Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (or more handsome)

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/12/fedora-25-review-the-best-linux-distro-of-2016-arrived-at-the-last-moment/

by AdmiralAsshat • 10 years ago

138 161 10 years ago

Fedora has really made great progress. The font situation is improved and used purely as a development/hacker workstation it works great on common hardware. Media playback, battery life remain big issues but I don't expect those to get any better soon. You can always fix the former with Rpmfusion packages and the latter by not using it unplugged :)

noahdesu• 10 years ago

Yup. Running FC25 right now on 27" iMac and the visual appearance is noticeably better than older distributions I'm running on other hardware.

Edit: FC25

Tharre5• 10 years ago

Care to explain what you mean with issues regarding media playback?

vetinari7• 10 years ago

Fedora does not ship with many popular codecs (mp3 decoding is a new thing in F25, decoding h.264 was new in F24). Third party repositories do offer the codecs, but Fedora project itself does not.

XzetaU8• 10 years ago

and the latter by not using it unplugged

Or by using PowerTop/TLP

https://fedoramagazine.org/saving-laptop-power-with-powertop...

0xFFC2• 10 years ago

As software developer I spend all of my time doing reading/writing code and text. So the most important aspect of a linux distro is font rendering and font aliasing for me.

And fedora, last time I tried it, didn't have smooth font by default ! (it was version 23 if I remember correctly)

xwat• 10 years ago

What are you using then? I'm curious about which distro best handles font rendering.

0xFFC2• 10 years ago

I did use Gentoo and Arch for a year or two, but right now I do use Ubuntu LTS. I don't have enough time to deal with broken packages when I update, so I stick to the LTS.

vetinari7• 10 years ago

Fedora doesn't have rgba lcdfilter by default, due to Cleartype patents. It does have antialiasing.

You can resolve that by installing freetype-freeworld package (which has exactly the same freetype library, just with one #define flipped), that is offered by some repositories, or you can get a HiDPI display. Which, if the reading/writing text is important to you, you will want anyway.

udp• 10 years ago

Haven't the patents on the hinting stuff expired now? I'm sure I heard that somewhere.

boomboomsubban• 10 years ago

It's the kind of thing that's largely up to personal preference, people that spent a long time with Windows font rendering have a hard time adjusting to the old Freetype2. The newest Freetype2 integrated the infinality patches which make the rendering much easier on the eyes for those people.

Distrowatch says Fedora 25 uses an older Freetype2, I think the patches are available to toggle on.

Tharkun2• 10 years ago

As another software developer, I haven't noticed or cared about fonts in about 20 years. 20 years ago font rendering was sometimes bad. The last 20 years? I guess not or I would have noticed. Seems like whatever the defaults are on Fedora+Awesome, they're fine.

digi_owl16• 10 years ago

Yeah, caring about fonts when doing "code" sounds like a tell for "i am a web designer doing JS".

boondaburrah• 10 years ago

I've basically only noticed or cared about fonts when I'm on a windows computer or a poorly configured linux computer. Windows's hinting drives me nuts.

AceJohnny22• 10 years ago

One of the things I loved in Linux was the ability to swap out the "window manager", the program that takes app's windows, draws decorations like title bar and window borders around them, and arranges them on the screen. I had fun with Compiz, I fiddled with Enlightenment, and I finally settled for Awesome because I decided Tiling Was The Best (tm).

If I understand correctly from following the Gnome and KWin blogs, in Wayland it looks like the "window management" job is with the Compositor, which takes on a lot more of the display and input work that was traditionally handled by the X Server. So there's much more complexity to handle there. This would mean that we're unlikely to see the proliferation of WM experiments that X saw.

Is this a correct assessment?

(I'm personally waiting for a good tiling window manager/compositor to show up with Wayland before I make the swtich)

justinsaccount• 10 years ago

https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway ?

based2• 10 years ago

https://phab.enlightenment.org/w/wayland/

https://archive.fosdem.org/2016/schedule/event/enlightenment...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_%28display_server_prot...

digi_owl16• 10 years ago

And? Since E17, E has pretty much been a DE in its own right. Fueled in large part because Rasterman ran afoul Gnome and RH office politics during his stay at RH labs.

