Solved Wayland Support

Steffie

Plasma 5.20 arrived today in my Arch. I have tried searching for info on how to actually invoke it in my Plasma, with middling to poor results so far. Atm this is the least-worst ref i found --

https://community.kde.org/KWin/Wayland

from which

Start a Plasma session on Wayland
First go to a tty (Press Ctrl+Alt+F3 for instance) and log in. Then run the following command:
.
dbus-run-session startplasma-wayland

Really? Is that it?

Has anyone here who also is now on Plasma 5.20 already begun using Wayland, & if so, what steps are needed pls?

A Former User

@Steffie IIRC, you just need to choose the Plasma on Wayland session in the display manager. If it isn’t there, check if you have a plasma.desktop or whatever under /usr/share/wayland-sessions/ (but it should be there).

Steffie

@potmeklecbohdan said in Wayland Support:

just need to choose the Plasma on Wayland session in the display manager

That's exactly also what i expected [it's the way GNOME does it already], but in my real Arch KDE, & in one of the VMs [ArchLabs KDE] also upgraded yesterday to 5.20, SDDM has no such option.

@potmeklecbohdan said in Wayland Support:

under /usr/share/wayland-sessions/

I have no such directory at all. Only these:

steffie@archlinuxTower[/usr/share] 10:29:49 Thu Oct 15 $> ls | grep way
drwxr-xr-x   2 root root  4096 2020-04-12 14:03 wayland
drwxr-xr-x   4 root root  4096 2019-12-07 01:43 wayland-protocols
steffie@archlinuxTower[/usr/share] 10:30:02 Thu Oct 15 $>

Ditto in the VM.

Bwaaaaah, FOMO.

Steffie

@Steffie Coincidentally this morning i saw this, https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/jazpim/cant_login_under_wayland/g8t36jv/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Try starting without sddm. Switch to another TTY (e.g Ctrl+Alt+F1, Ctrl+Alt+F2, etc), login and then run XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland dbus-run-session startplasma-wayland.

I tried first the shorter line per my earlier post, then later this longer line, but only in my Arch KDE VM, not my real system. Neither worked, giving only a black screen albeit with my yellow pointer-arrow. After an extended delay the TTY filled up with error messages.

Both those failures might have more to do with VirtualBox incompatibility than Plasma itself, but even if so, needing to launch Plasma Wayland from TTY is a simply cretinous design decision, & astounds me given all the mucho Wayland hype in the lead-up to 5.20.

Looking in Pamac i see some Waylandish packages not yet installed, so maybe some of them are needed before W can simply be selected direct from SDDM... but atm i have no time to further explore.

A Former User

@Steffie

Install plasma-wayland-session and select Plasma (Wayland) to launch a new session in Wayland.

— https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/KDE#Using_a_display_manager

Steffie

@potmeklecbohdan Thank you very much! I've been off chasing unicorns for the past 24 hrs so not able to return to this til now. Earlier i'd not gotten around to reading that Wiki, having only instead looked at https://community.kde.org/KWin/Wayland which was, tbh, quite useless.

Anyway now in two of my VMs [EndeavourOS KDE & ~~ArchLabs KDE~~ KaOS, fwiw] having done their updates to 5.20.0 i then installed this package, SDDM does indeed then conveniently provide the new option. In both those VM distros, so far [not experimented very much yet] they seem to be working ok.

Better still, in the EOS VM i tried launching Vivaldi-Snapshot, & it seems to be a happy camper - yay.

I'm now keen to asap try it in my real Arch KDE, so once i finish updating the last VM, i can then log out back to SDDM, & give it a go.

Steffie

@Steffie Ha! Oh well, that experiment [Plasma Wayland in my real Arch] lasted less than 5'... am now logged back in ordinary x11.

Initially it all seemed surprisingly "normal" & fine. However then i found that none of these atm work in W:

PulseAudio System Tray
KSnip
Flameshot

Possibly longer testing might have revealed additional problems, but all three of those [or rather, at least 1 & 2, or 1 & 3] are Must Haves.

Still, it seems extremely promising... KWin Desktop Effects seemed good, Activities & VD switching good, responsiveness good [albeit i suspect it was slightly more laggy by a tiny amount, than x11].

It'll be interesting to keep watching the upcoming refinements & fixes.

The question remains -- what are Vivaldi's plans to build V to run natively in W not just X ?

luetage

@Steffie said in Wayland Support:

what are Vivaldi's plans to build V to run natively in W not just X ?

Why should they care, I’m the only Vivaldi user on Wayland full time I know of. I expect it will take Ubuntu to switch over to Wayland by default to make this a target worth targeting. It’s a known problem, why switch over before things work and on the other hand why develop, if no one’s using it?

