You know what I just realised? These "universal formats" were created to make it easier for developers to package software for Linux, and there just so happens to be this thing called the Open Build Service by OpenSUSE, which allows you to package for Debian and Ubuntu (deb), Fedora and RHEL (rpm) and SUSE and OpenSUSE (also rpm). And then the dudes that do AUR packages can take a deb package and write a PKGBUILD that installs it on Arch and Artix. I think I just solved the universal packaging problem.

And maybe we can get OBS to add PKGBUILD support....

Also, feel free to let me know what you think about it as I'm genuinely curious: did I miss anything obvious? Thanks

Essentially as the title says, I'm running SDDM with the Wayland backend on Fedora 40 Sway edition and I want to enable tap-to-click for my touchpad. Any ideas on how I can do that? I tried doing it in the xorf config but then I realised the x server isn't even installed so SDDM is actually running on Wayland, and I don't know how to do that on Wayland with SDDM. Any ideas?

Edit: So if Plasma is installed, SDDM uses kwin_wayland, and the docs say that it normally uses weston. But what happens when neither of those are installed? Well, as it turns out, on Fedora Sway, they use Sway as the compositor for SDDM (probably to lower the ISO size). So imagine my delight when I did a sudo -e /etc/sway/sddm-greeter.conf and copied the tap-to-click (and keyboard layout for good measure) blocks of code from my old sway config to that file, saved and logged out. It worked! So yeah, the secret is in realising what compositor SDDM is using (and I think you might be able to force a compositor of your choice in the SDDM config, but I'm not sure how)

I'll try keep this short and concise.

I've been on Fedora for about 2 months now and it is one of the few distros to have all the packages I use (albeit, via COPR).

I recently read an article about Void and it seemed very appealing to me. I've been wanting to move onto something more minimal, and Void, with Runit and with its scripts that it ships with, as well as giving me a new init system and package manager to learn, seems amazing.

In terms of getting all my stuff on Void, their package search suggests all the packages I currently need are available for it.

Only potential sources of trouble are:

• Hyprland is an unofficial package

• Pywlroots and Pywayland (for qtile Wayland) don't exist, BUT there is a qtile-wayland package

• My broswer of choice, Floorp, will have to be ran as a flatpak, which may cause issues, especially performance issues, as I'm a serious tab hoarder.

I want to learn more about Void's systems by using them, but I'm not sure if the transition is worthwhile.

Is the bootup/shutdown speed, and faster package management really worth it? Is it really significant enough?

I'm still torn on nvim vs Emacs. I have my Emacs config readt and I'm working on finishing my nvim config, but I'm still switching back and forth and can't decide. I thought Emacs' other features would be enough to make me stay but frankly I find myself preferring non-emacs alternatives like cmus over emms and I don't use RSS feeds enough to justify elfeed. I also prefer kitty in zsh over term, vterm and eshell. As an editor, however currently Emacs is superior, but we'll see if that changes when my neovim config is complete. Currently, the only advantage of nvim over Emacs when it comes to being my IDE, is faster load times. I think Neovim has faster load time, and Emacs has org-mode as features that stand out, where Emacs startup, even with the daemon/server, is slower, and orgmode support for neovim is inferior. The thing is, I haven't been able to really get into org-mode and I haven't even finished configuring neovim. For the time being, I'll stick to my approach of switching back and forth, but we'll see where things go in the future.

In terms of any other text editing features, I can't say either reigns supreme, as they're both really good. They have the features one would expect and theming is just amazing!

But I think my choice of editor will come down to org-mode or markdown. Markdown is simpler for me, as I'm more familiar with it and I use it all the time for my uni work, as I'm required to. Org-mode is more powerful and featured, but is also more difficult to learn because of how different it is. My other problem is that I just couldn't get into it. So currently, I'm on markdown, because that way, my mind doesn't have to switch back and forth, which is confusing.

If markdown support in Emacs was as good as Orgmode support (meaning things like making titles larger in-document, essentially giving me a live preview in the document itself as I'm writing it, was available in Emacs), the coice would be obvious. Currently, I use Ghostwriter for Markdown and it feels good, but it feels useless, as in, it's another program for just this one thing (markdown), that's a usecase under another usecase umbrella (text editing). Alternatively, if Emacs supported live markdown preview within itself to the level of ghostwriter (and no, the browser preview doesn't count, it's not good enough to have to have a broswer window opened alongside Emacs) so if I can get Ghostwriter-level of polish for Markdown and specifically Markdown live preview in Emacs, or Orgmode-level of support, where the live preview happens in the document itself as I'm writing it, I would likely switch to Emacs. But currently, I'm quite torn.

Is the above possible? And if so, can you point me in the right direction of how to achieve it? Thanks.

Edit: a massive thank you rhabarba for helping me get markdown set up on Emacs! After doing that, and adding a few other quality-of-life features, I'd say my Emacs configuration feels quite complete.

