9 ms·

Dropping GNOME's X11 session approved for Fedora 41

50 points by voxadam 3y ago

petepete 3y ago
I think this is a good move. Wayland has been stable for me for years. I hope it prompts companies like Slack to sort their apps out.
- martinsbalodis 3y ago
  Slack is the only reason why we switch back to X11. It's because screen sharing doesn't work on Wayland.
  - k8svet 3y ago
    I've been screen sharing my desktop (sway) for years at my job. Years is not an exaggeration. What do Discord, Slack, and Nvidia all have in common?
  - petepete 3y ago
    I use Slack in a Chrome tab and screen sharing works perfectly there. I don't know how they've managed to fuck their app up so much it just shows a black rectangle.
  - bogdan 3y ago
    It does with the browser version. Is there any reason to use the non browser version? 1 less v8 instance running
    - bayindirh 3y ago
      > Is there any reason to use the non browser version? Making it completely disappear to a tray icon. > 1 less v8 instance running I doubt. With process isolation, I guess every tab runs its on V8. Otherwise, oh boy.
      - bonzini 3y ago
        Tabs are sharing the code though, because it comes from the same binary. Every electron app instead has its V8 and Blink in a separate binary that has to be loaded into its own RAM.
        MikusR 3y ago
        I suggest you open your systems version of task manager. All those chrome processes are loaded in their own ram.
        kaba0 3y ago
        That’s just sandboxing. They still share a significant amount of resources.
        bonzini 3y ago
        Sharing of read-only pages from the executable is done at the kernel (page cache) level. I agree that for example JIT compiled code is not shared.
    - raffraffraff 3y ago
      It's weird that it doesn't work since it uses webrtc for huddles. That's precisely what I had to enable in the browser to get various screen sharing websites to work. Btw, this isn't for slack but teams: I use the website because their Linux app blows, but I actually use a totally different browser (chromium) to my main browser (firefox) intentionally. Occasionally when teams takes 100% cpu and memory for no reason, I can 'pkill chromium' without nuking firefox. So the "one less engine" argument wouldn't convince me.
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    I had the same issue with Teams a few years ago and I just switched to the browser version. Teams app was buggy anyway. No big deal. The good thing with the browser version is rolling updates are immediate, no need to upgrade a flatpak or rpm. And if they fuck up, rollback is also immediate. Also this is about removing the gnome x11 session package from the default install. That doesn't mean you can't run X11. Having said that I don't know who would want to keep using X11 AND choose Fedora as its goto distro. This is a distro whose purpose is to push forward these kind of stuff, there are a number of much more conservative distros available and one could argue that if you are conservative and want to stay in the RPM/RH family you can use RHEL or a derivative distro such as Almalinux or Rocky. That is what I use on the media center computer in my living room for other reasons[1]. Back in the day someone would complain about outdated package but nowadays with tools like flatpak, podman and the toolbox this is just not true anymore. [1] I don't power it up so often. I don't want to have tons of packages to update every time I power it up to watch a show on streaming. All I want is to be able to upgrade the browser's flatpak.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    Why even install these web apps separately? You can even just create a shortcut for them that opens them in a separate browser window if you need that.
- bayindirh 3y ago
  "Works on my machine" is never a good argument for something AFAICS. There are still many edge cases and paper cuts with many Free and Open Source applications. Yes, it'll push developers a little harder, but we will see tons of complaints in the beginning. This will take another ~2-3 years to be sorted out. While X11's codebase is known for its state, it's working well at this point.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    Since Fedora is ostensibly the bleeding edge distro second only to the likes of Arch, it seems reasonable for the dev nudging to start(?) happen(ing?) there.
    - Zetaphor 3y ago
      People seem to either ignore or just not be aware of this. Fedora has always been the first mover. If that's not what you want you should be using a different distro. Ubuntu will be supporting an LTS version with X11 for many more years.
      - bayindirh 3y ago
        Personally I'm very aware, and not against that. Just wanted to point out that a single "I'm running it without problems for years" experience is not a high quality signal for state of any piece of software. I have experienced "very fun" problems with a "supported NVIDIA card with official drivers that support that card", while people said that they are using theirs without any problems for years.
    - NekkoDroid 3y ago
      I get where you are coming from with the bleeding edge comment, but Arch is not really experimental levels of cutting edge, they just try to follow upstream as close as possible. Fedora OTOH is happy to do these kinda non-upstream stuff to actually bring stuff forward.
      - 3y ago
- raffraffraff 3y ago
