Wayland heading for default as Mint devs add to Cinnamon 6 • The Register
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TLDR: XFCE and Cinnamon devs are begging beginning to work on Wayland support.
TLDR: XFCE and Cinnamon devs are begging beginning to work on Wayland support.
The "TLDR" is sub heading is completely misleading. Cinnamon devs see they have to move, that's the reason. "Begging to work" on Wayland is not at all what the article says. Before you downvote, read it. Nothing in that article or the link to one dev's blog says anything even remotely like that.
I suspect it's just an autocorrect typo for "beginning to work".
I like that... I'll take it. Thank you for putting it that way.
Beginning* yep sorry!
As a Debian XFCE user, I will gladly switch to Wayland when it is available.
Why not just install the Cinnamon desktop when it becomes wayland ready?
XFCE wants to be Wayland ready with XFCE 4.20, which should be released near the end of 2024. Cinnamon wants to have Wayland as default by 2026. So, in theory at least, XFCE should be Wayland-ready before Cinnamon.
Good. X11 has not been properly maintained and shouldn’t be the default for any distro. (Xorg, whatever.)
At least the Mint devs are being realistic on the time span needed for Wayland to have a chance at working for everyone, unlike Fedora, KDE, and Gnome that are jumping the gun.
Jumping the gun? It's been working mostly without issue for most people for years now.
just this month I had multiple wayland issues forcing me to switch to an x11 session
Since we're going with anecdotal evidence, I've been using Wayland daily for over a year and haven't had any issues related to it
Ok
Personally X11 is unusably buggy and janky. Just a clearly inferior experience.
While maybe sometimes buggy, at least things run. I'm all for modernization, but if there are compatibility problems with recent software, I'm not OK with it being declared "the better, mature standard thing everybody should now use".
If you ignore all the things where it doesn't.
Could say the same about X. To me X seems pretty broken and unstable.
If nobody does that, nobody will be using Wayland to report issues.
Wayland works pretty well, especially on GNOME. It's good they did the jump, X11 poses unacceptable security risks for the current time.
Cinnamon and XFCE are outliers in that they try to be super stable, "complete" desktops, compared to GNOME and KDE that try to be bleeding edge and packed with new and changing features.
Benefits to both, but I can respect why Cinnamon and XFCE have been slow to adopt Wayland (to a fault, many would argue)
I feel like talk about Wayland being the next big thing, “coming soon” began back when I was using Linux as my daily driver over ten years ago.
It’s still not widely used?
It’s the default in most big distros, so it is widely used.
the usual exception is nvidia, a lot of distros fall back to X on nvidia
Not sure if that'll stay much longer, either. I'm using using dual graphics with nVidia and Wayland on KDE works just fine. The only annoyance is that KDE doesn't have very good touchpad gestures by default, but you also can't modify them. Boo!
It's extremely widely used. It's been the Gnome default (unless you used Nvidia) since 2016 or something.
Even in Debian on Gnome it's been the default since 2019.
On KDE a bunch of distros use it too.
Wayland is the future. But for most it's already the present too.
Nvidia has been decent on Wayland from my experience. Then again my experience has just been 5 days, but it feels snappier than X11 I kinda like the feel.
Nvidia on Wayland is usable but not much more than that. There are issues with Xwayland windows flickering and some general instabilities and glitches. But it works for the most part, and the 545 drivers supposedly fix lots of missing features and bugs for Wayland.
Yeah xwayland does has a lot of issues, with fullscreen wine games for example all you see is constantly zooming background instead of the game. But the finger gestures and the overall smoothness makes it worth it for me, even tho I play my games in a window. Hopefully 545 fixes that.
It's a very slow moving project by design for better or for worse. There also hasn't been a ton of developer interest in the DE space in supporting it until the last few years since it would necessarily take resources away from other work, and generally X has been "good enough" until recently. I don't have anything to back this up but I suspect that the increased accessibility of gaming on Linux as well as HRR and HDR displays entering the mainstream had a lot to do with this renewed interest.
I've been using Wayland for about 8 years at this point. Some people (especially in the Linux world) are just really against change.
It's still got issues even now, but back then they were big enough that you had to really want to use it, casual users would have become quickly frustrated.
Also Steam.
"Coming soon" for me started when major DEs started abandoning xorg, not when they adopted wayland.
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Steamdeck's KDE desktop doesn't run Wayland, it's still X11. That being said, Valve has said they want to move to Wayland at some point.
Not sure about their gamescope mode. I know it's a custom compositor but beyond that I've got no idea what the underlying tech powers it.
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Ahhhh right, yeah not sure why they don't use wayland on desktop though. I can imagine they will in a year or so
Keep in mind their time line is like 2 years.
Oh so in about that time Wayland will finally be able to fulfill simple UX expectations like, say, global shortcuts?
Do you mean beginning?
OP: "did I fucking stutter?!"
Yup! my bad!
It could be begging if they're not the ones in control of the steering.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The creators of Linux Mint and the Cinnamon desktop are experimenting with the Wayland protocol – and so is the original developer of Xfce.
Normally, the project's experimental repository, codenamed "Romeo," is private, and code is only opened to the public once it reaches beta test stage.
Cinnamon 6.0, planned for Mint 21.3 this year, will feature experimental Wayland support, but he warns folks not to expect too much at this early stage:
It was the first release that defaulted to the then-new Unity desktop, and at the time, the Reg didn't rate it very highly.
As his new blog reveals, so is Red Hat developer Olivier Fourdan, who has been working on a rootful mode for XWayland.
What is possibly more interesting is that Monsieur Fourdan has a previous claim to fame: he is the original author of the Xfce desktop, which he started building way back in 1996, as he mentions in this 2009 interview.
The original article contains 484 words, the summary contains 157 words. Saved 68%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
How did Mint fuck up year-based version numbering? I did a fresh install on a laptop this year and briefly worried project had died.
It's not actually based on the year. There have been 21 other major releases at various intervals starting with 1.0 in 2006. It just happens to be close to the current year right now.
Wayland has been great on Debian stable after swapping to an AMD graphics card
I've had good experiences with Wayland on nVidia too. KDE has a rock solid Wayland implementation.
Is is possible to overclock Nvidia cards using Wayland or xwayland?
No idea on the overclocking front I'm afraid.