apt install \
    brightnessctl \
    foot \
    gammastep \
    gdm3 \
    grim slurp \
    pipewire-pulse \
    sway \
    swayidle \
    swaylock \
    wdisplays \
    wev \
    wireplumber \
    wlr-randr \
    xdg-desktop-portal-wlr

Why switch? I originally held back from migrating to Wayland: it seemed like a complicated endeavor hardly worth the cost. It also didn't seem actually ready. But after reading this blurb on LWN, I decided to at least document the situation here. The actual quote that convinced me it might be worth it was:

It s amazing. I have never experienced gaming on Linux that looked this smooth in my life.

... I'm not a gamer, but I do care about latency. The longer version is worth a read as well. The point here is not to bash one side or the other, or even do a thorough comparison. I start with the premise that Xorg is likely going away in the future and that I will need to adapt some day. In fact, the last major Xorg release (21.1, October 2021) is rumored to be the last ("just like the previous release...", that said, minor releases are still coming out, e.g. 21.1.4). Indeed, it seems even core Xorg people have moved on to developing Wayland, or at least Xwayland, which was spun off it its own source tree. X, or at least Xorg, in in maintenance mode and has been for years. Granted, the X Window System is getting close to forty years old at this point: it got us amazingly far for something that was designed around the time the first graphical interface. Since Mac and (especially?) Windows released theirs, they have rebuilt their graphical backends numerous times, but UNIX derivatives have stuck on Xorg this entire time, which is a testament to the design and reliability of X. (Or our incapacity at developing meaningful architectural change across the entire ecosystem, take your pick I guess.) What pushed me over the edge is that I had some pretty bad driver crashes with Xorg while screen sharing under Firefox, in Debian bookworm (around November 2022). The symptom would be that the UI would completely crash, reverting to a text-only console, while Firefox would keep running, audio and everything still working. People could still see my screen, but I couldn't, of course, let alone interact with it. All processes still running, including Xorg. (And no, sorry, I haven't reported that bug, maybe I should have, and it's actually possible it comes up again in Wayland, of course. But at first, screen sharing didn't work of course, so it's coming a much further way. After making screen sharing work, though, the bug didn't occur again, so I consider this a Xorg-specific problem until further notice.) There were also frustrating glitches in the UI, in general. I actually had to setup a compositor alongside i3 to make things bearable at all. Video playback in a window was laggy, sluggish, and out of sync. Wayland fixed all of this.

Wayland equivalents This section documents each tool I have picked as an alternative to the current Xorg tool I am using for the task at hand. It also touches on other alternatives and how the tool was configured. Note that this list is based on the series of tools I use in desktop. TODO: update desktop with the following when done, possibly moving old configs to a ?xorg archive.

Window manager: i3 sway This seems like kind of a no-brainer. Sway is around, it's feature-complete, and it's in Debian. I'm a bit worried about the "Drew DeVault community", to be honest. There's a certain aggressiveness in the community I don't like so much; at least an open hostility towards more modern UNIX tools like containers and systemd that make it hard to do my work while interacting with that community. I'm also concern about the lack of unit tests and user manual for Sway. The i3 window manager has been designed by a fellow (ex-)Debian developer I have a lot of respect for (Michael Stapelberg), partly because of i3 itself, but also working with him on other projects. Beyond the characters, i3 has a user guide, a code of conduct, and lots more documentation. It has a test suite. Sway has... manual pages, with the homepage just telling users to use man -k sway to find what they need. I don't think we need that kind of elitism in our communities, to put this bluntly. But let's put that aside: Sway is still a no-brainer. It's the easiest thing to migrate to, because it's mostly compatible with i3. I had to immediately fix those resources to get a minimal session going:

i3	Sway	note
set_from_resources	set	no support for X resources, naturally
new_window pixel 1	default_border pixel 1	actually supported in i3 as well

That's it. All of the other changes I had to do (and there were actually a lot) were all Wayland-specific changes, not Sway-specific changes. For example, use brightnessctl instead of xbacklight to change the backlight levels. See a copy of my full sway/config for details. Other options include:

• dwl: tiling, minimalist, dwm for Wayland, not in Debian
• Hyprland: tiling, fancy animations, not in Debian
• Qtile: tiling, extensible, in Python, not in Debian (1015267)
• river: Zig, stackable, tagging, not in Debian (1006593)
• velox: inspired by xmonad and dwm, not in Debian
• vivarium: inspired by xmonad, not in Debian

Status bar: py3status waybar I have invested quite a bit of effort in setting up my status bar with py3status. It supports Sway directly, and did not actually require any change when migrating to Wayland. Unfortunately, I had trouble making nm-applet work. Based on this nm-applet.service, I found that you need to pass --indicator for it to show up at all. In theory, tray icon support was merged in 1.5, but in practice there are still several limitations, like icons not clickable. Also, on startup, nm-applet --indicator triggers this error in the Sway logs:

nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.325 [INFO] [swaybar/tray/host.c:24] Registering Status Notifier Item ':1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet'
nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.327 [ERROR] [swaybar/tray/item.c:127] :1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet IconPixmap: No such property  IconPixmap 
nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.327 [ERROR] [swaybar/tray/item.c:127] :1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet AttentionIconPixmap: No such property  AttentionIconPixmap 
nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.327 [ERROR] [swaybar/tray/item.c:127] :1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet ItemIsMenu: No such property  ItemIsMenu 
nov 11 22:36:10 angela sway[313419]: info: fcft.c:838: /usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSans.ttf: size=24.00pt/32px, dpi=96.00

... but that seems innocuous. The tray icon displays but is not clickable. Note that there is currently (November 2022) a pull request to hook up a "Tray D-Bus Menu" which, according to Reddit might fix this, or at least be somewhat relevant. If you don't see the icon, check the bar.tray_output property in the Sway config, try: tray_output *. The non-working tray was the biggest irritant in my migration. I have used nmtui to connect to new Wifi hotspots or change connection settings, but that doesn't support actions like "turn off WiFi". I eventually fixed this by switching from py3status to waybar, which was another yak horde shaving session, but ultimately, it worked.

Web browser: Firefox Firefox has had support for Wayland for a while now, with the team enabling it by default in nightlies around January 2022. It's actually not easy to figure out the state of the port, the meta bug report is still open and it's huge: it currently (Sept 2022) depends on 76 open bugs, it was opened twelve (2010) years ago, and it's still getting daily updates (mostly linking to other tickets). Firefox 106 presumably shipped with "Better screen sharing for Windows and Linux Wayland users", but I couldn't quite figure out what those were. TL;DR: echo MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 >> ~/.config/environment.d/firefox.conf && apt install xdg-desktop-portal-wlr

How to enable it Firefox depends on this silly variable to start correctly under Wayland (otherwise it starts inside Xwayland and looks fuzzy and fails to screen share):

MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 firefox

To make the change permanent, many recipes recommend adding this to an environment startup script:

if [ "$XDG_SESSION_TYPE" == "wayland" ]; then
    export MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1
fi

At least that's the theory. In practice, Sway doesn't actually run any startup shell script, so that can't possibly work. Furthermore, XDG_SESSION_TYPE is not actually set when starting Sway from gdm3 which I find really confusing, and I'm not the only one. So the above trick doesn't actually work, even if the environment (XDG_SESSION_TYPE) is set correctly, because we don't have conditionals in environment.d(5). (Note that systemd.environment-generator(7) do support running arbitrary commands to generate environment, but for some some do not support user-specific configuration files... Even then it may be a solution to have a conditional MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND environment, but I'm not sure it would work because ordering between those two isn't clear: maybe the XDG_SESSION_TYPE wouldn't be set just yet...) At first, I made this ridiculous script to workaround those issues. Really, it seems to me Firefox should just parse the XDG_SESSION_TYPE variable here... but then I realized that Firefox works fine in Xorg when the MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND is set. So now I just set that variable in environment.d and It Just Works :

MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1

Screen sharing Out of the box, screen sharing doesn't work until you install xdg-desktop-portal-wlr or similar (e.g. xdg-desktop-portal-gnome on GNOME). I had to reboot for the change to take effect. Without those tools, it shows the usual permission prompt with "Use operating system settings" as the only choice, but when we accept... nothing happens. After installing the portals, it actualyl works, and works well! This was tested in Debian bookworm/testing with Firefox ESR 102 and Firefox 106. Major caveat: we can only share a full screen, we can't currently share just a window. The major upside to that is that, by default, it streams only one output which is actually what I want most of the time! See the screencast compatibility for more information on what is supposed to work. This is actually a huge improvement over the situation in Xorg, where Firefox can only share a window or all monitors, which led me to use Chromium a lot for video-conferencing. With this change, in other words, I will not need Chromium for anything anymore, whoohoo! If slurp, wofi, or bemenu are installed, one of them will be used to pick the monitor to share, which effectively acts as some minimal security measure. See xdg-desktop-portal-wlr(1) for how to configure that.

