Tell HN: Gnome on Wayland Is Amazing
I've been using MATE+Compiz on Archlinux since 2015 because I was used to it and it had a lot of GUI features that I didn't find elsewhere. At around the same time, I did give Gnome 3 a spin and found a lot of clunky behavior and bugs. Fast forward to yesterday when I was considering buying a new laptop to replace my ThinkPad x250 which is starting to show its age, I thought I give Gnome on Wayland another try.
OMG! It is nothing like I remember it. To put it succinctly, it's MacOS interface for linux. It's smooth, performant, beautiful and functional. I can do everything I used to have on Compiz, here on Gnome and it's built-in. I haven't actually needed any Gnome Extensions so far.
Well done Wayland, Gnome, GTK and every other project involved in making what's essentially the best Linux Desktop experience I've ever had.
As for getting a new laptop, that idea went out the window fast. My machine feels like new and I can attest to a significant performance boost of GUI apps as the result of switching to Gnome.
430 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 74.6 ms ] threadThe person said GNOME is like Mac OS. They didn't say their laptop is like a Mac.
> software
Insomuch that GNOME is not Mac OS, and Mac OS is not GNOME, yes that's true.
> user experience
Is a personal preference. There are a lot of completely asinine choices on both GNOME and Mac OS, and it usually comes down to what you are used to and what you are willing to tolerate.
> design
see above.
> ecosystem
this is definitely a huge thing. I personally prefer to stay without any ecosystem because I consider it putting all my eggs in one large basket, but the convenience is undeniable.
One of the nice things about Linux is, I can choose Gnome and you can choose whatever it is that you like. There’s plenty of room for diversity of opinion.
Not a JS developer. Run a beast of a machine. Use Ubuntu & Gnome.
Very well only for the apps that cooperate well, e.g. GTK-based apps.
Non-native apps (eg IntelliJ Idea) on my Ubuntu desktop were blurry when I used any kind of scaling - not just fractional scaling but any scaling != 100%. Reducing the display resolution by 2x resulted in much crispier rendering than full resolution with 2x scaling for those apps.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19052960
https://imgur.com/a/w4PAipI
Also includes night mode out of the box.
My bug in particular seems to be related with thunderbolt or USB c connected monitors. A disconnect will prompt a segfault.
I'd like to contribute with a proper bug report and I probably would if I hadn't had everything working with gnome+X. But now I just can't motivate spending time on it over other things in my life. Hope they have telemetry for segfaults at least.
Pipewire support is there for a long time now.
Considering the age of Wayland it's not that long. Besides that, Pipewire is not part of the Wayland protocol. This means external protocols now have to jump in fixing the deficiencies of Wayland.
Good point. This is the only issue keeping me from using Wayland, because OBS just won't work with it yet.
To be honest, I could have survived the segfault thing if I could predict when they would occur. But coupled with the fact that my laptop draws >100W at peak and that my monitors only supply ~70W or so over thunderbolt, my laptop disconnects the peripherals attached over thunderbolt on power peaks. When this happens, Gnome segfaults and I lose whatever I was doing outside of tmux :)
X stays out of my way and allows me to get work done.
Much like... everything in any OS, its really hardware-dependant
Fixed that for you.
Furthermore, even some commercial "designed for Linux" laptops like the Dell XPS Developer Edition have critical features missing like suspend/sleep, both of which work better on unofficially supported machines like Thinkpads. You're welcome to support whichever hardware vendors you choose, but you absolutely can't pretend like all hardware works "fine" on Linux to the same degree it would on MacOS or Windows.
Linux tries to support "all" hardware, but you should not expect that it's possible to actually do it perfectly.
> commercial "designed for Linux" laptops like the Dell XPS Developer Edition have critical features missing like suspend/sleep
So you should stop trusting Dell with their hardware. Why do you blame the Linux community for not supporting proprietary hardware without documentation flawlessly?
> pretend like all hardware works "fine" on Linux
I never said that all hardware worked fine on Linux. There is no OS with which all hardware works fine, and can't be. I'm just suggesting to rely on actually supported hardware, which is rare but pretty much possible to find. See also: System76.
The experience left me feeling that any misbehaving app/driver can break the desktop. And since you can't restart the window manager without losing your session, you'll lose a bunch of time every time something goes wrong.
btw I should say I was seriously impressed by the UI in general and how smooth everything felt, but stability is ultimately more important for me.
I think I've had maybe two instances where I had to do a hard reboot in those years and those both involved me doing something a tad aggressive with multiple containers on my system, which is an ultrabook and really isn't speced to handle a lot of them.
For instance, I have bound keyboard shortcuts to manage windows via `wmctrl`. It's absolutely crucial to my workflow, since I use an ultrawide monitor. wmctrl is mostly impossible with Wayland, and which required me to revert back to X11. Certain apps also sometimes do not work in X11 (e.g. Ubuntu's Software Center, for reasons lost to me), which then forces me to use Wayland.
I've noted a couple of other grievances, so I do not agree that Wayland is absolutely a good thing for now (at least for me).
(Through yes some X11-specific programs did got wayland support.)
But all(? at least most) of it's functionality is still supported at least on sway.
This thread is about gnome and wayland. Sway implements a bunch of extra stuff because wayland itself is unusable. See https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots
And I'm pretty sure there are ways to do so too on Gnome (but idk.).
Sure what is missing is a standardized interface to do so.
But that could still be added as another Wayland protocol, or through desktop-portal or similar.
Just people need to care enough to add such an protocol.
https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/ek3cyc/cinnamon_s...
The first two minutes of this were done automatically in Cinnamon using a couple of bash scripts and lots of wmctrl and xdotool; does anyone know if this can be done in a simple manner in Wayland?
