I am looking into changing from x11 to wayland. I use mate desktop 1.28 that is apparently not fully converted to wayland according to mate info. I want to do a test but I am cautious about not hosing my system and getting locked out.
I see methods to change to wayland systemwide by modifying system config files. For example changing:
/etc/sysconfig/displaymanager
to point from x11 to wayland.
In Yast Software Manager there is a pattern for gnome desktop environment (wayland).
If the system is set to x11 and you enter, e.g., a wayland desktop pattern are you really using wayland or x11? Does the desktop pattern setting override the system setting.
To test mate 1.28, I assume I would need to set display manager to wayland in the displaymanager system file. I see no wayland mate environment pattern.
Also, do you need to reboot after changing “/etc/sysconfig/displaymanager”?
Here’s some of the mate info on updates to v1.28. Looks pretty well configured for wayland.
Putting mate aside, if I try gnome wayland pattern with system set for x11, am I using wayland? Could I bork my system trying that?
After almost three years of development, it is official announced desktop environment release MATE 1.28, which continues the development of the GNOME 2.32 code base while maintaining the classic concept of creating a desktop. The release announcement was dated February, but the announcement on the project website appeared only a few hours ago, and before that the new branch was mentioned only in the form tags in the project's Git repository, without an explicit release announcement and without publishing a general list of changes. Packages with MATE 1.28 already available in the repositories of such distributions as Fedora 40, Gentoo, Mageia, Manjaro, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Arch Linux, ALT Linux, Artix, OpenIndiana, GhostBSD, Parabola, Solus and Void Linux.
The most important changes:
When preparing the new branch, the main focus was on providing support for working using the Wayland protocol. Added an experimental Wayland-based session using the Wayfire composite server. Most of the applets located in the panel, including the volume control applet, the battery charge indicator applet and the network applet, are adapted to work with Wayland (the only exceptions were the AccessX and Geyes applets, which are tied to X11). Enabled to work with Wayland configurator (Control Center), multimedia applications, notification display system, energy management system, terminal emulator.
Not in my view; keeping in mind how much time it took to Gnome (the “real one”) to get to full Wayland with Gnome 50 (still in openQA for Tumbleweed) I would rate the Mate statement as a “hey, this is beta testing!”.
Gnome 49 is “Wayland only” as in “there is only one gnome-session and it is a Wayland session”, while an X session is still available with Gnome 48 in Leap 16.0.
Gnome 50 (to be released in the next few days) has discarded every X11 piece remaining.
Gnome is not happy with Display managers other than gdm, so the “Gnome Wayland Pattern” installs gdm and should use it by default.
gdm should still offer login to a Mate X11 session if that is still installed (but please note the should as in “I have not tested and cannot tell for sure”).
Can you bork your system? Definitely, if you don’t know what you are doing.
A point to be noted is what Display Manager Mate is currently using, replacing that by gdm should work for Gnome, but might jeopardize Mate.
If you are confident enough in using the command line, you can always revert your changes logging in in a VT (like CTRL+ALT+F4 and giving the root password).
Or if you are using snapper and have a working snapshot you should be able to rollback to that snapshot.
Sorry for the long post, but you are asking for a “guarantee” that nobody is able to offer (well, unless you have a paid subscription to SUSE )
Yes, I “reversed” the order of your statements.
Why?? … this way we read that you admit that Mate is not ready for wayland.
Then you state you want to switch to wayland.
To me … makes no sense at all. So the real question is:
.
“Why do you want to jump to Wayland (as it is not fully supported by your environment) ?”.
If you want to “experiment”, then create a new installation of Mate in a virtual machine, then play around in there … no need to worry about messing up your REAL time system.
Well, look at the words I included from the MATE people. They say they have many modules are ready for wayland but not all. They list the major processes. So I would think a test would be warranted if only some secondary processes might not work. I agree though that it should be done in a vm. I am not sure that the vm is a valid test, however, as the vm uses it’s own display managers I believe. I need to investigate that.
I did try logging into plasma-x11 and plasma-wayland. In plasma-x11 "echo “$XDG_SESSION_TYPE” said I was in X11. All desktop icons and panel items seemed to work on a cursory basis.
I then logged in to plasma-wayland. The command "echo “$XDG_SESSION_TYPE” said I was in wayland. This says to me that the desktop can change to wayland while system was still configured for x11 in config files. But desktop items and panel items including main menu did not work at all. I did not investigate further to determine the cause.
I did not see any perceptible change in display view due to wayland. I will close this issue and continue to look further at MATE wayland issues.
They wanted to get rid of all the issues other DMs had with their wayland route, so they did the right thing (IMNSHO): include the gdm in the DE. With plasma-login-manager the KDE people our now going in the same direction. So Plasma6.8 (end this year) will be wayland-only.
I went and retried plasma-wayland and things started working. I quite like plasma but I have still not tested everything. As of now, though, I am going to stay with plasma-wayland, at least umtil some problen surfaces.
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