Fresh Fedora 23 GNOME Shell Wayland Tests

[Bandul9876]

this is the great thing to do.

[gufide]

I would like a perfect 144 FPS tear-free desktop please! I hope (expect) that will be possible! Right now it's definitely not rendering in 144 FPS, only the mouse cursor is.

Well... With KWin (and a custom config) I'm running my desktop at 144 fps, most of cases tear free and running on X11. With Wayland it should be even better (less input lag, no choppy resize, every case tear free)

[magika]

I would like a perfect 144 FPS tear-free desktop please! I hope (expect) that will be possible! Right now it's definitely not rendering in 144 FPS, only the mouse cursor is.

As already mentioned above KWIN is able to do that. The compositior in question GNOME's Mutter, however, always renders things at a lower fps.

[xeekei]

There is no tearing (except sometimes, when it maybe messes up for a second), but it stutters, and looks the same as on my 60 Hz monitor. The mouse cursor however is noticebly smoother on the 144 Hz one.

I didn't know that KWin could handle it, that sounds very cool. GNOME Wayland is almost here though, I'll just wait. Thanks, guys!

[Luke]

I just tested the GNOME on Wayland session in Debian Unstable with gnome3.18. Had to start the session from GDM3 because Lightdm cannot handle Wayland. Basically worked, all the GNOME apps worked and so Iceweasel.

Unfortunately there was a dealbreaker bug: No filemanager could be made to put icons on the desktop, which is mandatory in my setup! Nautilus ran without issue, except that turning on desktop icons in gnome-tweak-tool was ignored. Oh well, doing that in X makes nautilus 3.18 segfault. Nemo segfaulted and would not open. Caja would open but could not be resized except by fullscreening-and segfaulted if space between folders was clicked on. Launching it with the XDG desktop environment set to MATE (like I do in IceWM) so it will manage the desktop causes a segfault.

The segfaults are exactly the same in a Weston session fired up with weston-launch from a VT, so they are not a GNOME issue at all. GNOME apps work in Wayland, except for the inablity of Nautilus to manage the desktop. It's taking so long to get Wayland ready for end users I worry it will be "obsolete" before any major distro is using it as a default.

[magika]

It's taking so long to get Wayland ready for end users I worry it will be "obsolete" before any major distro is using it as a default.

What would make it obsolete? Wayland2? X2?

[Luke_Wolf]

It's taking so long to get Wayland ready for end users I worry it will be "obsolete" before any major distro is using it as a default.

It is most certainly not taking "so long", it's just people like yourself are exceedingly impatient and don't seem to get that literally the entire ecosystem had to be shifted in order to bring wayland about, and furthermore it is arriving precisely on what's been the expected time for quite some time now, pretty much all of the major desktops other than XFCE have wayland available in preview form, and they should solidify over 2016 with distros beginning to switch for their 2H2016 releases.

[Luke]

It is most certainly not taking "so long", it's just people like yourself are exceedingly impatient and don't seem to get that literally the entire ecosystem had to be shifted in order to bring wayland about, and furthermore it is arriving precisely on what's been the expected time for quite some time now, pretty much all of the major desktops other than XFCE have wayland available in preview form, and they should solidify over 2016 with distros beginning to switch for their 2H2016 releases.

I still remember Ubuntu devs speculating about Wayland by default on their next release well before they bailed out and started up their Mir project. Perhaps distros (the sources of these sort of reports) underestimated just how much stuff is hardcoded to X or otherwise dependent on it? Some things look easier than they actually are with this.

OK, I will provide more examples from my own testing. Some say an application need only use a toolkit that supports Wayland, such as GTK3. It's not quite that simple. MATE has Wayland on the roadmap and now supports GTK3 in versions 1.10 and later. OK, I fired up Weston and then fired up some MATE apps. Got the above-mentioned inablity to resize Caja, though Nautilus worked perfectly except for no desktop icons. Stuff like mate-panel would segfault, apparently because it contains code that in the old GNOME 2 days was hardcoded directly against X and not against GTK. Some MATE apps such as Atril also have this issue, others like EOM do not, in fact EOM works perfectly in Wayland. I was REALLY hoping to get a mate-session going with Weston as the window manager, since the roadmap for Wayland support by MATE 1.12 only mentions supporting GTK3 and developing a Wayland compositor. OK, I used a GTK3 build and used Weston for the compositor but with no panel and no usable Caja this has a lot of work left to do.

KDE supports Wayland, so I fired up Kdenlive in a Weston session, it works but there is one "papercut" bug: Attempting to drag the file chooser from one part of the screen to another drags the main window instead! No dealbreaker, but bugs like this and that non-resizeable Caja window just seem to abound. Still, if I ever have to edit video with a broken X server I can do it, and Weston is more than good enough right now for getting a simple GUI environment for recovering a system where X won't start, thanks to Nautilus working and Pluma working. Its getting to the point that I can now have a GUI on two VT's, one of them being my X environment and the other from weston-launch, but sometimes a freeze on the Wayland side while doing this turns into a total system lockup.

I thought the audio editor Audacity might be an issue because I remember in the old days having issues with X extensions Ubuntu Dapper didn't have, but got lucky: audacity 2.0.6 was slow to start, looked like it would not come up with lots of error text in terminal but finally opened and worked, presumably xwayland is good enough for audacity to work, it uses the WXgtk toolkit.

Maybe getting one DE (probably GNOME with it's extension system) all the way ready for default use will break the ice. I just wish there was an easier way to get the gnome session running while Lightdm is still installed (though shut down from the systemd command line). Sometime I will have to benchmark GNOME with the bottom panel and applications menu extensions on Wayland vs MATE on X with Marco on my little Intel Atom Netbook. If GNOME's heavier main code can catch or pass MATE on X for speed of opening apps and general interaction on a very low powered machine they will really have something. Until now GNOME and especially Cinnamon have been entirely too heavy for that netbook.,

[Luke]

What would make it obsolete? Wayland2? X2?

Obsolete would more take the form of things like reliance on external code that had since been deprecated, or having taken so long to evolve that like X it was full of legacy code that had once been needed but now was no longer useful. I've seen that complaint before, it's not my original idea but I can see why this would come up. Also, could another big shift in small form factor interfaces, comparable to Crapple's iphone coming out, throw another wrench in the works for those kinds of devices? If it does, we will need to make damned sure we don't make another Window 8 style mistake in responding to it.

[Nobu]

Wayland is a pretty simple API (library source only being a little over 1KB and the protocol itself a little over 85KB)--shouldn't be too difficult to make a wrapper if mobile interfaces suddenly change.