[wayland] wayfire and other compositors

Anon-E-moose · Last edited by Anon-E-moose on Sat Jan 28, 2023 7:28 pm; edited 1 time in total

I decided to start this thread rather than continue on the lxde thread.

So I run wayfire on wayland, have been running it for about a week or so. Stable for day to day use.
It's similar to the old compiz desktop (though I never ran it myself) but I like the way it's done with wayland.

To start with finding documentation on anything wayland related is ... well, like pulling hens teeth. :lol:

It's not non-existent but it is difficult to find ... at times ... and for certain things.

I looked at using either gnome or kde, as they both embrace wayland (to different degrees with different results) but I'm not a fan of either desktop.
I run openbox in X, so I wanted something similar, dynamic not tiling, with keyboard bindings and a decent ability to change it to my way of doing things.
So I looked at hikari (OB like, early still needs work) and labwc/waybox (both still only partially working) and decided on wayfire.
So I settled on wayfire, at least for now.

Originally posted here https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1132029-start-25.html but moved here to not muddy that thread too much.

These plugins affect what you see to some extent either standing still or in motion:
alpha animate blur cube decoration fisheye rounded-corners water wm-actions wobbly

For decorations effects:
font title_height border_size button_order active_color inactive_color ignore_views

Many of the decorations are set with css values, so there's room to play.

Having said that, much of wayland is still (in what I would call) a good solid beta stage.
Comparable to where X was in '95 or so.

It's definitely in an early adopter stage.

Here are some links to youtube with short clips showing some of what it can do (vary between 15 sec and a minute and a half)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVw0BWNwR0E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=en9ZDizSuw4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFKQnEDTXbA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKrR3NhTAPk

Enjoy
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UM780, 6.12 zen kernel, gcc 13, openrc, wayland

Zucca · Posted: Fri Mar 19, 2021 5:31 pm Post subject:

Yay for wayfire.
I've been using it since the early days when wayfire switched to wlroots. I ran live version and reported some bugs and helped people to fix them by using me as a test bunny. :P When live wayfire started to require too new wlroots, I switched to latest unstable fron ::gentoo. But I only unmasked that one version. Now I'm running stable. Long journey to stable. :)

Maybe We should gather here the bits and pieces for wiki?
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..: Zucca :..

Anon-E-moose · Posted: Sun Mar 21, 2021 4:53 pm Post subject:

For bars I'm using both the ones from wf-shell and waybar, I wish there was just one good one.

wf-shell
Pro: background changer, launcher and built-in menu and the clock works well
Con: terrible look to taskbar and dock (no way to size them, they're oversized for everything else)

waybar
Pro: taskbar and clock work well, modules for many things, custom modules (I slapped one together to show the current song in deadbeef) are easy
Con: doesn't provide launcher per se or menu options though I suppose a custom module could be written.

So wf-shell runs on top and waybar on the bottom.
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UM780, 6.12 zen kernel, gcc 13, openrc, wayland

Zucca · Posted: Sun Mar 21, 2021 4:55 pm Post subject:

Have you tried lavalauncher for the launcher side of things..?
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..: Zucca :..

Anon-E-moose · Posted: Sun Mar 21, 2021 5:20 pm Post subject:

Haven't gotten around to trying it yet.
As I said I do like the way wf-shell handles launchers, and the fact that wf-shell was written (primarily at first for wayfire).

Been busy trying to make wayland behave, as much as possible, like X.
Cut and paste I've got going, Key mapping, I've sort of got working, Screenshots work.
For remote work I've got waypipe/wayvnc loaded.
Got yambar (supposedly like polybar) but I haven't worked with it yet.

Spent yesterday getting gtk apps to look proper (from my view), though I've thought about upgrading most of my gtk2 apps to gtk3 since gtk3 is wayland aware.

Also looking at foot as a terminal emulator. Urxvt works well but definitely not wayland aware.
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UM780, 6.12 zen kernel, gcc 13, openrc, wayland

Zucca · Posted: Sun Mar 21, 2021 6:07 pm Post subject:

Anon-E-moose · Posted: Sun Mar 21, 2021 7:51 pm Post subject:

Haven't tried alacritty yet. I've heard good things about it.

The worst thing about foot (for me) is trying to get the colors to match urxvt/console.
His colors are odd and don't work well with the DIR COLORS that gentoo/gnu uses. But I'm getting there.

I'm just trying the different stuff, with an eye towards it being wayland aware, preferably built with wayland in mind first instead of X.