I often wonder where people get the energy to fiddle with things like this. When I was a student with plenty of time on my hands, I used to tinker a lot. Now I'm older and I just want something that 'works', gets out of my way and let's me get to coding. I only invest time into things that have an immediate improvement on my workflow. If I had a large 4k display I might invest some time on tiling but for now simple L/R splits work fine for me.
Do you know of a program which does that on wayland with hw acceleration? I admit I couldn't do it a few months ago and haven't tried since.
Or maybe I could fallback to x where things work.
I'm using Plasma on Wayland and there doesn't seem to be any screenshot tool that works properly.
Grim only works on Sway. Flameshot's GUI mode doesn't recognize the secondary screen. Spectacle fails to copy the screenshot to clipboard when running in background mode. KSnip doesn't have a region select mode. Shutter only works in X.
Out of Spectacle and Flameshot, Spectacle is more responsive and works across both screens. I'm thinking I can work around the clipboard issue by having it save to a temporary file, and use `inotifywait` to monitor that file and copy to clipboard with `wl-copy`. I wish I wouldn't have to use such workarounds though.
I just tested this with Wireshark and rest of the desktop. In fact, there is a built-in shortcut Ctrl+Alt+Shift+R which starts a screen recording and dumps it in the home directory. Worked flawlessly!
You can't share a display or app, only a region.
Autokey shortcuts don't seem to trigger on Wayland, works with x11
Parcellite, I can't make it show up with shortcuts.
Those are the ones that made me revert to x11
You basically can take screenshots/record your screen in every major wayland compositor. On the other hand, screen recording by applications require interfacing with pipewire, which is pretty much done by many programs (including chrome (and thus electron), firefox, obs, etc), but plenty electron apps do not use the necessary flag.
If you don’t want to tinker with rebuilds I recommend using the web version of zoom in an up-to-date browser.
And why doesn't xwayland support it out of the box? Is crippling existing X11 programs intentional or is it just an inherent limitation of the way wayland works?
There's a whole thread about it here (https://community.zoom.com/t5/Meetings/Wayland-screen-sharin...) but I don't think Zoom cares enough about their Linux client to fix these issues.
I don't know about the shortcut issues you're facing, my guess would be the key logger protections built into wayland prevent your shortcut daemon from capturing the necessary keys. Autokey certainly runs into that problem (https://github.com/autokey/autokey/issues/87). Other programs seem to get similar features working, but not everyone had the time or expertise to bring out compatible versions of their software.
A common misleading counter point to this is, that you can still keylog easily under Wayland using non-Wayland specific means. But this is a stupid argument IMHO, as if you don't start improving things you will never reach the goal and all the "key logging alternatives" are non DM specific and as such need non DM specific fixes (which already exists btw. just aren't often setup by default).
Then there are docents of improvements for developers, like the X11 code base is close to being unmaintainable (from what some of the X11 maintainers say, but I forgot who did so).
There are also improvements for a bunch of features you likely won't care about as a normal users, around multi-seat setups and some embedding specific stuff.
Or implementation details only relevant for people implementing the Wayland compositor.
Theoretically there can be performance/latency improvements for modern applications running on modern hardware. Practically this depends on the hardware/driver, Wayland compositor implementation and client program.
Also by now Wayland-only programs already start to pop up. For now mainly for some special purpose applications, but it's just a matter of time until this can become a problem for some users, needing to use some specific software.
Weather people like it or hate it, X11 on Linux is dying. Wayland will replace it. Incremental improvements will (and often already have) remove many of the limitations people have with it.
I don't see a successor for Wayland for years to come (for normal desktop usage). Through I guess there could be some "label" like "Wayland XXX" which is just the same Wayland but requiring more of the optional available protocols to be implemented. I think currently there is some form of living (incremental improving) standard of standardized Wayland protocols compositors "really"-should implement.
Already now I feel a lot of the complains fall into 4 categories:
- outdated, was fixed quite a while ago
- "my" X11 specific tool doesn't work under Wayland (but there is a Wayland specific tool which has nearly the same features but "I" don't care because "I" don't want to both switching over/porting my config).
- Ubuntu (somehow it really often pops up when people have problems with Wayland)
- fractional HDPI (got already better, will still get better)
I hope in the near future we will be left with only (mostly) the first two categories.
EDIT: Also with how PipeWire develops it's just a question of time until all kind of multimedia/audio/streaming/screen sharing applications will just work much more smoothly on Wayland with much less work required from developers of applications using/managing it.
Initially with non-standard Wayland protocols (so it was quite hit or miss wrt. which capture programs worked under which Wayland compositor).
Since a while there are now standardized ways using PipeWire and the desktop-portal interface.
(Through at least a few month ago sway still did only support full screen capture, and not per-window capture (out of the box), but that's not a Wayland but a sway problem. As far as I can tell currently there is simple no one who 1. cares about it 2. wants to implement it 3. has the time/skill to do so. On KDE/Gnome it per-window capture works. On sway it might still work with some workarounds, just not out-of-the box.)
They needed the help of Canonical to fix the stupid performance issues
Whenever i have to use a GTK client with the stupid giant headers, i want to nuke my linux partition
It is a stupid desktop environment, and they have a stupid gui library that is infecting every distro
With gnome, there is no way linux will become mainstream
The only time linux managed to penetrate the mainstream market was Ubuntu with Unity7
Thanks to red hat, everything got killed
Keep pushing gnome if you want windows to still dominate despite it being a virus
You can ship turd and make it mainstream (as Microsoft has demonstrated time and time again). Shipping computers linux pre-installed is what makes any OS/desktop adopted in large scale, not design/quality. Ubuntu shipped pre-installed on Dell and a bunch of other computers with strong push from Canonical.
