Wayland

TOC

Standard GNOME desktop under Debian Buster 10 has moved to use Wayland.

Although the migration from X to Wayland is mostly transparent to the end-user like me, there are some exceptions.

How to check if an application uses Wayland or X

• Execute “xeyes &” from a terminal console .
• Move mouse pointer over to an application in question.
• If eyes are responsive, it’s an X application.
• If eyes aren’t responsive, it’s a Wayland application.

You need to have x11-apps package installed.

How to reassign Caps-key as Esc-key

For vim user, reassigning practically unused Caps-key as Esc-key is very desirable customization. This becomes more important on laptop PCs since their Esc-key tends to be very small.

How to reassign Caps-key as Esc-key under Wayland.

For GNOME, GNOME Tweaks can reassign Caps-key as Esc-key for gnome-terminal which is a Wayland application.

Old tricks based on X doesn’t work any more.

How to reassign Caps-key as Esc-key under Linux console

For Linux console, the default keyboard layout is shared with X and described in /etc/default/keyboard on somewhat recent Debian.

...
XKBOPTIONS=caps:escape

Values used here can be found in /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/base.lst.

For Bulleseye 11, changing this only doesn’t change actual keyboard layout behavior of Linux console upon reboot. I needed to run the following command manually in Linux console to activate this configuration:

 $ sudo setupcon -v -k
...

I suppose, Wayland system doesn’t run keyboard initialization code for Linux console upon reboot.