Wayland

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I found a workaround to make megasync work under W while in KDE https://github.com/meganz/MEGAsync/issues/214 the suggested "solution" is to launch it with
Code:
XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=GNOME megasync
And it works. I wondered if this "hack" would work with appimages too, it does. So, this kind of "confirms" what I wrote in a previous post about appimages running just fine in Gnome under W, the problem seems to be in the KDE Plasma's side.
 

Now that KDE is supported by Wayland, I may give it a try.
I downloaded the KDE spin after reading that it uses W by default as I wanted to know if appimages would work there. I burnt the .iso to a USB, booted the Live OS, and yes, it does use W by default, so thought I would share my findings here :)
This is what's been my experience so far with W on KDE Plasma in 3 different distros; Debian Bullseye/Testing, openSUSE Leap 15.2 and Fedora 34. Also, I tried Gnome 40 in openSUSE TW which uses W by default too. Note that I was most interested in finding out whether KDE Plasma + W would work for my specific use-case, that means being able to run appimages, megasync and connect an external monitor from a vga port, and this is what I've learned so far:
Debian Bullseye/Testing:
Appimages don't work, unless I use
Code:
XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=GNOME
the only ones that work are those from the maui project https://mauikit.org/
Megasync doesn't work unless I use the same "ugly" hack from above.
Adding an external monitor/screen from a vga port doesn't work, at least not as expected; system freezes after I hit apply.
OpenSUSE Leap 15.2:
Appimages don't work either, unless I use
Code:
XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=GNOME
the only ones that work are those from the maui project https://mauikit.org/
Megasync does work without any issues and without having to use "ugly" hacks
Adding an external monitor/screen from a vga port doesn't work either, at least not as expected; system freezes after I hit apply just like it does in Debian.
Fedora 34:
Appimages work without any issues and without having to use "ugly" hacks.
Megasync works without any issues and without having to use "ugly" hacks either.
Adding an external monitor/screen from a vga port works too, although I did run into a problem when I disconnected it as the system froze, it might be due to the "Live nature" of the OS, or that I did something wrong, either way, it worked; I could use my EM :)
OpenSUSE TW with Gnome:
Appimages work without any issues and without having to use "ugly" hacks. However, I've no idea how to add them to the "apps menu", since there's no such thing in Gnome, and according to what I read one would need to install a gnome-shell extension to do that, which I didn't try.
Megasync does work too without any issues and without having to use "ugly" hacks either.
Adding an external monitor/screen from a vga port works too, and in fact, it is way easier than in KDE and straightforward.
It would seem, that right now, Fedora 34 might be the one with better support for W in KDE Plasma, at least for my specific use-case and in the short time I've been using/trying it. OpenSUSE seems to be a bit ahead of Debian in this regard. Gnome in TW works too, and I guess it probably does in Debian, Leap, Fedora and most distros as well, but I honestly don't like it.

EDIT:
I just learned something quite interesting. It would seem that if I log in straight to a W session, as opposed to log out from X and then log in to W, then appimages do work without having to use that gnome "ugly" hack. I just did that in Debian, though I did so because I noticed earlier there were a few updates for W, and I wanted to check on those. I tried a few appimages, and they worked, while in Debian I tried and see if megasync worked, it didn't. I've just done the same thing in openSUSE with the same result; logged in straight to W and try some appimages, they worked too, so this is good news for me :) I also tried again adding the external monitor in Debian, unfortunately, it didn't work and system keeps on freezing, in fact, system settings just crashed this time. I did the same thing in openSUSE, and I might've been doing it wrong before because this time it worked, and while not entirely perfect and the system didn't freeze this time, when I disconnected the EM, FF kept on using the same EM's resolution, which is different from that of the laptops', so it just remained there and couldn't do anything, had to jump to a tty, killed FF from there and only then I could use the system again, I kind of remember reading about this being a known issue while using W. So yeah, it isn't "perfect" but, it's kind of "workable".
 
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Thanks! I'll have a look.
You're welcome! :) I found that while searching things on W, and remembered someone had mentioned sway in this thread, so thought I would share it.
 
Just bumped into this while checking my feed https://taiwins.org/
Taiwins is a modern and modular wayland compositor, and it is extensible through lua script. It has a builtin shell and GUI system called twidgets Writing a minimum Wayland client using twidgets would take only 20 lines of code.
Taiwins is the tiling as well as a floating window manager, you can allocate windows on your desktop logicially or based on your needs, drag your windows freely.
features
  • fast and small codebase.
  • extensible and easy config through lua.
  • builtin shell.
  • wayland client system.
  • configurable theme.
  • multi key-presses bindings like emacs.
  • dbus support.
  • and more.
 
I'm going to stick to X11 for now because I use components of Xfce4 which aren't Wayland compatible yet and I don't really want to look for alternatives as in what I use now works. Will keep checking the status of Xfce and wayland compatibility and try again at a later time.
 
For the curious(like me ;)) https://github.com/natpen/awesome-wayland A curated list of Wayland code and resources. I already tried one of those, a screenshot tool named swappy advertised on that page as a "Wayland-native snapshot editing tool, inspired by Snappy on macOS" however, it didn't work, got this error
Code:
$ swappy                                                                                                                                                  

** (swappy:28283): CRITICAL **: 13:07:02.049: original image not loaded

(swappy:28283): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: 13:07:02.061: g_object_unref: assertion 'G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed
This on Fedora 34 with KDE on W. Installed via dnf. Reading here https://github.com/jtheoof/swappy/issues/103 I understand what the problem is; it seems it isn't a screenshot tool as it doesn't take screenshots, it's used to work/edit them, not take them, for that you need another pkg, either grim or slurp, which does the screenshotting part. And after re-reading the error and the description, now I realize I completely misunderstood how it worked. :p
 
I made a start with playing around with Wayland, I got it working but I'm going to have to change some settings because some things of my i3 configuration don't seem to be working as expect and I had to use a different panel because the xfce4-panel isn't compatible.
 
I don't think Xfce supports Wayland yet however that may have changed since I've looked into it.

Old link.
I know, I was aware of that. I normally use i3wm with xfce4-panel. In order to use wayland I am using sway but since the xfce4-panel isn't compatible I used another panel, waybar. I did run into a few things but I am going to continue with it this weekend to see how far I can get my configuration to and see how many of my applications work with wayland.
 
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Here's a picture of my Sway setup :cool:
 

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For normal desktop use I'm able to fully switch over now but when launching a game through Steam most of my games react strange as in the most doesn't respond and one game doesn't seem to pickup my systems resolution and only offers a low resolution. For gaming I'll stick to X11 for now but when I'm not gaming I'll be using Wayland, although I'm still going to spend some time tweaking my new panel.
 
I have the best results with Wayland / Ubuntu 20.04.2 using desktops that are all Intel inside.

I ran Wayland and Ubuntu 20.04.2 on a desktop with an Nvidia graphics card and it worked reasonably but was quite quirky.
 

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