I have read that ubuntu mate has support for wayland for some time now and wanted to give it a try, because supposedly it's all around better for security and performance and a lot cleaner code.
uname -a gives me: Linux <hostname> 5.4.0-62-generic #70-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jan 12 12:45:47 UTC 2021 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux and I'm running on a Toshiba R702Q Vivobook.
I have searched for instructions on how to install wayland on ubuntu mate and came up short. I have found a snap package "MATE-on-wayland", but I don't really like snap. I tried it anyway and I get a selection on the login screen. When I pick the wayland option the display flickers briefly before staying blank (with the backlights on). The websites talking about this snap package seem very computer generated and give no more info other than "use sudo snap install blah to install the package" and the package description.
I have had a look at my installed packages and plenty of libwayland- packages are installed by default (as dependencies of some dependency of ubuntu-mate-desktop or something).
$ apt list --installed | grep --ignore-case wayland
WARNING: apt does not have a stable CLI interface. Use with caution in scripts.
kwayland-data/focal,focal,now 4:5.68.0-0ubuntu1 all [installed,automatic]
kwayland-integration/focal,now 4:5.18.4.1-0ubuntu1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
libkf5waylandclient5/focal,now 4:5.68.0-0ubuntu1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
libqt5waylandclient5-dev/focal,now 5.12.8-0ubuntu1 amd64 [installed]
libqt5waylandclient5/focal,now 5.12.8-0ubuntu1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
libqt5waylandcompositor5-dev/focal,now 5.12.8-0ubuntu1 amd64 [installed]
libqt5waylandcompositor5/focal,now 5.12.8-0ubuntu1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
libva-wayland2/focal,now 2.7.0-2 amd64 [installed,automatic]
libwayland-bin/focal,now 1.18.0-1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
libwayland-client0/focal,now 1.18.0-1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
libwayland-client0/focal,now 1.18.0-1 i386 [installed,automatic]
libwayland-cursor0/focal,now 1.18.0-1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
libwayland-cursor0/focal,now 1.18.0-1 i386 [installed,automatic]
libwayland-dev/focal,now 1.18.0-1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
libwayland-egl1/focal,now 1.18.0-1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
libwayland-egl1/focal,now 1.18.0-1 i386 [installed,automatic]
libwayland-server0/focal,now 1.18.0-1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
qtwayland5-dev-tools/focal,now 5.12.8-0ubuntu1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
qtwayland5-doc/focal,focal,now 5.12.8-0ubuntu1 all [installed,automatic]
qtwayland5/focal,now 5.12.8-0ubuntu1 amd64 [installed]
wayland-protocols/focal,focal,now 1.20-1 all [installed,automatic]
Yet I can not pick it during login. I have seen a similar question that was resolved (in the comments) by reinstalling the libwayland-* packages. I did so with
sudo apt install --reinstall libwayland-bin libwayland-client0 libwayland-cursor0 libwayland-dev libwayland-egl1 libwayland-server0
which gave me no appreciable effect, even after a reboot.
My current display manager is lightdm. Because of that I looked up how to enable wayland with lightdm and came up with this set of instructions.
- Verify that you have a Gnome session in /usr/share/wayland-sessions.
- Using root privilege open a text editor of your preference and edit the /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf file and uncomment the following line: sessions-directory=/usr/share/lightdm/sessions:/usr/share/xsessions:/usr/share/wayland-sessions
I do not have any files or directories in /usr/share/wayland-sessions, though the folder exists.
Furthermore I do not have a file /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf, though 2 other .conf files exist (one to turn on numlock and another to forbid certain users (nologin, nobody, etc) and shells /bin/false, /bin/nologin, etc) and an empty directory for config files.
So I'm at a loss. Supposedly ubuntu mate ships and supports wayland, yet I can not use it. And I can't find any resource on how to make it work.
I also would like to run some wayland compositor natively, not on top of x. What's the point in adding more overhead when I want to save power :P
PS: I'm aware that wayland is not a software, but rather a protocol. But I don't know what compositor mate is supposed to ship with, because apparently every major distribution is making their own one, or so I've read.
Also I don't really know what all the terms mean. window manager, display manager, compositor or what is client to which server (and how to connect a client to a remote server for that matter).
So when I search compositor or wayland with apt search I get to see stuff like mutter, weston and xweston. And when I apt info mutter I get
Example window manager using GNOME's window manager library Mutter is a Wayland display server and X11 window manager and compositor library. It contains functionality related to, among other things, window management, window compositing, focus tracking, workspace management, keybindings and monitor configuration.
Which might as well be chineese.
Edit:
I tried to install the weston package, which gave me the option to select it from the login screen. However launching it from terminal (weston), virtual terminal (TTY1) weston-launch or the login screen (via dropdown select) gives me a very, very barebones and unusable gray "desktop" kind of area with nothing but a button to launch a terminal and a clock, which is nothing like the mate desktop.
Edit2:
Trying to run mate-wayland from terminal (instead of from the login screen) after installing the snap package gave me an error about xwayland not being installed. After installing it it kinda worked. But the pannels threw me a lot of errors about missing references and a lot of things didn't show up on them (including the menu). Running firefox (from a quick link that survived the messed up panels) gave me a window that'd flash at a high update rate (> 10/s) with text and images shifting all over with every update until a page was done loading. Interestingly enough that firefox didn't remember my cookies (I wasn't logged into stackexchange for example) or the session, though it popped up with some old version of my opened tab list.
0 Answers