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Wow, not even Debian has done this. What a world in which RHEL is more adventurous than Debian. So, is Wayland ready? I've been afraid to try it, but maybe it'

Wow, not even Debian has done this. What a world in which RHEL is more adventurous than Debian. So, is Wayland ready? I've been afraid to try it, but maybe it's time to take the plunge. How is gaming on Wayland? I'm afraid many games have been compiled for X.org.

slondr 3y ago
It’s still missing plenty of features that X has, so no I wouldn’t say that it’s ready.
- Gigachad 3y ago
  Depends on your use case, I've been using it for years now and am yet to run in to missing features. There are a few features x11 is missing like different dpi scales between monitors which Wayland does. Sandboxing with flatpak is another big one as well.
  - slondr 3y ago
    I'm a big Barrier user, which has no Wayland equivalent. I also frequently make use of X tunelling over SSH, which had no Wayland equivalent the last time I checked, although it has been a year or so since the last time I looked into it.
    - neurostimulant 3y ago
      Synergy (the one Barrier forked from) seems to have wayland support on their beta release. It's not free though.
      - Rondom 3y ago
        Input Leap has wayland support as well. https://github.com/input-leap/input-leap https://github.com/input-leap/input-leap
- neurostimulant 3y ago
  Not all X features are going to be implemented in wayland, right? If a feature has security implication, chance that it won't be implemented in wayland. It took them years to get screen sharing working, and that with a significant proportion of wayland users begging for it on every release. Chance that other insecure but useful X features won't be implemented in wayland unless they can be implemented with security in mind AND the features somehow got prioritized for development (or some l33t programmers suddenly show up with a patch and got accepted).
  - kaba0 3y ago
    Many “insecure” features are implemented on a per compositor-family basis in the meanwhile. Like every wlroots-based one has this protocol, things like that.
magicalhippo 3y ago
> So, is Wayland ready? I'm not that interested in digging into the details of why, but SMPlayer doesn't like Wayland on my system, and SMPlayer is the only video player that I can get to play videos from smb shares without a fuzz. So Xorg it is... I try to switch every 6 months or so to see if things have improved but, so far the answer is no.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  I use VLC to play files on a smb share under Wayland no problem.
  - magicalhippo 3y ago
    On my system VLC just doesn't play the files from shares. No problem if I copy the files locally. There's something in the error logs, I spent many hours trying to get it work a year ago but I just gave up and went back to SMPlayer on Xorg. VLC also has issues with audio, apparently VLC doesn't play ball with PulseAudio or something like that, so I get massive audio dropout for quite a while when skipping/jumping in the video file. Yay. Something about clocks going back in time or something. IIRC there's a fix pending, so maybe in a year or two...
- dawidpotocki 3y ago
  I personally use mpv and never had an issue with playing from SMB.
  - l72 3y ago
    I love mpv on xorg, but there are still have issues on wayland depending on which compositor you are using: > [vo/gpu/wayland] GNOME's wayland compositor lacks support for the idle inhibit protocol. This means the screen can blank during playback.
yoyohello13 3y ago
Wayland is fine. I haven't run into any problems using it in Fedora. Wayland vs Xorg shouldn't affect gaming.
- mcjiggerlog 3y ago
  Fine for some, but for others there are still show-stoppers. I have a laptop with an Nvidia card and my latest attempt to use Wayland, on Fedora 38, didn't last very long at all before being forced to retreat to xorg by the issues.
  - yoyohello13 3y ago
    Unfortunately, there is not much Wayland devs can do about Nvidia drivers. But RHEL didn't even set a date for removing Xorg support so it will probably stick around for a long while.
    - ranger_danger 3y ago
      An employee in the comments earlier said the next release (RHEL10) will remove it, but that won't be for another 10 years.
      - indolering 3y ago
        RHEL 9 will be supported for ~10 years, but RHEL is scheduled to come out in ~3 years. Fedora will probably still support it and I would bet some of the RHEL rebuilds will too.
      - aforwardslash 3y ago
        Given the status of "certified drivers" in Wayland due to their closed-source nature, either RedHat is giving up their graphic workstation business, or removing xorg won't happen any release soon.
        bootsmann 3y ago
George83728 3y ago
RHEL doesn't really care about supporting desktop users, so they're trimming fat. They don't need X and Wayland to nominally support workstation use, just one of those is enough to sell workstation support contracts to executives who won't even be using it themselves.. Debian on the other hand cares about keeping desktop users happy, so it makes sense to support both.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  Nonsense. Why am I able to file a bug in Fedora and a Red Hat engineer will work on it then?
  - George83728 3y ago
    Will they continue to do so, on company time, for packages that are no longer in any supported version of RHEL? I think they fix bugs that presently or will effect both Fedora and RHEL, or do more in their free time because they are themselves enthusiasts and not just corporate workers.
  - qbrass 3y ago
    The bug affects something a paying customer uses.
    - 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
      So they do care about desktop users?
      - George83728 3y ago
        They care about fulfilling the workstation support contracts. But if they can reduce the scope of what it means to support workstation support contracts, it is in their interest to do so. They respond to X bugs right now because right now X is still in versions of RHEL they support. When that is no longer true, do you really expect them to continue supporting X on other distros?
Spivak 3y ago
RHEL has always been more adventurous than Debian. Debian is the pragmatic distro that meets users where they are. Debian half-heartedly switched to systemd years after it was the only option in RHEL. RHEL switched to firewalld in 7. They dropped docker for podman. They wrote then adopted sssd and relamd. They dropped NIS. Went all in of SELinux and now it "just works."
- yamtaddle 3y ago
  Red Hat is adventurous in rapidly adopting and evangelizing projects they control, or at least largely steer, in an effort to make themselves the de facto First Party Vendor for so much of Linux that it's hard to justify going with anyone else for commercial support. They've been openly sparring with Ubuntu over this for more than a decade—and Ubuntu's lost every single point. This is basically the story of the direction of the Linux ecosystem in the modern era.
