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Switch from X / IceWM to Wayland / Gnome shell #1868

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@mchf mchf commented Jan 7, 2025

Problem

No problem, just willing to use Wayland and Gnome shell

Solution

  • removed IceWM package(s) and configuration
  • removed (some - see later) X related packages
  • installed gnome-shell, gnome-kiosk and other stuff
  • provided configuration for gnome-shell / gnome-kiosk

Caveats

  1. during development it turned out that Wayland / Gnome is unusable in VirtualBox. Mutter - a wayland display server used by Gnome (or some underlying piece of stack like drivers or so) terribly crashes (core dump or freeze) in 9.5 cases out of 10. Rest of the development was done in libvirtd / virt-manager and QEMU. A discussion with a SUSE's Graphical software engineer turned there were some issues with Mesa drivers. That's where those 0.5 of working cases gets from. After Christmas vacation it started working even in VirtualBox. so probably something got fixed in the meantime. However, it still behaves like frozen in VirtualBox (e.g. you cannot pick a product, click a button or do a whatever interaction with GUI - no reaction).

  2. It seems that "Wayland with Gnome" in TW still needs pieces of X. At least one service / script checks for existence of /usr/bin/X. If not present, service crashes with status=6/NOTCONFIGURED. I also found some discussion in Arch Linux forum which kind of confirms that. So far it is not clear whether it can be workarounded by creating the above path manually or there is really a need of X server pieces to be present. X server however is not in dependencies of wayland packages, it has to be added manually. The workaround is in TBD state ;-)
    Update: Seems that creating /usr/bin/X manually is enough and we can get rid of X11 completely then.

  3. firefox --kiosk doesn't work in wayland - shows black screen . Confirmed on various distributions and desktop environments (not only Gnome). It was confirmed even on bare metal not only in virtualization. It could be related to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1894338 and according to the discussion it could be fixed by a newer release of firefox. Without the --kiosk option everything works. So, check of the fix is another TBD.

  4. last TBD is to check whether whole Gnome pattern is neeaded or if it is possible to pick just some packages. However, this is going to be a bit time consuming.

Everything what made any sense was checked even on common OS TW with GNOME installation (so especially (2))

Testing

  • Tested manually

Screenshots

Agama installer in virt-manager running in Wayland / Gnome shell:
agama-installer-gnome-shell

@mchf mchf requested a review from imobachgs January 7, 2025 13:50
@mchf mchf force-pushed the switch-to-wayland-and-gnome-shell branch 3 times, most recently from 57949e7 to 72511ae Compare January 8, 2025 06:03
@mchf mchf force-pushed the switch-to-wayland-and-gnome-shell branch from 75b2715 to d436e14 Compare January 10, 2025 10:09
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