga 6y ago
About sway, if you don’t mind using Firefox, that works natively under Wayland. On another note though, the reason I don’t use sway, is that I couldn’t figure out how to get inertial scrolling working... Did you manage this, or just not bother with inertial scrolling?
- fluffything 6y ago
  I use the chromium ozone packages from the AUR with sway on Wayland and they work fine. The real problem with wayland are all the apps that just don't support it. From emacs, to, e.g., all the electron apps built with older versions of chromium, etc. You can use them seamlessly with Xwayland, but then a lot of things work "weirdly", e.g., HiDPI displays blurry Xwayland apps, applications like obs-studio cannot record some apps, etc. The the Sway ecosystem main drawbacks are the immaturity of the tools (e.g., waybar (i3bar replacement), wofi (rofi replacement), etc.) and the drawbacks of wlroots (e.g. lack of nvidia support in contrast to gnome and kde, etc.). Many things kind of "just work" under Wayland, but many things also kind of just don't properly work. Using pipewire to, e.g., stream desktop apps via webchat from firefox/chrome works weirdly, streaming one monitor or one sway workspace from firefox/chrome does not work, capturing one workspace from sway using obs studio in another workspace does not work, etc.
  - danshick 6y ago
    WebRTC (firefox and chrome) can (usually) stream individual XWayland windows using the same mechanism that was in place for window sharing under X. Wayland native apps are not shareable (and may not be if/until some protocol changes are introduced). I hope that fullscreen desktop sharing "just works" now that we've released xdg-desktop-portal-wlr[0]. If you have any trouble with it, hit me up on freenode #sway or raise an issue on this project. We're happy to help and looking for a broader user base to help us test it out. [0] https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr
mjg59 6y ago
One of the problems with replicating this with more modern Apple hardware is that Apple have increasingly moved away from the "traditional" PC hardware platform, and their more modern laptops have adopted various design patterns that were traditionally associated with more embedded devices (such as using SPI for their input devices). This is a completely reasonable set of design choices on Apple's part, but it means there's now a pretty long lag between a new generation of Apple devices and it being possible to run native Linux on them in a reasonable way.
- izacus 6y ago
  They also started to add separate controllers running separate OSes (e.g. T2 chip) which have completely undocumented protocols and are protected by DRM.
read_if_gay_ 6y ago
For automatically switching screen layouts when plugging/unplugging, look at autorandr.
- djhworld 6y ago
  TIL - thanks!
  - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
    You’re welcome. Also, just remembered another neat piece of software: flameshot. It’s basically macOS’s screenshot editor but even better IMO. I’m not sure whether you can bind it to macOS keyboard shortcuts though.
harpratap 6y ago
How is your Macbook handling VMs running for like 8 hours a day? I use docker (which runs inside a hyperkit VM on OSX) and it absolutely toasts my Macbook. To the point where my screen has started showing black lines on top and bottom due to overheating.
- djhworld 6y ago
  It's been fine, I've noticed a significant different in performance between Virtualbox and VMWare Fusion - I'm not sure what VMWare are doing but their hypervisor makes VMs feel almost native in performance levels it's quite extraordinary.
mijoharas 6y ago
Hey, nice post! I'm the guy from the sway github issue mentioning that the chrome autoscaling had been fixed, so maybe you need a more up to date chrome, or maybe there was some kind of regression. (I had some other bug with sway to do with the tray, so haven't been using it). One other suggestion for an alfred/spotlight alternative is dmenu (or bemenu for a wayland compatible one if you go for sway), there's also rofi as an option which does the same thing iirc.

Author here. Post is a bit rambling but I just wanted to document somewhere the things I encountered along the way with links to resources, to save someone having to trawl the web for it next time.

intarga 6y ago

About sway, if you don’t mind using Firefox, that works natively under Wayland. On another note though, the reason I don’t use sway, is that I couldn’t figure out how to get inertial scrolling working... Did you manage this, or just not bother with inertial scrolling?

fluffything 6y ago
I use the chromium ozone packages from the AUR with sway on Wayland and they work fine. The real problem with wayland are all the apps that just don't support it. From emacs, to, e.g., all the electron apps built with older versions of chromium, etc. You can use them seamlessly with Xwayland, but then a lot of things work "weirdly", e.g., HiDPI displays blurry Xwayland apps, applications like obs-studio cannot record some apps, etc. The the Sway ecosystem main drawbacks are the immaturity of the tools (e.g., waybar (i3bar replacement), wofi (rofi replacement), etc.) and the drawbacks of wlroots (e.g. lack of nvidia support in contrast to gnome and kde, etc.). Many things kind of "just work" under Wayland, but many things also kind of just don't properly work. Using pipewire to, e.g., stream desktop apps via webchat from firefox/chrome works weirdly, streaming one monitor or one sway workspace from firefox/chrome does not work, capturing one workspace from sway using obs studio in another workspace does not work, etc.
- danshick 6y ago
  WebRTC (firefox and chrome) can (usually) stream individual XWayland windows using the same mechanism that was in place for window sharing under X. Wayland native apps are not shareable (and may not be if/until some protocol changes are introduced). I hope that fullscreen desktop sharing "just works" now that we've released xdg-desktop-portal-wlr[0]. If you have any trouble with it, hit me up on freenode #sway or raise an issue on this project. We're happy to help and looking for a broader user base to help us test it out. [0] https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr

mjg59 6y ago

One of the problems with replicating this with more modern Apple hardware is that Apple have increasingly moved away from the "traditional" PC hardware platform, and their more modern laptops have adopted various design patterns that were traditionally associated with more embedded devices (such as using SPI for their input devices). This is a completely reasonable set of design choices on Apple's part, but it means there's now a pretty long lag between a new generation of Apple devices and it being possible to run native Linux on them in a reasonable way.

izacus 6y ago
They also started to add separate controllers running separate OSes (e.g. T2 chip) which have completely undocumented protocols and are protected by DRM.

read_if_gay_ 6y ago

For automatically switching screen layouts when plugging/unplugging, look at autorandr.

djhworld 6y ago
TIL - thanks!
- read_if_gay_ 6y ago
  You’re welcome. Also, just remembered another neat piece of software: flameshot. It’s basically macOS’s screenshot editor but even better IMO. I’m not sure whether you can bind it to macOS keyboard shortcuts though.

harpratap 6y ago

How is your Macbook handling VMs running for like 8 hours a day? I use docker (which runs inside a hyperkit VM on OSX) and it absolutely toasts my Macbook. To the point where my screen has started showing black lines on top and bottom due to overheating.

djhworld 6y ago
It's been fine, I've noticed a significant different in performance between Virtualbox and VMWare Fusion - I'm not sure what VMWare are doing but their hypervisor makes VMs feel almost native in performance levels it's quite extraordinary.

mijoharas 6y ago

Hey, nice post! I'm the guy from the sway github issue mentioning that the chrome autoscaling had been fixed, so maybe you need a more up to date chrome, or maybe there was some kind of regression. (I had some other bug with sway to do with the tray, so haven't been using it). One other suggestion for an alfred/spotlight alternative is dmenu (or bemenu for a wayland compatible one if you go for sway), there's also rofi as an option which does the same thing iirc.