  - slondr 3y ago
    It really is a shame that the community's last, best hope against a Red Hat monopoly is Ubuntu. Fortunately in the desktop space there's little reason to care what the big names are doing. There will likely always be a distro out there that does exactly what you want it to, it'll likely always be Gentoo, and there will probably be enough folks interested in the space to bring those solutions to binary distros as well. It's been especially interesting to me to watch Alpine take over the mindshare that Slackware had back in the day. As long as there's enough people on un-"official" distros to file bug reports with software vendors, there's hope for the users.
    - yamtaddle 3y ago
      > It really is a shame that the community's last, best hope against a Red Hat monopoly is Ubuntu. Oh, strongly agree. It's a "whoever wins, we lose" sort of situation for sure. I think Red Hat's technical... taste, if you will, is consistently terrible, but Ubuntu's gross in its own way, though I feel that way more due to perceived company culture and the owner's statements, admittedly, than their results (though I do think their distro peaked quality-wise some time around '08). > There will likely always be a distro out there that does exactly what you want it to, it'll likely always be Gentoo, and there will probably be enough folks interested in the space to bring those solutions to binary distros as well. Hobbyists are kinda safe, to some degree, but the more incompatible choices RH successfully pushes, the more limitations and workarounds hobbyists not running a straight copy of Red Hat's preferred stack will run into.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
throwawaylinux 3y ago
> Wow, not even Debian has done this. What a world in which RHEL is more adventurous than Debian. Not even Debian has said they would remove it in a future release? I'm not sure what you mean here, Debian has a reputation for being glacial... > So, is Wayland ready? I've been afraid to try it, but maybe it's time to take the plunge. Yes, it's increasingly becoming the default on desktop distros, it's pretty good. Some apps still lack support for it I guess. I recently upgraded to a distro where it was enabled and didn't notice any difference except for a screen recording app didn't support recording with sound unless I switched to X. > How is gaming on Wayland? I'm afraid many games have been compiled for X.org. AFAIK such things just start under an Xwayland session transparently. Phoronix seems to do a lot of gaming tests of wayland, I don't really know the details but clearly something works for some games at least.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
mattrick 3y ago
It definitely depends on your definition of "ready". Wayland is completely usable for most hardware configurations I've thrown at it, but ymmv. It's pretty much been indistinguishable from X11 for me. There's still a lack of certain protocols for things that were possible in X11. The one that's bugged me the most is one that would allow authorized applications to track which window is active so tools can swap around hotkeys and macros and stuff. That was super easy to do in X11 but Wayland doesn't yet have a way of doing this afaik.
- Arnavion 3y ago
  That isn't a Wayland-level feature, but individual compositors may support it. For example that can be done in sway with `swaymsg -t subscribe -m '["window"]' | ...`
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    That's one of my biggest problems with Wayland; I rather like being able to swap out the window manager without breaking half my tools.
    - kaba0 3y ago
      Since it’s wlroots, most niche window manager will also understand it. There is basically only gnome, plasma, and all the rest.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
        That's probably true for protocol-level things but still doesn't cover as much as you'd think. For example, with X (possibly just Xorg but at least everyone standardized on that) I could run `setxkbmap` to set keyboard layout. Now as far as I can tell, wlroots does have a proper way to control keyboard layout... but it's up to each and every compositor to hook it up. So naturally, when I went to try a cool new compositor I found, I discovered that it doesn't actually support that. In fact, I couldn't find a way to configure keyboard layout at all in that compositor (don't recall which, but it was wlroots-based). So I threw up my hands and went back to X11, where one command controls the keyboard on literally every window manager I have ever tried.
justizin 3y ago
> Wow, not even Debian has done this. What a world in which RHEL is more adventurous than Debian. Adventurous is adding things. Why remove things that work if some people are using them? Debian is less prescriptive than RHEL, and is widely used as the basis for a vast array of different targets. If there are still reasons for people to use Xorg, there are still reasons to have it in Debian, IMO. That doesn’t mean it will be installed and/or used by default. RHEL is a specific type of target, particularly for things that need some sort of vendor certification, or for fleets who want to depend on RH for LTS and/or use their professional services, use it as part of a larger IBM contract, etc..
mmwelt 3y ago
Screen sharing seems to be a difficult problem to resolve. Zoom only just resolved this recently[1], Webex has been promising a fix for a while[2], and Skype still hasn't done anything[3]. [1] https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/6634039380877-Zoom-sharing-your-screen-on-Wayland-issue https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/6634039380877-Zoom... [2] https://help.webex.com/en-us/article/9vstcdb/Webex-App-for-Linux?dtid=osoblg000513 https://help.webex.com/en-us/article/9vstcdb/Webex-App-for-L... [3] https://github.com/flathub/com.skype.Client/issues/142 https://github.com/flathub/com.skype.Client/issues/142
- worthless-trash 3y ago
  I feel that google chat and meet has had screensharing working for a long time on wayland.
neurostimulant 3y ago
It's been rock solid as long as you don't use nvidia cards. It's been great on my laptop, but on my desktop with an nvidia card installed there are always minor annoyances every update (fixed an issue but has another issue appear, etc), probably nvidia driver's fault.
creatonez 3y ago
> What a world in which RHEL is more adventurous than Debian. Always been the case. I don't know why people say the only purpose of RHEL is for enterprise support, or for meeting certifications and compliance. They innovate on the technology a lot, too.

