I have been putting it off for ages, it's been on my to-do list for
months. Anytime I saw it pop-up I would just ignore it either due to
laziness, not interested or just general procrastinating. However, not
this weekend! Wayland will be the de facto and soon enough replace Xorg
am sure.
My setup is heavily terminal based with the usual tooling you see these
days. Suckless based tools such as dwm, dmenu and st as the main WM
tooling. Mutt for email, all kinds of feeds via Newsboat, MPV for
videos, browsing with Qutebrower and Amfora for Gemini. I was hoping
with such minimal GUI usage the switch over would be easy enough.
A quick look around and it looks like I would need to completely switch
dwm, dmenu and st over to a wayland equivalent.
I do have a few edge case applications I use but upon checking, they all
work under wayland. These were Qutebrowser (Browsing), Performance
Portfolio (Accounting) and Calibre (Ebooks), result!
First, the window manager! As it turns out there is a wayland port of
dwm called dwl, there seems to be a few trivial changes, but they are
basically like for like. On a sidenote, I had been tweaking dwm recently
and it really became a bit of a pain in the arse building, restart dwm
all the time. With this still at the back of my mind, anticipating that
I will be doing it again with dwl, I thought why not try out something
new. Enter Sway.
Sway is the wayland port of i3 with some common patches people used
rolled in. A look at the config file setup for Sway made it look very
straight forward to replicate my dwm keybinds and layout. Another
benefit being I could install the packages via the AUR instead of
building it myself, this felt like a plus after many many years of
compiling from source.
I kinda hate st, truth be told. You need to add in a few patches to the
build as out of the box it's very limiting. So on that I was happy to
find a replacement for st. Two options were on the table for me,
Alacritty and Foot. I ended up going with Foot, it seemed to be a lot
faster and lightweight compared to Alacritty, according to their own
benchmark results. I also wasn't sold on the idea of it being GPU
accelerated. Alacritty also clams to be faster than all the rest, but
they didn't seem to provide the actual benchmarks, just the tool they
used. Whereas Foot had a whole ton of information, benchmarks and
screenshots explaining why its fast as fuck.
Again the application was in the AUR and with a live reload config file
it was trivial to set up. Interestingly, the out of the box config would
have been fine, only thing I really changed were the colours and font.
dmenu, this one I spent most of my time researching and testing out
various alternatives. At first, I was just going to use rofi but soon
found out that it doesn't have native wayland support and uses Xwayland
instead. There is a port called wofi too, I tried both of them out.
I don't know, I just didn't like them, they seemed to flashy, the config
for them seemed tedious. I then tried out bemenu which is based on
dmenu, this was the one. Yet again I just needed to install the AUR
package, the config can be set via an environment variable called
BEMENU_OPTS. After playing about with it I just added this to my bashrc
profile and I was done. So simple, love it.
So far I have had no crashes or any issues at all. One thing that I have
noticed is MPV playback seems way smoother and scrolling in Qutebrowser
is tear-free. So far so good, and I really don't feel like I am missing
anything switching over.
Another side, my installed packages has reduced massively, all
X packages have been removed as they are no longer needed. My dotfiles
directory looks a lot leaner without all the dwm, herbe, st and dmenu
builds. Trivial I know.
I guess now I just continue as is for a few more months and see what
I think then!
