I'm finally able to use Wayland on an ongoing basis
It was the need for Waydroid only working under only Wayland, that forced me to again have another go at Wayland this week on my Manjaro KDE Plasma. Yet again I hit some issues, one or two of which were show-stoppers, but I have finally overcome them, and although there are some irritations, they are now pretty minor, and I have workarounds to make everything work now. These were all issues that made Wayland feel, for me, it was not quite ready for full prime time.
Key for me was to be sure that:
* Steam games worked
* KMyMoney finance app worked
* My hundreds of shortcuts in Steam Deck worked
* OBS Studio worked
* VLC Media player worked
* Wayland was stable without intermittent crashes
I suspect that XWayland has largely been the reason everything now seems so much better.
For KMyMoney I had long since sorted out that if I added the environment variable "QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb", this sorted out the non-display of the application. This may even not be needed any more.
My biggest challenge had been to find alternatives to the excellent xdotool utility, which I use extensively in Bitfocus Companion for my hundred plus productivity shortcuts. Not only is xdotool exclusively for X11, but it is really easy to use as it uses the key names such as Enter, Space, etc. Yes there is ydotool, but it is really difficult to do set up say 'xdotool key Ctrl_L+f' in ydotool as this must be 'ydotool key 29:1 33:1 33:0 29:0' and just don't dare forget one of the key up sequences otherwise it will all break. I started looking into dotool this week as well as other options.
Nothing beats xdotool for simplicity of use. I'm not sure why or when, but I tested out an existing xdotool shortcut... and it just worked! Wow, OK so this must be some XWayland improvement. This made me very happy, as converting everything to ydotool would be pain times 100.
Wayland still has its 'security' limitations on insertions into keyboard/mouse input, so I do sometimes get a popup that I must accept, but it works! Wayland also does not like keystrokes to be inserted into background windows, but I see there is now an application called Kdotool which I must still explore.
The other irritation was not being able to resize application windows. Normally, I'd move the mouse cursor to any corner of an app and then drag it bigger or smaller. Wayland was just not allowing this to happen. So what I've discovered to make this happen is two things:
One can hold down the Meta key and then hold the right mouse button near that corner, and then do the usual resizing quite quickly. How will I remember the key combination? Well with my Stream Deck, as I now have a key mapped to hold the Meta key down, and reminds me to right-click the mouse.
The other thing I discovered was, resizing does sort of work if you have extremely fine motor skills. You have to position the mouse about a pixel outside the corner of an app, and then you can grab and resize it like 'normal'. If you do this on the corner or just inside the app, it does not work. So the issue seems to be that the resize handle area is extremely small. I've looked inside the window theme settings and cannot seem to see anything that would make this larger. Yes, I know there is a setting called 'Enable extended resize handles' and I have that ticked already.
There is also a window menu that has an option for resizing, but that is too clunky to use, so the above two workarounds see m to work OK for me for now.
Another thing was my mouse cursor 'sticking' as it moved across screen one to two, and from two to three. It only happens when I move it fairly slowly. Turns out this is a feature for those not wanting to go past the screen edges. But there is a setting not only to adjust the stickiness, but also to disable that. So sorted too.
I have some open apps that show blank icons in the toolbar. This is not too serious, as if I hover the mouse cursor over them, their preview shows what they are. For now too, it is only my Joplin notes app that does this under Wayland.
OBS Studio works as-is. The only issue seemed to be the screen to capture. It is a super easy fix, but must be reversed if you ever use X11 again. Basically I had to just add a new screen capture and I think its properties were for Pipewire capture or something like that. Everything else worked as before.
The last thing that was broken, was VLC media player was giving codec errors on playback. The short of it was I just needed to install additional codec plugins (not sure why, as it all worked as-is on X11). Or one can also install the Flatpak version of VLC and that works out of the box (or is that inside the container?). Other media players like MPV just worked as normal without any changes.
Some screenrecorders, like Vokoscreen will work, but they lose their ability to record only a window or a rectangular area, as they are X11 specific. OBS Studio can do the job, but I also installed Kooha which does do rectangular areas under Wayland.
I've now been using Wayland for two and a bit days. No need yet to go back into X11 to do anything, and Wayland has been stable so far. I've tried two games under Steam Games, and they are working, and my Stream Deck shortcuts for those games are also working fine.
Very ironically, the Waydroid app is not starting after the second day. It was the reason for me re-trying Wayland again. But that is not really a Wayland issue itself.
It looks like I'm now fully moved over to Wayland, and my mind is at rest, at least for the showstoppers I had before with it.
#technology #Linux #opensource #Wayland