Edit to add: just looked at the one for alacritty.
I remember why I passed it by for now, rust/crates. seems to have a ton of them. So I put it on far down on my todo list. :lol:

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UM780, 6.12 zen kernel, gcc 13, openrc, wayland

Zucca · Posted: Sun Mar 21, 2021 8:03 pm Post subject:

Anon-E-moose · Posted: Sun Mar 21, 2021 8:31 pm Post subject:

Thanks, for the colors, I'll try them out and see what it looks like.

Except for the colors, I like foot, though I haven't used it much, urxvt is still my goto term. :lol:

ETA: Just remember foot is wayland only, doesn't understand X.

Too many things to try ... too little time ~le sigh~

Edit to add: re the colors in foot I mentioned earlier, turns out part of the problem is "foot" TERM, the bashrc proto in /etc didn't understand it.

Once I manually set it, things started matching up.

WooHoo :lol:

ETA2: Got the colors pretty much what I like, it seems I've been used to rxvt's brokenness re colors.
Foot on the other hand understands true color and can display more, so it does look different.

This is stuff from foot.ini that deals with color

Anon-E-moose · Posted: Mon Mar 29, 2021 11:57 am Post subject:

Been using wayland instead of X for a couple of weeks now, I like it.
I'm really happy with wayfire as a compositor.
And now that I've got foot where I want it, colorwise, I'm pretty happy with it.

Been watching labwc (openbox style compositor) and it's coming along, still got problems but I can see that it has potential.
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UM780, 6.12 zen kernel, gcc 13, openrc, wayland

Zucca · Posted: Tue Apr 27, 2021 6:35 am Post subject:

Anon-E-moose: From which overlay you did install foot? I wan't to test it out. It seems simpler to configure at least.
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..: Zucca :..

Anon-E-moose · Posted: Tue Apr 27, 2021 9:39 am Post subject:

I think it's in the guru overlay, I have 2 overlays that have wayland stuff, guru and wayland-desktop.

I have been using the 9999 version, but they're up to 1.72 now, and I think that's stable.
I also use fnott (notification) and fuzzel (dmenu like app) and wbg (wallpaper app).

wbg is pretty simple only handles one image.
but it was easy enough to modify, now you can tell it a dir of images, with random (yes/no) and time (secs) for swapping images.
https://codeberg.org/droc12345/wbg

Edit to add: Some of the git repos that I have bookmarked
https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/ -- wlroots
https://github.com/WayfireWM -- wayfire & parts
https://github.com/Alexays/Waybar -- waybar
https://codeberg.org/dnkl/ -- foot, etc

https://github.com/johanmalm/labwc -- openbox like for wayland (WIP)
https://hikari.acmelabs.space/ -- another stacking compositor (haven't played with it lately)
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UM780, 6.12 zen kernel, gcc 13, openrc, wayland

mv · Watchman Joined: 20 Apr 2005 Posts: 6780

I am excited about kitty as a terminal emulator: Everything which I configured into xterm could be configured into kitty as well, and much more. I strongly recommend it as a wayland terminal emulator.

Anon-E-moose · Posted: Tue Apr 27, 2021 2:48 pm Post subject:

I looked at kitty but hadn't gotten around to playing with it, interesting concept.
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UM780, 6.12 zen kernel, gcc 13, openrc, wayland

Zucca · Posted: Tue Apr 27, 2021 3:08 pm Post subject:

For my use kitty is too full of features.
I stumbled into some problem (can't recall now what it was) with kitty, and when speaking about it on IRC I was told that the developer of kitty won't fix the problem and isn't likely cooperate in any way.

That was some 1.5 years ago, I think. Things might have changed, I may have given misinformation too.

I'll try foot next. I dislike alacritty's configuration so much that I now seek for alternatives.
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..: Zucca :..

MrZammler · Posted: Sat May 01, 2021 6:04 am Post subject:

Hi!

I'm also currently testing wayfire, and like it a lot! But I've stumbled upon a bug I can't (and neither with the author I discussed a bit) can explain.

Basically, when I turn off and then back on my monitor, all the windows from all workspaces are transferred to the first one. Since the author says it generally works, then it should be something on my setup.

So basic question, does this happen to you too? Maybe I could track down something on my gentoo installation that triggers it.... I'm using preserve-output plugin, happens both with it and without it. Also tried a minimal set of plugins, still no go...

My setup shouldn't be too exotic... A radeon RX570 connected via HDMI to a single Dell monitor. No other monitors.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

Anon-E-moose · Posted: Sat May 01, 2021 11:01 am Post subject:

Which version of wayfire and wlroots?

