8 ms·

FWIW I recently switched full time to Linux and have had absolutely 0 problems with GNOME, Wayland and Fedora, though I am using an AMD GPU. wl-copy works fine

FWIW I recently switched full time to Linux and have had absolutely 0 problems with GNOME, Wayland and Fedora, though I am using an AMD GPU. wl-copy works fine, askpass works, copy and paste works, screen sharing with Google Meet works, drag and drop works. Using an iphone as a webcam works as does recording my screen. Most importantly using multiple monitors with fractional scaling works perfectly. AFIAK this is not possible to do well (at all?) on X11, which is a complete show stopper for me. If anyone's reading this and sitting on the fence, I would really give Fedora a go. I've found it so much more polished than Ubuntu, and loads of things which didn't work on it work out of the box on Fedora (at least compared to 24.04 LTS).

seabrookmx 7mo ago
That's probably just due to the older kernel. I go back and forth between Fedora and Ubuntu a lot, and once you get past the snap/flatpak and the apt/dnf differences everything feels the same. I usually format my Fedora disk ext4, add flatpak to my Ubuntu installs, manually override the fonts, add dash-to-panel.. the resulting experience ends up identical.
tmtvl 7mo ago
Separate scaling fractions on separate monitors doesn't work under X. Well, I lie: it does work under zaphod mode, but no applications other than Emacs support that.
- spudlyo 7mo ago
  Heh. Just today I started fooling around with a new X11 setup on a barebones Ubuntu Server VM with just xorg, xinit, xterm, Emacs and i3. It's pretty neat learning about iommu groups and doing NVMe passthrough with KVM/Qemu, and also messing around with the new (to me) Spice/virgl 3D acceleration. I was impressed I was able to play YT videos in the Ubuntu Virtual Machine Manager with hand-built mpv/ffmpeg + yt-dlp setup without dropping too many frames or serious glitches. Huzzah for libgl1-mesa-dri. After that, I rebooted the host OS, jumped into the UEFI boot menu and booted the "guest" NVMe disk directly with my actual GPU, and it still worked. It's quite a trip down memory lane, typing 'startx' and having a both a :0.0 and :0.1 displays. That muscle memory from the 1990s is still going strong.
  - mikestorrent 7mo ago
    I miss the simplicity of how I remember XFree86 running on the alt-f7 terminal, and having alt-f1 through alt-f6 for my own needs... a second X on alt-f8 when I got 64MB of ram. ctrl-alt-backspace to quickly kill X and restart it (within a few seconds on a 486). Then, gradually, these things disappeared from Linux, for no good reason; you can still configure them but someone decided in their infinite wisdom that some of the most compelling features just weren't really needed anymore, in favour of rewriting the XDM again and again until now there's too many of them and none of them are really any better than what we had in the 90s.
    - spudlyo 7mo ago
      setxkbmap -option terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp I had to put that in my .xinitrc, because like you I really missed that feature. I also made a .Xresources file and had to remember that xrdb was a thing. Good times, good memories. I also remember the jump to 64MiB of memory, it was a big deal! I think I got a Gravis UltraSound right around then too. I stopped my nostalgia journey short of pimping out my console (sadly now only fbcon works, and the old vga modes are a legacy BIOS thing I think) with fonts and higher resolution, and enabling in the kernel the Alt+SysReq+g key for dropping into the kernel debugger, but there is always tomorrow!
- lnx01 7mo ago
  Running X11 on Ubuntu 22.04 - I have a 2650x1600 main at 150% scale and a 1920x1980 secondary at 100% scale. Essentially they're the same virtual size side-by-side. This _only_ works on my nVidia GPU...
andrewstuart2 7mo ago
My experience lately has been similar. Most things work well now. But, I think the article has some valid points about how long it's taken to get even this far. And it just kinda sucks that some things are still broken or don't have alternatives (the #1 thing I miss right now is Barrier (Synergy) for using my macbook from my linux desktop). HDR gaming on linux is possible thanks to Valve but it's still nowhere near as simple as plugging in your HDR display and toggling one switch. And it's been rough getting here, and it seems like there are still some things that are slow and hard to get right. I'm not a display protocol dev, so I don't really have educated opinions about the protocol. But I know it's been a rough transition relative to other projects I've adopted even when there was major pushback (systemd springs to mind).
- martinald 7mo ago