  But surely... Gnome shouldn't be dropping X11 sessions until Slack do get their shit together? (And I'm not just talking about Slack obviously). I get it, people are lazy, but I don't like these gun-to-the-head upgrades because the users are the losers. FWIW I tried to switch to Wayland 3 times in the last year before finally making it stick. I had to change a ton of silly little things, like: - grepping through my .config and /etc for any mention of xclip and switching to wl-copy (vimrc, tmux.conf to name two) - enabling webtrc on browsers so that screen sharing works in web apps (MS Teams still refuses to work) I don't know if there's a good source of migration tips that covers all of these things in one place so you can search for the things that affect you. But on a work machine, switching across can result in random minor disruptions over a week, some of them in the middle of meetings. And if you're having "one of those weeks" you need to switch back to what works. Even now on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, a bleeding edge rolling distro with excellent wayland + kde plasma support, I still run into the odd issue that makes me wanna switch back. Disappearing cursor is one. It's totally random, but if I click on a text input box on a browser, I get no text cursor. WTH.
  - raverbashing 3y ago
    Why is wayland not shipping xclip (could be just a symbolic link to wl-copy) This is the kind of thing that makes it harder on people to switch The lack of focus and backwards compatibility in the open source world is appaling. As much as I like to complain about systemd it is not surprising it came to replace 3 scripts in a long coat
  - crote 3y ago
    It's a chicken-and-egg problem. Apps like Slack don't want to invest time in supporting Wayland: just ask the user to switch to an X11 session! But Gnome shouldn't drop X11 support until all apps work on Wayland. In other words, we're stuck with X11 apps forever. Someone eventually has to break the stalemate, and Fedora is usually the distro making the switch first. Its users are used to stuff like this, and it serves as a nice heads-up for app developers to get to work because it'll land in RHEL within a year or two and you can't really claim Linux support if your app doesn't work on RHEL.
  - sloowm 3y ago
jeroenhd 3y ago
by default This issue doesn't seem to indicate support is disappearing completely, you'll probably be one dnf command away from getting back X11 if you're running on Nvidia or really old AMD/Intel.
- aragilar 3y ago
  For now, but https://lwn.net/Articles/961899/ https://lwn.net/Articles/961899/ highlights that there's a push to remove things even if there are people who are willing and able (and currently are) maintaining it.
  - suby 3y ago
    I'm on the latest Nvidia drivers (550), I have a 3080 video card, and I get something like 20 FPS in Plasma's Wayland session. They are crazy if they drop support for x11. Fedora was similarly crazy for making it the default when they did. I remember trying out Fedora around that time, not being aware that Wayland was even a thing. I installed it on my machine, I attempted to login, the screen goes black and then after a second I'm back at the login screen. I ended up installing another distro, not realizing what the problem was. Wayland is wonderful if your hardware supports it well, but even then it is not without problems and regressions.
    - brnt 3y ago
      Wayland and the way some people and distros handle the move puts me off because they violate a core tenet of user facing software design: support most if not all of your users. Not just a happy path. Not a few either. It's _all about_ understanding that the job is about 1001 'edge' cases, not a few happy paths. A mindset that says a piece of software should be the only option because it works for all your fellow developers on their standard Intel Dell laptops is not one I put much stock in. X is dead, long live X.
      - kaba0 3y ago
        It’s open source software, feel free to support/maintain your own edge case. It makes zero sense to spread a team that thin on handling some edge case no one uses. There are only finite resources, and it makes sense to focus on a smooth experience for the vast majority of people.
hawski 3y ago
I would compare X11/Wayland situation to Python 2/3. I'm not a very advanced Pythonista, but I'm competent and use it more and more. - 2009 - Python 3.0 came out at the very end of 2008 so let's count it as from 2009. - 2011 (2 years later) - Six the compatibility library to ease the transition releases 1.0.0 - 2013 (4) - On Fedora's Bugzilla "Replace Python 2 with Python 3 in default installation" issue was created [1] - 2015 (6) - Python 3.5 (introducing typing module) - 2016 (7) - "Replace Python 2 with Python 3 in default installation" closed. - 2017 (8) - Python 3.6 (f-strings introduction, for me privately first 2/3 difference that makes me consider Python 3). - 2020 (11) - Last release of Python 2.7: 2.7.18. python-is-python3 package available in Ubuntu 20.04 (not default AFAIK). - 2021 (12) - So far the last Six release (1.16.0) In comparison with GNOME/Wayland: - 2013 - Wayland 1.2 - wayland-server API becomes stable - 2015 (2 years later) - Wayland introduction in GNOME with version 3.20 - 2016 (3 years after Wayland 1.2; 1 year after GNOME 3.20) - Mainlining Xwayland in xorg-server 1.16 release. Drag and drop actions are now added to the Wayland API. Fedora 22 defaults to Wayland session. - 2024 (today - 11; 9) For me: I will switch when Xfce will. Edit: Added Six to the timeline per aragilar suggestion below and a bit more points. [1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1014209 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1014209
- sprash 3y ago
  Two things that are wrong here: 1. Wayland was actually started in 2008 2. Wayland API is not stable even today
  - nitinreddy88 3y ago
    One more point, no VR support in Wayland yet
  - hawski 3y ago
    1. Python 3 also started earlier (2006 for pep-3000 [1]). 2. I meant a first meaningful stable release for both [2]. Python 3 is also seeing new releases. [1] https://peps.python.org/pep-3000/ https://peps.python.org/pep-3000/ [2] https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2013-July/010278.html https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2013-Ju...