Side note: Chrome fails to share a full screen I was still using Google Chrome (or, more accurately, Debian's Chromium package) for some videoconferencing. It's mainly because Chromium was the only browser which will allow me to share only one of my two monitors, which is extremely useful. To start chrome with the Wayland backend, you need to use:

chromium  -enable-features=UseOzonePlatform -ozone-platform=wayland

If it shows an ugly gray border, check the Use system title bar and borders setting. It can do some screensharing. Sharing a window and a tab seems to work, but sharing a full screen doesn't: it's all black. Maybe not ready for prime time. And since Firefox can do what I need under Wayland now, I will not need to fight with Chromium to work under Wayland:

apt purge chromium

Note that a similar fix was necessary for Signal Desktop, see this commit. Basically you need to figure out a way to pass those same flags to signal:

--enable-features=WaylandWindowDecorations --ozone-platform-hint=auto

Email: notmuch See Emacs, below.

File manager: thunar Unchanged.

News: feed2exec, gnus See Email, above, or Emacs in Editor, below.

Editor: Emacs okay-ish Emacs is being actively ported to Wayland. According to this LWN article, the first (partial, to Cairo) port was done in 2014 and a working port (to GTK3) was completed in 2021, but wasn't merged until late 2021. That is: after Emacs 28 was released (April 2022). So we'll probably need to wait for Emacs 29 to have native Wayland support in Emacs, which, in turn, is unlikely to arrive in time for the Debian bookworm freeze. There are, however, unofficial builds for both Emacs 28 and 29 provided by spwhitton which may provide native Wayland support. I tested the snapshot packages and they do not quite work well enough. First off, they completely take over the builtin Emacs they hijack the $PATH in /etc! and certain things are simply not working in my setup. For example, this hook never gets ran on startup:

(add-hook 'after-init-hook 'server-start t) 

Still, like many X11 applications, Emacs mostly works fine under Xwayland. The clipboard works as expected, for example. Scaling is a bit of an issue: fonts look fuzzy. I have heard anecdotal evidence of hard lockups with Emacs running under Xwayland as well, but haven't experienced any problem so far. I did experience a Wayland crash with the snapshot version however. TODO: look again at Wayland in Emacs 29.

Backups: borg Mostly irrelevant, as I do not use a GUI.

Color theme: srcery, redshift gammastep I am keeping Srcery as a color theme, in general. Redshift is another story: it has no support for Wayland out of the box, but it's apparently possible to apply a hack on the TTY before starting Wayland, with:

redshift -m drm -PO 3000

This tip is from the arch wiki which also has other suggestions for Wayland-based alternatives. Both KDE and GNOME have their own "red shifters", and for wlroots-based compositors, they (currently, Sept. 2022) list the following alternatives:

• gammastep: in Debian, panel indicator, seems good
• clight: uses the webcam to probe for light
• wl-gammaray: fork of gammastep, runs as a DBUS service
• wlsunset: WNPP

I configured gammastep with a simple gammastep.service file associated with the sway-session.target.

Display manager: lightdm gdm3 Switched because lightdm failed to start sway:

nov 16 16:41:43 angela sway[843121]: 00:00:00.002 [ERROR] [wlr] [libseat] [common/terminal.c:162] Could not open target tty: Permission denied

Possible alternatives:

• lightdm elephant greeter (I tried slick-greeter and ukui-greeter, neither could start the Sway session)
• greetd and QtGreet (former in Debian, not latter, which means we're stuck with the weird agreety which doesn't work at all)
• sddm: KDE's default, in Debian, probably heavier or as heavy as gdm3

Terminal: xterm foot One of the biggest question mark in this transition was what to do about Xterm. After writing two articles about terminal emulators as a professional journalist, decades of working on the terminal, and probably using dozens of different terminal emulators, I'm still not happy with any of them. This is such a big topic that I actually have an entire blog post specifically about this. For starters, using xterm under Xwayland works well enough, although the font scaling makes things look a bit too fuzzy. I have also tried foot: it ... just works! Fonts are much crisper than Xterm and Emacs. URLs are not clickable but the URL selector (control-shift-u) is just plain awesome (think "vimperator" for the terminal). There's cool hack to jump between prompts. Copy-paste works. True colors work. The word-wrapping is excellent: it doesn't lose one byte. Emojis are nicely sized and colored. Font resize works. There's even scroll back search (control-shift-r). Foot went from a question mark to being a reason to switch to Wayland, just for this little goodie, which says a lot about the quality of that software. The selection clicks are a not quite what I would expect though. In rxvt and others, you have the following patterns:

• single click: reset selection, or drag to select
• double: select word
• triple: select quotes or line
• quadruple: select line

I particularly find the "select quotes" bit useful. It seems like foot just supports double and triple clicks, with word and line selected. You can select a rectangle with control,. It correctly extends the selection word-wise with right click if double-click was first used. One major problem with Foot is that it's a new terminal, with its own termcap entry. Support for foot was added to ncurses in the 20210731 release, which was shipped after the current Debian stable release (Debian bullseye, which ships 6.2+20201114-2). A workaround for this problem is to install the foot-terminfo package on the remote host, which is available in Debian stable. This should eventually resolve itself, as Debian bookworm has a newer version. Note that some corrections were also shipped in the 20211113 release, but that is also shipped in Debian bookworm. That said, I am almost certain I will have to revert back to xterm under Xwayland at some point in the future. Back when I was using GNOME Terminal, it would mostly work for everything until I had to use the serial console on a (HP ProCurve) network switch, which have a fancy TUI that was basically unusable there. I fully expect such problems with foot, or any other terminal than xterm, for that matter. The foot wiki has good troubleshooting instructions as well. Update: I did find one tiny thing to improve with foot, and it's the default logging level which I found pretty verbose. After discussing it with the maintainer on IRC, I submitted this patch to tweak it, which I described like this on Mastodon:

today's reason why i will go to hell when i die (TRWIWGTHWID?): a 600-word, 63 lines commit log for a one line change: https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot/pulls/1215

It's Friday.

Launcher: rofi rofi?? rofi does not support Wayland. There was a rather disgraceful battle in the pull request that led to the creation of a fork (lbonn/rofi), so it's unclear how that will turn out. Given how relatively trivial problem space is, there is of course a profusion of options:

Tool	In Debian	Notes
alfred	yes	general launcher/assistant tool
bemenu	yes, bookworm+	inspired by dmenu
cerebro	no	Javascript ... uh... thing
dmenu-wl	no	fork of dmenu, straight port to Wayland
Fuzzel	ITP 982140	dmenu/drun replacement, app icon overlay
gmenu	no	drun replacement, with app icons
kickoff	no	dmenu/run replacement, fuzzy search, "snappy", history, copy-paste, Rust
krunner	yes	KDE's runner
mauncher	no	dmenu/drun replacement, math
nwg-launchers	no	dmenu/drun replacement, JSON config, app icons, nwg-shell project
Onagre	no	rofi/alfred inspired, multiple plugins, Rust
menu	no	dmenu/drun rewrite
Rofi (lbonn's fork)	no	see above
sirula	no	.desktop based app launcher
Ulauncher	ITP 949358	generic launcher like Onagre/rofi/alfred, might be overkill
tofi	yes, bookworm+	dmenu/drun replacement, C
wmenu	no	fork of dmenu-wl, but mostly a rewrite
Wofi	yes	dmenu/drun replacement, not actively maintained
yofi	no	dmenu/drun replacement, Rust

The above list comes partly from https://arewewaylandyet.com/ and awesome-wayland. It is likely incomplete. I have read some good things about bemenu, fuzzel, and wofi. A particularly tricky option is that my rofi password management depends on xdotool for some operations. At first, I thought this was just going to be (thankfully?) impossible, because we actually like the idea that one app cannot send keystrokes to another. But it seems there are actually alternatives to this, like wtype or ydotool, the latter which requires root access. wl-ime-type does that through the input-method-unstable-v2 protocol (sample emoji picker, but is not packaged in Debian. As it turns out, wtype just works as expected, and fixing this was basically a two-line patch. Another alternative, not in Debian, is wofi-pass. The other problem is that I actually heavily modified rofi. I use "modis" which are not actually implemented in wofi or tofi, so I'm left with reinventing those wheels from scratch or using the rofi + wayland fork... It's really too bad that fork isn't being reintegrated... For now, I'm actually still using rofi under Xwayland. The main downside is that fonts are fuzzy, but it otherwise just works. Note that wlogout could be a partial replacement (just for the "power menu").

