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Monthly News – October 2023 – The Linux Mint Blog
https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=4591
https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=4591
Some positive news for a lot of Linux Mint users who have been complaining about the lack of Wayland support. However, as the blog post listed, it's only going to be experimental in the next major update of Version 21. Still, it'll be good to experience the change.
Also, very clever on the naming schemes used by the Debian and Mint teams for their stable and unstable releases.
Funny times: while one distro kicks Xorg overboard, another distro finally includes Wayland as experimental.
Which is not a distro nor a display server but, like kde and gnome, a desktop environment. They are actively working on wayland support as can be seen here: https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap
So just for clarification 😇
And I recognized now that this post was about cinnamon desktop environment, which comes with mint distro, and not the distro itself. So the comparison to GNOME would have been more fitting from my site (they’ll drop Xorg support soon, but still let it be installed in post).
So, yea, and then there is XFCE where we have no real clue when Wayland support is completely ready. But it seems like it could work with something called xwayland that seem to kinda emulate Xorg on wayland 🧐
Oh yeah, I was just mentioning them in general. The most exciting feature of their last big release was being able to change the clocks' font.
I trust XFCE to bring in new features only when they are 100% sure it'll work perfectly. That DE has been nothing but rocksolid for me, and I greatly appreciate that.
Though to push them a little bit, Xorg certainly has flaws when it comes to security, and since pretty much no one will make the effort of working on these flaws anymore, Wayland should be a higher priority for any distro or DE.
XD Linux devs are such nerds...I love it. Glad to see that Wayland is becoming the standard.
I seriously don't understand the Wayland hate. I'm running it on all my machines that run displays with the exception of my HA panels running on Raspbian.
Even my work laptop is Ubuntu, Nvidia, Wayland.
Ooooh how dare you? Dontyaknow Birdie from Phoronix is struggling to run a window manager from 1983 on a ATi Rage II with Wayland???!?!??
It's here on Lemmy, too.
I was down to like -50 on a thread about an X11 vulnerability and all I wrote was, "Imagine still running X."
I'd downvote that comment too. It adds nothing to the discussion and is deliberately confrontative and superficial.
I really think some of the Linux crowd on Lemmy are way too sensitive and liberal with downvoting. That's a perfectly fine comment to make. I imagine a friend saying that to me in real life and obviously it's just an inoffensive joke/jab that shouldn't be taken at face value.
It's not like I give a flying fuck about downvotes regardless but when it comes to Wayland the X11 folks are just wrong. It's time to move on, and bitching and screaming isn't going to make the developers come back to fix it. It's Weekend At Bernies, the display manager.
Shut the fuck up, install Wayland, and help submit bug reports and make it better. It's the future.
Then you fix Wayland on all my company's damned NVidia laptops. Go on, get off your butt and fix it already! And don't you fricken dare blame NVidia. If you can't fix it, then don't you dare tell us to STFU. Fix it, or YOU STFU!
So, as it's been stated, Wayland is still not universally better than X. There are still bugs in places. Gaming is still an issue. Kwin's implementation still isn't complete enough to be reliably introduced as the default.
This is after years and years of work. Yes, making an entirely new display protocol is hard. However Wayland was introduced as the "eventual X replacement" when I was in high school. I'm 30 now. I've heard some variation of "Wayland is almost ready" since my senior year of college.
At some point it becomes exhausting. At this point when someone says something along the lines of "in a year or two, Wayland will reach a point where X.org will be a thing of the past" my immediate reaction is to call bullshit.
While I mostly agree with you, adoption and readiness follows a curve and, at some point, that curve begins to steepen. The curve ahead of us is steeper than the curve behind us.
GNOME defaults to Wayland now and is actually talking about removing X11 support. This Cinnamon post says that they will also do that in a couple of years. KDE is talking about doing it next year with Plasma 6.
Once GNOME and KDE have switched, the majority of Linux desktop users will be Wayland by default. Not only will that drive the ecosystem to fix remaining problems more quickly but it will just not matter as much.
In the next 36 months, it is going to go from “when will Wayland be ready” to “who is still using X”?
at some point they'll be right though! Right when shmayland is announced as the successor to Wayland--since Wayland is getting long in the tooth.
