Re: GNOME on Wayland current status

[Rutger Helling <rhelling@mykolab.com>]

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Hi ng0,

that might be a good idea. I was disturbed to learn that SLiM
has seemingly been abandoned since 2013
(source: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/SLiM), so lightdm might
be a good light-weight alternative as the default display manager. Do
you know if the lightdm process itself can run on Wayland (like GDM)?

@Mark

SDDM for the moment cannot run on Wayland yet, which is why it starts
its own X server.

I don't think I've had some of the problems you had with GNOME. Could
you try logging in once via a display manager to GNOME (either X11 or
Wayland is fine), then logging out, stopping the display manager and
running the following command on a TTY:

XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland dbus-run-session gnome-session

One of the problems I've run into myself is that X11 screen lockers
like xlock don't seem to work. In GNOME GDM is supposed to be the
screen locker I believe, but I don't think that works at the moment.
I'll try and see if there's a simple Wayland-based screen locker we
could use later.

On Thu, 4 Jan 2018 08:38:58 +0000
ng0 <ng0@n0.is> wrote:

> Mark H Weaver transcribed 2.4K bytes:
> > Hi Rutger,
> > 
> > Rutger Helling <rhelling@mykolab.com> writes:
> >   
> > > I've sent in a patch (#29943) that adds a small paragraph to the
> > > documentation about the current situation.
> > >
> > > I believe there was a plan to replace SLiM with GDM for the
> > > default login manager. Getting GDM to work properly should
> > > probably be the first step since it has great Wayland support.
> > > From what I know GDM can default to Wayland and falls back
> > > automatically to X11 if for some reason Wayland doesn't work.
> > >
> > > Alternatively we could switch to SDDM as the default for now,
> > > until GDM is ready.  
> 
> What about lightdm? Does it not offer wayland support?
> We have no service for it yet, but as far as I understand the greeters
> (like 'lightdm-gtk-greeter') writing your own theme is relatively
> standardized.
> 
> > I recently switched my x86_64 GuixSD laptop to use SDDM, so I could
> > try out GNOME on Wayland.  It mostly works, but there are still a
> > few problems:
> > 
> > * Even after logging in, SDDM is still visibly running within
> >   xorg-server on VT 7, while Wayland is running on VT 8.  If you
> > switch back to VT 7, you can see the login screen still there, with
> > the clock showing the time that you logged in instead of the
> > current time.  I'm not sure if there are security implications to
> > this, but it's certainly a waste of system resources.
> > 
> > * SDDM is based on Qt, so it substantially increases the closure
> > size of the system, as well as memory usage since SDDM and
> > Xorg-server continues to run in another VT during your entire
> > session.
> > 
> > * The "Sound" panel of the GNOME settings is non-functional.
> > Whenever I try to change anything at all in that panel, it crashes.
> > 
> > * Startup notification for several GNOME programs is broken, e.g.
> > GNOME Terminal, Files (Nautilus), Videos (Totem), and possibly
> > other.  When I launch any of those programs, although the program
> > immediately starts up, GNOME Shell doesn't seem to realize this,
> > and for quite some time the spinner continues to indicate that the
> > application is starting up, and it doesn't show up in the Alt-Tab
> > application switcher.  If you switch to another application, you
> > cannot switch back to it via Alt-Tab.
> > 
> > * As far as I know, we haven't yet themed SDDM to include our
> > beautiful GuixSD login screen artwork.  It would be a shame to lose
> > that by default.
> > 
> > On the other hand, I'm pleased to report that under Wayland,
> > tearing no longer occurs during video playback, scrolling, etc.
> > 
> > Anyway, it's very exciting to see progress on this, but I'm
> > reluctant to bring Qt into our default system closure, and
> > furthermore I'd be inclined to wait until more of the
> > aforementioned problems are addressed.
> > 
> > What do you think?
> > 
> >       Mark
> > 
> >   
> 


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