Image viewers: geeqie ? I'm not very happy with geeqie in the first place, and I suspect the Wayland switch will just make add impossible things on top of the things I already find irritating (Geeqie doesn't support copy-pasting images). In practice, Geeqie doesn't seem to work so well under Wayland. The fonts are fuzzy and the thumbnail preview just doesn't work anymore (filed as Debian bug 1024092). It seems it also has problems with scaling. Alternatives:

• gwenview: KDE viewer, in Debian
• koko: KDE viewer, not in Debian?
• imv: x11/wayland viewer, scriptable, possible security issues and limited format support, in Debian
• mvi: mpv-based image viewer
• pix: KDE/mobile viewer, not in Debian
• swayimg: overlay, in Debian
• vimiv: vim-like keybindings, not in Debian

See also this list and that list for other list of image viewers, not necessarily ported to Wayland. TODO: pick an alternative to geeqie, nomacs would be gorgeous if it wouldn't be basically abandoned upstream (no release since 2020), has an unpatched CVE-2020-23884 since July 2020, does bad vendoring, and is in bad shape in Debian (4 minor releases behind). So for now I'm still grumpily using Geeqie.

Media player: mpv, gmpc / sublime This is basically unchanged. mpv seems to work fine under Wayland, better than Xorg on my new laptop (as mentioned in the introduction), and that before the version which improves Wayland support significantly, by bringing native Pipewire support and DMA-BUF support. gmpc is more of a problem, mainly because it is abandoned. See 2022-08-22-gmpc-alternatives for the full discussion, one of the alternatives there will likely support Wayland. Finally, I might just switch to sublime-music instead... In any case, not many changes here, thankfully.

Screensaver: xsecurelock swaylock I was previously using xss-lock and xsecurelock as a screensaver, with xscreensaver "hacks" as a backend for xsecurelock. The basic screensaver in Sway seems to be built with swayidle and swaylock. It's interesting because it's the same "split" design as xss-lock and xsecurelock. That, unfortunately, does not include the fancy "hacks" provided by xscreensaver, and that is unlikely to be implemented upstream. Other alternatives include gtklock and waylock (zig), which do not solve that problem either. It looks like swaylock-plugin, a swaylock fork, which at least attempts to solve this problem, although not directly using the real xscreensaver hacks. swaylock-effects is another attempt at this, but it only adds more effects, it doesn't delegate the image display. Other than that, maybe it's time to just let go of those funky animations and just let swaylock do it's thing, which is display a static image or just a black screen, which is fine by me. In the end, I am just using swayidle with a configuration based on the systemd integration wiki page but with additional tweaks from this service, see the resulting swayidle.service file. Interestingly, damjan also has a service for swaylock itself, although it's not clear to me what its purpose is...

Screenshot: maim grim, pubpaste I'm a heavy user of maim (and a package uploader in Debian). It looks like the direct replacement to maim (and slop) is grim (and slurp). There's also swappy which goes on top of grim and allows preview/edit of the resulting image, nice touch (not in Debian though). See also awesome-wayland screenshots for other alternatives: there are many, including X11 tools like Flameshot that also support Wayland. One key problem here was that I have my own screenshot / pastebin software which will needed an update for Wayland as well. That, thankfully, meant actually cleaning up a lot of horrible code that involved calling xterm and xmessage for user interaction. Now, pubpaste uses GTK for prompts and looks much better. (And before anyone freaks out, I already had to use GTK for proper clipboard support, so this isn't much of a stretch...)

Screen recorder: simplescreenrecorder wf-recorder In Xorg, I have used both peek or simplescreenrecorder for screen recordings. The former will work in Wayland, but has no sound support. The latter has a fork with Wayland support but it is limited and buggy ("doesn't support recording area selection and has issues with multiple screens"). It looks like wf-recorder will just do everything correctly out of the box, including audio support (with --audio, duh). It's also packaged in Debian. One has to wonder how this works while keeping the "between app security" that Wayland promises, however... Would installing such a program make my system less secure? Many other options are available, see the awesome Wayland screencasting list.

RSI: workrave nothing? Workrave has no support for Wayland. activity watch is a time tracker alternative, but is not a RSI watcher. KDE has rsiwatcher, but that's a bit too much on the heavy side for my taste. SafeEyes looks like an alternative at first, but it has many issues under Wayland (escape doesn't work, idle doesn't work, it just doesn't work really). timekpr-next could be an alternative as well, and has support for Wayland. I am also considering just abandoning workrave, even if I stick with Xorg, because it apparently introduces significant latency in the input pipeline. And besides, I've developed a pretty unhealthy alert fatigue with Workrave. I have used the program for so long that my fingers know exactly where to click to dismiss those warnings very effectively. It makes my work just more irritating, and doesn't fix the fundamental problem I have with computers.

Other apps This is a constantly changing list, of course. There's a bit of a "death by a thousand cuts" in migrating to Wayland because you realize how many things you were using are tightly bound to X.

• .Xresources - just say goodbye to that old resource system, it was used, in my case, only for rofi, xterm, and ... Xboard!?
• keyboard layout switcher: built-in to Sway since 2017 (PR 1505, 1.5rc2+), requires a small configuration change, see this answer as well, looks something like this command:

   swaymsg input 0:0:X11_keyboard xkb_layout de
  

  or using this config:

   input *  
       xkb_layout "ca,us"
       xkb_options "grp:sclk_toggle"
    
  

  That works refreshingly well, even better than in Xorg, I must say. swaykbdd is an alternative that supports per-window layouts (in Debian).
• wallpaper: currently using feh, will need a replacement, TODO: figure out something that does, like feh, a random shuffle. swaybg just loads a single image, duh. oguri might be a solution, but unmaintained, used here, not in Debian. wallutils is another option, also not in Debian. For now I just don't have a wallpaper, the background is a solid gray, which is better than Xorg's default (which is whatever crap was left around a buffer by the previous collection of programs, basically)
• notifications: currently using dunst in some places, which works well in both Xorg and Wayland, not a blocker, salut a possible alternative (not in Debian), damjan uses mako. TODO: install dunst everywhere
• notification area: I had trouble making nm-applet work. based on this nm-applet.service, I found that you need to pass --indicator. In theory, tray icon support was merged in 1.5, but in practice there are still several limitations, like icons not clickable. On startup, nm-applet --indicator triggers this error in the Sway logs:

   nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.325 [INFO] [swaybar/tray/host.c:24] Registering Status Notifier Item ':1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet'
   nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.327 [ERROR] [swaybar/tray/item.c:127] :1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet IconPixmap: No such property  IconPixmap 
   nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.327 [ERROR] [swaybar/tray/item.c:127] :1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet AttentionIconPixmap: No such property  AttentionIconPixmap 
   nov 11 22:34:12 angela sway[298938]: 00:49:42.327 [ERROR] [swaybar/tray/item.c:127] :1.47/org/ayatana/NotificationItem/nm_applet ItemIsMenu: No such property  ItemIsMenu 
   nov 11 22:36:10 angela sway[313419]: info: fcft.c:838: /usr/share/fonts/truetype/dejavu/DejaVuSans.ttf: size=24.00pt/32px, dpi=96.00
  

  ... but it seems innocuous. The tray icon displays but, as stated above, is not clickable. If you don't see the icon, check the bar.tray_output property in the Sway config, try: tray_output *. Note that there is currently (November 2022) a pull request to hook up a "Tray D-Bus Menu" which, according to Reddit might fix this, or at least be somewhat relevant. This was the biggest irritant in my migration. I have used nmtui to connect to new Wifi hotspots or change connection settings, but that doesn't support actions like "turn off WiFi". I eventually fixed this by switching from py3status to waybar.
• window switcher: in i3 I was using this bespoke i3-focus script, which doesn't work under Sway, swayr an option, not in Debian. So I put together this other bespoke hack from multiple sources, which works.
• PDF viewer: currently using atril (which supports Wayland), could also just switch to zatura/mupdf permanently, see also calibre for a discussion on document viewers

See also this list of useful addons and this other list for other app alternatives.

