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Happy new year of the Linux Desktop! (linux.community)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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[–] 108 points 2 years ago (6 children)

I firmly believe this will be the year of the Wayland Desktop. Everything is shaping up to finishing off the transition for regular people and further stabilisation of the Wayland desktop space.

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  • [–] 31 points 2 years ago* (3 children)

    This won't be the year of the Wayland desktop for me unless I can afford to replace my Nvidia card this year. I'll never buy one again, but I've still gotta suffer with the one I have a bit longer.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    By the time you're ready to buy a new card, Nvidia might be working well under wayland. They've already made significant changes in the past couple of years, like implementing GBM and hardware accelerated XWayland. To my understanding, this MR will also fix some remaining issues in the future. I don't know how much more work needs to be done after that, but just the fact they are cooperating with the free software ecosystem is a good sign.

    Perhaps more importantly, the free nouveau driver can now experimentally reclock nvidia gpus from the 2000 series and newer. With this breakthrough it is possible that nouveau + nvk will be able to compete with the proprietary driver in the near future. If/when we have a well-supported free driver, we will probably have proper wayland support as well.

    I'm not really in a hurry to switch to Nvidia. I've been quite happy with my AMD cards so far. But it's definitely a good thing to have the option to buy from any vendor.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Oh yeah, I'm also keeping a eye on that. Every time I see nvidia pop up in my updates, I try logging into Wayland and doing my usual tasks. If it starts working, that'll just let me extend the life of this card. I'll probably still strongly consider switching flavors with my next card.

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  • [–] 24 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    As someone using Wayland on a HiDPI screen it's not a great experience with legacy apps. You can't completely rely on application-controlled scaling since not all apps support it and if you switch to system-wide scaling everything looks like crap.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    Which apps? I've discovered recently Electron apps can enable Wayland support with a command line argument.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    But isn't that still on par with xorg where you can't have any fractional scaling?

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    As someone who dabbles in Linux but is ultimately a regular people, what’s the advantage of this?

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  • [–] 27 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    A unified, bug-free, performant and featureful display stack to ensure people can use things like Variable refresh rate, which, iirc, is an impossibility on X11.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    That’s pretty awesome. I imagine this would be a huge advantage with the growth of Linux gaming too

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Wait, what? I'm on PopOS, with Nvidia GPU, and my "g-sync" VRR works fine.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    PopOS uses GNOME which hopefully uses Wayland

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    I can confirm that PopOS 22.04 is definitely running on X. wayland is officially coming when Cosmic releases.

    That said, I see that Wayland is "available" if I want to manually switch to it - but it is definitely disabled as a default (and current) setting.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    This is what wayland said every year lol.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    Source?

    We have been hearing about “The Year of the Linux Desktop” for 20 years I think and Linux has less than 5% share.

    In contrast, I do not remember hearing “The Year of the Wayland Desktop” until recently. I have been hearing “Wayland is the future” forever but it has been correct the whole time.

    By the time we enter 2025, I am not sure there will be a major desktop environment that does not support Wayland and many distros and DEs will be Wayland by default or even Wayland only. That is already happening. Valve may have ditched X by then and it feels like that is where most new Linux users are going to come from. It seems quite unlikely that Wayland market share on the Linux Desktop will be less than 75%.

    I am not saying this is “The Year of the Wayland Desktop” but I would feel foolish publicly betting against it.

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  • [–] -3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I don't understand this fetish. Every day I read about problems people have with Wayland, while I've been using X for the past 15 years without any issues.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Wayland is better at segmenting each app. On X any app could potentially see/record what happen on the entire screen while on Wayland that requires you do manually grant the rights. Similar to how macOS is requesting you to give each app the possibility to record your screen or not.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    That's an improvement. But risk = impact * probability. Realistically, the probability of installing such an app from repos is virtually non-existent. My point is that Wayland comes with some improvements, but I've been seeing comments like the one I replied to for almost 15 years, as if Wayland will revolutionize Linux desktop. It won't. Probably most users won't see any difference, except for bugs caused by the migration.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I have been using X since 1992 with lots of issues. I do not understand the fetish with X11 and why people cling to it so tightly.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    If that was true, we would be on Wayland for years. But in reality, it proves minor improvements versus heavy investments to migrate from X. And that's why it's still a fetish and not a standard.

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