- people who don’t care and haven’t even bothered to check out wayland and compare it to x
I’ve been using Wayland for a while, but I remember two factors that might have held me back in another universe:
- lack of support from Xmonad (so group 3 from the article)
- I used to make extensive use of keyboard remapping using xkb & xcape, and last I checked that doesn’t work in native Wayland apps. (I think that would’ve put me in one of the niche groups.)
I’m not sure if those restrictions still apply. Luckily for the simplicity of my life I switched to Gnome (partially for Wayland support, partially for a simpler setup), and I switched to doing keyboard reconfiguration in hardware.
xkb has been split off from Xorg, all Wayland compositors (that I know of) use it for mapping.
Oh, very nice! Thanks for letting me know
What kind of hardware are you using for keyboard reconfiguration?
I built a wireless Corne keyboard from a kit. It uses nice!nano controllers running ZMK. Previously when I used a Kinesis Advantage 2 I replaced its controller board with a KinT which uses a Teensy as its controller. Customizing the keyboard with custom firmware is much nicer than customizing in the OS. But it can be a commitment. Although there are some keyboards that come the reprogramming options out-of-the-box, like the Kinesis Advantage 360, the Moonlander, all of Keyboardio’s models.
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I’m not going to be the poor sod figuring out the rest and documenting it.
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That’s a perfectly fair criticism as far as the average user is concerned, which is why Plasma and GNOME have both made using Wayland as simple as flipping a switch. You at least seemed to imply that you’re a NixOS user, though. Does that not consist mostly of editing config files?
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I’ve tried Manjaro Sway and it was a lovely experience. I would still be using it, but there was nothing like barrier on Wayland and that’s a deal breaker for me. I’ve tried like four or five different alternatives, but none of them were comparable. So I am back on X11 and i3.
The default Gnome installation on NixOS uses Wayland. And GDM too - it’s pretty much the same as other distros I’ve used. I’d guess the Plasma install option is also on Wayland.
I do have some issues with screen sharing. It generally works fine in Firefox and Discord. But screen sharing in Slack crashes every time.
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Is sway any harder to start than, say, i3?
I’m using Wayland and KDE but it wasn’t any more difficult than setting up X11 and KDE. Both required actual configuration (and on my system, either launches from SDDM).
If you’re using a distro that does one by default, then yes it takes some effort to go with a non-default option, but if you’re configuring from the ground up then choosing Wayland doesn’t seem any harder.