More X11 / Wayland equivalents For all the tools above, it's not exactly clear what options exist in Wayland, or when they do, which one should be used. But for some basic tools, it seems the options are actually quite clear. If that's the case, they should be listed here:

X11	Wayland	In Debian
arandr	wdisplays	yes
autorandr	kanshi	yes
xdotool	wtype	yes
xev	wev	yes
xlsclients	swaymsg -t get_tree	yes
xrandr	wlr-randr	yes

lswt is a more direct replacement for xlsclients but is not packaged in Debian. See also:

• https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/Useful-add-ons-for-sway
• https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/i3-Migration-Guide

Note that arandr and autorandr are not directly part of X. arewewaylandyet.com refers to a few alternatives. We suggest wdisplays and kanshi above (see also this service file) but wallutils can also do the autorandr stuff, apparently, and nwg-displays can do the arandr part. Neither are packaged in Debian yet. So I have tried wdisplays and it Just Works, and well. The UI even looks better and more usable than arandr, so another clean win from Wayland here. TODO: test kanshi as a autorandr replacement

Other issues

systemd integration I've had trouble getting session startup to work. This is partly because I had a kind of funky system to start my session in the first place. I used to have my whole session started from .xsession like this:

#!/bin/sh
. ~/.shenv
systemctl --user import-environment
exec systemctl --user start --wait xsession.target

But obviously, the xsession.target is not started by the Sway session. It seems to just start a default.target, which is really not what we want because we want to associate the services directly with the graphical-session.target, so that they don't start when logging in over (say) SSH. damjan on #debian-systemd showed me his sway-setup which features systemd integration. It involves starting a different session in a completely new .desktop file. That work was submitted upstream but refused on the grounds that "I'd rather not give a preference to any particular init system." Another PR was abandoned because "restarting sway does not makes sense: that kills everything". The work was therefore moved to the wiki. So. Not a great situation. The upstream wiki systemd integration suggests starting the systemd target from within Sway, which has all sorts of problems:

• you don't get Sway logs anywhere
• control groups are all messed up

I have done a lot of work trying to figure this out, but I remember that starting systemd from Sway didn't actually work for me: my previously configured systemd units didn't correctly start, and especially not with the right $PATH and environment. So I went down that rabbit hole and managed to correctly configure Sway to be started from the systemd --user session. I have partly followed the wiki but also picked ideas from damjan's sway-setup and xdbob's sway-services. Another option is uwsm (not in Debian). This is the config I have in .config/systemd/user/:

• sway.service
• sway-session.target

I have also configured those services, but that's somewhat optional:

• gammastep.service
• swayidle.service
• wcolortaillog.service
• wterminal.service

You will also need at least part of my sway/config, which sends the systemd notification (because, no, Sway doesn't support any sort of readiness notification, that would be too easy). And you might like to see my swayidle-config while you're there. Finally, you need to hook this up somehow to the login manager. This is typically done with a desktop file, so drop sway-session.desktop in /usr/share/wayland-sessions and sway-user-service somewhere in your $PATH (typically /usr/bin/sway-user-service). The session then looks something like this:

$ systemd-cgls   head -101
Control group /:
-.slice
 user.slice (#472)
    user.invocation_id: bc405c6341de4e93a545bde6d7abbeec
    trusted.invocation_id: bc405c6341de4e93a545bde6d7abbeec
   user-1000.slice (#10072)
      user.invocation_id: 08f40f5c4bcd4fd6adfd27bec24e4827
      trusted.invocation_id: 08f40f5c4bcd4fd6adfd27bec24e4827
     user@1000.service   (#10156)
        user.delegate: 1
        trusted.delegate: 1
        user.invocation_id: 76bed72a1ffb41dca9bfda7bb174ef6b
        trusted.invocation_id: 76bed72a1ffb41dca9bfda7bb174ef6b
       session.slice (#10282)
         xdg-document-portal.service (#12248)
           9533 /usr/libexec/xdg-document-portal
           9542 fusermount3 -o rw,nosuid,nodev,fsname=portal,auto_unmount,subt 
         xdg-desktop-portal.service (#12211)
           9529 /usr/libexec/xdg-desktop-portal
         pipewire-pulse.service (#10778)
           6002 /usr/bin/pipewire-pulse
         wireplumber.service (#10519)
           5944 /usr/bin/wireplumber
         gvfs-daemon.service (#10667)
           5960 /usr/libexec/gvfsd
         gvfs-udisks2-volume-monitor.service (#10852)
           6021 /usr/libexec/gvfs-udisks2-volume-monitor
         at-spi-dbus-bus.service (#11481)
           6210 /usr/libexec/at-spi-bus-launcher
           6216 /usr/bin/dbus-daemon --config-file=/usr/share/defaults/at-spi2 
           6450 /usr/libexec/at-spi2-registryd --use-gnome-session
         pipewire.service (#10403)
           5940 /usr/bin/pipewire
         dbus.service (#10593)
           5946 /usr/bin/dbus-daemon --session --address=systemd: --nofork --n 
       background.slice (#10324)
         tracker-miner-fs-3.service (#10741)
           6001 /usr/libexec/tracker-miner-fs-3
       app.slice (#10240)
         xdg-permission-store.service (#12285)
           9536 /usr/libexec/xdg-permission-store
         gammastep.service (#11370)
           6197 gammastep
         dunst.service (#11958)
           7460 /usr/bin/dunst
         wterminal.service (#13980)
           69100 foot --title pop-up
           69101 /bin/bash
           77660 sudo systemd-cgls
           77661 head -101
           77662 wl-copy
           77663 sudo systemd-cgls
           77664 systemd-cgls
         syncthing.service (#11995)
           7529 /usr/bin/syncthing -no-browser -no-restart -logflags=0 --verbo 
           7537 /usr/bin/syncthing -no-browser -no-restart -logflags=0 --verbo 
         dconf.service (#10704)
           5967 /usr/libexec/dconf-service
         gnome-keyring-daemon.service (#10630)
           5951 /usr/bin/gnome-keyring-daemon --foreground --components=pkcs11 
         gcr-ssh-agent.service (#10963)
           6035 /usr/libexec/gcr-ssh-agent /run/user/1000/gcr
         swayidle.service (#11444)
           6199 /usr/bin/swayidle -w
         nm-applet.service (#11407)
           6198 /usr/bin/nm-applet --indicator
         wcolortaillog.service (#11518)
           6226 foot colortaillog
           6228 /bin/sh /home/anarcat/bin/colortaillog
           6230 sudo journalctl -f
           6233 ccze -m ansi
           6235 sudo journalctl -f
           6236 journalctl -f
         afuse.service (#10889)
           6051 /usr/bin/afuse -o mount_template=sshfs -o transform_symlinks - 
         gpg-agent.service (#13547)
           51662 /usr/bin/gpg-agent --supervised
           51719 scdaemon --multi-server
         emacs.service (#10926)
            6034 /usr/bin/emacs --fg-daemon
           33203 /usr/bin/aspell -a -m -d en --encoding=utf-8
         xdg-desktop-portal-gtk.service (#12322)
           9546 /usr/libexec/xdg-desktop-portal-gtk
         xdg-desktop-portal-wlr.service (#12359)
           9555 /usr/libexec/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr
         sway.service (#11037)
           6037 /usr/bin/sway
           6181 swaybar -b bar-0
           6209 py3status
           6309 /usr/bin/i3status -c /tmp/py3status_oy4ntfnq
           6969 Xwayland :0 -rootless -terminate -core -listen 29 -listen 30 - 
       init.scope (#10198)
         5909 /lib/systemd/systemd --user
         5911 (sd-pam)
     session-7.scope (#10440)
       5895 gdm-session-worker [pam/gdm-password]
       6028 /usr/libexec/gdm-wayland-session --register-session sway-user-serv 
[...]

I think that's pretty neat.

• TODO: consider this improved script: https://github.com/xdbob/sway-services/blob/master/bin/sway-user-service
• TODO: move config into Puppet so it's in sync
• TODO: maybe submit as a PR on the Debian package?

