Back to X11

Earlier this year I upgraded my Lenovo laptop with a new, larger SSD. Video takes a staggering amount of disk space. In the process I decided to completely re-install everything. It had probably been at least five years since I’ve done that.

Normally I would never say anything about this because really, the software you run is just a tool. If it works for you then that’s all that matters. However, since I once disregarded this otherwise excellent advice and wrote about how I use Arch Linux and Sway, I feel somewhat obligated to follow up and report that I still love Arch, but I no longer run Sway or Wayland.

I went back to X.org. Sorry Wayland, but much as I love Sway, I did not love wrestling with MIDI controller drivers, JACK, video codecs and hardware acceleration and all the other elements of an audio/video workflow in Wayland. It can be done, but it’s more work. I don’t want to work at getting software to work. I’m too old for that shit.

I want to open a video and edit. I want to plug in a microphone and record. If it’s any more complicated than that — and it was for me in Wayland with the mics I own — I will find something else. Again, I really don’t care what my software stack is, so long as I can create what I want to create with it.

So I went back to running Openbox with a Tint2 status bar. And you know what… I really like it.

Wayland was smoother, less graphically glitchy, but meh, whatever. Ninety-five percent of the time I’m writing in Vim in a Urxvt window. I even started browsing the web in the terminal half the time. I need smooth scrolling and transitions like I need a hole in my head.

That said, I did take all of Sway’s good ideas and try as best I could to replicate them in Openbox. So I still have the same keyboard shortcuts and honestly, aside from the fact that Tint2 has more icons than Waybar, and creating “desktops” isn’t dynamic, I can’t tell much difference. Even my battery life seems to have improved in X11, and that’s why I switched to Wayland in the first place, was the better battery life I was getting. Apparently that’s not true with this laptop (a Lenovo Flex 5, as opposed to the X270, which does get better battery life under Wayland).

Anyway, there you have it. X11 for the win. At least for me. For now.