Migrating to Wayland

Recently I moved to wayland and sway.

It’s been some time since I started to think about doing it. First time a read about it, it was confusing and a little scary. All my life knowing about the X11 and it’s Window Managers, and now I was reading about Compositors, Seats..

Anyway.. the idea of something more “modern and clean” than the “old” (although proven and stable) X11 with tons of legacy code behind it’s back, attracted me.

Applications

The first thing you need to run wayland is a Wayland compositor (think: window manager). As usual, you can run full blown desktop environments like KDE o GNOME, both of them are wayland compatible. But if you prefere a more minimalistic and lean aproach (like I do) you have some options like Sway (i3 clone) dwl (dwm clone) and Waybox (openbox clone)

I choose Sway beacuse it seems the most mature of them, and has the right amount of features for me. Being and almost drop-in replacement for i3, which I already knew, made things easier for me.

Migrating to wayland doesn’t mean you current apps won’t run anymore. All of them will continue to run even if they were programmed with only x11 in mind, thanks to something called Xwayland. The only exception are window managers and specific apps to control X11 features (think: clipboard, backlight, screenshots..)

Having said that, if you want “native” applications for your most common needs, here are some of them:

Most common apps (browsers, office suites, electron apps..) are nowadays wayland native, although some of them prefer to stay on the safe side, and work in x11 mode even if you are on wayland, so you have to manually enable “wayland mode”.

For screen sharing, first install xdg-desktop-portal-wlr

Guides:

• https://www.fosskers.ca/en/blog/wayland
• https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/wayland
• https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki
• https://github.com/Alexays/Waybar/wiki
• https://luxagraf.net/src/guide-to-switching-i3-to-sway