The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

Comments

• sip@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  5. people who don’t care and haven’t even bothered to check out wayland and compare it to x

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• hallettj@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I’ve been using Wayland for a while, but I remember two factors that might have held me back in another universe:

  • lack of support from Xmonad (so group 3 from the article)
  • I used to make extensive use of keyboard remapping using xkb & xcape, and last I checked that doesn’t work in native Wayland apps. (I think that would’ve put me in one of the niche groups.)

  I’m not sure if those restrictions still apply. Luckily for the simplicity of my life I switched to Gnome (partially for Wayland support, partially for a simpler setup), and I switched to doing keyboard reconfiguration in hardware.

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  • tastysnacks@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    What kind of hardware are you using for keyboard reconfiguration?

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    • hallettj@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I built a wireless Corne keyboard from a kit. It uses nice!nano controllers running ZMK. Previously when I used a Kinesis Advantage 2 I replaced its controller board with a KinT which uses a Teensy as its controller. Customizing the keyboard with custom firmware is much nicer than customizing in the OS. But it can be a commitment. Although there are some keyboards that come the reprogramming options out-of-the-box, like the Kinesis Advantage 360, the Moonlander, all of Keyboardio’s models.

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• onlinepersona@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I thought this was going to be a bullshit article about “X is as good as Wayland”, but the author does have a point as I haven’t switched to Wayland yet for the simple fact that I’ve seen other users struggle with sharing their desktop. My time is not going to be spent figuring that out xdg-desktop-portal-wlr? Yeah, no. It’s not worth my time.

  Also, the Wayland page on the nixos wiki is woefully empty. While the nixos manual says

  While X11 (see X Window System) is still the primary display technology on NixOS, Wayland support is steadily improving

  programs.sway.enable = true;

  This installs the sway compositor along with some essential utilities. Now you can start sway from the TTY console.

  Kekw. So it’ll boot into a TTY, I’ll have to login and start sway? Are you nuts? Absolutely no thank you. If it’s at that level, I’m not going to be the poor sod figuring out the rest and documenting it.

  Once there’s a new application which should absolutely be in my library and that doesn’t support X, that will be the day wayland will be spun up.

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  • hallettj@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    The default Gnome installation on NixOS uses Wayland. And GDM too - it’s pretty much the same as other distros I’ve used. I’d guess the Plasma install option is also on Wayland.

    I do have some issues with screen sharing. It generally works fine in Firefox and Discord. But screen sharing in Slack crashes every time.

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    • onlinepersona@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      But screen sharing in Slack crashes every time

      😢

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  • state_electrician@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I’ve tried Manjaro Sway and it was a lovely experience. I would still be using it, but there was nothing like barrier on Wayland and that’s a deal breaker for me. I’ve tried like four or five different alternatives, but none of them were comparable. So I am back on X11 and i3.

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  • silt@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I’m not going to be the poor sod figuring out the rest and documenting it.

    I’ve got great news for you

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    • onlinepersona@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I’ll be honest, if I have to open a console and go edit a few files to configure sway, I’m out. It always starts with “just edit this one file” and balloons to “yeah, if you want everything to work you’ll need this over here, and that over there too, oh and I forgot to document this totally optional but mandatory thing that you’ll find out about on stackoverflow”. Have enough PTSD from “just make && sudo make install” to believe that things are that easy - especially if Arch mentions it.

      Thanks for the link, it might come in handy someday, but Wayland is off-limits until my X11 system becomes unstable.

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  • BarryZuckerkorn@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Is sway any harder to start than, say, i3?

    I’m using Wayland and KDE but it wasn’t any more difficult than setting up X11 and KDE. Both required actual configuration (and on my system, either launches from SDDM).

    If you’re using a distro that does one by default, then yes it takes some effort to go with a non-default option, but if you’re configuring from the ground up then choosing Wayland doesn’t seem any harder.

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