wayland.norg

@document.meta
title: wayland
description: Notes about wayland
authors: nsalas
created: 2022-10-03
updated: 2022-10-05
version: 0.0.15
@end

* Impressions

  Tried it first with gnome. LOVED IT. Everything is butter smooth. I'm kind of
  excited about wayland right now.

* Replacements

  - dwm -> Hyprland
  - dmenu -> bemenu
  - st/Alacritty -> foot
  - flameshot -> grim + slurp + wl-clipboard
  - xsel/xclip -> wl-clipboard
  - dwmblocks-async -> waybar
  - xdotool -> wtype

  Have used those replacements for a while now. I *really* miss flameshot. A
  shame that there's no viable alternative.

  I feel like there are other apps that I haven't considered here, like
  datagrip or vscode (lol). I should make sure those work too and annotate them
  here

* Don't need replacement

  - Firefox. Needs MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 as env variable
  - dunst. Amazing that it didn't need any setting to work

* New apps

** Gammastep

   I always liked Night Light in GNOME and the thingy in macOS which I can't
   remember the name. I set up
   {https://gitlab.com/chinstrap/gammastep}[gammastep] using rough coordinates
   here in Santiago and worked wonders. The Arch Linux package also has a
   systemd user unit. Also nice!

* Things to consider if going back to xorg

** bemenu

   Might be useful to go all in on `bemenu`. It /almost/ does the same and
   would simplify *a lot* of my current scripts. I don't feel like dmenu does
   enough to keep me using it and changing would imply one less tool to compile
   on the xorg side

** Electron / Chromium

   These need a setting inside config files to work and I don't intend to stop
   supporting my xorg config at least for another year. I'm not exactly sure
   how to proceed here because I would need to append to files on login in
   wayland and delete lines from lines on login in xorg. It's doable, totally,
   and maybe I should, but feels like a hassle. I don't use electron that much

* General commentary on moving to wayland

** Hyprland

   Has really good ideas, but some things are a bit annoying

   - binding jump to previous workspace works 2 times only
   - doesn't expose all workflows to waybar (or any bar)

   I can live with those, I don't think they are very important. They're there
   though

   Over the course of 2 days I've found a couple of rough patches though, it
   sometimes glitches window positions. I feel like it still has work to do.
   I'll just try out sway I think. More stable. If that doesn't work out, then
   idk, maybe gnome, maybe go back to xorg for a while

** All dmenu scripts

   Hah... not much to say here, having to `if` everywhere to see if
   wayland/x11 is not a big deal. I already set up bemenu so it shouldn't be
   too much of a pain, just long work.

   Basically, always check for the value of `XDG_SESSION_TYPE` being equal to
   `wayland`.

** Flameshot

   This looks like it's broken beyond repair for the following reasons

   - Everything needs to be pointing at sway (why?)
   - Doesn't respect desktop fractional scaling
   - Clipboard doesn't work

   I don't think I'll be trying it out any further. Will probably try out
   swappy https://github.com/jtheoof/swappy

** Screen sharing

   I usually share my screen at work and I heard screen could be shared with
   xdg-desktop-portal and some combination of packages. So I set out to do
   that but no dice, didn't work until I found this issue on github
   https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/issues/861. Downgrading
   xdg-desktop-portal to 1.14 did the trick. I can only share my entire
   screen, but I always do that anyway so I don't see any downside there