11 ms·

Wayland in 2021

141 points by swalladge 6y ago

k_sze 6y ago
Does ibus work seamlessly in Wayland yet? As a person who regularly needs to input French, Chinese, and Japanese, besides English, I tried Wayland in Kubuntu 20.04 and a non-working ibus was a complete showstopper for me.
- chousuke 6y ago
  ibus works with Gnome out-of-the-box. On sway/wlroots, you will have more luck with fcitx. I don't know which tool works best with KDE.
  - ducktective 6y ago
    Why, in Wayland, support of some basic features has to do with what DE or TWM you use? It is not like this in X11 and it seems there is more adherence to the UNIX philosophy in X11.
    - bregma 6y ago
      Because Wayland is a display service protocol. It's not responsible for secure message passing between desktop applications: that's the DE's business. Just because DEs used X11 as an insecure inter-process message passing agent doesn't mean it's a good design or even make sense.
    - erinnh 6y ago
      Wouldnt it be the other way around? X11 isnt adhering to the UNIX philosophy because it does everything under the sun. Wayland gives some tasks to the compositor.
    - chousuke 6y ago
      There's no "Wayland" that could implement a generic way of handling input. Wayland is an extensible set of protocols with several implementations. Handling input is an integral part of what a compositor does, and it's not an easy problem to solve when said input doesn't map linearly to text. Input methods in particular are not something that X11 "solves" at all: Under X every toolkit implemented their own way of handling complex input methods. XIM existed, but it was limited and only there for compatibility with ancient applications. There are Wayland protocols for complex input methods too. Gnome's gone all-in and integrated ibus with their own compositor, so that obviously works, but Gnome also benefits a lot from distributions like Fedora making sure it works: everything is set up correctly out-of-the-box if you use Gnome. However, more niche implementations like Sway have to deal with a lower level of integration because there's no distribution that's built around Sway to create a full desktop environment.
- dmytrish 6y ago
  It's not a Wayland problem, ibus does not work in KDE even on X11.
  - codewiz 6y ago
    Uh? I've been using ibus with mozc for Japanese input on KDE for the past 3 years.
    - mrwoggle 6y ago
      Same for me. been using ibus-pinyin for a few years
    - dmytrish 6y ago
      Do you use ibus input methods only? In my case, I wanted to keep my configured xkb keyboard layouts + I wanted to be able to use ibus in parallel for CJK. Ok, there must be a problem with *my* KDE setup: when I try to disable KDE keyboard layouts, KDE does not persist changes to the next session: when I log in next time, KDE keyboard layouts are enabled again and interfere with ibus.
  - mrwoggle 6y ago
    It should work on Kubuntu and X11, but I remember that the installation and configuration process (or at least the documentation) is a bit lacking. Make sure you also install the ibus-[input method] package. If you don't the ibus preferences still allows you to add a chinese/japanese input method, but it doesn't actually do anything. You might also want to restart your x11 session after that.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- numpad0 6y ago
  What's with IBus and IBus-centric IME switching being sub-optimal for better part of past decade or so[1], yet being pushed from non-CJK regions? Usually I don't even GNOME and just go with whatever fcitx plays with, so not an issue for me, not angry or anything but curious what's happening "up there" consistently[2][3][4]. 1: https://cpplover.blogspot.com/2013/10/ibus-15_21.html https://cpplover.blogspot.com/2013/10/ibus-15_21.html 2: https://uwabami.junkhub.org/log/20210224p01.html#p01 https://uwabami.junkhub.org/log/20210224p01.html#p01 3: https://uwabami.junkhub.org/log/20210312.html https://uwabami.junkhub.org/log/20210312.html 4: https://lists.debian.or.jp/pipermail/debian-devel/2021-February/000379.html https://lists.debian.or.jp/pipermail/debian-devel/2021-Febru...
xrd 6y ago
The author uses Pipewire with WebRTC in Chrome, very cool. Pipewire is showing up all over the place. I've been reading a little about it, but I finally got a comfortable setup of jackd and pulseaudio and am worried it might interfere with my stable setup. Am I being paranoid?
- bitbang 6y ago
