Fedora Workstation 41 to No Longer Install Gnome X.org Session by Default

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-41-No-GNOME-Xorg-Install

by mikece • 2 years ago

54 59 2 years ago

phoronix.com

voxadam• 2 years ago

Related: Dropping GNOME's X11 session approved for Fedora 41 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39624492

1-6• 2 years ago

Although Wayland is more modern, it’s been nothing but trouble for me on older hardware (and even some new hardware).

I’d prefer non-smooth scrolling any day over a computer screen that doesn’t come back after sleep.

dralley• 2 years ago

a computer screen that doesn’t come back after sleep

Given all of the known issues with "modern sleep" in modern laptops, I'd hesitate to blame this on Wayland. Sounds more like a driver problem.

When PulseAudio took over, a lot of "PulseAudio problems" were actually bugs in audio drivers that had previously been papered over but were now exposed. Not to say that PulseAudio was perfect in those days, but it got a lot of blame for things that weren't their fault. Wayland seems to be in a similar position sometimes. I get that people don't care all that much about the distinctions if "Xorg" works for them and "Wayland" is broken, but they do still exist.

ParetoOptimal• 2 years ago

Given all of the known issues with "modern sleep" in modern laptops, I'd hesitate to blame this Wayland. Sounds more like a driver problem.

I was about to post "then why does sleep work fine for X11" but I think I recently had issues with it as well. There was a piece of time though where sleep worked fine on X11 and not on wayland for the same device.

It could be the nvidia driver at fault once again though, I'll have to retest things and see if both work with Nouveau.

Also Wayland is fixing it, but FPS games are buggier and have much higher frametime latency by default. After disabling compositor, the frametime latency is only slightly higher but I get weird frame glitches/flickering.

Everything else Wayland works great for and in the case of waydroid gives extra features, but having everything work and be stable is a lot of stress off my plate.

circusfly2• 2 years ago

Given all of the known issues with "modern sleep" in modern laptops

I don't use sleep or hibernate, not even on work Windows laptops, there's always some ensuing flakiness that occurs. My machines are either running or shutdown.

tigeroil• 2 years ago

Funnily enough I had a similar issue that only occurred after switching to Wayland, that turned out to be due to a bad DisplayPort to HDMI adaptor.

Replaced it with a new one and it now works fine.

nottorp2• 2 years ago

Yeah that attitude gave us that piece of art called systemd.

Last week a secondary hard drive from a headless machine of mine croaked. Guess what, the whole machine refused to boot and be accessible by ssh in spite of the boot/OS disk being a-ok. I had to plug in a monitor and keyboard for no good reason.

You're probably going to blame Ubuntu, I guess...

Gigachad• 2 years ago

Macbooks are the only devices I've seen return from sleep properly. Windows and linux devices all seem to be filled with issues. I'd sooner blame the actual hardware than wayland.

cogman105• 2 years ago

Ah, Nvidia drivers

There's a bunch of settings that need tweaking and that aren't on by default. It's very annoying.

Here's the document to resolve them.

https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/460.67/READ...

bloopernova3• 2 years ago

If you're not suspending or hibernating, do you need any of those settings?

CoastalCoder• 2 years ago

INTPenis3• 2 years ago

I started using Fedora as my desktop just as they defaulted to wayland and honestly the transition has barely been noticed by me.

The biggest issue a few years ago was screen sharing not working in video metting apps like Teams. But I can't even remember when that was anymore.

So the team has really done well from my perspective.

csdreamer7• 2 years ago

Teams is unusually bad on Linux the last time I used it. I had it refuse to even work on GNOME Xorg.

littlestymaar• 2 years ago

Interesting, I've never had any issues specific to Linux (MATE Xorg though, not GNOME or Wayland) when using teams. over the past two years.

The software is pretty bad overall, like very slow and clumsy UX, but it's not any better on Windows…

circusfly2• 2 years ago

I use it all the time, from within the web browser, both Edge and Chrome, Teams works great, including screen sharing, on X. I haven't tried Wayland to compare. I'm on Kubuntu.

INTPenis3• 2 years ago

It's been very stable for a while now, I actually installed it as an app in Chromium and run it directly from sways dmenu somehow. It just works™

Of course it's still atrocious when it comes to copying content in chat messages but I think that's on all platforms.

bloopernova3• 2 years ago

On Fedora, I had to compile Emacs to use GTK rendering.

VSCode needed some custom launch parameters with the insiders version:

  code-insiders --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --enable-features=WaylandWindowDecorations --ozone-platform=wayland --disable-features=WaylandFractionalScaleV1

Factorio runs really well with:

  SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland __GL_SYNC_TO_VBLANK=yes ~/Games/factorio/bin/x64/factorio

So some slight annoyances, but nothing really unusual for anyone who's used Linux desktops for a long time.

