progress: i suppose it counts as progress that Wayland doesn't immediately crash the machine, as it has on the previous occasions i've tried it
however, what i'm not seeing is anything as simple as just shoving a window manager in an .xinitrc file and saying startx. instead, we have two tiling window managers which are utterly inscrutable - i cannot figure out, even after poring over the man page and the config file for sway, how to open a damn terminal window; and in any case, i loathe tiling window managers with a passion. undiscoverability is not a feature damn it!
then there's wayfire, which arrived without any kind of documentation; and weston, which refuses to start on my machine for reasons it elected not to condescend to explain to me.
this is... frustrating.
oh, right. weston wouldn't start because it made me add myself to the weston-launch group, which meant i had to log out and back in, which unset the XDG_RUNTIME_DIR variable it depends on, which caused it to silently fail.
so i set that again, and it noisily froze instead.
however: success! i finally figured out wayfire, and it seems to work! enough that i could get a terminal up, at any rate, which is pretty much 90% of the way there
and it seems to have started an X server automagically... and one that seems to have much better performance than the standard one; glmark2-es2 returns a score of 240 on X, but 608 under wayfire! which is as well, because glmark2-es2-wayland just crashes on startup...
