KDE/Plasma with only wayland (+wayland), without X11 (-X).

Draenin · n00b Joined: 24 Mar 2016 Posts: 26

Sorry because this question seems like one that had to be asked already many times. But, I took a look at the forum and I sure missed the answer.

Basically I am almost done with the planning for a clean Gentoo installation in my PC. And I am willing to try and see if I don't miss too much in a wayland-only Plasma environment. But to be honest, the initial installation of a Gentoo system requires quite a work. And I think I am just going to throw this one out in the forum and save some trial and error time of compiling the DE (KDE/Plasma) several times.

So, basically in the technical side:

1- First, Is it possible to install only Wayland without X11? Or does Wayland still needs some functionality/libraries/whatever from the X11 server? so that even if I only use Wayland I still have to have X11 installed.
2- Assuming the previous answer is 'yes'. To do it, once the /Desktop/Plasma profile is selected, all is needed is to edit my /etc/portage/make.conf and set "-X +wayland"?
3- If I wanted to give support(run) X11 applications in my only-Wayland environment.. I would have to install "dev-libs/wlc" and set its local USE flag "+xwayland", right?

In the no-so-technical side. Any advice or recommendation is also welcomed.

Fedora has some time now offering Wayland by default, Ubuntu almost offered it by default with 18.04. Some rumors said Ubuntu finally didn't switch because of the lack of Wayland support by Nvidia. Which, quite frankly, I don't care about Nvidia. I am only using AMD GPUs, current one is Radeon HD 5770, and I already bought the upgrade. A RX Vega 64 is in the mail right now, hopefully on time for the new Gentoo install.

So, I assuming a lot of things, if not almost everything, should be working in Wayland by now. I am planing in use mostly KDE apps. Falkon, Kmail, Kdevelop, and so on. With some exceptions like VCL. I understand a few won't work in Wayland, like Krita (because of the lack of tablet support in Wayland) so in those cases xwayland may be handy.

But, anyway, any opinions/suggestion is welcomed.

Thanks.
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szczerb · Posted: Thu Dec 06, 2018 10:32 am Post subject:

Won't answer all of your questions, but may offer some experience. I'm kind of forced to be using Wayland because in X11 you just can't configure sensible scaling that would match 13" 4k laptop and 2x 27" 1440p screens. So I switched from XFCE to Plasma when getting this machine.

No wlc installed here. Also the projects site says it's deprecated and to use wlroots. From what I understand they interest you only if you want to implement your own compositor.

There are issues when more then one display is connected. After upgrading to 5.14 I've got somewhat less crashes of the panel (but still sometimes), but GTK+ apps get no keyboard/mouse on one of the screens.

Also XWayland seems to work really bad, so I had to disable the x11 GDK backend workaround. On 5.13 GTK+ apps sucked more when using wayland backend, but worked just fine with the x11 backend.

Draenin · n00b Joined: 24 Mar 2016 Posts: 26

szczerb, thanks for the reply.

I am thinking to just go ahead with the installation as I have planned (minus dev-libs/wlc, you are right it is deprecated), and just figure things out through trial and error.

If I remember this thread afterwards, and I plough through, I will try to post an update with the final settings just in case someone else may be interested.

By the way, I was planning to replace dev-libs/wlc with dev-libs/wlroots instead. Because I thought it was necessary for getting the XWayland support. But you understand these are only for implementing your own compositor. You may as well be right, thanks for the heads-up. I will look into this a little bit more.
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asturm · Posted: Thu Dec 06, 2018 4:33 pm Post subject:

kde-plasma/plasma-meta provides you with all dependencies you need to start a Plasma Wayland session, for the setup just read the Gentoo KDE Wiki. Forget about non-X though, you will have to keep this dependency in the foreseeable future (many packages don't even build without it).
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backend.cpp:92:2: warning: #warning TODO - this error message is about as useful as a cooling unit in the arctic

Draenin · n00b Joined: 24 Mar 2016 Posts: 26

Thank you very much for the advice asturm.

I will take it. You saved me a lot of time.
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fpemud · Apprentice Joined: 15 Feb 2012 Posts: 258

szczerb · Posted: Fri Dec 07, 2018 11:04 am Post subject:

I don't think there is a display manager using Wayland itself currently.

And one more thing BTW. I noticed yesterday after posting the previous reply. Switching to wayland GDK backend also broke copy&paste GTK+ based apps. It works within an application, but not cross-application. So that's quite annoying also.

EDIT: So for a non-X expierience, you need to start Plasma from a TTY VT: https://community.kde.org/KWin/Wayland#Start_a_Plasma_session_on_Wayland