I dunno, i daily sway/Wayland & game without issues (including game streaming). Wayland gaining mainstream support across most distros (especially something as "slow" as debian) is proof enough that its not the eventual replacement, it is the replacement.
Unless I'm mistaken and they've fixed it recently, anything to do with synchronized frame rates still sucks on Wayland, which is terrible for anything but casual gaming.
The primary monitor is FreeSync but the secondary isn't? Welcome stutters.
Want to avoid any delay and present frames immediately, even if it costs tearing? Good luck, ask developers to update their content with specific Wayland support (haha, you wish).
My only issue with it currently is global hot keys. Push-to-talk on discord only seem to work when a xwayland window is in focus.
What I've done instead is configured a desktop hotkey that toggles the system-level microphone mute. Two birds with one stone: foolproof PTT and on the same hotkey regardless of Zoom/Meet/Teams/Slack/Discord (consulting is fun)
My sticking point with Discord in particular is that, at the moment, it's allergic to file drag and drop under Wayland. If I want to drag and drop a file attachment, I have to open the file explorer dialog and drag onto that.
This is more of a Discord being sluggish to update problem than a Wayland being unstable problem, but it's still extremely irritating.
In the meantime (how many years did it take Discord to update their electron to a not-quite-as-ancient version the last time?), one thing I'd like to see here would be the option to allow listening to global keypresses for certain apps. Yes, that makes security slightly worse I guess but I'd rather have all the other benefits of Wayland working for me while this one isn't working yet.
I don't get a chance to use Wayland too much (Nvidia sadly), but I swear I had heard KDE came up with something for this. I believe it was if you use non-alphanumeric keys, it's supposed to allow it (because you wouldn't use those in say, a password).
However, I can't confirm this - nor can I confirm if it'd work with Discord specifically.
If you use arch, there is discord_arch_electron which can build with the latest electron
I use WebCord though
I'm also annoyed with the global key issue, but for Discord, I just set a key to mute my mic system wide.
I am excited about Wayland. I'm just waiting on PopOS to run it as the default. I've tried using it but I was getting hard locks when I left my computer idle for a while.
The logs made it seem like it was a Wayland issue so I switched back to x11 for now. It hasn't happened since.
I imagine most people don't have a strong opinion one way or the other. They just want their distro and em to work well.
Wayland has worked better than X.org in my experience.
I tried i3 with Compton and Picom - both compositors for X.org - and it had major rendering issues, both on AMD (weird lagging) and NVIDIA (colour issues). Meanwhile I tried Hyprland on a spare PC and it provides a great tiled WM with both form and function. If anything'll get me on a tiled WM, it'll be Hyprland now. I'm also looking forward to Wayfire. We need a spiritual successor to Compiz.
I'm glad to hear it. I am ready to start using it. The architecture is so much more modern and secure. I'm assuming(hoping) Cosmic will be on Wayland when it's launched.
I presume so, but there might be an X.org version because of NVIDIA, who still seems to be problematic with Wayland when using their drivers.
What Remote Desktop tool works for you in Wayland? Found none Working well on Wayland (Maybe I did something wrong when I tried VNC and RDP)
This has been my first struggle with Wayland. Used to be able to enable remote desktop with a single check box in most distros, then VNC into it from a Windows PC no problem. It's a real hassle now and glitchy at best once it's up and going. I gave up and have been using Anydesk to remote access a machine, and even that wasn't simple to get going.
The only time I RDP is to my Windows machine for gaming and I've had great success with Remmina
Oh, yea, was thinking the other way around: I want my GNOME session streamed to an iPad, that I can use on the couch. (OpenSuse tumbleweed)
Yeah, can't help you there. I use Firefox tab sync to send browser sessions to other machines so I don't feel the need to RDP into anything to keep a train of thought going.
I see, of course for browsing the web, I would still use a local browser on the iPad. I would use the remotes session for learning different linux/coding things, where SSH is not enough, while I’m not gone in the bureau for several hours but sharing the evening with the family.
In the Steam Link app, you have the option to select "Start Streaming" without picking a specific game. This will stream the screen as it is without binding to a specific window.
The main caveats here are as follows:
Remmina or krdc work fine for me. Also parsec (no hosting there though). Oh if hosting, I'm not sure, but moonlight/sunshine work fine for me, even if it's not the usual desktop sharing app.
