Today, Canonical released Ubuntu 21.04 with native Microsoft Active Directory integration, Wayland graphics by default, and a Flutter application development SDK. Separately, Canonical and Microsoft announced performance optimization and joint support for Microsoft SQL Server on Ubuntu.
Ubuntu 21.04 is an important release, if only because of the switch to Wayland, following in Fedora’s footsteps. Ubuntu did opt out of shipping GNOME 40, though, so it comes with 3.38 instead. The step to Wayland is surely going to cause problems for some people, but overall, I think it’s high time and Wayland is pretty much as ready as it’s ever going to be. Remember, Wayland is not X, as I said a few months ago:
Wayland is not X.org. Let me repeat that. Wayland is not X.org. If you need the functionality that X.org delivers, then you shouldn’t be using Wayland. This is like buying a Mac and complaining your Windows applications don’t work.
With NVIDIA finally seeming to get at least somewhat on board, and X.org development basically having dried up, the time for Wayland is now.
I’ve been lurking around here for years because occasionally there is something interesting. I’ve finally registered just because I cannot stand the Wayland infatuation any longer.
Wayland is not X? Correct. It doesn’t do what X can do. Remote desktop is not good enough. Many situations require the ability to forward individual applications. Microsoft realised this and added the ability to remotely display individual apps under Remote Desktop Services, which works nearly as well as X does (but does need a lot more configuration).
X.org development has dried up? That’s what you get when you have a mature product that works.
Not sure which of the following aphorisms applies best. If you reckon X is good enough (and it certainly has been for well over a decade):
“Don’t fix it if it ain’t broken.”
But if you reckon there are things in X that needed to be fixed, then perhaps do that rather than replacing the whole thing:
“Don’t throw or the baby out with the bathwater.”
Obviously you don’t understand what X is very well let alone how it works on the protocol level. Many things in X are broken beyond salvation and only hacked together by horrendous bubblegum in a bid to achieve barely acceptable user experience for the modern ages.
Speaking about user experience… I often ssh into another box on my LAN, like
ssh -X nextroom.local
thunar ~/Desktop
Can I use the same easy commands (no configuration needed) to remotely open an application using Wayland?
Of course there is work in progress to enable remote desktop for Wayland sessions. I don’t use such features myself so I do not keep track of what the current state is, though.
For me, it’s core functionality, one of the main reasons I switched from Windows to Linux desktop computing. If after al these years such functionality is still not part of Wayland, well, let’s hope it will not be “hacked together”. 🙁
I sort of keep track, and it’s coming along. I think Pipewire might be the big piece.
I am way to optimistic about Wayland’s Remote Desktop being usable. Remote desktop on Xorg was so broken that it hasn’t been worth it for years, and anyone saying otherwise isn’t being honest or tried to do real work.
SSH and tmux is the best *nix remote desktop, and I will die of old age and boredom on this hill.
the -X session is only useful for a few things, and mostly administrative work. You will not use it for audio/video production and other GUI intensive tasks.
I do not have any idea how Wayland handles remote graphics. If true that it will include pipewire audio, then it is a light at the end of the tunnel.
The short answer is “no”, and if you need that to continue as-is, you’ll have to stick with a sensible Linux distro that doesn’t move fast and break things for the hell of it, or else move to a non-Linux OS like OpenBSD where their fork of X not only works as it should, it’s more secure.
Desktop Linux is finally here, and of course it’s just a bad clone of Windows between systemd, Wayland, and Canonical’s marriage to Microsoft.
Currently I’m on Arch Linux with XFCE, but I’ll keep the OpenBSD option in mind. I also would rather use Windows (ugh) than a bad clone of Windows…
Systemd makes lots of sense and works really well in a desktop setting. 🙂 Per user services and timers are especially nice.
It makes less sense on servers. Unit files and timers are nice, but other things don’t make much sense, like udev and parallel execution.
“systemd, Wayland, and Canonical’s marriage to Microsoft.”
You need to cooperate with big neighbours. You do not have a choice, or else be still like an obscure Linux distro that almost everybody doesn’t care.
What we need from a Linux desktop experience is more apps, more apps, more apps at the user level.
Short answer: “yes”.
Long answer: using pure Wayland, “no”, but all well known distributions come with XWayland, which transparently launches an X session if needed and you don’t even notice. That’s why the final answer is a “yes”.