  No I do get that, it's definitely been a slow and painful migration. But just having a very insecure X11 "forever" with no fractional font scaling wasn't a long term plan either imo.
- saghm 7mo ago
  > the #1 thing I miss right now is Barrier (Synergy) for using my macbook from my linux desktop) It's admittedly tough to keep up with all of the forks that have happened, but the current iteration, Input Leap, has worked for this for me for years now https://github.com/input-leap/input-leap https://github.com/input-leap/input-leap
  - jpetso 7mo ago
    That's not even the most recent iteration, there's also Deskflow now which is maintained by the main Synergy developer and a very active independent dev. Works fine on Wayland afaik. Also has a wiki page with the history of all the forks! https://github.com/deskflow/deskflow https://github.com/deskflow/deskflow
    - saghm 7mo ago
      Unbelievable! Thank you, I guess I'll have to see if I should switch over to that one now
wildredkraut 7mo ago
Yeah? Then try to drag out a tab of firefox or GNOME files to the upper direction, good luck. Then check how "awful" Blender 5.1 titlebar and window frame integrates to GNOME. Have fun trying to make Deskflow/Synergy working on GDM.
- iknowstuff 7mo ago
  Wow what a showstopper!
  - renewiltord 7mo ago
    Decades of using Linux desktops and nothing has ever changed hahaha. Users still complain things don’t work. Fans still say “oh what a first world problem”. Like a little 2004 era time loop. People still installing Dapper Drake. Haha. In the time that people have been talking about the Wayland future to today where they’re still talking about it I have lived in 3 continents, met my wife and had a child, and experienced a few huge technology shifts. Truly amazing. I get this blast of nostalgia every time this discussion happens. Like looking through a bubble and seeing my teenage self.
    - jasonjayr 7mo ago
      Wayland breaks my slashdot-themed e16 desktop!! /s
    - philwelch 7mo ago
      Hey at least they finished Perl 6!
      - NetMageSCW 7mo ago
        I think it’s more like they gave up on Perl 6, admitted it was a mistake, and renamed all that work like it wasn’t related to Perl. Where it languishes in mostly obscurity.
    - wildredkraut 7mo ago
chillfox 7mo ago
I recently had to go through several remote desktop apps before I found one that would work.
atomicnumber3 7mo ago
You don't even need fedora - clean arch install, install vim gnome and Firefox, and boom your computer now just works.
- glouwbug 7mo ago
  Hyprlands been making waves
zahlman 7mo ago
I already have stuff that works out of box (based on 24.04 as it happens), and from what I've seen of GNOME Desktop I really just don't like the design — and its maintainers generally just impress me as insufferable people any time a story comes up. Overall I think it's much better that options exist. I'm even willing to tolerate GUI inconsistency across the Linux ecosystem in exchange.
Rapzid 7mo ago
I moved away from desktop Linux a few years back after getting a new development laptop with a hiDPI screen and running into fractional scaling issues. Windows wsl2 was just getting real good at the time, so I moved over on my desktop and laptop. Nice to hear fractional scaling situation is better now. Tempted to try it out but.. Man Windows(Pro) is just such a nice desktop and host now, and I can still develop in "linux"..
- queenkjuul 7mo ago
  Same. It's sad but W11+WSL2 is just a straight up better experience than Linux native on my laptop.
- drnick1 7mo ago
  > Man Windows(Pro) is just such a nice desktop and host now Windows is terrible relative to a recent version of GNOME on Wayland, slow, bloated, full of spyware and AI.
  - denkmoon 7mo ago
    Just gonna jump in with the alternate view, if you like Windows desktop but not Windows, KDE is just amazing now. I didn’t enjoy it much in be KDE3 and 4 days but I’m loving Plasma 6.
    - simonask 7mo ago
      Plasma 6 has worked flawlessly for me, even on NVIDIA graphics out of the box (Arch, btw).
    - esseph 7mo ago
      KDE just feels like windows, and just as disjointed. (To any devs that may read this: I acknowledge a LOT of development progress and features you all have added, it's just not my cup of tea!)
ewoodrich 7mo ago
Yes! Per-monitor fractional scaling on Fedora/Wayland finally allowed me to switch my default OS on my laptop from Windows 11 to Linux. I had to give up on my previous attempt a couple years ago with Linux Mint/X11 because it was an exercise in futility trying to make my various apps look acceptable on my mixed DPI monitor setup. Linux Mint with Wayland clearly was not getting a lot of attention at the time, and the general attitude when I looked up bugs seemed to be "just don't use Wayland", but maybe the situation has improved by now. It was also kinda off-putting reading Reddit/forum comments whose attitude towards per-monitor DPI scaling on Linux in general was basically "why would anyone need that" when it's been a basic Windows feature for a decade+. Fedora on the other hand was literally just plug-and-play and has been very enjoyable to use as my daily driver.
