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Comment by lvh | Hacker News Reader

It looks like Wayland is only the default in testing, not yet in jessie. From where I'm sitting, that's mostly a good thing; thanks to Wayland, the default installation for debian-testing just flaps trying to show the GUI when installed in Virtualbox.

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Making a major change like that in a stable point release would be unusual for Debian. Since Debian 8 (jessie) shipped with X as default, the 8.x point releases do the same. If that switch happens, it'll be with the release of Debian 9 (stretch).

does wayland even work on non-intel gpu's?

It does, but not as you would expect. Last time I tried with an ATI, I had random freezes. But it was a year ago. There were lots of improvements since then.

well, last week i tried with an nvdidia gpu on my workstation and it didn't boot at all.

I'm using Wayland on Arch with and AMD card. It seems pretty stable. Most issues I run into are XWayland issues when trying to run X11 applications.

Mesa was the only for a while. (You need libgbm and a DRM+KMS driver to make a compositor and/or EGL_WL_bind_wayland_display for an embedded one). So that only worked with Intel and AMD GPUs. Nvidia now has EGLDevice and EGLStream for their drivers, and they provided patches for Weston and GNOME has added support as well.

does this mean that every compositor has to add gpu support on its own? a gpu that works in gnome would not neccesserily work in sway or orbment?

In the case of NVIDIA, yes. Their GPUs need compositor support and the GNOME people ended up giving in and merging their patches.

facepalm...

Switch from X to Wayland won't happen in a Debian point release. So far I haven't heard anything about Debian's Wayland switch although a test Live CD ISO has been made available back in October 2016 -> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=RBOS-Octo...

Right now, the only Linux distribution ships Wayland display manager by default is Fedora 25 (I am running it on an old Latitude D630 with NVIDIA GPU -> KDE Plasma 5 ;-).

This is Debian. They don't just change the display system in a point release.

Since a package has to be at least 3 years out of date to be included in debian stable, and wayland is only 4 years old, it will take another 10 years. And it is probably a good thing, i tried switching to wayland but it didnt make much sense. The only tiling compositor that worked for me was sway, but every other app i tried to use worked thru xwayland. no native firefox, no redshift. it did fix tearing in video playback though.

Maybe if i used gnome it would have made more sense.

Most desktop users are better off with unstable.

I'd say testing is a better choice for desktop users, and pinning some unstable packages only if necessary.

Fair comment!

Please be aware that security fixes for Debian testing may lag behind [1].

[1] https://www.debian.org/security/faq.en.html#testing

Some desktop users prefer stable despite its older package set. I use backports on stable for a few things.

HNers will probably prefer Sid as the packages will be newer. debootstrap springs to mind for newer programming language versions &c (I have never used a debootstrap install for that purpose however).

Wayland usage would depend on your DE. For example in KDE, pointer containtment was added only in Plasma 5.9.x, which makes Wayland unusable for games. And 5.9.x didn't make into Debian before the freeze because it's still in beta. I.e. Stretch will most likely come out with 5.8.x and Wayland there won't be really ready.

Am glad. There are a subset of desktop users who will happily forsake following the latest s/w versions for rock solid stability, which Debian stable comes closer to than most other distros. At the end of the day, when you use your system as a tool to get (non-s/w dev related) work done, you want stability, and only the latest versions of a very few select packages. I DON'T want the latest kernel or libs because once I install a distro I stick to it for 2-4 years and by that time I upgrade lock, stock and barrel to new hardware. In the meantime I want those 2-4 years to be as crash-free as possible.

Keep up the good work Debain!

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