Is luascript the bottleneck of AAA games as well?
The Linux Desktop deserves better than GNOME, and sadly KDE is the one that's gotten massively improved in the last 10 years.
You just accused me of writing up "information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view".
You are saying "everything works amazingly well". Others are reporting "simple things don't work, sometimes it just segfaults". Of course those other people can perceive your post as a form of propaganda.
I have never used Wayland (I don't have a good reason to try it), so I don't know whether you or GP is correct. But there is obviously a possibility that GP is correct. You could even both be correct, if there are hardware-related bugs that you just happen to not experience.
Sometimes it's very useful to flag these things up so that they can either be acknowledged or fixed.
Sometimes, if you're lucky, they actually have been solved since the last time you checked.
From my perspective it has been working well for years, and the alternative stacks all appear to be dying off since Ubuntu has also blessed it.
Gnome is not just javascript, it uses js as a scripting engine similarly to how AAA games use C#/Lua.
This. Sadly. I have tried switching numerous times.
The problem for me is libinput which seems to suffer from the "we know better" syndrome that seems to have become more prevalent in recent years on Linux. The author even openly states so in the FAQ [0]. Certain features will NEVER be implemented, because you are wrong to want them. Looks like Apple to me. On X I luckily still have synaptics which provides the knobs I need.
Aside from that Wayland still randomly crashes.
[0] https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/latest/faqs.htm...
Pushing so much responsibility onto compositors means we'll never get even close to the variety of DEs that we had before. Even the two biggest DEs don't have feature parity with X11 despite owning their compositors.
Speak for yourself. I want the macOS lite experience on Linux, not the Windows lite one, thank you very much.
GNOME at least tries to have a cohesive and consistent design, instead of the whole kitchen sink approach of Windows and KDE.
To be fair I have a great deal of appreciation and respect for KDE, but its users are quick to shit on GNOME whenever they can. Nobody is forcing it on you.
But is that really the case? </TIK>
Gnome/Gtk developers have sabotaged integration efforts since many years. The negative attitude against their products does not come à propos nothing. It is deserved as it follows naturally from their anti-user and anti-cooperative behaviour.
There is absolutely nothing wrong in a DE wanting to go their own way instead of supporting any type of weird crazy configuration users might ask for. I want an opinionated desktop environment, I don't go complain to KDE devs that they should get rid of menus and adopt a headerbar because I dislike menus. Yet the opposite happens every time.
GNOME is exploring a UI paradigm different from any other else, and some really dislike them because of it. How dare they, the hubris of these developers!
This isn't about "exploring a UI paradigm", this is about users of the other DEs actually being treated badly by the Gnome/Gtk developers. The criticism will continue until they adopt the mindset that is prevalent in the F/OSS community and stop offloading their externalities, so that a user's choice of an opinionated DE does not negatively affect another user's choice of a configurable DE.
Funny, my company actually is forcing me to use Gnome once we migrate to CentOS 8. Something about how RHEL is no longer supporting other desktop managers and it's too difficult to harden other ones. I am a Mate user and am not pleased.
Why is that sad? It's just a scripting engine...
> and sadly KDE is the one that's gotten massively improved in the last 10 years.
Why is that sad? Sounds like a good thing...
I'm starting to think your definition of "sadly" is different to mine...
I am still waiting for Gnome to implement server-side decorations and for proper drag and drop between windows.
This decision of the Gnome folks really means a very bad fragmentation of the Wayland infrastructure
The point of extensions being extension and not being a part of core protocol is being optional, you know. On the other hand, compliant clients have to run and behave correctly without them being present.
> I am still waiting for Gnome to implement server-side decorations
Sorry little wizard, you are going to wait for a while. Don't hold your breath meanwhile :/
That being said, it is not going to be implemented anytime soon. Intentionally. For a good reasons.
What kept me off Wayland was the screenshots thing, but the argument in favour of the idea is strong. The downside is Wayland's conception of permissions and interactions is too basic and crippled adoption for a few years but the fundamentals (blocking cross-application snooping) is going to be necessary. Operating systems have to be less trusting.
From my perspective, Wayland is like btrfs - it doesn't seem to offer me anything major worth switching for, and there are still gotcha's lurking.
> It does what I need.
If the features of neither of those fit your use cases: great, be happy and keep using what works for you.
But I, for one, like to have no tearing anymore, no random apps just stealing my keyboard input or clipboard content, having a more efficient way to operate on (frame) buffers, having active development for new tech features like HDR and that all while still running xwayland for 100% x11 compat; you cannot do the reverse, at least while not also getting the same features.
So, I really like wayland as it gives people the possibility for better security/sandboxing and new features while I can just run x11 apps fine.
> From my perspective, Wayland is like btrfs
The same with btrfs, as RAID0/1/10 its just nice and stable since forever, its architecture is seemingly just a bad fit for RAID5/6, the single possible problematic part since a while, CoW and rebalancing are really nice to have on a server with important data.
Multiple FS catering to different requirements are there for a reason, and not everyone needs to use every type of FS to give it a reason to exist...
The way software (or things in general) get old is by working well. The things with obvious issues get replaced quickly. Having stuck around for a long time is really not a sign something needs to be replaced.
I find that Xorg is really starting to show cracks as new hardware, and especially new inputs, are becoming mainstream.
