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Desktops which support Wayland as of 2021
GustyGhost Nov 13, 2021
Wayland has been supported on Gnome for a few years by now and while it works well it is very heavy, softly steers one into the GTK/Gnome ecosystem and does too much hand holding. I've tried Sway but found I'm more of a DE guy than a WM guy. Is there any word on the street of Wayland support in any of the lighter desktop environments? Roadmaps?
mr-victory Nov 13, 2021
As far as I know, you have 4 choices:
  • GNOME

  • KDE Plasma

  • wlroots

  • Enlightenment


I won’t expect wayland support for any other DEs including Cinnamon, Mate, XFCE, LXDE, LXQt.

KDE Plasma’s wayland support is not entirely complete but works. You might find Plasma heavy.
wlroots is the basis for window managers like Weston and Sway. This is not what you are looking for.
Enlightenment and all of its native apps has experimental yet complete wayland support and it is very lightweight. It is not well-known (probably the least popular DE in this post) and might feel weird at the beginning but I guess the end result is worth it.
GustyGhost Nov 13, 2021
It looks like there is [url=https://github.com/lxqt/lxqt/issues/10]some movement on LXQt[/url] by riding on the work of KDE. I'll check these out on one of my testbed systems.
Xpander Nov 14, 2021
Theres wayland movement on MATE also. Several mate applications got wayland support. But yeah it will probably take some time before it can be used with wayland. By that time all the wayland quirks are probably fixed :)
PublicNuisance Nov 14, 2021
Mate added Wayland support for some of their programs in version 1.26.

"We added Wayland support for Atril, System Monitor, Pluma, Terminal and other components of the Desktop"

https://mate-desktop.org/blog/2021-08-08-mate-1-26-released/

I haven't tried using Wayland on mate yet though.
denyasis Nov 19, 2021
So all the recent talk of Wayland encouraged me to try Enlightenment again and see how it runs. I tried it several years ago and it was fast, but kinda different (especially with defaults)

Tumbleweed has a meta package and theme set-up that kinds gives it a Gnome 2 / XFCE / Old KDE vibe, complete with a taskbar!

Sadly the fun ends there. Wayland loaded and looked nice, but I had no input. No Keyboard. No Mouse. Not even the power button. I had to hard reset since nothing would work.

X11 wasn't much better, lot of lock-ups (which I don't remember last time I tried it). Steam basically locked up with a bunch of visual artifacts (I'm on Intel).

It was kinda disappointing given, when it did work, it was very fast and responsive. IDLE, it was using less than 200MB of RAM. XFCE right now is using about 350MB. I'll fool around with it some more, maybe I'm missing something odd.
tuubi Nov 21, 2021
Quoting: Guest
Quoting: mr-victoryI won’t expect wayland support for any other DEs including Cinnamon, Mate, XFCE, LXDE, LXQt.

i remember a few days ago a reddit user posted how he got xfce working on wayland. i think it is on r/linux but not sure.

https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap

They're working on it, but very slowly. Cinnamon basically has the same mindset. They're accepting code, but not working on this as a priority. Both will probably support Wayland by the time it's unavoidable. Mate seems to be further along, at least based on their messaging.
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