And E has a long history of supporting just about anything under the sun. You could even run its terminal "emulator" as an alternative tty on top of the Linux framebuffer if you so wanted.

nacc• 10 years ago

There are a number of window managers for wayland already. The ArchWiki has a list of them [0].

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Wayland#Window_managers...

lomnakkus5• 10 years ago

If I understand correctly from following the Gnome and KWin blogs, in Wayland it looks like the "window management" job is with the Compositor, which takes on a lot more of the display and input work that was traditionally handled by the X Server.

This is basically right. However, you have to remember that the Wayland protocol is at least an order of magnitude (if not two) smaller than X11. It's also defined/specced using a machine-readable XML document which means that an implementation of the protocol can basically be auto-generated from the spec document -- thus making it a lot easier to keep your implementation up to date.

This would mean that we're unlikely to see the proliferation of WM experiments that X saw.

Remains to be seen, I guess.

digi_owl16• 10 years ago

Give W as much time as X11 has had, and it will be of comparable size as X11 is right now. They will perhaps try to play semantic games by putting much of the additions into support libs that you "don't need", unless you want to run anything more than a decade old.

Wayland, X11, SVGALib, F if i can tell a diff...

Tharkun2• 10 years ago

I'm heavy Awesome user myself. Pretty much refuse to use anything else these days. It works, doesn't get in the way and goes really well with my workflow.

It looks like the Awesome community currently has no plans for a Wayland port -- as it apparently wouldn't be trivial. Though someone mentioned that it might Just Work as a magical legacy X application. Can anyone confirm that?

lima2• 10 years ago

good tiling window manager

SirCmpwn is porting i3:

http://swaywm.org/

https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway

cyphar5• 10 years ago

> good tiling window manager
SirCmpwn is porting i3:

It's not a port, it's a complete rewrite. You can't port i3 just because of all of the differences between X11 and Wayland.

Also, I would recommend anyone who uses SirCmpwn's several projects that they donate to him (he even made a free software project for dontations): https://drewdevault.com/donate/

stinkytaco6• 10 years ago

It also offloads several of the features of X to the clients. Including inter-process communication and networking. I suppose you can view this as good or bad, but it certainly much smaller and, in some ways, more efficient since I don't need to have the ability to network unless I load up an RDP.

djsumdog• 10 years ago

Xorg doesn't really need a configuration file today; it's good at auto detecting hardware. But one of the things I really like about X is that you can have a config file and specify exactly which devices you want. In this way, you can connect two keyboards, two mice and two video cards to the same machine and have two totally different login screens. You can essentially have two people logged into the same machine as if they were using two different terminals (just do try to plug in a USB device if both users have automounters running).

Even on my current single user machine, I still run multiple X servers (one for my work related stuff and one for non-work. I work remotely so that way, I can just switch X servers at the end of the business day).

Can Wayland support multiple terminals on a single machine in the same way? Can you have two Wayland instances running like you can with X servers?

stemc432• 10 years ago

With Wayland I can finally dock & undock my thinkpad without having to restart my laptop.

lima2• 10 years ago

What configuration? Works fine for me with a Skylake ThinkPad on Fedora 24.

krzyk• 10 years ago

I can do the same with Xorg (also thinkpad), what kind of problems do you have in Xorg with docking?

ChuckMcM2• 10 years ago

I know you are making an earnest comment but the idea of having one computer support multiple users each on their own terminal is really really well explored territory. So I chuckled a bit at how even old things can be new again.

It does speak to having way more compute resources than you can consume at a given time.

digi_owl16• 10 years ago

Its old yes, but the Freedesktop boys are doing it in a "new" way. This by using sofware to bundled a random set of devices into a single seat, and assigning said seat to a user on login based on the input device used. The old way was to hang dedicated hardware off serial ports and figure out the "seat" (if such a concept needed to be defined at all back then) that way.

digi_owl16• 10 years ago

Wayland (or more "correctly" the support plumbing that will surround it, but developed by the same team) will likely support all that, in time.

