So a bit under 3 years ago, I made my infamous Wayland rant post that is likely the most read post on this blog by miles. I should really actually write about music again one of these days, but that’s a topic for another time. The language was perhaps a bit inflammatory, but I felt the criticisms I made at the time were fair. It was primarily born out some frustrations I had with the entire ecosystem, and it was not like I was the only sole voice. There are other people out there you can find that encountered their own unique Wayland problems and wrote about it.
With that post, I probably cast myself as some anti-Wayland guy which is my own doing, but I promise you that is not the case. You can check my mpv commits, and it’s businesses as usual. Lots of Wayland fixes, features, and all that good stuff. Quite some time has passed since then, and it is really overdue look at the situation again with all the new developments in mind. To be frank, my original post is very outdated and it is not fair to leave it up in its current state without acknowledging the work that has been done. So in comparison to 3 years ago, I have a much more positive outlook now.
I knew dudemanguy would eventually make a post like this. I use the distro(Artix Linux) he’s a maintainer on Artix, and he’s a solid dude that is always willing to help and gives solid help.
I have both riverwm and bspwm along with Wayland and X on my system and honestly have stuck on X because getting my workflow exactly the same on Wayland has been a technical hurdle of learning Zig (riverwm is written in Zig), and so far, with the exception of the occasional race condition, X just works.
I want to convert to Wayland, and will probably get around to making my own custom scripts in zig for working with riverwm. But until then, X/bspwm is where I live.
Have you explore hyprland, niri (scrollable, not dynamic, but it’s sort of dynamic then) or sway (static tiling though, but offering tabbed layout and dynamic stacking/floating, plus hugely customizable)? Did you discard them because not close enough to bspwm? Just curious, not to judge your decision or anything like that.
Being an artix user, are you using logind (the official default), or just seatd, or the new logind alternative turnstile (not supported by all init systems, looks like only dinit which I use and openrc, tough void has it working with runit I believe)? I’m wondering what’s really required on wayland. I like the approach of just seatd, but I don’t know what one would lose and what are the wins, but if not seat alone then turnstile which actually require seatd. Also I would like to drop calling d-bus, but I’m not sure if that would prevent the compositor to work, but further if screen sharing with webrtc, electron apps like slack or teams-for-linux would stop working. I guess not using d-bus would not affect mako. But any ways, I’m curious of what would be you choice for your wayland experience if/when you get into it. The official and default way is just logind plus d-bus plus polkit. For such sharing xdg-desktop-portal is required, which fundamentally seems to be plumbing of d-bus, but I’m not sure…
BTW, from the blog post referenced, dudemanguy is also the mpv developer, so that requires quite a lot of effort (mpv specially on the support side of things, besides the developing effort, particularly to support wayland, and mpv does for some time now) together with artix effort. I’m glad he’s back writing, :)