Link to article: https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d1f2277?permalink_comment_id=4749746

This OUTDATED article gets posted all the time. The full story is the guy is a massive FreeBSD fan so he is trying to convince more people to keep on using Xorg because he wants to make sure it isn't abandoned. Reason for that being that Wayland is built with Linux in mind and would not work under FreeBSD without a lot of effort bwing put in as it uses some Linux-specific components or libraries.

Let's go through the article point by point:

Wayland is broken by design:

• A crash in the window manager takes down all running applications: Yes, because the compositor IS the server, window manager AND compositor at the same time.

• You cannot do a lot of things: What, like allowing Windows to see your keystrokes, which makes developing a keylogger absolutely trivial?

• There is not /usr/bin/wayland: Yes, because Wayland is a set of protocols, which a bunch of projects can implement as few or as many of, as they see fit, thus avoiding the issue of "unmaintainable mess" that has plagued Xorg for years.

• It offloads work to the window manager: Again, yes, that's a part of its structure: do the protocols, then let the compositor implement them. That way, you have multiple implementations running simultaneously that are well integrated with their window managers and thus more efficient and performant. It also means that when a compositor suffers from too much cruft, we can just make a new one, while application developers wouldn't really have anything to change because if their application works on Wayland, then it works on different compositors (unless it is made specifically for GNOME, or specifically for wlroots, like wlr-randr)

....so what works on DE 1, doesn't necessarily work on DE 2: True, because oftentimes, it doesn't need to. Not implementing features can lead to a more lean and streamlined software solution. However, sometimes features are necessary and only implemented in some compositors. This usually happens because the universal solution is not ready. KDE are often known to do this with Plasma and KWin.

• Wayland breaks screen recording applications: Correction: The following screen recording applications were not built to support Wayland (because Wayland is new to them or they just decided not to, or they were either too busy or too irresponsible enough to realise Wayland is coming, and has been for over 10 years. In defence of the devs, they probably wanted to make sure Wayland will become stable enough, but it has been the default even on Debian for many years now, so....

In terms of the applications, I'm not aware of many of them, and for this sort of application, I'm sire alot of work is required to change the graphical backend, so I understood that some smaller projects gave up, but OBS has been working on Wayland for quite a while. Is it perfect? I don't think so, but back when Brodie Robertson was using Hyprland, he was recording his videos using OBS. This article is quite outdated.

• Wayland breaks screen sharing applications:

As the update shows, Jitsi now does work on Wayland.

Zoom only seemed to work on gnome, BUT if you open up the Link to the zoom issue and read through the comments, there is clearly a person that clearly states that they changed /etc/os-release from PureOS to debian and it worked for them, all because of some pointless limitations enforced by the Zoom developers. As the person posting the issue states "Currently, the zoom application has put an arbirtrary restriction on screensharing so it ONLY works on GNOME, when the api being used works on all wayland desktops." Read that again. It's a pointless restriction put there by the Zoom team because they couldn't be bothered to test anything non-GNOME.

And the last issue is a problem with the article writer's own appimage. I don't know about that one.

• Wayland breaks automation software

As stated IN YOUR FACE, it is an application that works on X11 only. Yes, Wayland is not made to use such applications, but it doesn't mean they can't exist. Every heard of ydotool (remember that name)? Now you have.

Next up, we have 3 issues about GNOME and KDE global menus (1 for GNOME, 2 for KDE). From the little I know about global menus and using these projects, as well as considering that they are both incredibly stable on Wayland and Fedora KDE will be dropping Xorg completely, I think it's safe to assume these issues have probably been fixed. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

• Wayland breaks AppImages that don't ship a special QT plugin: Great! Just ship the plugins then! Problem solved! Also, quote from the article: "However, there is a workaround: "AppImages which ship just the XCB plugin will automatically fallback to running in xwayland mode" (see below)."

• Wayland breaks Redshift: Once again, a program built for Xorg doesn't always work on Wayland. Especially if it works with the compositor, like a colour temperature control application, or a wallpaper setter. The article quotes that "Redshift does not support Wayland since it offers no way to adjust the color temperature" which is not true, as proven by Redshift alternatives like Gammastep.

• Wayland breaks global hotkeys: I present to you: Hyprland (where you can get global hotkeys). Now, it is normally not allowed by design, as a security measure, but Hyprland has not allowed that to stop them from implementing a solution where you can choose keys that will be passed on to the application. Boom, problem solved. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be implemented anywhere else, as far as I know.

• Wayland does not work for XFCE: Come back to me in late 2024 after XFCE 4.20, which will introduce Wayland support, has been released. Also, https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap

• Wayland does not work properly on Nvidia Hardware: It keeps on getting closer but is not there yet, or so I've heard. Apparently, the issue is with the proprietary drivers, as noveau works well. But I use AMD, so I'm only working off rumours and opinions here.

