X or Wayland

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21

Ah, so you’re using lightdm?

22

No. But I try different things out (mostly in virtual machines).

I don’t really remember why, but for some reason I decided to experiment with “lightdm” in Leap 15.2 Alpha. And I ran into the problem there, so I also tried it on Tumbleweed which had the same problem.

23

Ok, but does the problem still exist with gdm or sddm?

24

The problem with “firefox” is still there with “gdm”. I have not tried with “sddm”, but I assume it’s the same.

I mentioned “lightdm” above, because it is a gtk application, and “firefox” is a gtk application. So that might be a commonality. But maybe I just added confusion.

Looking at the “.desktop” file that start Plasma Full Wayland, I see it just starts the regular Wayland, but if first sets a couple of environmental values.

So I tried that with Gnome


env GDK_BACKEND=wayland QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland firefox

And that works fine in Gnome. So maybe Plasma Full Wayland is not quite ready for prime time.

25

Yes, “GDK_BACKEND=wayland” ensures that it launches natively under Walyland rather than via XWayland.

And that works fine in Gnome. So maybe Plasma Full Wayland is not quite ready for prime time.

Good to know regarding Gnome. Although it’s not clear (to me at least) why firefox as a Wayland client would behave differently with the two desktop environments. I had a quick search but didn’t yet find any pertinent bug reports.

26

I’ve tried firefox with wayland in Gnome and here everything runs fine, the about:support page shows that wayland is used, the problem is that I don’t like gnome…

There is already a bug filed in bugzilla:

https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1156612

but without any solutions yet

27

Is there a reason not to use KDM if you’re a KDE user? I don’t know about Wayland support, but with X11, nothing seems to be able to beat a minimal, unthemed KDM config in my opinion. It boots up super-fast (according to systemd-analyze blame in under 100ms — compared to overly complex, eye-candy SDDM which takes 350ms on my main Core-i5 rig).

KDM also preloads some of those libs KDE needs anyway, so why not take advantage of that?

[Edited to fix typos.]

28

KDM is not yet anymore available for tumbleweed, you can install it from software.opensuse.org but there is only a 4.xx version, so I assume that KDM is only an option if you use KDE4. I’ve tried also to use GDM as displaymanager since firefox is working well in wayland mode in gnome but without success. I don’t think that the problem is related to the displaymanager.

29

Thank you for that reference.

I suspect that this is an upstream problem, meaning that a solution has to come from kde.org.

30

I always liked KDM. But it is out of support. It is not in the Tumbleweed repos. I depended on QT4, which is no longer supported.

I mostly use GDM, which I really don’t like. But I have Gnome installed, and Gnome does not work well if you are not using GDM. I don’t much care for SDDM either.

31

I’ve tried two other distros that offers a live environment with KDE and wayland:

  • Fedora uses XWayland and its firefox cannot be started in full wayland mode, it still depends on X11
  • Rebecca Black OS: I’ve downloaded a firefox nightly and started it, it still more or less hangs, sometimes you can enter something in the address bar, mostly it takes the input when you switch to another tab and back again

So probably its possible that the problem is in KDE since it is working fine in GNOME. I did not find any bugs related to this issue at bugs.kde.org

32

As mentioned before there is already a bug filed in the opesuse bugzilla, someone proposed there to use an older version of firefox (<=69.0.3) to get it to work. I’ve tested this with the following results:
This is halfway a workaround, I’ve tested it on two machines:

  • One is a workstation with a radeon graphics card, here the old version is running relatively smoothly, sometimes pop-ups (menus or search proposals when you enter something in the address bar are completely black), but more or less you can work
  • The other one is a lenovo yoga with a built-in intel graphics card, here I have more issues, sometimes when I swich between tabs the page not changes, or when I enter a website, I have to switch to another tab and to get this site rendered

Here the link to this bug: https://bugzilla.opensuse.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1156612

33

You’re absolutely correct. I just checked my KDM dependencies with »ldd«, and I was utterly wrong to assume that the kdm binary would load any KDE/Qt libs at all:

rig:~ ▶ **ldd /usr/bin/kdm**
        linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007ffd38fb5000)
        libX11.so.6 => /usr/lib64/libX11.so.6 (0x00007f6051489000)
        libXau.so.6 => /usr/lib64/libXau.so.6 (0x00007f6051285000)
        libXdmcp.so.6 => /usr/lib64/libXdmcp.so.6 (0x00007f605107f000)
        libpam.so.0 => /lib64/libpam.so.0 (0x00007f6050e70000)
        librt.so.1 => /lib64/librt.so.1 (0x00007f6050c68000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib64/libc.so.6 (0x00007f60508ae000)
        libxcb.so.1 => /usr/lib64/libxcb.so.1 (0x00007f6050685000)
        libdl.so.2 => /lib64/libdl.so.2 (0x00007f6050481000)
        libaudit.so.1 => /usr/lib64/libaudit.so.1 (0x00007f605025b000)
        libpthread.so.0 => /lib64/libpthread.so.0 (0x00007f605003d000)
        /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007f60519f7000)
rig:~ ▶ _

(For giggles, do the same for the sddm binary. The list of libs will be quite a bit longer, I assume.)

Still, due to its quick startup, I’ll keep using my slightly outdated KDM (package version 4.11.22, build date 2018-05-15) to auto-login to KDE/Plasma5. Cheers!