In particular, I think Xorg does a crappy job with
- Audio in general (but bluetooth specifically)
- Gesture/touchpad input (some folks are trying to fund this still, but Wayland feels about as good as macOS by default - This was my "must have" feature that pushed me to wayland everywhere)
- HiDPI support - it's ok if you have the same resolution on every screen. If you're mixing resolutions, wayland is MILES better. Even XWayland is bad here - this is just truly a limitation of XOrg.
- Privacy. This one is a mixed blessing. XOrg lets apps do a lot of things to other apps. This is nice in some ways, because things like screen-recorders work easily and without permissions. But problematic because it means any app can quietly be a screen recorder.
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Xorg still wins in terms of overall compatibility, and in user customization. But I think it's pretty clear from the statements from the Xorg & Wayland teams that Xorg is not just "mature" - it's in the process of being slowly replaced with system that most of them feel is better.
I think the more likely scenario is that you are not using the features that really make a distinction (which is a-ok!). In that case stick with what works for you. Xorg isn't going anywhere any time soon, and if your workflow is stable, you aren't missing the new stuff.
But other people absolutely are, and it's not because Xorg is "finished" - it's because it's broken and no longer getting the level of support it used to, that's mostly going to Wayland now (and it REALLY shows, if you use it for a while).
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Here - to quote the debian wiki (https://wiki.debian.org/PipeWire):
"PipeWire is a server and API for handling multimedia on Linux. Its most common use is for Wayland and Flatpak applications to implement screensharing, remote desktop, and other forms of audio and video routing between different pieces of software. Per the official FAQ, "you can think of it as a multimedia routing layer on top of the drivers that applications and libraries can use."
- Xorg hasn't directly handled audio since the days of 2.4 era kernels (anybody remember NAS?). PulseAudio and PipeWire revolve around D-Bus and their concern around the graphical desktop mostly involves seat configuration rather than what's powering the seat (X11, Wayland).
- libinput works on X11 too (and I know I'm using libinput because I accidentally installed synaptics/evdev first xD). I personally love how trackpad scroll on Linux just feels infinitely smoother and more precise than the same hardware on Windows 10.
- HiDPI is in a state of global discohesion structurally speaking at the moment, I think because of some demographic correlations. The art/production/engineering/get-things-done side of the fence was already buying expensive peripherals a decade ago - for example you could play with 3840x2400@41Hz in 2003 if you had $9000 for a 22" IBM T221 and quad-link DVI. That's an extreme example; it didn't take that much enablement to be quite selective about one's productivity tools. However, I don't think many people in this niche used Linux in a predominantly-tinkering use-case - they were too busy getting things done and focusing on sustaining revenue. The Linux users were the kids and teenagers and 20-somethings often found figuring it out on ~decade-old equipment and making the best of random resources they found lying around. Now, HiDPI may seem to have theoretically zeroed the distance between prosumer and some kid working with whatever they've got, but there are three issues: first, software support follows commoditized access to hardware, and given the focus on laptops nowadays (and the inconsistency of the laptop hardware situation at the moment with things like s0ix etc) people are sticking with whatever's in their known-good 5-10+ year old banger or whatever; second, yes, HiDPI has brought the high-end and the low-end together *in hardware*, but done nothing around the current *software* status quo, wherein the high/low-end not-really-a-rift-but-kinda is still kicking around and doesn't quite know what to do with itself yet and people are still finding themselves self-sort into a few common buckets (see also the argument about HiDPI being a "gimmick" and a "premium"); in a couple years when laptops have gotten their acts sorted out and HiDPI displays cost the same as 1920x1080 things will perhaps look a bit different; thirdly, these logistical distractions do not help the already-fragmented world of open source where it's so incredibly easy for new ideas to never gain critical mass because everyone gets hung up on details and bikesheds. I can easily guess that there have probably been a few individual attempts and initiatives to try and fix this that have just never had the chance to get off the ground because so few people with HiDPI screens are willing to play guinea pig for a bit (case in point / mea culpa). So, HiDPI will probably reach a crystallization point right around the moment where hardware accessibility starts to bottom out and software initiatives have had a chance to settle and stabilize, most likely on Wayland where that's already being fostered. Chances are something similar to the libinput "touchpad like macOS" effort will come along and try and backport whatever gets figured out to X11. Good question whether it'll be successful.
- Privacy: See also
(Leave it running, go do something else):P
Xorg reminds me of the hackable mindset used in the old Lisp machines, where you could (supposedly) tweak anything you wanted. I'm not sure but I think those crazy machines had no memory protection - not that they would have used it anyway, that would have bee...
No - not really. Wayland doesn't use dbus (outside of some support in XWayland for legacy x11 applications) - it uses its own IPC protocol instead. And that's really where pipewire shines, since the security model it uses (akin to polkit) allows much finer grain control over what applications are reading/recording.
> libinput works on X11 too
Yes - but as an afterthought, basically. Directly from their wiki: "libinput is a library to handle input devices in Wayland compositors"
...
"The X.Org libinput driver is a thin wrapper around libinput and allows for libinput to be used for input devices in X. This driver can be used as as drop-in replacement for evdev and synaptics. Simply build and install in your $PREFIX, then install the config file in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/. Restart X and the libinput driver will take over your devices."
From personal experience - the same hardware running X with libinput does not feel as nice as it does when running libinput with wayland (although I'll admit, this could be mental, since it's close)
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I have no real idea what you're talking about with regards to hiDPI. It's not 2003 anymore. Every laptop I've used for the last 10 years has come with a screen that requires some sort of scaling, and using them in combination with a standard res external monitor is a SHITSHOW on X.