Just that rather than manually configure it, it will be automatically (they hope) configured by combo of systemd, polkit and your DE of "choice".

jff• 10 years ago

So once again freedesktop.org pushes out the new software with the promise that some day it will meet the capabilities of the current tools, honest, we pinky swear. They did it with systemd and they'll do it again with Wayland.

znpy• 10 years ago

Just that rather than manually configure it, it will be automatically

That's the point. It'already automatic.

I haven't even mistakenly opened xorg.conf in at least five years.

And quite franky, I see no need for another thing like Wayland to add entropy to the GNU/Linux desktop.

by combo of systemd, polkit and your DE of "choice"

eh...

Ace17• 10 years ago

I totally agree with the need for eliminating tearing from games (and every other application, and increasing the overall smoothness of desktop displays). However, from the article itself, the list of regressions associated with the switch to Wayland seems to be non-negligible ; especially the lack of fast drivers for Nvidia graphic adapters, which makes it unlikely for GNU/Linux-gamers to do the switch.

Is it impossible to fix the tearing and smoothness issues of Xorg/X11?

fabianhjr• 10 years ago

At least in my case most games crash, though it is likely due to using Bumblebee (Nvidia Optimus) and switching between Integrated Graphics and Dedicated Graphics.

The plus side is that I can log into using either Wayland or Xorg. So switching between the two is almost seamless.

ZenoArrow2• 10 years ago

The problems with X go beyond just screen tearing. For example, it's possible for Xorg apps to spy on each other, such as reading keypresses when a user is entering a password.

digi_owl16• 10 years ago

Something that could have been eliminated without chucking the whole of X. A starting point is the Security extension that introduce the concept of trusted and untrusted X Clients.

Thew basic thing is that different clients can see those inputs because they live inside the same root window. Give each a different root window and the issue "magically" disappears.

Tharre5• 10 years ago

Add libinput to that list, that currently makes it impossible for me to switch. I just can't reproduce the behavior of synaptics with the options libinput currently offers, and without them my mouse drives me crazy.

bitwize3• 10 years ago

Some X drivers can be made to do proper vsync discipline by setting a "NoTearing" option in xorg.conf.

pizza2342• 10 years ago

During the last year, I've solved tearing from movie playback on three different systems (nVidia discrete, AMD integrated, Intel integrated) by using the "TearFree" Xorg Driver option.

I'm not sure if this also affects the desktop environment (looks like it does from the machine I'm using). If so, this mean s that there is a working solution.

Tearing in games is an entirely different beast, as other factors come into play (most notably, latency) - besides, games have specific option[s] for that.

dandelion_lover• 10 years ago

Can anyone comment whether this problem with GUI isolation

http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.de/2011/04/linux-security....

is now solved?

TD-Linux2• 10 years ago

Yes. Some applications still use the XWayland compatibility layer, so they can snoop on each other, but not on Wayland apps. I think the only XWayland-using app that Fedora ships with is Firefox.

coldtea8• 10 years ago

After the author mentions who this is the best/easier Linux distro ever, and how Wayland mades everything so much better, there's this:

There are some things to bear in mind about using Wayland with GNOME, especially since more than a few GNOME hacks won't work anymore. For example, take desktop icons. These aren't really a GNOME 3.x thing, though you could use Gnome Tweak Tools if you can get them, but they are not supported in Wayland and never will be. I've also been unable to find a clipboard manager that works properly under Wayland. The other problem I've run into is that neither of the tint-shifting applications I use work with Wayland. Neither f.lux nor redshift do anything when running under Wayland. Judging by posts from around the Web, video playback is sometimes an issue too, though I have not actually experienced this problem. In terms of hardware support and Wayland, I would definitely suggest sticking with kernel 4.8.x or newer, which is exactly what Fedora 25 ships with. The other major gripe I have with Wayland is that it doesn't appear to support fractional scaling for HiDPI screens. It works great at 2X, which covers most screens, but there are those where 1X is too small, but 2X is too much. If you have a screen that works best at 1.5X, you might want to stick with X for now. Those are, however, relatively minor issues.

So desktop icons, no proper clipboard, no fractional HiDPI scaling, video playback issues, and those are "relatively minor issues"?

