Linux @lemmy.ml arsCynic @beehaw.org 6d ago

Which X11 software keeps you from switching to Wayland?

For me AutoKey is absolutely essential to my workflow. I have tons of text expansions and shortcuts to "remap" keys. E.g., respectively, typing dAt expands into 2025-05-08, 13:47:40 CEST, and pressing alt + k simulates the arrow down key.

Secondly there's XScreenSaver which has so many wonderful (mathematical) visualizations that it would be a damn shame if these eventually get lost as Wayland gets more adoption.

None of these have Wayland alternatives as far as I know. For text expansion there's Espanso, but it doesn't support keyboard shortcuts yet.

87 comments

Absolutely none. On my setup everything runs fine either natively or with Xwayland.
- Yeah, I think my sway config is around five years old now. The Wayland experience hasn't been entirely without warts, but as someone who kind of just uses the desktop to drive a browser and a bunch of terminals, there's not a whole lot of problems to run into either.
AwesomeWM, and xdotool.

That's it. Oh and x-eyes of course
- New hyprland patch can do pretty much all the xdotool stuff since they added a send key to window thing
- There's ydotool.
  
  I find it's not as reliable in targeting inputs, and you sometimes need to set the XDG_RUNTIME variable yourself. wtype is much better at this, but is limited to keystrokes
- what do you use x-eyes for?
  
  👀
  
  https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.5/doc/man/man1/xeyes.1.html
  
  Xeyes watches what you do and reports to the Boss.
  
  I don't think that was entirely serious...
- You might be interested in river as a awesome replacement:
  
  https://codeberg.org/river/wiki
  
  Appreciate the link, and I don't mean to sound so ungrateful, but that extensive README contains everything except what exactly river is. Is it a desktop manager? A standalone compositor? What does it fix? What does it replace? etc.
  
  Edit: Oh, it's a tiling window manager, and all WMs in wayland have to be compositors.
- Have you tried ydotools, which works on both Wayland and X?
  
  https://lemmy.ml/post/29786179/18482468
Stumpwm. The most ergonomic tiling window manager I know, fantastic configurability like emacs.
urxvt, bspwm, sxhkd, and many small utilities that I built my desktop with. It's hard to reproduce the same setup.
XFCE, mostly.
The inability to roll windows up into just the title bar, or to get Firefox to place each of its windows on the same virtual desktop as before, are major annoyances. Otherwise, Wayland runs better than I expected.
XMonad
For me is the lack of virtual displays is Wayland.

I'm using a 49" monitor (with i3) and split it into virtual monitors/displays. For some tasks two displays are good, for others three, and all doesn't need to be the same size.

The reason for not using i3 splits is that many programs have fullscreen functions that I often use.

Watching a movie is one example, where I have a script that automatically calculate the optimal width without borders and gives me an extra virtual display beside with whatever's left.
- Hyprland can tell a window to be in fullscreen when in fact, it's not (it's called.. Fakefullscreen). I binded it to shift+f11 and its become part of my workflow, lol
  
  Uhhh, I've been dreaming if this and now I've got it!
RustDesk (remote desktop control) and Barriers (KVM-like server to control my laptop screen from my desktop just by moving mouse to that screen). Both of these are tightly integrated in my daily workflow and would be a hard loss.

There's a modern fork of Barriers but I haven't been able to get it working cross-platform yet. I know RustDesk is actively working to complete wayland support, but it's not quite there yet.
- What about Deskflow? Worked pretty well for me.
  
  I'll check it out, thanks!
- I use rustdesk with wayland, works for me for everything i need it to. As for barriers, i believe input-leap works with wayland.
  
  RustDesk on Wayland can't run headless, which I need (unless they fixed already and I just haven't noticed yet - I know they've been working on it!)
  
  Yeah, Input-leap is the Barriers fork I was referring to. I need it to work on all platforms though, and I wasn't able to get it working on macOS. I keep checking periodically tho (usually in response to posts like these - I wanna move Wayland like everyone else!)
- Does input-leap do what you need from Barriers? I control my testing mac at work with input-leap
- I think Rustdesk for me as well. My main computer is a Windows laptop, but I use a few Linux laptops around the house to control it and others with Rustdesk. Alt+Tab works on the remote system in Gnome Classic (I think that's what it's called - says X11) but on the other options it performs switches locally only. Tested on Debian and Fedora.
I just need steam\proton\wine to support native wayland and then I'll remove xwayland from my system, can't wait

i'm on hyprland though
RDP.
- ??
  
  RDP works on Wayland.
  