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I think we're in pretty solid agreement on the security front. I will also miss some of the nifty things you could do - but I appreciate that Wayland limits a lot of nifty things malicious apps can do :)
EDIT: But as always, if you're happy with what you've got, indeed why should you switch? I really don't get this idea of there being "the one-size-fits-all" and the urge to tell others what to do. A major point of Linux is your freedom to do things your way. OP is just telling others (who may have older now no longer relevant experiences) how much things have changed. No need to get defensive.
The problem is you can't expect X11 to keep up going forward. Developers are not interested in working on a huge and clunky legacy system.
Re-reading, I suspect the new hardware with high-DPI requires Wayland, because X11 has poor support for high-DPI (implying Wayland supports it better).
Mint (specifically Cinnamon) doesn't have Wayland support. Not having Wayland means it doesn't work well on my new hardware. Not working on my new hardware is a showstopper. Thus I am no longer using Mint.
But I decided to take the plunge in setting up a new laptop, and I wish I'd done it sooner. It's a lot nicer to configure (and especially to test changes in configuration in) sway than X. I don't know what I was worried about really, I should at least have looked into it - the whole thing has been easier so far than any single change I made to my old configuration (keybindings, modmap, etc.).
After switching that, and then seeing beautiful crisp fonts everywhere has meant that I haven't even considered going back to X, although I had to uninstall the zoom desktop app in order to screenshare (which works through the web version on chrome).
I jumped pretty early, and almost every problem I had has been sorted out now, so it's just a better experience for me now. (also, screenshots work fine, it's just screensharing on certain old apps that's a problem).
[0] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/i...
Update:
I can still see open bugs such as https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/1135. Are they outdated?
I can reproduce some of the effects from the second bug when looking at my 4K monitor from an extremely small distance (a few cm). I am not sure if this is really a bug. It looks like antialiased edges that don't perfectly fit the pixel grid. Probably hard to avoid in any scaling scenario. In any case, it is not noticeable at a reasonable viewing distance.
By native scaling I mean absolutely no bitmap scaling. If rendering happened at target scale then all pixels would match grid and no artifacts would be possible. I can't even imagine how ClearType could work with bitmap scaling when it targets individual subpixels.
I think people have wildly different sensitivity to resolution. I know some that can't tell difference between 4k and 1080p and 1080p scaled on 4k screen. Some crazy people even think MacOS has good font rendering.
I don't think it is possible to avoid having lines "in between" pixels when using fractional scaling. The physical pixel grid simply does not always align with the one at "100%" scale.
I specifically bought the 4K monitor to get crisp text rendering. Upscaling from 1080p (e.g. what XWayland does) is very noticeable to me. I don't see any difference between native Wayland fractional scaling, and setting Gnome to native resolution (except for the tiny UI elements).
You get blurry when scaling UP. Xwayland does scale up, from 96 dpi to whatever fractional scale is set, so that's the reason why X apps are blurry. Native wayland app are not.
When I was using X11 I had things set to fractional scaling because there wasn't good support for multiple monitors with different resolutions (and had it set to 1.5, where one monitor should be 2, and another should be 1, so I split the difference.)
Now on wayland, I have things set correctly, where scaling is set to 2 on a single monitor, and is set to 1 on the other monitor (and the application respects this and can be moved between monitors with the expected behaviour).
I also remember something about fractional scaling not being recommended on wayland (I believe it increases the amount of processing needed to be done by a lot.)
Security: https://blog.invisiblethings.org/2011/04/23/linux-security-c....
https://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2011/04/linux-securi...
https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/linux.html
https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/guides/linux-harden...
I am on Fedora 35 and that was the case just a few weeks/months ago. They locked down the screenshot API to only the GNOME screenshotter.
E.g. while sway works well it tends to not ask the user and just grants permission as it doesn't really have it's own "HUD" (it has a default task parts, but that just a default program you could run if you want to, there are also other programs).
It's also one of the things which makes most sense to be part of the "HUD" interface of the Wayland compositor so not making it a implementation details doesn't make much sense sadly.
Seem to be all over (the place) for XR
Now, many people don't mind, but I certainly mind. That is why I still use X11. Definition of trust... you trust what you must. "Operating systems have to be less trusting". But my Operating System must trust me. I give it no choice in the matter. My Operating System must not override my Trust decisions.
At some point I tried Windows+WSL but that was a complete disaster.
A couple of years ago I decided to try Fedora+Gnome+Wayland. It is an outstanding experience. Everything is smooth, the UI is beautiful. Now with PipeWire and Libadwaita things are getting even better. After some stagnation, the Linux desktop is gaining momentum again.
There are a lot of hate comments for Gnome in this post. My advice for those reading is: Try it for yourself! Most of the haters haven't used Gnome since 2004. Just try it!
They are both unstable, but Gnome has indicated that they are not planning to implement server side decorations even if it was a stable extension: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217
If is difficult to synchronize two different processes to do frame-perfect rendering. In the end, it is unnecessary complexity, when you can do in-process.
Mutter, when it detects non-responsive application, will ask whether you want to kill it, or whether you want to wait a while.
Add to that that server side decorations can achieve a degree of consistency that is just not ever going to happen with client side decorations.
Consistency is a matter of POV - it is not really consistent, if your decorations have different widgets, or even font rendering (Qt is quite specific in this) than the rest of the app. The apps themselves are not consistent anyway, so having consistent decorations, for the price of dragging entire widget library and font shaping & rendering into the compositor process is not worth it. That's on top of the synchronization.
Is it the toolkits job or the compositor/wm?
I would rather have system styling be done by the system not in any applications. Doesn't that sound logical?
I would also like the system to remember window placement, since it has responsibility for user dragging and applications no longer have access to their position or the ability to change it.
