I recently switched from using X11 to Wayland when it became available in my
Linux distro (Crux). This of course means I had to switch from my currently
window manager, i3, to its Wayland equivelant, Sway. But while Sway
claims to be a drop in replacement for i3, that isn't strictly true. Switching
to Wayland and Sway took a lot more effort than I originally thought. Here is a
list of things I had to do to get things back to normal for the most part.
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 "${picture}".
This of course no longer works with Wayland, as feh does not have that
support. Fortunately, the Sway window manager provides a program with this
functionality: swaybg. There is a problem with this however. I don't know
how Wayland works very well, so there is probably a good explanation for this,
but swaybg doesn't set the wallpaper like feh does. Feh sets the
wallpaper and exits. Swaybg sets the wallpaper and stays running, and if you
kill it the wallpaper becomes unset again. Regardless, this makes changing
the wallpaper difficult, as you must track down the existing swaybg
process, kill it, and start a new one with a different image.
To do this, I wrote a wrapper script called swaybg-singleton.sh. This
script will set the wallpaper from the provided directory or image,
backgrounding the swaybg process. It also writes a pidfile however, so
subsequent runs know which process to kill when setting the wallpaper again.
When changing the wallpaper, it starts a second swaybg process, which overrides
the first on the display, and then kills the first (old) process so there is no
blip in the wallpaper between setting it from old to new. It can be run as many
times as needed without creating conflicting processes.
When my computer boots up, the login screen is a tty. I don't use any of those
fancy login managers like gdm or even lightdm. That said, to start up the GUI,
I would log in and type startx previously. That obviously doesn't work
anymore (well, if I want to use Wayland at least).
So, I wrote up a wrapper script to handle a few of the init processes, very
similar to my old .xinitrc file. Right now this is called runsway.sh, but I
think it might get renamed to something like startwl at some point.
This script contains the following:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
export XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=$(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
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).
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).
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.
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).
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 <https://github.com/emersion/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"
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.
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.
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.
Switching to Wayland was not an easy task for sure. It took me over a week to find all of those replacements. But that said, Wayland is definitely lighter weight and seems to run much faster on older hardware. I especially appreciate that I don't need to run a special compositor in addition to my display manager just to get some transparency on windows. So far I like Wayland, but this early on I am still unsure if I will stick with it for the longer term. If I run into any other gaps in my processes, I'll post how I solved them here.
Written on: 2021-10-15 16:08:18 -0600
Last edited: 2025-03-01 01:54:36 UTC
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
by Aaron Ball