In my recent experiments with Wayland, I find my self still very much trying to decide on a decent panel.

At present, I am wrestling with the configs for sfwbar - mainly because the documentation seems fairly sparse. Lots other people seem to use it, though, so it must be possible to figure it out.

I'm currently struggling with three particular aspects:

1. How to prevent windows maximising over or under the bar. At the moment the bottom of all my windows is hidden under the panel.

2. Configuring some sort of network data for the widget. At the moment I have a very simple LAN icon which, as a tooltip, displays static information that I could easily obtain with a simple "ip a". What I really want is, at the very least, some way of monitoring when my interface is transferring data in one direction or the other. If it could tell me the amount of data that would be perfect. All I've been able to figure out so far from what docs there are is that it might be something to do with a NetStat function. How to use this function, however, is far from clear and I can't find examples.

3. How to get a bar on each of my monitors that, ideally, displays icons for only the windows on that monitor.

Any help gratefully received - thanks in advance!

I was, until recently, under the impression that it wasn't even worth bothering with wayland if you had an Nvidia GPU - as I do (GTX 1070).

There was a recent post somewhere, however, where someone talked about their experiences with wayland on an Nvidia system. In my shock - I thought I'd give it a go. Here are my impressions and also some questions.

Firstly, I was amazed at how easy it was. I decided to go with labwc because I use and love openbox on xorg, so I thought I'd be comfortable there. I installed it and, well, it just worked. I was a little underwhelmed at the completely blank screen I saw, but then I realised that it was actually working when I right clicked and a (tiny) menu appeared offering me the choices of reconfiguring or exiting.

I was somewhat surprised to not have any kind of mouse cursor at all. This was fixed by adding WLR_NO_HARDWARE_CURSORS=1 to ~/.config/labwc/environment. I'd like a better fix for this, but it seems to work for the moment.

Most of the apps I've tried run directly on wayland instead of XWayland - steam being the only exception so far. Steam seems to run well enough, though and the one game I've actually tried (Hollow Knight) ran, as far as I could tell in 5 minutes, perfectly.

I've since been messing around with various things like waybar and setting up the menu on my desktop and it seems to all be working well at the moment.

I used albert as my launcher on openbox, but that doesn't seem to work on wayland. I found a post about a guy who managed to get it to work, but it sounds like the performance simply wasn't worth the effort. So my first question: is there a launcher similar to albert that runs on Wayland? All my efforts to find something have so far come up blank. I mean, there are several options for launchers, but none as nice as albert that I've found yet… Fuzzel has potential, but it still doesn't look as good.

One of the main things I miss from openbox is the slit. As far as I can tell - it simply isn't supported on labwc or any other compositor I've been able to find - is that true? I can probably work around it using waybar modules or similar, but still…

I think that covers everything so far - I would certainly appreciate any tips/suggestions that any of you might have though!

Edit: After playing around in Wayland for more than a day now, I have to report that, unfortunately, Steam has unacceptable flickering/rendering issues. It only seems to affect some games, but it also affects the client. As far as I can tell, it's a known issue that doesn't have a fix or a usable workaround. sigh

This is something of a deal breaker for me - but, when it's fixed, at least I'll be ready for Wayland.

Also - for those suggesting I try Plasma. I appreciate the suggestion and screenshots do seem to show that it's beautiful, but I'm really a fan of the Openbox type aesthetic - which is why I've gone with labwc.

Edit #2: Also VCVRack flickers a lot as well - which, now that I think of it, is the only other app I've tried (I think) that runs on XWayland...

I'm looking for recommendations for a dotfile manager - there are so many out there I've got a bit of options paralysis!

I'd like a system that can backup all my dotfiles - with version management - and, if I nuked my home directory, could restore them all for me with a simple command.

Thanks in advance for you suggestions!