  I've replaced pulse with pipewire and that has been seamless. The experience is generally determined by how well the distro supports moving from one to the other rather than any maturity issues with pipewire. I've retained jackd instead of using pipewire's implementation because I don't think the pipewire version supports transport control or timecode.
- neolog 6y ago
  It's not perfect but mostly works.
- foobar33333 6y ago
  The next version of fedora uses pipewire instead of pulse audio. From all the people I have seen test it, they said it works much better than pulse.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
    I'm testing it now. Fixed my USB audio issues. Much better than pulse.
- solarkraft 6y ago
  Yes. I currently run it besides Pulse for screen sharing and there are no issues. I haven't replaced Pulse yet because it didn't work right away, but plan to try again eventually because Pipewire supports HFP, the less terrible Bluetooth headset profile.
  - xrd 6y ago
    Bluetooth support alone would be worthy of the pain of switching. Thank you.
Cloudef 6y ago
It's possible to also configure bemenu with BEMENU_OPTS env variable. I usually create wrapper script in my local bin path however, as that method will work universally with any program.
colordrops 6y ago
Is it still the case that Nvidia drivers don't work with Wayland?
- Iolaum 6y ago
  Not exactly. I m successfully using Fedora SilverBlue with proprietary nvidia in Wayland. In the official docs it's not supported but Mutter (from Gnome) has the pieces in place to do so. However I don't use anything too specialised that would force me back to Xorg. For example I did revert to Xorg while I played around with lutris a bit. Still as long as distro maintainers don't declare official support, be ready to expect surprises.
- belak 6y ago
  The short version is "it depends". Essentially, each separate Wayland compositor needs to add support for the nvidia driver (or the driver needs to support more standardized APIs). Gnome and KDE support Wayland on nvidia hardware (though it's a bit rough around the edges). Wlroots (and therefore Sway) doesn't because they don't want to have a separate code-path for one driver which doesn't want to support standards and because the APIs the driver does support wouldn't work well with the code model of wlroots.
  - qudat 6y ago
    Nvidia works with wlroots if you use nouveau and not the proprietary drivers.
    - solarkraft 6y ago
      As much as I appreciate Noveau, it's not really practically usable with recent cards (due to Nvidias faults!).
      - shmerl 6y ago
        It's probably not relevant in the long term anyway. I expect desktop Nvidia usage on Linux to pretty much plummet while their driver remains a blob. The trend is negative for them already. So I fully support wlroots developer's approach to it - show Nvidia to the door until they come back with upstreamed driver.
shmerl 6y ago
Still waiting for KWin to support adaptive sync and then I'll be switching to the Wayland session.
halz 6y ago
A project to keep an eye on, to replicate 'autotype' support offered by many password managers, is wlrctl¹. A popular alternative is ydotool², but brings some additional risks the operator might not be comfortable with. ¹https://git.sr.ht/%7Ebrocellous/wlrctl https://git.sr.ht/%7Ebrocellous/wlrctl ²https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool
- ashkankiani 6y ago
  re:ydotool. More than risks, I would say the author constantly changing things without testing and breaking the tool is what made me stop using it. I wrote my own version using evdev and never looked back.
  - erinnh 6y ago
    Could you post a link to it? Ive been using ydotool for a while, its not working 100% reliably though.
    - ashkankiani 6y ago
      It's not public. I don't really open source most of the tools I write for myself because there's basically no incentive to do so.
c-c-c-c-c 6y ago
Not a single screenshot
- sh1bumi 6y ago
  Here you go: https://kurisu.shibumi.dev/share/img-2021-03-27-21-02-41.png https://kurisu.shibumi.dev/share/img-2021-03-27-21-02-41.png This is a screenshot from my current system. * btw it's my first post on ycombinator lol..
- knorker 6y ago
  The book has no pictures? It's sway. So that's what it looks like. And the content is much deeper than showing off the color scheme you chose.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  It fits with the culture of working in VT-100 in the 21st century.
- diffeomorphism 6y ago
