- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- news
A set of merge requests were opened that would effectively drop X.Org (X11) session support for the GNOME desktop and once that code is removed making it a Wayland-only desktop environment.
Going along with Fedora 40 looking to disable the GNOME X11 session support (and also making KDE Plasma 6 Wayland-only for Fedora), upstream GNOME is evaluating the prospect of disabling and then removing their X11 session support.
Some concerns were raised already how this could impact downstream desktops like Budgie and Pantheon that haven’t yet fully transitioned over to Wayland. In any event we’ll see where the discussions lead but it’s sure looking like 2024 will be the year that GNOME goes Wayland-only.
What’s everyone’s Wayland showstopper?
I’m holding out for better autoclickers/macro recorders before I go to Wayland
Nvidia
Better Wine support. It’s coming soon, but I prefer xorg until Wine properly supports Wayland.
is XWayland not good enough for that?
I would say Xwayland is good ENOUGH, but it’s not great, my clipboard with xwayland is awful on sway, for example. It works, but not the best.
ah, on Gnome it’s relatively seamless
I recently stopped switching to x11 for gaming. With most games, the performance is 5-10fps better on Wayland
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Honestly, Wayland just doesn’t give the impression of working well enough with everything to replace my window manager and all kinds of utilities that grew around it (or X11 in general) for a decade or two just to only notice after using it for a few weeks that it won’t work with some things. It demands a huge time investment up front for questionable gain basically.
As a multimonitor user with mixed properties, and an AMD user, Wayland has been nothing but a massive gain for me and continues to get better in equally massive strides on KDE (been using kwin-wayland for almost a full year as a daily driver now). It even improved the user experience on my surface pro that I’m running the surface-linux kernel on.
I am not using a Desktop Environment and if switching to Wayland means I will have to give up tiling window managers for DEs I will never switch to Wayland.
https://hyprland.org/
The Arch wiki lists more options to choose from: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/wayland
https://swaywm.org/
Considering how many things Wayland apparently still lacks that need to be implemented in each compositor separately a last release in February sounds like a half-dead project.
Sway is based on wlroots and therefore does not need to implement the complete Wayland specification itself. Many other Wayland window managers are also based on wlroots and therefore share a common base (compositor).
Furthermore Sway’s git repo has activity up to a couple of days ago: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/commits/master
The project you’re looking for is called wlroots, everything will be based on it eventually, the only compositors that aren’t are gnome and kde and that’s because they made their compositors BEFORE wlroots existed.
Dude, why are you so annoying about this topic? sway is a very good tiling window manager that IIRC two years ago was able to do things X11 based window managers will never be able to (different VRR on multiple monitors) and its basically the reference manager for wlroots, a library implementing the Wayland functionality. I’ve been using Wayland exclusively since about 2021 and I can say all my stuff now works better than under X11. Does it mean everything under the sun works better or is possible? Probably not, but at the same time, the people putting in the work have decided that the old concept was no longer maintainable for them and no one else is willing to pick it up.
Because Wayland proponents have been at it for over a decade now pointing at their broken mess saying “look, everything works” and yet somehow the longer these posts stick around the more comments accumulate about things that do not work, and not minor edge cases either but major features like screen recording, games, one of two major graphics cards vendors, remote desktop, significant applications not working,… I am sick and tired of this broken project pretending it is ready to replace X11 over and over and over again.
If they had acknowledged that it was 20% done, 40% done, 60% done (that is maybe where it is now) it would be different but Wayland developers seem to live in their own bubble where “works on my machine sometimes, with half of all applications” is considered done.
Today I can install any game, any application on Linux and know it works with X11, no ifs, no “only on that vendor”, no “only on the latest unreleased bleeding edge version”. Why should I give that up for years of Wayland pain just to get back to where I started minus the things Wayland will never implement like network transparency.
Sure thing. I use Wayland exclusively and have been able to play and stream games no problem. Screen capture, window capture, both work. So I don’t know where these comments are coming from nowadays.
Let me just take this opportunity to say Nvidia can get fucked, I can’t wait for the entertainment Linux 6.6 will bring.
Yeah. On the other hand, providing the desktop functionality over network is kind of an edge case: it makes sense to me to keep it out of the core protocol, otherwise even systems that don’t even have network access would need to include it if they implement the Wayland protocol. Nobody is stopping anyone to develop a protocol for secure remote input.
If your significant application includes e.g. Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop, X11 won’t help you either.
