Wwwwayland sucks (2018)
magnushoff.com
magnushoff.com
I decided it was time to get with the times and try out GNOME on wayland. While I would have preferred to stick with xfce, Debian stable does not make it convenient to upgrade to their latest version, 4.16.
I'm using a T480 Thinkpad and I'm sure my GNOME version is similarly out of date, but wayland has been performing well enough so far.
However, at this point I'm looking to migrate to Fedora when I get the time. I'm tired of fighting against the bizarre nerd carnival that is the Linux Desktop.
These are my installation notes: https://github.com/anschwa/debian-thinkpad-install
Sway is still unstable. Even if the bugs have gotten less frequent, having it crash is not an uncommon experience. And because they tied its feature set to i3, the scripting experience is really not great. I say all of this as someone who has:
- used i3 for many years daily
- used sway for many years daily
- written both a Rust (https://github.com/norcalli/ksway) and Lua package (https://github.com/norcalli/lua-sway) for sway.
- written about a dozen or more scripts for sway
- contributed patches to Sway
The bugs are so irritating and wayland is so irritating that it's driven me to have already started making both my own browser due to firefox's issues, and my own alternative compositor. I'd rather make something outside of both wayland and X that only runs programs that I personally wrote and have QEMU as an escape hatch than use either of them full time. And one day I'll port it to Raspberry Pi on a unikernel or just off of the bare ISA.
E: Oh yeah and screen capture, IME, and various other things are still basically experimental.
I do not use Firefox so I cannot comment on that, I'm using Brave (which is based on Chromium 88) and the ozone backend is working fine after a rocky start. The only application that gives me trouble is Zoom where it likes to crash on start and I need to fake being in GNOME through envs in order to enable desktop sharing (and even then, I have to do it through the webcam interface).
About a year and a half back, I got a new laptop and installed arch/gnome/wayland on it again, and was very pleasantly surprised.
At this point, my only remaining issue is that screen sharing is hit or miss. Pipewire has landed and most electron apps support screen sharing now (including slack, which didn't as recently as 2 months ago). But it's still not perfect. For example - I can share a full desktop screen in zoom or hangouts, but only an application window in slack.
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Outside of screen sharing? I'll never go back to X. My touchpad feels as good as the touchpad on my work macbook. I'm typing this while using two displays - one at 1080p and one at 4k, and scaling mostly "just works" between them. Applications that depend on x-wayland won't auto adjust when moved between screens, but native wayland apps do - and I'm using native wayland apps everywhere I can at this point (including a chromium-ozone build in AUR: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs...)
I absolutely love that I can't remember the last time I saw a screen tear. I also haven't touched a HID or Display config file on this machine ever. No more xorg config file headaches.
Overall - if you're setting up a new machine with the intent to use a graphical desktop - I'd suggest starting with Wayland.
I think I tried stock fedora a year or two back to try Wayland but didn't like gnome 3, so didn't stick with it. Is there a distro with W and gnome2/mate support?