This is a strange argument - replacing the subject matter with something else to demonstrate the absurdity - would you have regex parsing in every application, or would you have regex parsing in a central system process?
Supposedly it's been fixed recently: https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/29618
Or do you mean the GNOME compositor?
Until Gnome philosophy and attitude changes I will not touch it. I have vision disabilities so shit looking cool is zero advantage for me, I prefer function over form.
I use KDE , some of the features:
1 easy to setup global shortcuts , I can trigger my custom scripts just with a key press (so this is not a casual user feature)
2 the Zoom Kwin plugin, I use this all the time, you can set what kebyoard shortcut you want (when I tested Windows 7 the Zoom feature keys are hard coded and you had to use 2 hands to zoom in and out and it had lag, so KDE Zoom is better then Windows (maybe recent windows improved...)) ... no idea about GNOME Zoom , last time I was using Compiz with Gnome to get it.
3 KDE has an easy way to let you set font sizes for Qt and GTK apps, those GNOME assholes will never attempt to support Qt apps on their desktop
4 I use a deprecated KDE app called joview for text to speech, cool feature is it has a queue and I can put stuff in the queue and have it read it to me. I do not care for natural sounding voices, my TTS is setup to max speed anyway so it will sound unnatural anyway.
From what I read from the accessibility mailing list the situation is not as good for blind people, there are still issues that need solving and only volunteers are working on this area , but they will respond and try to fix bugs.
3
Windows Magnifier keys are still hardcoded (as of Windows 10), but zooming in/out with [Win]+[+] and [Win]+[-] can be done with one hand (using right [Win]) and performance is pretty good once it's running (turning it on or changing mode has a huge delay though).
When was the last time you tried it?
The trouble is, it will break on every new gnome version, because Gnome devs don't believe in backwards compatibility ever for their extensions APIs. Just imagine if a browser did this.
But in general it's been really good for many releases now.
The name predates the meme
His jokes are not even that funny. The amount of followers he has is insane.
There are only so maany ways you can overclock/mod a build or "accidentally" drop expensive computer parts.
I disagree with you on Linus though. He is still a very reliable source when it comes to product reviews, and his channel is informative when it comes to which part to pick. He realizes that the channel is not very technical, which is why he is investing heavily into equipping and staffing his new test lab.
The Fedora hat (actually the Trilby hat) usually is associated with socially inept neckbeards. No need to use such strong words, even though it might describe some of them. Not all neckbeards are incels.
Yeah, I feel the same way.
I guess it's time for gnome 4 :)
GNOME 3 seems to have been where people really started to hate Gnome, and that came out in 2011. I suspect that many of the Gnome haters actually loved Gnome in 2004.
I currently use KDE and I try out various other desktop environments periodically. 2019 was the last time I tried Gnome and it definitely wasn't "for me"
My needs are relatively modest; I rarely game and I use screens that don't require scaling.
I'm forced to use Wayland on my laptop, which sadly means I forced to use Gnome 3. To those saying "try it": I do, it's just not for me. It's choices are just plain weird.
To explain, what a good UI looks like largely depends on display size. On a tiny display like a phone there is no space for window decorations or a menu bar going across the entire screen, let alone a 2nd application window. Which is why iOS and Android have no window decorations at all, and often no dedicated menu button either.
Increase the screen real estate a bit, and a dedicated menu bar that makes all functions faster to reach becomes an affordable luxury along with a task switcher to reduce flipping between applications a single click. Hell, you might even allow the user to display multiple windows. That's what the Apple desktop has, and it made sense back in the day when they were first released.
Scale it up further, and running multiple windows on the same display starts making sense. If you do flipping between application now needs zero clicks. And now you can see the app and it's help screen at same time, and you can happily drag and paste from one window to another. With so much space you can easily afford to give each app it's own menu bar, borders that permit scaling and moving of windows, and more besides.
Gnome3 was introduced as a desktop window manager when we were very firmly in the era of HD displays. And for reasons I suspect I'll never don't understand, they chose the same layout the first Mac's used 30 years previously and even more infuriatingly pressed you at every change it got into maximising your window to occupy the entire display - almost as if it was dealing with a phone sized screen.
As soon as mint / cinnamon / lxqt moves to Wayland, I'm gone.
By the by, Wayland is a definite improvement on X. It's noticeably faster, and handles scaling better. The lack of network transparency (eg, running gvim with X) doesn't matter because everything still uses X under the hood (via XWayland). I gather they have a workable solution or network transparency now, so the future is looking bright. It's just Gnome3 that's the problem.
I don't know whether it's a coincidence, but Gnome3 copied OSX's look and feel, and systemd copied OSX's launchd, and most of the development of both happens in the same company. There is even a launchctl. If they love OSX then fine, but I would have been happier if that had of scratched that itch by buying themselves Mac's rather than trying to copy them.
And Wayland is still mostly unusable with Nvidia cards (and no, “buy another card” is not an answer, sorry). Though at least it is technically working, which is already a major improvement. I am optimistic that I will be able to use Wayland in the next 2 years or so.
[0]. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1441
It's beautiful, and I like the UX, but it's lacking underneath, go ahead and play a 4k clip on Wayland enabled Firefox then move the mouse pointer, it stutters like crazy.
The mouse movements/scrolling in general doesn't feel natural at all, it has some kind of weird acceleration curve, scroll on Wayland enabled Firefox for example and compare that to Firefox under X11, day and night difference, under X11 it's MacOS like smoothness.
For some weird reason, switching to X11 fixes the performance, responsiveness and mouse scrolling/acceleration/movement accuracy, without doing a thing.
