Wayland Archive

LXQt, the desktop environment that is to KDE what Xfce is to GNOME, has released version 2.1.0, and while the version number change seems average, it’s got a big ace up its sleeve: you can now run LXQt in a Wayland session, and they claim it works quite well, too, and it supports a wide variety of compositors. Through its new component lxqt-wayland-session, LXQt 2.1.0 supports 7 Wayland sessions (with Labwc, KWin, Wayfire, Hyprland, Sway, River and Niri), has two Wayland back-ends in lxqt-panel (one for kwin_wayland and the other general), and will add more later. All LXQt components that are not limited to X11 — i.e., most components — work fine on Wayland. The sessions are available in the new section Wayland Settings inside LXQt Session Settings. At least one supported Wayland compositor should be installed in addition to lxqt-wayland-session for it to be used. There is still hard work to do, but all of the current LXQt Wayland sessions are quite usable; their differences are about what the supported Wayland compositors provide. ↫ LXQt 2.1.0 release announcement This is great news for LXQt, as it ensures the desktop environment is ready to keep up with what modern Linux distributions provide. Crucially and in line with what we’ve come to expect from LXQt, X11 support is a core part of the project, and they even go so far as to say “the X11 session will be supported indefinitely”, which should set people preferring to stay on X11 at ease. I personally may have gleefully left X11 in the dustbin of history, but many among us haven’t, and it’s welcome to see LXQt’s clear promise here. Many of the other improvements in this release are tied to Wayland, making sure the various components work and Wayland settings can be adjusted. On top of that, there’s the usual list of bug fixes and smaller changes, too.

Speaking of Wayland, one of the most important parts of the transition is Xwayland, which makes sure legacy X applications not yet capable of running under a modern graphics stack can continue to function. Xwayland applications have had this weird visual glitch during resize operations, however, where the opposite side of the window would expand and contract while resizing. KDE developer Vlad Zahorodnii wanted to fix this, and he wrote a very detailed article explaining why, exactly, this bug happens, which takes you deep into the weeds of X and Wayland. Window resizing in X would be a glitchy mess, if it wasn’t for the X11 protocol to synchronize window repaints during interactive resize, which ensures that the window resize and the application repainting its window contents remain synchronised. This protocol is supported by Kwin and GNOME’s Mutter, so what’s the problem here? Shouldn’t everything just work? KWin supports the basic frame synchronization protocol, so there should be no visual glitches when resizing X11 windows in the Plasma Wayland session, right? At quick glance, yes, but we forget about the most important detail: Wayland compositors don’t use XCompositeNameWindowPixmap() or xcb_composite_name_window_pixmap() to grab the contents of X11 windows, instead they rely on Xwayland attaching graphics buffers to wl_surface objects, so there is no strict order between the Wayland compositor receiving an XSync request acknowledgement and graphics buffers for the new window size. ↫ Vlad Zahorodnii Basically, the goal of the fix is to make sure these steps are also synchronised when using Xwayland, and that’s exactly what Zahorodnii has achieved. This makes the resizing X windows under Xwayland look normal and without weird visual glitches, which is a massive improvement to the overall experience of using a Wayland desktop with a few stray X applications. Thanks to this fix, which was made possible with help from Wayland developers, Kwin is now one of the few compositors that correctly synchronises X windows running under Wayland. KDE has been doing an amazing job moving from X to Wayland, and I don’t think there’s anyone else who has managed to make the transition quite as painless. Not only do KDE developers focus on difficult bugs like this one that many others would just shrug off as acceptable jank, they also made things like the Wayland to X11 Video Bridge, a desktop-agnostic tool to allow things like screen sharing in Teams, Discord, Slack, etc. to work properly on Wayland.

So given that, xmem can be useful as a monitoring tool. Fluffy (my main server) runs both squid and apache, and given that fluffy only has 64MB of RAM, things can get a little cramped. If I suddenly see that the whole of xmem turns blue (i.e. the swap file’s thrashing), then I know that something is odd, and I can easily find out which processes are eating up so much RAM. I said earlier that xmem can brighten up one’s desktop. Indeed, as I use FVWM in a rather archaic fashion, it seems fitting I should like xmem. 🙂 Here’s a full screenshot showing xmem (plus other applications) in action. ↫ Thomas Adam This is basically just an excuse to show off this awesome FVWM desktop shown off in this short little article about xmem, written by one of FVWM’s core developers. It just looks neat.

