Now it is official. Gnome will remove X11 support until version 50!. I always stayed with X11 because it simple felt more stable than Wayland. Or, to be fair: Applications simply felt to be more performant with X11 than with Wayland.
Plank
I am very fond of Plank. A very lightweight an minimalistic Dock. Unfortunately, it does not natively support Wayland. But, at least now, it is possible to run Plank with Wayland, anyway. There are two things you'll have to do. First, make sure you have XWayland installed. In Debian it is as simple as running sudo apt install xwayland. This is a little extra package that makes it possible to run X11 applications with Wayland. Second, you must overrule Plank in detecting it environment. With the following command I could successfully run Plank and so far I could not make out any differences with respect to X11:
env XDG_SESSION_TYPE=x11 GDK_BACKEND=x11 plank &
My current Wayland version is 1.23.1. So, if it does not work for you, maybe you'll need to upgrade.
Autokey
Another X11-only application I do not want to miss ist Autokey. You can make it run under Wayland like this:
env -u WAYLAND_DISPLAY autokey &
One caveat will be that Autokey will then only be able to intercept X11 applications. Since I use ist mostly for custom shortcuts when using e.g. Google Chrome, I can live with this limitation... for the moment.
Google Chrome
To run Google Chrome in X11 compatible mode, I use this command:
google-chrome-stable --enable-features=VaapiVideoDecoder --ozone-platform=x11 --use-gl=egl &
Make sure you have the necessary drivers installed. On Debian the minimum (with all its dependencies) are:
- libva-drm2
- libva-wayland2
- libva-x11-2
Running Google Chrome in this way allowed me to use Autokey the same way I used it when using X11.
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