Qtile On Wayland...It Kinda Works!

In the last two or three years, I would say one of the most common questions I get is, "Hey DT, when are you going to switch to Whan? Man, you need to switch to Whan DT because X11 is old and deprecated and only old fuddy duddies still run X11. All the cool kids are on Whan yada yada yada. When are you going to move to Whan?" Right. Well, [laughter] I and my answer has always been for the last 16 years because that's how long Wayland has been under development for 16 years and it's still not ready, but I will switch when it's ready and when it's available on the desktop environments and window managers that I actually want to run. I'm not a Gnome user. I know Wayland is fantastic on Gnome. I'm not going to run Gnome. I know Whan kind of works on a couple of window managers like Hyperland and Sway. Uh Sway is basically a i3 clone and i3 is one of my least favorite window managers as far as tiling window managers. I just don't like it. Hyperlands okay, but it's not my kind of window manager. I want to use a dynamic tiling window manager that handles multimonitors the way Xmonad does or Qile does. And I've been primarily using those window managers for a number of years now. And I've been using Qile on X11 and Qile for the last few years has been working on Whan support and they have a Whan login session. It's kind of experimental. It's kind of in beta format. So I mean you may or may not get on Wayan to work on your machine. I had to jump through some hoops, but I've been playing around with it for the last couple of days. I've spent a few hours playing with on Whan. Now, I've always wanted to play around with QAL on Wayland, but the problem was I never could get it to work. Every time I tried to log into the Whan session for QTL, I'd just get a black screen, it would freeze, and it would freeze hard. You couldn't even drop to a TTY. You would have to hard reboot the computer. And yeah, I I couldn't figure out what the problem was. And a couple of days ago, I was like, well, I'm going to investigate the situation. I'm going to really try to get a Whan session running with QL. And the problem was my config and it's probably going to be the problem with your config as well. So let me go to my config.py for QTL. This is Qile's config file. And what I ended up doing is I ended up starting with a brand new like default configuration. And I was able to log into a plain default QL desktop using Wayland. if I just deleted my config and used the default config that gets shipped, which is a very plain vanilla kind of config. So then I started adding all of my config arts back to the default config slowly, you know, in small little chunks to see if I could spot whatever is the problem with my config. And honestly, it was pretty obvious when I got to it because it was like the last thing in my config that's the problem. The last thing in my config was I have this block here where I have this startup hook here where we auto start an auto start file. So uh your startup programs like I want for example the wallpaper drawn. I want Cocky to launch. I want next cloud to la you know I've got some things that I want to auto start every time I log in to Qile. And the problem with this, let me do a split here, is my auto start file that I was using and this is what I was using on the exorg session for Qile and some of this stuff that it was trying to launch just does not work on Whan. So when Qile was launching and it was running the startup hook, you know, it's the first thing it runs is all the startup stuff, you know, some of this was just not going to run. For example, pycom the compositor that I was using for exorg obviously doesn't need to run in whin because the compositor on whin it's it's using wl roots. So I know that was a problem. Also drawing my wallpaper using the waypaper program was a problem cuz wayaper on x11 I set it to use fe to set the wallpaper. Fe is for x11 right. For [snorts] whining sessions I need waypaper to use a different backend. I installed swaybg uh for waypaper to use as the the backend to draw the wallpaper on way. I got rid of better lock screen. I made all of this quite a bit different for for my auto start file on Wayland. Uh and then I added a couple of interesting things that I needed. I needed this particular program Kenchi and this is because I use multimonitors. There's a couple of programs I needed to install. Uh let me switch to a different screen and and let me clear the screen and zoom in. So some of the things you need to install here on Arch Linux. So I installed the following packages. So initially I needed to do a Pac-Man and I went ahead and installed python-pand python-pwl roots and then exorg-xan was also not on my system and I wanted to make sure xland was there just in case I needed it for some app support. So I installed those programs there and I'm just going to go ahead and cancel installing all of that. And then the next thing I installed, we needed to do a Pac-Man- capital S. Uh if you need a wallpaper program, install waypaper. It's a really cool program. You need a backend to it, right? So you need something that uh actually sets the wallpaper, some back-end program. Use Swaybg, for example. When you have that installed, you can use Waypaper to actually set your wallpaper. So it's just a standard wallpaper program. You just pick a wallpaper. For example, I picked that one and it just changed my wallpaper there. So pretty neat little program there. And you have your engines down here. Swaybg is the backend that I'm using for the Whan session. If I move