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Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (or more handsome)
- blinkingled 10y agoFedora has really made great progress. The font situation is improved and used purely as a development/hacker workstation it works great on common hardware. Media playback, battery life remain big issues but I don't expect those to get any better soon. You can always fix the former with Rpmfusion packages and the latter by not using it unplugged :)
- noahdesu 10y agoYup. Running FC25 right now on 27" iMac and the visual appearance is noticeably better than older distributions I'm running on other hardware. Edit: FC25
- Tharre 10y agoCare to explain what you mean with issues regarding media playback?
- vetinari 10y agoFedora does not ship with many popular codecs (mp3 decoding is a new thing in F25, decoding h.264 was new in F24). Third party repositories do offer the codecs, but Fedora project itself does not.
- Tharre 10y agoAh, I see. Unfortunately this is most likely due to software patents. Bummer. Thanks though.
- XzetaU8 10y ago> and the latter by not using it unplugged Or by using PowerTop/TLP https://fedoramagazine.org/saving-laptop-power-with-powertop/ https://fedoramagazine.org/saving-laptop-power-with-powertop...
- 0xFFC 10y agoAs software developer I spend all of my time doing reading/writing code and text. So the most important aspect of a linux distro is font rendering and font aliasing for me. And fedora, last time I tried it, didn't have smooth font by default ! (it was version 23 if I remember correctly)
- xwat 10y agoWhat are you using then? I'm curious about which distro best handles font rendering.
- 0xFFC 10y agoI did use Gentoo and Arch for a year or two, but right now I do use Ubuntu LTS. I don't have enough time to deal with broken packages when I update, so I stick to the LTS.
- vetinari 10y agoFedora doesn't have rgba lcdfilter by default, due to Cleartype patents. It does have antialiasing. You can resolve that by installing freetype-freeworld package (which has exactly the same freetype library, just with one #define flipped), that is offered by some repositories, or you can get a HiDPI display. Which, if the reading/writing text is important to you, you will want anyway.
- boomboomsubban 10y ago
- AceJohnny2 10y agoOne of the things I loved in Linux was the ability to swap out the "window manager", the program that takes app's windows, draws decorations like title bar and window borders around them, and arranges them on the screen. I had fun with Compiz, I fiddled with Enlightenment, and I finally settled for Awesome because I decided Tiling Was The Best (tm). If I understand correctly from following the Gnome and KWin blogs, in Wayland it looks like the "window management" job is with the Compositor, which takes on a lot more of the display and input work that was traditionally handled by the X Server. So there's much more complexity to handle there. This would mean that we're unlikely to see the proliferation of WM experiments that X saw. Is this a correct assessment? (I'm personally waiting for a good tiling window manager/compositor to show up with Wayland before I make the swtich)
- justinsaccount 10y agohttps://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway ?
- based2 10y agohttps://phab.enlightenment.org/w/wayland/ https://phab.enlightenment.org/w/wayland/ https://archive.fosdem.org/2016/schedule/event/enlightenment_of_wayland/ https://archive.fosdem.org/2016/schedule/event/enlightenment... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_%28display_server_protocol%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_%28display_server_prot...
- digi_owl 10y agoAnd? Since E17, E has pretty much been a DE in its own right. Fueled in large part because Rasterman ran afoul Gnome and RH office politics during his stay at RH labs. And E has a long history of supporting just about anything under the sun. You could even run its terminal "emulator" as an alternative tty on top of the Linux framebuffer if you so wanted.
- AceJohnny2 10y ago> Fueled in large part because Rasterman ran afoul Gnome and RH office politics during his stay at RH labs. I recall Rasterman running afoul of pretty much every organisation he was part of... I recall issues with OpenMoko, an early linuxphone company, as well.
- djsumdog 10y agoXorg doesn't really need a configuration file today; it's good at auto detecting hardware. But one of the things I really like about X is that you can have a config file and specify exactly which devices you want. In this way, you can connect two keyboards, two mice and two video cards to the same machine and have two totally different login screens. You can essentially have two people logged into the same machine as if they were using two different terminals (just do try to plug in a USB device if both users have automounters running). Even on my current single user machine, I still run multiple X servers (one for my work related stuff and one for non-work. I work remotely so that way, I can just switch X servers at the end of the business day). Can Wayland support multiple terminals on a single machine in the same way? Can you have two Wayland instances running like you can with X servers?
- stemc43 10y agoWith Wayland I can finally dock & undock my thinkpad without having to restart my laptop.
- lima 10y agoWhat configuration? Works fine for me with a Skylake ThinkPad on Fedora 24.
- krzyk 10y agoI can do the same with Xorg (also thinkpad), what kind of problems do you have in Xorg with docking?
- stemc43 10y agoScreen was freezing in Fedora. In Ubuntu it was working but took ~25 seconds for screen to come on. constant problems across several OS releases & versions.
