Wayland: The new hot thing in the Linux community to either love or hate. It's really funny actually that it is yet another software, which tries to improve something, and that people either shill or rant about to the extreme. That has been the case with many different software (I don't even have to mention them lol), and Wayland is no exception to that. So I took a look at it instead of following the shill crowd or the hate crowd.
That's were I noticed the first issue: I couldn't use it.
I got my personal computer in 2019, and the parts were picked for Microsoft Windows, in which of course NVIDIA is a better choice. I started using Linux in 2022 though, so no Wayland was possible unless I used KDE Plasma, a desktop environment that I have never liked, or GNOME, in which I couldn't do more than general purpose computing when I tried using it.
Now in 2022, I got a laptop, which, again, was for running Microsoft Windows 11, but this time, there was no NVIDIA graphics card built into the laptop, meaning that after deleting Microsoft Windows 11 (hehe), I finally got the chance to use Wayland! But I didn't xd
I don't remember why I wasn't trying out Wayland as soon as I got my hands on my laptop. I suppose that I literally sat for weeks for my X setup, and starting from scratch seemed a bit overwhelming, so I just used my regular X setup on my laptop until I found about Hyprland, and I went ahead and tried it out, and it sucked. While it is a really cool project, it is in beta stage, and the last time I used it, my config file didn't work anymore because of how fast things change in Hyprland right now. As of writing this, Hyprland is in version 0.23, and is not widespread available. Maybe in the future I will try it out again, but at the moment, it is unusable for me.
With that in mind, I tried out sway, which I should have really used in the first place because I am an i3 enjoyer, and sway is pretty much "i3 for Wayland", and it is stable. I didn't bother with any other Wayland compositor ever since that.
Settled on a Wayland compositor, I needed a status bar. I wasn't really comfortable with swaybar because you have to mostly create shell script to display information, which I am not really willing to do. Luckily, when I tried out Hyprland, I also tried out Waybar, so I just changed a few lines in the Waybar config, and got myself a nice looking status bar ^-^
Last, but not least, the terminal emulator. Now I could've just used Alacritty or kitty, however, I wanted to use a terminal emulator that is a bit more closer to XTerm ("minimal", fast, low on resources). The closest thing to XTerm on Wayland that I found was foot, and I am pretty happy with it. Also, the developer of foot, Daniel Eklöf, is an awesome developer, who also made some other Wayland applications. Be sure to check him out!
So that has been my Wayland journey so far. I currently use it on my laptop as it is a general purpose computer for simple things such as web browsing or writings, however, for things such as gaming on my desktop computer I prefer X at the moment because of the reliability of it, and that it works with my hardware. To not have an huge issue with applications not supporting Wayland, I tried to replace most of my graphical applications with terminal applications because they don't need a display server to run correctly, so that is be a good way for me to prepare for Wayland.
So can we already ditch X? NO!
One of the most annoying things about Wayland is actually not a software related issue, which is that people shill it WAY TOO MUCH. In very niche use cases, you can replace X with Wayland, but people, who shill Wayland a lot have so little empathy it's actually insane. I am fine with Ubuntu or Fedora, who ship Wayland by default, it just depends on whether they can sustain the amount of forum posts saying W and X issues (pun intended), and I am fine with newer applications with Wayland in mind because that seems more obvious, nevertheless, I am not fine when people over promise a piece of software that after 14 years of development is at version 1.21. Of course, this is not a way to determine the quality of a software, but it just sounds vague to myself. Normies already see Linux as a buggy ecosystem, and with Wayland, I am concerned that this prejudicing increases with the Linux community pushing a software that is in really active developement where things change very quickly (just like this website). Wayland is a wild west, and you shouldn't mislead people to go there thinking it will improve your desktop experience.
Nevertheless, I will continue using Wayland on my laptop and maybe on my computer once I get an AMD GPU, and I may write a follow up to this blog post in the future.