I don’t have a single case here where something works on X11, but not on Wayland. Except for my old Nvidia Optimus card, but that’s so old it doesn’t even work properly under Xorg anymore it feels like. But since I don’t game on it anymore it doesn’t matter, chip is 10 years old at this point and I just don’t buy Nvidia anymore.
You’re most likely not using X11 network transparency anyways. At first approximation, no one is. What most people rather do is forward X over SSH. For Wayland, waypipe exists and covers the same use case.
Remind me in 2 years /s
The time-investment is short-term pain, long-term profit. That’s kinda our thing as Linux guys
But where it the long-term profit? Every time Wayland comes up in the last 15 or so years since it was first mentioned somewhere it is an endless list of comments about things that don’t work and “will work soon” ™. Meanwhile in all that time there hasn’t been a single exploit for the security issues Wayland claims to fix. X11 has worked just fine for all this time.
I am not opposed to replacing things in general (e.g. I do like systemd and never want init scripts back) but Wayland just seems like a bad design with bad goals and bad implementations.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/XOrg-Vulnerabilities-Since-1988
That talks about typical implementation vulnerabilities. I am talking about the kind of vulnerabilities the Wayland design supposedly protects us from by design.
You do realize you’re comparing wayland to a protocol that doesn’t even make an attempt at stopping keylogging, screengrabbing, or really implements any form of security whatsoever, right? I could make a list but it’d be effort, you should really research this stuff before you spread FUD on accident.
I’m just going to point out that there’s a reason EVERY SINGLE PERSON who worked on X11 has moved onto wayland. Imagine how hard of a sell it’d be for most people to move on from a project that has THIRTY YEARS of work, to redoing everything from scratch, how many people in any other situation would ALL choose rewriting from scratch.
They learned from their mistakes, and that’s why they restarted from scratch.
I have to research more thoroughly what the promised advantages of Wayland are, but from what I’ve heard is that the capability system is much more secure and the architecture is more decentralized, not a single server which takes everything down with it when it breaks.
Anyways, Wayland has a LOT more growth behind it. X is in the process of being deprecated. So I’m pretty sure Wayland must be better in some general way, otherwise it couldn’t have gotten this momentum.
Mine’s mostly just bad electron app support for native Wayland. In theory Electron now offers full Wayland support but hooooo boy is it going to be a while until all of the electron garbage I use finally updates to a new enough version for proper support.
The other gotcha is just general client side decorations support for apps in general. I’m shocked that no one has built a small libadwaita wrapper library that implements client side decorations for apps. It’s going to be ages until app developers all implement their own (crummy) CSD that doesn’t match system themes at all.
You can still use XWayland though, it’s not going anywhere. They are only removing the ability to run a X11-only session.
Yeah, fair - they’re not so much showstoppers as persistent irritations.
There’s this
I play Heroes of the Storm through Lutris.
I have a superultrawide 32:9 monitor.
In X11, I can get HotS to scale past its normal limits just like I could in windows and take up a full 5120x1440 resolution.
In Wayland, I can’t.
I will die on this hill.
thy gamescope(that run on steam deck) i think it can scale, if yes, so it’s an implementation issue, that need to be fixed by the compositor
It is a Wayland issue that things like this need to be fixed per compositor. Honestly, what were the designers thinking?
the compositor need to implement the option to change resolution, how could wayland(the protocol) dictate it?, it don’t have a feasible way to do it, what could help is less fragmentation, like using wlroot, but again wayland(protocol) don’t habe a way to dictate it
If they had kept the window manager concept, separating mechanism and policy they would have only needed one implementation for all the mechanisms.
yes, they could have made the implementation from the start, and that is a valid criticism to wayland(i also agree), but we have wlroots now, and they are working very close with KDE(in one of the devs blog they even said about KDE being ported to wlroots in the future), except for gnome, every DE are working together
there is a base implementation basically all compositors are based on
Why should it not be fixed by the compositor, exactly?
As far as I see it, that’s a smart design choice, the issue is just that we needed a universal implementation, an x.org equivalent, and we now have that with wlroots, now that that exists, there’s no downsides to that approach, as far as i’m aware.
In what way exactly does that make it a smart design choice. It sounds like compositor implementers essentially have to work around the bad design choice by including a library and even then each compositor will have to update the dependency version for wlroots each time something needs to be fixed that breaks the wlroots ABI (or for containers, static linking,… just each time).