slondr 3y ago

It’s still missing plenty of features that X has, so no I wouldn’t say that it’s ready.

Gigachad 3y ago
Depends on your use case, I've been using it for years now and am yet to run in to missing features. There are a few features x11 is missing like different dpi scales between monitors which Wayland does. Sandboxing with flatpak is another big one as well.
- slondr 3y ago
  I'm a big Barrier user, which has no Wayland equivalent. I also frequently make use of X tunelling over SSH, which had no Wayland equivalent the last time I checked, although it has been a year or so since the last time I looked into it.
  - neurostimulant 3y ago
    Synergy (the one Barrier forked from) seems to have wayland support on their beta release. It's not free though.
    - Rondom 3y ago
      Input Leap has wayland support as well. https://github.com/input-leap/input-leap https://github.com/input-leap/input-leap
neurostimulant 3y ago
Not all X features are going to be implemented in wayland, right? If a feature has security implication, chance that it won't be implemented in wayland. It took them years to get screen sharing working, and that with a significant proportion of wayland users begging for it on every release. Chance that other insecure but useful X features won't be implemented in wayland unless they can be implemented with security in mind AND the features somehow got prioritized for development (or some l33t programmers suddenly show up with a patch and got accepted).
- kaba0 3y ago
  Many “insecure” features are implemented on a per compositor-family basis in the meanwhile. Like every wlroots-based one has this protocol, things like that.

magicalhippo 3y ago

> So, is Wayland ready? I'm not that interested in digging into the details of why, but SMPlayer doesn't like Wayland on my system, and SMPlayer is the only video player that I can get to play videos from smb shares without a fuzz. So Xorg it is... I try to switch every 6 months or so to see if things have improved but, so far the answer is no.

