Change from Xorg to Wayland

sokrovenno · n00b Joined: 23 Aug 2023 Posts: 65

As the title says I was thinking about change from Xorg to Wayland just to see how it goes.
But I was wondering. Will I need to change my DE? I'm currently using XFCE and I do not really want to change much. I like the way things are now.

Assuming that wayland supports XFCE, how should I approach this change? just change make.conf and add wayland and -X?

What is the difference between X, Wayland and Xwayland?

Is wayland compatible with games?

alamahant · Advocate Joined: 23 Mar 2019 Posts: 3879

Zucca · Posted: Sun Jan 07, 2024 12:27 pm Post subject:

If you don't want any hassle, then wait until XFCE is fully wayland compatible.

@alamahant, so you perform XFCE test runs using wayfire as compositor for XFCE?
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alamahant · Advocate Joined: 23 Mar 2019 Posts: 3879

depontius · Advocate Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 3509

I'm looking to dip my toes into Wayland also. I'm not ready to switch yet, I just want to try it out. Is there an established method for simply going back and forth? I recognize that it would likely require a reboot to do so.

I use sddm for a login manger, though I see neither X nor Wayland USE flags, I guess I need to read some.

I also have been using icewm for a few decades. Can anyone suggest a work-alike?
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Anon-E-moose · Posted: Sun Jan 07, 2024 7:43 pm Post subject:

I started working with wayland while still having X installed (openbox),
since I was using startx it was as simple as going back to console and starting the wayland session.

Both X and wayland can exist in the same system and if you build xwayland, then you can use many X apps inside wayland.
There are still some gotchas with wayland/xwayland, due to design philosophy/criteria and hardware (think nvidia)

Sddm is supposed to work with wayland as well as X, but I don't use it, so ....

IIRC icewm is a stacking compositor,

wayland stacking wayfire and labwc are the best, ATM as far as stacking.

There is a breed of wm called dynamic tiling, and many offer the option of floating windows, making it not that much different that a stacking wm.

Personally I swap between labwc and hyprland.
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depontius · Advocate Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 3509

On a quick look I like what I saw with labwc. I don't care about rotating cubes, I don't care about rotating windows. I just want something to put my windows up there and give me some visible methods of manipulating them. I see the window manager - or compositor - as something to help my applications do their thing, not something to wow me on it's own.

Thanks.
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Anon-E-moose · Posted: Sun Jan 07, 2024 9:15 pm Post subject:

I've tried wayfire and hyprland and for the most part I turn off animations, gee-whiz effects, etc.
Usually done in the config file.

I like labwc, it's a little slower to be updated (or was in the past), but overall stable and usable for a few years now.
You will want to look at adding something like waybar (panel) if you are used to that in icewm.
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flexibeast · Posted: Sun Jan 07, 2024 10:51 pm Post subject:

nvaert1986 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 05 May 2019 Posts: 120

It's really personal and it depends on your setup. In your case I'd stay with X.org as there's no full wayland support yet.

I've recently switched to Wayland myself on my new build with an AMD GPU using KDE and SDDM. Both KDE and SDDM work fine and I've not encountered any crashes, issues or whatsoever. I did also notice that the image quality seems slightly better / more stable and that Adaptive Sync (FreeSync) is finally working properly (which did not work properly under X.org for me).

Games work fine when using Steam. All my games that I currently play work on Wayland (You need to have xwayland installed).

If you're using a hybrid setup (Intel NVIDIA or AMD / NVIDIA) on a laptop I would not use Wayland, as there's still too many issues (on my laptop I use X.org), like an extremely low frame rate and high CPU usage when connecting external screens.

sokrovenno · n00b Joined: 23 Aug 2023 Posts: 65

Thank you everybody for your insights.

I decided to wait for Xfce Development Team to release their possible XFCE Wayland version although it may never come.
They made it clear here:

depontius · Advocate Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 3509

Just another "dip my toes" question. To start this process I presume I can add "wayland" and "xwayland" to my USE flags in make.conf and with a bit of quick command line exploration I see that for instance sdl2 will need "glesl2" as well. I presume I can then rebuild my system and it will continue to work as it has, but it will be mostly ready to try wayland.

I suspect that my path to actually trying wayland begins in the sddm configuration, so it starts wayland instead of X11.

What is the wayland equivalent of .Xclients or .xinitrc - where I start a window manager - or compositor?

Am I barking up the right tree here, or am I making some fundamentally incorrect assumptions?
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Anon-E-moose · Posted: Fri Jan 12, 2024 9:08 pm Post subject:

I kept X when I started trying wayland, eventually just got rid of the Xserver and used wayland/Xwayland.
At least until I found many wayland only programs, I've since removed Xwayland completely and just run straight wayland.

So to dip the toes, I assume you're running with X (globally), I would add wayland USE flag and emerge what needs it.
At that point, decide which compositor (wayland) you're wanting to run and emerge that.

Not sure about sddm as I don't use it, but it is supposed to run wayland as well as X, at least the lastest versions.
I personally have a script similar to startx, that sets env vars and fires off the compositor.

