I’m fairly new to Manjaro and I have been using Ubuntu since 2007, so this is the first time I migrate to this distro, apologies if I mistype commands or make a mess of things, but I want to give it a good go (I bought a RTX 5090 and would want a rolling stable distro with decent drivers, Ubuntu 24.04 didn’t have the latest and the 5090 refused to load when entering in Gnome).
So, I’m now setting everything up from scratch and I realized that MangoHud doesn’t quite work for Valheim (but does for Cyberpunk 2077!) - and I thought perhaps it’s also the fact I’m running on Wayland and not X11.
I’m aware that on Ubuntu one can chose the session they want to load in the startup menu - is it possible to do the same in Manjaro as well?
If so, which packages do I need to install?
It used to be, but not anymore now, because GNOME 49 has dropped support for X11 and is now Wayland-only. For that matter, KDE Plasma does still support X11 for now if the additional support packages are installed, but KDE too have announced that they will be dropping X11 support completely for Plasma 6.8.
I’m afraid Wayland is the only way to go anymore if you’re on either of those two desktop environments. Xfce does still run on X11 by default, even if only because Wayland support is still quite experimental there, due to the rather conservative nature of Xfce itself.
Hmm, that’s not advisable, because the configuration files in your home directory might get corrupted.
It used to be easier to do this, but due to the standardization rules imposed by freedesktop.org on account of configuration, there might be conflicts, and especially so because GNOME and Xfce are both gtk-based.
Even with Plasma and GNOME or Plasma and Xfce, we don’t advise it.
Well, the right approach would be to uninstall GNOME and install Xfce, but for that you sort of need to know what you’re doing, and therefore, it might be easier to just wipe your installation and install from an Xfce ISO.
There should be, but I’ve never done it. Wayland contains an X11-compatibility layer called XWayland, which will let individual applications run on top of an X11 process which itself is a Wayland client.
It is intended to eventually replace the classic X.Org server, thus reducing maintenance burden of X11 applications, but a lot of work needs to be done first.
Basically everything old enough that is forced x11 will run there
I use one of my system as secondary gaming machine for things i can’t do on the Series X. (Mostly modding old games or playing Fallout New London etc.) I don’t use Gnome though. Installation was done with the Plasma ISO and i also installed LxQt alongside. I don’t see problems with using different DEs with the same user - well i wouldn’t use Gnome alongside Plasma since these large environments tend also to theme applications not belonging into the environment so Plasma themes GTK apps and vice versa Gnome may theme Qt apps and doing so on the same account may lead to unexpected results.
Anyway, i don’t have any issues with Plasma and LxQt (using openbox so its X). If you only want to try an X session for MangoHUD you could also install merely a window manager like icewm for intance. It’s all in the Manjaro repository.
Example (using XWayland) env XDG_SESSION_TYPE=x11 GDK_BACKEND=x11 plank &
to start Plank in Wayland…
( edit as user: .config/autostart/net.launchpad.plank.desktop (because it is in your /home dir.)
(and change line:
…
Type=Application Exec=env XDG_SESSION_TYPE=x11 GDK_BACKEND=x11 plank &
Icon=plank
)
Next example:… Exec=env XDG_SESSION_TYPE=x11 GDK_BACKEND=x11 qjournalctl
to start “QJournalctl”.
(edit as root: /usr/share/applications/qjournalctl.desktop)