  Of what would you possibly want a screenshot here? It is about the under the hood plumbing so take any screenshot from the last years, copy it and write "this is what it looks like under wayland".
  - cranium 6y ago
    I like to see what other people have crafted for their own usage. Sometimes, I find a clever use of monitor real estate that would make my life easier. I adopted most of my tools by looking at other people setups and customizing them to my use case.
- _pmf_ 6y ago
  Unsure if this is a low key jab at Wayland breaking screenshot tools ...
denysvitali 6y ago
If you are looking for an alternative status bar that works with sway, you can use my fork of yagostatus :) https://github.com/denysvitali/yagostatus https://github.com/denysvitali/yagostatus
- majewsky 6y ago
  I'm using https://github.com/greshake/i3status-rust https://github.com/greshake/i3status-rust which also works well with Sway.
  - 12ian34 6y ago
    I currently use i3status-rust. with a lot of custom blocks, with X. I'm thinking of switching to Sway. Did you have any config problems?
    - majewsky 6y ago
      Not that I can think of, but obviously it depends on what your blocks are doing. I remember having trouble with the backlight block, but I fixed that upstream a long time ago, so it should not be a problem for you anymore. For reference, my config is at: https://github.com/majewsky/devenv/tree/master/i3status-rust https://github.com/majewsky/devenv/tree/master/i3status-rust (as a bunch of single-purpose snippets, the actual config file is obtained by concatenating `common/.toml` and `$HOSTNAME/.toml`)
- dasb 6y ago
  I use Waybar.
  - solarkraft 6y ago
    Same here, it's nice.
rwmj 6y ago
Can I run applications transparently over the network yet?
- superluserdo 6y ago
  You can run applications over the network with (edit: waypipe, not pipewire, I mix up the names every time), which works quite well. Technically it's not "transparent", but it isn't on X either because pretty much 0 UIs today draw themselves using X11 primitives, they just draw their own buffer and get X to display it.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- cbm-vic-20 6y ago
  I don't think network transparency is a goal for Wayland. X11 network transparency was awesome in the late 80s and early 90s. In many universities, there would be rooms of X11 terminals that connected to the "big machines" in the server rooms- and you could have each of your applications, even even the window manager itself, all being run on different machines. This made sense when an institution would license software for their big iron, and when desktop computers weren't nearly as powerful as they eventually became during the 90s. But most people gave up on it right around the time that Netscape Navigator, with its very bitmap-heavy UI gained traction. The X protocol really wasn't designed around this. Extensions helped, but not enough. I bet the vast majority of people using X11 today have never run a remote X11 client.
- rstuart4133 6y ago
  This isn't really an answer to your question, but under Gnone3+Wayland "ssh -X" works as you might expect. Which amazed me at first, because I wasn't expecting it. Turns out it's because most applications are X11, Wayland supports X11 applications via XWayland, and X is doing network transparency like it always does.
Decabytes 6y ago
I don’t know how I feel about Wayland. On the one hand it’s being made by x11 devs so I think they more than anyone else know why they would need to start from scratch over improving x11. On the other hand, moving away from x breaks so many things and I haven’t heard anyone singing it’s praises yet about how happy they are to use it. I understand apps are breaking because they relied on features of x that were security risks but it doesn’t seem like Wayland provides a safe or convenient alternative to the way apps were doing things before. I wonder if it will ever reach the adoption level of x11
- gurkendoktor 6y ago
  Besides security concerns, mixed-DPI setups are such a major pain point with X11 that many people who use a laptop with additional screens would probably switch to Wayland just for that alone. That's a large demographic.
  - tyfon 6y ago
    Do any desktop system handle mixed DPI well? I mainly use Linux so I don't know, but one of my work laptops have windows on it and it freaks out every time I connect it to a 4k monitor. At least in linux I can use triggers and xrandr [1] to manage it even if it's not pretty, never figured out how to do it automatically in windows. Edit: I am using KDE/Qt apps for 99% of my gui stuff. Gnome etc might be worse. [1] http://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/mixed-dpi-x11/#therandrway http://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/mixed-dpi-x11/#therandrway
