this post was submitted on 10 May 2024
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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?

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[–] Altomes@lemm.ee 10 points 6 months ago
[–] antsu@lemmy.wtf 8 points 6 months ago

Just echoing what others said, Plank does not run on Wayland. You can install the "Dash to Dock" Gnome extension for a very similar experience (minus widgets). If using KDE, consider replacing Guake (which is GTK) with Yakuake (Qt).

[–] its_me_gb@feddit.uk 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

You could try Yakuake instead of Guake in KDE?

[–] LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Sure! Is it missing any features from Guake, or is it just some clone fork?

[–] its_me_gb@feddit.uk 3 points 6 months ago

I'm afraid that I've never used either Guake or Yakuake so I don't know either of their feature sets 😁

[–] leopold@lemmy.kde.social 2 points 6 months ago

Neither is a fork of the other, but Yakuake came first. I assume it has more features, since that's how it usually goes with KDE apps vs GNOME apps. Haven't tried Guake, tho.

[–] bbbhltz 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Hi,

It it possible that Plank doesn't work with Wayland, plain and simple.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/plank/+bug/1632841

The latest version dates back to 2019.

I think Dash to dock is used often.

For Guake the version in Bookworm is from 2022 and you may need to set an environmental variable or perhaps it isn't built with Wayland support on Debian.

You could hit up the Debian forums for a better answer.

[–] LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

That's unfortunate. Will have to switch back to X.Org until this is fixed by the Wayland/XWayland developers, is there any clue as to why it specifically wouldn't work? If it's updated as recently as 2019 then I'd have expected Wayland to fix this by now, not like I'm trying to run a DOS game or something haha!

[–] d_k_bo@feddit.de 13 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

Will have to switch back to X.Org until this is fixed by the Wayland/XWayland developers

This isn't the responsibility of “wayland developers”. The developers of an application need to adapt to the new API.

[–] bbbhltz 2 points 6 months ago

Also, for Plank at least, I have a feeling that development has stopped so waiting won't help. You'll need to find an alternative.

[–] LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 6 months ago

Or they could develop the API in such a way it doesn't break every app for no reason. See the situation with PulseAudio for example.

Either way, hard to believe Wayland is still useless all these years later, can't even run Plank :(

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Damn that's a shame. Hopefully Wayland gets rewritten so middleware stops breaking compatibility for the end-user

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 1 points 6 months ago

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.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 1 points 6 months ago

Plank would need to be rewritten