Having a compatibility layer is fine. I still use some Tk applications, which doesn’t have Wayland support, but I can continue to use them while benefiting from all the good things that Wayland brings.
Thanks. That could work. I’ll try it out some day.
This is good. But there is should be a disclaimer to users, that this is only a hack, and users needs to understand that xWayland is there for the sake of compatibility with X, not enhancing X sesssions.
I agree that X is outdated and should have been replaced long ago, but Wayland is a train wreck. First, the layering is all wrong. The proper way to do it IMO would be with a generic policy-free compositor and an X-style reparenting window manager on top of that, but the Wayland developers must have decided that stupid useless bling effects like distorting windows were more important than reduced attack surface, ease of crash recovery, and more effective sharing of code between different DEs (certain types of completely useless window effects are the only thing I can think of that would be more difficult with a policy-free compositor; actual useful window effects like live previews or window zooming would be no more difficult than with a compositing window manager as long as the compositor provides a sufficient window transform API). Also, rather than dividing the API into subsets that could be subject to access control, they decided to be authoritarian and just leave out any “dangerous” APIs entirely.
There are probably things that I don’t understand about X and how it works. But I know it does work for what I want to do and I know that Wayland doesn’t do things that I can do with X – things I want to continue to do.
You tell me which one is broken?
It cannot be broken if it isn’t even implemented. You are crying about a different thing because you are ignorant. Wayland is not ready for all users, so if you are one of that kind, then you should stay with Xorg.
So Wayland isn’t broken because it isn’t ready to be the default, so we’ll make it the default!
That’s some twisted logic, sister.
Obviously this decision is Canonical’s alone and does not necessarily reflect the “Linux community” in broader sense. So just pick another distro or, eh, change the settings to your liking. Whining about “wrong” defaults is retarded as nobody actually uses only the defaults all the time anyways.
I cannot actually even remember an app that I didn’t change the settings for. Even the terminal emulator has “wrong” defaults if you ask me…
sj87,
That’s a common sense answer. Alas, sometimes common sense is in short supply, haha.
I actually think the majority of users do stick with the defaults though whatever they are. This is why being the default browser or search engine can be so valuable, for example.
I’m not against wayland, but I do disagree with some of their decisions to drop features and impose arbitrary limitations. Xwayland compatibility is absolutely excellent and I’m almost 100% on board with it… except that wayland API falls short and has missing features. I’m still waiting for it to work with remote screen streaming. Even my kids cannot use wayland until this is working flawlessly. I wish wayland devs would have been more receptive to user needs rather than creating this completely unnecessary friction with the community. Oh well, it is what it is.
I don’t care about Wayland vs Xorg.
I just want WindowMaker and fvwm2 to work. Preferably with 2x scaling on my 5k display. Probably a pipe dream, but one can hope. If every single app inside Wayland is an Xorg app running through Xwayland, whatever, I’m fine with that, I have lots of RAM and lots of cores.
Kudos to the Ubuntu team for another fine release. My home desktops are Debian, OpenBSD, and macOS, but I’m sure I’ll see it at work.
Windows Remote Desktop works much, much, much better then Xorg or VNC/xRDP.
X really fell behind in this regard, and the vaunted X forwarding or VNC has been inadequate for a decade. Wayland not supporting any of the crappy, Linux remote desktop solutions was a merciful, and will hopefully force people to come up with a better solution.
I doubt it, because no one uses that feature, but one can hope.
The Xorg devs switched to working on Wayland. Their opinions about the state of Xorg differ from the peanut gallery.
“OMG Xorg is broken, it needs to be fixed! Let’s replace it entirely with Wayland!” – Says the Xorg developers who now work on Wayland…
I remember the XFree86 days… and Xorg was made so that they could change XFree86’s monolithic setup to a more modular one so that Xorg could be updated much easier… so what happened with that and why is it so horribly broken these days? I don’t think it is, I think it’s a case of ‘we want to work on something new.’
And for the comment about ‘it’s not Xorg, so don’t expect it to act like Xorg’ is pretty short sighted as it is intended to replace Xorg, so it damn well better not break all the things… which is the purpose of XWayland, yet at the same time it’s still not 100% compatible, so what, we’re just going to have to live with (sometimes paid for) software that will eventually no longer work, just because some developers felt like they wanted to do something new instead of fix the thing that everyone used before?
