5 ms·

I use dwm and X11. I don’t use a “desktop” and never will. I only use one monitor, and don’t care about screen sharing. X11 works fine for me in almost all resp

I use dwm and X11. I don’t use a “desktop” and never will. I only use one monitor, and don’t care about screen sharing. X11 works fine for me in almost all respects—the exception is some applications drawing some of their text too small on my high-resolution screen. Is there any reason for me to know about Wayland?

zamadatix 6y ago
Wayland gives a better way for those apps to draw on high resolution displays appropriately and at worst case if they don't know about Wayland they draw all the same as now via XWayland anyways. Ddevault actually created sway which is a Wayland i3 clone so his workflow probably wasn't all that different from yours on dwm.
- leephillips 6y ago
  OK. I may want to try it, in that case. Do you know if there is a good guide somewhere to how to do this? The idea seems a bit scary, as X11 is embedded pretty deeply into the system.
  - zamadatix 6y ago
    I did it on a fresh secondary install first just to get an understanding of what I wanted to do. If you were going for a more prepackaged system like KDE it's just a click but dwm -> sway is basically rebuilding everything you did in dwm and (at least for me) couldn't be done in one shot on a Saturday afternoon. I hear if you're coming from i3 it's dead simple but I was coming from KDE basically so had to figure everything out plus figure the wayland bits out. As far as documentation I think this comment chain has the perfect set of links for that https://www.reddit.com/r/swaywm/comments/l54a1a/guidestutorials_for_sway_where_are_they/gksvfui/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/swaywm/comments/l54a1a/guidestutori... and the subreddit in general is a great source of information/tips on it. In general it's going to come down to 1) packages for sway, and wayland tools for things like clipboard/screenshot/xwayland/etc, and wayland compatibility on different toolkits/libraries 2) your sway config file which ties all of those packages together and personalizes the look, feel, and functionality of your workspace 3) envvars and other configurations to signal to GTK/Firefox/QT/etc you want to prefer wayland native (otherwise a lot of things still default to X11 which will run via xwayland). Right now I'd classify it as "no harder than getting dwm/i3 working the way you want it for the first time but a lot of work". Also like I said it gives the apps the ability to understand per monitor DPI or fractional DPI and so on, not it makes every app work perfectly. E.g. FF has really solid and performant GPU accelerated rendering and video decoding you can enable on top of webrender in Wayland but it's a GTK app so if you have it run at 1.5x scale GTK is going to render it at 2x your screen resolution at 3x your configured DPI and downscale the output by 2x to end up at your resolution with 1.5x scale like you asked. Not much different than when it was on X11, except it's a bit more performant and they say it's easier to maintain/simpler than the X11 GPU acceleration code. On the flipside you have Chromium which now has the same GPU accelerated story in Wayland (with configuration) but understands how to do 1.5x without rescaling when running in Wayland and can move to another monitor that's 1x and scale appropriately. tl;dr: it's a lot of work and a bit scary, don't jump unless you've really got some time and interest. If you do jump it does do what it says on the tin though and apps are only going to get more native Wayland support with time not less.
    - leephillips 6y ago
      Thanks, I appreciate the detailed reply.

zamadatix 6y ago

Wayland gives a better way for those apps to draw on high resolution displays appropriately and at worst case if they don't know about Wayland they draw all the same as now via XWayland anyways. Ddevault actually created sway which is a Wayland i3 clone so his workflow probably wasn't all that different from yours on dwm.

leephillips 6y ago
OK. I may want to try it, in that case. Do you know if there is a good guide somewhere to how to do this? The idea seems a bit scary, as X11 is embedded pretty deeply into the system.
- zamadatix 6y ago
  I did it on a fresh secondary install first just to get an understanding of what I wanted to do. If you were going for a more prepackaged system like KDE it's just a click but dwm -> sway is basically rebuilding everything you did in dwm and (at least for me) couldn't be done in one shot on a Saturday afternoon. I hear if you're coming from i3 it's dead simple but I was coming from KDE basically so had to figure everything out plus figure the wayland bits out. As far as documentation I think this comment chain has the perfect set of links for that https://www.reddit.com/r/swaywm/comments/l54a1a/guidestutorials_for_sway_where_are_they/gksvfui/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/swaywm/comments/l54a1a/guidestutori... and the subreddit in general is a great source of information/tips on it. In general it's going to come down to 1) packages for sway, and wayland tools for things like clipboard/screenshot/xwayland/etc, and wayland compatibility on different toolkits/libraries 2) your sway config file which ties all of those packages together and personalizes the look, feel, and functionality of your workspace 3) envvars and other configurations to signal to GTK/Firefox/QT/etc you want to prefer wayland native (otherwise a lot of things still default to X11 which will run via xwayland). Right now I'd classify it as "no harder than getting dwm/i3 working the way you want it for the first time but a lot of work". Also like I said it gives the apps the ability to understand per monitor DPI or fractional DPI and so on, not it makes every app work perfectly. E.g. FF has really solid and performant GPU accelerated rendering and video decoding you can enable on top of webrender in Wayland but it's a GTK app so if you have it run at 1.5x scale GTK is going to render it at 2x your screen resolution at 3x your configured DPI and downscale the output by 2x to end up at your resolution with 1.5x scale like you asked. Not much different than when it was on X11, except it's a bit more performant and they say it's easier to maintain/simpler than the X11 GPU acceleration code. On the flipside you have Chromium which now has the same GPU accelerated story in Wayland (with configuration) but understands how to do 1.5x without rescaling when running in Wayland and can move to another monitor that's 1x and scale appropriately. tl;dr: it's a lot of work and a bit scary, don't jump unless you've really got some time and interest. If you do jump it does do what it says on the tin though and apps are only going to get more native Wayland support with time not less.
  - leephillips 6y ago
    Thanks, I appreciate the detailed reply.