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
I use VLC to play files on a smb share under Wayland no problem.
- magicalhippo 3y ago
  On my system VLC just doesn't play the files from shares. No problem if I copy the files locally. There's something in the error logs, I spent many hours trying to get it work a year ago but I just gave up and went back to SMPlayer on Xorg. VLC also has issues with audio, apparently VLC doesn't play ball with PulseAudio or something like that, so I get massive audio dropout for quite a while when skipping/jumping in the video file. Yay. Something about clocks going back in time or something. IIRC there's a fix pending, so maybe in a year or two...
dawidpotocki 3y ago
I personally use mpv and never had an issue with playing from SMB.
- l72 3y ago
  I love mpv on xorg, but there are still have issues on wayland depending on which compositor you are using: > [vo/gpu/wayland] GNOME's wayland compositor lacks support for the idle inhibit protocol. This means the screen can blank during playback.

yoyohello13 3y ago

Wayland is fine. I haven't run into any problems using it in Fedora. Wayland vs Xorg shouldn't affect gaming.

mcjiggerlog 3y ago
Fine for some, but for others there are still show-stoppers. I have a laptop with an Nvidia card and my latest attempt to use Wayland, on Fedora 38, didn't last very long at all before being forced to retreat to xorg by the issues.
- yoyohello13 3y ago
  Unfortunately, there is not much Wayland devs can do about Nvidia drivers. But RHEL didn't even set a date for removing Xorg support so it will probably stick around for a long while.
  - ranger_danger 3y ago
    An employee in the comments earlier said the next release (RHEL10) will remove it, but that won't be for another 10 years.
    - indolering 3y ago
      RHEL 9 will be supported for ~10 years, but RHEL is scheduled to come out in ~3 years. Fedora will probably still support it and I would bet some of the RHEL rebuilds will too.
    - aforwardslash 3y ago
      Given the status of "certified drivers" in Wayland due to their closed-source nature, either RedHat is giving up their graphic workstation business, or removing xorg won't happen any release soon.
      - bootsmann 3y ago

George83728 3y ago

RHEL doesn't really care about supporting desktop users, so they're trimming fat. They don't need X and Wayland to nominally support workstation use, just one of those is enough to sell workstation support contracts to executives who won't even be using it themselves.. Debian on the other hand cares about keeping desktop users happy, so it makes sense to support both.

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
Nonsense. Why am I able to file a bug in Fedora and a Red Hat engineer will work on it then?
- George83728 3y ago
  Will they continue to do so, on company time, for packages that are no longer in any supported version of RHEL? I think they fix bugs that presently or will effect both Fedora and RHEL, or do more in their free time because they are themselves enthusiasts and not just corporate workers.
- qbrass 3y ago
  The bug affects something a paying customer uses.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
    So they do care about desktop users?
    - George83728 3y ago
      They care about fulfilling the workstation support contracts. But if they can reduce the scope of what it means to support workstation support contracts, it is in their interest to do so. They respond to X bugs right now because right now X is still in versions of RHEL they support. When that is no longer true, do you really expect them to continue supporting X on other distros?

Spivak 3y ago

RHEL has always been more adventurous than Debian. Debian is the pragmatic distro that meets users where they are. Debian half-heartedly switched to systemd years after it was the only option in RHEL. RHEL switched to firewalld in 7. They dropped docker for podman. They wrote then adopted sssd and relamd. They dropped NIS. Went all in of SELinux and now it "just works."

yamtaddle 3y ago
Red Hat is adventurous in rapidly adopting and evangelizing projects they control, or at least largely steer, in an effort to make themselves the de facto First Party Vendor for so much of Linux that it's hard to justify going with anyone else for commercial support. They've been openly sparring with Ubuntu over this for more than a decade—and Ubuntu's lost every single point. This is basically the story of the direction of the Linux ecosystem in the modern era.
- slondr 3y ago
  It really is a shame that the community's last, best hope against a Red Hat monopoly is Ubuntu. Fortunately in the desktop space there's little reason to care what the big names are doing. There will likely always be a distro out there that does exactly what you want it to, it'll likely always be Gentoo, and there will probably be enough folks interested in the space to bring those solutions to binary distros as well. It's been especially interesting to me to watch Alpine take over the mindshare that Slackware had back in the day. As long as there's enough people on un-"official" distros to file bug reports with software vendors, there's hope for the users.
  - yamtaddle 3y ago
    > It really is a shame that the community's last, best hope against a Red Hat monopoly is Ubuntu. Oh, strongly agree. It's a "whoever wins, we lose" sort of situation for sure. I think Red Hat's technical... taste, if you will, is consistently terrible, but Ubuntu's gross in its own way, though I feel that way more due to perceived company culture and the owner's statements, admittedly, than their results (though I do think their distro peaked quality-wise some time around '08). > There will likely always be a distro out there that does exactly what you want it to, it'll likely always be Gentoo, and there will probably be enough folks interested in the space to bring those solutions to binary distros as well. Hobbyists are kinda safe, to some degree, but the more incompatible choices RH successfully pushes, the more limitations and workarounds hobbyists not running a straight copy of Red Hat's preferred stack will run into.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