lionkor 3y ago
Just as Linux Desktop market share is going up and a lot of my gamer friends are full-time switching to Linux, major distros decide its the right time to break every single nvidia user's distro by default. Thats what this is.
- greggsy 3y ago
  It’s like when Gnome 3 came out, and everyone who was just getting a taste of Linux through the more accessible Ubuntu was forced to use a (IMHO) crap UI. It was polished, but it basically copied the much loathet full screen ‘menu’ from Windows 8.
  - jdub 3y ago
    Ubuntu was released with GNOME 2.8, was shipping Unity as the default desktop at the time GNOME 3 was released, and only switched the default desktop to GNOME 3.28 (configured to look more like Unity) in 2018.
- atemerev 3y ago
  Nvidia now works more or less fine with Wayland.
- alwayslikethis 3y ago
  Nvidia on Wayland isn't that broken anymore at least if you have recent cards.
  - gliptic 3y ago
    Lots of things running under Xwayland are unusable until the implicit/explicit sync issue between nvidia/wayland is resolved.
  - Timon3 3y ago
    I recently set up a new Desktop system with an RTX 4080 and installed Fedora Kinoite (specifically ublue-nvidia). Things were weirdly broken in many ways: - Many apps were flickering between the actual content and black rectangles - Games didn't work at all, most without any error messages or discernible reasons, some told me they couldn't find a GPU - I couldn't use CUDA at all - Firefox couldn't use WebGL or play content with hardware acceleration After debugging this for multiple days I switched to X11, and everything immediately worked. I'm relatively proficient with Linux, and I have no idea what the issue was or how I could continue debugging it. So, at least for me, NVidia is still completely broken with Wayland.
alwayslikethis 3y ago
I've been using GNOME under Wayland on my laptop and I noticed a few things. GNOME still won't support server side decorations on Wayland. Qt apps look like crap, with thin titlebars which are non-interactive, even though they looked just fine under X11. It just makes them look broken on a GNOME desktop and benefits no one. The fractional scaling is also still broken because they can't be bothered to combine Wayland and X11 scaling and not blur Xwayland apps. Hyprland (a tiling wm / compositor) works properly here and allows not blurring X11 apps as well as letting them scale by themselves. Electron apps also scale properly, unlike on GNOME.
throwawayyy9237 3y ago
Hijacking the topic: I don't use Wayland. But I have a lot of Mac hardware running Fedora with GNOME X11. What's the status of Wayland to configure input hardware, namely keyboards (ie xmodmap, xkbd)?
- __s 3y ago
  https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/1.10.4/faq.html#faq_config_options https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/1.10.4/faq.html...
gigatexal 3y ago
my only gripe going to wayland 100% is screensharing easily like i can in x11 is still hit and miss. has anyone solved this where I can screenshare in teams, meet, slack, etc?
- sloowm 3y ago
  From the browser it works so for meet it should always work. For slack and teams I think a lot of apps are still using a version of electron that is years old by now and doesn't work with Wayland properly.
Faaak 3y ago
Completely unrelated, but I didn't know about pagure. Looks really nice and neat
jchw 3y ago
Personal opinion: If Linux "catches on" without dropping X11 rather quickly, it will lose all of the momentum. Xorg offers a fairly good out-of-box experience on many GPUs but it falls apart when you try to do things that would be considered normal on other OSes, like having displays of different DPIs, streaming 4K video via OBS, and so forth. Everybody keeps treating this issue like it's just programmers deprecating old code for fun, but the actual reality of it is that you can only like Xorg if you exist in the narrow space where it is sufficient, and while it's easy to downplay the importance of its shortcomings if you either coincidentally follow the line or if perhaps your behavior has adjusted to the limitations, it's much harder when you're having to explain it to someone who is trying to get into Linux for the first time and realizing what they have taken for granted elsewhere. Yes, a broken Wayland session won't be much better. But if the Wayland session is still not suitable for a majority of users by the time Fedora 41 ships, whatever window of opportunity exists for Linux is going to just get missed entirely.
- brnt 3y ago
  If you call what Xorg supports a narrow space, I'm not sure you've used Wayland. I read the exact same things about it a decade ago, and I remember that Fedora 31 (maybe 32?) defaulted to Wayland. Just as it was then: I get breakage whereas with Xorg I get none. And a trivial search reveals there are _many_ more for who Wayland creates issues or showstoppers. Once people in the Wayland sphere start to realize they'll need to cover those 1001 Xorg edge cases _on top_ of enabling the good stuff that they've done, sure, we'll be getting there. However, that interest doesn't seem to be there, counting by the #worksforme's...
  - jchw 3y ago
    I have been using SwayWM for five years. My system configuration is public on Github. I have also been closely tracking the Plasma Wayland session on AMD hardware, too. Unfortunately you didn't list any of the shortcomings, just vaguely that there are breakages, but my point isn't that Wayland is perfect, it's that X11 is effectively non-viable for many people due to shortcomings that are difficult or nearly impossible to fix that nobody is working on. Meanwhile, one of the biggest showstoppers for Wayland isn't even Wayland, it's that the Linux graphics infrastructure Wayland compositors rely on isn't well-supported by the official NVIDIA driver.