Nearly three years in the making, the ext-image-capture-source-v1 and ext-image-copy-capture-v1 protocols have been merged into the Wayland Protocols repository for vastly improving screen capture support on the Wayland desktop. The ext-image-capture-source-v1 and ext-image-copy-capture-v1 screen copy protocols build upon wlroots’ wlr-screencopy-unstable-v1 with various improvements for better screen capture support under Wayland. These new protocols should allow for better performance and window capturing support for use-cases around RDP/VNC remote desktop, screen sharing, and more. ↫ Michael Larabel A very big addition to Wayland, as this has been a sore spot for many people wishing to move to Wayland from X. One of the developers behind the effort has penned a blog post with more details about these new protocols.

Ly is a lightweight TUI (ncurses-like) display manager for Linux and BSD. ↫ Ly GitHub page That’s it. That’s the description. I’ve been wanting to take a stab at running a full CLI/TUI environment for a while, see just how far I can get in my computing life (excluding games) running nothing but a few tiled terminal emulators running various TUI apps for email, Mastodon, browsing, and so on. I’m not sure I’d be particularly happy with it – I’m a GUI user through and through – but lately I’ve seen quite a few really capable and just pleasantly usable TUI applications come by, and they’ve made me wonder. It’d make a great article too.

For the uninitiated, what are we looking at? Could it be the Moiré Error from Doom? Well, no. You are looking at (part of) the boot up screen for the X Window System, specifically the pattern it uses as the background of the root window. This pattern is technically called a stipple. What you’re seeing is pretty important and came to symbolize a lot for me as a computer practitioner. ↫ Matt T. Proud The X bootup pattern is definitely burnt onto my retina, as it probably is for a lot of late ’90s, early 2000s Linux users. Setting up X correctly, and more importantly, not breaking it later, was almost an art at the time, so any time you loaded up your PC and this pattern didn’t greet you, you’d get this sinister feeling in the pit of your stomach. There was now a very real chance you were going to have to debug your X configuration file, and nobody – absolutely nobody – liked doing that, and if you did, you’re lying. Matt T. Proud dove into the history of the X stipple, and discovered it’s been part of X since pretty much the very beginning, and even more esoteric X implementations, like the ones used by Solaris or the various commercial versions, have the stipple. He also discovered several other variants of the stipple included in X, so there is a chance your memory might be just a tiny bit different. The stipple eventually disappeared at around 2008 or so, it disappeared as part of the various efforts to modernise, sanitise, and speed up the Linux boot process on desktops. On modern distributions still using X, you won’t encounter it anymore by default, but in true X fashion, the code is still there and you can easily bring it back using a flag specifically designed for it, -retro, that you can use with startx or your X init file. There’s a ton more information in Proud’s excellent article, but this one paragraph made me smile: I will remark that in spite of my job being a software engineer, I had never spent a lot of time looking at the source code for the X Server (XFree86 or X.Org) before. It’s really nuts to see that a lot of the architecture from X10R3 and X11R1 still persists in the code today, which is a statement that can be said in deep admiration for legacy code but also disturbance from the power of old decisions. Without having looked at the internals of any Wayland implementation, I can sympathize sight unseen with the sentiments that some developers have toward the X Window System: the code is a dead end. I say that with the utmost respect to the X Window System as a technology and an ecosystem. I’ll keep using X, and I will be really sad when it’s no longer possible for me to do so for one reason or another, as I’m extremely attached to it quirks. But it’s clear the future is limited. ↫ Matt T. Proud We all have great – and not so great – memories of X, but I am really, really happy I no longer have to use it.

