If you watched enough of the Muppet Show long ago, like I did, then “the continuing stooory, of a cat .. who has gone to the dogs” should trigger Pigs in Space memories. Like a good(?) soap opera, Wayland on FreeBSD just keeps giving material for a new episode, so let’s take a look at recent changes.

I should emphasize again that much of the actual work is being done by other people: much of the time I’m just the monkey clicking things and then complaining on various instant-messanger channels. My favorite response is “that’s fixed already”.

  • Charm Time Tracker (deskutils/charmtimetracker) hasn’t had an upstream release for some time, but there is a patch fixing a crashes-always-after-a-minute on Wayland. It has a downside: idle detection doesn’t work on Wayland (er .. maybe just in KDE Plasma) at all. This will be good for my efficiency numbers.
  • Focus-follows-mouse could be tricked by slowly moving the cursor from one window to another. Reported, fixed upstream for 5.22 and backported to 5.21.4 for FreeBSD for me (being a packager has it’s advantages).
  • Cursor-weirdness was my own fault for fiddling too much with settings. Simplifying the settings made things better. I think I saw one odd cursor – shifted over by one pixel, with wrap-around – this week, but can’t reproduce it.
  • VirtualBox is unhappy, both as a Wayland client and as a XWayland client, in KDE Plasma Wayland but reportedly also in Sway; this shows there are still some specialized protocols to come up with for the special cases like (Full-Screen) VMs.

Until I hit the VirtualBox problem, I had spent all week in Wayland doing the things I always do – building new UI bits in Calamares, hacking on KDE Frameworks, doing FreeBSD ports work and doing web-front-end work for some LDAP tomfoolery – and just didn’t notice. It’s in great shape for me. Huh, maybe this soap opera has a happy ending?