Lariscus 3y ago
Anyone acting surprised should read about what Fedora is. They were always an bleeding edge distro and are often the first major distro to adopt something that later becomes widely used if not a de facto standard. Just a few examples: - Fedora 8 changed to Pulseaudio by default [0] - Fedora 15 adopted systemd [1] - Fedora 34 default PipeWire [2] Sometimes these things don't work out like the attempted switch to Wayland for Fedora 25.[3] This attempt now is really nothing out of the ordinary for Fedora and with the current state of Wayland I am in no doubt that this time they will stick with Wayland. [0] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeaturePulseaudio https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeaturePulseaudio [1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/systemd https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/systemd [2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/DefaultPipeWire https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/DefaultPipeWire [3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-25-Wayland-Default https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-25-Wayland-Default
Mikhail_K 3y ago
Enshittification of "Red Hat" linux is proceeding apace.
saint_yossarian 3y ago
I've been very patient with Wayland, trying it out every once in a while for the past few years, wasting many hours following the endless discussions, and simplifying my setup to avoid X11-specific tools etc. These days I just don't care anymore, and will stay on Xorg as long as I can. Besides screensharing, which from what I hear is still a clusterfuck (i.e. it can work just fine, but any given app might or might not work), I've whittled it down to two, seemingly very basic and essential-to-me features, that for some reason still aren't supported: Window positioning: As in, the ability for an app to request a specific position for a window. Like when I minimize my music player to the tray, and when I open it again I want it to appear in the same location. Or when productivity apps remember the positions of their tool windows, or I want to script apps to start in specific positions using the near-universal "--geometry" flag of old. Wayland doesn't want to expose global coordinates, supposedly for security reasons (which I call bullshit on), and in order not to discriminate against non-finite/non-square displays (which I guess could just ignore the position requests, but apparently that's not good enough). One of the proposed solutions for this is the "xdg-session-management" protocol, where it would be the compositor's job to remember window positions for client apps. But to me that only sounded like a partial solution that probably won't ever work consistently, and anyway there hasn't been much progress on the MR for this which was started a full 4 years ago. There's been a lot of activity recently with the "ext-placement" protocol, which from what I understand introduces an application-local "zone" system which will allow window positioning in a very roundabout way that will hopefully please everyone. I appreciate everyone's work on this, but at this rate it will probably take a couple more years until compositors support this new protocol, and client apps have made the necessary changes. Refresh rate changes: I have a HTPC connected to a TV. No refresh rate changes means I get constant micro-stutters when watching 24fps content. And yes, I do notice them, and no, turning on motion smoothing doesn't make them go away (and looks even crappier anyway). There are protocols to request refresh rate changes (last time I looked, at least four of them), but client apps like Kodi are not allowed to use them (only system management tools), and proper support for apps to signal a desired refresh rate is tangled up in discussions about achieving the perfect design to support VRR. So I'll give this at least a couple more years too.
pixard 3y ago
Maybe I am just lucky, but here is my experience as of literally today. I just installed Fedora 40 (KDE 6) using the Fedora-40-20240304.n.0 nightly ISO. I then enabled the NVIDIA and Steam repos and installed both. Also installed asusctl. Everything seems to work perfectly. This is on a Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 from 2021 (GA401QM) laptop with a Ryzen 9 5900HS + NVIDIA 3060. The screen is at full resolution at 120 Hz. Keyboard lights work, audio works, WiFi worked out of the box, sleep works etc. I tried a few games on Steam and they all worked out of the box without any tweaks what so ever. I also find I am really enjoying KDE. It must be over 15 years since I last tried KDE but now I really think it is way better than Gnome. My desktop is still on Windows, I'm waiting for HDR support. I'm so excited to get off Windows forever. It really feels like Linux is finally good enough.
- Symbiote 3y ago
  > I'm waiting for HDR support What HDR content would you like to view? I think my screen supports it, but I have long forgotten about that feature — maybe it wasn't even working when I tested it with a MacBook, but I couldn't tell any difference. "KDE#Plasma 6.0 introduced experimental HDR support for Wayland session: System Settings > Display & Monitor > High Dynamic Range > Enable HDR." according to https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HDR_monitor_support https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HDR_monitor_support
  - pixard 3y ago
    My use case is for gaming. I know there is some preliminary support now but I'm going to wait until everything is stable and "mostly works (tm)". :) Thanks though!