The goal is to be able to drag an icon from a background window without immediately raising that window and obscuring the drop target window when using the click-to-focus mode. This is a barebones description of what needs to happen. It assumes familiarity with code, protocols, etc. as needed. ↫ Quod Video The articles describes how to get there using both X and Wayland, and it’s clear there’s still quite a bit of work to do. At least on my KDE Wayland setups, the way it works now is that when I click to drag an icon from a lower Dolphin window to a higher one, it brings the lower window forward, but then, when I hover for a bit over the other window, it brings it back up. Of course, this only works if the destination window remains at least partially visible, which might not always be the case. For usability’s sake, there needs to be an option to start a drag operation from one window to the next without altering the Z-order.

David Rosenthal, one of the primary contributors to the X Windowing System, has published an awesome blog post about the recent 40 year anniversary of X, full of details about the early days of X development, as well as the limitations they had to deal with, the choices they had to make, and the environment in which they were constrained. Once at Sun I realized that it was more important for the company that the Unix world standardized on a single window system than that the standard be Sun’s NeWS system. At C-MU I had already looked into X as an alternative to the Andrew window system, so I knew it was the obvious alternative to NeWS. Although most of my time was spent developing NeWS, I rapidly ported X version 10 to the Sun/1, likely the second port to non-DEC hardware. It worked, but I had to kludge several areas that depended on DEC-specific hardware. The worst was the completely DEC-specific keyboard support. Because it was clear that a major redesign of X was needed to make it portable and in particular to make it work well on Sun hardware, Gosling and I worked with the teams at DEC SRC and WRL on the design of X version 11. Gosling provided significant input on the imaging model, and I designed the keyboard support. As the implementation evolved I maintained the Sun port and did a lot of testing and bug fixing. All of which led to my trip to Boston to pull all-nighters at MIT finalizing the release. ↫ David Rosenthal They were clearly right. During those days, the UNIX world was using a variety of windowing systems, all tied to various companies and platforms. Standardising virtually the entire UNIX world on X aided in keeping UNIX compatible-ish even in the then-new graphical era, and X’s enduring existence to this very day is evidence of the fact they made a lot of right choices early on. Rosenthal also explains why one of the main alternatives to X, Sun’s PostScript-based NeWS, which was also co-developed by Rosenthal, didn’t win out over X. It had several things working against its adoptions and popularisation, such as Sun requiring a license fee for the source code, its heftier system requirements, and the fact it was more difficult to program for. After trying to create what Rosenthal describes as a “ghastly kludge” by combining NeWS and X into Xnews, Sun eventually killed it altogether. Of course, this wouldn’t be restrospective of X without mentioning Wayland. We and Jobs were wrong about the imaging model, for at least two reasons. First, early on pixels were in short supply and applications needed to make the best use of the few they were assigned. They didn’t want to delegate control to the PostScript interpreter. Second, later on came GPUs with 3D imaging models. The idea of a one-size-fits-all model became obsolete. The reason that Wayland should replace X11 is that it is agnostic to the application’s choice of imaging model. ↫ David Rosenthal This is about as close to a blessing from the original X Windowing System developers you’re ever going to get, but Rosenthal does correctly note that XWayland is a thing, and since not every application is going to be rewritten to support Wayland, X will most likely be around for a long time to come. In fact, he looks towards the future, and predicts that we’ll definitely be celebrating 50 years of X, and that yes, people will still be using it by then.

There’s incredibly good news for people who use accessibility tools on Linux, but who were facing serious, gamebreaking problems when trying to use Wayland. Matt Campbell, of the GNOME accessibility team, has been hard at work on an entirely new accessibility architecture for modern free desktops, and he’s got some impressive results to show for it already. I’ve now implemented enough of the new architecture that Orca is basically usable on Wayland with some real GTK 4 apps, including Nautilus, Text Editor, Podcasts, and the Fractal client for Matrix. Orca keyboard commands and keyboard learn mode work, with either Caps Lock or Insert as the Orca modifier. Mouse review also works more or less. Flat review is also working. The Orca command to left-click the current flat review item works for standard GTK 4 widgets. ↫ Matt Campbell One of the major goals of the project was to enable such accessibility support for Flatpak applications without having to pass an exception for the AT-SPI bus. what this means is that the new accessibility architecture can run as part of a Flatpak application without having to break out of their sandbox, which is obviously a hugely important feature to implement. There’s still a lot of work to be done, though. Something like the GNOME shell doesn’t yet support Newton, of course, so that’s still using the older, much slower AT-SPI bus. Wayland also doesn’t support mouse synthesizing yet, things like font, size, style, and colour aren’t exposed yet, and there’s a many more limitations due to this being such a new project. The project also isn’t trying to be GNOME-specific; Campbell wants to work with the other desktops to eventually end up with an accessibility architecture that is truly cross-desktop. The blog post further goes into great detail about implementation details, current and possible future shortcomings, and a lot more.

