Wayland is… a faraway land
I have been and am trying to use Wayland on my work laptop, but it’s proving itself to be a tough cookie in its own right.
I use Arch (btw) on my work laptop. On it, I installed and run KDE as my main DE. I have other options, but right now, KDE is where it’s at. And there are a number of issues.
Okay, okay, why on earth would I use something like Arch on my main work laptop? And KDE on top of that no less? That combination is basically an unwashed rug in an abandoned house years ago, infested with bugs. Well, I’m using Arch on my other machines, and to be honest, after cutting my teeth a little, installing and getting to a proper desktop is not that big of a deal, and after that, the AUR has every package under the sun (for better or worse) so installing things is rather simple. As for Wayland, well, X11 has been biting me in the rear end a little, and I was curious to see how far along the future of desktop linux had come. And because of the AUR and the fact that Arch is bleeding edge, I figured that it would get me the best experience possible.
I don’t know about best, but it’s not that good, let just say.
Let’s talk about the things that are keeping me trying first. There are 3 things, I reckon. The first is screen tearing. Since my work setup involves many monitors with different refresh rates and sizes and orientations, X11 just sort of gave up? I have tried different ways, from DEs like GNOME or KDE to WM with a compositor like picom, but to no avail. The second reason is wallpaper management. X11 frequently forgets and mixes up my wallpapers, which is an issue, since my monitors are not uniform in anyway. The third issue and arguably the most important, mouse speed. X11 auto resets the mouse speed, which is too fast for me. Again, I have tried different things, none of which work. I have RTFMed as well as GPTed. Nada. There are also other trivial problems such as corner ghosting, which occurs because X11 expects the windows to be square, but because “modern”, some programs are trying to copy catch MacOS and Windows and uses rounded windows, leaving glass-like ghosts around their corners. No biggie, but it is a bug.
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And at any rate, X11 is old code, we know that. Not even accounting for the potential security risks (which IMO are true, but you’d probably better off worrying about other security risks before worrying about X11), X11 is hard to maintain. It’s clunky, inefficient, and as I found out when taking over someone else’s project for the first time, it’s easier to just scrape everything and start over.
And for the most part, Wayland actually delivers. It fixes my 3 complaints, almost, but close enough, we’ll get to it, but only for the most part.
Firstly, the tearing issues and the artifacts are gone. I have nothing to add there accept for it just works. The mouse thing is the same. It just works. I set my mouse speed once, and basically forgot about it until I wrote this. The wallpaper issue is solved partially. I still forgets my order of my wallpapers, but a reboot or sometimes a reconnect solves it. Not perfect, but at least way faster than going to the menus and set things up again.
But then comes the issues. KDE on Arch, even though at this point ships with only Wayland (you can enable X11 support with a separate package), is still not there. The tiling plugin that I enjoyed using, Bismuth, I think, doesn’t like Wayland. Sometimes it would just straight up not work, and tile my windows under the panel. I have tried other plugins but… they’re not the same.
I also have other issues regarding OpenCV, although that probably doesn’t apply to everyone. That being said, Wayland isn’t exactly brand new. The first that I have heard of it was 2018, a good 7 years ago, and even then it was not a new idea, and compatibility is still an issue.
I tried using the most popular software, to the DE, because I knew that if I was hellbent on Qtile, which is what I’m comfortable on anyway, it would choke (I have tried it), so I have no doubt that compatibility is still an issue for many people.
There is no conclusion to all this, because you already know what I’m going to say: Wayland is neat, it is the future, but X11 remains.