50 points by voxadam 3y ago

I think this is a good move. Wayland has been stable for me for years. I hope it prompts companies like Slack to sort their apps out.

martinsbalodis 3y ago
Slack is the only reason why we switch back to X11. It's because screen sharing doesn't work on Wayland.
- k8svet 3y ago
  I've been screen sharing my desktop (sway) for years at my job. Years is not an exaggeration. What do Discord, Slack, and Nvidia all have in common?
- petepete 3y ago
  I use Slack in a Chrome tab and screen sharing works perfectly there. I don't know how they've managed to fuck their app up so much it just shows a black rectangle.
- bogdan 3y ago
  It does with the browser version. Is there any reason to use the non browser version? 1 less v8 instance running
  - bayindirh 3y ago
    > Is there any reason to use the non browser version? Making it completely disappear to a tray icon. > 1 less v8 instance running I doubt. With process isolation, I guess every tab runs its on V8. Otherwise, oh boy.
    - bonzini 3y ago
      Tabs are sharing the code though, because it comes from the same binary. Every electron app instead has its V8 and Blink in a separate binary that has to be loaded into its own RAM.
      - MikusR 3y ago
        I suggest you open your systems version of task manager. All those chrome processes are loaded in their own ram.
        kaba0 3y ago
        That’s just sandboxing. They still share a significant amount of resources.
        bonzini 3y ago
        Sharing of read-only pages from the executable is done at the kernel (page cache) level. I agree that for example JIT compiled code is not shared.
  - raffraffraff 3y ago
    It's weird that it doesn't work since it uses webrtc for huddles. That's precisely what I had to enable in the browser to get various screen sharing websites to work. Btw, this isn't for slack but teams: I use the website because their Linux app blows, but I actually use a totally different browser (chromium) to my main browser (firefox) intentionally. Occasionally when teams takes 100% cpu and memory for no reason, I can 'pkill chromium' without nuking firefox. So the "one less engine" argument wouldn't convince me.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  I had the same issue with Teams a few years ago and I just switched to the browser version. Teams app was buggy anyway. No big deal. The good thing with the browser version is rolling updates are immediate, no need to upgrade a flatpak or rpm. And if they fuck up, rollback is also immediate. Also this is about removing the gnome x11 session package from the default install. That doesn't mean you can't run X11. Having said that I don't know who would want to keep using X11 AND choose Fedora as its goto distro. This is a distro whose purpose is to push forward these kind of stuff, there are a number of much more conservative distros available and one could argue that if you are conservative and want to stay in the RPM/RH family you can use RHEL or a derivative distro such as Almalinux or Rocky. That is what I use on the media center computer in my living room for other reasons[1]. Back in the day someone would complain about outdated package but nowadays with tools like flatpak, podman and the toolbox this is just not true anymore. [1] I don't power it up so often. I don't want to have tons of packages to update every time I power it up to watch a show on streaming. All I want is to be able to upgrade the browser's flatpak.
- kaba0 3y ago
  Why even install these web apps separately? You can even just create a shortcut for them that opens them in a separate browser window if you need that.
bayindirh 3y ago
"Works on my machine" is never a good argument for something AFAICS. There are still many edge cases and paper cuts with many Free and Open Source applications. Yes, it'll push developers a little harder, but we will see tons of complaints in the beginning. This will take another ~2-3 years to be sorted out. While X11's codebase is known for its state, it's working well at this point.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  Since Fedora is ostensibly the bleeding edge distro second only to the likes of Arch, it seems reasonable for the dev nudging to start(?) happen(ing?) there.
  - Zetaphor 3y ago
    People seem to either ignore or just not be aware of this. Fedora has always been the first mover. If that's not what you want you should be using a different distro. Ubuntu will be supporting an LTS version with X11 for many more years.
    - bayindirh 3y ago
      Personally I'm very aware, and not against that. Just wanted to point out that a single "I'm running it without problems for years" experience is not a high quality signal for state of any piece of software. I have experienced "very fun" problems with a "supported NVIDIA card with official drivers that support that card", while people said that they are using theirs without any problems for years.
  - NekkoDroid 3y ago
    I get where you are coming from with the bleeding edge comment, but Arch is not really experimental levels of cutting edge, they just try to follow upstream as close as possible. Fedora OTOH is happy to do these kinda non-upstream stuff to actually bring stuff forward.
    - 3y ago
raffraffraff 3y ago
But surely... Gnome shouldn't be dropping X11 sessions until Slack do get their shit together? (And I'm not just talking about Slack obviously). I get it, people are lazy, but I don't like these gun-to-the-head upgrades because the users are the losers. FWIW I tried to switch to Wayland 3 times in the last year before finally making it stick. I had to change a ton of silly little things, like: - grepping through my .config and /etc for any mention of xclip and switching to wl-copy (vimrc, tmux.conf to name two) - enabling webtrc on browsers so that screen sharing works in web apps (MS Teams still refuses to work) I don't know if there's a good source of migration tips that covers all of these things in one place so you can search for the things that affect you. But on a work machine, switching across can result in random minor disruptions over a week, some of them in the middle of meetings. And if you're having "one of those weeks" you need to switch back to what works. Even now on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, a bleeding edge rolling distro with excellent wayland + kde plasma support, I still run into the odd issue that makes me wanna switch back. Disappearing cursor is one. It's totally random, but if I click on a text input box on a browser, I get no text cursor. WTH.
- raverbashing 3y ago
  Why is wayland not shipping xclip (could be just a symbolic link to wl-copy) This is the kind of thing that makes it harder on people to switch The lack of focus and backwards compatibility in the open source world is appaling. As much as I like to complain about systemd it is not surprising it came to replace 3 scripts in a long coat
- crote 3y ago
  It's a chicken-and-egg problem. Apps like Slack don't want to invest time in supporting Wayland: just ask the user to switch to an X11 session! But Gnome shouldn't drop X11 support until all apps work on Wayland. In other words, we're stuck with X11 apps forever. Someone eventually has to break the stalemate, and Fedora is usually the distro making the switch first. Its users are used to stuff like this, and it serves as a nice heads-up for app developers to get to work because it'll land in RHEL within a year or two and you can't really claim Linux support if your app doesn't work on RHEL.
- sloowm 3y ago

