Find Your Footing After Installing Arch Linux
34 comments
·January 21, 2025dark__paladin
ranger207
IME Wayland handles mixed DPI, fractional scaling, and mixed scaling far better than X did, which is important for me since I have a couple of differently sized and different resolution monitors
kfghkdghje
security: you can think of x11 as being similar to how memory worked back in the dos world. any x11 client can look at the screen content of any other client, can steal/monitor inputs, etc. in wayland you have a framework called Portals that allows you to grant this access on a limited basis and ensure an indicator is displayed when the screen is being recorded/shared
performance: holy shit it's so buttery smooth, especially if you're on an intel or amd graphics stack. under x11, it felt like it was impossible to actually eliminate tearing everywhere. under wayland (my experience is limited to sway, gnome, and most recently kde) tearing just ceases to be a thing.
jraph
> Wayland may well replace X in the future, but at the time of writing X is still the de-facto standard for a window system
Is it? The article was written end of last year. I believe the most widespread DEs on the most widespread distros now use Wayland by default, don't they?
There's now stuff that just works better on Wayland today. I've kept X11 for a very long time, probably until 2023, because of little annoying details, but now it just works. I think the only remaming thing that annoys me is some apps like Kate not coming to the to the foreground when invoked.
Things are slowly going to stop working on X11. Perhaps not today, but we are talking about setting up a new Linux install.
Especially something like Arch that has all the recent versions.
epoxia
I haven't touched Wayland because of a lack of window control tools, but don't know if the landscape has changed. Specifically to replace autokey, xdotool, wmctrl. I know kdotool exists for kde only which would cover most of xdotool, but I don't know about text expansion (autokey). Isn't most of Wayland's keybindings just remapping and not macros? I've written my own code to read dev files with elevated permissions so I think I'm fine with macros, but that might be too much work for other people. Would appreciate some Wayland users experience.
MrDrMcCoy
For text expansion, I'm using Espanso on KDE Wayland. The text expansion works fine, but its ability to paste image files only works in certain apps for reasons I haven't gotten to the bottom of yet.
yashasolutions
Wayland users seems very happy with it and it is great. I don't understand the animosity toward X. Why do wish X to die so hard? I am using X for twenty years. It works great. It is stable and well documented. Is wayland a better option? Could be. But since when cannot there be 2 good options? Why does it bother there is an alternative to wayland?
3abiton
I recently got a good laptop with great hardware, so I opted for Wayland (with hyprland). It is still finniky. One main issue is Xwayland dependency that feels a bit warped. Another one is gaming support (Wine still heavily depends on X11). Then you got nvidia. It's a lot of small things. Overall, big improvement since I gave it a try 2 years ago, it's evolving fast, and I would argue nearly "there". But not yet.
jraph
> One main issue is Xwayland dependency that feels a bit warped.
I believe XWayland is there to stay for retro compatibility. That seems fine to me, retro-compatibility seems like a good thing. That would not be unlike XQuartz on Mac, which doesn't make us question Mac's own display server.
> I would argue nearly "there". But not yet.
I fully believe there are use case that are not fully covered indeed.
Gaming would be one (I don't know whether gaming on Linux, outside the Steam Deck, is actually niche). But doesn't Wine work well with XWayland? (until they fully move to Wayland, which I think I've read they are in the process of doing)
I would guess NVidia would concern mainly gamers and people working with ML (maybe those people don't actually need NVidia to display stuff though, and are actually fully covered by the iGPU - I don't know).
It seems to me running an actual X11 session is now needed for niche things, but I might be wrong.
3abiton
> I believe XWayland is there to stay for retro compatibility. That seems fine to me, retro-compatibility seems like a good thing. That would not be unlike XQuartz on Mac, which doesn't make us question Mac's own display server.
Yes but if more than 50% of the GUI softwares you run fallback to XWayland (including terminals), it makes no sense.
> But doesn't Wine work well with XWayland? (until they fully move to Wayland, which I think I've read they are in the process of doing).
Wine is already a compatibility layer, so adding XWayland on top of it introduces overheads and additional lags and visual artifacts in some games. There is an experimental version of wine 9.22+ that should theoretically run natively on Wayland, but it still crashes 100% of the time for me. Nvidia drivers were also notorious with Wayland, but they are getting better progressively.
I think the meme is nearly here: this might be the year of the Linux gaming desktop.
ta988
Wine just released in the last days a new version with excellent Wayland support.
