I’m really worried about the time when Wayland will be the only option, because Wayland doesn’t run satisfactorily on my system. (16 × AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS w/ Radeon 780M Graphics; Plasma 6.3.2; TUXEDO OS)
In xnviewmp, an app I use every day, the screen color picker doesn’t work, nor does copy&paste.
The fonts and photos are blurry and fuzzy at 150% scaling (necessary at 2500x1600).
I’ve tried it with different distros—same thing everywhere!
1 Like
That’s an xnviewmp issue, they need to implement Wayland support at least for the clipboard.
The screen-color picker probably won’t be accessible in apps, but Plasma has the feature built-in.
xnviewmp is an application using XWayland in a Wayland Session and X11/XWayland can’t handle proper fractional scaling. The application needs some work to benefit from actual Wayland fractional scaling.
You can compare with gwenview or digikam for instance.
Your concern sums up to old application not having Wayland support. That’s a typical chicken-and-egg problem.
The application won’t work on a new environment support unless they really want to or have to.
But the ship has sailed with gimp, Krita, Wine having proper Wayland support nowadays as well as all the KDE and GNOME apps.
The applications without Wayland support will become obsolete unless they jump into the wagon. That might not be simple unfortunately but there is no way around it and many have done it in the past.
Just to support real fractional scaling should be a reason enough for image/video applications, but that’s still up to the devs.
You can report this to xnviewmp bug tracking system.
This isn’t Free Software making this harder, because only the company can do something about it, the community can’t help, and companies do things when they have to for business benefit.
2 Likes
Thank you very much; unfortunately is xnview the only app, with which fotolabeling is easy an quick (and I have to label very much fotos of a birding comunity); I spoke with the maintainer, he told me, everything would work under wayland, but it doesn’t.
And He is right, it does work with XWayland and unless you use fractional scaling it will look (almost) exactly the same.
You have to detail your case, give him screenshot.
He probably doesn’t know about Wayland fractional scaling (
Fractional scale protocol | Wayland Explorer), this isn’t an easy subject for developers, unless you use frameworks such as Gtk or Qt.
KDE was working on this subject years ago.
What can I say—some tools, especially the screen color picker (directly from the photo), don’t work, and I can’t paste text from another application. I don’t know what the problem is—maybe it’s my system?
what distro are you running actually ?
You pinpointed your issue - using some remnant of your Windows experience!
Firstly, it’s not FOSS - just in case you were interested - and your post simply will be answered with - why complain that some proprietary software doesn’t run properly? Why not simply find better software.
I have no issues at all, but I don’t use xnviewmp.
Though ‘fotolabeling’ isn’t a word, I’m assuming you want to label and/or tag your images…
For advanced tagging, you should look at STAG/CVAT with DigiKam to manage XMP tags and organise the images after labelling.
Also you could look at ‘Merlin Bird ID’ from Cornell Lab for quick species verification.
TUXEDO OS - it is a rolling Ubuntu;
To avoid misunderstanding: Almost everything in xnviewmp runs correctly under Wayland; however, two functions (screen color picker and paste from another app) do not work. Everything works flawlessly under X11. Basically, I would like to switch completely to Wayland to finally stop switching back and forth.
Why not use better software: Only in GIMP can the background color of a label be adjusted from the photo (not from a color table); but in GIMP this is cumbersome and slow; with xnview it is quick and easy.
Though ‘fotolabeling’ isn’t a word: I need to write text on a photo, let’s say of a sparrow, that contains information about this shot and this bird. This text must appear in the photo. It therefore consists of font and background, whereby the background should match the color that predominates at the point where the text is inserted. I hope that makes sense; I’m afraid I can’t explain it any better.
It’s a semi- rolling Plasma on top of Ubuntu LTS, based on KDE neon but held back a little bit, fwiw.
I assume that you have reported this on whatever they use for a bug tracker? At least so that any developers can notice it.
Thanks, but I don’t have any trouble identifying birds; but you’re right, Merlin is a really nice app, like everything that comes from Cornell.
try the flatpak version
I am a bit surprised by the color picker issue.
You are trying to pick from a window of the same program, right?
Also surprised about this.
I would have assumed that XWayland would bridge between the X11 selection and its Wayland counterpart
True, which means they will be working on Wayland support sooner or later.
It appears to be a multi platform application so they will already have some platform abstraction.
Possibly even something they don’t maintain themselves and just waiting for that to get proper Wayland backend.
Thanks, I tried that too. Unfortunately, nothing changed.
I also tried Fedora, Manjaro, and Debian, without success.
@ jamesfredrik
Thanks, I tried that too. Unfortunately, nothing changed.
I also tried Fedora, Manjaro, and Debian, without success.
@krake
Yes, I open the Text-module, than pic screen color and move the cursor on the foto to that position, where I want to insert the text; this will choose the color of the background from the text, I have to insert.
Perhaps this example image can explain my problem. I label photos, currently around 40-60 per day in spring and summer. These photos are stored in a private database belonging to a birding community.
In the example photo, you can see two labels with different backgrounds, which are matched to the respective color of the photo. That’s what this is about: the background color. It’s easy with xnviewmp, but difficult or impossible with other apps.
Yeah, that is what I thought.
Which is a bit strange, since the app should be able to do that as both windows are within the same XWayland server.
Inkscape, a really great application that I use frequently, does not start at all under Wayland. (Internal error); I fully understand that not everything can work during a transition period, but then the old, functioning manager should be retained until most things are working. Or are they trying to put pressure on the developers? I don’t know; but as I said, it would be quite unpleasant for me if x11 (whose flaws I am aware of!) were to disappear completely.
It should still be able to run fine in XWayland.
As a GTK application is should be able to decide at startup time which backend it loads.
That should be the case, yes.
Hence XWayland being tightly integrated in most Wayland composers, e.g. automatically starting when an X11 client is detected.
A lot of distributions continue to ship support for “bare metal” X11 server and respective sessions 
But it’s not working at all…
Could my AMD graphics card be to blame?
Testing here, xnviewmp runs under Wayland by default (use xwininfo to verify - no crosshair in the app window = Wayland)).
Forcing it to use Xwayland :
export QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb
xnview
It behaves identically, the color picker is not working, as described.