- jauntywundrkind 7mo ago
  What a pox that such an old slow moving distro as Mint somehow is people's first port of call. I don't know how this happened, how Mint rooted itself so well (in 2006 it was fresh!), but this perception that you should use the slowest moving oldest possible dustiest Linux is the best possible thing Microsoft and Apple could spread to convince the world to believe. If you are going to jump into Linux, dont sell yourself the weird delusion that using ancient ass systems is somehow going to be better for you.
  - ewoodrich 7mo ago
    Sorry if I sold myself a delusion about the Linux distro I casually tried but I've been jumping on and off Linux for 20 years at this point and didn't get the memo it was outdated until later on. The significant change here was being able to daily drive it on my laptop instead of living in a VM or secondary dual boot. In the past Ubuntu was always my go-to but the snap thing was irritating, and I'd always used some kind of Debian variant, so after cycling through all the X-buntus said hey, why not this Linux Mint I keep hearing about? Plus, Cinnamon looked decent in screenshots but turned out Gnome with a few tweaks ended up being much closer to my ideal than even heavily customized Cinnamon.
    - 7mo ago
queenkjuul 7mo ago
I'll never understand it but Fedora just doesn't work ootb on my Asus laptop or Asus desktop. Gnome 50 on Ubuntu 26.04 beta has served me okay in testing so far.
Blikkentrekker 7mo ago
It's really simple, then I have to use GNOME or KDE or any other thing that is on Wayland which I don't use. AwesomeWM, Xmonad, Fluxbox, OpenBox and many other interfaces just aren't on Wayland and have no intention to be because it just doesn't really do well what they want to and they don't feel like maintaining two versions. The real issue with Wayland and “setting back” isn't what the article says, but just that like 15 years was taken just to get Wayland on semi-decent feature-parity with X11 during which time development on X11 came to a standstill. That time could've been used to improve X11 and it's still not real feature parity. And part of it was just the devs refusing to believe that people needed those features. I talked with them around 2010-ish and about some of the things they cut out claiming that no one ever used them. These were things related to mouse acceleration that is pretty essential to video games and image editing, certain forms of screen capture, various things with fonts and color management that are essential to many professionals and they actually believed that no one used those things. Eventually they came around and added many of those things back in, in doing so basically making many of the initial security promises complete void again but so much time has been put in what isn't much of an improvement to justify the time spent on it.
- simonask 7mo ago
  You're lamenting the use of time by people, but you are not those people's boss. People work on what they want to work on. There is no rule that people who worked on Wayland (and I happen to think they did a great job) would have worked on Xorg instead, or that the original motivations for building Wayland are invalid.
  - Blikkentrekker 7mo ago
    Well that's the issue with free software isn't it. In properitary software people work on what their boss tells them to work on which is decided by market research based on what people want. Others said in this thread that Wayland in many ways was more so trying to solve issues for developers than for users and that's true.
    - 7mo ago
dgan 7mo ago
I am on latest Fedora Gnome, and tab switching between windows randomly stucks. It's so annoying, i had to go back to X11, even if handles badly high dpi laptop; the alternative being to reboot randomoy in the middle of the work
WhoCaresAboutIt 7mo ago
It's pretty funny to see "copy/paste works" and "drag and drop works" presented like some kind of win. That's the absolute baseline for a desktop OS.. since at least Windows 3.x. Windows, bloated and ad-riddled as it is now, never had to be defended on the basis that basic GUI behavior still functioned. But this year surely will be the year of the Linux desktop!
- stemlord 7mo ago
  I have constant issues with drag and drop on my windows pc. It'll stop working and I have to reboot to get it back