over to the X11 session of Qile, I have FE installed and I need to actually manually switch that inside Waypaper if I'm going to use the uh X11 session for QTL and have Waypaper set the background for me. Now, one of the most annoying things that I ran into was setting my monitors because I have three monitors. The monitors were out of order, right? I've got monitor one, two, three, but they were all out of order like it's so I had to rearrange them on X11. Of course, you would do this with XR renderer or you would use a guey front end to the XR renderer program. You would use a reander, right? And I needed something like that for Whan and Whan does have a program for this. I found this particular program called Wis. If I type W view displays here, it's a very similar program to something like a renderer. It lists my three monitors and I can rearrange them in the order that they should be in. And you know, just click uh there'll be a button up here that says activate or you know, set it or whatever. You click the button and it's done. And all your monitors are in the right order. But there's a problem with W displays. It doesn't do the same thing that Arander did. A renderer wrote a little bash script giving you the command, the X renderer command to put those monitors in the right order. And because it wrote that command to a config file, you could use that config file in your window manager auto start file, for example. So every time you log in, it automatically arranges your monitors in the right order. W displays does not do that. You would have to manually go into the guey program and change it every time you log in. Naturally, that's not what I wanted to do. But there is this program here called Kenchi. It's a a command line program that basically reads a config file. There's a config file on my system. If I actually open this with Vim. Let's open config config. This here, right, this is what I needed. And you can make WD displays actually write to this Kchi file if in conjunction with Kchi you install a different version of WD displays. Do not install for example you would normally think you would do a Pac-Man-SW displays is the normal program. Well there is this program here W displays persistent. So I think this may have been in the AUR. install that along with this Kenchi command line program. And now when you use WD displays to arrange your monitors, it'll give you that config file and Kenchi automatically just every time you log in, you know, will set your monitors right. As long as you have Kchi in your auto start file. So if I go back to Emacs and go back to my auto start file, um let's see there is the config.py. We'll open a split. Let's go to the auto start for Whan. And that's why in my auto start programs, the very first thing I launch is Kani to put the monitors in the right order. And then I launch Emacs, the Emacs server, the Emacs Damon. I have Waypaper draw the uh wallpaper for me. I also have Cony running, but Cony I I need to adjust this. It doesn't work quite right on the way session because the Cony windows always stay above the actual windows. Uh, so I've got to config it a little differently for Coni to work properly in Whan, but that is a very minor gripe. A couple of other packages I needed to install because it was going to cause me some problems. OBS wouldn't record my desktop uh for whatever reason. And I think part of that was just because I didn't have a XDG desktop portal package. So I needed a portal WLR, which is the WL roots, which is the compositor that QL is based off of. But even installing that, OBS still did not offer me any way to actually do a screen capture. And I found this program inside the AUR. So you wouldn't be able to do this with Pac-Man. You use something like Paru for example. And I installed this package WLR for WL roots. OBS-HG. This package here basically is a plugin for OBS. Uh you don't have to do anything. It it sets itself up. You just install that. And now it every time I open OBS, I now have an option to actually uh do a screen capture to record my desktop. Without this package, I was not able to actually get OBS uh working properly for me here inside Qile on Whan. So that is it. I had to install several different new programs obviously to get Whan working. I had to make sure that whatever auto start file that I was running for QL made sure I have to make sure that that auto start file is not trying to run anything that's a X11 only kind of program because that was uh just locking things up to the point you would have to do a hard reboot. Once I got all that straight uh pretty much the rest of my config stayed the same. I didn't have to really do anything. Now are there any problems with QL on Whan? Well, yeah. It's not all sunshine and rainbows. So, uh, I haven't lived in it too long and I'm not really going to live in it cuz right now, um, there's a couple of, uh, things that I I just I I can't stand. Some of the programs just don't work. Some of the programs I use on a daily basis, uh, one of the most obvious ones because I'm a trader. You know, I trade the the markets every day, I run a second YouTube channel where, you know, I talk about options trading and teach people a little bit about how to trade options. And you know, my broker here, my uh trading platform is Tasty Trade. It's going to take a second to load up. It's a Java app, but one of the problems with it is it's basically unusable because anything that is a menu doesn't actually work. Like this menu here, I click on it. Where' the menu go? This menu here, it's a drop down. You can kind of see