I’m back in the mode of being concerned for the path to mainstream Linux. From a purely Linux perspective, I think Ubuntu is making the right choice here. I, personally, haven’t encountered any issues with Wayland. But if people are encountering critical issues, it’s good that Ubuntu is rolling back for their next LTS release.
But unfortunately that does put things in a bit of a bind. In Wayland I’m encountering software working properly that wasn’t working properly in Xorg specifically because the software has moved on to Wayland. For example, Virtual Machine Manager. I’m also encountering software that hasn’t solved for Wayland yet. For example, Shutter.
I’m worried that the back and forth will be confusing to developers. I’m pretty certain the developers of VMM and Shutter will be continuing development towards Wayland, because that’s where we need to go. It’s when we expand our thinking to include closed source developers. Will they find this to be just a big ball of confusion that they’d rather avoid?
I had this concern back when Steam announced support for Linux. My concern happily seemed to be mostly misplaced. Here’s to hoping I’m just being a worry wart once again.
I switched back to Xorg when I discovered-- to my frank amazement– that Wayland doesn’t support any sort of remote desktop. No RD, no VNC, nothing. It’s still astonishing to me that they released it in mainline distributions without that functionality.
I feel like its going to be a good decision for a LTS release as there is alot more programs that work on Xorg that wayland. Wayland still lacks alot of key features that Xorg has had years to refine so its going to a uphill battle trying to come close to Xorg
Agree whole heartedly. In my haste, I forgot to mention the other bump that contributes to my worry. That Ubuntu is planning on reconsidering this decision for 18.10. To that point, I think Ubuntu would be making a huge mistake to go back to Wayland as default for 18.10, unless they were at the point where they would put Wayland on their next LTS release.
Even then, they probably shouldn’t. In my mind, Wayland should get to the point of being good enough for an LTS, and then Ubuntu should kick off the move to Wayland on an LTS release to show their commitment.
What i think ubuntu is going todo with the whole wayland vs Xorg argument is have Xorg on LTS releases and Wayland on the non LTS releases. This would allow the people who need something that is stable and secure to get that experince meanwhile the people who like to live a bit more “On the Edge” will go for the wayland version to help track down bugs, test features, etc
I’ve had problems with some programs like gparted not launching under Wayland. Switched to x and no issues. Maybe its a choice made for compatibility reasons.
Also some integrated hardware seems to behave better with xorg.
… to not upset hardware companies and endusers alike, yes. Therefor I also think this is the right decision for ubuntu and at the same time one of the reasons I have no interest in it.
Due to the nature of open-source development it will never improve if major distros don’t switch to it. But at the same time, base functionality must be present first. The inability to remote desktop in is really unacceptable. And obviously it shouldn’t go into a LTS release until it’s rock-solid.
They’re not removing the wayland-session but rather defaulting to the xorg-session. No harm in that. Those who want to use wayland just need to do two clicks once and are good to go.
The nVidia drivers for Debian and Fedora have been rock solid the past couple of years, so I refuse to believe they don’t care about Linux. Their composite manage rolls up and smokes anything anyone else has offered in a DE or GPU environment.
To the topic at hand, Wayland, and by extension Gnome, needs a lot of work. It seems like whenever they release something it’s two steps back than it was before.
Wayland, in my experience, has had terrible multimonitor support (I know, I know, comparing it to X.org?!) and the crashes tank the system HARD. It’s not fun when that happens, at least when X crashes you can just restart the service.
The future is ever promising, though. Wayland is on my laptops.
Ubuntu is almost to the point where I care about it a lot and wayland would have gotten me over the hill and so far into the woods that I woulda missed grandma’s house and bought my own house instead. But if they’re just going to use X and my system is going to continue screen tearing all over the damn place just by scrolling through steam or opening a menu I’m just going to go back to arch. I’m kind of done waiting for everyone to get their shit together and modernize. We have the GPU drivers arranged, sort of (COUGH COUGH NVIDIA), wireless isn’t an issue, snaps and flatpaks are a thing, pulse isn’t an annoying pile of shit anymore (now its just a pile of shit), ALL WE NEED IS TO GET RID OF X. COME ON ALREADY.
It’s never been about driver quality. Nvidia has always had the best Linux drivers. ATI and then AMD drivers are notoriously bad.
Linus was fully justified when he famously gave Nvidia the finger 5 years ago. They supported Linux via closed-source BLOBs only, and wouldn’t give the time of day to open-source Linux developers while they simultaneously bent over backwards to support Android. Shortly after he flipped them off, Nvidia responded by coordinating with Linux developers and the problem was (largely) addressed.
@FaunCB, you can still run Wayland on Ubuntu, it just won’t be the default for this specific release.
I’m not going to start a fight
I’m not going to start a fight
I’m not going to start a fight
Are you high? No. You are high, because so much work was put in to AMDGPU that it would not fail at stupid little shit, unlike any nvidia machine that I try to use where Gnome crashes every 20 minutes because of some fucked up code in the GPU stack or random graphical glitches in games or blender.
I wasn’t aware of this? What changed? (maybe appropriate for a separate thread) As last i tried, the nouveau drivers are (in my experience) still pretty much useless for anything other than getting a graphical desktop.
As for AMD id say, used to be, this isn’t the case anymore, though there are still numerous other issues to better address.
on the topic. Ubuntu going Xorg for LTS isn’t much of a big deal and maybe the right decision for that type of release. I likely would have made the same chose when you put together various use cases you might want to cover.
Nouveau still isn’t particularly usable, but they aren’t blaming Nvidia for that anymore, it’s just the usual open-source ennui. Agree AMD has improved too, and did not mean to imply otherwise.
on my laptops.