I used Debian bookworm stable’s tasksel app to install “GNOME Flashback”. At the login screen there is no option to select wayland like there is with Debian’s standard “GNOME” installation. Is there a way to configure “GNOME Flashback” to use wayland instead of XORG?
After installing Debian’s plasma-desktop I installed the SDDM display manager and it was aware both XORG and wayland could be used. Is there a file I could check to ensure the display manager is aware that “GNOME Flashback” supports wayland, if indeed it does?
GNOME Flashback uses metacity, meaning the window manager that mutter, the window manager and compositor library used by gnome-shell, is originally based on. There is no support for Wayland in metacity as far as I know, so I think you’re out of luck there.
If a similar experience is what you are after, but want to use Wayland, I suggest “GNOME Classic”, which makes GNOME Shell behave in a more “classic” way.
Someone mentioned “GNOME Flashback” might consume less resources so I gave it a try. I think you’re right about “GNOME Classic” being a good alternative as when I’ve installed it in the past it used about the same amount of memory as “GNOME Flashback” and supports wayland.
I installed Debian’s “plasma-desktop” and have been using the UI to disable all non-critical features and have started to use HTOP to terminate remaining processes which “seem” non-critical. Next is to disable the services which start these processes and test for failures. Ideally, I’d like to uninstall every non-critical package such that I can still run terminals, browsers, calcs, Libre Office, and editors.
I want to do the same with "GNOME Classic”, not “GNOME Flashback” thanks to your input, and compare resource usage between plasma and GNOME. I’m getting plasma down to about 37 tasks and 500M but as plasmashell is rather large I’m hoping " GNOME Classic " might have smaller processes which provide plasmashell functionality. I prefer the functionality of the plasma start menu to GNOME Classic’s start menu but GNOME Classic is more responsive in my VirtualBox VMs. And more critical is GNOME has been dealing with wayland/X compatibility problems for much longer than plasma so my guess is GNOME is more stable.