6 mo. ago • 72%

Can't figure out how to get Plank working on Wayland

Hey y'all

So I've been a big anti-Wayland shill around here but decided to finally give it a shot, I installed Debian 12 with GNOME, and can't seem to get Plank working.

Without the Plank dock, GNOME is unusable, and KDE refuses to autostart Guake (does not save the setting in autostart), and when it works it seems broken (stuck to the left side of the screen).

These are fundamental apps to me for any decent Linux laptop use. What gives? Is there an alternative?

41 comments

Dash-to-Plank specifically says it does not support Wayland. Plank has had an issue open about Wayland support since 2016, and they still haven't done it. Can't blame Wayland.

What's your use case for Plank? My guess is you're using GNOME wrong.

18
- What is Dash-to-Plank? I just use Plank the dock app.
  
  1
  
  https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4198/dash-to-plank/
  
  3
- Lemmy never fails to surprise me with its toxicity.
  
  -9
  
  "you're using it wrong" seems more like the official motto of Wayland whenever anything that isn't working on it is brought up.
  
  4
  
  True, but the creator of this post is worse
  
  3
  
  I wouldn't blame Lemmy for a few bad apples like Wildbus though. There are plenty of good people here.
  
  -2
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/307/dash-to-dock/

I use this and its worked great

16
Just echoing what others said, Plank does not run on Wayland. You can install the "Dash to Dock" Gnome extension for a very similar experience (minus widgets). If using KDE, consider replacing Guake (which is GTK) with Yakuake (Qt).

12
You could try Yakuake instead of Guake in KDE?

8
- Sure! Is it missing any features from Guake, or is it just some clone fork?
  
  2
  
  Pretty sure Yakuake is the OG?
  
  4
  
  I'm afraid that I've never used either Guake or Yakuake so I don't know either of their feature sets 😁
  
  3
  
  Neither is a fork of the other, but Yakuake came first. I assume it has more features, since that's how it usually goes with KDE apps vs GNOME apps. Haven't tried Guake, tho.
  
  2
  
  You might try Dash to Dock also:
  
  https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/307/dash-to-dock/
  
  1
Hi,

It it possible that Plank doesn't work with Wayland, plain and simple.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/plank/+bug/1632841

The latest version dates back to 2019.

I think Dash to dock is used often.

For Guake the version in Bookworm is from 2022 and you may need to set an environmental variable or perhaps it isn't built with Wayland support on Debian.

You could hit up the Debian forums for a better answer.

7
- That's unfortunate. Will have to switch back to X.Org until this is fixed by the Wayland/XWayland developers, is there any clue as to why it specifically wouldn't work? If it's updated as recently as 2019 then I'd have expected Wayland to fix this by now, not like I'm trying to run a DOS game or something haha!
  
  -8
  
  Will have to switch back to X.Org until this is fixed by the Wayland/XWayland developers
  
  This isn't the responsibility of “wayland developers”. The developers of an application need to adapt to the new API.
  
  12
  
  You could start maintaining Plank yourself.
  
  Making it work on Wayland isn't simple. It would literally need to be redone from the ground up.
  
  -1
The Dash to Plank dev doesn't want to support Wayland. You could use Dash to Panel or dash to dock instead, they've been the community favourites for years now.

Or of course you could use the standard Gnome workflow.

6
- I've never heard of either of these things and I've been in the community for decades, cheers. I only use Plank itself, not dash-to-x anything. I've no idea what that even means tbh as I'm an i3 user usually so I've been out of the GNOME game for a bit.
  
  -3
  
  if you're coming from i3, you may want to check out Sway instead.
  
  3
  
  I've never heard of either of these things and I've been in the community for decades, cheers.
  
  ...
  
  I've no idea what that even means tbh as I'm an i3 user
  
  1
Plank would need to be rewritten

4
Permanently Deleted

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