  Not headless last I tried, unless that changed recently.
GPU screen recorder, the hotkeys dont work in Wayland
- This one should be getting resolved soon! With the new global shortcut portal
- Strange, they do for me on Plasma Wayland.
- Depends on your desktop environment. Works on KDE.
Talon voice.

Autokey.

Anydesk. (although rustdesk is probably going to replace that)

Talon voice though. I'll need X11 for the rest of my life.
I need to force keepass and some other things to x11 mode so that autotype and window detection works.
keepassxc's autotype

also, nvidia
- KeepassXC work fine on Wayland with xwayland
  
  only with other x11 applications
- There are still some quirks but it's been generally fine for me with Nvidia, almost a year now.
  
  i heard about that. sadly my gpu is so old the latest driver that supports it is the 470 driver
autokey

I accomplish the same thing with compose sequences, and by binding a keyboard shortcut in my desktop to call a script with wtype. It's not a cross-compositor solution though, as you'd have to manually setup binds in each of them.

I don't see much hope for this one-to-one unfortunately.
- Check out xremap https://github.com/xremap/xremap
- ydotool iirc
  
  Same camp as wtype, you have to bind something to exec it.
x11

i am not gonna go with any of the idiotchanges. lost me at systemd, flatpaks and so on

moronic people like lennard poettering and everyone at red hat are a desease.

i will start downgrading Iinux PCs to Windows10 just to not have any of the broken linux promises.

do ONE thing but do it right.
- Oké grandpa, its time to take your meds
  
  RHEL10 is probably a month away from being the first distro to ship without even the option of using Xorg. It is not even going to be in the repos.
  
  Other distros will follow their lead.
  
  If you are a fan of x11, not liking Red Hat makes sense.
Xfwm. Taskbars are now wayland, but don't autohide without the compositor supporting it.
sddm
- huh? Isn't that the thing that let's me select the DE/Compositor/Server mashup while logging in? It just occured to me that this sounds like circular reasoning, but that's what it looks like it does
  
  Yes. It's the only package on my system that still depends on X. Without it, I could remove X entirely.
Glxgears. :P I'm on wayland for a least 4 years
- Hilarious. Is vkgears a possible replacement in your workflow?
Session restore
Mostly Beamng (ik not software but game using windows Vulkan/native Linux and a note that my de doesnt have good wayland support at this time )
Gnome. No shell restart on wayland, and not planned.
- Pardon?
  
  GNOME defaults to Wayland. GNOME 49 is going to remove X11 support all together.
  
  Only new version default wayland, my version not. And not update. Until shell restart on wayland, not use wayland.
Wayland's been my daily driver for a few years now, mostly without incident. However, occasionally certain applications (Ryujinx and pcsx2, predictably) require the GDK_BACKEND=x11 environment variable to be set before they'll function.
- I don't have that variable set on my environment, but perhaps it's due to my running PCSX2 as an AppImage?
  
  I don’t have that variable set on my environment, but perhaps it’s due to my running PCSX2 as an AppImage?
  
  True. AppImages are often convenient because they run w/o requiring any env settings.
I used to have issues with middle click scroll, but my own solution works fine and it works on Wayland and X11 too
To me it's mostly the lack of feature parity in kwin between x11 and Wayland, specially lack of global menu support for GTK apps in Wayland.
Balders Gate 3. Cannot get it to work on Wayland. No issues on X11.
- I run basically all my games in gamescope, plus I get HDR for those games that support it.
  
  I wasn't able to get gamescope working while I was using an nvidia card, and haven't tried yet with amd
- Works for me in Wayland on Bazzite. Maybe depends on your distro and GPU drivers.
  
  Same for me on Arch (btw)
I would really like to see xtrlock find its way into the Wayland session!

But at the moment, it's only available for wlroots based compositors...
Ubuntu 24.04s KDE Package. Have I borked something or when will it ask me about upgrading?
I'm too dumb to set up Wayland on Nvidia and honestly don't really care to. My laptop has an intel haswell-ult so it works with Wayland ootb and all the apps I use on it (literally just calibre, falkon, lapce and libreoffice Writer) work fine.

Edit: spelling
Easystroke https://github.com/thjaeger/easystroke, please, please, please somebody pick the project, I'll gladly pay a license to use it.
- https://github.com/jersou/mouse-actions
  
  It's recommended by the easystroke dev too: https://github.com/thjaeger/easystroke/wiki
  
  I tried Mouse Actions many times, just a different beast (many Easystroke users have the same opinion).
@arsCynic Nvidia drivers, prime offload with Wayland is still a no go.

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