Environment propagation At first, my terminals and rofi didn't have the right $PATH, which broke a lot of my workflow. It's hard to tell exactly how Wayland gets started or where to inject environment. This discussion suggests a few alternatives and this Debian bug report discusses this issue as well. I eventually picked environment.d(5) since I already manage my user session with systemd, and it fixes a bunch of other problems. I used to have a .shenv that I had to manually source everywhere. The only problem with that approach is that it doesn't support conditionals, but that's something that's rarely needed.

Pipewire This is a whole topic onto itself, but migrating to Wayland also involves using Pipewire if you want screen sharing to work. You can actually keep using Pulseaudio for audio, that said, but that migration is actually something I've wanted to do anyways: Pipewire's design seems much better than Pulseaudio, as it folds in JACK features which allows for pretty neat tricks. (Which I should probably show in a separate post, because this one is getting rather long.) I first tried this migration in Debian bullseye, and it didn't work very well. Ardour would fail to export tracks and I would get into weird situations where streams would just drop mid-way. A particularly funny incident is when I was in a meeting and I couldn't hear my colleagues speak anymore (but they could) and I went on blabbering on my own for a solid 5 minutes until I realized what was going on. By then, people had tried numerous ways of letting me know that something was off, including (apparently) coughing, saying "hello?", chat messages, IRC, and so on, until they just gave up and left. I suspect that was also a Pipewire bug, but it could also have been that I muted the tab by error, as I recently learned that clicking on the little tiny speaker icon on a tab mutes that tab. Since the tab itself can get pretty small when you have lots of them, it's actually quite frequently that I mistakenly mute tabs. Anyways. Point is: I already knew how to make the migration, and I had already documented how to make the change in Puppet. It's basically:

apt install pipewire pipewire-audio-client-libraries pipewire-pulse wireplumber 

Then, as a regular user:

systemctl --user daemon-reload
systemctl --user --now disable pulseaudio.service pulseaudio.socket
systemctl --user --now enable pipewire pipewire-pulse
systemctl --user mask pulseaudio

An optional (but key, IMHO) configuration you should also make is to "switch on connect", which will make your Bluetooth or USB headset automatically be the default route for audio, when connected. In ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf.d/autoconnect.conf:

context.exec = [
      path = "pactl"        args = "load-module module-always-sink"  
      path = "pactl"        args = "load-module module-switch-on-connect"  
    #  path = "/usr/bin/sh"  args = "~/.config/pipewire/default.pw"  
]

See the excellent as usual Arch wiki page about Pipewire for that trick and more information about Pipewire. Note that you must not put the file in ~/.config/pipewire/pipewire.conf (or pipewire-pulse.conf, maybe) directly, as that will break your setup. If you want to add to that file, first copy the template from /usr/share/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf first. So far I'm happy with Pipewire in bookworm, but I've heard mixed reports from it. I have high hopes it will become the standard media server for Linux in the coming months or years, which is great because I've been (rather boldly, I admit) on the record saying I don't like PulseAudio. Rereading this now, I feel it might have been a little unfair, as "over-engineered and tries to do too many things at once" applies probably even more to Pipewire than PulseAudio (since it also handles video dispatching). That said, I think Pipewire took the right approach by implementing existing interfaces like Pulseaudio and JACK. That way we're not adding a third (or fourth?) way of doing audio in Linux; we're just making the server better.

Keypress drops Sometimes I lose keyboard presses. This correlates with the following warning from Sway:

d c 06 10:36:31 curie sway[343384]: 23:32:14.034 [ERROR] [wlr] [libinput] event5  - SONiX USB Keyboard: client bug: event processing lagging behind by 37ms, your system is too slow 

... and corresponds to an open bug report in Sway. It seems the "system is too slow" should really be "your compositor is too slow" which seems to be the case here on this older system (curie). It doesn't happen often, but it does happen, particularly when a bunch of busy processes start in parallel (in my case: a linter running inside a container and notmuch new). The proposed fix for this in Sway is to gain real time privileges and add the CAP_SYS_NICE capability to the binary. We'll see how that goes in Debian once 1.8 gets released and shipped.

Improvements over i3

Tiling improvements There's a lot of improvements Sway could bring over using plain i3. There are pretty neat auto-tilers that could replicate the configurations I used to have in Xmonad or Awesome, see:

• autotiling
• swaymonad

Display latency tweaks TODO: You can tweak the display latency in wlroots compositors with the max_render_time parameter, possibly getting lower latency than X11 in the end.

Sound/brightness changes notifications TODO: Avizo can display a pop-up to give feedback on volume and brightness changes. Not in Debian. Other alternatives include SwayOSD and sway-nc, also not in Debian.

Debugging tricks The xeyes (in the x11-apps package) will run in Wayland, and can actually be used to easily see if a given window is also in Wayland. If the "eyes" follow the cursor, the app is actually running in xwayland, so not natively in Wayland. Another way to see what is using Wayland in Sway is with the command:

swaymsg -t get_tree

Other documentation

• awesome-wayland
• arewewaylandyet.com
• hacktivist.me notes
• Arch Linux wiki
• Gentoo apps list
• Sway: useful addons
• i3 migration guide

Conclusion In general, this took me a long time, but it mostly works. The tray icon situation is pretty frustrating, but there's a workaround and I have high hopes it will eventually fix itself. I'm also actually worried about the DisplayLink support because I eventually want to be using this, but hopefully that's another thing that will hopefully fix itself before I need it.

A word on the security model I'm kind of worried about all the hacks that have been added to Wayland just to make things work. Pretty much everywhere we need to, we punched a hole in the security model:

• windows can spy on each other (although xdg-desktop-portal-wlr does confirm if you have some chooser installed, see xdg-desktop-portal-wrl(5))
• windows can type over each other (through e.g. wtype through the virtual-keyboard protocol)
• windows can overlay on top of each other (so one app could, for example, spoof a password dialog, through the layer-shell protocol)

Wikipedia describes the security properties of Wayland as it "isolates the input and output of every window, achieving confidentiality, integrity and availability for both." I'm not sure those are actually realized in the actual implementation, because of all those holes punched in the design, at least in Sway. For example, apparently the GNOME compositor doesn't have the virtual-keyboard protocol, but they do have (another?!) text input protocol. Wayland does offer a better basis to implement such a system, however. It feels like the Linux applications security model lacks critical decision points in the UI, like the user approving "yes, this application can share my screen now". Applications themselves might have some of those prompts, but it's not mandatory, and that is worrisome.

route6: 2a0c:5a80::/29
descr: Digi Spain Telecom S.L.U.
origin: AS57269

$ docker run --net host --rm -it docker.io/stapelberg/speedtest:latest -s 50092
[..]
     Server: Michael Stapelberg - Zurich (id = 50092)
        ISP: Digi Spain
    Latency:    34.29 ms   (0.20 ms jitter)
   Download:  2252.42 Mbps (data used: 3.4 GB )
     Upload:  2239.27 Mbps (data used: 2.8 GB )
Packet Loss:     0.0%
 Result URL: https://www.speedtest.net/result/c/cc8d6a78-c6f8-4f71-b554-a79812e10106

$ docker run --net host --rm -it docker.io/stapelberg/speedtest:latest -s 50092
[..]
     Server: Michael Stapelberg - Zurich (id = 50092)
        ISP: Digi Spain
    Latency:    34.05 ms   (0.21 ms jitter)
   Download:  2209.85 Mbps (data used: 3.2 GB )
     Upload:  2223.45 Mbps (data used: 2.9 GB )
Packet Loss:     0.0%
 Result URL: https://www.speedtest.net/result/c/32f9158e-fc1a-47e9-bd33-130e66c25417

• I want to cancel the service.
• What s the reason?
• I got upgraded to 10G by another ISP
• The speed is measured in MB, not G.
• Ok, I got upgraded to 10.000 MB
• That s not possible.
• Well

Aug 8 04:04] list_del corruption. prev->next should be ffff90c96e9c2090,
but was ffff90c94e9c2090

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/2lk9xr7q
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/2njkc22w
• [3] https://frame.work/
• [4] https://fs.blog/job-interviews
• [5] https://tinyurl.com/2co3l83n
• [6] https://tinyurl.com/yzpsvfof
• [7] https://spectrum.ieee.org/intel-i860
• [8] https://ncase.me/trust/
• [9] https://tinyurl.com/2jwbfcto

Repfix paper Zhilei Ren, Shiwei Sun, Jifeng Xuan, Xiaochen Li, Zhide Zhou and He Jiang have published an academic paper titled Automated Patching for Unreproducible Builds:

[..] fixing unreproducible build issues poses a set of challenges [..], among which we consider the localization granularity and the historical knowledge utilization as the most significant ones. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel approach [called] RepFix that combines tracing-based fine-grained localization with history-based patch generation mechanisms.

