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Inxsible

Forum Fellow

From: Chicago

Registered: 2008-06-09

Posts: 9,183

Switching over to Wayland

I was going to move my installation to a smaller 80GB HDD, because I require my current 1TB HDD to be a part of my FreeNAS storage pool because of a drive failure.

While doing this, I thought it might be a good idea to switch to Wayland and see what the fuss is all about. I currently use i3 and it looks like it already has a port for Wayland in sway. So my question is, do we have native applications for Wayland for the following:

• i3 = sway

• feh = imv

• xsane

• gimp -- I know gimp has added Wayland support, but can it do all that the X-app can?

• mupdf

• conky

• rxvt-unicode

• vim -- clipboard etc

• leafpad

• gsimplecal

• galculator

• dmenu

• ipmitool & ipmiview

I did search but most times the links said it works via XWayland -- which is not what I am looking for. If I am switching, I need a clean break from X which is why the key word is native. I want to find out if all the applications that I use regularly are natively supported in Wayland yet. The list of apps that I use regularly is not very long as I run a minimal environment.

If not, I might still give Wayland a try by just putting it on a separate tty.

Thanks.

Last edited by Inxsible (2018-06-28 04:03:08)

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ooo

Member

Registered: 2013-04-10

Posts: 1,638

Re: Switching over to Wayland

Well, sway depends on Xwayland, so unless you're prepared to switch to a different desktop environment, you're out of luck. Although it seems enlightenment is currently the only compositor from the prominent ones, that can be run without Xwayland.

For native application support, see the list of GUI libraries. Anything else, and applications that depend on X libraries shouldn't work without Xwayland.

I've been using gnome on wayland for quite awhile and there are no major issues (at least that I care about). There are no issues with using applications trough Xwayland either, and you won't generally notice any difference between native wayland applications. I suppose the overall experience largely depends the compositor you're using, but my understanding is that sway should be in good shape.

Using any wayland compositor without Xwayland probably won't make sense for years forward though, due to the large number of applications that may never be ported to run natively.

Haller

Member

Registered: 2018-04-08

Posts: 45

Re: Switching over to Wayland

You mention a lot of gtk2 apps, which cannot run with native wayland.

I'm using KDE on wayland and there are also no major issues I care about. However, not everything works fine. I guess Gnome's wayland support is superior.
And there are programs like libreoffice, which work poor on wayland (but fine with Xwayland).

progandy

Member

Registered: 2012-05-17

Posts: 5,212

Re: Switching over to Wayland

For xsane there is no real replacement, but simple-scan uses gtk3 and should work with wayland.
gsimplecal, and galculator use gtk3 and therefore have wayland support
mupdf: maybe mupdf-gl combined with freeglut-wayland-svn (AUR) can work
ipmiview: that would depend on java wayland support. How far has that come?
leafpad: maybe try mousepad which uses gtk3.

As for terminals, you can try everything that uses vte/gtk3.

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Inxsible

Forum Fellow

From: Chicago

Registered: 2008-06-09

Posts: 9,183

Re: Switching over to Wayland

Well, sway depends on Xwayland,

well according to this sway works just fine without XWayland.

You mention a lot of gtk2 apps, which cannot run with native wayland.

Right, but I am not asking for them to run natively on Wayland. I was asking for similar alternatives that do.

For xsane there is no real replacement, but simple-scan uses gtk3 and should work with wayland.
gsimplecal, and galculator use gtk3 and therefore have wayland support
mupdf: maybe mupdf-gl combined with freeglut-wayland-svn (AUR) can work
ipmiview: that would depend on java wayland support. How far has that come?
leafpad: maybe try mousepad which uses gtk3.

As for terminals, you can try everything that uses vte/gtk3.

Now that's helpful. Me thinks then xsane is the only app that I might have to pull in XWayland for -- but at that point I might as well continue using the apps that I am currently using, since I will have XWayland installed anyway.

Time to put it on a separate tty.

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Forum Rules

There's no such thing as a stupid question, but there sure are a lot of inquisitive idiots !

Haller

Member

Registered: 2018-04-08

Posts: 45

Re: Switching over to Wayland

You mention a lot of gtk2 apps, which cannot run with native wayland.

Right, but I am not asking for them to run natively on Wayland. I was asking for similar alternatives that do.

If you don't mind the dependencies, I'ld recommend you the default GNOME applications.