So, is Wayland ready? I've been afraid to try it, but maybe it's time to take the plunge. How is gaming on Wayland? I'm afraid many games have been compiled for X.org.
I'm not that interested in digging into the details of why, but SMPlayer doesn't like Wayland on my system, and SMPlayer is the only video player that I can get to play videos from smb shares without a fuzz. So Xorg it is...
I try to switch every 6 months or so to see if things have improved but, so far the answer is no.
There's something in the error logs, I spent many hours trying to get it work a year ago but I just gave up and went back to SMPlayer on Xorg.
VLC also has issues with audio, apparently VLC doesn't play ball with PulseAudio or something like that, so I get massive audio dropout for quite a while when skipping/jumping in the video file. Yay. Something about clocks going back in time or something. IIRC there's a fix pending, so maybe in a year or two...
> [vo/gpu/wayland] GNOME's wayland compositor lacks support for the idle inhibit protocol. This means the screen can blank during playback.
Debian half-heartedly switched to systemd years after it was the only option in RHEL. RHEL switched to firewalld in 7. They dropped docker for podman. They wrote then adopted sssd and relamd. They dropped NIS. Went all in of SELinux and now it "just works."
Fortunately in the desktop space there's little reason to care what the big names are doing. There will likely always be a distro out there that does exactly what you want it to, it'll likely always be Gentoo, and there will probably be enough folks interested in the space to bring those solutions to binary distros as well.
It's been especially interesting to me to watch Alpine take over the mindshare that Slackware had back in the day. As long as there's enough people on un-"official" distros to file bug reports with software vendors, there's hope for the users.
Oh, strongly agree. It's a "whoever wins, we lose" sort of situation for sure. I think Red Hat's technical... taste, if you will, is consistently terrible, but Ubuntu's gross in its own way, though I feel that way more due to perceived company culture and the owner's statements, admittedly, than their results (though I do think their distro peaked quality-wise some time around '08).
> There will likely always be a distro out there that does exactly what you want it to, it'll likely always be Gentoo, and there will probably be enough folks interested in the space to bring those solutions to binary distros as well.
Hobbyists are kinda safe, to some degree, but the more incompatible choices RH successfully pushes, the more limitations and workarounds hobbyists not running a straight copy of Red Hat's preferred stack will run into.
They'll never be able to swing an EEE on any of their OSS projects because other distros couldn't adopt them and RHEL only is a death-knell.
Big if for sure, but if IBM continues letting them stay course while they fuck about with Openstack then we'll be better for it. Redhat is the standard for what good stewardship of OSS looks like from a company.
Slackware lost its way by trying to compete with Ubuntu when it was never it's niche.
Ever since they required Samba installed just to run SMPlayer, and then said the full install is what is expected in every case (When I always used Slackware with a minimal install), I was out.
Void seemed interesting as well but I ran into too many issues - Alpine has been smooth sailing so far.
But RHEL didn't even set a date for removing Xorg support so it will probably stick around for a long while.
Lets not even talk about trying to use Wayland in a VM desktop -- Even Firefox/Chrome don't render properly.
I'll try Wayland again this next semester, see if anything has changed.
For example, I still use pidgin for all my messaging (even with Slack and our own custom protocol). In xorg, I can set my pidgin buddy list as a Utility Window, make it sticky, below all windows by default, and skip the taskbar. This makes the buddy list not show up in my alt-tab or as a running application (doesn't show up in the gnome-shell overview). Then I have a simple script using wnck to raise/lower the window using a hotkey, which gives me really quick access to my buddy list and chats.
_Some_ of this is possible in wayland, but not everything.
I also haven't found a replacement for devilspie for wayland, which I use to set a bunch of default properties on various applications, like size, virtual desktop number, stickyness, and so on.
Both of these things are really essential to my daily flow and are going to be hard to give up.
Not even Debian has said they would remove it in a future release? I'm not sure what you mean here, Debian has a reputation for being glacial...
> So, is Wayland ready? I've been afraid to try it, but maybe it's time to take the plunge.
Yes, it's increasingly becoming the default on desktop distros, it's pretty good. Some apps still lack support for it I guess. I recently upgraded to a distro where it was enabled and didn't notice any difference except for a screen recording app didn't support recording with sound unless I switched to X.
> How is gaming on Wayland? I'm afraid many games have been compiled for X.org.
AFAIK such things just start under an Xwayland session transparently. Phoronix seems to do a lot of gaming tests of wayland, I don't really know the details but clearly something works for some games at least.
There's still a lack of certain protocols for things that were possible in X11. The one that's bugged me the most is one that would allow authorized applications to track which window is active so tools can swap around hotkeys and macros and stuff. That was super easy to do in X11 but Wayland doesn't yet have a way of doing this afaik.
So far the only positive thing I've noticed about Wayland is that it plays better with my pen tablet but that's also extremely frustrating because why is better pen support linked to the compositor/window manager in the first place. Everything else is either the same or worse.
[1] https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/6634039380877-Zoom...
[2] https://help.webex.com/en-us/article/9vstcdb/Webex-App-for-L...
Adventurous is adding things. Why remove things that work if some people are using them? Debian is less prescriptive than RHEL, and is widely used as the basis for a vast array of different targets. If there are still reasons for people to use Xorg, there are still reasons to have it in Debian, IMO. That doesn’t mean it will be installed and/or used by default.
RHEL is a specific type of target, particularly for things that need some sort of vendor certification, or for fleets who want to depend on RH for LTS and/or use their professional services, use it as part of a larger IBM contract, etc..
Debian on the other hand cares about keeping desktop users happy, so it makes sense to support both.
They respond to X bugs right now because right now X is still in versions of RHEL they support. When that is no longer true, do you really expect them to continue supporting X on other distros?
but if you ask for a bugfix on Xorg needing a large amount of time to spent on it probably not going to be worked on...
Not including xorg in RHEL doesn't prevent people from running xorg on rhel. The question is, why would you ? Red Hat is aiming at the server market and the cloud, not the desktop.
Always been the case. I don't know why people say the only purpose of RHEL is for enterprise support, or for meeting certifications and compliance. They innovate on the technology a lot, too.