Sadly, because of the above and the fact that Gnome 42 no longer does fractional scaling under X11, I had to leave Gnome behind, I'm now on Fedora 36 KDE which I'm liking so far.
* My machine (3900x/rx5500/4k monitor/mx master 3) felt very slow sometimes to the point I was going to get rid of Linux all together and go MacOS or Windows (I dislike both).
* Thanks everyone for the continued work on Desktop GNU/Linux, inc Gnome and Wayland guys.
Recently however I had to disable it, see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1759947
There is a super nice demo there that sheds light into what I'm trying to convey.
Either your DE or your Firefox aren't actually using Wayland because for me it's incredibly smooth, and CPU usage is in the low 10%. Fedora 35 on a 6800 XT here.
Firefox still needs tweaks to have actual complete hardware video acceleration.
As coldblues said, it's probably Mutter not having an independent thread for the mouse pointer, X11's pointer handling is independent from Mutter/KWin it seems.
See the demo here to know exactly what I'm talking about: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1241
What's your monitor like? Sometimes I suspect it's because of my 4K monitor (with 1.5x scaling), that's a lot of pixels to shuffle, especially if the rendering code/pipeline is not optimised[0].
Testing my setup with a 1080p/75hz monitor[1], it's crazy fast and responsive, but mouse acceleration curve (and scroll), not speed, is still weird.
[0]See Ubuntu pushing for triple buffering for example, and other optimisation work on the past.
[1]Apparently that causes huge speedup, as it affects frame scheduling, according to one GUADEC talk by a Mutter dev.
* move the mouse cursor evenly in a straight motion
* while moving press `Super+a` to open the application list
During the animation, i.e. when GNOME Shell is busy, the mouse cursor noticeably stutters for a moment. On my faster systems it's less apparent but still visible, except when I set the CPU governor to `performance`.
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1915
> Nothing has been done here to avoid potential wayland event queue overflows, as IIUC this is being worked on separately. Although I should probably also mention that this hasn't been seen in the wild during this work.
It's because of stuff like this that we should treat UIs more like real time systems. There's really no good reason at all that a modern machine can't render every frame perfectly every time regardless of system load --- it's due to inadequate attention paid to isolating real-time-ish paths like mouse cursor movement, composition, input event dispatch, and so on from app-induced loads that we get weird responsiveness issues. X actually did a better job in this particular respect than your typical Wayland compositor --- it used interrupt driven mouse cursor rendering, for example.
Screen sharing in Zoom works quite well if I go through Firefox instead of the Zoom client, which I even do under X, otherwise my machine eventually crashes (probably a memory leak)
In my opinion, it represents a significantly better UI than Gnome/KDE/MacOS/Windows paradigms. So much that it's probably the largest reason why I live mostly in Linux land instead of Mac right now.
If so, how much of a time investment was it to reach the point where you were no longer customising to reach parity with "batteries included" desktop environments (battery bar, sane sleep/wake-ups, volume control)? And how does it handle being plugged/unplugged from external monitors?
I have tried to switch to tiling WMs several times, but I have always found myself going back to Gnome as soon as it's a rabbit-hole of config files to do something "simple" like, adjust volume, or organise monitors. That is, features that are quite discoverable in standard DEs.
But it definitely requires more tinkering to reach similar levels of, hm, “convenience”.
I estimate that I've spent 10 hours last year on finding and tinkering the best fit software for my use case. But perhaps we have to consider that I've been using Linux in some form since 1996, so it's very possible that I've grown calluses all over the place.
External monitor plugging/unplugging works amazingly well, I'd almost say perfectly. I don't think that it required any configuration from me. I use Displayport over USB-C, and I don't remember it failing ever. Specifically it works much much better than xorg ever did.
I have two different Thinkpads: T490 and E14/AMD.
I spent a little while on this, but I migrated from i3, so I just ported every little section of my config bit by bit.
In terms of battery bar and other "bar" type things, I use waybar[0] which basically does all the things you'd expect by default (just install and it "works").
For multi-monitor, config, I initially setup with wdisplays[1] (think arandr for wayland) and then manually copied the positions into my sway config. Monitor positioning was the only thing I needed to setup (and telling it that one monitor was HDPI) and then all of the scaling and everything worked perfectly. This was my biggest selling point for wayland, I now get nice crisp fonts and application scaling works nicely (which was not the case with X).
volume control from the keyboard took no time, just a couple of extra lines.
There was some stuff to do with the clipboard (wl-clipboard[2]) and screenshots (grim[3] + slurp[4]) that required some setup, but again, just a few lines, and didn't take much mental load.
Oh and I needed to change my notifications daemon(dunst[5]), and chose to change my program launcher to one with a nicer interface and cleaner fonts (wofi[6]).
I think that's all the tweaking that I did. Oh, and I needed to do something with pipewire to sort out screensharing at the start, don't remember that too well though...
[0] https://github.com/Alexays/Waybar
[1] https://github.com/artizirk/wdisplays
[2] https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard
[3] https://github.com/emersion/grim
[4] https://github.com/emersion/slurp
[5] https://github.com/dunst-project/dunst
[6] https://hg.sr.ht/~scoopta/wofi
Coming from i3, transitioning to Sway was easy. Previously, I'd transferred from Xfce to i3, and more recently I transitioned from ALSA to Pipewire. Each of these transitions took some effort, say an hour or two initially, and then another hour or two spread over a few weeks to work out edge cases. But the thing is, once I've worked out the edge cases, my desktop is rock solid. I don't cringe when I run a system update, I'm confident it will work. And if an update were to cause Sway to break (which hasn't happened to me yet), Sway's internals are accessible enough that I'm confident I'd be able to quickly resolve the issue.
