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Linux Mint Working on Wayland Support

40 points by AdmiralAsshat 3y ago

butz 3y ago
Even running Wayland-first distribution, XWayland still keeps catching me off-guard.
xtracto 3y ago
[flagged]
- deepsun 3y ago
  Discussed previously at: "I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit (drewdevault.com)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26001179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26001179
  - hedora 3y ago
    The top comment there from AnIdiotOnTheNet clearly explains why the complaints aren’t “horseshit”. As far as I can tell, no progress has been made in the last two years (since the problem is organizational, not technical, and the wayland architecture would have to drastically change to meet user expectations).
  - xtracto 3y ago
    LOL, that was a great read. The more things change, the more they stay the same! It reminded me of the WinModem times or the OSS -> Alsa times, and countless others. Oh my I've been around Linux for more than 30 years now. It's always the same: "If it doesn't work, it's not the fault of the thing that doesn't work, it's always the fault of the [user/modem manufacturer/soundcard manufacturer/WiFi manufacturer/etc]" As someone wrote in the article you linked: Most people don't care whose "fault" it is, they just see it is a problem with the Operating System. Can't share my screen on Chrome Ubuntu? sorry, in Mac/Windows I do it with one click, and without tinkering. Wayland is yet another example of "tech guys" doing stuff without proper Product development. If Wayland was developed say, inside Apple or Microsoft, it would go form "what can people achieve" to "how can we make them do it in 2023" and not "X is old and ugly, let's create something new and shiny" It's OK, it is Libre and Gratis. It is people doing it in their free time and they are free to do whatever they want. They just shouldn't expect everyone to agree with their approach.
- jcastro 3y ago
  The article you linked literally shows you that the problem is a setting in the browser that needs to be fixed.
- gizmo686 3y ago
  > We don’t expect it to replace Xorg as default any time soon
- tristan957 3y ago
  Then you would have to wait forever because it is a goal of Wayland not to implement all of X.
  - hedora 3y ago
    I think you just made their point for them.
    - tristan957 3y ago
      If their point is that they will be the ones maintaining X11, then more power to them.
  - josephcsible 3y ago
    Between that and distros and DE's saying they're going to remove X support, it really feels like a giant middle finger to anyone relying on said features.
    - fturst 3y ago
      what, inform me please, which distros and DEs say that? I couldnt find it by search.
      - johnny22 3y ago
        the new cosmic DE doesnt support x11 at all. Fedora KDE SIG plans to not offer the x11 session in the session chooser.
      - pengaru 3y ago
        prolly referring to https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-40-Eyes-No-X11-Session https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-40-Eyes-No-X11-Session
      - josephcsible 3y ago
        In addition to what others have already mentioned, https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/9/html/9.0_release_notes/deprecated_functionality https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp... says "The X.org display server is deprecated, and will be removed in a future major RHEL release."
- babypuncher 3y ago
  Wayland will not and should not try to replicate all X functionality. Apps should be updated to work with the way Wayland does things. This is absolutely necessary to reap some of the benefits provided by Wayland. There is no way around it. A big one is Wayland's security model, of which X has none, and adding such access controls to X would end up breaking the same apps. The longer everyone sticks to X, the further it will fall behind Windows and macOS.
  - saurik 3y ago
    I honestly don't understand how "apps can't do X unless they prompt and get permission to" wouldn't both work for everyone and not prevent anything... I mean, there are probably only like two or three apps total each user is using that want this kind of "dangerous" functionality, right?
    - babypuncher 3y ago
      The problem is a lot of X apps are just built assuming they have these permissions. They have no mechanism to deal with needing to wait for the user to grant this permission. So when you try to do these things in xwayland, you run into undefined behavior.
- II2II 3y ago