• Wayland does not work properly on Intel hardware: Again, I'm using AMD, so I can't confirm or deny this, but considering the Intel drivers are open source, and I've heard about many, many improvements made on the Intel side of things, I think it would be reasonable to assume it has been fixed.

Edit: As multiple Intel users have pointed out in the comments, there seem to be no issues on Wayland with Intel hardware.

• Wayland prevents GUI applications from running as root: This one has been crossed out as the article writer admits there is a solution

• Wayland is biased towards Linux and breaks BSD: Arguments seem valid, and I'm guessing, are correct. This one is likely true and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

Edit: And yet, it seems that there are Wayland compositors for FreeBSD, so the above might only be true for OpenBSD and others.

• Wayland complicates server side decorations: From what I've heard, this is true, mainly something to do with some GNOME agenda, as the article states. I think that one is true.

• Wayland breaks windows raising/activating themselves: The linked issue is closed and seems to be resolved. There is a mention of a WIP protocol at the time (2019) that woukd fix this. I had difficulty following the discussion, but I think this has been fixed.

• Wayland breaks RescueTime: Because RescueTime depends on X11-only tools like xprop.

• Wayland breaks window manager: What you're describing is Wayland breaking X11-only tools for doing various tasks in a window manager. They are X11 tools, so of course they don't work on Wayland. I'm not sure if there are alternatives, but I'd guess there probably are. I know for a fact that Xrandr has alternatives like wlr-randr and kanshi for wlroots.

• Wayland requires {instert WM here} to implement Xorg-like functionality:Yes, it does.

Quote from article: "As it currently stands minor WMs and DEs do not even intend to support Wayland given the sheer complexity of writing all the code required to support the above features. "

DEs: GNOME, KDE, MATE, XFCE, Cinnamon, Budgie, Enlightenment, and recently even Pantheon have either announced to start work on, have started work on, or already support Wayland.

Window managers: Qtile is doing it. Xmonad wants to hire a dev to do it. Dwm has a spiritual successor called dwl. i3 has a drop-in replacement called sway. Openbox has 2 spiritual successors called labwc and waybox. Now you might notice one of the biggest WMs is missing on here: AwesomeWM, which is such a shame. The Awesome devs have said they would be okay with someone taking on that challenge (which has already been attempted, as evidenced by the existence of way-cooler), but it seems that they wouldn't do it themselves.

As for the projects mentioned in the article, (JWM, TWM, XDM, IceWM) they are too small and obscure, and will likely fade away with Xorg.

• Wayland breaks _NET_WM_STATE_SKIP_TASKBAR protocol I don't know about that one, ao I'll assume it is still the case. Edit: Ignoring the fact that the link is broken, it basically just links to a docs change where skipTaskbar is marked as unsupported on Linux. Link: https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/33226

• Wayland breaks NoMachine NX The link points to a page that has this marked as "SOLVED, Released in version 8" so I'm guessing it has been solved.

• Wayland breaks Xclip: As you said it yourself, Xclip is an X11 application, so it doesn't work on Wayland. Of course it wouldn't work on Wayland. With Wayland, we're trying to prevent what happened with Xorg from happening again, or am I wrong?

Edit: As pointed out by some people in the comments, there are also alternatives to xclip like wl-clipboard.

• Wayland breaks SUDO_ASKPASS: That link seems to point to the way this issue has been resolved so I don't see your point.

• Wayland breaks X11 atoms: I lack knowledge on the topic so will assume this to be a valid argument

• Wayland break games: I'm 99% sure you can disable Vsync??? But I'm not a gamer. Also, WINE on Wayland is getting better and better. Soon enough, I hope the subpar performance will become better performance (when compared to Xorg)

• Wayland breaks xdotool: Well, yes. There is ydotool, but you're looking for a 1-to-1 replacement and I'm not sure if ydotool fits the bill for that.

• Wayland breaks xkill: Well, yes. Again. It is an X application, so of course it does. Though for some reason I remember it working once on wayland. Must have been an xwayland app, or maybe I'm just misremembering this.

• Wayland breaks screensavers: Yeah, that seems to be the case.

• Wayland breaks setting the window position: That is a WIP for Plasma, not sure about any other projects, so assume true for anything else.

• Wayland breaks color management: Not anymore. That is being actively worked on.

• Wayland breaks DRM leasing: While not rhat familiar with the issue, my understanding of the topic is the article is correct: not all compositors support it.

• Wayland breaks in-home streaming: Not familiar with this, so will assume true.

• Wayland breaks NetWM/EWMH: Yeah, that seems to be the case.

• Wayland breaks window icons: Yeah, that seems to be the case, as said in the article, when no .desktop files are used.