I have had various problems with turning the monitor off, have a bug report for it, the system will not come back from a power off state, it goes into a dpms style monitor off and never comes back. I chased it down to running the wf-background program when I powered off. If no wf-background no problem. Still no solution for that one.

I had that happen early on with wayfire, but I haven't noticed it lately, but I don't run wf-shell, instead I use waybar.
I think it had something to do with the interaction between programs being minimized, the panel bar and how it handles those apps, when the monitor either goes to sleep or is turned off.

I've never used the preserve output plugin, never have had it loaded (didn't realize there was one :lol:

) and the only problems are with gtk+:2 apps and they like to move to the left side of the workspace.

Describe your problem a little more, which apps are running, are they minimized, and of course the 1st question (versions of software)

I know that wlroots is doing a lot of rework inside, so running 9999 might give problems (though the fixes are faster).

Edit to add: as a test I always start removing things that are common to the problem but not required for running, such as wf-* apps.
I'd temporarily disable the panel and see if the problem still exists with moving windows.
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UM780, 6.12 zen kernel, gcc 13, openrc, wayland

MrZammler · Posted: Sat May 01, 2021 11:34 am Post subject:

Okay!

So, this is with wayfire 0.7.0 and wlroots 0.12.0. I've tried 0.5.0 and 0.6.0 and still had the same problem. wf-shell is not installed, I'm not using a bar at all! :-)

Wallpaper is set via swaybg.

I've also tried with and without the preserve-output plugin (actually added it because I thought it would fix the problem), tried with a minimal set of plugins, no change.

It doesn't take much windows or anything either. Just by having a kitty terminal on e.g. workspace 3 (not minimized), turn the monitor off and then on, it gets moved to workspace 1 (I have only a horizontal row of 9 workspaces).

I also tried a default wayfire.ini, still the same...

I know that wayfire detects the monitor being disconnected, tries to move everything (windows etc) to a NOOP-1 output, and then when it re-connects, again from NOOP-1 to e.g. HDMI-A-1 (to be honest though, not sure why this is needed at all?)

Anon-E-moose · Posted: Sat May 01, 2021 12:09 pm Post subject:

The problem is when no NOOP is set, then it winds up defaulting to 1200x720 which screws up placement. At least it used to work that way.

I had added a patch to wayfire to change the default noop to be the same as my monitor 1920x1080 and haven't had any problems.
I'll test it in a little bit as I'm a little curious.

What should happen is noop should be set to the same size as the last valid output.

Edit to add: patch

MrZammler · Posted: Sat May 01, 2021 12:27 pm Post subject:

Well, I did think of that, and added an output entry for NOOP:

Anon-E-moose · Posted: Sat May 01, 2021 1:00 pm Post subject:

The matching mode line is nothing (really should be removed as it's not helpful).

I just did some tests, removed the override from the src code and recompiled.

*No NOOP output and no preserve-output
If I put a term on grid 2 and turn the monitor off and back on, then the term gets moved to grid 1.

I put in NOOP and it still went to grid 1

I added preserve-output and now a term on 2 stays on 2 with monitor off/on.

I notice in the log you're still using 1200x720

pastebin your whole wayfire config file

Edit to add: All I have for the output line is just width, height, freq. (I know early on I had problems with making NOOP behave and just the mode line worked for me)

MrZammler · Posted: Sat May 01, 2021 1:21 pm Post subject:

Man, thanks for this.... Could lead somewhere :-)

!

This is my current wayfire.ini -> https://pastebin.com/VaxHEf8Q

(Yes this log was old, so it still shows 1200x720).

Anon-E-moose · Posted: Sat May 01, 2021 1:37 pm Post subject:

I would remove everything from the NOOP output line except for the mode and see if that changes anything.

Edit to add: Noop is like a surrogate display, things can write to it just like they would the screen, then when the monitor is turned back on, all the stuff that's been drawn (off screen noop) gets copied back.
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UM780, 6.12 zen kernel, gcc 13, openrc, wayland

MrZammler · Posted: Tue May 04, 2021 10:49 am Post subject:

Nope, didn't work....

Can you share your wayfire.ini? Are you also using 0.7.0 ?

Thanks! (and sorry for the late reply).

Anon-E-moose · Posted: Tue May 04, 2021 11:50 am Post subject:

I'm running the git (9999) version of wayfire and wlroots.

I expect there to be an ebuild for 0.7.1 to pick up changes and use the newer wlroots.

My wayfire.ini http://dpaste.com/BMUTCEDTR
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UM780, 6.12 zen kernel, gcc 13, openrc, wayland