Wayland is not happening for me

Due to issues with HiDPI (High Dots-Per-Ince) on my Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon, I wanted to try Sway and Hyprland, which were touted to handle HiDPI displays transparently.   The original issue was mainly that my go to i3 tiling window manager does not pay well with HiDPI resolution.  Text was unreadable for some apps.   

 It is true.  Out of the box, Sway---especially installed as a complete distribution of Manjaro Sway Edition---worked nicely.  Many key bindings were compatible with i3.  In a day or two, I was up and running.  

Along the way, I tried Hyprland, an overly decorated tiling option.  Hyprland works really well.  It was able to run applications like RawTherapee that did not work well for me on the Sway install.  Even the flatpak of Entangle Photo Manager---an essential package for me---worked well.  Not so for Sway.  Today I found an application that does not work with Hyprland, either.  

 I have maintained i3 on my desktop linux box.   It seemed ok to use either of the two Wayland options on my laptop; but jumping from system to system is too painful, when some apps don't work on one, but work fine on the other.  

 Wayland has some downsides, imho.  Configuration is a little too nerdy.  

 When wayland first arrived on the scene, I wondered what could be so bad about X11 that these changes were needed.  I'm getting tired of jumping through update hoops; that's why I quit Gentoo a long time ago.   I now learn that Wayland, slick as it may be, is actually not a drop-in replacement for X11, which I am now used to.

 Apparently Xwayland, often mentioned as a way to run X11 applications on Wayland machines, is not as simple to use as promised by Sway users.  There are some other issues, that apparently X11 compatibility do not solve.  I have not figured out how to configure Xwayland on Sway.   

 Goodbye, Wayland, at least for now.   Maybe I'll try you again, someday.  But why?

 

 

Trying out Sway, an i3wm workalike for Wayland

 A good move I recently made was to sell my MacBook Pro, M2; and purchase a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon, several years old.  One of the best features of this new laptop is a HiDPI (High Dots Per Inch) screen with a resolution of something like  3200x1800.  It's a remarkable display for other reasons, which I will not go into here.  The blacks are incredible.  

 With my usual Manjaro i3wm, this means that the type is almost unreadable.  With the guidance of several source on the Internet, I was able to cajol the system into somewhat useful settings that most software works fine with.  Along they way, several references passed me by about Wayland, a newer graphical setup that X11.  

 

I am reluctant to make huge changes to a long time stalwart system, but finally I have begun to experiment with Sway, a workalike system to i3, and Hyprland, a fancier tiling window manager, working on top of Wayland.  Both, I am happy to report, work nicely with this  HiDPI screen.  

 

So I installed Manjaro's Sway edition.  So far, so good.  Now I'm at the point of trying to configure pop-up/drop-down floating windows for Kitty, Emacs, R, orage (probably impossible, but this is the best little calendar app I have found.  Once I have set the month, and popped it back up, the same month is show.  Very useful for calendar work), and a ham radio clock, that is actually of little use.  

HiDPI is not a problem.  

 

When I install a new distro, one of the first things I do  is set the user id to "1004", as well as the groupid.  Consequently, the home directory of my previous setup and user are completely accessible, because this was the case for the previous login as well.  I never duplicate the login, out of worry that the dot file tweaks will be incompatible with anything different.  

 

So far, so good.