seabrookmx 7mo ago

That's probably just due to the older kernel. I go back and forth between Fedora and Ubuntu a lot, and once you get past the snap/flatpak and the apt/dnf differences everything feels the same. I usually format my Fedora disk ext4, add flatpak to my Ubuntu installs, manually override the fonts, add dash-to-panel.. the resulting experience ends up identical.

tmtvl 7mo ago

Separate scaling fractions on separate monitors doesn't work under X. Well, I lie: it does work under zaphod mode, but no applications other than Emacs support that.

spudlyo 7mo ago
Heh. Just today I started fooling around with a new X11 setup on a barebones Ubuntu Server VM with just xorg, xinit, xterm, Emacs and i3. It's pretty neat learning about iommu groups and doing NVMe passthrough with KVM/Qemu, and also messing around with the new (to me) Spice/virgl 3D acceleration. I was impressed I was able to play YT videos in the Ubuntu Virtual Machine Manager with hand-built mpv/ffmpeg + yt-dlp setup without dropping too many frames or serious glitches. Huzzah for libgl1-mesa-dri. After that, I rebooted the host OS, jumped into the UEFI boot menu and booted the "guest" NVMe disk directly with my actual GPU, and it still worked. It's quite a trip down memory lane, typing 'startx' and having a both a :0.0 and :0.1 displays. That muscle memory from the 1990s is still going strong.
- mikestorrent 7mo ago
  I miss the simplicity of how I remember XFree86 running on the alt-f7 terminal, and having alt-f1 through alt-f6 for my own needs... a second X on alt-f8 when I got 64MB of ram. ctrl-alt-backspace to quickly kill X and restart it (within a few seconds on a 486). Then, gradually, these things disappeared from Linux, for no good reason; you can still configure them but someone decided in their infinite wisdom that some of the most compelling features just weren't really needed anymore, in favour of rewriting the XDM again and again until now there's too many of them and none of them are really any better than what we had in the 90s.
  - spudlyo 7mo ago
    setxkbmap -option terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp I had to put that in my .xinitrc, because like you I really missed that feature. I also made a .Xresources file and had to remember that xrdb was a thing. Good times, good memories. I also remember the jump to 64MiB of memory, it was a big deal! I think I got a Gravis UltraSound right around then too. I stopped my nostalgia journey short of pimping out my console (sadly now only fbcon works, and the old vga modes are a legacy BIOS thing I think) with fonts and higher resolution, and enabling in the kernel the Alt+SysReq+g key for dropping into the kernel debugger, but there is always tomorrow!
lnx01 7mo ago
Running X11 on Ubuntu 22.04 - I have a 2650x1600 main at 150% scale and a 1920x1980 secondary at 100% scale. Essentially they're the same virtual size side-by-side. This _only_ works on my nVidia GPU...

andrewstuart2 7mo ago

My experience lately has been similar. Most things work well now. But, I think the article has some valid points about how long it's taken to get even this far. And it just kinda sucks that some things are still broken or don't have alternatives (the #1 thing I miss right now is Barrier (Synergy) for using my macbook from my linux desktop). HDR gaming on linux is possible thanks to Valve but it's still nowhere near as simple as plugging in your HDR display and toggling one switch. And it's been rough getting here, and it seems like there are still some things that are slow and hard to get right. I'm not a display protocol dev, so I don't really have educated opinions about the protocol. But I know it's been a rough transition relative to other projects I've adopted even when there was major pushback (systemd springs to mind).