jeroenhd 3y ago

by default This issue doesn't seem to indicate support is disappearing completely, you'll probably be one dnf command away from getting back X11 if you're running on Nvidia or really old AMD/Intel.

aragilar 3y ago
For now, but https://lwn.net/Articles/961899/ https://lwn.net/Articles/961899/ highlights that there's a push to remove things even if there are people who are willing and able (and currently are) maintaining it.
- suby 3y ago
  I'm on the latest Nvidia drivers (550), I have a 3080 video card, and I get something like 20 FPS in Plasma's Wayland session. They are crazy if they drop support for x11. Fedora was similarly crazy for making it the default when they did. I remember trying out Fedora around that time, not being aware that Wayland was even a thing. I installed it on my machine, I attempted to login, the screen goes black and then after a second I'm back at the login screen. I ended up installing another distro, not realizing what the problem was. Wayland is wonderful if your hardware supports it well, but even then it is not without problems and regressions.
  - brnt 3y ago
    Wayland and the way some people and distros handle the move puts me off because they violate a core tenet of user facing software design: support most if not all of your users. Not just a happy path. Not a few either. It's _all about_ understanding that the job is about 1001 'edge' cases, not a few happy paths. A mindset that says a piece of software should be the only option because it works for all your fellow developers on their standard Intel Dell laptops is not one I put much stock in. X is dead, long live X.
    - kaba0 3y ago
      It’s open source software, feel free to support/maintain your own edge case. It makes zero sense to spread a team that thin on handling some edge case no one uses. There are only finite resources, and it makes sense to focus on a smooth experience for the vast majority of people.

hawski 3y ago

I would compare X11/Wayland situation to Python 2/3. I'm not a very advanced Pythonista, but I'm competent and use it more and more. - 2009 - Python 3.0 came out at the very end of 2008 so let's count it as from 2009. - 2011 (2 years later) - Six the compatibility library to ease the transition releases 1.0.0 - 2013 (4) - On Fedora's Bugzilla "Replace Python 2 with Python 3 in default installation" issue was created [1] - 2015 (6) - Python 3.5 (introducing typing module) - 2016 (7) - "Replace Python 2 with Python 3 in default installation" closed. - 2017 (8) - Python 3.6 (f-strings introduction, for me privately first 2/3 difference that makes me consider Python 3). - 2020 (11) - Last release of Python 2.7: 2.7.18. python-is-python3 package available in Ubuntu 20.04 (not default AFAIK). - 2021 (12) - So far the last Six release (1.16.0) In comparison with GNOME/Wayland: - 2013 - Wayland 1.2 - wayland-server API becomes stable - 2015 (2 years later) - Wayland introduction in GNOME with version 3.20 - 2016 (3 years after Wayland 1.2; 1 year after GNOME 3.20) - Mainlining Xwayland in xorg-server 1.16 release. Drag and drop actions are now added to the Wayland API. Fedora 22 defaults to Wayland session. - 2024 (today - 11; 9) For me: I will switch when Xfce will. Edit: Added Six to the timeline per aragilar suggestion below and a bit more points. [1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1014209 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1014209

sprash 3y ago
Two things that are wrong here: 1. Wayland was actually started in 2008 2. Wayland API is not stable even today
- nitinreddy88 3y ago
  One more point, no VR support in Wayland yet
- hawski 3y ago
  1. Python 3 also started earlier (2006 for pep-3000 [1]). 2. I meant a first meaningful stable release for both [2]. Python 3 is also seeing new releases. [1] https://peps.python.org/pep-3000/ https://peps.python.org/pep-3000/ [2] https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2013-July/010278.html https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2013-Ju...

