Re: GNOME on Wayland current status

[Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org>]

Hi Rutger,

Rutger Helling <rhelling@mykolab.com> writes:

> 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

I tried this, and it results in a GNOME-on-wayland session that seems to
work as well as it did when launched via SDDM, but with all of the same
problems I mentioned in my earlier email (except for the resource usage
due to Xorg-server/Qt/SDDM running in another VT).

In particular, the sound setting panel still crashes, and startup
notification is still broken for many GNOME programs including Nautilus
(Files), Totem (Videos), Evince (Documents), and Epiphany (Web).

Additionally, I've noticed that it's not possible to restart GNOME Shell
(via Alt-F2 r) under Wayland.  That's not a Guix-specific problem, but
it's a particular problem for Guix because it's needed after updating
one's profile in order to reload the set of known .desktop files, so
that when launching programs via GNOME Shell the updated programs are
run instead of the older ones (which may have security holes).

> 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.

FYI, here are the most recent updates on the efforts to get GDM working
in Guix:

  https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2017-08/msg00268.html
  https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2017-10/msg00231.html

Thanks for your work on this!

    Regards,
      Mark