Sway 1.4 Wayland Compositor Brings VNC Support, Initial Bits For MATE Panel Support

[HEX0]

Its truly a shame that sway is a clone of i3, a really terrible window manager, instead of something much more usable like dwm, xmonad..

Sorry, could you explain how sway (or i3) for that matter is less useable than dwm or xmonad? I haven't tried those but been running sway for a few years and personally been quite happy with it since version 1 when it switched from wlc to wlroots.

[royce]

The wlroots lot don't usually wait around for new wayland standards to be proposed and accepted, if something they want working is missing from wayland, they implement it as a wlr protocol then propose it to wayland for adoption. I very much like this proactive approach - they get feedback early from people who are technically minded that actually use it on their day to day setups.

That said, here's an xdg-desktop-portal backend for wlroots, but I've never tried to make it work and indeed don't know if it's complete.

Gosh I'm sounding like a fanboy now.

[juno]

I’m not sure I can follow you. What do you mean it is a problem to have a working intermediate solution while xdg-desktop-portal is going to be implemented?
This isn’t the one standard that just works, let alone was it when they designed wlr-screencopy 2 years ago.

So if wf-recorder is not something that's aiming for commonality, it's not really a good solution.

You know, wf-recorder just implements the wlr-screencopy protocol, which was an actual proposal for commonality.

[shmerl]

But I don't consider that a problem. Each DE ships their own screenshot tools anyway, even when it wasn't needed under X. In fact, I think KDE implemented something with PipeWire, but this doesn't make it obligatory for Wayland in general.

That's a major problem. The whole point of Pipewire was to provide a common method that could work with every Wayland compositor. Implementing N-teen methods in each application that needs to work with screen capturing (to support different compositors) because there is no common one is a horrible idea.

So if wf-recorder is not something that's aiming for commonality, it's not really a good solution. I.e. I personally don't really care if it's going to be Pipewire or something else, as long as all compositors provide it as a common method and developers can use that, instead of duplicating their efforts. Kind of like libinput. It's not mandatory for Wayland, but it's the common way to handle input in Wayland sessions.

[juno]

I thought Pipewire is needed for handling that on Wayland. Never heard of slurp and wf-recorder. Are those generic Wayland tools? I'm using KDE for the reference.

slurp is just a tool to interactively select a region on the screen and getting the coordinates, which can then be used for things like screenshots or screen capturing.

wf-recorder is specifically for wlroots-based compositors. They have a protocol for this: https://github.com/swaywm/wlr-protoc...nstable-v1.xml

But I don't consider that a problem. Each DE ships their own screenshot tools anyway, even when it wasn't needed under X. In fact, I think KDE implemented something with PipeWire, but this doesn't make it obligatory for Wayland in general.

[royce]

One feature that Michael didn't mention that's made a whole world of difference to me personally is the inclusion of a smart scaling filter for xwayland apps. It will use nearest neighbour scaling (instead of linear) on integer scale factor displays making these apps much sharper. I can finally now use my IDEs properly on my laptop screen.

All in all an excellent release.

[royce]

The most important thing about VNC is to run multiple sessions on one PC (like vncserver, xvfb+x11vnc, rdp_stub+vnc). Is this possible yet with any specific Wayland compositor?

Yes, sway 1.4 can. It's on the release notes.

[BwackNinja]

I thought Pipewire is needed for handling that on Wayland. Never heard of slurp and wf-recorder. Are those generic Wayland tools? I'm using KDE for the reference.

Pipewire is used by some applications, like https://github.com/benzea/gnome-network-displays . Pipewire in turn uses xdg-desktop-portal (more specifically org.freedesktop.portal.ScreenCast) which is in the process of being implemented for wlroots-based compositors here: https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desk...l-wlr/issues/1 .

KDE already supports the xdg-desktop-portal, so you can use tools that use Pipewire. If you were using a wlroots-based compositor, you could still use slurp ( https://github.com/emersion/slurp ) which lets you select a region on the screen in conjunction with wf-recorder ( https://github.com/ammen99/wf-recorder ) which would let you record and encode that region.

[kpedersen]

Its truly a shame that sway is a clone of i3, a really terrible window manager, instead of something much more usable like dwm, xmonad..

I agree. I am still surprised that there isn't a completed clone of dwm since the code is much simpler than i3. That said, with Wayland you need to implement *MUCH* more than just a window manager so I guess in the future the open-source community will be lacking this kind of great software.

The most important thing about VNC is to run multiple sessions on one PC (like vncserver, xvfb+x11vnc, rdp_stub+vnc). Is this possible yet with any specific Wayland compositor?

[shmerl]

I'm not sure if you're talking about (live) screen sharing, but as for actual screen capturing, it's the easiest thing to do on sway with slurp and wf-recorder. I don't know why you'd need PipeWire for that.

I thought Pipewire is needed for handling that on Wayland. Never heard of slurp and wf-recorder. Are those generic Wayland tools? I'm using KDE for the reference.