    - vially 6y ago
      > Do any desktop system handle mixed DPI well? This works today out-of-the-box in Wayland as long as the applications are Wayland native (e.g.: not being run through XWayland).
      - solarkraft 6y ago
        This is a major pain with the current generation of Electron apps, but luckily the newest version supports Wayland. HiDPI is also in the works for XWayland, but it looks complicated and still a few months out.
mulle_nat 6y ago
I was really looking forward to Wayland, when I moved to Linux. It was then said to be right around the corner. That was six years ago. If the current state of Wayland is as bare-bones as depicted in the article, it's just sad. And as there is no support for OBS on the horizon, it's a non-topic for me. And I never liked X11 to begin with...
- solarkraft 6y ago
  Yes, there is: Through Pipewire (xdg-desktop-portal), wlr-screencopy (wlrobs) or a virtual webcam (wf-recorder) :-) Pipewire has the brightest future long term, but wlrobs seems to be the easiest to get started with if "Wayland" means wlroots based compositor (Sway, Wayfire, etc) in this instance.
- opan 6y ago
  OBS is working already with wlrobs. https://hg.sr.ht/~scoopta/wlrobs https://hg.sr.ht/~scoopta/wlrobs
  - mulle_nat 6y ago
    Thanks for the link.
reidrac 6y ago
If this was 20 years ago, when I was kind of starting with Linux, I would love it: lots of possibilities and customisation. But the truth is that I don't have time for all that in 2021. When XFCE supports Wayland and I get a good experience out the box, I may stop using X11.
rnhmjoj 6y ago
I think Wayland, and the modern desktop in general too, has forgot about a few good ideas that the original X system had. I will miss them once Wayland has taken over: - A unified way to change applications settings. All old X apps used to read the X resources database (xrdb): you could set a global color scheme, fonts, window geometry and what not, all in one place using a simple but powerful text format. - The simplicity of the window managers, hotkey daemons and other X clients. You can implement a functional wm in a few hundred lines of C[1] because the X server takes care of most of the stuff. In comparison a compositor has much more work to do and it's difficult to implement one, unless using a big library like wl_roots. - A base graphics API based on drawing primitives like the original X, SVG or Cairo, rather than just bitmaps. This would make writing a simple application without importing huge frameworks feasible again. Also sending the drawing calls over the network would probably be less bandwidth intensive. [1]: https://github.com/vardy/aphelia https://github.com/vardy/aphelia
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  The beauty of free software is that X will always be there for anyone who wants it, just like you can still get great distros without systemd.
- addicted 6y ago
  > The simplicity of the window managers, hotkey daemons and other X clients. You can implement a functional wm in a few hundred lines of C[1] because the X server takes care of most of the stuff. In comparison a compositor has much more work to do and it's difficult to implement one, unless using a big library like wl_roots. This sounds like they simply extracted some of the work X used to do into an external library. That sounds like an excellent choice with no particular downside IMO?
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    Why is a library any better? Not even disagreeing; I can't see why to prefer either approach.
- nialv7 6y ago
ElijahLynn 6y ago
I am on Arch + Gnome for 3 years now and tried Wayland again this year and experienced too many broken things (Screen.so screensharing, Fireshot screencapture, I think CopyQ clipboard manager too) and had to switch back to X11. This article shows it is still not ready for the masses, yet.
- erinnh 6y ago
  Flameshot for screencapture and the standard gnome extension clipboard manager work pretty well for me on Wayland. Cant say anyting about screensharing with Screens.so. Zoom works though. Ive been a happy Wayland user since 2017 or 2018, not entirely sure.
Klwohu 6y ago
I'm not switching to Wayland. It simply doesn't do anything for me. It also doesn't function with many of the GPUs I use.

