RebeccaBlackOS with Wayland instead of X11

Standard Fare

When it comes to the traditional desktop environments, Enlightenment E20 in particular on the Debian derivative, this very resource-saving and fast GUI has already reached an advanced stage of development with Wayland similar to KDE and Gnome. It shows many optical effects that will also run on less powerful hardware without noticeable system load.

Enlightenment even offers several setting dialogs that let you tweak the look of the desktop when launching the system: For example, you can not only set the font sizes but also certain focusing methods for single windows, or you can enable the taskbar at the bottom of the screen. Additionally, the interface comes up with a dialog for customizing the keyboard layout, and there are four virtual desktops that you can easily page between.

In testing, however, we also noticed poor integration of KDE applications: Although we were able to launch these applications from the menus, they then froze in most cases. This forced us to quit by manually killing the relevant process in a terminal. The lack of uniformity in the individual program windows and partly missing window elements tarnished an otherwise positive impression of our Enlightenment session (Figure 5).

Figure 5: Enlightenment E20 also suffers from a lack of uniformity in the way it displays active windows.

Compatible

Because the Wayland Protocol requires modifications to the individual client applications due to its divergence from the X11 design, developers must modify their applications for use with Wayland. These modifications have been added for many core components. If this customization is missing, however, an intermediate layer called Xwayland is used – a modified X server that runs transparently. RebeccaBlackOS lets you call such applications via xwaylandapp launcher Weston panel.

After you click on the application, a terminal pops up, in which you need to enter a command with a syntax of xwaylandapp <program> --<parameter> . The application requires root privileges; you need to add wlsudo in front of the actual start command. If several programs are running, and you want to see which of the active applications requires the Xwayland intermediate layer, then the output from the xlsclients command will show you a list of corresponding applications.