The paper (PDF, 3.5MB) uses the Debian mylvmbackup package as an example to show how RepFix can automatically generate patches to make software build reproducibly. As it happens, Reiner Herrmann submitted a patch for the mylvmbackup package which has remained unapplied by the Debian package maintainer for over seven years, thus this paper inadvertently underscores that achieving reproducible builds will require both technical and social solutions.

Python variables Johannes Schauer discovered a fascinating bug where simply naming your Python variable _m led to unreproducible .pyc files. In particular, the types module in Python 3.10 requires the following patch to make it reproducible:

--- a/Lib/types.py
+++ b/Lib/types.py
@@ -37,8 +37,8 @@ _ag = _ag()
 AsyncGeneratorType = type(_ag)
 
 class _C:
-    def _m(self): pass
-MethodType = type(_C()._m)
+    def _b(self): pass
+MethodType = type(_C()._b)

Simply renaming the dummy method from _m to _b was enough to workaround the problem. Johannes bug report first led to a number of improvements in diffoscope to aid in dissecting .pyc files, but upstream identified this as caused by an issue surrounding interned strings and is being tracked in CPython bug #78274.

New SPDX team to incorporate build metadata in Software Bill of Materials SPDX, the open standard for Software Bill of Materials (SBOM), is continuously developed by a number of teams and committees. However, SPDX has welcomed a new addition; a team dedicated to enhancing metadata about software builds, complementing reproducible builds in creating a more secure software supply chain. The SPDX Builds Team has been working throughout May to define the universal primitives shared by all build systems, including the who, what, where and how of builds:

• Who: the identity of the person or organisation that controls the build infrastructure.
• What: the inputs and outputs of a given build, combining metadata about the build s configuration with an SBOM describing source code and dependencies.
• Where: the software packages making up the build system, from build orchestration tools such as Woodpecker CI and Tekton to language-specific tools.
• How: the invocation of a build, linking metadata of a build to the identity of the person or automation tool that initiated it.

The SPDX Builds Team expects to have a usable data model by September, ready for inclusion in the SPDX 3.0 standard. The team welcomes new contributors, inviting those interested in joining to introduce themselves on the SPDX-Tech mailing list.

Talks at Debian Reunion Hamburg Some of the Reproducible Builds team (Holger Levsen, Mattia Rizzolo, Roland Clobus, Philip Rinn, etc.) met in real life at the Debian Reunion Hamburg (official homepage). There were several informal discussions amongst them, as well as two talks related to reproducible builds. First, Holger Levsen gave a talk on the status of Reproducible Builds for bullseye and bookworm and beyond (WebM, 210MB): Secondly, Roland Clobus gave a talk called Reproducible builds as applied to non-compiler output (WebM, 115MB):

Supply-chain security attacks This was another bumper month for supply-chain attacks in package repositories. Early in the month, Lance R. Vick noticed that the maintainer of the NPM foreach package let their personal email domain expire, so they bought it and now controls foreach on NPM and the 36,826 projects that depend on it . Shortly afterwards, Drew DeVault published a related blog post titled When will we learn? that offers a brief timeline of major incidents in this area and, not uncontroversially, suggests that the correct way to ship packages is with your distribution s package manager .

Bootstrapping Bootstrapping is a process for building software tools progressively from a primitive compiler tool and source language up to a full Linux development environment with GCC, etc. This is important given the amount of trust we put in existing compiler binaries. This month, a bootstrappable mini-kernel was announced. Called boot2now, it comprises a series of compilers in the form of bootable machine images.

Google s new Assured Open Source Software service Google Cloud (the division responsible for the Google Compute Engine) announced a new Assured Open Source Software service. Noting the considerable 650% year-over-year increase in cyberattacks aimed at open source suppliers, the new service claims to enable enterprise and public sector users of open source software to easily incorporate the same OSS packages that Google uses into their own developer workflows . The announcement goes on to enumerate that packages curated by the new service would be:

• Regularly scanned, analyzed, and fuzz-tested for vulnerabilities.
• Have corresponding enriched metadata incorporating Container/Artifact Analysis data.
• Are built with Cloud Build including evidence of verifiable SLSA-compliance
• Are verifiably signed by Google.
• Are distributed from an Artifact Registry secured and protected by Google.

(Full announcement)

A retrospective on the Rust programming language Andrew bunnie Huang published a long blog post this month promising a critical retrospective on the Rust programming language. Amongst many acute observations about the evolution of the language s syntax (etc.), the post beings to critique the languages approach to supply chain security ( Rust Has A Limited View of Supply Chain Security ) and reproducibility ( You Can t Reproduce Someone Else s Rust Build ):

There s some bugs open with the Rust maintainers to address reproducible builds, but with the number of issues they have to deal with in the language, I am not optimistic that this problem will be resolved anytime soon. Assuming the only driver of the unreproducibility is the inclusion of OS paths in the binary, one fix to this would be to re-configure our build system to run in some sort of a chroot environment or a virtual machine that fixes the paths in a way that almost anyone else could reproduce. I say almost anyone else because this fix would be OS-dependent, so we d be able to get reproducible builds under, for example, Linux, but it would not help Windows users where chroot environments are not a thing.

(Full post)

Reproducible Builds IRC meeting The minutes and logs from our May 2022 IRC meeting have been published. In case you missed this one, our next IRC meeting will take place on Tuesday 28th June at 15:00 UTC on #reproducible-builds on the OFTC network.

A new tool to improve supply-chain security in Arch Linux kpcyrd published yet another interesting tool related to reproducibility. Writing about the tool in a recent blog post, kpcyrd mentions that although many PKGBUILDs provide authentication in the context of signed Git tags (i.e. the ability to verify the Git tag was signed by one of the two trusted keys ), they do not support pinning, ie. that upstream could create a new signed Git tag with an identical name, and arbitrarily change the source code without the [maintainer] noticing . Conversely, other PKGBUILDs support pinning but not authentication. The new tool, auth-tarball-from-git, fixes both problems, as nearly outlined in kpcyrd s original blog post.

diffoscope diffoscope is our in-depth and content-aware diff utility. Not only can it locate and diagnose reproducibility issues, it can provide human-readable diffs from many kinds of binary formats. This month, Chris Lamb prepared and uploaded versions 212, 213 and 214 to Debian unstable. Chris also made the following changes:

• New features:
  • Add support for extracting vmlinuz Linux kernel images. [ ]
  • Support both python-argcomplete 1.x and 2.x. [ ]
  • Strip sticky etc. from x.deb: sticky Debian binary package [ ]. [ ]
  • Integrate test coverage with GitLab s concept of artifacts. [ ][ ][ ]
• Bug fixes:
  • Don t mask differences in .zip or .jar central directory extra fields. [ ]
  • Don t show a binary comparison of .zip or .jar files if we have observed at least one nested difference. [ ]
• Codebase improvements:
  • Substantially update comment for our calls to zipinfo and zipinfo -v. [ ]
  • Use assert_diff in test_zip over calling get_data with a separate assert. [ ]
  • Don t call re.compile and then call .sub on the result; just call re.sub directly. [ ]
  • Clarify the comment around the difference between --usage and --help. [ ]
• Testsuite improvements:
  • Test --help and --usage. [ ]
  • Test that --help includes the file formats. [ ]

Vagrant Cascadian added an external tool reference xb-tool for GNU Guix [ ] as well as updated the diffoscope package in GNU Guix itself [ ][ ][ ].

Distribution work In Debian, 41 reviews of Debian packages were added, 85 were updated and 13 were removed this month adding to our knowledge about identified issues. A number of issue types have been updated, including adding a new nondeterministic_ordering_in_deprecated_items_collected_by_doxygen toolchain issue [ ] as well as ones for mono_mastersummary_xml_files_inherit_filesystem_ordering [ ], extended_attributes_in_jar_file_created_without_manifest [ ] and apxs_captures_build_path [ ]. Vagrant Cascadian performed a rough check of the reproducibility of core package sets in GNU Guix, and in openSUSE, Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted his usual monthly reproducible builds status report.

