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?

  • @wildbus8979@sh.itjust.works
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    7 months ago

    Dash-to-Plank specifically says it does not support Wayland. Plank has had an issue open about Wayland support since 2016, and they still haven’t done it. Can’t blame Wayland.

    What’s your use case for Plank? My guess is you’re using GNOME wrong.

  • antsu
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    126 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).

  • bbbhltz
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    77 months ago

    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.comOP
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      7 months ago

      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
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        6 months ago

        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
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          26 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.comOP
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          -26 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 :(

      • Possibly linux
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        -16 months ago

        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.

          • Possibly linux
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            06 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.

  • @TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    The Dash to Plank dev doesn’t want to support Wayland. You could use Dash to Panel or dash to dock instead, they’ve been the community favourites for years now.

    Or of course you could use the standard Gnome workflow.

    • @LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      -37 months ago

      I’ve never heard of either of these things and I’ve been in the community for decades, cheers. I only use Plank itself, not dash-to-x anything. I’ve no idea what that even means tbh as I’m an i3 user usually so I’ve been out of the GNOME game for a bit.

      • @leopold
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        36 months ago

        if you’re coming from i3, you may want to check out Sway instead.

          • @leopold
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            16 months ago

            it’s a drop-in replacement for i3 on wayland

              • @leopold
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                6 months ago

                i3 doesn’t support Wayland, not the other way around. It’s an X11 window manager. Not sure why you would expect it to work on Wayland.

                • @LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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                  06 months ago

                  Oh I just thought if this change to Wayland is being pushed so hard by peeps here then that would mean at least the basics work on it haha, well that makes sense.

                  Not sure why

                  Don’t really know what the technical differences are as I’m not a Linux expert by any means especially not when it comes to the relationship between the kernel and the display server, (Def gonna try to learn more with LFS soon tho!) or why Wayland hasn’t added support for window managers yet.

                  Gonna have to stick with Xorg until the Wayland folks make Xorg software compatible