Yes, I know Wayland has made some controversial design choices. The fact is, Wayland is the only viable X11 successor, which will hopefully bring more security and stability to the Linux desktop. Regardless of how it pans out, there’s nothing like a bit of competition to drive innovation. I won’t discuss any more politics in this post.
Also a disclaimer: I’m no systems programming expert (though I aspire to be), neither am I an expert in X11, Wayland, or their associated protocols or codebases. This post merely draws on my experiences as an end user that enjoys a highly customised workflow.
Wayland has been the talk of the town in the Linux world for quite a while now, but it seems a lot of important pieces of a modern desktop Linux distribution simply aren’t ready for it.
I’ve been using Wayland only on Fedora and Ubuntu for three or four years now and it has worked pretty well. That’s all with Intel or AMD graphics hardware. I’ve just been blacklisting the Nvidia cards in the laptops I use. They get used in a Windows dual boot but never in Linux.
And yes of course XWayland is used for a lot of things. And so? Are apps not “OS X Ready” if they run X on top of Quartz, or Windows DWM?
Windows is maybe a good example since it runs emulation of two or three older graphics stacks on top of their current Windows 10 one.
I’ve been trying Wayland on regular basis starting from Fedora 28. With latest realease I have no any major issues with it, but of course there are some small annoyances – like not cleaned window back-buffer which cause a momentary garbage to appear on screen, or stattering mouse pointer under load (I’m not sure if this one is Wayland specific or it just Gnome Mutter specific).
Overall, I think it is ready for most desktop users, unless I miss something critical in mine workflow.
“2019-11-25 3:14 pm
BlackV
I’ve been trying Wayland on regular basis starting from Fedora 28. With latest realease I have no any major issues with it, but of course there are some small annoyances – like not cleaned window back-buffer which cause a momentary garbage to appear on screen, or stattering mouse pointer under load (I’m not sure if this one is Wayland specific or it just Gnome Mutter specific).
Overall, I think it is ready for most desktop users, unless I miss something critical in mine workflow.”
You guys have been saying this same crap about Gnome 3 for how many years now? How many people actually want to use that POS for anything? Pretty much *NOBODY* including Linux users who aren’t members of the rabid Fedora/Gnome 3 fanbase.
Wayland is walking down that same road.
It’s the old saying at work, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”
Fedora,Gnone 3 and Wayland are perfect examples of the quickest way to break something is to fix it when it ain’t broken.
You are clearly barking on wrong tree. All I’ve written is that I’ve tried Wayland on Fedora since Fedora 28. Yeah I found it usable in Fedora 31… finaly.
Have I switched from Xorg? Nop.
In theory, I like some of the things Wayland will bring (eg. applications that don’t use SDL2 still getting GPU rescaling of their windows rather than changing the desktop resolution and confusing my WM) but, in practice, I have enough trouble with having to kill and restart my X11 compositor eventually.
(Hell, with the version of KWin I’m on, it will randomly decide to makeFirefox and/or mpv start to jank at around 1-2 FPS and I have to hit Ctrl+Alt+F12 (toggle compositing) twice to reset things.)
I’m waiting for compositor developers to hash out something analogous to the split between session manager and window manager on X11 to allow a session to recover from Wayland compositor failure rather than dying.
Well… that and I’m waiting to see a compositor arise that uses SSD or that mothballed KDE DWD idea and gives me at least a proprietary API that’ll let me hook in and monitor changes to the active window’s title for time-tracking purposes.
Why on earth would you want to inject proprietary garbage into the Linux desktop? I realise it would be nice to have all the proprietary stuff that already exists for Windows and Mac, but there is NO reason to make anything new proprietary, especially not if it’s a critical part of the infrastructure.
Maybe, just maybe because, as much as we might hate it yje proprietary tool might sometimes be the better at getting the task accomplished.
I guess the best thing to be said about Wayland is that you can put a session in front of people and they’d be none the wiser that they’re running Wayland. That’s pretty good. A lot of improvements still need to happen, but I would say that yes, we’re there.
…except that they’d be wondering about the bad performance all the time. Mouse pointer freezing every so often the most obvious and most annoying part of it. This is due to an implementation limitation on Mutter’s side (on Gnome) and will require a comprehensive rewrite, which will probably mean loads of bugs and broken behaviour for a couple of years.
‘2019-11-26 3:57 am
BlackV
You are clearly barking on wrong tree. All I’ve written is that I’ve tried Wayland on Fedora since Fedora 28. Yeah I found it usable in Fedora 31… finaly.
Have I switched from Xorg? Nop.”
This is like saying Fedora is real-world useable. It hasn’t been since 14.
Maybe it isn’t usable for you but I know at least 10 people including myself who prefer using Fedora with Gnome 3 for work and/or home.
It tends to work a whole lot better than Ubuntu or Debian with anything newer and isn’t as rough as Arch.
The biggest problem with Wayland is the delays in getting every desktop bar GNOME to work with it. Perhaps if Canonical or Ubuntu or even SUSE would fund that. (Yes, I know I can use GNOME. My opinions on GNOME are pretty much indistinguishable from yoko-t’s.)