The only actually "relatively minor" issue he mentions is the lack of screen-tinting support (a la f.lux). The above seem quite major to me...

vetinari7• 10 years ago

OSX does not support fractional HiDPI scaling, but nobody made a fuss, ever. So I wonder, why is that a bad thing, when Linux doesn't do it either?

MBCook2• 10 years ago

I believe it has ever since going Retina. It wasn't always presented up front, but it was an options.

xyzzy_plugh• 10 years ago

Because these are all regressions.

rcthompson2• 10 years ago

OSX does not support fractional HiDPI scaling

Yes it does. It's right there in the system preferences.

coldtea8• 10 years ago

OS X does. So the rest of the question is moot.

Gracana2• 10 years ago

Unsupported hacks and a feature needed for an uncommon setup don't work, yeah, those are relatively minor issues.

Drdrdrq• 10 years ago

Just wondering, is clipboard an "unsupported hack" or "feature needed for an uncommon setup"? What about video?

coldtea8• 10 years ago

What among desktop icons, proper working clipboard, fractional HiDPI scaling and video playback exactly sounds like a luxury, unsupported hack, or uncommon needs to you?

Perhaps you are just an administrator spending 24/7 on the command line, but I assure none of those are uncommon...

inyorgroove• 10 years ago

Not sure about on Fedora but I cannot get Hangouts screen sharing working under Wayland/Weston on Arch, though it worked fine under X11.

rwmj2• 10 years ago

All screen-sharing and device multiplexing is broken under Wayland, and it's by design. Wayland only lets an application see its own window content and its own input events.

On the one hand this is better than the security free-for-all which is X. On the other hand it breaks a number of useful tools, and at the same time I've never (provably) seen an X exploit in the wild.

However it's the lack of network transparency which stops me from using Wayland in the foreseeable future.

TallGuyShort• 10 years ago

Does anyone know if the KDE spin will also be using Wayland by default?

nickysielicki• 10 years ago

The KDE upstream developers release a distribution called KDE Neon that is based on Ubuntu, with an extra file in /etc/apt/sources.list.d which provides significantly newer builds than what Ubuntu / Kubuntu offer.

They offer two flavors of this distribution-- one meant for end-users with the stable Plasma releases and one with bleeding-edge git builds. The bleeding-edge git build now defaults to Wayland, but the build meant for daily usage does not. AFAIK, they aren't yet recommending that downstream distributions default to wayland. Hopefully it will happen in 2017!

sho_hn• 10 years ago

I think we're on track for delivering that in 2017. We do already have users on Wayland; it's not yet a drop-in replacement feature-wise, so it's up to whether we have the subset you use already in place.

dkarapetyan• 10 years ago

This release also brings improved support for Flatpak apps in GNOME Software. Flatpak apps are designed to improve the software installation process in GNOME and Linux in general by making it easier for developers to package, and users to install, software across distributions. With Flatpaks you don't need to worry about dependency conflicts or even if your distro of choice has the app you want. Flatpaks also offer improved security and stability by sandboxing applications.

Another competing packaging format. Why?

amlib• 10 years ago

Because I can finally download the same file and run it on my distro of choice without installing it as a system package. This is not a replacement for traditional linux packages. It has it's own set of advantages and disadvantages. This may lead to a good solution for app support fragmentation on linux.

digi_owl16• 10 years ago

Good? This is the devops container boys recreating Windows' DLL hell and selling it as an "improvement".

If you want to run something without installing it as a distro package the option was always to download it as a tar-ball.

BTW, Flatpak is a Gnom/freedesktop creation. It is a reaction to distro maintainers overriding the "perfect" decisions made by upstream (Gnome devs etc), and is upstreams attempt at taking over control.

Gnome+Freedesktop is aiming to make a singular Linux desktop experience, for all the wrong reasons.

brightball• 10 years ago

He comments in the conclusion that he runs Arch on his main machine. It seems like I've been seeing a lot of comments like that from people around the web lately.

What's the draw of Arch over Ubuntu/Fedora/Mint, etc?

colemickens6• 10 years ago

All of my packages are actually up to date, since Arch is a rolling release. Even on Xenial there are packages that are behind enough that I notice due to missing features/bug fixes.