Wayland in 2021

141 points by swalladge 6y ago

Does ibus work seamlessly in Wayland yet? As a person who regularly needs to input French, Chinese, and Japanese, besides English, I tried Wayland in Kubuntu 20.04 and a non-working ibus was a complete showstopper for me.

chousuke 6y ago
ibus works with Gnome out-of-the-box. On sway/wlroots, you will have more luck with fcitx. I don't know which tool works best with KDE.
- ducktective 6y ago
  Why, in Wayland, support of some basic features has to do with what DE or TWM you use? It is not like this in X11 and it seems there is more adherence to the UNIX philosophy in X11.
  - bregma 6y ago
    Because Wayland is a display service protocol. It's not responsible for secure message passing between desktop applications: that's the DE's business. Just because DEs used X11 as an insecure inter-process message passing agent doesn't mean it's a good design or even make sense.
  - erinnh 6y ago
    Wouldnt it be the other way around? X11 isnt adhering to the UNIX philosophy because it does everything under the sun. Wayland gives some tasks to the compositor.
  - chousuke 6y ago
    There's no "Wayland" that could implement a generic way of handling input. Wayland is an extensible set of protocols with several implementations. Handling input is an integral part of what a compositor does, and it's not an easy problem to solve when said input doesn't map linearly to text. Input methods in particular are not something that X11 "solves" at all: Under X every toolkit implemented their own way of handling complex input methods. XIM existed, but it was limited and only there for compatibility with ancient applications. There are Wayland protocols for complex input methods too. Gnome's gone all-in and integrated ibus with their own compositor, so that obviously works, but Gnome also benefits a lot from distributions like Fedora making sure it works: everything is set up correctly out-of-the-box if you use Gnome. However, more niche implementations like Sway have to deal with a lower level of integration because there's no distribution that's built around Sway to create a full desktop environment.
dmytrish 6y ago
It's not a Wayland problem, ibus does not work in KDE even on X11.
- codewiz 6y ago
  Uh? I've been using ibus with mozc for Japanese input on KDE for the past 3 years.
  - mrwoggle 6y ago
    Same for me. been using ibus-pinyin for a few years
  - dmytrish 6y ago
    Do you use ibus input methods only? In my case, I wanted to keep my configured xkb keyboard layouts + I wanted to be able to use ibus in parallel for CJK. Ok, there must be a problem with *my* KDE setup: when I try to disable KDE keyboard layouts, KDE does not persist changes to the next session: when I log in next time, KDE keyboard layouts are enabled again and interfere with ibus.
- mrwoggle 6y ago
  It should work on Kubuntu and X11, but I remember that the installation and configuration process (or at least the documentation) is a bit lacking. Make sure you also install the ibus-[input method] package. If you don't the ibus preferences still allows you to add a chinese/japanese input method, but it doesn't actually do anything. You might also want to restart your x11 session after that.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
numpad0 6y ago
What's with IBus and IBus-centric IME switching being sub-optimal for better part of past decade or so[1], yet being pushed from non-CJK regions? Usually I don't even GNOME and just go with whatever fcitx plays with, so not an issue for me, not angry or anything but curious what's happening "up there" consistently[2][3][4]. 1: https://cpplover.blogspot.com/2013/10/ibus-15_21.html https://cpplover.blogspot.com/2013/10/ibus-15_21.html 2: https://uwabami.junkhub.org/log/20210224p01.html#p01 https://uwabami.junkhub.org/log/20210224p01.html#p01 3: https://uwabami.junkhub.org/log/20210312.html https://uwabami.junkhub.org/log/20210312.html 4: https://lists.debian.or.jp/pipermail/debian-devel/2021-February/000379.html https://lists.debian.or.jp/pipermail/debian-devel/2021-Febru...

xrd 6y ago

The author uses Pipewire with WebRTC in Chrome, very cool. Pipewire is showing up all over the place. I've been reading a little about it, but I finally got a comfortable setup of jackd and pulseaudio and am worried it might interfere with my stable setup. Am I being paranoid?