martinald 7mo ago
No I do get that, it's definitely been a slow and painful migration. But just having a very insecure X11 "forever" with no fractional font scaling wasn't a long term plan either imo.
saghm 7mo ago
> the #1 thing I miss right now is Barrier (Synergy) for using my macbook from my linux desktop) It's admittedly tough to keep up with all of the forks that have happened, but the current iteration, Input Leap, has worked for this for me for years now https://github.com/input-leap/input-leap https://github.com/input-leap/input-leap
- jpetso 7mo ago
  That's not even the most recent iteration, there's also Deskflow now which is maintained by the main Synergy developer and a very active independent dev. Works fine on Wayland afaik. Also has a wiki page with the history of all the forks! https://github.com/deskflow/deskflow https://github.com/deskflow/deskflow
  - saghm 7mo ago
    Unbelievable! Thank you, I guess I'll have to see if I should switch over to that one now

wildredkraut 7mo ago

Yeah? Then try to drag out a tab of firefox or GNOME files to the upper direction, good luck. Then check how "awful" Blender 5.1 titlebar and window frame integrates to GNOME. Have fun trying to make Deskflow/Synergy working on GDM.

iknowstuff 7mo ago
Wow what a showstopper!
- renewiltord 7mo ago
  Decades of using Linux desktops and nothing has ever changed hahaha. Users still complain things don’t work. Fans still say “oh what a first world problem”. Like a little 2004 era time loop. People still installing Dapper Drake. Haha. In the time that people have been talking about the Wayland future to today where they’re still talking about it I have lived in 3 continents, met my wife and had a child, and experienced a few huge technology shifts. Truly amazing. I get this blast of nostalgia every time this discussion happens. Like looking through a bubble and seeing my teenage self.
  - jasonjayr 7mo ago
    Wayland breaks my slashdot-themed e16 desktop!! /s
  - philwelch 7mo ago
    Hey at least they finished Perl 6!
    - NetMageSCW 7mo ago
      I think it’s more like they gave up on Perl 6, admitted it was a mistake, and renamed all that work like it wasn’t related to Perl. Where it languishes in mostly obscurity.
  - wildredkraut 7mo ago

chillfox 7mo ago

I recently had to go through several remote desktop apps before I found one that would work.

atomicnumber3 7mo ago

You don't even need fedora - clean arch install, install vim gnome and Firefox, and boom your computer now just works.

glouwbug 7mo ago
Hyprlands been making waves

zahlman 7mo ago

I already have stuff that works out of box (based on 24.04 as it happens), and from what I've seen of GNOME Desktop I really just don't like the design — and its maintainers generally just impress me as insufferable people any time a story comes up. Overall I think it's much better that options exist. I'm even willing to tolerate GUI inconsistency across the Linux ecosystem in exchange.

Rapzid 7mo ago

I moved away from desktop Linux a few years back after getting a new development laptop with a hiDPI screen and running into fractional scaling issues. Windows wsl2 was just getting real good at the time, so I moved over on my desktop and laptop. Nice to hear fractional scaling situation is better now. Tempted to try it out but.. Man Windows(Pro) is just such a nice desktop and host now, and I can still develop in "linux"..

queenkjuul 7mo ago
Same. It's sad but W11+WSL2 is just a straight up better experience than Linux native on my laptop.
drnick1 7mo ago
> Man Windows(Pro) is just such a nice desktop and host now Windows is terrible relative to a recent version of GNOME on Wayland, slow, bloated, full of spyware and AI.
- denkmoon 7mo ago
  Just gonna jump in with the alternate view, if you like Windows desktop but not Windows, KDE is just amazing now. I didn’t enjoy it much in be KDE3 and 4 days but I’m loving Plasma 6.
  - simonask 7mo ago
    Plasma 6 has worked flawlessly for me, even on NVIDIA graphics out of the box (Arch, btw).
  - esseph 7mo ago
    KDE just feels like windows, and just as disjointed. (To any devs that may read this: I acknowledge a LOT of development progress and features you all have added, it's just not my cup of tea!)

