A dubia on Wayland, screensharing and Pipewire

[rwmlknjyr]

I have been interested in FreeBSD as a daily driver lately, I read the handbook. some mailing lists and some threads from the forum but still have some questions I did not find answer, so I am guessing the best way to have an answer before switching OS is to ask FreeBSD users.
In the handbook there is a guide to setup sway, and that is what I use as my wm on Linux but my understanding is that a wayland compositor have a hard dependence on Pipewire to do things like screensharing. Pipewire have hard dependence on ALSA, AFAIK. I checked the ports and there is one for Pipewire and other for an OSS backend for Pipewire, I was wondering how this works, does it works out of the box after installation of those ports o will manual intervention be needed? I am not scared of having to manually setup things but I prefer knowing before hand if I will need to. How easy is the Wayland experience on FreeBSD?
I apologize beforehand for any grammatical mistake as english is not my mother tongue.

 

[matt_k]

Hi, I'm using hyprland on FreeBSD and I installed it via pkg. pkg solves all your dependency issues for you. I'm not sure what your question is here, but you install sway and it just works. Of course, at first check your HW compatibility, FreeBSD is more strict with hardware. If your audio hardware is not supported by kernel or kernel modules, then you are out of luck. Generally, if you follow the handbook, installation of graphical environment is a breeze. Be aware though, that at the present time there are some issues with building binary packages (as evidenced for example here), so you may want to just wait it out.

EDIT: something (I guess it was hyprland) pulled the pipewire package as a dependency, I did not install it manually:

i~> pkg query %n | grep pipewire
pipewire
i~>

 

[rwmlknjyr]

Hi, I'm using hyprland on FreeBSD and I installed it via pkg. pkg solves all your dependency issues for you. I'm not sure what your question is here, but you install sway and it just works. Of course, at first check your HW compatibility, FreeBSD is more strict with hardware. If your audio hardware is not supported by kernel or kernel modules, then you are out of luck. Generally, if you follow the handbook, installation of graphical environment is a breeze. Be aware though, that at the present time there are some issues with building binary packages (as evidenced for example here), so you may want to just wait it out.

EDIT: something (I guess it was hyprland) pulled the pipewire package as a dependency, I did not install it manually:

i~> pkg query %n | grep pipewire
pipewire
i~>

Thank you for your answer, I think I did not formulate my question correctly. I was asking whether screensharing works with wayland on FreeBSD, given my experience in Linux Pipewire is a must to make it work easily, given you said hyprland pulled Pipewire I am guessing it do works for video at least. I checked my hardware with NomadBSD and everything worked, I am guessing the T480 is well supported. Thank you for your warning about the binary packages issue, I will wait until it is fixed to install FreeBSD on my machine. Thank you again.

 

[matt_k]

Thank you for your answer, I think I did not formulate my question correctly. I was asking whether screensharing works with wayland on FreeBSD, given my experience in Linux Pipewire is a must to make it work easily, given you said hyprland pulled Pipewire I am guessing it do works for video at least. I checked my hardware with NomadBSD and everything worked, I am guessing the T480 is well supported. Thank you for your warning about the binary packages issue, I will wait until it is fixed to install FreeBSD on my machine. Thank you again.

I don't know if it works, I'm not using that feature. I will check that for you if you want, but you must tell me how.

 

[rwmlknjyr]

I don't know if it works, I'm not using that feature. I will check that for you if you want, but you must tell me how.

I would be very grateful if you would do so, if it is not a bother. On hyprland my understanding is that xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland + Pipewire is needed and then one must set an environment variable on hyprland.conf to be ready at the start of the session
exec-once=dbus-update-activation-environment WAYLAND_DISPLAY XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP
You could use jitbit.com which is a simple site to check screensharing, thank you in advance.

 

[matt_k]

jitbit.com does not work for me. I tried jitsi.com to do a call from myself to myself, but screensharing did not work on chromium browser. I could see the camera though. I'm not sure I want to delve deeper into that. Haven't you tried FreeBSD in a VM and checked the functionality there?