First thoughts on Wayland.
Pixel-painting in the modern age.
I’ve finally switched to using Wayland (the modern graphics environment protocol for Linux, etc. which began development in 2008; it replaces X11 which ultimately began development in 1984). I’m using it with GNOME, which means GNOME’s shell, and mutter as the compositor (which implements the main Wayland protocol).
It’s say 90% a drop-in replacement, 8% general annoyance, and 2% GNOME’s opinionated-annoyance so far. I’m surprised it’s not higher than 90%, honestly. We’re just at the point where some distributions and environments are deprecating X11, and there are only a few key nits:
- Lack of window position restore. This is soon-to-be in mutter, apparently. (Or technically, it’s implemented but not in the version I’m using yet.)
- Some minor inconsistencies in drag-and-drop. This is also a work-in-progress. Some places it already works, like dragging within an application. Dragging between apps can fail when it works under X11, and dragging a tab out of a window to make a new window can also be dicey, but should be implemented by now in major apps.
The other 2% are extensions to Wayland that GNOME doesn’t want to implement in mutter, like wlr-layer-shell. The story, as best as I understand, is that the developers have opinions! You shouldn’t sully their pristine desktop environment with the likes of panels and widgets and so on. So they won’t let you. For now, conky continues to run under X11 via Xwayland, but it would be nice if it didn’t have to. (And it also seems strange that X11 applications get to position themselves while Wayland-native apps do not.)
In the case of mutter, I think it’s plausible they do eventually implement the zone protocol extension. But that will probably not happen for at least a few more years.
I may eventually switch away from mutter, though I haven’t looked into what all that involves yet. I might simply run what I want in Xwayland, requiring me to pull on GDK internals to grab the X11 bits and then use Xlib to do what GNOME won’t implement. I like most of what GNOME does, and when there’s something that’s too annoying there are alternatives I turn to. Usually that means a different app than the one they ship. But the whole Linux system is built around the freedom to use the code or not, to switch away. There is, thankfully, no Redmond in Linux.