Another nail in the coffin. Bye, Red Hat. Bye, NGOME. Non GNU OldIBM Mediocre Environment.
I wish GTK4 dies in IBM hands too, for the good. XFCE can go back to a community supported GTK3 anytime.
Sadly, I recently had to switch back from Wayland to xorg because clients are getting so memory hungry. My eight year old gpu only has 2gb of vram, which I constantly run out of. Some part of the gfx stack should handle swapping out vram to main ram but it apparently isn't.
I've been using Gnome for years, but, honestly, it just isn't good: seems like it's optimized for very basic use. Something as simple as adding launcher to a panel now requires an extension.
Also Wayland has some problem on my system (Thinkpad / Intel Xe) where it randomly just goes slow, this makes it an easy choice to try things other than Gnome.
Transition to Wayland opened so many user experience regressions. Many are solved today, or at least partially solved but...
There is still no possibility to have proper remote sessions when using Wayland. On any Window Manager and any distro. It's such a shitshow when you go into details. Nothing works, including third party tools (like NoMachine) and I could find no real hope for actual solutions being designed.
The best you can go with "remote session" on Wayland is viewing a desktop session that was already opened by someone directly on the computer. You can partially work around this by... setting your account to be automatically logged in with no password :D And even then it's a crippled experience.
A basic feature I used for the past 25 years and helped me to learn linux and offer safe space for others to learn it as well. To work around work computer limitations. To use your best hardware wherever and whenever you want.
I currently had to ditch both my favorite distro and WM because of that. But at least we can make screenshots nowadays, so I guess it could be worse.
> There is still no possibility to have proper remote sessions when using Wayland. On any Window Manager and any distro. It's such a shitshow when you go into details. Nothing works, including third party tools (like NoMachine) and I could find no real hope for actual solutions being designed.
Gnome has had remote desktop sharing I think since 46.
Settings --> System --> Remote Desktop
The "desktop sharing" tab is for setting credentials to share your logged in screen.
The "Remote Login" tab is for setting credentials to access GDM and login as any user (i.e. headless).
I haven’t booted into an X11 environment in maybe 4 years. Wayland has been fine (Fedora + Gnome, Fedora / Arch + Niri). I think this is one of those issues where hardcore users overestimate how much anyone else cares or will notice.
> I think this is one of those issues where hardcore users overestimate how much anyone else cares or will notice.
I don't think users that rely on accessibility featurescount as 'hardcore', and the majority of X->Wayland complaints i've heard center around all of that stuff.
On my end I'm still waiting on several critical-for-me things to be fixed. (first and foremost noticeable mouse pointer lag, but also clipboard over-security, and missing XInput analog)
I was working on a carousel library a few months ago. I had made a few stress-test demos so that I could catch obvious issues while I was adding things and tweaking things.
One carousel there had 16K slides.
On Windows both Chrome and Firefox managed that fine. They scrolled from start to end and back without issue and you could see, I think, all the frames in my 60Hz screen.
On GNOME and X11 (dual boot, so same hardware) Chrome was fine but there were issues with Firefox. I was curious so I logged out and logged in with Wayland. On Wayland Firefox was fine too, indistinguishable from Chrome.
I don’t understand hardware, compositors, etc., so I have no idea why that was, but it was interesting to see.
Firefox remains very conservative on enabling modern features on X11. Some distributions force them on, but otherwise it's up to the user to figure out how to do that.
It's likely that some hwaccel flag in about:config wasn't turned on by default. Similarly, if you want smooth touchpad scrolling, you need to set MOZ_USE_XINPUT2
Makes sense to move to something actively maintained. I don’t use GNOME, but I have been on Wayland for years in both KDE and tiling WMs. It works great while on X11 I would often get weird flickering and stuttering issues (some NVIDIA bug I could never track down). Anyway, if the X11 die-hards want it to survive, they need to organize an effort to maintain it, not yell at everyone who wants to build something better.
I am sympathetic to people who have a working setup and just don’t want to mess with their configuration anymore. Unless you’re on OpenBSD, though, that ship has long sailed in most *nix distros (even “stable” Debian). Long-term stability is underrated but hard to achieve.
I love Linux and vastly prefer it to Windows, but whenever people tell me Linux is vastly more stable than Windows, I think of the whol X11/Wayland saga.
I still scarcely know what these are. In fact I actively don't want to know about compositors and whatnot. When I want GUIs, I just want to see them.
I can list many crappinesses of Windows, but stuff like this kinda just works.
Linux is extremely stable. There are some exploits for it, but generally you are very unlikely to accidentally get a virus on it. If you don't update your software, it could potentially run for YEARS without a reboot on Linux. Maybe that is possible on Windows but I have yet to see it really.
If you mean API/ABI stability, the question is far more nuanced. I think most Linux software you are likely to use will run on any Linux distro equally well, although you may require it to be rebuilt for your particular distro. In the worst case there is always Docker. Statically linked programs can work for a VERY long time across distros. Microsoft probably has a bigger commitment to backward compatibility right now, but Linux binary software can be carried forward for many years as well with few/no changes. The Wayland thing is going to upset this stability, but in theory XWayland should make the old stuff keep working.