Most things that you might set in .xinitrc either have no analog (setting a compositor, xrdb. etc)
but most WL. compositors have auto start capabilities, so that your favorite progs can be started.
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depontius · Advocate Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 3509

How is the compositor itself selected and started? In the past I've fiddled with multiple WMs just for fun and used wither selectwm or just tweaked my .Xclients file.
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Anon-E-moose · Posted: Fri Jan 12, 2024 10:57 pm Post subject:

The binary executable starts the compositor.

I used to use openbox, and would have something like
exec /usr/bin/openbox --startup "sh /home/don/.config/openbox/autostart"
in my .xinitrc.

To start the compositor, just call it's executable, for something like wayfire,
type wayfire from the tty (if set for drm), it has a default area for a config file.

gentoo's wiki has some info, arch has a slightly better wiki on wayland.

So, for example, have env vars set, then to start wayfire, you would type wayfire or /usr/bin/wayfire from the command line,
it would read its config file and set things up properly, key binds, etc.
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flexibeast · Posted: Fri Jan 12, 2024 11:41 pm Post subject:

In terms of Wayfire in particular, the WayfireWM repo has a wiki page describing configuration options (which is linked to from the 'Wayfire' page on the Gentoo wiki).

depontius · Advocate Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 3509

I think I'm getting this now. Wayland is a protocol / library, it's not a server like X. I start the compositor and it pulls in wayland.

Now I see that wayland support is experimental in sddm, but I get the impression that even without that support sddm can start under X as normal, then kick off a wayland compositor to begin a user session. This morning I added "wayland xwayland" and a few package.use flags before my update, and it just barely finished. I need to install a compositor, and I know that earlier in this thread I'd tentatively picked one. Then I need to read the sddm docs more carefully.

I appreciate the "startx" approach and may have to go there, but I switched to using a display manager a long time ago and rather like it.

Actually at this point I want to do a reboot and make sure that my system is still functional. I know it should be, but I just need to test.
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Anon-E-moose · Posted: Sat Jan 13, 2024 4:21 pm Post subject:

Pretty good way to look at it. Wayland is both server and wm all in one. X is a server that handles terminals (pc just being a fancy terminal)

Shouldn't be a problem your system, but I would check it out. As I said I used to have both X/openbox and wayland installed, and was swapping back and forth till I got comfortable (ie trust) wayland. *lol*

I've not found a good use case for DM's, but that's just me.
I still like to do many things at the console instead of in a graphic environment.

Here's how I set my startw up, I do have to edit the script to add a new compositor, but ... it's a shell script

It lets me choose which compositor, and allow either full debugging or logging, otherwise I redirect logging to /dev/null

depontius · Advocate Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 3509

Well a reboot later and everything is still working.

I don't see an ebuild for labwc, did you get it from an overlay? A quick search shows several more, and at least mutter and hikari are in portage, and there's always weston. Comments on those others?
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Anon-E-moose · Posted: Sat Jan 13, 2024 6:07 pm Post subject:

Labwc is in the wayland-desktop repo.

Mutter, I've not used it's gnome based so keep that in mind
Hikari looks interesting but I've never used it, though I have an ebuild for an eariler version.
Weston is truly a reference compositor, I would stay away from it for daily use.

Labwc, wayfire are both stacking style compositors
Sway, hyprland and many others are tiling or dynamic tiling compositors.
Hikari claims to be a stacking/tiling hyprid (I take it as just a dynamic tiling compositor though)

Dymanic tiling usually allows to pretty much emulate a stacking compositor.

https://github.com/natpen/awesome-wayland -- good collection of wayland links for many things
https://github.com/natpen/awesome-wayland#compositors - list of compositors (not all are currently being worked on or kept current)

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Wayland
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/List_of_software_for_Wayland

Edit to add: these are some from my local portage https://github.com/droc12345/local/tree/master/portage/gui-wm
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depontius · Advocate Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 3509

Thanks. Now emergeing labwc, waybar, and xwayland.

I spent over 40 years using VLSI CAD tools, and even up to the day I retired last spring never saw a peep about Wayland. Not only that, but a quick search shows nothing for "cadence virtuoso wayland". I'm guessing that it's not even in their roadmap, and if it happens they'll just use xwayland. That's only one vendor, but a dominant one. Searching for "mentor calibre wayland" is about as fruitful, except that I get hits for the Calibre e-reader software.

I'll pose the conjecture that VLSI CAD vendors are going to stick with either X11 or xwayland on wayland systems. If they're forced to do another API change it wouldn't surprise me at all that they would simply change to Windows and leave Linux behind. In other words, don't try to twist someone's arm if they don't need you. At my last job I had a Windows laptop going into a Linux cluster with a remote X solution. So the thing on my desk was Windows, and I have no idea how much of the cluster might have been Windows - maybe none, but somehow I doubt that.

The emerge is done, I guess it's time to start reading some documentation.
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Anon-E-moose · Posted: Sat Jan 13, 2024 6:59 pm Post subject:

make sure that seatd is installed and running before trying to start wayland compositors.

and yes, for those packages that work with X but aren't ported Xwayland will be the way to go.
Xwayland is basically an Xorg server with a wayland backend. It is still a work in progress, though very usable for most X apps.
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PRIME x570-pro, 3700x, 6.1 zen kernel
gcc 13, profile 17.0 (custom bare multilib), openrc, wayland