Wayland server and its complexity against the legendary X.Org

Hello All,

This post explains some of the differences between the old and stable Xorg - the open source implementation of the X Window System and Wayland.

Also I write this post to explain some of the problems that I faced before getting back into Xorg from Plasma to Wayland.

I have been using GNU/Linux and Linux variants from the year 2004. I am one person who believed in the theory that UI is not the first important thing, than the functionality in itself.

I started my Linux journey with a RHEL 7.1 with I think 4 floppy disks to load and unload the OS and not even persistent to some extent.

Then it was Fedora Core 1 - also called FC1.

Now I am in constant use with Debian * distros. I dont feel like using RPM based distributions, I think just out of usage practice. I also am a big fan of Arch Linux and I use the rolling version of it.

Ok now, coming to the main point, was reading a post from omgubuntu.co.uk and got interested in a post of installing an icon theme called papirus icon theme. And at the same time I read another post from the same site about the latest 3 years dev release of Amarok 2.9.0

Dont know what messed up my Display, I was using Plasma Desktop in 17.10. I had to accept 2 ppa repos to install papirus and amarok (though without success).

All of a sudden, I could observe zombies all over the session and I had no other chance but restart my system. Thats the moment and my sddm and plasma was destroyed. I could not recover and ended up with a lots of unmet dependencies issues.

With great struggle, I could connect to internet through CLI (Ctrl + Alt + F1) and with this below command:

sudo /etc/init.d/networking start

Ok now with internet connected, I had no other option to purge the installed deb files, but I had to finally uninstall sddm and used gdm to login into any other DM.

I also made sure that I removed those 2 third party repos from the sources.list.d folder. I gave an update as well.

Wayland is the latest display compositor written by Intel people and is believed to replace the Xorg as a whole in the pretty future.

I had to read a while before using Wayland... The architecture setup between wayland and xorg though looks similar; its not. You can compare architecture differences at wayland.freedesktop.org site.

Now finally with all these struggle, I could somehow connect to the Unity DM with wayland. Now the new problem started, I got inverted display every 2 or 3 minutes.

I could not figure out the exact problem with this peculiar issue. But I googled to see that its more related with HP laptops and kinda related to Wayland.

Finally to remove the unmet dependencies, I had to use dpkg command with a P option. I finally reinstalled Plasma but in vain of display again.

Now finally I had to settle to the legendary Xorg with this time Unity.

All in peace...

Let me know if anyone is more specifically interested to know how I could figure out and get  back to Xorg with Unity. I can explain them the steps in detail and is beyond the scope of this blog post.

Tc,
Ananth G S