The AUR is a far superior system than PPAs and offers far more software than I've seen "natively" available for any other distribution ever.

jlgaddis• 10 years ago

You hope they're up to date. If you install / depend on very much from AUR, I'd wager you're probably missing a security update or two.

Tharre5• 10 years ago

Honestly? It's just easier 99% of the time. And I don't mean easier in the sense that you could give Arch to a linux newbie and expect it to work.

But if something breaks in Arch, I can almost certainly just open up the wiki page and fix it. Ubuntu keeps breaking stuff over and over again that I just don't know how to fix.

EDIT: Thinking about it, a lot of those issues probably also come from the fact that I usually don't reinstall my OS. With Arch is designed for, but Ubuntu/Fedora/etc. not so much.

lisivka5• 10 years ago

I usually don't reinstall my OS. With Arch is designed for, but Ubuntu/Fedora/etc. not so much.

LOL. Debian has one of the best automatic upgrading procedure long before Arch is born. RedHat/Fedora was not good at automatic upgrading between releases when an conflict happens, but it was doable with third-party Smart package manager. Now Fedora supports upgrade out of the box. I never ever reinstalled any of my Fedora or Debian distro just for upgrade.

stinkytaco6• 10 years ago

It's a great way to learn Linux.

But really, the documentation is the best of any GNU/Linux distribution, bar none. There are very few things I cannot figure out by going to the arch wiki.

uabstraction2• 10 years ago

This may be the best thing about Arch. Their crowd-sourced documentation model covers a lot of corner cases and unique configuration that many other distributions cathedral model documentation lack. The wiki format also helps it keep up with the rolling nature of Arch. Even the Gentoo wiki links to the Arch wiki in a lot of scenarios.

rvern2• 10 years ago

For every Fedora release, the Documentation Project prepares a new version of the System Administrator's Guide[1] and of five other high-quality manuals. These manuals are usually up-to-date, accurate and comprehensive, and since they are maintained in the DocBook format (which is very superior to wikimarkup for technical documents), they can be converted into HTML (for the version on docs.fedoraproject.org), PDF (for printing or viewing in a PDF reader) and EPUB (so I can put the guides on a e-reader and read them comfortably). The documentation is even translated in multiple languages.

[1] https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/25/html/System_A...

uabstraction2• 10 years ago

I personally view Arch as a "poor man's Gentoo." It's a rolling release, which is great considering the never-finished state of free software. Many projects have different release schedules, which means that stable distributions will always miss out on the newest version of X% of their packages. With Arch, those updates get pushed when they're ready, instead of pushing what works by the release deadline.

Arch also has the AUR (Arch User's Repository) which provides a lot of software that isn't available through most distributions for various reasons, such as quality, stability, maturity, patent, freedom or packaging/dependency issues. This makes customization a lot easier, at the expense of all the trust, stability, and security expected from using a distribution (I guarantee none of you actually verify the packages aren't malware when installing through AUR)

From my perspective, Arch seems a little expedient. It provides a good Desktop experience, but is not as robust as distributions based on package managers like Portage, APT, or RPM. It is a lot easier to install and set up than Gentoo though, and provides similar benefits in terms of software freshness and builds with a few different configurations - hence my assessment.

phkahler• 10 years ago

I'm not certain, but I think they're still running Firefox under Xwayland along with LibreOffice. I'd like to see them run the native Wayland versions of those apps by default.

mangix• 10 years ago

my only gripe with it is the mouse lag. I have a feeling input is not multi-threaded like in Xorg.

atombender• 10 years ago

As a Mac user who's considering switching to Linux as a desktop OS, I gave this a go inside VMware. I sincerely hope this isn't the best Linux distro in 2016, because that was... underwhelming. Not quite a trainwreck, but still pretty bad. How is Elementary or Mint?

One positive thing I can say is that they seem to have accomplished what they wanted with Wayland -- unlike earlier X-based distros I have tried out, rendering smoothness seems pretty much on par with macOS (unlike Windows, which still flickers and stutters a lot).

Fedora 25: With Wayland, Linux has never been easier (or more handsome)

Related Stories