ewoodrich 7mo ago

Yes! Per-monitor fractional scaling on Fedora/Wayland finally allowed me to switch my default OS on my laptop from Windows 11 to Linux. I had to give up on my previous attempt a couple years ago with Linux Mint/X11 because it was an exercise in futility trying to make my various apps look acceptable on my mixed DPI monitor setup. Linux Mint with Wayland clearly was not getting a lot of attention at the time, and the general attitude when I looked up bugs seemed to be "just don't use Wayland", but maybe the situation has improved by now. It was also kinda off-putting reading Reddit/forum comments whose attitude towards per-monitor DPI scaling on Linux in general was basically "why would anyone need that" when it's been a basic Windows feature for a decade+. Fedora on the other hand was literally just plug-and-play and has been very enjoyable to use as my daily driver.

jauntywundrkind 7mo ago
What a pox that such an old slow moving distro as Mint somehow is people's first port of call. I don't know how this happened, how Mint rooted itself so well (in 2006 it was fresh!), but this perception that you should use the slowest moving oldest possible dustiest Linux is the best possible thing Microsoft and Apple could spread to convince the world to believe. If you are going to jump into Linux, dont sell yourself the weird delusion that using ancient ass systems is somehow going to be better for you.
- ewoodrich 7mo ago
  Sorry if I sold myself a delusion about the Linux distro I casually tried but I've been jumping on and off Linux for 20 years at this point and didn't get the memo it was outdated until later on. The significant change here was being able to daily drive it on my laptop instead of living in a VM or secondary dual boot. In the past Ubuntu was always my go-to but the snap thing was irritating, and I'd always used some kind of Debian variant, so after cycling through all the X-buntus said hey, why not this Linux Mint I keep hearing about? Plus, Cinnamon looked decent in screenshots but turned out Gnome with a few tweaks ended up being much closer to my ideal than even heavily customized Cinnamon.
  - 7mo ago

queenkjuul 7mo ago

I'll never understand it but Fedora just doesn't work ootb on my Asus laptop or Asus desktop. Gnome 50 on Ubuntu 26.04 beta has served me okay in testing so far.

Blikkentrekker 7mo ago

It's really simple, then I have to use GNOME or KDE or any other thing that is on Wayland which I don't use. AwesomeWM, Xmonad, Fluxbox, OpenBox and many other interfaces just aren't on Wayland and have no intention to be because it just doesn't really do well what they want to and they don't feel like maintaining two versions. The real issue with Wayland and “setting back” isn't what the article says, but just that like 15 years was taken just to get Wayland on semi-decent feature-parity with X11 during which time development on X11 came to a standstill. That time could've been used to improve X11 and it's still not real feature parity. And part of it was just the devs refusing to believe that people needed those features. I talked with them around 2010-ish and about some of the things they cut out claiming that no one ever used them. These were things related to mouse acceleration that is pretty essential to video games and image editing, certain forms of screen capture, various things with fonts and color management that are essential to many professionals and they actually believed that no one used those things. Eventually they came around and added many of those things back in, in doing so basically making many of the initial security promises complete void again but so much time has been put in what isn't much of an improvement to justify the time spent on it.

simonask 7mo ago
You're lamenting the use of time by people, but you are not those people's boss. People work on what they want to work on. There is no rule that people who worked on Wayland (and I happen to think they did a great job) would have worked on Xorg instead, or that the original motivations for building Wayland are invalid.
- Blikkentrekker 7mo ago
  Well that's the issue with free software isn't it. In properitary software people work on what their boss tells them to work on which is decided by market research based on what people want. Others said in this thread that Wayland in many ways was more so trying to solve issues for developers than for users and that's true.
  - 7mo ago

dgan 7mo ago

I am on latest Fedora Gnome, and tab switching between windows randomly stucks. It's so annoying, i had to go back to X11, even if handles badly high dpi laptop; the alternative being to reboot randomoy in the middle of the work

WhoCaresAboutIt 7mo ago

It's pretty funny to see "copy/paste works" and "drag and drop works" presented like some kind of win. That's the absolute baseline for a desktop OS.. since at least Windows 3.x. Windows, bloated and ad-riddled as it is now, never had to be defended on the basis that basic GUI behavior still functioned. But this year surely will be the year of the Linux desktop!

stemlord 7mo ago
I have constant issues with drag and drop on my windows pc. It'll stop working and I have to reboot to get it back