Wow, not even Debian has done this. What a world in which RHEL is more adventurous than Debian.
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.
On my system VLC just doesn't play the files from shares. No problem if I copy the files locally.
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...
RHEL has always been more adventurous than Debian. Debian is the pragmatic distro that meets users where they are.
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."
Red Hat is adventurous in rapidly adopting and evangelizing projects they control, or at least largely steer, in an effort to make themselves the de facto First Party Vendor for so much of Linux that it's hard to justify going with anyone else for commercial support. They've been openly sparring with Ubuntu over this for more than a decade—and Ubuntu's lost every single point. This is basically the story of the direction of the Linux ecosystem in the modern era.
It really is a shame that the community's last, best hope against a Red Hat monopoly is Ubuntu.
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.
> It really is a shame that the community's last, best hope against a Red Hat monopoly is Ubuntu.
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.
I'm not sure I get the fear.
Oh no Redhat is making so much high quality OSS that distros adopt makes Redhat commercial support better simply because you can get the engineer that wrote it on the phone? I mean that does happen but I'm not sure it's a bad thing.
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.
> It's been especially interesting to me to watch Alpine take over the mindshare that Slackware had back in the day.
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.
Fine for some, but for others there are still show-stoppers. I have a laptop with an Nvidia card and my latest attempt to use Wayland, on Fedora 38, didn't last very long at all before being forced to retreat to xorg by the issues.
This has been my every experience with Wayland + Nvidia thus far. Tried Tumbleweed and Fedora both, nothing but display bugs as far as the eye can see.
Lets not even talk about trying to use Wayland in a VM desktop -- Even Firefox/Chrome don't render properly.
Does your card have proper DRM support (the linux subsystem for managing video buffers)? That’s what wayland builds upon (instead of patching the xorg binary with some proprietary extension).
They have since started supporting the linux kernel and implemented its APIs more or less. I don’t own any nvidia card, so can’t really speak from first-hand experience though.
Yeah, hybrid laptops with Nvidia is still a no no. Currently I have setup: Arch (EndeavourOS) + KDE Plasma + Xorg, works with minor issues, with a Rog Zephyrus G15, with minor issues; it was/is enough to replace Windows entirely.
I'll try Wayland again this next semester, see if anything has changed.
Given the status of "certified drivers" in Wayland due to their closed-source nature, either RedHat is giving up their graphic workstation business, or removing xorg won't happen any release soon.
RHEL 9 will be supported for ~10 years, but RHEL is scheduled to come out in ~3 years. Fedora will probably still support it and I would bet some of the RHEL rebuilds will too.
I am positive on wayland, but am still missing some things I love with Xorg.
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.
> Wow, not even Debian has done this. What a world in which RHEL is more adventurous than Debian.
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.
Not all X features are going to be implemented in wayland, right? If a feature has security implication, chance that it won't be implemented in wayland. It took them years to get screen sharing working, and that with a significant proportion of wayland users begging for it on every release. Chance that other insecure but useful X features won't be implemented in wayland unless they can be implemented with security in mind AND the features somehow got prioritized for development (or some l33t programmers suddenly show up with a patch and got accepted).
Many “insecure” features are implemented on a per compositor-family basis in the meanwhile. Like every wlroots-based one has this protocol, things like that.
Depends on your use case, I've been using it for years now and am yet to run in to missing features. There are a few features x11 is missing like different dpi scales between monitors which Wayland does. Sandboxing with flatpak is another big one as well.
I'm a big Barrier user, which has no Wayland equivalent. I also frequently make use of X tunelling over SSH, which had no Wayland equivalent the last time I checked, although it has been a year or so since the last time I looked into it.
It definitely depends on your definition of "ready". Wayland is completely usable for most hardware configurations I've thrown at it, but ymmv. It's pretty much been indistinguishable from X11 for me.
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.
There's lots of little things I think. Like I have my trackball scroll by holding down middle click and moving the ball. Not too hard to do in X11, works in all window managers too. I have no idea how to do it Wayland, it seems like it's a different process for every compositor/DE. I think maybe I could do it in GNOME but then I'd have to use GNOME.
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.
That's how thinkpad trackpoint works, right? Hold the middle button and you can scroll horizontally and vertically using the trackpoint. It works on gnome/wayland, so maybe there is a way to configure generic trackball to behave like that too.
Just a guess but probably its due to libinput, which is used by default on Wayland. AFAIK it can also be set on X as the default for probably similarly good pen support, but I have never tried - I am more than fine with Wayland.
That isn't a Wayland-level feature, but individual compositors may support it. For example that can be done in sway with `swaymsg -t subscribe -m '["window"]' | ...`
No, `swaymsg` is specific to sway, not wlroots. It won't work with any other compositor (wlroots-based or not) unless that compositor also binds $SWAYSOCK and serves the i3-ipc protocol.
That's probably true for protocol-level things but still doesn't cover as much as you'd think. For example, with X (possibly just Xorg but at least everyone standardized on that) I could run `setxkbmap` to set keyboard layout. Now as far as I can tell, wlroots does have a proper way to control keyboard layout... but it's up to each and every compositor to hook it up. So naturally, when I went to try a cool new compositor I found, I discovered that it doesn't actually support that. In fact, I couldn't find a way to configure keyboard layout at all in that compositor (don't recall which, but it was wlroots-based). So I threw up my hands and went back to X11, where one command controls the keyboard on literally every window manager I have ever tried.
Screen sharing seems to be a difficult problem to resolve. Zoom only just resolved this recently[1], Webex has been promising a fix for a while[2], and Skype still hasn't done anything[3].
> Wow, not even Debian has done this. What a world in which RHEL is more adventurous than Debian.
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..
RHEL doesn't really care about supporting desktop users, so they're trimming fat. They don't need X and Wayland to nominally support workstation use, just one of those is enough to sell workstation support contracts to executives who won't even be using it themselves..
Debian on the other hand cares about keeping desktop users happy, so it makes sense to support both.
They care about fulfilling the workstation support contracts. But if they can reduce the scope of what it means to support workstation support contracts, it is in their interest to do so.
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?
Will they continue to do so, on company time, for packages that are no longer in any supported version of RHEL? I think they fix bugs that presently or will effect both Fedora and RHEL, or do more in their free time because they are themselves enthusiasts and not just corporate workers.
Dave Airlie the guy who maintains the AMD drivers works for Red Hat, on xorg and wayland and the KMS that both use.
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.
If that was the case, they'd be picking xorg and not wayland. You see, official certified drivers are closed-source, and they are buggy as hell in wayland. You seem to assume a workstation is a desktop computer with a gui.
It's been rock solid as long as you don't use nvidia cards. It's been great on my laptop, but on my desktop with an nvidia card installed there are always minor annoyances every update (fixed an issue but has another issue appear, etc), probably nvidia driver's fault.
> What a world in which RHEL is more adventurous than Debian.
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.
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.