And that concludes my response to this article based on my fairly limited knowledge on the topic. If I got anything wrong, please, please let me know. As you can see my knowledge is quite limited, and as such, any corrections (preferably backed up with evidence) would be appreciated

Now, I really like Wayland, and it's definitely better than the mess that is X11

BUT

I think the approach to Wayland is entirely wrong. There should be a unified backend/base for building compositors, something like universal wlroots, so that applications dealing with things like setting wallpapers don't have to worry about supporting GNOME, Plasma, Wlroots, AND Smithay (when COSMIC comes out). How about a universal Wayland protocol implementation that compositors are built on? That way, the developers of, say, wayshot, a screenshot utility, can be sure their program works across all Wayland compositors.

Currently, the lower-level work for creating a compositor has been done by all four of the GNOME, KDE, Wlroots and Smithay projects. To me, that's just replication of work and resources. Surely if all standalone compositors, as well as the XFCE desktop want to, and use wlroots, the GNOME and KDE teams could have done the same instead of replicating effort and wasting time and resources, causing useless separation in the process?

Am I missing something? Surely doing something like that would be better?

The issue with X11 is that it got big and bloated, and unmaintainable, containing useless code. None of these desktops use that useless code, still in X from the time where 20 machines were all connected to 1 mainframe. So why not just use the lean and maintainable wlroots, making things easier for some app developers? And if wlroots follows in the footsteps of X11, we can move to another implementation of the Wayland protocols. The advantage of Wayland is that it is a set of protocols on how to make a compositor that acts as a display server. If all the current Wayland implementations disappear, or if they become abandoned, unmaintained, or unmaintainable, all the Wayland apps like Calendars, file managers and other programs that don't affect the compositor itself would keep on working on any Wayland implementation. That's the advantage for the developers of such applications. But what about other programs? Theme changers, Wallpaper switchers etc? They would need to be remade for different Wayland implementations. With a unified framework, we could remove this issue. I think that for some things, the Linux desktop needs some unity, and this is one of these things. Another thing would be flatpak for desktop applications and eventually nix and similar projects for lower-level programs on immutable distros. But that's a topic for another day. Anyways, do you agree with my opinion on Wayland or not? And why? Thank you for reading.

Hello.

I have been a tiling window manager user, and a termincentric user for a while but one of the apps where I preferred to stick yo a GUI option was the file manager. I decided to use Thunar because of the thunar-volman extension which allows me to easily access the files on my external drives and USBs. That is pretty much the primary purpose for my file manager. The reason I chose Thunar is because I'm trying to switch to Wayland full time and as such, I wanted my file manager to not require xwayland, and pcmanfm will either have to be used in xwayland, or I'll have to find a way to theme QT apps as well, which I currently can't be bothered to do. The thing is, I've been experiencing some issues with Thunar, more specifically super slow load times (around 20-30 seconds) when switching between X11 and wayland backends. Now, I suspect fhis is a part of a broader issue with either gtk apps or XFCE apps (I've noticed the same issue with ristretto image viewer), but I digress. So I've decided that a good solution might be to switch to ranger, as it is one of the easier file managers to get into and feels intuitive to me. My question is: How can I get ranger set up to fulfill my main purpose for it: accessing files on different storage volumes? Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Alternatively, if you know about any good GUI file managers with few dependencies, that are widely packaged, follow GTK theming and allow fpr easy external volume management, I'd be happy to consider them and try them out.

Thank you.

I was configuring DWM, among other things, for the last 3-4 days, and every single rebuild switch caused a new generation to appear. There were too many Systemd-boot entries so they couldn't even fit on the screen and continued down to Gen 41. It's just crazy.

Edit: This post: https://feddit.uk/post/1454174 shows the rest of the boot entries

I was configuring DWM, among other things, for the last 3-4 days, and every single rebuild switch caused a new generation to appear. There were too many Systemd-boot entries so they couldn't even fit on the screen and continued down to Gen 41. It's just crazy.

Edit: This post: https://feddit.uk/post/1454176 shows the rest of the boot entries

Quote from the Archwiki (Installation guide):

Arch Linux should run on any x86_64-compatible machine with a minimum of 512 MiB RAM, though more memory is needed to boot the live system for installation. A basic installation should take less than 2 GiB of disk space.

Does that mean it is technically possible to get a Windows XP-era device with 512 Mb RAM and install Arch on it by pulling out the hard drive, connecting it to a modern machine via a SATA to usb connector, for example, with the modern machine running the live environment, and then just partitioning and installing on the old computer HDD, then putting the hdd back on the old computer? Is something like that feasible? I don't have a machine to test it on, but it certainly sounds like a fun experiment. It sort of reminds me of the stories of Gentoo cross-compiling.

Edit: It is a HYPOTHETICAL question. Please focus on the METHOD and IMPLEMENTATION instead of 32-bit compatibility or driver issues.