Most popular distros on common hardware "just work" these days and can be used easily by normal people. You might be confused if you tried to migrate a binary executable forward or between distros and it didn't work, but it is mostly developers and admins who think about such things.
This stuff just kinda works on Linux too. This discussion is for distro maintainers (think of them like OS packagers) and power users. If you just install Ubuntu or Bazzite or whatever, it should just work
what's the drive to use a nix but 'actively dont want to know' about things?
just need to fulfill some software necessity?
The two most major OSs out there specialize in catering to users that don't want to know how the thing works -- it seems like you're swimming against the current a little bit, no?
also I don't think that anyone has ever called any nix stable and had software politics and human-stuff in mind ; what's meant is that it doesn't crash and burn when you're trying to use it.
Everyone deserves freedom. Tinkerers and regular users, software engineers and grandmas, artists and Paint users.
Linux obviously has this nerdy root culture because it hardly cannot. But the freedom it brings is for everyone.
This is especially important in a time where MS has clearly stopped caring about Windows in the way they did in the 90s and 2000s, they largely don't care about consumer windows anymore, as long as Excel and all the enterprise shit stays locked in. So there's nothing stopping them from shoving ads and spyware (windows account) into every inch of the OS because they hope most users won't do anything, and if some small % switch to something else, oh well.
And macOS has clearly also stopped being cared for - most of apples revenue is iPhones and services. They mostly just want to sell overpriced hardware to corpos who need Xcode and to users who are in their walled garden.
We need to respect these users and bring the freedom to them that we all deserve.
Also - I'm a software engineer myself, and if I may be so bold, I like to think im a pretty good one. Certainly well positioned to understand how Linux works. And indeed I have spent enough time debugging weird shit that I suspect I know more than the average Linux bear.
And I STILL have no patience for X vs wayland bullshit. Draw the pixels or get the fuck out of my face. I literally don't care except which one lets me use 2 hiDPI monitors + the laptop display with fractional scaling and closing and reopening the laptop lid isn't some kind of bizarre edge case event. Wayland managed to get that right on Gnome for me as of late. I have a vague understanding of why, but largely just want Gnome to figure this crap out for me so I can run IntelliJ, PyCharm and vscode at the same time without weird artifacting.
I mean if you are a normal user and most people are, you absolutely do not need to care about both Wayland and X11. Distributions ship with working configurations. It just works.
Most of the people complaining about the transition just like to nitpick about low level pieces of technology which don’t actually impact their usage at all. It was the same with systemd for at least a decade.
One of the big problem I am/was facing with Wayland is the performance when accessing a VM with SPICE and virt-viewer. You basically had to use X11 on the host and the guest for everything to work in an optimal way.
Do anybody knows if any progress have been made on this front?
In my experience Wayland always had problems, so depending on how XWayland works, I'd probably have to drop Gnome if there's no X11 support that's functional and I imagine a lot of others would need to do so (until X11 support is reinstated)
What are some better Gnome alternatives that support X11?
I have no idea what issues folks are talking about. I use vanilla gnome for my work and personal use case (given with well supported GPUs, read: no Nvidia). All the features work. Zoom/screen share/obs etc.,
Multi touch gestures work on laptops as smoothly as they were on a mac. HDR has started working recently even in my browser. VRR has been working for almost a couple of years.
It doesn't break, most mem leaks that gnome was known for all gone. Almost all the cli X specific tools I use (mostly clipboard stuff) are all available. Initially when I switched I did see like a 10~15% increase in battery usage albeit being smooth.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 69.4 ms ] threadI think GTK is version 5, so they have to converge somewhere.
This is an old trick from SW developers to show a suppose maturity: bump the version number.
[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/file-roller/-/issues/4
Also Wayland has some problem on my system (Thinkpad / Intel Xe) where it randomly just goes slow, this makes it an easy choice to try things other than Gnome.
There is still no possibility to have proper remote sessions when using Wayland. On any Window Manager and any distro. It's such a shitshow when you go into details. Nothing works, including third party tools (like NoMachine) and I could find no real hope for actual solutions being designed.
The best you can go with "remote session" on Wayland is viewing a desktop session that was already opened by someone directly on the computer. You can partially work around this by... setting your account to be automatically logged in with no password :D And even then it's a crippled experience.
A basic feature I used for the past 25 years and helped me to learn linux and offer safe space for others to learn it as well. To work around work computer limitations. To use your best hardware wherever and whenever you want.
I currently had to ditch both my favorite distro and WM because of that. But at least we can make screenshots nowadays, so I guess it could be worse.
You can enable the rdp server there. It does allow opening new sessions remotely. It works fine.
Gnome has had remote desktop sharing I think since 46.
