Can't figure out how to get Plank working on Wayland
Can't figure out how to get Plank working on Wayland
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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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.
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!
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.
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.
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 :(
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.