Quote: “I don’t think it is [broken]”.
Well, you don’t have to “think” about. Xorg is utterly broken. Beyond repair. It’s been since almost its inception due to the limitations of its core (which, FOR OBVIOUS REASONS, wasNOT DESIGNED to work with *never before even imagine* hardware that would be created decades later).
So, now, you have three options (well, there’s a fourth one that no one wants to hear):
1st) Add hack-over-hack to “make it work”. Well, that’s what Xorg is nowadays… a nightmare if you have any problem with it.
2nd) Join the Wayland nightmare… Seriously, Wayland is… I can’t even explain it… Let’s call it the systemd-version of Xorg.
3rd) Enjoy the nightmware XWayland is…
Now, you can imagine the 4th option… and its consecuences.
I figure there are varying levels of ‘broken’.
To me, if it does the job that it is intended for (in the case of Xorg it is basically handling input and output, and allowing other things to use its API to display things), it is not fundamentally broken. If you are attsmpting to do new things with it and can’t because of other limitations, then how is it really broken? It is like having a car (yup, with the car analogy) that has four wheels, an engine and seating compartments that take you from A to B… but it doesn’t fly, and adding wings to it to make it do so is definitely too hard, as you need something to make it go up as well. But then once you do all of that, it is a plane and no longer a car… and some people are afraid of heights!
There is nothing wrong with Xorg outside of it being old and stable and developers want to work with new paradigms.
I still remember the days when XFree86 was all we had unless you wanted to spend tons on a commercial Xserver. Yup, those used to be a thing!
I am probably wrong, as I use nvidia cards and have for years, and before that, Matrox cards, and they have had excellent driver support. Everytime I have tried to use an AMD card, it has been awful. Then again, the Optimus stuff is terrible as well…
So, X.Org is broken beyond redemption and Wayland is a nightmare. Remind me why people should switch to Linux again.
People should switch to Linux if it meets their needs. People should not switch to Linux if it doesn’t meet their needs.
It’s rather simple, lol.
Wayland works fine. There are edge cases, but that’s mostly about the downstream devs catching up.
4) Give up the Linux desktop and use robust TUI CLI tools over SSH, which is what most people do.
What I find interesting is that users with Nvidia cards are more likely to find Xorg satisfactory. I read somewhere that the Nvidia driver replaces the 1/3rd of the Xorg stack, so in that sense, the Nvidia “driver” is more of a custom X11 solution (think SGI IRIX) than a driver. Makes sense, since Linux workstations with Nvidia graphics are now used for what SGI IRIX workstations were used in the past (for those clients who didn’t move to Windows anyway).
This of course means Nvidia has the incentive to keep their custom solution alive for as long as possible, and to sabotage Wayland by not getting fully on-board, in order to maintain their competitive edge.
The thing is that in the Xwindows stack, the differentiation between driver and other parts of the framework are not as clear as more modern display/windowing systems.
So a lot of the stack in the NVIDIA version has been customized by nvidia not just the driver itself.
Also with the support for compute, audio, and USB on the gfx chip, the nvidia driver does much more than just handle graphics calls/abstractions.
I really don’t understand all this commotion. When logging in you have a choice of going to a Wayland or X.org session. No one is forcing anyone into anything. The choice is always there.
[quote]
I really don’t understand all this commotion. When logging in you have a choice of going to a Wayland or X.org session. No one is forcing anyone into anything. The choice is always there.
[/quote]
How should Linux desktop grow in use for non-tinkerer when you have to relog into another session to run a specific program?
But you don’t need to relogin if you’re using Wayland, X applications continue to work via Xwayland.
Sodki,
Mostly, Xwayland’s compatibility is very good, but not complete since wayland’s developers decided not to support some features. This results in various levels of breakage, some minor and others complete show stoppers. These are the very same show stoppers that prevented wayland becoming the default in ubuntu in the past. I’d like to be an optimist and believe that these issues were finally fixed, but the last time I checked several months ago they remained broken, meaning ubuntu themselves grew impatient waiting for wayland to fix things so they’re making it default without fixes.
