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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s a perfectly fair criticism as far as the average user is concerned, which is why Plasma and GNOME have both made using Wayland as simple as flipping a switch. You at least seemed to imply that you’re a NixOS user, though. Does that not consist mostly of editing config files?
That is true. I have nixos and multiple debian variants running in my house. Nix has a semi-functional graphical interface for modifying that file, but I don’t want to start editing my .profile in order to get sway to work. My current focus is on a different project right now (and will be for the foreseeable future). Experimenting with wayland isn’t on my TODO list right now, especially with the notice in the nixos manual and wiki.
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.
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.
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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