Settings --> System --> Remote Desktop
The "desktop sharing" tab is for setting credentials to share your logged in screen.
The "Remote Login" tab is for setting credentials to access GDM and login as any user (i.e. headless).
I don't think users that rely on accessibility featurescount as 'hardcore', and the majority of X->Wayland complaints i've heard center around all of that stuff.
Little of it has been remediated last I checked.
David (UI details) beats Goliath.
Wayland and SDL got support this summer.
And Xwayland has had support for past 10 years: https://www.phoronix.com/news/XWayland-Pointer-Confinement
On my end I'm still waiting on several critical-for-me things to be fixed. (first and foremost noticeable mouse pointer lag, but also clipboard over-security, and missing XInput analog)
One carousel there had 16K slides.
On Windows both Chrome and Firefox managed that fine. They scrolled from start to end and back without issue and you could see, I think, all the frames in my 60Hz screen.
On GNOME and X11 (dual boot, so same hardware) Chrome was fine but there were issues with Firefox. I was curious so I logged out and logged in with Wayland. On Wayland Firefox was fine too, indistinguishable from Chrome.
I don’t understand hardware, compositors, etc., so I have no idea why that was, but it was interesting to see.
It's likely that some hwaccel flag in about:config wasn't turned on by default. Similarly, if you want smooth touchpad scrolling, you need to set MOZ_USE_XINPUT2
I am sympathetic to people who have a working setup and just don’t want to mess with their configuration anymore. Unless you’re on OpenBSD, though, that ship has long sailed in most *nix distros (even “stable” Debian). Long-term stability is underrated but hard to achieve.
I still scarcely know what these are. In fact I actively don't want to know about compositors and whatnot. When I want GUIs, I just want to see them.
I can list many crappinesses of Windows, but stuff like this kinda just works.
If you mean API/ABI stability, the question is far more nuanced. I think most Linux software you are likely to use will run on any Linux distro equally well, although you may require it to be rebuilt for your particular distro. In the worst case there is always Docker. Statically linked programs can work for a VERY long time across distros. Microsoft probably has a bigger commitment to backward compatibility right now, but Linux binary software can be carried forward for many years as well with few/no changes. The Wayland thing is going to upset this stability, but in theory XWayland should make the old stuff keep working.
Most popular distros on common hardware "just work" these days and can be used easily by normal people. You might be confused if you tried to migrate a binary executable forward or between distros and it didn't work, but it is mostly developers and admins who think about such things.
just need to fulfill some software necessity?
The two most major OSs out there specialize in catering to users that don't want to know how the thing works -- it seems like you're swimming against the current a little bit, no?
also I don't think that anyone has ever called any nix stable and had software politics and human-stuff in mind ; what's meant is that it doesn't crash and burn when you're trying to use it.
Linux obviously has this nerdy root culture because it hardly cannot. But the freedom it brings is for everyone.
This is especially important in a time where MS has clearly stopped caring about Windows in the way they did in the 90s and 2000s, they largely don't care about consumer windows anymore, as long as Excel and all the enterprise shit stays locked in. So there's nothing stopping them from shoving ads and spyware (windows account) into every inch of the OS because they hope most users won't do anything, and if some small % switch to something else, oh well.
And macOS has clearly also stopped being cared for - most of apples revenue is iPhones and services. They mostly just want to sell overpriced hardware to corpos who need Xcode and to users who are in their walled garden.
We need to respect these users and bring the freedom to them that we all deserve.
Also - I'm a software engineer myself, and if I may be so bold, I like to think im a pretty good one. Certainly well positioned to understand how Linux works. And indeed I have spent enough time debugging weird shit that I suspect I know more than the average Linux bear.
And I STILL have no patience for X vs wayland bullshit. Draw the pixels or get the fuck out of my face. I literally don't care except which one lets me use 2 hiDPI monitors + the laptop display with fractional scaling and closing and reopening the laptop lid isn't some kind of bizarre edge case event. Wayland managed to get that right on Gnome for me as of late. I have a vague understanding of why, but largely just want Gnome to figure this crap out for me so I can run IntelliJ, PyCharm and vscode at the same time without weird artifacting.
Most of the people complaining about the transition just like to nitpick about low level pieces of technology which don’t actually impact their usage at all. It was the same with systemd for at least a decade.
Do anybody knows if any progress have been made on this front?
"Think twice before abandoning X11. Wayland breaks everything!"
https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d...
In my experience Wayland always had problems, so depending on how XWayland works, I'd probably have to drop Gnome if there's no X11 support that's functional and I imagine a lot of others would need to do so (until X11 support is reinstated)
What are some better Gnome alternatives that support X11?
Multi touch gestures work on laptops as smoothly as they were on a mac. HDR has started working recently even in my browser. VRR has been working for almost a couple of years.
It doesn't break, most mem leaks that gnome was known for all gone. Almost all the cli X specific tools I use (mostly clipboard stuff) are all available. Initially when I switched I did see like a 10~15% increase in battery usage albeit being smooth.