INTPenis3• 2 years ago

Oh yeah of course the last time I logged out and into Xorg was for a game. But again, that was years ago now.

westurner• 2 years ago

vscodium flatpak fonts are already fine; IME vscodium works with font scaling fine out of the box. There's a vscode flatpak issue: "Feature: add optional Wayland support" https://github.com/flathub/com.visualstudio.code/issues/471#...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39625917#39637408

nightowl_games• 2 years ago

I like that fedora keeps the ball moving forward. It's important that someone is always pushing. I switched to fedora for pipewire for a bit. Eventually went back to Linux Mint

eadmund3• 2 years ago

Please, please, please don’t require Wayland yet. It’s still not ready for prime time.

Consider that it may not be appropriate to require it ever. Rather than just implementing the window manager protocol, as X does, Wayland requires its compositors to implement a huge amount of functionality. It is going to reduce the ability for small window manager to innovate, and make the Linux desktop less interesting.

Maybe at some point there will be a decent way for non-C, independent window managers to coexist with Wayland. But I don’t believe we’re there yet. It’s just not ready.

tapoxi• 2 years ago

The Xorg team is now developing Wayland, there's no future for Xorg.

For independent, smaller compositors the Sway team has developed wlroots, a library that brings most of the requirements of a compositor: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots/

eadmund3• 2 years ago

The problem with wlroots is giant C library. A nice thing about X is that it is feasible to use directly from non-C languages such as Common Lisp.

LorenDB3• 2 years ago

Nobody's requiring Wayland. You can still daily-drive X just fine if you want to use i3 or some other WM. This discussion is about defaulting to Wayland. This move makes sense, because Wayland is the way forward, and contrary to your statements, it's perfectly ready for prime time. If you want to switch to a WM, it doesn't make a big difference whether your distro shipped with X or Wayland; for the normie user who is going to use the default option, setting Wayland as the default is a smart move.

eadmund3• 2 years ago

Nobody's requiring Wayland.

Yet. Defaulting to it is one step on the path towards removing support for X and independent window managers forever.

I deeply, deeply care about running an independent window manager. A minimal X window manager is a page of code: https://github.com/mackstann/tinywm/blob/master/tinywm.c (yes, plus xlib); a minimal Wayland compositor is tens of thousands of lines of code.

contrary to your statements, it's perfectly ready for prime time

These comments are full of folks mentioning issues. Wayland does not support my window manager; thus it is demonstrably not ready for prime time for me.

Wayland is the way forward

It may actually be. I’m not as opposed to Wayland as I may sound! But do you understand how you and other Wayland advocates sound — like advocates? ‘Wayland is the way forward’; ‘there's no future for Xorg’; these things are arguably true, but they are also rather cruel to say (a bit like ‘inevitably you and everyone will die’: it really is true, but it’s also not at all a nice thing to say).

I do think that Wayland or something very like it may be the way forward, but it needs to be an evolution, not a revolution. I know that the party line is that that’s not possible, but I suspect that rather than not possible it is just very hard. It’s always easier to greenfield, and it is always hell to be 100% backwards compatible.

But that’s what it needs to be.

E39M5S622• 2 years ago

What is your argument for why it's not ready for prime time?

yjftsjthsd-h3• 2 years ago

It is perhaps worth pointing out that most of the rest of this comment section is people either saying how great it is that this progress is being made... or describing all the fun little ways that Wayland still breaks things for them. I suppose it depends on what you mean by ready for prime time, but "still breaks things" seems like a defensible position.

zamalek• 2 years ago

Fedora is a bleeding edge distro, it is definitely the wrong choice if you care about ongoing support for legacy software.

LorenDB3• 2 years ago

I've been daily-driving Plasma Wayland for probably 3 years by now and I have had very few problems overall. Even given the poor state of Wayland with Nvidia (my work machine uses Nvidia graphics), I don't really have a lot of complaints. It generally just works.

okasaki• 2 years ago

This type of comment just seems totally unreal to me to the point where it's making me angry.

I have a laptop with a nvidia card and nothing works. From the installers crashing, windows freezing, full desktop freezes, awful performance, awful battery life under Wayland, every glitch under the sun from minor lines appearing on the screen to potentially physically damaging glitches like rapid flickering, and every other issue you could possibly imagine: it happened.

I mean it happened in like the week total combined that I was testing GNOME/KDE. Probably if I spent any more time on it my computer would explode?

Meanwhile X11 with i3 just fucking rocks. Smooth and stable like nothing else.

bootsmann• 2 years ago

Thats weird, how did you install the Nvidia drivers?

