Linux:Switching from X11 to Native Wayland

Setting the Wallpaper

When on X11, I used feh to set my wallpaper on login. I had a cleverly named script called random_wallpaper.sh which took one argument, the path to the pictures directory from which to randomly select an image. It them set the wallpaper with the command feh --bg-fill "${picture}".

This of course no longer works with Wayland, as feh does not have that support. Fortunately, the Sway window manager provides a program with this functionality: swaybg. There is a problem with this however. I don't know how Wayland works very well, so there is probably a good explanation for this, but swaybg doesn't set the wallpaper like feh does. Feh sets the wallpaper and exits. Swaybg sets the wallpaper and stays running, and if you kill it the wallpaper becomes unset again. Regardless, this makes changing the wallpaper difficult, as you must track down the existing swaybg process, kill it, and start a new one with a different image.

To do this, I wrote a wrapper script called swaybg-singleton.sh. This script will set the wallpaper from the provided directory or image, backgrounding the swaybg process. It also writes a pidfile however, so subsequent runs know which process to kill when setting the wallpaper again. When changing the wallpaper, it starts a second swaybg process, which overrides the first on the display, and then kills the first (old) process so there is no blip in the wallpaper between setting it from old to new. It can be run as many times as needed without creating conflicting processes.

Startup Script and Properly Setting GTK Themes

When my computer boots up, the login screen is a tty. I don't use any of those fancy login managers like gdm or even lightdm. That said, to start up the GUI, I would log in and type startx previously. That obviously doesn't work anymore (well, if I want to use Wayland at least).

So, I wrote up a wrapper script to handle a few of the init processes, very similar to my old .xinitrc file. Right now this is called runsway.sh, but I think it might get renamed to something like startwl at some point.

This script contains the following:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

export XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=$(mktemp -d /tmp/xdg.XXXXXXX)
export GTK_BACKEND=wayland

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-theme 'Pop-dark'
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface icon-theme 'Papirus'
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface font-name 'Iosevka Aile 12'
# If you want to set this for the cursor
#gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-theme 'Pop'

dbus-run-session sway

Clipboard management

With X11, I used the xclip program. With Wayland, there exists an unofficial replacement called wl-clipboard, which provides the commands wl-copy and wl-paste. They work fairly similarly to xclip.

This isn't particularly needed for many folks probably. I used xclip as a means to programatically place things in the clipboard, such as text (usernames and passwords most often) and images (screenshots).

Watching Videos

With i3, I typically used mplayer to watch videos on my system or listen to some audio (I typically use mpd, mpc, and ncmpc for consistently listening to music). Unfortunately, mplayer does not yet support wayland. Also on my system however, I had ffplay, which is the video player utility that comes with ffmpeg. This worked on Wayland, but lacked the ability to play multiple videos in sequence without a wrapper script. I did some research, and came up with mpv. This tool works great, and even better, it works somewhat like mplayer (because long, long ago it was forked from mplayer).

Keyboard Automation

Under X11, I often used xdotool to type things automatically. Specifically, I used xdotool to type usernames and passwords. However, due to lack of support for unicode typing (many of my passwords contain characters across the unicode range), I also used xclip to copy, and xdotool to paste my passwords automatically to sidestep the issue.

The consistently recommended replacement for these two tools are wl-clipboard for clipboard management and wtype for sending keyboard key strokes.

I have had a large amount of trouble trying to get wtype to press control+v for me and it actually pasting the contents of the clipboard which I set with a script with wl-clipboard. For some reason it doesnt work across windows (in other words, I can't copy in my terminal and paste in my browser). That problem aside, I also haven't had any issues with wtype typing unicode characters yet, so I am just using that for now without using copy/paste between the two programs.

Lightweight Terminal

On i3 I used xterm for my terminal emulator. It's old, but still very well maintained, and very lightweight. However, it does not work on Wayland unfortunately. After some research, I quickly found wterm, which is now an unmaintained project. My distro kindly provides the foot terminal, which is also very lightweight and works great on wayland. It even copies on highlight much like xterm does (one of my favorite features).

Screenshots

With X11 and i3, I used imagemagick to take screenshots, specifically the import tool. This of course does not yet work on Wayland, so an alternative had to be found.

After some research I found I needed two tools to do what I wanted. Imagemagick's import tool allowed you to select what part of the screen you wanted to screenshot, rather than just always capturing the whole screen. The common advice for Wayland is two tools for this.

First we need slurp. This tool doesn't do much other than grey out the screen a bit and allow you to select a rectangle of it. The output of this operation (to STDOUT) is the screen geometry of the selection (eg: 149,117 668x335). This output is fed into the next tool, grim. Grim takes the actual screenshot, but if geometry is specified, it only does so of that geometry. So, to tie this together, my new screenshot command (which is now in my screenshot.sh script) looks like this:

grim -g "$(slurp -w 4)" "${savepath}/screen.${date}.jpg"

Viewing Photos

To be clear on this one, this is referring to things like jpgs, pngs, etc. This is not referring to photo editing or raw image processing (eg: gimp or darktable, respectively, both of which I use though gimp doesn't support Wayland until version 2.99.2 or later).

As mentioned in the wallpapers section, I prevously used feh to set my wallpaper. Feh also happens to be a very lightweight image viewer, which I used often. Some research quickly brought up a good Wayland replacement: imv.

Viewing PDFs

On X11 and i3, I used mupdf to view and work on PDFs. But, as with most of the other tools in this post, mupdf also does not yet work on Wayland. After some research, I found zathura, which actually uses mupdf to render pdfs on Wayland. Zathura works very well and can display much more than PDFs even.

Web Browsing

Fortunately here, I didn't need to change the applications I use. For a while now I have used two browsers, Gnome Web (Epiphany) and Firefox. Gnome Web supported Wayland out of the box and I had to do nothing to start it up on Wayland. Firefox was almost that easy. By default, Firefox tries to work on X11, and obviously fails on Wayland with this. The common recommendation on the internet is to set the environment variable export MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 which will make Firefox try the Wayland protocol (with which it should work fine). After a lot more research though, I found a more universal way to set this (not that this solution is bad at all). It turns out that Firefox also reads a more generic environment variable, export GTK_BACKEND=wayland. Setting either of those should make Firefox work on Wayland.