Steffie

@luetage Heehee.

Chicken, egg.

Build it & they'll come?

@luetage said in Wayland Support:

I’m the only Vivaldi user on Wayland full time I know of

How untrue! For 5' there were two of us. Count them, two!

One.
Two.
Five.

jumpsq

@luetage said in Wayland Support:

I’m the only Vivaldi user on Wayland full time I know of.

You shall not only watch your own feet.
I have been using Wayland (incl. Xwayland) exclusively for the least year or so.

But you are probably correct about the egg. And also, Xwayland may be working too good for everyone but purists to insist, even if ubuntu or some common DE should become waylanded in the future once more.

Steffie

I gave Wayland another hour's try yesterday in my Tower's real Arch Plasma.

I was pleased to find a workaround to the problem re PulseAudio System Tray failing in Wayland [it segfaults then dumps core, & aborts], by creating a custom launcher for /usr/bin/kcmshell5 kcm_pulseaudio & running it then as an on-demand app. It can't do everything that PAST does, but it does enough for me to be viable.
I don't understand this. My earlier attempts with Wayland found that the native copy-select-to-clipboard middle-click-paste-from-clipboard simply did not work the other day, but seemed to work ok this latest time.
Flameshot & KSnip still fail for rectangular target capture in Wayland, but happily Vivaldi's internal capture does work... presumably that's because V is not running in W but only in XWayland. In any event, i rarely use V's tool coz it obviously works only within the V window... i need to capture desktop & file-manager & other app images too, not only browser stuff. That's partly why FS & KS are so badly missed in W. However i found to my surprise that the Plasma Devs have rebuilt their native app Spectacle so that it fully works now in W, & so [this is clunky but doable] i can capture targets with S, then export the capture to KS, then therein apply the desired markup annotations.
The bad pointer pixel offset so apparent & annoying the other day, did not manifest this time.
I was unsure the other day, but Wayland definitely is slightly more sluggish in general feel & responsiveness than X.
Several Plasma Window Behaviour & Task Manager behaviours that i'd not tested initially the other day but did test this time, do not work [some, properly, others, at all] in W. Given i actively use these a lot, this is a real bummer. Examples include Focus Follows Mouse with Window Raising [sometimes worked, other time not], & Highlight windows when hovering over tasks [completely broken].
Latte-Dock is not entirely happy in Wayland. Its Auto-Hide is buggy in W, such that even when it hides, a residual opaque shadow remains permanently visible that covers thus obstructs any other window dragged into this area.
No dockable app [ie, (in X11) can show a small icon in the System Tray to which the app retreats when minimised, rather than remaining in the Task Manager] functions in Wayland yet. Hence frequently-used apps like CherryTree, KSnip, KeePassXC clutter up the Task Manager instead of retreating to the SysTray.

Obviously almost all those hassles are not Vivaldi's fault in any way, but they combine to continue dissuading me from yet living in Wayland. To that extent, my earlier question about V becoming native to W is entirely moot, atm.

jumpsq

@Steffie

Flameshot & KSnip still fail for rectangular target capture in Wayland

u may use grim -g "$(slurp)" filename.png
no gui, but it should do the job.

I was unsure the other day, but Wayland definitely is slightly more sluggish in general feel & responsiveness than X.

That's surprising to me. May be related to plasma/KDE?

luetage

@Steffie Almost exclusively issues with Wayland on KDE, Gnome is ahead there.

luetage

https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/26022

Only problem is Vivaldi doesn’t use Electron directly.

Steffie

@luetage Mmmmmm, noice!

The Wayland support is very experimental and various features which were working in X11 may either be broken or not implemented for Wayland.

Steffie

Fyi...
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Wayland-Chromium-2020

luetage

@Steffie I assume this doesn’t work for Vivaldi. But maybe it will motivate the team to do something in the long run.

Steffie

@luetage I also was/am unsure wrt its V application, but thought i'd post anyway as others presumably would just like a general sense of dev trajectory.

Slightly OT, but from other articles i've read this week, it really seems more & more that the X project is functionally dead, with previous major backers like Red Hat moving dev effort from X to W, & nobody else stepping up so far to take on the ongoing X development & support burden. Hence, IMO, downstream devs including V, are probably gonna be backed into a corner unless they start proactively moving themselves along with W as well.

Steffie

Salient for X:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ajax-On-The-X-Server

WhyNotHugo

The lack of Wayland support is what's keeping me from adopting Vivaldi.

Aside from the security issues of using XWayland, it also does not support scaling, so if you have a HiDPI screen (which is pretty common in 2020), Vivaldi will render extremely blurry (since it's rendered low-res and then the bitmap streched).

This is a hard dealbreaker, not only due to blurriness and ugliness, but also text it extremely hard to read.