LorenDB3• 2 years ago

Well, I'm certainly sorry for your awful experience, but I do get along pretty good on Nvidia plus Wayland. I have noticed that graphics do tend to be less glitchy when they are drawn to the screen with the iGPU, but in general I don't have a ton of graphical problems. When I do I just feel mad at Nvidia, because I think they are the real problem here.

Tmpod2• 2 years ago

I'm sorry to raise your blood pressure (;p), but this laptop (bought over 3 years ago) hasn't seen anything else other than KDE Plasma, the first couple of months with X, but with Wayland since then. I have seen none of the issues you've listed, nor did I notice any performance or battery life degradation with the switch, quite the opposite -- while the battery life seemed to have remaining pretty much the same, performance (specially with multi-monitor setups) is much better. My laptop also has dual GPUs (discrete Nvidia and integrated Intel) and I notice no differences between running with nvidia completely turned off and in optimus hybrid mode.

My only issue is, ironically enough, also with multi-monitor setups, where the layout and main monitor selection seems unstable and sometimes changes when waking up from sleep. I've been following KDE's development (through Nate's incredible blog[0]) and I'm pretty sure these problems have been fixed with the new 6.0 release.

But yeah, you seem to be particularly affected by bugs, sorry for the experience. What Nvidia card do you have? And driver versions?

[0] https://pointieststick.com

E39M5S622• 2 years ago

Good. While Wayland isn't without issues, there are at least developers working on the core set of protocols and applications/libraries.

samueloph• 2 years ago

The only issue I have with wayland is that screen sharing from slack does not work (when using the app).

bitvoid2• 2 years ago

IIRC, that's because Slack uses an older version of Electron/Chromium.

argulane• 2 years ago

It does not work because they intentionally disable pipewire support. You can binary patch the slack executable to enable wayland screen sharing https://askubuntu.com/a/1492207

IshKebab• 2 years ago

Yeah screen sharing seems to be Wayland's biggest weakness. It doesn't work for me in Chrome, Firefox, OBS Studio, or VMWare Horizon (which explicitly says "Wayland is not supported").

Most of the others are just buggy, e.g. it "works" in Chrome but the window selector always shows the file browser icon at like 10x size so I can't select a window.

This is on RHEL 8, so maybe they've fixed things in the mean time.

Tmpod2• 2 years ago

I can't speak for Chrome nor VMWare, but Firefox and OBS have received "Wayland native" screen capturing functionality, through XDG portals and Pipewire, as far as I'm aware.

As a side-note, I've recently discovered a really cool project[0] that enables incredibly fast screen capture for OpenGL and Vulkan applications, mostly tailored to games. Tried it with a bunch of stuff and it works much better than both X's and Pipewire's screen grabbing. I can actually capture videos at my monitor's native refresh rate (144Hz).

[0] https://github.com/nowrep/obs-vkcapture

AdmiralAsshat• 2 years ago

I assume this would be only in the default Fedora workstation w/ GNOME DE, right? That would certainly break the Cinnamon spin that I use on my Fedora installs, since it's still using X.org.

vimsee• 2 years ago

I assume this is for GNOME.

When speaking of Fedora Workstation or Fedora as a whole, then GNOME is the implied desktop environment.

Any other desktop environment is delivered via what they call "spin". I guess since you are using the Cinnamon spin, you probably already knew that, though. :)

ndiddy• 2 years ago

The last time I tried Wayland (couple weeks ago), I noticed that picture-in-picture in Firefox didn't work correctly because Wayland doesn't allow applications to say "this window should show up on top of all other windows". The workaround in KDE was to go into the window management settings and add a special rule for Firefox picture-in-picture windows.

I looked up why this was and it turned out that there was a proposal for picture-in-picture (https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m...) that had been stuck at an impasse for years. The Gnome developers want to make the picture-in-picture windows have controls rendered by the compositor and make them unable to receive input (I find this somewhat ironic given Gnome's reluctance to have the compositor draw server-side window decorations), while the KDE developers want to make them able to receive input and draw their own controls.

I feel like this is my problem with Wayland in a nutshell. It requires every single interaction a user can have with an application to be hashed out through a years-long bureaucratic process.

yogorenapan• 2 years ago

It’s possible to do in Hyprland with window rules

butz• 2 years ago

Qt5 on GNOME desktop still has some issues on Wayland. They will probably linger around until applications migrate to Qt6. And that might take a while.

jhoechtl• 2 years ago

What greeter are they using? Are greeters Wayland only and what compositor are they using?

this_user• 2 years ago

Arch just updated KDE to version 6 and has enabled Wayland by default. For some reason, mouse handling is just terrible. At first it is sluggish and imprecise, and then it jumps all over the place. Half an hour of fiddling with the settings couldn't get it to where it actually felt right again, so I went back to Xorg. It certainly seems like there is still work to be done on Wayland.

Fedora Workstation 41 to No Longer Install Gnome X.org Session by Default

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