Hey y’all
So I’ve been a big anti-Wayland shill around here but decided to finally give it a shot, I installed Debian 12 with GNOME, and can’t seem to get Plank working.
Without the Plank dock, GNOME is unusable, and KDE refuses to autostart Guake (does not save the setting in autostart), and when it works it seems broken (stuck to the left side of the screen).
These are fundamental apps to me for any decent Linux laptop use. What gives? Is there an alternative?
You could start maintaining Plank yourself.
Making it work on Wayland isn’t simple. It would literally need to be redone from the ground up.
Damn that’s a shame. Hopefully Wayland gets rewritten so middleware stops breaking compatibility for the end-user
Wayland isn’t a program. Wayland is a set of protocols that allow a program to write to the display. Your desktop or window manager writes to the display and then your apps talk to the desktop that then draws content on the screen.
My point is that Wayland has a totally different design so apps simply will never be wayland native without significant work. However, older X apps run just fine on Wayland via Xwayland which is a X server that runs on wayland. The limitation with Xwayland is that X apps can only see other X apps and things like a dock will be broken.
As far as Plank goes the project is pretty much dead as far as I can tell. It doesn’t have any commits since 2019 which is a bad sign.