Sway on Today I learned…

Interactive Brokers' Trader Workstation on Wayland

Sat, 21 Dec 2024 12:14:00 +0100

I need to run Interactive Brokers Trader Workstation on Linux on Wayland on HiDPI - a fateful combination

Fixing idle-inhibitor behaviour in Firefox with Wayland

Sat, 20 Jul 2024 17:44:21 +0200

Whenever Firefox played videos or - actually more relevant - I watched the shared screen of a colleague, after some time the screenlock would start. This is especially annoying, since I have to enter my password to unlock again.

In my status way waybar there is an idle inhibit switch which I could then use to prevent the lock from activating. That this switch worked led to the conclusion that there is something with Firefox that prevented this from working. Behind the scenes, there are two components that have mixed responsibility when it comes to locking / suspending / sleeping - responsibilities which overlap, and are not completely clear in the end.

Archlinux Sway with a 4K display

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 16:12:36 +0100

Subtle issues running an external 4K display on Linux

Managing Sway tools as systemd services

Fri, 27 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I recently took some time to set up some of the accompanying services of Sway (the window manager) as systemd user services. Those services are dunst, blueman-applet, kanshi - amongst others.

The most simple way to run those applications are to exec them when Sway starts. This is simple, but it lacks everything from automatic restart, reloading configuration and status inspection.

So, let’s look at kanshi, the service that magically manages different monitors that get detected on the system at any time; you’d run it within sway as:

Waiting for Waybar tray

Sat, 09 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

When starting sway, it takes a while until waybar has fully started. A possible speed up trick has been documented in sway GitHub, but it’s still delayed from time to time.

The problem is though, that some applications that embed into the system tray which is provided by waybar cannot register themselves in such a case. One part of apps managed to ’late register’ once waybar’s systray then becomes available, but others do not. Examples for the latter are KeepassXC and OnedriveGUI.