For me AutoKey is absolutely essential to my workflow. I have tons of text expansions and shortcuts to “remap” keys. E.g., respectively, typing dAt expands into 2025-05-08, 13:47:40 CEST, and pressing alt + k simulates the arrow down key.
Secondly there’s XScreenSaver which has so many wonderful (mathematical) visualizations that it would be a damn shame if these eventually get lost as Wayland gets more adoption.
None of these have Wayland alternatives as far as I know. For text expansion there’s Espanso, but it doesn’t support keyboard shortcuts yet.
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Xfwm. Taskbars are now wayland, but don’t autohide without the compositor supporting it.
I need to force keepass and some other things to x11 mode so that autotype and window detection works.
Gnome. No shell restart on wayland, and not planned.
Pardon?
GNOME defaults to Wayland. GNOME 49 is going to remove X11 support all together.
The inability to roll windows up into just the title bar, or to get Firefox to place each of its windows on the same virtual desktop as before, are major annoyances. Otherwise, Wayland runs better than I expected.
Session restore
RustDesk (remote desktop control) and Barriers (KVM-like server to control my laptop screen from my desktop just by moving mouse to that screen). Both of these are tightly integrated in my daily workflow and would be a hard loss.
There’s a modern fork of Barriers but I haven’t been able to get it working cross-platform yet. I know RustDesk is actively working to complete wayland support, but it’s not quite there yet.
What about Deskflow? Worked pretty well for me.
Nice! DeskFlow seems like exactly what I was looking for as my Barrier replacement. I have an annoyance with Wayland where it won’t remember my preference to allow mouse/kb sharing, but more importantly IT WORKS, and better yet it’s an active project still. THANK YOU!
I think Rustdesk for me as well. My main computer is a Windows laptop, but I use a few Linux laptops around the house to control it and others with Rustdesk. Alt+Tab works on the remote system in Gnome Classic (I think that’s what it’s called - says X11) but on the other options it performs switches locally only. Tested on Debian and Fedora.
I use rustdesk with wayland, works for me for everything i need it to. As for barriers, i believe input-leap works with wayland.
RustDesk on Wayland can’t run headless, which I need (unless they fixed already and I just haven’t noticed yet - I know they’ve been working on it!)
Yeah, Input-leap is the Barriers fork I was referring to. I need it to work on all platforms though, and I wasn’t able to get it working on macOS. I keep checking periodically tho (usually in response to posts like these - I wanna move Wayland like everyone else!)
Network transparency
Easystroke https://github.com/thjaeger/easystroke, please, please, please somebody pick the project, I’ll gladly pay a license to use it.
https://github.com/jersou/mouse-actions
It’s recommended by the easystroke dev too: https://github.com/thjaeger/easystroke/wiki
I tried Mouse Actions many times, just a different beast (many Easystroke users have the same opinion).
autokey
I accomplish the same thing with compose sequences, and by binding a keyboard shortcut in my desktop to call a script with
wtype. It’s not a cross-compositor solution though, as you’d have to manually setup binds in each of them.I don’t see much hope for this one-to-one unfortunately.
ydotool iirc
Check out xremap https://github.com/xremap/xremap
Balders Gate 3. Cannot get it to work on Wayland. No issues on X11.
Works for me in Wayland on Bazzite. Maybe depends on your distro and GPU drivers.
Same for me on Arch (btw)
I run basically all my games in gamescope, plus I get HDR for those games that support it.
I wasn’t able to get gamescope working while I was using an nvidia card, and haven’t tried yet with amd
XFCE, mostly.
keepassxc’s autotype
also, nvidia
KeepassXC work fine on Wayland with xwayland
There are still some quirks but it’s been generally fine for me with Nvidia, almost a year now.
i heard about that. sadly my gpu is so old the latest driver that supports it is the 470 driver
Well, you can hold onto that GPU for a little longer with X11. But it seems you’ll need an upgrade some time later. Though if you don’t game (aside from FOSS ones), Nouveau driver should do the job for your daily needs. However, it still needs time for Wayland.
the nouveau driver works fine except when it crashes for no clear reason after some hours of usage
Even on X11? I tried it on Wayland months ago to see its state and it was generally fine except gaming. Though the results still might depend on the card in use I guess.
Even on X11?
yup. i think it had something to do with video calls or screen sharing, which are essential at work
Hey, I’m in the same boat. Gigabyte GTX 670. Wayland was a sluggish mess, and same goes for nouveau with X11.
I bit the bullet after eight months of running Arch like this, and experimenting around with newer iGPUs in laptops, and bought a new radeon finally. Time to retire this ancient piece of tech.
670 is still better than nothing.
Hopefully it can find its way to someone else’s home on the cheap and still give them plenty of years of fun.
Talon voice.
Autokey.
Anydesk. (although rustdesk is probably going to replace that)
Talon voice though. I’ll need X11 for the rest of my life.
AwesomeWM, and xdotool.
That’s it. Oh and x-eyes of course
what do you use x-eyes for?
I don’t think that was entirely serious…
👀
https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.5/doc/man/man1/xeyes.1.html
Xeyes watches what you do and reports to the Boss.
Have you tried ydotools, which works on both Wayland and X?
There’s ydotool.
I find it’s not as reliable in targeting inputs, and you sometimes need to set the XDG_RUNTIME variable yourself.
wtypeis much better at this, but is limited to keystrokes
New hyprland patch can do pretty much all the xdotool stuff since they added a send key to window thing
You might be interested in river as a awesome replacement:
Absolutely none. On my setup everything runs fine either natively or with Xwayland.
Yeah, I think my sway config is around five years old now. The Wayland experience hasn’t been entirely without warts, but as someone who kind of just uses the desktop to drive a browser and a bunch of terminals, there’s not a whole lot of problems to run into either.
