Yes, after being pushed back from release after release, Fedora 25 finally defaults to using the Wayland graphics stack (assuming you have a supported graphics card). This is perhaps the biggest change to come in the Linux world since the move to systemd. However, unlike that systemd transition, the switch to Wayland was so seamless I had to logout and double check that I was in fact using Wayland.
I called Fedora 24, released earlier this year, “the year’s best Linux distro” but one that I would have a hard time recommending thanks to some ugly kernel-related bugs. Well, Fedora 25 is here with an updated kernel, the bugs appear to be gone, and I have no reservations about recommending it. Not only is Fedora 25 a great release, the updated GNOME 3.22 running on top of Wayland appears to be slick and very stable.
The switch to Wayland has been so long in the making. That being said, I’ve been using Wayland for several years now – on my Jolla devices.
Does anybody know if the non-Gnome spins are Wayland yet, specifically, KDE?
They aren’t. Take a look at https://community.kde.org/Plasma/5.8_Errata#Wayland
You’d think those who are still loyal to Gnome would be jaded to big changes like this by now.
If it can:
1. Run Wine games
2. Run Blender and other 3D/visualization apps
Then it is stable, otherwise, it’s another test released.
Sometimes, stable is subjective.
allanregistos,
While you make a valid point, wayland might not actually be the root cause of the problems in either of those two cases.
Wine has always been buggy with some software, to my chagrin.
IMHO Blender has way too many stability problems of it’s own to be used as litmus test for wayland’s stability. Just this week I was having problems with it rendering improperly and crashing with faults on windows. The bug tracker shows I’m far from alone in experiencing these problems, unfortunately.
https://developer.blender.org/maniphest/project/2/type/Bug/
I think the point being made was that, to the end user, the assigning of fault doesn’t matter… just the action which caused problems to start occurring.
(ie. “It was working before and I have stuff to do. Go test your damn changes on someone else.”)
Edited 2016-12-17 05:42 UTC
ssokolow,
If they’re attributing blame to the wrong project, well then that’s a different problem. But ultimately you are right that regardless of the fault, it can tarnish the reputation. The perception of fault is just as damaging as actually being at fault.
That kind of reminds me about when microsoft was deliberately creating conditional bugs in windows when lotus (or was it wordperfect?) was detected. And I vaguely remember they did the same thing with windows running on drdos.
Funny, that is exactly how I feel about Windows 10 each time they put out a so-called “feature upgrade.”
Which is why I run stable/LTS Linux releases and accept that, sometimes, things like the newest version of Dolphin or ScummVM just won’t be available to me without setting up a chroot containing a newer version of the OS because of all the dependencies which would need to be upgraded.
It’s worked pretty well for me so far.
Edited 2016-12-20 03:11 UTC
Yes I agree that it is not all of wayland’s responsibility. GPU Vendors must support wayland, so my post is a bit misleading perhaps. Before I can categorically mention Wayland’s stability, the project must be supported first by vendors.
There are quite a few problems with Wayland still (LibreOffice is just plain unusable on HiDPI), but you can easily work around them by running the application on XWayland.
Thank you for all your hard work!
Has anyone tried Fedora 25 or, specifically, Wayland on very old hardware (something like an old Core 2 Duo laptop)? How well does it perform on old hardware?
Wayland runs faster than X on anything with enough GPU. Even having Xwayland around for half your processes, it’s not responsible for drawing the full screen so you still get the benefits. Most things more than that are highly compositor dependent. I don’t much like GNOME under X or Wayland, but I will say that Sway is pretty neat.
–posted from a Wayland session on Arch, so about what you’d get with Fedora 25.
The reason I won’t touch any Fedora release now is not GNOME or Wayland but Anaconda, in particular, the partitioner. It is the most hideous installer I’ve ever seen, you can’t customise much as you can on OpenSUSE, and the partitioner is over-complicated and makes it very easy to make mistakes. The old Anaconda (up to Beefy Miracle), even though it was slow, was easy to use; the new “hub and spoke” installer is a nightmare.
Funny, my main reasons for not using Fedora is because it’s not as comprehensive as far as what is pre-packaged compared to Debian, so I pretty much stick to Debian Testing, which also has all the wayland bits. The problem with Wayland, from what I can gather, is that it still doesn’t have support for all the drivers that Xorg does.
And a certain graphics maker said it will support neither Wayland or Mir. So the only hope is open source drivers for said hardware.
Which one? If you’re referring to nVidia, you’ve got your terms confused.
nVidia has no problem supporting EGL, which is what Wayland needs for direct rendering. They just disagree with Mesa’s “GBM” approach to filling in the platform-specific bits that EGL leaves unspecified.
They’ve proposed working together on a successor to both Mesa’s GBM and their own EGLStreams to satisfy both parties.
In the mean time, Fedora should support nVidia because GNOME has merged patches to support their EGLStreams API and the other spins are still on X11 as far as I know.
Edited 2016-12-18 08:54 UTC
” …tasks like dragging windows are much smoother…”
Yes. Finally. After 25 years of development you can do smooth windows dragging in Linux. I guess we will be given proper audio&video support as well, let’s say in about 30 years from now.
Hilariously oxymoron news.
Yes, just like when your next Linux distro is on the news, releasing an alleged number of features(Really features???) but what you will see is the next iteration or update of a given package and call it a feature.
So I will stay with a distro that is simple enough to use and disregards all the politics that comes with Linux distro bashing.