No, it sounds like compositors will use a library so that they don’t have to do a shitload of work that they’d have to do otherwise.
…this is already how x.org works. You have to implement the x.org server, or create your own implementation of X11.
The only reason you think your criticism doesn’t apply to X.org is because nobody updates X.org anymore… There’s no more breaking changes to be made because it’s a fundamentally broken, shitty protocol.
Color management
This is probably the blocker for me, too. There are some other things but this one just feels amateur.
Autotype for password managers. I don’t only have passwords which I use in my browser for which the plugin is fine. But other apps require autotype. And copy & paste can’t be the solution for this missing feature.
For me personally, none. Until around 2 years ago, it was Nvidia, for Kwin usage on desktop, but before that, I was happily using Wayland sessions and WMs on my laptops for some years
Wayland is my daily driver. The only thing that annoys me is that screen-sharing on Signal Desktop doesn’t work. But that is rather the fault of Signal, making the stupid decision of supporting a deprecated Ubuntu version instead of supporting Wayland fully
I use my laptop for work presentations and running a presentation with embedded videos doesn’t work on external displays.
I found no Remote Desktop solution to be working well together with wayland. (I’m not quite sure, if wayland was the cause of the issues I had with RDP and VNC, have to test that). The proprietary Remote Desktop all show a warning that wayland is not supported. While TeamViewer does kinda work, despite the warning, it is not a very sable connection.
ironically this is what x11 was originally built for.
I’ve tried this out, and its promising (KDE Plasma RDP Server). https://planet.kde.org/arjen-hiemstra-2023-08-08-remote-desktop-using-the-rdp-protocol-for-plasma-wayland/
Nice 😃 i currently am a GNOME user (love the animations) but if GNOME on Xorg is no option anymore and GNOME on Wayland still does not work for me, I may have to switch to Plasma on Wayland and use this Thank you very much😇
I don’t know if this would work for whatever your remote desktop needs are specifically, but I use Sunshine and it works really well.
I have a older iMac running openSuse tumbleweed GNOME and would like to be able waking it up using my iPad an start a remote season in my iPad from my couch/kitchen, so I can watch my child while do some fun linux stuff (I’m relatively new in the scene) First problem is the waking up part: I had to forcefully disable susbend because the screen was always very glitchy upon wake up (open source readon driver). I used this command for that: sudo systemctl mask suspend.target So I have to wake the iMac from off state or find another sleep mode or fix hibernate to solve the issue. I plan to research if there is way to use wakeOnLan for that.
Second problem was the screen remote on wayland which right now resulted in me using teamviewer on GNOME on Xorg. I don’t really like this setup and I’m looking for FOSS alternatives which preferably work on wayland and idealy would allow to ise multytouch gestures.
Probably never gonna happen, given how Wayland is designed.
It’s never going to happen on Wayland level. It’s absolutely no problem to implement this on a compositor level.
or even lower level, they don’t want people running keyloggers without admin permissions
Actually libEI allows for exactly this. It’s very new so not widely supported yet but it’ll definitely get there eventually.
SteamVR doesn’t work on GNOME Wayland because it’s missing DRM (the thing that’s needed to use the display of the VR headset)
Virtual keyboard support
idk what desktop you’re using but GNOME has that built in and it works on Wayland
here’s a few: https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/Phosh/squeekboard
https://maliit.github.io/
https://github.com/proycon/svkbd
i tried rhis autoclicker https://github.com/konkitoman/autoclicker and worked flawless(just needed ticker the suders file because cargo install on .local/bin), but if someone could suggest a macro recorder i appreciate!
For whatever reason it can’t seem to suspend my thinkpad. Everything crashes and when I open the lid I have to log in again :/
Is that a Wayland issue? Lots of modern laptops have suspend issues (broken S0ix sleep, missing S3, bios declaring wrong states, etc)
I can only assume it’s wayland causing the crash. When I run gnome45 in x11, it suspends and resumes normally, but when I run in wayland upon resume everything is gone, regardless of what was running. I’ve combed through dmesg to find out what’s happening but it hasn’t been too fruitful so far.
What hardware is your Thinkpad? Is it amd?
The name
What are you, a rival DCL school alumnus? I mean, not Weston obviously, cause that’s a thing. It’s a better name for a display server than Lincoln-Sudbury or Cambridge Ridge and Latin
Or are you just traumatized by the 128/Pike interchange traffic?