You and I know when we need to switch back to X, but a non-technical user would likely not know why something is broken. It’s things like this that are the reason why I don’t recommend linux for ordinary end users unless they have a more technical person around. Take my parents, linux can do everything they need it to do, things like zoom, but they’re helpless to fix things that don’t just work 100%. They’re not going to read man pages, use terminals, or edit /etc files. Here is the point: minor things to you and me can be major stumbling blocks to ordinary users.
Is it just me or is everyone who is anti wayland also anti systemd? Seems like a pattern, tbh.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
I have a hunch your referring the likes of me, haha. It’s true I’ve been critical of both.
I am not against replacing older standards like X11 and system-v. I actually hated sysv init and I understand the flaws of X windows.
My criticisms generally stem from the management styles that can often plague these projects. I appreciate the contributions and the desire to make something better, but I find the “my way or the highway” attitude troubling. Too often community input gets ignored and too much effort goes into plowing through the criticism instead of acknowledging it and solving the problems, which is a shame. As much as I want the linux community to be better than the corporate world where strong-arming is the norm, I’m slowly learning that being a dick just comes with the territory. A lot of the characteristics I find distasteful such as greed/selfishness/social apathy seem to get people further ahead in our world nevertheless. I don’t know what, if anything, can be done about this. People who cooperate too much are easily stepped on and leave a path wide open for dicks to take over. Survival of the fittest doesn’t bode well for genuinely nice people.
I know this went a bit tangential, but I just wanted to provide the rational behind my “pattern” 🙂
My resistance to the two projects is rooted in similar sentiments. The *idea* of systemd, at least how it started, was a good one. The implementation is horrendous, almost as bad as the attitude of its creator and maintainer, who lives by the mantra “screw your bug reports, we’re doing it my way or no way, full steam ahead!” Wayland isn’t quite as bad, but it’s the same “move fast, break things, screw the users and their silly bug reports” attitude going on over there too.
Put the two together and you have a system that might hang when loading the interface (Ubuntu 21.04 on AMD64) or doesn’t allow typing in the terminal app (Ubuntu 21.04 on the Raspberry Pi 4). Three different systems I’ve tested Ubuntu 21.04 on have all had show-stopping bugs related to Wayland, and systemd continues to sometimes hang at boot on both Ubuntu and Debian on **all** of my test systems (Dell PowerEdge tower, three different Lenovo laptops/netbooks, Ryzen 5 3600 based workstation, HP Stream mini desktop, Lenovo ThinkCentre M91 desktop). If it was one or even two systems I’d call it a hardware conflict, but on so many different computers spanning the past 12 years, it’s no longer coincidence.
It might be Ubuntu. As a long time RHEL/CentOS and Fedora user, I have experienced none of this.
Fedora set Wayland as default ~2 years ago, and aside from a few oddities, mostly centered around Firefox, Thunderbird, and OBS which isn’t used that often, it’s been a very smooth transition.
I mostly have Intel Haswell systems using the iGPU.
Good to know, thanks. It has mostly been Debian based distros I’ve seen this issue on. I haven’t messed with Fedora much since long before systemd and Wayland showed up; I was into Red Hat and Corel Linux (remember that one?) waaaay back in the day but always went back to Slackware for sanity’s sake.
I’ll have to give Fedora a go just to see how well systemd and Wayland work on their “native” distro.
The Linux community is a corporate community these days. There isn’t much left of the grassroots, DIY enthusiasts.
There have been studies, and being a dick works in the short term. Ultimately, being cooperative and someone other people want to work with works out better in the long term.
Flatland_Spider,
A bit off topic, but that reminds me of this “Simulating Green Beard Altruism” video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goePYJ74Ydg
Real life is obviously more complex. I don’t think it’s realistic to think of greed and altruism as strictly binary values. It’s more of a spectrum. A common capitalistic mantra is that “greed is good”, but even those who believe this still have to make sure the bottom gets something. People won’t want to work under someone who is 100% greedy, 100% greed at the top leaves everyone else with nothing to loose and lots of motivation to topple the system. But with 0% greed one is easily exploitable by those who are greedy. So the question becomes how much greed can the system tolerate sustainably while not causing too much instability so-as to encourage a rebellion from those at the bottom.
It would be very interesting to have an academic study about this using real human subjects. If you know of any papers that go into this kind of thing, send me a link 🙂
Using it on my laptop, and loving it. It is too bad this isn’t an LTS, as it is smooth and responsive with wayland. Great release, going to update my desktop soon.