I've tried. KDE Plasma on the 4k external screen is giving me big black blocks to the right of windows I move or for the launcher... Like a shadow. Flickering trails of black block shadows if I move windows around. The latest nvidia driver did finally fix the mouse leave trails of black boxes, though. No idea if it works for Gnome, I can't stand Gnome's layout, workflow, and window management.
Can't replicate your results here. I play on Wayland, and deliberately force some games to run natively on Wayland (SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland) and so far I haven't noticed any framerate changes except statistical noise.
Even the FPS monitor numbers show the same but there is visible lag when playing on wayland as against X11 (you'll perhaps need a side-by-side comparison to notice). This isn't just my observation, it's well-known in the linux gaming community
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/n-eq6SBfGfo?si=yErL8VuItnvk5D8c
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I was perfectly confident that the Mint team would get around to Wayland support, when it was good and ready. By the time they get it implemented and set as the default, it'll work great.
I like the careful approach. Yes, it's going to take longer. But when it finally arrives, it'll work.
It was always just a matter of time. A LOT of time in the case of anything wayland related apparently.
Its about time! Finally, I've been waiting a long time for this.
I wonder what will happen with the mate desktop? I know xfce is getting wayalnd support so mate might be the odd one out
No, MATE announced Wayland support a while back. Cinnamon was the odd one out until now
No, MATE announced Wayland support a while back.
I know progress on that has been slow, but I look in on it every now and again and work does seem to be steady in porting their core components.
I'm not sure if they're settled on a compositor yet. There was talk (from the Ubuntu MATE devs) about using Mir, but I haven't heard anything about it in ages, and the Mir suggestion was at a time when wlroots was in a much less mature position. With XFCE, Budgie and Raspberry Pi OS all now going the wlroots direction, it's not inconceivable that MATE will go the same way.
I often reread stuff while imagining I'm someone with no knowledge of the topic, the title of this post is a good example of how hilarious things become.
Anyone know where the sources for this are? I can't find many references to Wayland in the main Cinnamon repo, at least using GitHub's search.
I wanted to check if they use wlroots for this or are writing yet another compositor from scratch.
yet another compositor from scratch
it's a good thing to have multiple implementations of compositors. that avoids bad practices or making compositor specific programs that wouldn't work with other compositors.
I don't think there are many "compositors from scratch" are there? GNOME and KDE both have their own, Cinnamon uses a GNOME fork, and almost everything else I can think of is wlroots based. The only other one I can think of which isn't is Mir, which has been around almost as long as Wayland has.
Can someone explain to me what Wayland is? I don't fully understand I read wikis on it but I'm still new to a lot of this
The way for your desktop to communicate with the hardware.
It used to be X11 - A server-client architecture, which meant your desktop was effectively just a client that told the server what to do. The server was the one doing the drawing
Wayland is just a protocol, defining how programs and desktop should communicate with each other - without a middleman that was X11 server. The desktop does the actual drawing here.
Software that displays programs on screen. X11 goes way back and is inefficient. Wayland is the new standard but is seeing regular improvement and updates. I know Fedora have already moved to Wayland. I think Ubuntu have now too. Mint going this direction is good news.
TLDR, software that displays apps on screen. X11 is old and awkward. Wayland is new and better but has been slowly becoming standard.
Wayland is basically the graphics system. Technically, Wayland is just the protocol and a “compositor” that implements Wayland acts as the display server—the thing that draws and manages the application windows on your screen.
Wayland replaces X11 ( the X Window System ), if you know what that is.
This is important when windows inevitably dies (subscription-based Windows 12?!) and linux mint gets flooded. Better have the "new" thing from the start
Windows won't die what are you talking about? Windows 12 subscriptions are a) just a rumor and b) not for the entire os, just certain features like AI and stuff
Trust me bro, Windows is gonna die any day now
-- Linux forum people, for as long as I can remember
I heard there will be a ”windows 365". If windows goes full online like office 365 then the underlining OS could be everything Linux.
You know like 70% of desktops run Windows right? That's not what I would call "dead". Almost every company out there uses Windows on their computers.
Don't get me wrong, I would love it if Windows died but there are no signs at all of that happening any time soon.
Other than me, I don't think I've ever seen a person, business, etc, in the wild running Linux.
Even business signs/billboard I've seen run Windows.