Upstream patches The Reproducible Builds project detects, dissects and attempts to fix as many currently-unreproducible packages as possible. We endeavour to send all of our patches upstream where appropriate. This month, we wrote a large number of such patches, including:

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • gtkmm-documentation (merged; sorting issue)
  • librespot (merged; random BuildID issue)
  • lirc (merged)
  • lsof (uname/hostname problem)
  • solanum (merged, possibly a race condition)
• Chris Lamb:
  • #1010845 filed against logapp.
  • #1010854 filed against mono.
  • #1010855 filed against longrun.
  • #1011452 filed against rust-simplelog.
  • #1011752 filed against freesas.
  • PeachPy (merged, sort entries)
• Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues:
  • #1010957 filed against man-db.
• Vagrant Cascadian:
  • #1010462 filed against mtink.
  • #1010463 filed against fceux.
  • #1010466 filed against glob2.
  • #1010483 filed against coinor-cgl.
  • #1010486 filed against metapixel.
  • #1010781 filed against ragel.
  • #1010785 filed against gdome2.
  • #1010787 filed against sgml-base-doc.
  • #1010789 filed against xarclock.
  • #1010790 filed against xgammon.
  • #1010825 filed against lwatch.
  • #1010828 filed against bbrun.
  • #1010830 filed against gscanbus.
  • #1010859 filed against libnss-gw-name.
  • #1010870 filed against pidgin-blinklight.
  • #1010871 filed against dvbtune.
  • #1010872 filed against efax.
  • #1010944 filed against quelcom.
  • #1010948 filed against xine-lib-1.2.
  • #1011034 filed against fusesmb.
  • #1011036 filed against mailfront.
  • #1011104 filed against convlit.
  • #1011109 filed against bitstormlite.
  • #1011257 filed against coinor-osi.
  • #1011402 filed against razor.
  • #1011405 filed against autoclass.
  • #1011428 filed against cdbackup.
  • #1011429 filed against dds2tar.
  • #1011469 filed against transcalc.
  • #1011470 filed against libapache2-mod-authz-unixgroup.
  • #1011471 filed against mgdiff.
  • #1011478 filed against scsitools.
  • #1011479 filed against fstrcmp.
  • #1011480 filed against libxsettings-client.
  • #1011481 filed against tamil-gtk2im.
  • #1011486 filed against tdfsb.
  • #1011488 filed against stymulator.
  • #1011489 filed against wiipdf.
  • #1011490 filed against gdigi.
  • #1011491 filed against getstream.
  • #1011493 filed against freecdb.
  • #1011495 filed against modglue.
  • #1011496 filed against nwall.
  • #1011498 filed against parprouted.
  • #1011499 filed against imagination.
  • #1011500 filed against tuxcmd-modules.
  • #1011501 filed against libapache2-mod-authn-yubikey.
  • #1011503 filed against libapache2-mod-auth-plain.
  • lcsync (remove build paths)

Reproducible builds website Chris Lamb updated the main Reproducible Builds website and documentation in a number of small ways, but also prepared and published an interview with Jan Nieuwenhuizen about Bootstrappable Builds, GNU Mes and GNU Guix. [ ][ ][ ][ ] In addition, Tim Jones added a link to the Talos Linux project [ ] and billchenchina fixed a dead link [ ].

Testing framework The Reproducible Builds project runs a significant testing framework at tests.reproducible-builds.org, to check packages and other artifacts for reproducibility. This month, the following changes were made:

• Holger Levsen:
  • Add support for detecting running kernels that require attention. [ ]
  • Temporarily configure a host to support performing Debian builds for packages that lack .buildinfo files. [ ]
  • Update generated webpages to clarify wishes for feedback. [ ]
  • Update copyright years on various scripts. [ ]
• Mattia Rizzolo:
  • Provide a facility so that Debian Live image generation can copy a file remotely. [ ][ ][ ][ ]
• Roland Clobus:
  • Add initial support for testing generated images with OpenQA. [ ]

And finally, as usual, node maintenance was also performed by Holger Levsen [ ][ ].

Misc news On our mailing list this month:

• John Neffenger posted that the early-access release of OpenJDK version 19 build 21 is reproducible.
• Mattia Rizzolo added a request around tentatively planning a Reproducible Builds summit in 2022.
• Bernhard M. Wiedemann posted about a Reproducible Builds meetup at the openSUSE conference in Nuremberg.
• Luca Boccassi asked for help getting arm64 binaries to build reproducibly for the Debian systemd package.
• Yaobin Wen asked a number of questions in an attempt to discover the best practices for manage Debian .dsc files using reprepro.

Contact If you are interested in contributing to the Reproducible Builds project, please visit our Contribute page on our website. However, you can get in touch with us via:

• IRC: #reproducible-builds on irc.oftc.net.
• Twitter: @ReproBuilds
• Mailing list: rb-general@lists.reproducible-builds.org

The internet, it s that thing that acts up all the time, right? As said in my first post, I abandoned the idea to interview children younger than 9 years because it seems they are not necessarily aware that they are using the internet. But it turns out that some do have heard about the internet. My friend Anna, who has 9 younger siblings, tried to win some of her brothers and sisters for an interview with me. At the dinner table, this turned into a discussion and she sent me an incredibly funny video where two of her brothers and sisters, aged 5 and 6, discuss with her about the internet. I won t share the video for privacy reasons besides, the kids speak in the wondrous dialect of Vorarlberg, a region in western Austria, close to the border with Liechtenstein. Here s a transcription of the dinner table discussion:

• Anna: what is the internet?
• both children: (shouting as if it was a game of who gets it first) photo! mobile! device! camera!
• Anna: But one can have a camera without the internet
• M.: Internet is the mobile phone charger! Mobile phone full!
• J.: Internet is internet is
• M.: I know! Internet is where you can charge something, the mobile phone and
• Anna: You mean electricity?
• M.: Yeah, that is the internet, electricity!
• Anna: (laughs), Yes, the internet works a bit similarly, true.
• J.: It s the electricity of the house!
• Anna: The electricity of the house

(everyone is talking at the same time now.)

• Anna: And what s WiFi?
• M.: WiFi it s the TV!
• Anna (laughs)
• M.: WiFi is there so it doesn t act up!
• Anna (laughs harder)
• J. (repeats what M. just said): WiFi is there so it doesn t act up!
• Anna: So that what doesn t act up?
• M.: (moves her finger wildly drawing a small circle in the air) So that it doesn t spin!
• Anna: Ah?
• M.: When one wants to watch something on Youtube, well then that the thing doesn t spin like that!
• Anna: Ahhh! so when you use Youtube, you need the internet, right?
• J.: Yes, so that one can watch things.

I really like how the kids associate the internet with a thing that works all the time, except for when it doesn t work. Then they notice: The internet is acting up! Probably, when that happens, parents or older siblings say: the internet is acting up or let me check why the internet acts up again and maybe they get up from the sofa, switch a home router on and off again, which creates this association with electricity. (Just for the sake of clarity for fellow multilingualist readers, the kids used the German word spinnen , which I translated to acting up . In French that would be d conner .)

WiFi for everyone! I interviewed another of Anna s siblings, a 10 year old boy. He told me that he does not really use the internet by himself yet, and does not own any internet capable device. He watches when older family members look up stuff on Google, or put on a video on Youtube, Netflix, or Amazon he knew all these brand names though. In the living room, there s Alexa, he told me, and he uses the internet by asking Alexa to play music.

Then I say: Alexa, play this song!

Interestingly, he knew that, in order to listen to a CD, the internet was not needed. When asked how a drawing would look like that explains the internet, he drew a scheme of the living room at home, with the TV, Alexa, and some kind of WiFi dongle, maybe a repeater. (Unfortunately I did not manage to get his drawing.) If he could ask a wise and friendly dragon one thing about the internet that he always wanted to know, he would ask How much internet can one have and what are all the things one can do with the internet? If he could change the internet for the better for everyone, he would build a gigantic building which would provide the entire world with WiFi.

Cut out the stupid stuff from the internet His slightly older sister does own a laptop and a smartphone. She uses the internet to watch movies, or series, to talk with her friends, or to listen to music. When asked how she would explain the internet to an alien, she said that

one can do a lot of things on the internet, but on the internet there can be stupid things, but also good things, one can learn stuff on the internet, for example how to do crochet.

Most importantly, she noticed that

one needs the internet nowadays.