  It may not be the 5 to 10 years you want, but they did mention support being available in the 2026 timeframe. As for catching up with X functionality, times change and software changes with it. Not everyone will appreciate that change and it is doubtful that anyone will be entirely satisfied (though some will see the benefits as outweighing what they lose). Not that that really matters. It looks like Wayland will be the future of graphics on Linux. It is simply a matter of when people choose to adopt it.
  - erik_seaberg 3y ago
    With nobody working on remote GPU-accelerated rendering apart from Javascript and Wasm, it looks like the browser will be the future of graphics.
haunter 3y ago
>Hypnotix, the TV viewer application How is that app legal btw? Or more like how is it okay what Mint does? The majority of the streams are pirated. I know the app itself is open source and it's a frontend for Free TV but it's still sharing copyrighted content. https://github.com/Free-TV/IPTV/tree/master/playlists https://github.com/Free-TV/IPTV/tree/master/playlists It would be a different story if it comes "empty" like Transmission but it isn't.
- esrauch 3y ago
  FreeTV seems to claim to only have freely available legal content, is it actually just a false claim and it has pirated content?
- HissingMachine 3y ago
  Well, at least all the channels from my country are either public or advertisement funded channels that you can see for free, can you give some examples of pirated content?
anotherhue 3y ago
Generally the worst offenders for Wayland support are closed source / abandoned apps that you should consider replacing. Zoom crashes if I try and screenshare, but google meet (in a chrome-alike) works fine. I don't want zoom anyway.
- michaelmrose 3y ago
  People you need to communicate with especially for work are unlikely to be impressed by your reason why everyone should use a different technology.
- linuxandrew 3y ago
  Have you tried using Zoom in-browser? That worked last time I tried, and you avoid downloading a proprietary non-system package.
  - petepete 3y ago
    This is what I need to do to to be able to share my screen in Slack or Teams.
- abrouwers 3y ago
  I haven't had luck with chrom(ium,e) using scaling, or vaapi, natively on Wayland. Firefox is a far better experience for me.
  - hollerith 3y ago
    I've been using Chrome natively on Wayland for over 2 years as my daily browser. There used to be lots of bugs, but over the last 4 months, the only bug I noticed was a missing insertion cursor while typing in TEXTAREAs, and that seems to have fixed itself. In the Display pane of Gnome's Settings app, I have "Scale" set to 175%.
  - johnny22 3y ago
    they'll get that settled properly at some point, since chromeos is switching to a wayland compositor.
mariusmg 3y ago
Regarding Wayland support, the gap between KDE/Gnome and these smaller DEs (XFCE, Cinnamon, Mate , LXDE etc etc) is getting wider and wider...
- smoldesu 3y ago
  Yep! Though to be fair, it's mostly because KDE and GNOME are starting to merge really great Wayland support patches. I'm personally not much of a fan of the way Wayland was rolled out or designed, but I do daily-drive it without issue on Plasma. It's far-and-away the better option for gesture-oriented workflows and gaming, and it feels more deeply integrated with the DE (for better and worse). It's the new hotness that all the gimmeck-obsessed Windows and Mac converts are going to want. You, me and the UNIX graybeard in the basement might get our feathers ruffled, but Bob and Alice get touchpad gestures.
  - jraph 3y ago
    > get touchpad gestures Which ones? Is there something beyond pinch zooming (which works on both) that works on Wayland and not on X?
    - smoldesu 3y ago
      All the Plasma desktop gestures are broken on x11, and if memory serves it's the same situation on GNOME. I spent a long time on x11 trying to get it to work (via Touchegg et. al) but eventually left for Wayland where it worked out-of-box. And to be fair, some gestures do work on x11. 2-finger trackpad scrolling isn't precise but it works, and Chromium/Firefox both seem to work with libinput-gestures. The situation is completely different for native applications and desktops though (unfortunately). On Wayland, gestures work like they do on MacOS and Windows. On x11 they work like they did in Compiz.
- MuffinFlavored 3y ago
  Hot take (and sorry ahead of time): A bunch of open source developers drawing a line in the sand on which project they like to contribute to in a fragmented fashion instead of working together isn't great for the "end user". Not that people should be forced to spend their time doing anything they don't want to do when it comes to free, volunteer open-source contributions. Just an interesting callout. It's pretty clear why the gap is getting wider: too few people working on too many ways to skin the same cat.
InfiniteRand 3y ago
Just curious, does the sort-of recent Xorg release (version 21.1 released in 2021), change anyone's equation regarding X vs Wayland?