- ChuckMcM 10y agoI know you are making an earnest comment but the idea of having one computer support multiple users each on their own terminal is really really well explored territory. So I chuckled a bit at how even old things can be new again. It does speak to having way more compute resources than you can consume at a given time.
- Ace17 10y agoI totally agree with the need for eliminating tearing from games (and every other application, and increasing the overall smoothness of desktop displays). However, from the article itself, the list of regressions associated with the switch to Wayland seems to be non-negligible ; especially the lack of fast drivers for Nvidia graphic adapters, which makes it unlikely for GNU/Linux-gamers to do the switch. Is it impossible to fix the tearing and smoothness issues of Xorg/X11?
- fabianhjr 10y agoAt least in my case most games crash, though it is likely due to using Bumblebee (Nvidia Optimus) and switching between Integrated Graphics and Dedicated Graphics. The plus side is that I can log into using either Wayland or Xorg. So switching between the two is almost seamless.
- ZenoArrow 10y agoThe problems with X go beyond just screen tearing. For example, it's possible for Xorg apps to spy on each other, such as reading keypresses when a user is entering a password.
- digi_owl 10y agoSomething that could have been eliminated without chucking the whole of X. A starting point is the Security extension that introduce the concept of trusted and untrusted X Clients. Thew basic thing is that different clients can see those inputs because they live inside the same root window. Give each a different root window and the issue "magically" disappears.
- ZenoArrow 10y agoYes, everything can be solved with more extensions, but that approach is part of why X became unwieldy in the first place.
- Tharre 10y agoAdd libinput to that list, that currently makes it impossible for me to switch. I just can't reproduce the behavior of synaptics with the options libinput currently offers, and without them my mouse drives me crazy.
- digi_owl 10y agoThe problem there is A: crap drivers, and B: fighting between the game and the compositor over the same hardware resources. Frankly the whole compositor eyecandy wanking is an abomination. Turn of the compositor, and stop sucking Nividia's dick (thanks Torvalds), and the problem should go away over night.
- udp 10y agoI always wondered how modern desktop UIs seemed to feel so much slower than, say, Windows 95 did even though the hardware was so much better. When I first turned off the compositor, even just dragging a window around the screen was an amazing experience. I now have it disabled everywhere, and I much prefer the occasional afterimage trail than adding a noticeable rendering delay to everything for the sake of a semitransparent terminal.
- bitwize 10y agoOr can use Wayland, and get lag-free compositing! Yay!
- untoreh 10y agoThat's prob caused by crappy config of whatever compositor you tried, compositors use GPU which adds latency, for example Compton using openglx backend is quite slow but if you add copyonbuffermesa it gets as responsive as CPU rendering,at least in my case, it obvs depends on the vga
- MBCook 10y agoThis isn't a very constructive comment. You know what else isn't constructive? Copying memory around and around and around and doing basic blitting when we can share GPU memory and have it all composited by the GPU for less power and much faster than the CPU can. And you get all sorts of other effects for free. There's a reason OS X does it. There's a reason iOS does it. There's a reason Android does it. I don't know about Windows but I think they started in 7 or 8.
- 10y ago
- dandelion_lover 10y agoCan anyone comment whether this problem with GUI isolation http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.de/2011/04/linux-security.. http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.de/2011/04/linux-security.... is now solved?
- TD-Linux 10y agoYes. Some applications still use the XWayland compatibility layer, so they can snoop on each other, but not on Wayland apps. I think the only XWayland-using app that Fedora ships with is Firefox.
- coldtea 10y agoAfter the author mentions who this is the best/easier Linux distro ever, and how Wayland mades everything so much better, there's this: >There are some things to bear in mind about using Wayland with GNOME, especially since more than a few GNOME hacks won't work anymore. For example, take desktop icons. These aren't really a GNOME 3.x thing, though you could use Gnome Tweak Tools if you can get them, but they are not supported in Wayland and never will be. I've also been unable to find a clipboard manager that works properly under Wayland. The other problem I've run into is that neither of the tint-shifting applications I use work with Wayland. Neither f.lux nor redshift do anything when running under Wayland. Judging by posts from around the Web, video playback is sometimes an issue too, though I have not actually experienced this problem. In terms of hardware support and Wayland, I would definitely suggest sticking with kernel 4.8.x or newer, which is exactly what Fedora 25 ships with. The other major gripe I have with Wayland is that it doesn't appear to support fractional scaling for HiDPI screens. It works great at 2X, which covers most screens, but there are those where 1X is too small, but 2X is too much. If you have a screen that works best at 1.5X, you might want to stick with X for now. Those are, however, relatively minor issues. So desktop icons, no proper clipboard, no fractional HiDPI scaling, video playback issues, and those are "relatively minor issues"? The only actually "relatively minor" issue he mentions is the lack of screen-tinting support (a la f.lux). The above seem quite major to me...
- vetinari 10y agoOSX does not support fractional HiDPI scaling, but nobody made a fuss, ever. So I wonder, why is that a bad thing, when Linux doesn't do it either?