This is quite the opposite of my experience with GNOME or KDE. These DEs make an attempt to match the accessibility and intuitiveness of proprietary interfaces, but in my experience they lack the resources. The inherent complexity is papered over and becomes exposed as soon as you try to do something even slightly off the beaten path. And if something does happen to break (which happened to me frequently when running GNOME), fixing the issue is a deep rabbit hole of undocumented or semi-documented options and bugzilla reports.
Having said that, I'm open to the notion that one or both of them have improved a lot since then. I really hope they have because running a minimalist desktop like Sway isn't for everyone.
My only complaint with Gnome is that Nautilus doesn't support splitting panes. So, I use Nemo instead.
So it was back to X11. Until screen sharing works in more apps, and until Proton/Wine games work I'm sticking to X11 and I'm not complaining.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#WebRTC_screen_shar...
Having the pixels of your screen be more "sacred" than the files on your $HOME is a disturbingly bizarre security model.
Also, please have a look at here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30735099 This simply should not happen, any random executable having access to your $HOME is a terrible terrible practice.
Running random executables is the only terrible practice here. If I run "cat" over a file on my $HOME, then I expect to see its contents, regardless of which program wrote the file. Similarly, if a program writes pixels on my screen, then I expect to be able to screenshot them.
Conversely, if I write a file in my $HOME, then I expect that other programs that I run will be able to read it. Similarly, if I write pixels on my screen, I should not be surprised that my other programs can read them.
Call me conspiracist, but this silly wayland security theater seems like a side of a multi-pronged attack to destroy the very principles of unix. First, screens; then, files. But you know what? You'll pry fopen and fread from my cold, dead hands!
You can screenshot it. Zoom or whatever else can’t do so without calling the respective APIs with the respective security policy (which by default is: giving you a popup to allow the request)
Have you seen my linked thread? Ok, let’s say `cat` works on behalf of you. Does `apt`, `npm` etc also do what it does on behalf of you? The problem is not only third-party code, but third-party data — any bug in the program can hijack the whole program at which point it no longer works on your behalf.
1. Zoom - screenshare doesn't work or crashes - I can't remember now
2. Peek - cannot capture gif recordings
3. Flameshot - cannot take screenshots
Some (all?) browsers lack the ability to talk with Wayland's screensharing system. A quick workaround that worked for me (using Zoom at least) was to launch that browser session and the windows to be shared in XWayland.
A perhaps more convenient workaround is exposing your entire Wayland session as a fake webcam. I don't remember the name of the software that lets you do this, but it works quite well.
So try the web version of zoom, it will just work. I don’t know the other programs but pipewire is the relevant API they should implement.
2. Have you tried: https://github.com/SeaDve/Kooha ?
https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/screen-shot-r...
* i use Kupfer as a quicksilver/alfred replacement. triggering the hotkey made it open the dialog on the bottom left of the window i'd most recently used (rather than centre-screen)
* alt-tabbing in and out of fullscreen-games was much less reliable (if at all possible) - which was weird as i'd have said there was a perceptable increase in latency
* getting wine/proton games to launch was more challenging
* i've modified lots of things on this system to have mac-like keybindings (e.g. "command"-c/v for copy paste in terminal, etc. and not all of these are configuration changes, as in many terminal emulators). i seem to remember wayland behaving strangely with super-based keybinds. i don't think i ever got "command"-w to work properly.
* a myriad of behavioral differences in window/desktop management made it surprisingly painful to persist for any length of time.
which is a shame because it really does feel that wayland is architected better than X11.
But when I Poked wayland WMs, man, Things felt just... smoother. I probably will move to river+waybar, but, I need to just, do the effort of configuring waybar a bit more, to make it prettier. But that is okay, for now, bspwm as fallback :P
And GNOME.. About the only DE I actually like, so I agree with you lol
- frequent system freezes that don't seem recoverable. Possibly driver related (intel xe with an i5, 5.16 kernel). But really annoying.
- I've had to deal with a weird bug where after standby the laptop would wake up and then lock again after a few seconds. I "fixed" it by disabling screen and lock timeouts for now. I have no idea how this started happening; or why. The workaround is of course not great on a laptop.
- Screen sharing with discord, slack, etc. seems a PITA. I can share a window but not my screen in discord. And then of course Firefox is not among the windows I can actually share.
- A lot of things that would be settings that I'd like to manipulate in Gnome are instead only configurable via perpetually unstable extensions that break between updates; or configuration file. For example, I'd like to get rid of the top bar in gnome because it's a waste of space and a pretty dumb idea on a 1080p screen (sadly the most common form factor for laptops). There's an extension for that that promptly broke with the next Gnome update.
- Key settings related to touchpad configuration (appallingly bad defaults out of the box) don't even have UI. You just need to fiddle with configuration files.
- The gnome terminal has keybindings for switching tabs that don't seem to work. I've no idea why. I'd like that to work in a sane way. I'm experimenting with alternatives but haven't really found anything that comes even close to what I had with iterm2 on mac.
https://www.tecmint.com/top-most-popular-linux-distributions...
I'm on mobile, so I can't do a proper research, but I reckon the _desktop_ Linux distro ranking would look a bit like: Ubuntu, Arch Linux, Linux Mint, Fedora, Debian, Pop OS, Manjaro, etc.
I see the problem. I’d go straight Arch or Fedora. Manjaro always gave me problems.
I run Fedora on my 2 Dell Laptops and on a custom built desktop with no problems at all, but I did pick all three for their Linux compatibility.
I’d suggest giving Fedora a spin and seeing if it works out of the box for you.
Try Ubuntu or Fedora. Manjaro isn't very stable.