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?

possiblylinux127,

Plank would need to be rewritten

antsu,

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,
@bbbhltz@beehaw.org avatar

Hi,

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

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, (edited )

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, (edited )

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,
@bbbhltz@beehaw.org avatar

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,

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,

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,

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

possiblylinux127,

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, (edited )

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,

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,

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

LainTrain,

What’s Sway? Another twm?

leopold,

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

LainTrain,

Wayland doesn’t even support i3? Jesus

leopold, (edited )

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,

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

Altomes,

extensions.gnome.org/extension/307/dash-to-dock/

I use this and its worked great

wildbus8979, (edited )

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.

GolfNovemberUniform,
@GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml avatar

Lemmy never fails to surprise me with its toxicity.

taladar,

“you’re using it wrong” seems more like the official motto of Wayland whenever anything that isn’t working on it is brought up.

atzanteol,

“Wayland - it’s not us, it’s you”

secret300,

Eh more of a gnome thing than a Wayland thing

GolfNovemberUniform,
@GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml avatar

Ikr

0oWow, (edited )

I wouldn’t blame Lemmy for a few bad apples like Wildbus though. There are plenty of good people here.

GolfNovemberUniform, (edited )
@GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml avatar

I don’t blame Lemmy even though the official instance (and therefore devs) is kinda sus. They even delete discriminatory comments that I report quite quickly. The thing is that I see toxic comments all the time and what surprises me is that often they’re replies to non-provoking and absolutely reasonable posts/comments (this case is not anywhere near the worst I’ve seen). That means the people behind them are just very aggressive which still hurts me a lot even though I lost hope for humanity quite some time ago. I guess I see a bit more % of them in the wild than you do for some reason

possiblylinux127,

True, but the creator of this post is worse

GolfNovemberUniform,
@GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml avatar

How so? By not supporting Wayland? Bruh

possiblylinux127,

Well no, I just think this person has the same problematic altitude many of us have. We expect a large amount or work from bunch of Foss developers and we feel that we know everything there is to know about Linux.

I’m saying they are worse because I can relate.

GolfNovemberUniform, (edited )
@GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml avatar

The last past is weird but ok. Though if you think that being toxic is better than expecting too much from FOSS developers, I will do my best to argue as much and as hard as possible.

LainTrain,

What is Dash-to-Plank? I just use Plank the dock app.

wildbus8979,

extensions.gnome.org/extension/…/dash-to-plank/

its_me_gb,

You could try Yakuake instead of Guake in KDE?

LainTrain,

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

its_me_gb,

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

optissima,
@optissima@lemmy.world avatar

Pretty sure Yakuake is the OG?

leopold,

Well, technically the OG would be Quake, but Yakuake did come before Guake.

optissima,
@optissima@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah fair point

leopold,

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.

0oWow,

You might try Dash to Dock also:

extensions.gnome.org/extension/307/dash-to-dock/

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