In the middle of January, my computer decided to surprise me, and not in a good way. Differently from all the quirks I've come to expect from it after all these 6 years of use — faulty keyboard, flashing screen, bad audio jack — this time it was worse, and it wasn't even a hardware issue.
At least once a day, my computer would completely freeze. The only action it responded to was, yes, holding down the power button to force it to shutdown. Not great.
I had the idea to try to SSH in using my phone (thank god for Termux) and that
worked. I listed the processes and saw xorg-server using 100% of CPU. I
killed it, and the computer magically came back to life. But obviously, having
just killed the graphical interface, all my open applications were gone with it,
and I was basically as good as getting back from a reboot anyway.
After about three days enduring this, trying to check logs to debug it, I was done with X.Org.
I'm sure most of you know about it, and I'm certainly not well qualified to talk about this, but X.Org, the application that has long powered the Linux graphical interfaces is a giant mess. Its code is very hard to maintain, and its architecture presents security concerns, to the point that a new alternative was born quite a few years ago called Wayland.
The thing is, a lot of applications today still depend on X, which also means moving to Wayland can be a breaking change. So although the move to Wayland for the ecosystem as a whole seems inevitable, people are still confortable enough with X.Org for the time being.
That was me as well, until X itself gave me a reason to quit. That issue could probably be investigated and fixed, by why waste time on something that will soon enter maintenance mode? It was finally time I gave Wayland a shot.
Making the switch
From my point of view, switching to Wayland means essentially installing it and changing all the applications I used on X, to equivalent ones that work on Wayland. The main one being the graphical interface itself, which in my case was the i3 window manager.
Thankfully, there's an already very well established i3-compatible window manager for Wayland called sway, so that change was pretty straight-forward. It was just a matter of installing sway and changing the config a bit.
Something that helped things a lot was that the sway wiki has a i3 migration guide, which not only shows the main changes needed in the i3 configuration for it to work on sway, but also a list of the Wayland programs equivalent to the ones normally used on X.Org.
For instance, the keyboard layout setup and toggling, which is normally handled
by setxkbmap in X, is integrated in sway so I just used input commands in
sway's config to configure the possible layouts and to have a binding for
toggling it.
Still on the keyboard topic, I have grown really accustomed to making my Caps Lock work double duty: it acts as Esc when just pressed independently, and as Control when held while pressing another key. I used setxkbmap together with xcape to achieve this, but those obviously aren't an option on Wayland.
To my rescue came Interception Tools, which allows the same to be done regardless of being on X or Wayland. In itself it just provides the framework, but the function of mapping both Esc and Control to Caps Lock I mentioned can be easily configured by using the official plugin caps2esc.
Oh, and it can also be combined with another plugin, space2meta, to use the Spacebar key as space when just pressed, but as the Meta key (the modifier on i3/sway) when held. I had previously experimented with this in X using xcape but I kept accidentally triggering bindings, so reverted back. But since space2meta is smarter and only sends it on the key release event, it's really usable and worth it for the increased comfort.
A bit of a side track: If caps2esc and space2meta sound like crazy talk to you, then I do urge you to try them out. Mainly caps2esc, as that one doesn't have any drawbacks, honestly. Like, how frequently do you use Caps Lock anyway? There's no reason to keep it there in the home row. Esc and Control on the other hand are really useful, even more if you use Vim. Now back on track...
What about rofi, a menu launcher that I use for all sorts of stuff? It's also X dependent. There's wofi as an alternative for Wayland, but I didn't really like it. Felt a lot slower and I'm not a fan of it being GTK (the magnifying glass icon beside the input field really bothers me). I just want a single color rectangle with a prompt and options highlighted below, and rofi does that much better. Luckily some brave soul created a rofi fork for Wayland and it works like a charm. Mostly...
Unfortunately, the window switching functionality doesn't work. And I find it quite useful to go directly to a specific open application, otherwise I need to cycle through all workspaces searching for it. But it was very easy to find a window switcher script on the web, although for wofi, so I simply changed it a bit to work with rofi and got myself a window switcher script. And that's a perfectly fine rofi in Wayland.
Taking screenshots with maim was also no longer possible. The alternative is grim, and a separate program, slurp, to be able to select a region or a window for the screenshot. As a nice bonus, as grim's README shows, it's very simple to make a color picker using it together with slurp and imagemagick, so I set that up as well. My previous attempt at doing this with maim failed, so this was a nice bonus of moving to Wayland.
xclip obviously also doesn't work on Wayland. So to keep my clipboard working, I
needed to install wl-clipboard. This wasn't enough for Vim though. In Vim,
operating on the system clipboard is done through the + register, like
"+yy to copy the current line to the clipboard, but that doesn't work with
Wayland's clipboard. I got really close to installing Neovim since it seems to
work there, but I found the vim-wayland-clipboard plugin for vim which works
flawlessly.
One thing I didn't expect to not work out of the box was screen sharing.
Thankfully Pipewire's page on ArchWiki gave instructions on how to get it
working, which was pretty simple too: just set an environment variable and
install xdg-desktop-portal-wlr and pipewire-media-session. That said, I did
have an issue after a pipeWire update, but it seems to have been solved since.
I also changed my notification daemon from dunst to mako. That said, as of version 1.6.0, dunst supports Wayland as well although it still isn't packaged on Arch Linux. But I'm fine with mako too to be honest, so will probably stay with it.
Some other changes that I don't think deserve any special comment:
- light instead of xbacklight to control the screen brightness
- gammastep instead of redshift to make the screen temperature more comfortable at night
- imv instead of sxiv as the image viewer
And finally, it's important to mention Xwayland. It's the application that allows you to run X applications on Wayland. It doesn't work for everything (otherwise I wouldn't have changed all those previous applications), but for example for Electron applications and for the Steam and games it has worked flawlessly so far to that point that it's hard to know that they aren't native on Wayland, which I think is awesome. If Wayland is to be the future, it has to allow current X applications to continue to run on it until they are properly ported over to Wayland.
Plot twist
After all that change I was all set up on Wayland, but there were actually some really annoying graphical glitches. From time to time, applications would start flashing and glitching and there wasn't anything that made it stop, except, of course, quitting Wayland. So I was essentially where I started, although a bit better since in this case the whole computer didn't freeze, so I could at least save everything before rebooting.
In the meantime though, I got a new computer from my employer, which was much appreciated given all the quirks of the old one. Since I had already gone through all the trouble of the Wayland transition, I installed sway in this new computer as well. And everything worked perfectly. No issue whatsoever.
So, what is the conclusion of this story? The crashing/glitching issue was something related to my old computer's hardware rather than X itself, but at least that gave me the push I needed to migrate to Wayland. I could have probably stayed on X on the new computer, yes, but that would only be delaying the inevitable. The important thing is that now everything works, and I feel much more comfortable debugging and reporting issues with the graphical interface, given that it's actively maintained, if that ever happens in the future.