lionkor 3y ago

Just as Linux Desktop market share is going up and a lot of my gamer friends are full-time switching to Linux, major distros decide its the right time to break every single nvidia user's distro by default. Thats what this is.

greggsy 3y ago
It’s like when Gnome 3 came out, and everyone who was just getting a taste of Linux through the more accessible Ubuntu was forced to use a (IMHO) crap UI. It was polished, but it basically copied the much loathet full screen ‘menu’ from Windows 8.
- jdub 3y ago
  Ubuntu was released with GNOME 2.8, was shipping Unity as the default desktop at the time GNOME 3 was released, and only switched the default desktop to GNOME 3.28 (configured to look more like Unity) in 2018.
atemerev 3y ago
Nvidia now works more or less fine with Wayland.
alwayslikethis 3y ago
Nvidia on Wayland isn't that broken anymore at least if you have recent cards.
- gliptic 3y ago
  Lots of things running under Xwayland are unusable until the implicit/explicit sync issue between nvidia/wayland is resolved.
- Timon3 3y ago
  I recently set up a new Desktop system with an RTX 4080 and installed Fedora Kinoite (specifically ublue-nvidia). Things were weirdly broken in many ways: - Many apps were flickering between the actual content and black rectangles - Games didn't work at all, most without any error messages or discernible reasons, some told me they couldn't find a GPU - I couldn't use CUDA at all - Firefox couldn't use WebGL or play content with hardware acceleration After debugging this for multiple days I switched to X11, and everything immediately worked. I'm relatively proficient with Linux, and I have no idea what the issue was or how I could continue debugging it. So, at least for me, NVidia is still completely broken with Wayland.

alwayslikethis 3y ago

I've been using GNOME under Wayland on my laptop and I noticed a few things. GNOME still won't support server side decorations on Wayland. Qt apps look like crap, with thin titlebars which are non-interactive, even though they looked just fine under X11. It just makes them look broken on a GNOME desktop and benefits no one. The fractional scaling is also still broken because they can't be bothered to combine Wayland and X11 scaling and not blur Xwayland apps. Hyprland (a tiling wm / compositor) works properly here and allows not blurring X11 apps as well as letting them scale by themselves. Electron apps also scale properly, unlike on GNOME.

throwawayyy9237 3y ago

Hijacking the topic: I don't use Wayland. But I have a lot of Mac hardware running Fedora with GNOME X11. What's the status of Wayland to configure input hardware, namely keyboards (ie xmodmap, xkbd)?

__s 3y ago
https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/1.10.4/faq.html#faq_config_options https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/1.10.4/faq.html...

gigatexal 3y ago

my only gripe going to wayland 100% is screensharing easily like i can in x11 is still hit and miss. has anyone solved this where I can screenshare in teams, meet, slack, etc?

sloowm 3y ago
From the browser it works so for meet it should always work. For slack and teams I think a lot of apps are still using a version of electron that is years old by now and doesn't work with Wayland properly.

Faaak 3y ago

Completely unrelated, but I didn't know about pagure. Looks really nice and neat

jchw 3y ago

Personal opinion: If Linux "catches on" without dropping X11 rather quickly, it will lose all of the momentum. Xorg offers a fairly good out-of-box experience on many GPUs but it falls apart when you try to do things that would be considered normal on other OSes, like having displays of different DPIs, streaming 4K video via OBS, and so forth. Everybody keeps treating this issue like it's just programmers deprecating old code for fun, but the actual reality of it is that you can only like Xorg if you exist in the narrow space where it is sufficient, and while it's easy to downplay the importance of its shortcomings if you either coincidentally follow the line or if perhaps your behavior has adjusted to the limitations, it's much harder when you're having to explain it to someone who is trying to get into Linux for the first time and realizing what they have taken for granted elsewhere. Yes, a broken Wayland session won't be much better. But if the Wayland session is still not suitable for a majority of users by the time Fedora 41 ships, whatever window of opportunity exists for Linux is going to just get missed entirely.

brnt 3y ago
If you call what Xorg supports a narrow space, I'm not sure you've used Wayland. I read the exact same things about it a decade ago, and I remember that Fedora 31 (maybe 32?) defaulted to Wayland. Just as it was then: I get breakage whereas with Xorg I get none. And a trivial search reveals there are _many_ more for who Wayland creates issues or showstoppers. Once people in the Wayland sphere start to realize they'll need to cover those 1001 Xorg edge cases _on top_ of enabling the good stuff that they've done, sure, we'll be getting there. However, that interest doesn't seem to be there, counting by the #worksforme's...
- jchw 3y ago
  I have been using SwayWM for five years. My system configuration is public on Github. I have also been closely tracking the Plasma Wayland session on AMD hardware, too. Unfortunately you didn't list any of the shortcomings, just vaguely that there are breakages, but my point isn't that Wayland is perfect, it's that X11 is effectively non-viable for many people due to shortcomings that are difficult or nearly impossible to fix that nobody is working on. Meanwhile, one of the biggest showstoppers for Wayland isn't even Wayland, it's that the Linux graphics infrastructure Wayland compositors rely on isn't well-supported by the official NVIDIA driver.