it appear for just a split second. You may not even see that on the video because it just the frame rate, but uh you know, none of the menus in it work. makes it practically unusable. And of course, I could never deal with this. And this is a program I use, you know, every day, you know, Monday through Friday when the stock market is open. And I can't have this not working because it could be dangerous, right? [laughter] I need to be able to get in and out of uh some of the trades that I'm doing. So, that is a deal breaker for me. And then I just tried to close the uh window. And where did that popup go? Right. The pop-ups sometimes are appearing behind the window. And that's for various programs. You can actually see this with my file manager. Let's go to a guey file manager like PC man. I'm going to go down here to this test file and I'm just going to hit the delete key on my keyboard and it gives me a confirmation. Do you really want to move that test file to the trash can? Yes or no. I'm going to choose no. Uh so that works there when it's full screen. But when I do it in floating mode, get the window in floating. And now hit the delete key. Where is the pop-up window that's saying, hey, yes or no? Well, it's behind the window, right? And that is extremely annoying. This happens in a lot of programs. These popups, I've got a lot of popups that don't work right in OBS. Like, if I need to change settings in OBS, I'll, you know, click the little settings cog wheel. But the window, where's the window? Well, it's behind the main window. Like, I've got to drag windows around to finally find the little dialogue boxes. And that's a deal breaker. I mean, that's annoying enough. That would bother me. But the fact that uh that my trading platform just doesn't work at all. And I use that practically every day would prevent me from using uh Qile on Wayland as a daily driver just yet. Now, other than that, the actual window manager itself, you know, the tiling and the layouts and the widgets and everything, all of that seems to work. Uh, you know, I pull up my web browser, everything in the web browser, of course, you know, web- based, you know, all that's fine. Uh, for the most part, I would say, you know, it's like 95% of the way there. So, does QTL on Whan works? Yeah, it kind of works. Like, it's it's getting close. And, you know, probably I would think, you know, a year, maybe two years out, it'll be to the point where maybe I could move over to it and live in it full-time. You know, I wouldn't do it right now because it just doesn't make any sense because I'm not gaining anything. If anything, I'm giving up a lot, right? because I'm basically I would be adding all of these headaches to my life. You know, programs not quite working right. And for what advantage? No real advantage. And I say no real advantage because uh for me X11 and Wayland don't do too much. I don't have any kind of exotic, you know, like monitor setups that, you know, maybe Whan would provide an advantage for me. Like you got different refresh rates and different screen orientations and resolutions on various multimonitors. all of my multimonitor setups, I'm using the same monitor for all three monitors. They're the same refresh rates and the same resolutions and all of that. So, X11 Whan, you know, it doesn't offer me any real advantages, but it would offer me a hell of a lot of headaches, right? A lot of heartache and pain moving to Whan right now, but I am pretty excited. I was actually pretty happy spending the last couple of days trying to get this to work and I will keep playing around in it. One of the things with having a a Whan session in Qile, I can log in between the two. I can log out of the Wayland session and log into the X11 session and vice versa. Matter of fact, right now I'm using two different configs, one for X11 and one for Whan, I can actually write my Q-tile config in such a way that, you know, through some if statements and things that hey, if the display server is X11, do this. If it's Whan, do that. So uh you could have one config that handles both the X11 and the Whan sessions if you write it in such a way. One final thing I need to mention is uh I don't have a cy tray obviously here in the Qile session either. One of the things with X11 I have a cy tray widget and I do have Nexcloud the desktop client for Nexcloud open all the time. And I've got a couple of other things like Flameshot and things like that that are not as important, but I use NexCloud all the time. And I really have grown used to having that NexCloud cyst tray widget there. And now not having a cy tray. Like I don't even know if the next cloud desktop client is running on my system or not. Let me open up a terminal here. So let me I'm just going to run a kill all nextcloud just to see if it's running. No process was found. So, it's not even running right now cuz it can't run because it's a cyr outlet and that's a problem cuz it syncs files between various machines of mine. So, that's another issue I'd have to deal with. But that's it for this video. Before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Matt, Steve, George, Dar, Lee, Mark, Methos, Urion, Peace, Arch of Door, Roland, Morento, and Abuntu, and Willie. These guys, they're the producers of this episode. They're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this episode about getting Coutile to run on Whan wouldn't have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and want to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software like, subscribe to Dro Tube over on Patreon. Peace, guys.