Problems Being Investigated Under Wayland Itches Program, Including Gaming Performance

[beniwtv]

I don't believe.

Default Firefox and Chromium builds published by any distribution do not enable Wayland.

True, but you can enable, in Firefox's case with the environment variable "GDK_BACKEND=wayland" quite easily. And it's really a lot smoother than on X11.

[aksdb]

It's good to see good people working on next-gen technologies, specially focused on the most polished DE. Keep the good work, guy!

Wait, I thought this news was about Gnome? ;-)

[uid313]

I don't believe.

Default Firefox and Chromium builds published by any distribution do not enable Wayland.

You are right.
But you can download a Firefox nightly build and run that. It is what I do. Just download the binary and run it. No need to compile anything.

[Delgarde]

Isn't this very specific to Gnome, and not Wayland in general?

It's a bit of both. Obviously he's approaching the problems as a Gnome user/developer, and so that includes fixes for Gnome. But it also includes a lot of stuff that in theory should apply on any Wayland-based desktop... e.g. the bits around full-screen gaming are mostly at the level of the SDL libraries used by those games, not in the desktop. And a fair number of the issues are stuff that needs to be resolved in a compatible way across multiple desktops... e.g. figuring out how to support screencasting, etc.

[Sonadow]

True, but you can enable, in Firefox's case with the environment variable "GDK_BACKEND=wayland" quite easily. And it's really a lot smoother than on X11.

That is only if the distribution built it against Cairo + GTK3 and a reasonably recent version of libwayland. In minimalist distributions, Firefox is still built against GTK2, or built against GTK3 with the wayland option explicitly disabled. Like my Firefox builds on Fedora 22 are compiled against Cairo + GTK3 but must have the Wayland option disabled at build time or the build configuration fails because the build system refuses to work with any version of Wayland released before 2018.

And Chromium does not have environment variables for switching to Wayland. It needs to be rebuilt with at least four additional build options during compile time, three of which are incompatible with the standard build defaults. So you can only have:

• a build of Chromium that runs on only X11, or
• a build that runs its own graphical toolkit that works on Wayland (A bit crash-happy though. Then again, I only said that it's usable).

but not a build that does both.

Disclosure: I compile my own Wayland-compatible builds of FF and Chromium on a weekly basis.

[beniwtv]

That is only if the distribution built it against Cairo + GTK3 and a reasonably recent version of libwayland. In minimalist distributions, Firefox is still built against GTK2.

And Chromium does not have environment variables for switching to Wayland. It needs to be rebuilt with at least four additional build options during compile time, three of which are incompatible with the standard build defaults. So you can only have:

• a build of Chromium that runs on only X11, or
• a build that runs its own graphical toolkit that works on Wayland (A bit crash-happy though. Then again, I only said that it's usable).

but not a build that does both.

Disclosure: I compile my own Wayland-compatible builds of FF and Chromium on a weekly basis.

Oh I don't doubt that
On Ubuntu and Manjaro (and probably others like Fedora) it does work without needing to compile though, which is nice.

[Brisse]

True, but you can enable, in Firefox's case with the environment variable "GDK_BACKEND=wayland" quite easily. And it's really a lot smoother than on X11.

This has never worked for me. Tried it again just now. Downloaded Firefox Nightly, set GDK_BACKEND=wayland and launched Nightly. It's still running through xwayland. Why?

[Girolamo_Cavazzoni]

Fedora offers the firefox-wayland package which installs a launcher for Firefox with Wayland backend. That's most comfortable. (Same for Thunderbird, by the way.)

[Mateus Felipe]

Wait, I thought this news was about Gnome? ;-)

Exactly.

[royce]

RE: hidpi in xwayland --> https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/...e_requests/111 this patch addresses the problem head-on, and seems to work wonders with a matching patch in kwin. Looks like activity on the MR has died out though.