bitbang 6y ago
I've replaced pulse with pipewire and that has been seamless. The experience is generally determined by how well the distro supports moving from one to the other rather than any maturity issues with pipewire. I've retained jackd instead of using pipewire's implementation because I don't think the pipewire version supports transport control or timecode.
neolog 6y ago
It's not perfect but mostly works.
foobar33333 6y ago
The next version of fedora uses pipewire instead of pulse audio. From all the people I have seen test it, they said it works much better than pulse.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
  I'm testing it now. Fixed my USB audio issues. Much better than pulse.
solarkraft 6y ago
Yes. I currently run it besides Pulse for screen sharing and there are no issues. I haven't replaced Pulse yet because it didn't work right away, but plan to try again eventually because Pipewire supports HFP, the less terrible Bluetooth headset profile.
- xrd 6y ago
  Bluetooth support alone would be worthy of the pain of switching. Thank you.

Cloudef 6y ago

It's possible to also configure bemenu with BEMENU_OPTS env variable. I usually create wrapper script in my local bin path however, as that method will work universally with any program.

colordrops 6y ago

Is it still the case that Nvidia drivers don't work with Wayland?

Iolaum 6y ago
Not exactly. I m successfully using Fedora SilverBlue with proprietary nvidia in Wayland. In the official docs it's not supported but Mutter (from Gnome) has the pieces in place to do so. However I don't use anything too specialised that would force me back to Xorg. For example I did revert to Xorg while I played around with lutris a bit. Still as long as distro maintainers don't declare official support, be ready to expect surprises.
belak 6y ago
The short version is "it depends". Essentially, each separate Wayland compositor needs to add support for the nvidia driver (or the driver needs to support more standardized APIs). Gnome and KDE support Wayland on nvidia hardware (though it's a bit rough around the edges). Wlroots (and therefore Sway) doesn't because they don't want to have a separate code-path for one driver which doesn't want to support standards and because the APIs the driver does support wouldn't work well with the code model of wlroots.
- qudat 6y ago
  Nvidia works with wlroots if you use nouveau and not the proprietary drivers.
  - solarkraft 6y ago
    As much as I appreciate Noveau, it's not really practically usable with recent cards (due to Nvidias faults!).
    - shmerl 6y ago
      It's probably not relevant in the long term anyway. I expect desktop Nvidia usage on Linux to pretty much plummet while their driver remains a blob. The trend is negative for them already. So I fully support wlroots developer's approach to it - show Nvidia to the door until they come back with upstreamed driver.

shmerl 6y ago

Still waiting for KWin to support adaptive sync and then I'll be switching to the Wayland session.

halz 6y ago

A project to keep an eye on, to replicate 'autotype' support offered by many password managers, is wlrctl¹. A popular alternative is ydotool², but brings some additional risks the operator might not be comfortable with. ¹https://git.sr.ht/%7Ebrocellous/wlrctl https://git.sr.ht/%7Ebrocellous/wlrctl ²https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool

ashkankiani 6y ago
re:ydotool. More than risks, I would say the author constantly changing things without testing and breaking the tool is what made me stop using it. I wrote my own version using evdev and never looked back.
- erinnh 6y ago
  Could you post a link to it? Ive been using ydotool for a while, its not working 100% reliably though.
  - ashkankiani 6y ago
    It's not public. I don't really open source most of the tools I write for myself because there's basically no incentive to do so.