throwawaylinux 3y ago

> Wow, not even Debian has done this. What a world in which RHEL is more adventurous than Debian. Not even Debian has said they would remove it in a future release? I'm not sure what you mean here, Debian has a reputation for being glacial... > So, is Wayland ready? I've been afraid to try it, but maybe it's time to take the plunge. Yes, it's increasingly becoming the default on desktop distros, it's pretty good. Some apps still lack support for it I guess. I recently upgraded to a distro where it was enabled and didn't notice any difference except for a screen recording app didn't support recording with sound unless I switched to X. > How is gaming on Wayland? I'm afraid many games have been compiled for X.org. AFAIK such things just start under an Xwayland session transparently. Phoronix seems to do a lot of gaming tests of wayland, I don't really know the details but clearly something works for some games at least.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

mattrick 3y ago

It definitely depends on your definition of "ready". Wayland is completely usable for most hardware configurations I've thrown at it, but ymmv. It's pretty much been indistinguishable from X11 for me. There's still a lack of certain protocols for things that were possible in X11. The one that's bugged me the most is one that would allow authorized applications to track which window is active so tools can swap around hotkeys and macros and stuff. That was super easy to do in X11 but Wayland doesn't yet have a way of doing this afaik.

Arnavion 3y ago
That isn't a Wayland-level feature, but individual compositors may support it. For example that can be done in sway with `swaymsg -t subscribe -m '["window"]' | ...`
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  That's one of my biggest problems with Wayland; I rather like being able to swap out the window manager without breaking half my tools.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    Since it’s wlroots, most niche window manager will also understand it. There is basically only gnome, plasma, and all the rest.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      That's probably true for protocol-level things but still doesn't cover as much as you'd think. For example, with X (possibly just Xorg but at least everyone standardized on that) I could run `setxkbmap` to set keyboard layout. Now as far as I can tell, wlroots does have a proper way to control keyboard layout... but it's up to each and every compositor to hook it up. So naturally, when I went to try a cool new compositor I found, I discovered that it doesn't actually support that. In fact, I couldn't find a way to configure keyboard layout at all in that compositor (don't recall which, but it was wlroots-based). So I threw up my hands and went back to X11, where one command controls the keyboard on literally every window manager I have ever tried.

justizin 3y ago

> Wow, not even Debian has done this. What a world in which RHEL is more adventurous than Debian. Adventurous is adding things. Why remove things that work if some people are using them? Debian is less prescriptive than RHEL, and is widely used as the basis for a vast array of different targets. If there are still reasons for people to use Xorg, there are still reasons to have it in Debian, IMO. That doesn’t mean it will be installed and/or used by default. RHEL is a specific type of target, particularly for things that need some sort of vendor certification, or for fleets who want to depend on RH for LTS and/or use their professional services, use it as part of a larger IBM contract, etc..

mmwelt 3y ago

Screen sharing seems to be a difficult problem to resolve. Zoom only just resolved this recently[1], Webex has been promising a fix for a while[2], and Skype still hasn't done anything[3]. [1] https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/6634039380877-Zoom-sharing-your-screen-on-Wayland-issue https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/6634039380877-Zoom... [2] https://help.webex.com/en-us/article/9vstcdb/Webex-App-for-Linux?dtid=osoblg000513 https://help.webex.com/en-us/article/9vstcdb/Webex-App-for-L... [3] https://github.com/flathub/com.skype.Client/issues/142 https://github.com/flathub/com.skype.Client/issues/142

worthless-trash 3y ago
I feel that google chat and meet has had screensharing working for a long time on wayland.

neurostimulant 3y ago

It's been rock solid as long as you don't use nvidia cards. It's been great on my laptop, but on my desktop with an nvidia card installed there are always minor annoyances every update (fixed an issue but has another issue appear, etc), probably nvidia driver's fault.

creatonez 3y ago

> What a world in which RHEL is more adventurous than Debian. Always been the case. I don't know why people say the only purpose of RHEL is for enterprise support, or for meeting certifications and compliance. They innovate on the technology a lot, too.