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Replacing xorg with wayland


 Hello guys. Trying to replace xorg with the better option wayland. I'm currently on xfce DE and Xfwm4 as window manger, with runit 
 init on  board. Is it tricky to get it running or I just need to install some packages? From what I see I have wayland already installed.
 Any good advice is appreciated. Thank you!

Re: Replacing xorg with wayland

Reply #1 –
Using wayland directly requires using a wayland compositor (more or less the equivalent of a window manager in Xorg; although wayland compositors also do a lot of other stuff as well). xfce doesn't have wayland support so you would have to use something else. The most common wayland compositors for the desktop are GNOME, Plasma, and Sway. There's some other, less popular ones out there as well. Keep in mind that virtually every desktop package will be linked to both wayland and xorg in some way, so you won't exactly be getting rid of it.

Re: Replacing xorg with wayland

Reply #2 –
Quote from: Surf3r – on
Trying to replace xorg with the better option wayland.
Without any irony my 'good advice' is use X. Unless you are just curious to try wayland.
But if you expect wayland to be better (in the sense of workflow and features) be prepared to be disappointed. Better is subjective. Every time I've tried wayland I've found it worse for me.
This is one of the best explanations of wayland and it's shortcomings I've come across (do note the author).
https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/posts/2022-06-10-wayland-xorg/wayland-xorg.html

Re: Replacing xorg with wayland

Reply #3 –
 Thanks @Dudemanguy for the quick but in-depth review about Wayland. I've been curious about Wayland after reading it has windows isolation and it
 doesn't allow at least that easy as xorg, remote access. Also I've read xorg code is rather oldish and it's focused on versatility in mind
 (can make many things) rather than a robust/modern/safer code like Wayland seems to pursue. As for now I think I'm gonna stick
 with xorg since Artix Team doesn't seem that amazed by it. Hope things will move forward bringing Wayland and xfce together.
 Thanks @gripped too for the advice/link, I'm gonna look it up more closely.

Re: Replacing xorg with wayland

Reply #4 –
Xorg has xace for security hardening. I don't think anyone actually uses it but the feature is there at least.

That article could use a follow up in the near future. Some things have actually gotten better since then. A couple even surprised me.

Re: Replacing xorg with wayland

Reply #5 –
Hi there,

With Plasma 6 coming out, what’s your opinion on switching to Wayland in this regard? I’ve heard that KDE team aren’t going to drop X11 support for the release, and I’ll probably keep on using it until some pieces of software natively support Wayland.

Re: Replacing xorg with wayland

Reply #6 –
I'm with others who say wayland is not ready.

I use slim+openbox as a really simple window display for X11.

I recently tried labwc and it mostly worked. However, I could not match the X11 styling at all and I could not find a useful toolbar; I tried many, but they could not auto-hide and it seems they only seem to know about wayland clients and miss the xwayland ones. I tried tint2 and  it seemed to work, but it misses the wayland clients. Also I could not seem to get client windows to appear at known locations so simple concepts like devilspie don't seem to be possible.

The really awful hurdle is that we have multiple compositors all of which have slight (or major) protocol differences. without a unified approach wayland is bad by design.

Re: Replacing xorg with wayland

Reply #7 –
I've been using wayland for a few weeks now and I like it although I admit I don't know enough about the differences to make an informed opinion.  I've been running hyprland and waybar and everything seems to work okay with a few bugs here and there.  For example waybar has a weird bug where if you make a custom "execute on click" type button, sometimes after using it the entire bar will act like that button for the next click.  It's a known bug and I think there are workarounds but still kind of funky.  Then also there's this bug with hyprland where it doesn't quit cleanly, so when exiting you are stuck on a black screen and can't even switch tty to kill it so you gotta hard reboot.  Again, there's a workaround where you just don't use the builtin quit command and instead write a little script that handles any kind of sloppiness on quit.  Been using one of those that a user posted to the issue on github and it's working nicely.

Before I was just using xfce on xorg so I tend to like a simple (yet not stripped down) desktop, I would even disable all the extra workspaces for xfce, but I've gotten to like the tiling wm system with it's multiple workspaces and even set up some rules so that some apps launch to specific workspaces.

All-in-all I'm happy with it, just switched from lightdm to gdm (couldn't get sddm to work, although I gave up rather quickly) and switched from xfce to hyprland (I like the small eye-candy things hyprland has, similar to running picom on xorg).

Re: Replacing xorg with wayland

Reply #8 –
I am not happy that ssh -X seems to not work any longer.

Re: Replacing xorg with wayland

Reply #9 –
I just updated from Xorg to Wayland on KDE. So far I'm impressed, there were a few visual "ticks" I could never fix on X that seem to be flattened now. The largest being that KDE previously required a restart to change global zoom. I use this when switching from laptop to dock, so this is a massively welcomed change.

The only downside is I was using Krohnkite, a tiling WM for KDE, but it hasn't been upgraded in 2 years, so it's finally time for me to move to something like sway or awesome.

I read dudemanguy's original blog post and it makes sense. However, with all the DE's moving to Wayland....it seems wise to follow. It doesn't seem like as big of a deal as systemd.

Re: Replacing xorg with wayland

Reply #10 –
https://9to5linux.com/the-lxqt-desktop-environment-is-now-100-wayland-ready
LXQt coming in April probably with labwc (by then i'm sure it will iron out it's last annoyances)
I will switch then too myself. Nothing else to stop it apart from xwayland not working exactly right or the compositor missing my favourite blur/custom shadow support i have with picom on x11, but hey i can live without them.
Quote from: forged24 – on
I read dudemanguy's original blog post and it makes sense. However, with all the DE's moving to Wayland....it seems wise to follow. It doesn't seem like as big of a deal as systemd.
i guess so, it's like with pipewire, not too many things to go "wrong"/rogue, plus sticking with the latest is always better in the long run indeed.

Re: Replacing xorg with wayland

Reply #11 –
I'm not sure it's the "better" solution yet.

I've just switched my last machine back to X11 (plasmax11).
Since the switch to Wayland I've got issues with Steam and Kodi (among others but these were really annoying).
On one of my machines I could not use "barrier" anymore (which is kind of expected when you think about it.)
I'll wait for a while yet before considering the switch again.

Re: Replacing xorg with wayland

Reply #12 –
In steam the linux native games think the resolution is lower if i use display scaling and they have a weird lag too, have no idea from where they can be fixed.

Re: Replacing xorg with wayland

Reply #13 –
Devil's advocate  :P

I read plenty of "Wayland almost works now, so long as I decide not to to do some things I used to be able to" type posts.

What are the actual advantages of Wayland ? How is it better than X ?

A couple I see are:
X is unmaintained - It isn't.
Wayland is new - So is covid, I'd still sooner catch a cold no matter how old fashioned that is.

What are some tangible advantages ?

Re: Replacing xorg with wayland

Reply #14 –
I have been playing around with a tablet where x11 doesn't have quite the best layout and i realized that this works in greetd:

Code: [Select]
[default_session]
command = "dbus-run-session env GNOME_SHELL_SESSION_MODE=classic XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland gnome-session"

Don't swear me but i quite like it  :D Looks a bit comical but it's the best for a touch device.
Sort of an answer to above comment really.
I still haven't moved from x11 on the main pc.