40 points by AdmiralAsshat 3y ago

butz 3y ago

Even running Wayland-first distribution, XWayland still keeps catching me off-guard.

xtracto 3y ago

[flagged]

deepsun 3y ago
Discussed previously at: "I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit (drewdevault.com)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26001179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26001179
- hedora 3y ago
  The top comment there from AnIdiotOnTheNet clearly explains why the complaints aren’t “horseshit”. As far as I can tell, no progress has been made in the last two years (since the problem is organizational, not technical, and the wayland architecture would have to drastically change to meet user expectations).
- xtracto 3y ago
  LOL, that was a great read. The more things change, the more they stay the same! It reminded me of the WinModem times or the OSS -> Alsa times, and countless others. Oh my I've been around Linux for more than 30 years now. It's always the same: "If it doesn't work, it's not the fault of the thing that doesn't work, it's always the fault of the [user/modem manufacturer/soundcard manufacturer/WiFi manufacturer/etc]" As someone wrote in the article you linked: Most people don't care whose "fault" it is, they just see it is a problem with the Operating System. Can't share my screen on Chrome Ubuntu? sorry, in Mac/Windows I do it with one click, and without tinkering. Wayland is yet another example of "tech guys" doing stuff without proper Product development. If Wayland was developed say, inside Apple or Microsoft, it would go form "what can people achieve" to "how can we make them do it in 2023" and not "X is old and ugly, let's create something new and shiny" It's OK, it is Libre and Gratis. It is people doing it in their free time and they are free to do whatever they want. They just shouldn't expect everyone to agree with their approach.
jcastro 3y ago
The article you linked literally shows you that the problem is a setting in the browser that needs to be fixed.
gizmo686 3y ago
> We don’t expect it to replace Xorg as default any time soon
tristan957 3y ago
Then you would have to wait forever because it is a goal of Wayland not to implement all of X.
- hedora 3y ago
  I think you just made their point for them.
  - tristan957 3y ago
    If their point is that they will be the ones maintaining X11, then more power to them.
- josephcsible 3y ago
  Between that and distros and DE's saying they're going to remove X support, it really feels like a giant middle finger to anyone relying on said features.
  - fturst 3y ago
    what, inform me please, which distros and DEs say that? I couldnt find it by search.
    - johnny22 3y ago
      the new cosmic DE doesnt support x11 at all. Fedora KDE SIG plans to not offer the x11 session in the session chooser.
    - pengaru 3y ago
      prolly referring to https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-40-Eyes-No-X11-Session https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-40-Eyes-No-X11-Session
    - josephcsible 3y ago
      In addition to what others have already mentioned, https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/9/html/9.0_release_notes/deprecated_functionality https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterp... says "The X.org display server is deprecated, and will be removed in a future major RHEL release."
babypuncher 3y ago
Wayland will not and should not try to replicate all X functionality. Apps should be updated to work with the way Wayland does things. This is absolutely necessary to reap some of the benefits provided by Wayland. There is no way around it. A big one is Wayland's security model, of which X has none, and adding such access controls to X would end up breaking the same apps. The longer everyone sticks to X, the further it will fall behind Windows and macOS.
- saurik 3y ago
  I honestly don't understand how "apps can't do X unless they prompt and get permission to" wouldn't both work for everyone and not prevent anything... I mean, there are probably only like two or three apps total each user is using that want this kind of "dangerous" functionality, right?
  - babypuncher 3y ago
    The problem is a lot of X apps are just built assuming they have these permissions. They have no mechanism to deal with needing to wait for the user to grant this permission. So when you try to do these things in xwayland, you run into undefined behavior.
II2II 3y ago
It may not be the 5 to 10 years you want, but they did mention support being available in the 2026 timeframe. As for catching up with X functionality, times change and software changes with it. Not everyone will appreciate that change and it is doubtful that anyone will be entirely satisfied (though some will see the benefits as outweighing what they lose). Not that that really matters. It looks like Wayland will be the future of graphics on Linux. It is simply a matter of when people choose to adopt it.
- erik_seaberg 3y ago
  With nobody working on remote GPU-accelerated rendering apart from Javascript and Wasm, it looks like the browser will be the future of graphics.

