Mate-wayland-session with Debian 12 Bookworm

[cjstoddard]

I am running Debian 12, although Mate is my DE of choice, I have decided to make the move to Wayland. For the time being I am using KDE, but I would much rather use a Mate environment. I am giving this a shot, I don't mind being an Alpha tester. For those of you thinking about it, here is the list of bumps I ran into along the way.

1. For some reason Mate (Wayfire) did not show up as an option in the display manager until I changed Exec and TryExec in MATE.desktop to /usr/local/bin/mate-wayland.sh.
2. What I am supposed to do with mate-wayland-components.sh is still unclear to me. I added it to the bottom of my .config/wayfire/wayfire.ini and set autostart_wf_shell = false. I am not sure if that was what I was supposed to do, but it didn't seem to stop it from working.
3. firedecor does not seem to be an installable package in Debian 12, although it looks to be available in Unstable, but I am not going there, sorry. At some point I will track it down and install it manually.
4. When the Mate desktop came up, it had my old Mate panel just the way I left it. The problem was the Notifications Applet is not Wayland compatible and would not start. Any suggestions for what to replace it with?
5. Some things in the menu don't work like Display and Logout, I am sure this is just a matter of editing those entries to point to the correct applets.

All in all, not the worst Alpha software test I have ever tried to implement.

[lukefromdc]

I have yet to be able to actually get it to work from /usr/local due to the gsettings override file, which breaks make install if sent to /usr/local

[lukefromdc]

The fact that you were able to install to /usr/local also tells me that w some SED work and just disabling thr gschema override for installs to /usr/local I can make that work. Thanks!

[cjstoddard]

All I did was run autogen.sh, then make, then sudo make install. I did not try to build a deb package, I was being lazy. I don't know if that makes any difference or not.

[lukefromdc]

autogen .sh --prefix=/usr will install to /usr (as when I build a deb) and works perfectly. You ran into absolute path issues with an install to /usr/local that are next on the agenda to fix.

[lukefromdc]

I now have installs to /usr/local working after
3d4c0a8

Note that the menta window buttons used by default on first run will only show up if firedecor (optional) and mate-wayland-session are both installed to the same set of directories or at least have the same data directory. This would be the case if both are local builds installed to /usr/local, both are installed from .deb (etc...) files and go to /usr, or one is installed from a package and one is locally installed to /usr. Simple enough to copy or symlink the files, but making that work unconditionally would require finding and always writing to the same data directory firedecor used. That would break the use of /usr/local to keep locally installed files out of the directories managed by the package manager

[lukefromdc]

A test would be appreciated

[lukefromdc]

Build system has received a great many changes to support making tarballs with make distcheck so please test again