Fnoord
A couple of years ago (2-3), I had a fully functioning Linux desktop with Wayland and SwayWM. Even automation worked, key rebinds worked, touchpad (approx like it works on macOS). Lots of software with great performance, too. Like Alacritty, for example. I could even run apps remotely over Waypipe (I ran Android emulator remotely). I did have to run a Windows application in XWayland IIRC. Was on Arch, too. This was after I had been running dual-boot on my PC at home, running Ubuntu with GNOME with Wayland as default. But what I do not use, is Nvidia GPUs!
nextos
The good thing about Wayland is that security is much better. In X, a compromised application can easily steal information. Sandboxing is hard. The bad thing about Wayland is that changes to the architecture are incompatible with window managers, which require a rewrite.
Things like XMonad or StumpWM are relatively popular among Arch users so that is why X is still featured prominently in the Wiki. I use those two, but on NixOS, and I find it annoying there is no simple migration route. Waymonad never took off. StumpWM/Mahogany seems to be getting there, but AFAIK there is no release in the horizon yet.
aboardRat4
Does CJK input work for you in each and every program?
astaunton
Not a criticism of the article / documents but an observation that aligns with others comments. For new users it is probably not going to be an issue to select a different window manager / desktop experience.
Boot Arch ISO
Run archinstall
select desktop / window manager you wish to install
No requirement to manually setup X or Wayland, as the scripts / install will take care of it for you. I also understand that this is not 100% in the ethos of using Arch (where you should really understand all the packages going into your system and how all the configuration is done).
I would also include that the following is also a good resource for learning Arch. https://arcolinux.com/ (although is is a derivative of Arch this site has alot of documentation that users can learn from)
a-arbabian
I switched to Wayland (hyprland) last year and have never regretted it, until I need to load up an Electron app. What a shit framework.
greenavocado
Arch Linux is the best distro for KDE enjoyers. I recommend going all in on KDE, especially with its companion app "KDE Connect" on your smartphone
bigstrat2003
Unfortunately KDE is currently broken on Arch. The screen locker freezes when you wake the screen back up (see https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=483094). Hopefully they fix the bug soon but it's been almost a year so I don't have a ton of hope.
gh02t
Not using Arch anymore, but I did have this issue recently on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I switched KDE to Wayland (defaulted to X11 for some reason) and the issue went away. Worth a try if you haven't already.
bigstrat2003
Thank you for the tip! Unfortunately I can't use Wayland because it breaks the AFK detection in Discord. I would actually prefer to use Wayland, but Discord Linux support is real bad. That said I'll have to take a look because maybe there's a solution that didn't exist last time I tried. And worst case scenario, I can at least decide which bug is less bad.
jraph
openSUSE is quite good as well, any specific reason Arch would be better for KDE than openSUSE?
saidinesh5
Dunno about the opensuse variant of rolling release distro (tumbleweed?), but usually You'd want Arch to avoid the 6 month "upgrade to the new version of the distro and find the ppa/user repos for the software i couldn't find in official repos" headaches.
Also Arch KDE is more or less upstream, while i remember Suse polishing the theme etc .. Back when i tried it 15 years ago
MrDrMcCoy
Tumbleweed is really close to upstream and doesn't need extra repos to stay on the latest versions. They do ship their own theme, but vanilla breeze is only a few clicks away. Tumbleweed is mostly tied with Arch in my book for favorite distro. They both have papercuts and things that work better than the other in different areas, but on the whole are very close.
eklavya
In my opinion the best KDE experience would be KDE neon by the KDE developers.
MrDrMcCoy
They don't want you to use the full Ubuntu package repos nor any PPAs, though. They expect you to be content with just KDE apps and Flatpak. Flatpak in no way covers my needs on its own, and I got tired of fighting with 3rd-party repos on it. If I have to run Ubuntu and want up-to-date KDE, I run Tuxedo OS. That's what my work laptop is on, and has been pretty great overall. The rest of my machines are on one rolling release or another (Debian Testing, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, or Arch).
bdhcuidbebe
I think new users to linux should skip x11 entirely as it is out of fashion and only adds friction.
sway instead of i3 if you insist on tiling wm (i do, but it is a fringe option and another pain point for newbies)
tmtvl
Written for laptop users. I'd raise an eyebrow at going with i3 rather than... I don't know... Gnome or KDE or MATE or Cinnamon or Xfce or, well, anything a little more user-friendly.
wonger_
FWIW, the author explains his reasoning about desktop environments in the middle of this page: https://ejmastnak.com/tutorials/arch/startx/
Basically recommending to start minimal, with the freedom to configure/add things afterwards.
null
I still use X11 because it just works. I understand that Wayland is the "latest and greatest", but I genuinely do not understand why I need to upgrade yet. Could someone provide an actual tangible example as to why Wayland is "better" than X11? I've only ever heard hand-wavy explanations.