Lariscus 3y ago

Anyone acting surprised should read about what Fedora is. They were always an bleeding edge distro and are often the first major distro to adopt something that later becomes widely used if not a de facto standard. Just a few examples: - Fedora 8 changed to Pulseaudio by default [0] - Fedora 15 adopted systemd [1] - Fedora 34 default PipeWire [2] Sometimes these things don't work out like the attempted switch to Wayland for Fedora 25.[3] This attempt now is really nothing out of the ordinary for Fedora and with the current state of Wayland I am in no doubt that this time they will stick with Wayland. [0] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeaturePulseaudio https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeaturePulseaudio [1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/systemd https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/systemd [2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/DefaultPipeWire https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/DefaultPipeWire [3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-25-Wayland-Default https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-25-Wayland-Default

Mikhail_K 3y ago

Enshittification of "Red Hat" linux is proceeding apace.

saint_yossarian 3y ago

I've been very patient with Wayland, trying it out every once in a while for the past few years, wasting many hours following the endless discussions, and simplifying my setup to avoid X11-specific tools etc. These days I just don't care anymore, and will stay on Xorg as long as I can. Besides screensharing, which from what I hear is still a clusterfuck (i.e. it can work just fine, but any given app might or might not work), I've whittled it down to two, seemingly very basic and essential-to-me features, that for some reason still aren't supported: Window positioning: As in, the ability for an app to request a specific position for a window. Like when I minimize my music player to the tray, and when I open it again I want it to appear in the same location. Or when productivity apps remember the positions of their tool windows, or I want to script apps to start in specific positions using the near-universal "--geometry" flag of old. Wayland doesn't want to expose global coordinates, supposedly for security reasons (which I call bullshit on), and in order not to discriminate against non-finite/non-square displays (which I guess could just ignore the position requests, but apparently that's not good enough). One of the proposed solutions for this is the "xdg-session-management" protocol, where it would be the compositor's job to remember window positions for client apps. But to me that only sounded like a partial solution that probably won't ever work consistently, and anyway there hasn't been much progress on the MR for this which was started a full 4 years ago. There's been a lot of activity recently with the "ext-placement" protocol, which from what I understand introduces an application-local "zone" system which will allow window positioning in a very roundabout way that will hopefully please everyone. I appreciate everyone's work on this, but at this rate it will probably take a couple more years until compositors support this new protocol, and client apps have made the necessary changes. Refresh rate changes: I have a HTPC connected to a TV. No refresh rate changes means I get constant micro-stutters when watching 24fps content. And yes, I do notice them, and no, turning on motion smoothing doesn't make them go away (and looks even crappier anyway). There are protocols to request refresh rate changes (last time I looked, at least four of them), but client apps like Kodi are not allowed to use them (only system management tools), and proper support for apps to signal a desired refresh rate is tangled up in discussions about achieving the perfect design to support VRR. So I'll give this at least a couple more years too.

pixard 3y ago

Maybe I am just lucky, but here is my experience as of literally today. I just installed Fedora 40 (KDE 6) using the Fedora-40-20240304.n.0 nightly ISO. I then enabled the NVIDIA and Steam repos and installed both. Also installed asusctl. Everything seems to work perfectly. This is on a Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 from 2021 (GA401QM) laptop with a Ryzen 9 5900HS + NVIDIA 3060. The screen is at full resolution at 120 Hz. Keyboard lights work, audio works, WiFi worked out of the box, sleep works etc. I tried a few games on Steam and they all worked out of the box without any tweaks what so ever. I also find I am really enjoying KDE. It must be over 15 years since I last tried KDE but now I really think it is way better than Gnome. My desktop is still on Windows, I'm waiting for HDR support. I'm so excited to get off Windows forever. It really feels like Linux is finally good enough.

Symbiote 3y ago
> I'm waiting for HDR support What HDR content would you like to view? I think my screen supports it, but I have long forgotten about that feature — maybe it wasn't even working when I tested it with a MacBook, but I couldn't tell any difference. "KDE#Plasma 6.0 introduced experimental HDR support for Wayland session: System Settings > Display & Monitor > High Dynamic Range > Enable HDR." according to https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HDR_monitor_support https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HDR_monitor_support
- pixard 3y ago
  My use case is for gaming. I know there is some preliminary support now but I'm going to wait until everything is stable and "mostly works (tm)". :) Thanks though!