- TallGuyShort 10y agoDoes anyone know if the KDE spin will also be using Wayland by default?
- nickysielicki 10y agoThe KDE upstream developers release a distribution called KDE Neon that is based on Ubuntu, with an extra file in /etc/apt/sources.list.d which provides significantly newer builds than what Ubuntu / Kubuntu offer. They offer two flavors of this distribution-- one meant for end-users with the stable Plasma releases and one with bleeding-edge git builds. The bleeding-edge git build now defaults to Wayland, but the build meant for daily usage does not. AFAIK, they aren't yet recommending that downstream distributions default to wayland. Hopefully it will happen in 2017!
- sho_hn 10y agoI think we're on track for delivering that in 2017. We do already have users on Wayland; it's not yet a drop-in replacement feature-wise, so it's up to whether we have the subset you use already in place.
- dkarapetyan 10y ago> This release also brings improved support for Flatpak apps in GNOME Software. Flatpak apps are designed to improve the software installation process in GNOME and Linux in general by making it easier for developers to package, and users to install, software across distributions. With Flatpaks you don't need to worry about dependency conflicts or even if your distro of choice has the app you want. Flatpaks also offer improved security and stability by sandboxing applications. Another competing packaging format. Why?
- amlib 10y agoBecause I can finally download the same file and run it on my distro of choice without installing it as a system package. This is not a replacement for traditional linux packages. It has it's own set of advantages and disadvantages. This may lead to a good solution for app support fragmentation on linux.
- digi_owl 10y agoGood? This is the devops container boys recreating Windows' DLL hell and selling it as an "improvement". If you want to run something without installing it as a distro package the option was always to download it as a tar-ball. BTW, Flatpak is a Gnom/freedesktop creation. It is a reaction to distro maintainers overriding the "perfect" decisions made by upstream (Gnome devs etc), and is upstreams attempt at taking over control. Gnome+Freedesktop is aiming to make a singular Linux desktop experience, for all the wrong reasons.
- colemickens 10y ago>This is the devops container boys recreating Windows' DLL hell and selling it as an "improvement". I'm not a fan of Flatpak (Nix/Guix for the win), but this is completely incorrect.
- digi_owl 10y agoHow so? You have a limited option to outsource what you bundle via "frameworks", but that concept only go so deep. You can bet your behind that if the format ever takes off, every flatpak will contain their own copy of libc on up just to be sure. This similar to how every Windows program ship with a VC++ DLL bundle, just to be sure.
- brightball 10y agoHe comments in the conclusion that he runs Arch on his main machine. It seems like I've been seeing a lot of comments like that from people around the web lately. What's the draw of Arch over Ubuntu/Fedora/Mint, etc?
- colemickens 10y agoAll of my packages are actually up to date, since Arch is a rolling release. Even on Xenial there are packages that are behind enough that I notice due to missing features/bug fixes. The AUR is a far superior system than PPAs and offers far more software than I've seen "natively" available for any other distribution ever.
- jlgaddis 10y agoYou hope they're up to date. If you install / depend on very much from AUR, I'd wager you're probably missing a security update or two.
- colemickens 10y agoAUR packages: local/caddy-full-bin 0.9.3-12, local/kakoune-git r4563.e441295-1, local/kubectl-bin 1.5.1-1, local/neofetch 2.0.2-1, local/package-query 1.8-2, local/tmuxp 1.2.2-1, local/yaourt 1.8.1-1 They're all completely up-to-date (kakaoune might be an exception because it just builds HEAD since there are no releases). I regularly observe AUR getting packages before the equivalent PPAs and before ubuntu packages are even updated. Even for security releases. But you're certainly right, it depends on the given package maintainer. In the rare case that updates take more than a day or two, I just pull the PKGBUILD, edit it, makepkg, pacman -U and I'm done. On the other hand, I could list hundreds of packages that are a version or two behind in Xenial that are update to date in Arch (not even AUR). Maybe not security fixes, but sometimes important bugfixes, etc. For example, Qemu in Xenial, can't make VHDs for Azure, which is constantly a thorn in my side (qemu takes a long time to build from source, even if you disable all non-x86).
- Tharre 10y ago
- phkahler 10y agoI'm not certain, but I think they're still running Firefox under Xwayland along with LibreOffice. I'd like to see them run the native Wayland versions of those apps by default.
- mangix 10y agomy only gripe with it is the mouse lag. I have a feeling input is not multi-threaded like in Xorg.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- atombender 10y agoAs a Mac user who's considering switching to Linux as a desktop OS, I gave this a go inside VMware. I sincerely hope this isn't the best Linux distro in 2016, because that was... underwhelming. Not quite a trainwreck, but still pretty bad. How is Elementary or Mint? One positive thing I can say is that they seem to have accomplished what they wanted with Wayland -- unlike earlier X-based distros I have tried out, rendering smoothness seems pretty much on par with macOS (unlike Windows, which still flickers and stutters a lot).