I think this is a good move. Wayland has been stable for me for years. I hope it prompts companies like Slack to sort their apps out.
Yes, it'll push developers a little harder, but we will see tons of complaints in the beginning. This will take another ~2-3 years to be sorted out. While X11's codebase is known for its state, it's working well at this point.
I have experienced "very fun" problems with a "supported NVIDIA card with official drivers that support that card", while people said that they are using theirs without any problems for years.
Thankfully enough people have made it for Fedora to be convinced it's a good idea. Other distros will soon follow (as always) and X11 will wither. Finally.
X11 will not wither overnight. There are still things which are very dependent on X11. Remote connections comes to my mind, for example.
Lastly, not all distributions are followers. Debian (testing at least), installs Wayland by default, but not enables it. It's installed on my system for a couple of years now.
Thankfully I don't have to, I want shiny new software thanks.
> Remote connections comes to my mind, for example.
Nobody uses them any more.
That's a choice. I prefer uptime more, for example. I use boring technology to create fun things.
> Nobody uses them any more.
You should follow X2Go users' & OpenOnDemand mailing lists. They're very heavily used by some significant groups (e.g. scientists).
There is also a VNC server for fullscreen sessions (only supports wlroots compositors for now): https://github.com/any1/wayvnc
Lol, I almost spit my coffee all over the keyboard... That timeframe is wildly unrealistic.
It will take the best part of a decade from the time all major distros switch their defaults (i.e. RedHat, Debian, Ubuntu, SuSE) to get to a point that could be considered stable (i.e. where the average user won't encounter breakage as soon as they run an app that was not part of the default install). And even then, lots of debris will be left floating, because nobody is going to update some small app from 2005 or even old releases of QT and GTK.
The Linux desktop is currently going through its Vista moment, and it's going to go on for a very long time.
I don't know about RedHat, but Debian already ships Wayland in Testing. Maybe current stable also has in its default installation I need to check. Tons of people are using it on Ubuntu, too.
So while ironing out everything will take even more than that, I assume a full decade starting today, first 90% will take ~2-3 years. As we know, second 90% doesn't really finish. Even today, X11 can be broken in interesting ways.
OTOH, there'll be always some debris left. It's same for Windows and macOS, too. Only difference is, Windows ships its old versions as WoW subsystems or invisible diversions for more than two decades now.
People always see the applications they use, but there's another world where people update extremely old programs or develop shims to keep them working. Linux ecosystem is an elephant now. And since people can see and feel different parts of it, everybody tells something different about it. It's much more complex and layered than it seems.
Vista moment? Even KDE4.x was better than that thing with all its bugs. Hah.
FWIW I tried to switch to Wayland 3 times in the last year before finally making it stick. I had to change a ton of silly little things, like:
- grepping through my .config and /etc for any mention of xclip and switching to wl-copy (vimrc, tmux.conf to name two)
- enabling webtrc on browsers so that screen sharing works in web apps (MS Teams still refuses to work)
I don't know if there's a good source of migration tips that covers all of these things in one place so you can search for the things that affect you. But on a work machine, switching across can result in random minor disruptions over a week, some of them in the middle of meetings. And if you're having "one of those weeks" you need to switch back to what works.
Even now on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, a bleeding edge rolling distro with excellent wayland + kde plasma support, I still run into the odd issue that makes me wanna switch back. Disappearing cursor is one. It's totally random, but if I click on a text input box on a browser, I get no text cursor. WTH.
This is the kind of thing that makes it harder on people to switch
The lack of focus and backwards compatibility in the open source world is appaling. As much as I like to complain about systemd it is not surprising it came to replace 3 scripts in a long coat
Someone eventually has to break the stalemate, and Fedora is usually the distro making the switch first. Its users are used to stuff like this, and it serves as a nice heads-up for app developers to get to work because it'll land in RHEL within a year or two and you can't really claim Linux support if your app doesn't work on RHEL.
Making it completely disappear to a tray icon.
> 1 less v8 instance running
I doubt. With process isolation, I guess every tab runs its on V8. Otherwise, oh boy.
Btw, this isn't for slack but teams: I use the website because their Linux app blows, but I actually use a totally different browser (chromium) to my main browser (firefox) intentionally. Occasionally when teams takes 100% cpu and memory for no reason, I can 'pkill chromium' without nuking firefox. So the "one less engine" argument wouldn't convince me.
The good thing with the browser version is rolling updates are immediate, no need to upgrade a flatpak or rpm. And if they fuck up, rollback is also immediate.
Also this is about removing the gnome x11 session package from the default install. That doesn't mean you can't run X11.
Having said that I don't know who would want to keep using X11 AND choose Fedora as its goto distro. This is a distro whose purpose is to push forward these kind of stuff, there are a number of much more conservative distros available and one could argue that if you are conservative and want to stay in the RPM/RH family you can use RHEL or a derivative distro such as Almalinux or Rocky. That is what I use on the media center computer in my living room for other reasons[1]. Back in the day someone would complain about outdated package but nowadays with tools like flatpak, podman and the toolbox this is just not true anymore.
[1] I don't power it up so often. I don't want to have tons of packages to update every time I power it up to watch a show on streaming. All I want is to be able to upgrade the browser's flatpak.
What do Discord, Slack, and Nvidia all have in common?