Her drawing shows how she uses the internet: calls using WhatsApp, watching movies online, and a laptop with open windows on the screen. She would ask the dragon that can explain one thing she always wanted to know about the internet:

What is the internet? How does it work at all? How does it function?

What she would change has to do with her earlier remark about stupid things:

I would make it so that there are less stupid things. It would be good to use the internet for better things, but not for useless things, that one doesn t actually need.

When I asked her what she meant by stupid things , she replied:

Useless videos where one talks about nonsense. And one can also google stupid things, for example how long will i be alive? and stuff like that.

Patterns From the interviews I made until now, there seems to be a cut between then age where kids don t own a device and use the internet to watch movies, series or listen to music and the age where they start owning a device and then they start talking to their friends, and create accounts on social media. This seems to happen roughly at ages 9-10. I m still surprised at the amount of ideas that kids have, when asked what they would change on the internet if they could. I m sure there s more if one goes looking for it.

Thanks Thanks to my friends who made all these interviews possible either by allowing me to meet their children, or their younger siblings: Anna, Christa, Aline, Cindy, and Martina.

• Love's A Lonely Place To Be
• A Summer Long Since Passed (re-recording of a highlight from Gardens)
• Darkness Has Reached It's End (Fantastic. I found the 12" of this somewhere, too)

Pervasive technology contributes to the idea that the internet is immaterial With their search engine website design, Google has put in place an extremely simple and straightforward user interface. Since then, designers and psychologists have worked on making user interfaces more and more intuitive to use. The buzzwords are usability and user experience design . Besides this optimization of visual interfaces, haptic interfaces have evolved as well, specifically on smartphones and tablets where hand gestures have replaced more clumsy external haptic interfaces such as a mouse. And beyond interfaces, the devices themselves have become smaller and slicker. While in our generation many people have experienced opening a computer tower or a laptop to replace parts, with the side effect of seeing the parts the device is physically composed of, the new generation of end user devices makes this close to impossible, essentially transforming these devices into black boxes, and further contributing to the idea that the internet they are being used to access with would be something entirely intangible.

What do kids in 2022 really know about the internet? So, what do kids of that generation really know about the internet, beyond purely using services they do not control? In order to find out, I decided to interview children between 10 and 18. I conducted 5 interviews with kids aged 9, 10, 12, 15 and 17, two boys and three girls. Two live in rural Germany, one in a German urban area, and two live in the French capital. I wrote the questions in a way to stimulate the interviewees to tell me a story each time. I also told them that the interview is not a test and that there are no wrong answers. Except for the 9 year old, all interviewees possessed both, their own smartphone and their own laptop. All of them used the internet mostly for chatting, entertainment (video and music streaming, online games), social media (TikTok, Instagram, Youtube), and instant messaging. Let me introduce you to their concepts of the internet. That was my first story telling question to them:

If aliens had landed on Earth and would ask you what the internet is, what would you explain to them? The majority of respondents agreed in their replies that the internet is intangible while still being a place where one can do anything and everything . Before I tell you more about their detailed answers to the above question, let me show you how they visualize their internet.

If you had to make a drawing to explain to a person what the internet is, how would this drawing look like? Each interviewee had some minutes to come up with a drawing. As you will see, that drawing corresponds to what the kids would want an alien to know about the internet and how they are using the internet themselves.

Movies, series, videos The youngest respondent, a 9 year old girl, drew a screen with lots of people around it and the words film, series, network, video , as well as a play icon. She said that she mostly uses the internet to watch movies. She was the only one who used a shared tablet and smartphone that belonged to her family, not to herself. And she would explain the net like this to an alien:

"Internet is a er one cannot touch it it s an, er [I propose the word idea ], yes it s an idea. Many people use it not necessarily to watch things, but also to read things or do other stuff."

User interface elements A 10 year old boy represented the internet by recalling user interface elements he sees every day in his drawing: a magnifying glass (search engine), a play icon (video streaming), speech bubbles (instant messaging). He would explain the internet like this to an alien:

"You can use the internet to learn things or get information, listen to music, watch movies, and chat with friends. You can do nearly anything with it."

Another planet A 12 year old girl imagines the internet like a second, intangible, planet where Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Ebay, or H&M are continents that one enters into.

"And on [the] Ebay [continent] there s a country for clothes, and ,trousers , for example, would be a federal state in that country."

Something that was unique about this interview was that she told me she had an email address but she never writes emails. She only has an email account to receive confirmation emails, for example when doing online shopping, or when registering to a service and needing to confirm one s address. This is interesting because it s an anti-spam measure that might become outdated with a generation that uses email less or not at all.

Home network A 15 year old boy knew that his family s devices are connected to a home router (Freebox is a router from the French ISP Free) but lacked an imagination of the rest of the internet s functioning. When I asked him about what would be behind the router, on the other side, he said what s behind is like a black hole to him. However, he was the only interviewee who did actually draw cables, wifi waves, a router, and the local network. His drawing is even extremely precise, it just lacks the cable connecting the router to the rest of the internet.

Satellite internet A 17 year old girl would explain the internet to an alien as follows:

"The internet goes around the entire globe. One is networked with everyone else on Earth. One can find everything. But one cannot touch the internet. It s like a parallel world. With a device one can look into the internet. With search engines, one can find anything in the world, one can phone around the world, and write messages. [The internet] is a gigantic thing."

This interviewee stated as the only one that the internet is huge. And while she also is the only one who drew the internet as actually having some kind of physical extension beyond her own home, she seems to believe that internet connectivity is based on satellite technology and wireless communication.

Imagine that a wise and friendly dragon could teach you one thing about the internet that you ve always wanted to know. What would you ask the dragon to teach you about? A 10 year old boy said he d like to know how big are the servers behind all of this . That s the only interview in which the word server came up. A 12 year old girl said I would ask how to earn money with the internet. I always wanted to know how this works, and where the money comes from. I love the last part of her question! The 15 year old boy for whom everything behind the home router is out of his event horizon would ask How is it possible to be connected like we are? How does the internet work scientifically? A 17 year old girl said she d like to learn how the darknet works, what hidden things are there? Is it possible to get spied on via the internet? Would it be technically possible to influence devices in a way that one can listen to secret or telecommanded devices? Lastly, I wanted to learn about what they find annoying, or problematic about the internet.

Imagine you could make the internet better for everyone. What would you do first? Asked what she would change if she could, the 9 year old girl advocated for a global usage limit of the internet in order to protect the human brain. Also, she said, her parents spend way too much time on their phones and people should rather spend more time with their children. Three of the interviewees agreed that they see way too many advertisements and two of them would like ads to disappear entirely from the web. The other one said that she doesn t want to see ads, but that ads are fine if she can at least click them away. The 15 year old boy had different ambitions. He told me he would change:

"the age of access to the internet. More and more younger people access the internet ; especially with TikTok there is a recommendation algorithm that can influcence young people a lot. And influencing young people should be avoided but the internet does it too much. And that can be negative. If you don t yet have a critical spirit, and you watch certain videos you cannot yet moderate your stance. It can influence you a lot. There are so many things that have become indispensable and that happen on the internet and we have become dependent. What happens if one day it doesn t work anymore? If we connect more and more things to the net, that s not a good thing."

The internet - Oh, that s what you mean! On a sidenote, my first interview tentative was with an 8 year old girl from my family. I asked her if she uses the internet and she denied, so I abandoned interviewing her. Some days later, while talking to her, she proposed to look something up on Google, using her smartphone. I said: Oh, so you are using the internet! She replied: Oh, that s what you re talking about? I think she knows the word Google and she knows that she can search for information with this Google thing. But it appeared that she doesn t know that the Google search engine is located somewhere else on internet and not on her smartphone. I concluded that for her, using the services on the smartphone is as natural as switching on a light in the house: we also don t think about where the electricity comes from when we do that.

What can we learn from these few interviews? Unsurprisingly, social media, streaming, entertainment, and instant messaging are the main activities kids undertake on the internet. They are completely at the mercy of advertisements in apps and on websites, not knowing how to get rid of them. They interact on a daily basis with algorithms that are unregulated and known to perpetuate discrimination and to create filter bubbles, without necessarily being aware of it. The kids I interviewed act as mere service users and seem to be mostly confined to specific apps or websites. All of them perceived the internet as being something intangible. Only the older interviewees perceived that there must be some kind of physical expansion to it: the 17 year old girl by drawing a network of satellites around the globe, the 15 year old boy by drawing the local network in his home. To be continued