this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2025
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I stumbled upon this post regarding an earlier rant about wayland, but now it seems fine, according to the author.

After using Linux for nearly 5 years, using both depending on distros defaults, I have to admit that I never got the core/main/game changing differences between wayland and x11.

To be said, that I also dont do fancy linux things other than basic sysadmin stuff and from time to time repair the mess my curiosity left behind.

Could somebody explain the differences between those two and afterwards maybe also say some words about what this has to do with the difference between window managers and desktop environments?

I am also happy about links to good blog posts or stuff, that target this very questions (as long as the questions make sence of course). Thanks beforehand :)

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Looks like XDG Desktop Portal is using dbus and expects it: https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/docs/common-conventions.html

XDG Desktop Portal uses D-Bus in a slightly uncommon way, due to the potentially long-running nature of some of its requests.

And for the one user in your link https://snoo.habedieeh.re/r/voidlinux/comments/1471jbk/why_do_i_need_to_start_sway_with_dbusrunsession/jnxpxz7/?context=3#jnxpxz7 stating instead using d-bus, would use seatd, I assume it has compatibility with d-bus. He recommends to uninstall d-bus in that case. I have no idea what seatd can do and if this is applicable to other distributions than Void Linux. So unfortunately I don't know more than you. It makes sense that some sort of messaging is required in sandboxed environments.

Funny enough I just looked in my Archlinux based system and look what we have, seatd is installed already. And dbus is also installed.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago

If you have installed wlroots, that's why. Wlroots has a hard dependency on libseatd, which is provided by seatd. Labwc also directly depends on it. Sway as well can use seatd as both documented by sway itself, and its arch wiki, but for some reason it doesn't directly depend on it, though it depends on wlroots, :). This is not a problem on arch since the seatd service can co-exist with logind/systemd, and on arch you can use the seatd service combined with libseatd for software build on top of libseatd, and users on arch can then choose between seatd or policy kit on that software. On other non systemd distros like artix, the seatd daemon is in conflict with logind (on artix it's extracted from systemd), precisely because you can get away without logind as long as you use acpid to provide some of the functionality logind also provides besides session administration. Not sure if besides wlroots on archthere's additional software depending on seatd. Several wayland compositors are based on wlroots, which attempts to somehow offer a standard for compositor and applications developers.

So it might be xdg-desktop-portal behaves differently for sandboxed apps such as flatpak ones than regular apps, hmm. So I'd still like to know how required d-bus is...

Thanks a lot !