Try New Technology

With recent package and kernel updates I have had X11 hang on my main screen a lot lately. I have also had the login screen not display anything on my 2nd monitor (even after logging in) and I had to logoff and it would fix itself. Instead of trying to figure out why, I figured it was a great time to just switch to Wayland (all AMD hardware) and it feels so much smoother and faster…everything I do.

I already am running Manjaro KDE. I installed the plasma-workspace package, but that may not have been needed as I didn’t know about the switch from X11 to Wayland being in the lower-left corner of the login screen when first booting up. I know it was there for certain after the plasma-workspace was loaded, but didn’t check before and don’t care to find out.

I did need to adjust some Kwin Windows Rules to get some applications to always open where I wanted them, which meant mostly updating the “Window class (application)” and removing the setting which put them in the 2nd screen since as far as I can tell the screens (2 of them) are named and not numbered in Wayland. The only application I can’t get locked to a certain location is Yakuake – if I find a fix I’ll write about it.

I also found out about the fun little application xeyes (package xorg-xeyes) which helps me know if anything is still rendering with X11 instead of Wayland. If the eyes follow you cursor then you are over an X11 applications (Steam Client is currently an X11 only app)

Anyways I just wanted to post this here in case anyone else was wondering these things. So far, so great with Wayland…of course I am using a modern AMD CPU/GPU (7700X/6950XT) which as I understand is great for Wayland.

If you ever need to disable the 2 “thumb” buttons on a mouse within Manjaro KDE (X11) then you will want to test and then apply the changes to stay after reboot with the following steps.

From Console:
xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 0 0 10"

(in my case buttons 8 and 9 were the two “thumb” buttons)

If that disables those buttons then you need to create the ~/.Xmodmap file and put the following line in it:
pointer = 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 0 0 10

The above file and line will ensure those buttons stay disabled after logout/reboot.

If you need to swap around buttons or disable different buttons you can use xev which is part of the xorg-xev package. With xev launches you can click the buttons on the mouse within the Event Tester window and watch what button is mapped to which number

Example:
ButtonRelease event, serial 40, synthetic NO, window 0x3400001,
root 0x3e0, subw 0x0, time 37309475, (1,245), root:(2746,1129),
state 0x110, button 1, same_screen YES

If you install a Windows application/program through Bottles on Linux then you may need to know where the files are at. Below is the location (at least on Manjaro KDE and I am pretty sure Steam Deck as well):

~/.var/app/com.usebottles.bottles/data/bottles/bottles/Winbox/drive_c/users/

Disabling or changing mouse buttons when using the Wayland compositor vs. X11 is something I needed to figure out.

This can be done on Wayland though the input-remapper application, which has a GUI interface.

Follow the Installations instructions, and if you are on Manjaro like me, then you may need to use sudo pacman -S yay to be able to install input-remapper. I needed to answered “Y” to install the missing packages.

Once I had Input Remapper installed I opened the GUI and I was able to create a new Preset for my mouse and once I Recorded my inputs to chance I just needed to set the “Enter your output here” field to “disable” and the buttons stopped working as I needed.

NOTE: Piper is another great option.

Suddenly after an about back in November I noticed the monitors no longer going to sleep. After digging around I found that the System Settings > Power Management > Energy Savings was throwing errors (I think the exact error was “kde power management service not running /usr/lib/org_kde_powerdevil”) about the service not running and therefor the panels would not be interacted with and all of the setting were disabled. Searching over a couple weeks finally came up with a solution thanks to a post on the Arch Linux BBS (ref: [SOLVED] KDE plasma power management not working / starting):

• Edit /usr/lib/systemd/user/plasma-powerdevil.service — I used Kate since it will correct sudo when saving
• Find the “TimeoutSec=” variable (line 10) — I changed mine to “10sec“
• Logoff or Reboot
• System Settings > Power Management > Energy Savings should now be working as expected

NOTE: I ended up applying this fix a few times due to an update seeming breaking things again. It has been “holding” fine with all the updates through December though. More details can be found on the Manjaro forums here.