c-c-c-c-c 6y ago

Not a single screenshot

sh1bumi 6y ago
Here you go: https://kurisu.shibumi.dev/share/img-2021-03-27-21-02-41.png https://kurisu.shibumi.dev/share/img-2021-03-27-21-02-41.png This is a screenshot from my current system. * btw it's my first post on ycombinator lol..
knorker 6y ago
The book has no pictures? It's sway. So that's what it looks like. And the content is much deeper than showing off the color scheme you chose.
pjmlp 6y ago
It fits with the culture of working in VT-100 in the 21st century.
diffeomorphism 6y ago
Of what would you possibly want a screenshot here? It is about the under the hood plumbing so take any screenshot from the last years, copy it and write "this is what it looks like under wayland".
- cranium 6y ago
  I like to see what other people have crafted for their own usage. Sometimes, I find a clever use of monitor real estate that would make my life easier. I adopted most of my tools by looking at other people setups and customizing them to my use case.
_pmf_ 6y ago
Unsure if this is a low key jab at Wayland breaking screenshot tools ...

denysvitali 6y ago

If you are looking for an alternative status bar that works with sway, you can use my fork of yagostatus :) https://github.com/denysvitali/yagostatus https://github.com/denysvitali/yagostatus

majewsky 6y ago
I'm using https://github.com/greshake/i3status-rust https://github.com/greshake/i3status-rust which also works well with Sway.
- 12ian34 6y ago
  I currently use i3status-rust. with a lot of custom blocks, with X. I'm thinking of switching to Sway. Did you have any config problems?
  - majewsky 6y ago
    Not that I can think of, but obviously it depends on what your blocks are doing. I remember having trouble with the backlight block, but I fixed that upstream a long time ago, so it should not be a problem for you anymore. For reference, my config is at: https://github.com/majewsky/devenv/tree/master/i3status-rust https://github.com/majewsky/devenv/tree/master/i3status-rust (as a bunch of single-purpose snippets, the actual config file is obtained by concatenating `common/.toml` and `$HOSTNAME/.toml`)
dasb 6y ago
I use Waybar.
- solarkraft 6y ago
  Same here, it's nice.

rwmj 6y ago

Can I run applications transparently over the network yet?

superluserdo 6y ago
You can run applications over the network with (edit: waypipe, not pipewire, I mix up the names every time), which works quite well. Technically it's not "transparent", but it isn't on X either because pretty much 0 UIs today draw themselves using X11 primitives, they just draw their own buffer and get X to display it.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
cbm-vic-20 6y ago
I don't think network transparency is a goal for Wayland. X11 network transparency was awesome in the late 80s and early 90s. In many universities, there would be rooms of X11 terminals that connected to the "big machines" in the server rooms- and you could have each of your applications, even even the window manager itself, all being run on different machines. This made sense when an institution would license software for their big iron, and when desktop computers weren't nearly as powerful as they eventually became during the 90s. But most people gave up on it right around the time that Netscape Navigator, with its very bitmap-heavy UI gained traction. The X protocol really wasn't designed around this. Extensions helped, but not enough. I bet the vast majority of people using X11 today have never run a remote X11 client.
rstuart4133 6y ago
This isn't really an answer to your question, but under Gnone3+Wayland "ssh -X" works as you might expect. Which amazed me at first, because I wasn't expecting it. Turns out it's because most applications are X11, Wayland supports X11 applications via XWayland, and X is doing network transparency like it always does.

Decabytes 6y ago

I don’t know how I feel about Wayland. On the one hand it’s being made by x11 devs so I think they more than anyone else know why they would need to start from scratch over improving x11. On the other hand, moving away from x breaks so many things and I haven’t heard anyone singing it’s praises yet about how happy they are to use it. I understand apps are breaking because they relied on features of x that were security risks but it doesn’t seem like Wayland provides a safe or convenient alternative to the way apps were doing things before. I wonder if it will ever reach the adoption level of x11

