Canonical Reportedly Not Planning To Enable Wayland-By-Default For Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Canonical Reportedly Not Planning To Enable Wayland-By-Default For Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

Since the short-lived Ubuntu 17.10 GNOME + Wayland experience, the Ubuntu desktop has still been using the trusted X.Org Server session by default. While Ubuntu 19.04 will soon be shipping and the Ubuntu 19.10 development cycle then getting underway, don't look for any Wayland-by-default change to be around the corner...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=No-Wayland-Default-20.04-LTS

[Azpegath]

C'mon, are they non-binary, genderfluid, testicle- or womb-bearing people of non-descriptive origin or MICE?! Just risk a little and get it done!

[treba]

Hm this is unfortunate
Have been using GS-Wayland for years know and IMO we are very close to feature parity (and in more and more areas even better, e.g. HIDPI with fractional scaling).

And the feature I'm looking for the most is the security benefit. Ubuntu doesn't seem to be that interested in Flatpak anyways, but proper app isolation like on adroid/iOS is simply not possible with X11 (and no, starting an own X11 server for every app, breaking even the clipboard, is no viable solution)

[bwat47]

I agree with their decision. It's just not ready yet IMO.

IMO, at the very least all default applications (including Firefox) should be wayland native.

Also, gnome on wayland still has a giant deal-breaking flaw. No crash recovery. Any gnome-shell crash loses your entire session.

[zoomblab]

6 months prior to a major release are not nearly enough for such pervasive changes. 6 months are barely enough just for testing. These class of changes need to be planned from now for the next next LTS and applied immediately in the release after the LTS, i.e., 20.10 IF they want to have it ready for 22.04 LTS. Btw, the same holds for other foundation shifts such as replacing pulseaudio with pipewire, apt with snaps, etc. These things should better be planned from now. My opinion ofc.

[Creak]

Well on Fedora I happen to try Wayland from time to time. I still have two major pain points: file drag and drop doesn't work in Nautilus, screensaver (a.k.a. turn off your display after 3 min in GNOME) doesn't work as well; I just have a black screen with the cursor still shown, the display is never turned off.

IMO these two features are pretty important in a desktop environment.

[bug77]

So if we're lucky, Wayland begins to ship by default a year from now.
I just looked up some dates: this time next year Wayland will be 11. That's about half the age at which X was when Wayland set to displace it because it was old and unwieldy.
This just proves I was right back then when I said it won't be easy to displace such an entrenched solution. People booed me at the time.

[Khrundel]

Currently some dxvk games (dark souls 2 for example) don't run in wayland session even through xwwyland, smplayer show mpv detached unless worst output mode (xv) is selected. New and fancy freesync support works with xorg only. No, wayland still far from production state.

[JMB9]

This is fantastic News - as in recent times it was frequently reported that Wayland is ready - and there are distros which do ship with Wayland being the default - but features which should be implemented long before thinking about the switch are still queued to get implemented.
It is similar to ZFS lacking an FS checker and being deployed by several SUN sites (not the one I had been part in).
So I will be happy to work with Wayland when ready - and most programs - especially the decisive ones like Browsers, Office application etc. really feel good on it. But it has a long time going.
After my experiences I would hope for 24.04 LTS - if all goes well - but it may be much sooner. I hope Ubuntu will prepare for the necessary tweaks, but typically those distros are good at it (even coming along with GNOME).
It is interesting to see that "new" is regarded as synonym for "better" - and features doesn't matter much.
I like changes - if the advantages outweight the disadvantages for everyone - but I would prefer to be able to keep old workflows and UI behaviour which just worked.
So Wayland yes - when ready to be much superior than X.org from a user's point of view.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

I using Wayland for a half year, but until at least XWayland get updated to version that support fullscreen Vulkan applications, it's shouldn't be enabled by default. PipeWire also need to get properly tested and deployed by default.