Firefox Is Going to Try and Ship with Wayland Enabled by Default

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • firefox-userchrome

    My Firefox userChrome

  • awesome-wlroots

    A curated list of tools and compositors for wlroots

  • If you are scripting-heavy user, I recommend trying out one of WMs based on wlroots (or implementing its custom protocols). Core Wayland protocols are designed with security in mind, which doesn't necessarily let you have all the automation fun. wlroots protocols bring back most of X11 capabilities at the cost of having similar security model.

    https://github.com/solarkraft/awesome-wlroots is a pretty nice list of various CLI utils you can use. Sadly I don't think anyone aimed to 1:1 replicate APIs of xdotool etc, so you will need to change the syntax in your scripts a bit.

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  • gamescope

    SteamOS session compositing window manager

  • One of the unfortunate things about Wayland is every compositor will have its own quality of implementation affecting things like latency.

    With XOrg, especially in the pre-compositing days, you could choose whatever WM you want and it wouldn't have any impact on the rendering performance of X clients. Once the Composite extension was added and everyone started running composited X desktops, that started to change, and the increased latency already started appearing - in an arguably worse architecture than Wayland because there were often three processes involved with lots of IPC per draw: X-Client->X-Server->X-Compositor->X-Server->CRTC. At least in Wayland it's more like Wayland-Client->Wayland-Compositor->CRTC.

    If you're unhappy with the rendering latency of your Wayland sessions, it may be worth trying alternative compositors... they likely vary significantly. The Valve/Steam folks have made a minimal one specifically optimized for games/low-latency [0]. I doubt the SteamDeck would be seeing as much success as it is if Wayland were so problematic in this department.

    [0]: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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