Less than a month after 3.5.0, IceWM is already shipping version 3.6.0. Once again not a major, earth-shattering release, it does contain at least one really cool feature that I think it pretty nifty: if you double-click on a window border, it will maximise just that side of the window. Pretty neat. For the rest, it’s small changes and bug fixes for this venerable window manager.

IceWM, the venerable window manager we’ve all used at some point in our lives, has released a new version, 3.5.0. It’s a relatively minor release, so you’ve got things like a new install option which will install an extra theme, a fix for porting to NetBSD 10, translation updates, and more such small improvements. The AddressBar, a command line in the taskbar that can be summoned with ctrl+alt+space, also got some love, with file argument completion and support for the cd and pwd commands. You can compile IceWM yourself, of course, but it’ll most likely find its way into your distribution’s repository quickly enough.

Linux auto tiling manager with hot corner support for Openbox, Fluxbox, IceWM, Xfwm, KWin, Marco, Muffin, Mutter and other EWMH compliant window managers using the X11 window system. Therefore, this project provides dynamic tiling for XFCE, LXDE, LXQt, KDE and GNOME (Mate, Deepin, Cinnamon, Budgie) based desktop environments. Simply keep your current window manager and install cortile on top of it. Once enabled, the tiling manager will handle resizing and positioning of existing and new windows. ↫ Cortile GitHub page I’ve always been mildly interested in trying out a proper tiling window manager – of which are millions – but installing and setting up an entirely new environment always felt a bit like overkill for something I’m just curious about instead of actually intending to use it permanently. This seems like a great solution to this issue.

X Server is slowly being deprecated in the Linux world and being replaced Wayland. Still X11 is an interesting protocol to look at from the perspective of binary communication and management of resource which require fast speeds. In this post I tried to cover basic information and create a simple but working app that is simple, defined in single file and easily compiles. No external code except libc was used. I find it fascinating when you can open black boxes and see how gears move each other. ↫ Hereket As much as the time of X has come and is now finally in the process of going, it’s still an incredibly powerful set of tools that even in a bare state can do way, way more than you think. X has come with its own window manager – twm – for decades, and it includes several basic applications like xedit, xclock, xterm, xeyes. Twm is actually pretty cool, and includes some features, like iconify to desktop, that I wish still existed in modern desktop environments. It’s quite bare-bones, though, and I doubt there’s anyone out there unironically using it today. As the linked article notes, even without advanced, complex libraries, toolkits, desktop environments, and so on, it’s entirely possible to create fully functional windows and applications with X. Of course, this makes perfect sense and shouldn’t be surprising – it’s the X Window System, after all – but you so rarely hear or read about it that you’d almost forget and just assume something like GNOME or KDE is an absolute requirement to use X.

Earlier this year, we talked about Niri, a very unique tiling window manager for Wayland that scrolls infinitely to the right. I’ve never seen anything quite like it, and while it seems polarising, I think it’s absolutely worthy of a dedicated niche. The project’s got a major new release out, and there’s a lot of improvements here. First and foremost, virtually all animations have been overhauled, and new ones have been added for almost every kind of interaction. The videos on the release page do a really good job of highlighting what they’re going for, and I think it looks great, and for the animation-averse, every individual animation can be turned off. Niri now also supports variable refresh rate, and the IPC mechanism has been improved. Among the smaller improvements is a welcome one: when using the touchscreen, the mouse cursor disappears. I really think this one has to be tried before judged, and I’m seriously contemplating setting up a Wayland environment just for this one, to see if it works for me. My window “flow”, if that makes sense, is already left-to-right, so the idea of having that effectively automated with an infinite canvas sounds very appealing to me, especially on smaller displays. I just need to figure out if it works in reality.