A quick journey history of my transition from Xorg to Wayland. I waited with this transition as long as possible because two of my favorite tools do not work on Wayland. But now it seems that my favorite dock Plank is broken. And actually, Xorg server is a mess. That’s, why Wayland was introduced.

So, I had to find two replacements. A natural replacement for plank was Dash-To-Dock. It does not have the beloved fish-eye effect, but the rest is very similar.

The other tool I use frequently is an implementation of pie menus. Luckily, there is a Wayland project of the same author called Fly-Pie. But it is only available for GNOME. The native X11 application Gnome-Pie primarily targets GNOME, but not exclusively.

Time to switch!

System failure

Right! It should be a matter of seconds. Guess what? Murphy’s Law punched me right in the face. First problem was, that GNOME Shell could not connect to X server. Problem was, I still had the legacy wrapper for Xorg installed (xserver-org-legacy). Uninstalling helped to get a connection. And with Wayland I do not want nor need any X server for my user session. And other applications for X can still be run in a nested XWayland server.

Broken extension

Still, after punching in my password GDM simply did nothing. I couldn’t even use my pointer. Turns out, one of my extensions was incompatible with Wayland. After I turned all extensions off, I could successfully log in. Then I activated extension by extension, logged out and back in until I found the culprit. Actually it is a sad thing that things like reloading the Gnome Shell no longer work.

Global shortcuts

The reason the author of Gnome-Pie rewrote his tool from scratch was driven by the fact that it could not simply be ported to Wayland. Xorg’s security concept is completely different to Wayland’s. The latter one is more secure and more strict. The very reason why it was crated, in the first place.

This also causes some tools to no longer work the same way as they did with Xorg. For instance, I use guake for fly-in terminals on an every-day basis. In quake, you can simply define a shortcut to bring up a terminal. That works like a charm within Xorg, but not with Wayland. As soon, as a window looses focus (disappears), you can no longer bring it back with a predefined shortcut.

The solution was to delete the shortcut set in guake’s preferences and create a keyboard shortcut in Gnome that triggers guake. Effect is the same, but it took me some time to figure that one out or better say find it somewhere in the comments.

The same is true for autokey. Global shortcuts to run a command won’t work. You’ll have to define them via custom shortcuts managed by your desktop environment, like GNOME. But application shortcuts still work as expected. At least, as far as I can tell.