Fedora Workstation 41 to No Longer Install Gnome X.org Session by Default
phoronix.com
phoronix.com
The biggest issue a few years ago was screen sharing not working in video metting apps like Teams. But I can't even remember when that was anymore.
So the team has really done well from my perspective.
The software is pretty bad overall, like very slow and clumsy UX, but it's not any better on Windows…
I just wish there was a better way to switch the Bluetooth codec. It's annoying I have to manually change it before a call.
Of course it's still atrocious when it comes to copying content in chat messages but I think that's on all platforms.
VSCode needed some custom launch parameters with the insiders version:
code-insiders --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --enable-features=WaylandWindowDecorations --ozone-platform=wayland --disable-features=WaylandFractionalScaleV1
SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland __GL_SYNC_TO_VBLANK=yes ~/Games/factorio/bin/x64/factorio
I looked up why this was and it turned out that there was a proposal for picture-in-picture (https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m...) that had been stuck at an impasse for years. The Gnome developers want to make the picture-in-picture windows have controls rendered by the compositor and make them unable to receive input (I find this somewhat ironic given Gnome's reluctance to have the compositor draw server-side window decorations), while the KDE developers want to make them able to receive input and draw their own controls.
I feel like this is my problem with Wayland in a nutshell. It requires every single interaction a user can have with an application to be hashed out through a years-long bureaucratic process.
I’d prefer non-smooth scrolling any day over a computer screen that doesn’t come back after sleep.
Given all of the known issues with "modern sleep" in modern laptops, I'd hesitate to blame this on Wayland. Sounds more like a driver problem.
When PulseAudio took over, a lot of "PulseAudio problems" were actually bugs in audio drivers that had previously been papered over but were now exposed. Not to say that PulseAudio was perfect in those days, but it got a lot of blame for things that weren't their fault. Wayland seems to be in a similar position sometimes. I get that people don't care all that much about the distinctions if "Xorg" works for them and "Wayland" is broken, but they do still exist.
Replaced it with a new one and it now works fine.
I was about to post "then why does sleep work fine for X11" but I think I recently had issues with it as well. There was a piece of time though where sleep worked fine on X11 and not on wayland for the same device.
It could be the nvidia driver at fault once again though, I'll have to retest things and see if both work with Nouveau.
Also Wayland is fixing it, but FPS games are buggier and have much higher frametime latency by default. After disabling compositor, the frametime latency is only slightly higher but I get weird frame glitches/flickering.
Everything else Wayland works great for and in the case of waydroid gives extra features, but having everything work and be stable is a lot of stress off my plate.
I don't use sleep or hibernate, not even on work Windows laptops, there's always some ensuing flakiness that occurs. My machines are either running or shutdown.
It's pretty nice being about to strike a key and have my desktop on instantly.
Last week a secondary hard drive from a headless machine of mine croaked. Guess what, the whole machine refused to boot and be accessible by ssh in spite of the boot/OS disk being a-ok. I had to plug in a monitor and keyboard for no good reason.
You're probably going to blame Ubuntu, I guess...
I waited for 15 minutes... twice... it was a pain to drag a monitor close enough.
There's a bunch of settings that need tweaking and that aren't on by default. It's very annoying.
Here's the document to resolve them.
https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/460.67/READ...
The settings control how the card interacts with the sleep signal. The default behavior for Nvidia is to do nothing which results in memory corruption when the computer wakes up again.
If you never put your computer to sleep, it'll never get that sleep signal so there's no real issue.
I'm not sure if I trust hibernation though, I've not tried it. Sleep has been just fine and doesn't eat too much power (like 5 watts for my desktop)
I have a laptop with a nvidia card and nothing works. From the installers crashing, windows freezing, full desktop freezes, awful performance, awful battery life under Wayland, every glitch under the sun from minor lines appearing on the screen to potentially physically damaging glitches like rapid flickering, and every other issue you could possibly imagine: it happened.
I mean it happened in like the week total combined that I was testing GNOME/KDE. Probably if I spent any more time on it my computer would explode?
Meanwhile X11 with i3 just fucking rocks. Smooth and stable like nothing else.
My only issue is, ironically enough, also with multi-monitor setups, where the layout and main monitor selection seems unstable and sometimes changes when waking up from sleep. I've been following KDE's development (through Nate's incredible blog[0]) and I'm pretty sure these problems have been fixed with the new 6.0 release.
But yeah, you seem to be particularly affected by bugs, sorry for the experience. What Nvidia card do you have? And driver versions?
Consider that it may not be appropriate to require it ever. Rather than just implementing the window manager protocol, as X does, Wayland requires its compositors to implement a huge amount of functionality. It is going to reduce the ability for small window manager to innovate, and make the Linux desktop less interesting.
Maybe at some point there will be a decent way for non-C, independent window managers to coexist with Wayland. But I don’t believe we’re there yet. It’s just not ready.
For independent, smaller compositors the Sway team has developed wlroots, a library that brings most of the requirements of a compositor: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots/
Yet. Defaulting to it is one step on the path towards removing support for X and independent window managers forever.
I deeply, deeply care about running an independent window manager. A minimal X window manager is a page of code: https://github.com/mackstann/tinywm/blob/master/tinywm.c (yes, plus xlib); a minimal Wayland compositor is tens of thousands of lines of code.
> contrary to your statements, it's perfectly ready for prime time
These comments are full of folks mentioning issues. Wayland does not support my window manager; thus it is demonstrably not ready for prime time for me.
> Wayland is the way forward
It may actually be. I’m not as opposed to Wayland as I may sound! But do you understand how you and other Wayland advocates sound — like advocates? ‘Wayland is the way forward’; ‘there's no future for Xorg’; these things are arguably true, but they are also rather cruel to say (a bit like ‘inevitably you and everyone will die’: it really is true, but it’s also not at all a nice thing to say).
I do think that Wayland or something very like it may be the way forward, but it needs to be an evolution, not a revolution. I know that the party line is that that’s not possible, but I suspect that rather than not possible it is just very hard. It’s always easier to greenfield, and it is always hell to be 100% backwards compatible.
But that’s what it needs to be.
The Xorg maintainers have been abundantly clear about this transition for longer than most on this board have been writing code.
Virtually every single program that doesn't work on Wayland is a result of the collective laziness of the userbase for a decade, deciding to fallback to X11 rather than fix problems or be a forcing function to pressure companies to fix software.
You're not entitled to the free labor of open source project maintainers. I don't understand why this is so difficult for some people to grasp.
When speaking of Fedora Workstation or Fedora as a whole, then GNOME is the implied desktop environment.
Any other desktop environment is delivered via what they call "spin". I guess since you are using the Cinnamon spin, you probably already knew that, though. :)
Most of the others are just buggy, e.g. it "works" in Chrome but the window selector always shows the file browser icon at like 10x size so I can't select a window.
This is on RHEL 8, so maybe they've fixed things in the mean time.
As a side-note, I've recently discovered a really cool project[0] that enables incredibly fast screen capture for OpenGL and Vulkan applications, mostly tailored to games. Tried it with a bunch of stuff and it works much better than both X's and Pipewire's screen grabbing. I can actually capture videos at my monitor's native refresh rate (144Hz).