Wayland has a bright future ahead: The move from Xorg to Wayland had a rough start, but things have improved, and there is an exciting roadmap for the future.
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SystemD is really bloated tho
I'm not saying we should all be using runit, but with systemD making more and more services only work through their init system just creates more vendor lock in
Like, who needs a cronjob alternative that only works if you use SystemD, limiting your software to people using it and locking out everyone needing a less bloated init system like runit? And who needs a systemD calendar?
Systemd won't be done until they port libre office to it dammit!
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I'm not sure if this is what you mean, but I do want to clarify - the drivers in the repository are still proprietary drivers from Nvidia, just tested and packaged by the distribution maintainers, dkms is just some magic that lets them work with arbitrary kernels with minimal compilation. Unless you're using nouveau, which I don't think is ready for most uses.
I understand that. What I meant was I was not happy with having to go out of my way to download other drivers. My apologies - I realized my previous comment was not very clear. Also, thank you for the dkms explanation.
I've been in linux for a short while already, but this is the first time I've used debian with an nvidia gpu. It's...a bit different from what I've experienced with arch on my laptops.
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You know Wayland will be ready when these threads don't get 100 comments
Wayland is already ready and majority of linux desktop users are using it without issue.
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Is fractional scaling functional?
It has been since like 2022 at least for me. I was on X11 and it looked blurry as hell. Same thing on wayland. One day, out of the blue a KDE update dropped and boom everything was crisp and clear. I thank the lords of wayland everyday
. Since then, it has only gotten better -
It has been since like 2022 at least for me. I was on X11 and it looked blurry as hell. Same thing on wayland. One day, out of the blue a KDE update dropped and boom everything was crisp and clear. I thank the lords of wayland everyday
. Since then, it has only gotten betterAwesome. I tried Wayland a year or two ago but it broke QT stuff back then so it was a no-go. I should really give it another try soon.
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Awesome. I tried Wayland a year or two ago but it broke QT stuff back then so it was a no-go. I should really give it another try soon.
For me X11 just flat out doesn't work, fucks up the icons and scaling. Unusable.
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For me X11 just flat out doesn't work, fucks up the icons and scaling. Unusable.
Xorg scaling has always been horrible. But Wayland broke stuff like OpenCV window showing in the past with QT.
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Using the latest Ubuntu lts is company policy if you want to use Linux. All support for x11 is removed from gnome, you can't even change x11 anymore. I switch workspaces all the time, like web browser in one, dev env and terminal, so constantly switching, 50% of the time it will miss the key up event from your keyboard and it's registering that you are holding the key down.
Gnome randomly crashes, for instance sometimes clicking on a link that someone sent you, just randomly crashes gnomes, happened yesterday. So all the processes you started via gnome is gone, you need to reopen all your tools again, happens at least 6 times a week.
Sometimes gdm doesn't work, so you can't login, you have to open another tty and reset gdm in the other session. It's so bad, never had these issues before in x11, sure there were bugs, but not annoying bugs.
Driver issues or not, it's annoying as fuck. Gnome developers (redhat or whoever sells support for gnome) implementing the display server, gg.
I'm sorry to hear that.
I've been using GNOME+Wayland on a few distros, including Fedora, OpenSUSE, and Arch, on at least 3 different computers, and I also use workspaces and keyboard shortcuts extensively: I've never encountered such problems.
I remember warching a video on YouTube, by The Linux Experiment, where he criticized the GNOME experience on tablets, just to discover later that it was an Ubuntu issue, and that other distros would work well: maybe this is the case, too?
Or maybe your computer has one of those older NVIDIA GPUs, which are infamous for working bad in Wayland due to driver issues. -
Like what? (Curious)
Here is some of them (they are all intermitent) :
- Wrong sensitivity with the mouse
- wrong tiling of my windows with multiple screens, (like I do a full screen and the window will disapear or occuoy half of the bottom of the screen for example.
- black screen after coming out of sleep
- some gtk applicatipn have randow widgets not working (but some do in the same window/frame...)
- sometimes when I try to share my screen with a native wayland app it just goes to black (and sharing with an X app I have to select two times what I want to share on top of in the app)
- sometimes sub menus are just misplaced
- some of my appimages gets broken with wayland
- some x apps are blurry
I forget a lot, but it's a lot of minor issues that piles up and gets frustrating
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Fair enough, I haven't worked in an industry with requirements like that. Can you share an example of software you would use for a setup like that? I'm interested in learning more about it. I wonder how many companies are currently using a solution like that with Linux.
Wayland itself isn't doing anything to prevent those solutions from working, but nobody has chosen to create a solution like that supporting Wayland. If the companies working on and funding Wayland need a solution like that, then they can make or fund it.
Right now, Wayland is good enough to be used on employee workstations for most peoples day to day work, because most people dont work at a company using a solution like you described.
After 15 years, Wayland is lacking some things X11 has, but has also far surpassed it in many ways. Linux is now usable on HiDPI and has proper color management. Companies like Redhat aren't picking features at random, they're prioritizing what their biggest customers need, because thats what makes money. Again, just to reiterate, Wayland supports the usecases you've described, but companies haven't made software for this usecases that works with Wayland.
Wayland may not be a better replacement for you, but is sure is for a ton of users and organizations.
The thing is - wayland does kind of prevent it by forcing the GPU into the rendering pipeline far harder than Xorg. The GPU-assumptions throughout the code base(s) makes latency shoot through the roof when running software rendered. If you want decent latency, you need a GPU, and if you want to run multiuser you are going to pay Nvidia a shitton of money.
I can also imagine it’s hard (impossible?) to do performant damage tracking in a VNC server without implementing at least parts of the VNC server inside the compositor. This means that the compositor and VNC server gets tightly coupled by necessity. Choice will be limited. Would you like the bad DE with the good VNC server or the good DE with the bad VNC server? Bad damage tracking means shit latency and high bandwidth usage, or other tradeoffs. So even if someone managed to implement what I want on Wayland, it would most likely be limited to a single compositor and not a general solution allowing a free choice of compositor.
Best software suite I know of for it is Cendio Thinlinc, on top of TigerVNC. Free for up to 5 users. There are some others in the same niche. My recommendation would be to try Thinlinc on Rocky 9 or Ubuntu 24, and configure it to use XFCE. Mate, KDE, or Cinnamon, all work fine. Turn off compositing! Over a good WAN-link it feels mostly local unless playing fullscreen videos. On a LAN-link, the only thing giving it away is extra tearing and compression artifacts when playing youtube-videos fullscreen. Compared to many others solutions I have tried, the latency and ”immersion” is incredible.
As for me, I’ll try to never manage linux desktop fleets or remote desktops again.