haunter 3y ago

>Hypnotix, the TV viewer application How is that app legal btw? Or more like how is it okay what Mint does? The majority of the streams are pirated. I know the app itself is open source and it's a frontend for Free TV but it's still sharing copyrighted content. https://github.com/Free-TV/IPTV/tree/master/playlists https://github.com/Free-TV/IPTV/tree/master/playlists It would be a different story if it comes "empty" like Transmission but it isn't.

esrauch 3y ago
FreeTV seems to claim to only have freely available legal content, is it actually just a false claim and it has pirated content?
HissingMachine 3y ago
Well, at least all the channels from my country are either public or advertisement funded channels that you can see for free, can you give some examples of pirated content?

anotherhue 3y ago

Generally the worst offenders for Wayland support are closed source / abandoned apps that you should consider replacing. Zoom crashes if I try and screenshare, but google meet (in a chrome-alike) works fine. I don't want zoom anyway.

michaelmrose 3y ago
People you need to communicate with especially for work are unlikely to be impressed by your reason why everyone should use a different technology.
linuxandrew 3y ago
Have you tried using Zoom in-browser? That worked last time I tried, and you avoid downloading a proprietary non-system package.
- petepete 3y ago
  This is what I need to do to to be able to share my screen in Slack or Teams.
abrouwers 3y ago
I haven't had luck with chrom(ium,e) using scaling, or vaapi, natively on Wayland. Firefox is a far better experience for me.
- hollerith 3y ago
  I've been using Chrome natively on Wayland for over 2 years as my daily browser. There used to be lots of bugs, but over the last 4 months, the only bug I noticed was a missing insertion cursor while typing in TEXTAREAs, and that seems to have fixed itself. In the Display pane of Gnome's Settings app, I have "Scale" set to 175%.
- johnny22 3y ago
  they'll get that settled properly at some point, since chromeos is switching to a wayland compositor.

mariusmg 3y ago

Regarding Wayland support, the gap between KDE/Gnome and these smaller DEs (XFCE, Cinnamon, Mate , LXDE etc etc) is getting wider and wider...

smoldesu 3y ago
Yep! Though to be fair, it's mostly because KDE and GNOME are starting to merge really great Wayland support patches. I'm personally not much of a fan of the way Wayland was rolled out or designed, but I do daily-drive it without issue on Plasma. It's far-and-away the better option for gesture-oriented workflows and gaming, and it feels more deeply integrated with the DE (for better and worse). It's the new hotness that all the gimmeck-obsessed Windows and Mac converts are going to want. You, me and the UNIX graybeard in the basement might get our feathers ruffled, but Bob and Alice get touchpad gestures.
- jraph 3y ago
  > get touchpad gestures Which ones? Is there something beyond pinch zooming (which works on both) that works on Wayland and not on X?
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    All the Plasma desktop gestures are broken on x11, and if memory serves it's the same situation on GNOME. I spent a long time on x11 trying to get it to work (via Touchegg et. al) but eventually left for Wayland where it worked out-of-box. And to be fair, some gestures do work on x11. 2-finger trackpad scrolling isn't precise but it works, and Chromium/Firefox both seem to work with libinput-gestures. The situation is completely different for native applications and desktops though (unfortunately). On Wayland, gestures work like they do on MacOS and Windows. On x11 they work like they did in Compiz.
MuffinFlavored 3y ago
Hot take (and sorry ahead of time): A bunch of open source developers drawing a line in the sand on which project they like to contribute to in a fragmented fashion instead of working together isn't great for the "end user". Not that people should be forced to spend their time doing anything they don't want to do when it comes to free, volunteer open-source contributions. Just an interesting callout. It's pretty clear why the gap is getting wider: too few people working on too many ways to skin the same cat.

InfiniteRand 3y ago

Just curious, does the sort-of recent Xorg release (version 21.1 released in 2021), change anyone's equation regarding X vs Wayland?