this is a linux post. be forewarned.
I just found out Xorg is apparently getting killed off with RedHat removing its life-support so the transition to Wayland is inevitable now. except... the whole system of compositors looks like a mess. there's only one solid tiling compositor (Sway) and both it and all the others basically had to be rewritten because they based themselves on the wayland reference implementation framework (wlc) -- which of course killed off all the smaller compositors that looked really cool.
personally, I'm coming from xmonad and no DE, stitching together a few utilities into providing the parts of a DE I actually care about and wanted, so I'd probably go the same route. would love to have a static tiling WM that was as deeply configurable as xmonad (it was a really a framework to build your own WM, not really a WM on its own) but I think I'm going to have to write that myself if I want it as no one seems to be working on anything like it (there was waymonad but the project looks abandoned/dead).
so what have y'all tried? what are the big gotchas switching over? I've heard screensharing on like zoom is basically impossible right now but a lot of other stuff mostly works? would really love to hear about people's experiences and some thoughts on whether its worth attempting the switch to Sway (seriously, how do people put up with having to rearrange their window layouts all the time, lol, that sounds so miserable... I put the layouts I like in code and call it a day once I'm done tweaking them).
if I do go the route of writing something myself, I'll probably build off of something like Smithay as it looks fairly well thought through.
The one and only Wayland project that matters is wlroots, the library behind Sway and most other Wayland desktops (including SteamOS). The author of wlroots is one of the most important people in open source today as well.
The NVIDIA issue is too bad, but I think its possible that they will upstream drivers in the future, and at that point it might get better.
Also the Xorg foundation is the main force behind Wayland, so its not really fair to say that X is getting killed off. It's just the most important compositor is now is xwayland.
+1 for wlroots - If you're making a wayland compositor, it's fifty thousand lines of code you'd be writing anyway. Unless your compositor wants to do super weird things, like have the mouse do something other than move the cursor (but even then, wlroots has escape hatches for that kind of thing.)
If you're not making a wayland compositor, it provides a bunch of foundational Wayland extensions for things like standardised screenshotting, layer-shell (allowing windows to display 'always-on-top', imagine a dock or a panel), there's
wlrobs, which lets OBS capture from wlroots compositors via a direct-memory-access buffer, meaning that recording videos happens in as few data copies as possible. (We use the X Shared Memory extension in obs-studio on X11.)I tried sway for a while, but am still chained to bspwm for now because of incompatibilities with an old version of IntelliJ (it was handling window focus weirdly under Wayland) and I have an nvidia graphics card and want to take advantage of the proprietary drivers' performance, which is unsupported by sway because nvidia won't implement the GBM API.
I'm currently using bspwm on X11, but I am really interested in wayfire. I was won over by a reddit video.
My next GPU will be AMD so that I can have nice open-source drivers for Linux.
I've recently switched to the Fedora 33 beta with Wayland and Gnome, and I havent noticed any difference compared to Arch with KDE and X.
Gnome support seems to be the best at the moment in my experience, but I imagine everything else will catch up as adoption reaches critical mass.
Really the big thing is that X is a constantly crumbling mess held together by a combination of tape and ungodly amounts of programmer suffering. I used to be involved with X.Org and good lord, X11 as a graphics system was on its last legs by the end of the 90s, by the time I stopped those legs had long since ceased to exist and it was crawling along with one arm. There's a reason every UNIX vendor in the 90s was trying to invent a replacement.
My favorite feature was nearly every application leaking pixmaps onto the server and just ballooning memory usage.
Xmonad+no-DE gang! Unfortunately, I have no advice, but I guess I'll have to start looking, too. Maybe waymonad can be revived. I've been meaning to adopt a new Haskell project, anyway.
Haskell gang! yeah, I need to look at the codebase and see how much sense it makes. restarting that effort is also something I'm thinking about.
I'll stay on Debian and X and pretend shiny new stuff doesn't exist until I absolutely have to.
I did try out sway and it mostly worked although wayland doesn't support libinput stuff so whatever compositor you use has to handle that and a bunch of other stuff by itself as well. It is a giant fuck. Thankfully sway did support the thing I needed to enable tap to click and natural scrolling on my touchpad.
I can live without screen sharing but Flameshot doesn't work on Sway. Which is weird considering they have a Wayland implementation for GNOME3. Fuck knows. Frustrated in half an hour and back to my comfort zone of BSPWM.
I use KWin. Wayland is pretty good, but still not 100% as good as X, so I'm still using X. Little things like windows popping up in the top-left rather than the center, windows not getting focus when they should, stuff being the wrong size, etc.
