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Comment by farresito | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone share his/her experience with Wayland? I'm on Arch, using i3wm, and have thought about switching to Wayland, but I'm not sure what problems I will encounter, and I would love to not have to spend a weekend to fix or revert back to X11 if things are still immature. Has anyone used it daily for a decent amount of time?

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I have been running sway on Arch on an XPS13 for the past nine months. As a longtime i3 user, I found the transition as painless as I could have hoped given the bleeding-edge nature of the wayland+sway stack.

A couple of findings from my time with sway:

- It was non-obvious how to tweak keyboard options (I like remapping capslock to ctrl). Various XKB_DEFAULT_* environment variables have to be set before starting sway.

- Firefox used to render poorly due to HiDPI scaling issues. Those seem to have been resolved and FF now works like a champ.

- I was excited about using alacritty as a wayland-native terminal, but it does not yet work with sway. It can be run as an X11 client with sway without issue. Hopefully the wlroots situation helps resolve the remaining issues with alacritty.

- Integer-only display scaling made it somewhat challenging to achieve my sweet-spot for my HiDPI display. I ended up not scaling the display (scale=1) and adjusting various font sizes. I'm happy to see that wlroots will enable fractional display scaling.

Sway has made an X11-free system viable for me.

> I was excited about using alacritty as a wayland-native terminal, but it does not yet work with sway.

Forgive me if I'm being dense, but: do you mean it's possible for a Wayland app to be incompatible with a particular Wayland window manager (or compositor)? That seems like a huge regression from the X11 status quo.

From what I can tell, there are issues both with sway and alacritty that lead to the current incompatibility.

https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty/issues/97 https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/1390 https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/1054

From what I gather, alacritty and its window system abstraction layers (glutin & winit) are still somewhat immature w.r.t. their wayland support and that sway, due to the limited nature of its wlc layer, do not quite meet in the middle. As stated in TFA, sway is moving toward a more capable wlroots foundation. And the rust-based alacritty ecosystem is also moving forward with tremendous pace. I have little doubt that class of incompatibility will not exist much longer.

Given the newness of not just wayland, but also alacritty, glutin/winit, rust, and sway, I remain astonished that they work as well as they do. But make no mistake, wayland is new tech and thus has some sharp corners where X11 is a well-established quantity after 30 years of existence.

So it does sound like there's a potentially incompatible layer of libraries between application and WM to a degree that isn't really the case with X11, by design. Well, I hope standardization happens quickly. One of the things I like about X11 is how agnostic applications and WMs are to each other, as well as how applications written years and years ago are still compatible with modern X servers.

Yes, this is quite possible.. Wayland is much lower level than X11 so each compositor has to add its own additional protocols which could 'in theory' be incompatible but note that 1) these additional protocols are most of the time a port of the existings protocols 2) the real reason that a Gnome app can run on top of KDE and vice versa is not just because of X11, it's because the developers of the applications and the DE worked together to make it happen so as long as the will is still here the inter-operability will be here eventually. Eventually is important here because I expect a long instability period..

KDE just shipped Plasma 5.11 which I would consider the beta of Wayland. It is almost there, but it has its fair of glitches, but none of them seem to be game breaking or complicated to overcome at this point.

I compare Plasma Wayland now to Plasma X 5.2-5.4. Almost there, and in two or so releases it should be prime.

I run it on Fedora 25. It's nice, but Firefox still uses xwayland and tends to crash the entire session too often. This may be my ancient video card, or it may be xwayland or some combination. Everything else works quite well and I'm looking forward to Fedora 27 which will hopefully fix my issue.

Firefox IMHO really needs to get native Wayland support out of the box. Not sure if Fedora is using the wayland version of LibreOffice, but it should be by now.

step 1: offer 'x compatibility'

step 2: make 'x compatibility' terrible

step 3: profit!

Firefox is undergoing a major redesign of the engine, so may be after its switch to WebRender, Wayland support will get some traction. I suspect it's the reason for several other features being stalled in Firefox now as well, like hardware accelerated video playback.

Please report bugs. "Crashes the entire session" is something we need to hear about.

I used the automatic reporting tool. Reproduction is simple. Run firefox on NV44 (Ben used to have one. I have a spare with less RAM if anyone cares about nouveau on that any more). Bring up cookie clicker in the browser and let it run for a bit. It will crash.

More recently gnome crashes right after login, but then doesn't when I login a second time. I don't think the automatic reporting is working for this one.

I figure at this point I'll let it slide until I upgrade and then get more vigilant about reporting problems. Unfortunately the auto-upgrade didn't work for me this time, so I'll reinstall 26 or 27 from scratch.

Automatic reporting tool? We don't have one of those. Your report probably went to /dev/null.

Hacker News isn't the right place for your bug report, though, please file a GitHub issue here: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/new

I am pretty sure it's abrt, this reports to downstream. I don't know whether they get passed upstream, but sometimes they do.

You can already test Wayland builds of Firefox from here: https://firefox-flatpak.mojefedora.cz/

Works pretty good in my experience.

Using Ubuntu 17.10 with Gnome and Wayland. Fast and stable.

Before that and a small step to Ubuntu 17.04, I used Wayland with Arch and Gnome. Not that stable experience back then, but now I'd say it's ready for production use, at least if you're using an Intel GPU.

It's progressing in KDE, but it's not quite there yet. Some applications still require XWayland are not even moving to Wayland so far, and XWayland path has its own bugs.

For instance Wine was quite glitchy for me (mouse movements were messed up) last time I tried it under XWayland in KDE.

If you don't need any binary drivers, and can live with libinput (touchpad support is still really bad, mouse is fine though) I'd say go for it.

I've been using wayland for ~6 months now and except for the aforementioned limitations it has been working flawlessly for me.

I tried using it on Fedora 26, where it's the default. It worked well. I tried to install binary Nvidia drivers since that's supposedly possible with some hackery, but couldn't get it to work.

I switched over during fedora 24 and haven't had any issues in a long time. By now the original bugs I had have been ironed out

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