gurkendoktor 6y ago
Besides security concerns, mixed-DPI setups are such a major pain point with X11 that many people who use a laptop with additional screens would probably switch to Wayland just for that alone. That's a large demographic.
- tyfon 6y ago
  Do any desktop system handle mixed DPI well? I mainly use Linux so I don't know, but one of my work laptops have windows on it and it freaks out every time I connect it to a 4k monitor. At least in linux I can use triggers and xrandr [1] to manage it even if it's not pretty, never figured out how to do it automatically in windows. Edit: I am using KDE/Qt apps for 99% of my gui stuff. Gnome etc might be worse. [1] http://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/mixed-dpi-x11/#therandrway http://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/mixed-dpi-x11/#therandrway
  - vially 6y ago
    > Do any desktop system handle mixed DPI well? This works today out-of-the-box in Wayland as long as the applications are Wayland native (e.g.: not being run through XWayland).
    - solarkraft 6y ago
      This is a major pain with the current generation of Electron apps, but luckily the newest version supports Wayland. HiDPI is also in the works for XWayland, but it looks complicated and still a few months out.

mulle_nat 6y ago

I was really looking forward to Wayland, when I moved to Linux. It was then said to be right around the corner. That was six years ago. If the current state of Wayland is as bare-bones as depicted in the article, it's just sad. And as there is no support for OBS on the horizon, it's a non-topic for me. And I never liked X11 to begin with...

solarkraft 6y ago
Yes, there is: Through Pipewire (xdg-desktop-portal), wlr-screencopy (wlrobs) or a virtual webcam (wf-recorder) :-) Pipewire has the brightest future long term, but wlrobs seems to be the easiest to get started with if "Wayland" means wlroots based compositor (Sway, Wayfire, etc) in this instance.
opan 6y ago
OBS is working already with wlrobs. https://hg.sr.ht/~scoopta/wlrobs https://hg.sr.ht/~scoopta/wlrobs
- mulle_nat 6y ago
  Thanks for the link.

reidrac 6y ago

If this was 20 years ago, when I was kind of starting with Linux, I would love it: lots of possibilities and customisation. But the truth is that I don't have time for all that in 2021. When XFCE supports Wayland and I get a good experience out the box, I may stop using X11.

rnhmjoj 6y ago

I think Wayland, and the modern desktop in general too, has forgot about a few good ideas that the original X system had. I will miss them once Wayland has taken over: - A unified way to change applications settings. All old X apps used to read the X resources database (xrdb): you could set a global color scheme, fonts, window geometry and what not, all in one place using a simple but powerful text format. - The simplicity of the window managers, hotkey daemons and other X clients. You can implement a functional wm in a few hundred lines of C[1] because the X server takes care of most of the stuff. In comparison a compositor has much more work to do and it's difficult to implement one, unless using a big library like wl_roots. - A base graphics API based on drawing primitives like the original X, SVG or Cairo, rather than just bitmaps. This would make writing a simple application without importing huge frameworks feasible again. Also sending the drawing calls over the network would probably be less bandwidth intensive. [1]: https://github.com/vardy/aphelia https://github.com/vardy/aphelia

forgotmypw17 6y ago
The beauty of free software is that X will always be there for anyone who wants it, just like you can still get great distros without systemd.
addicted 6y ago
> The simplicity of the window managers, hotkey daemons and other X clients. You can implement a functional wm in a few hundred lines of C[1] because the X server takes care of most of the stuff. In comparison a compositor has much more work to do and it's difficult to implement one, unless using a big library like wl_roots. This sounds like they simply extracted some of the work X used to do into an external library. That sounds like an excellent choice with no particular downside IMO?
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  Why is a library any better? Not even disagreeing; I can't see why to prefer either approach.
nialv7 6y ago

ElijahLynn 6y ago

I am on Arch + Gnome for 3 years now and tried Wayland again this year and experienced too many broken things (Screen.so screensharing, Fireshot screencapture, I think CopyQ clipboard manager too) and had to switch back to X11. This article shows it is still not ready for the masses, yet.

erinnh 6y ago
Flameshot for screencapture and the standard gnome extension clipboard manager work pretty well for me on Wayland. Cant say anyting about screensharing with Screens.so. Zoom works though. Ive been a happy Wayland user since 2017 or 2018, not entirely sure.

Klwohu 6y ago

I'm not switching to Wayland. It simply doesn't do anything for me. It also doesn't function with many of the GPUs I use.