What is your experience using only Wayland applications?

Questions
1

I am thinking about installing Sway on one of my laptops and reducing my usage of apps that require X or Xwayland.

Are there any noticeable bugs or drawbacks you have noticed when migrating completely to Wayland?

2

I use secureblue on my laptop, which removes XWayland. No issues if you stick to modern Linux apps especially written in GTK or Qt.

You may need to do an occasional configuration. This Arch Wiki page outlines what you’ll find yourself doing. In practice the most common one for me has been Electron apps. Sometimes one will surprise you, like SimpleX Desktop uses OpenJDK which doesn’t support Wayland at all yet (see linked wiki page).

Gaming / wine is also not great without XWayland yet, although I think early progress is being made. If you game with wine or proton, just stick to using XWayland for now.

3 Likes
3

I ran Fedora with Sway a few years ago and for my usecase (CS Student) it was absolutely fine. Guess it should be even better nowadays.

4

I haven’t installed electron apps in a while thankfully. I honestly can’t think of any apps not written in GTK or Qt on my computer right now.

That’s great to hear. Have you ever tried screensharing or recording your screen on your laptop? I heard that doesn’t usually work well but maybe things have changed. I’m sure you also had to use zoom too :confused:

5

Brave browser crashes very frequently with Wayland.

Here is one example: wayland crash when drag & drop text · Issue #37777 · brave/brave-browser · GitHub

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6

I presume this is just an issue with Brave and not Chromium?

7

I think I experienced that last year like those commenters. It was a Chromium issue, no longer present. I’m using Brave on Wayland right now; have been for almost 2 years. Crashes have been almost nonexistent.

There are a handful of bugs but nothing that makes the browser unusable lately.

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8

I used OBS for screen recording project showcases which worked fine. Never really had to share my screen through some video conferencing tool or use zoom at my uni since we were doing scrum meetings etc. in person and had a self hosted BigBlueButton instance for video conferences.

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9

I use it with Wayland only and it does not crash “very frequently” on Arch. The drag&drop bug was bad, but aside from that it works reasonably well.

It’s usually a bug with Chromium and not something specific to Brave.

10

I use the niri Wayland compositor, which doesn’t have built-in Xwayland support. With the relevant flags and environment variables, my apps work fine. I use KeePassXC, which doesn’t support Auto-Type under Wayland yet, but is being worked on. Almost all my logins are in the browser, so I just use the extension, but YMMV. When I use to do some gaming, I had to use xwayland-satellite (rootless Xwayland), but apart from that, I haven’t needed Xwayland for anything yet.

On Wayland, screen sharing is done using the XDG Desktop Portal and PipeWire, which is supported by the latest versions of Firefox and Chromium. You can test screen sharing in the browser using this site by Mozilla. I don’t use Zoom, but I quickly created an account to test it, and screen sharing worked in the web app in Brave. In case you use Discord in a Chromium-based browser, screen sharing wont work with “WebRTC IP handling policy” set to “Disable non-proxied USP” (any other option will work). Not sure about Firefox though. Note that Sway uses the WLR portal, which doesn’t support per-window sharing yet.

Screen recorders like OBS Studio, gpu-screen-recorder and Kooha use the portal/PipeWire as well, although there are other programs (non-exhaustive list) that use screencopy.

Slightly off-topic, related to Electron

I have two Electron app, namely Notesnook and Spotify. I might seriously switch to using the Spotify web app, if I’m able to deal with the lack of offline listening (a small price to pay TBH). I’m conflicted about Notesnook, because IDK what’s the consensus regarding websites/web apps vs Electron apps for E2EE services.

11

I’m using wayland on endeavour os with an nvidia 2060 and i’ve only run into a couple issues: Lapce absolutely bugging out and the ui randomly zoomed in so far i couldn’t access any of the ui settings to see wtf was going on, and some spicetify themes look kinda janky, like the catppuccin and rose pine theme colors don’t apply evenly across the app but the transparent animated galaxy stars theme looks normal. Aside from that it’s been surprisingly smooth sailing

12

Good so far, if you want to keep track of the progress see https://wearewaylandnow.com/ (it is updated unlike the other outdated popular one).

13

Have you find a way to use secureblue with electron apps ? I tried but Bitwarden, Proton apps isn’t working with their os

14

On nvidia, yes, a few applications randomly crash at times but I haven’t had an issue so big yet that would make me go back. I’d say that it’s 99% fine except for some edge cases, but then you can use a second compositor with its own builtin xwayland like gamescope or cage or another instance of sway to use X securely, with each sandbox having its own X server.

Works perfectly (Arch/Hyprland)

15
16

See Wayland - ArchWiki

I personally avoid Electron apps.