I've Been Running GNOME Wayland On My Primary Dev System: It's Been Going Great

[phoronix]

Phoronix: I've Been Running GNOME Wayland On My Primary Dev System: It's Been Going Great

For roughly the past week on my primary development box I've been running Fedora 23 using the GNOME Wayland desktop...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-Wayland-Loving-It

[Drago]

Hi Michael, thanks for sharing your experience. One question though. Is there any subjective difference than using X11? Namely: speed, sleekness, latency, etc?

[blackout23]

Only thing missing for me is support by the proprietary NVIDIA driver and mouse confinement, locking, relative pointer movement support. I can live with it not having screen rotation and a tiny overhead, because it doesn't unredirect fullscreen windows. All of the non-gaming stuff worked for me with nouveau.

As bonus would be great if it could remember the size and position of windows. At the moment all windows open in the top left corner and I have to move my mouse more than on Xorg to go and grab them from there. This is something that's not really consistent with Gnome on Xorg, too though. Nautilus for example remembers where it was last closed and what size it had, but Gnome-Terminal doesn't.

[flexprior]

Wayland is indeed shaping up very nicely. I've also been running it on and off on Fedora 23. These are the annoyances I've run into so far:

* Flickering videos when running VLC (from rpmfusion repo)
* No nice fonts anymore (since there's no X11, there's no freetype-freeworld equivalent from rpmfusion)
* Redshift doesn't work (https://github.com/jonls/redshift/issues/260 this is a personal annoyance, but I find redshift essential, so I can only use Wayland during daytime )
* No primary selection (i.e. select text and paste with middle mouse button, it's being worked on though: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Wayla...mary_selection)

All in all, I'm fairly impressed. I was expecting the whole thing to implode when I first turned it on, but depending on your workflow and tolerance to minor bugs and omissions it might not be ready for prime time yet.

[blackout23]

Flickering videos when running VLC (from rpmfusion repo)

Try mpv which has native Wayland support. You can select the video output mode with --vo=

me@archlinux ~ % mpv --vo=
completing video outputs
caca       -- libcaca
drm        -- Direct Rendering Manager
image      -- Write video frames to image files
null       -- Null video output
opengl     -- Extended OpenGL Renderer
opengl-hq  -- Extended OpenGL Renderer (high quality rendering preset)
vaapi      -- VA API with X11
vdpau      -- VDPAU with X11
wayland    -- Wayland SHM video output
x11        -- X11 (slow, old crap)
xv         -- X11/Xv

[blackiwid]

I am pretty shure you have no big disadvantages of using wayland, even not workling redshift is for some of us a no go. The question is what gain you have. Some security stuff shure but othre than that?

I was pretty eager to get wayland, and in long run we need something like that, but on the other side since I use tiling wms, which does not have most of the problems with X than gnome maybe has, I don't be so eager to migrate that fast.

that said I am happy when maybe fedora makes it as default to force developers to migrate their stuff to it.

But again would be nice to work out the advantages of wayland more... if we want not to happen something like systemd debates or just to inform us

[CrystalGamma]

it doesn't unredirect fullscreen windows

Where does this notion come from? In native Wayland (not Xwayland tough) windows are never 'redirected' in the first place.

Wayland is indeed shaping up very nicely. I've also been running it on and off on Fedora 23. These are the annoyances I've run into so far:

* Flickering videos when running VLC (from rpmfusion repo)

When I used the wayland session (on Arch, a few months ago) I merely got some tearing (which wayland promised to remove, but this was probably going through Xwayland anyway).

* No nice fonts anymore (since there's no X11, there's no freetype-freeworld equivalent from rpmfusion)

Must be a distro problem, I didn't see any differences here on Arch (NixOS doesn't package Wayland sessions yet, otherwise I would try it out there as well).

* Redshift doesn't work (https://github.com/jonls/redshift/issues/260 this is a personal annoyance, but I find redshift essential, so I can only use Wayland during daytime )

That's a nice tool, I'm trying it out right now. BTW, this functionality also comes in physical glasses if you want to.

* No primary selection (i.e. select text and paste with middle mouse button, it's being worked on though: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Wayla...mary_selection)

As someone who is very skeptical of even just the notion that any application can read just the normal clipboard (and that's one of the least scary aspects of X11, I know) I hope this feature is disabled by default.

All in all, I'm fairly impressed. I was expecting the whole thing to implode when I first turned it on, but depending on your workflow and tolerance to minor bugs and omissions it might not be ready for prime time yet.

That was my experience ~1 year ago, when I was first greeted by a session crash :S
Do these 'minor omissions' still include the (lack of) ability to copy-paste between Wayland and X windows? That was the most annoying thing last time I tried it.

[blackout23]

I am pretty shure you have no big disadvantages of using wayland, even not workling redshift is for some of us a no go. The question is what gain you have. Some security stuff shure but othre than that?

I was pretty eager to get wayland, and in long run we need something like that, but on the other side since I use tiling wms, which does not have most of the problems with X than gnome maybe has, I don't be so eager to migrate that fast.

that said I am happy when maybe fedora makes it as default to force developers to migrate their stuff to it.

But again would be nice to work out the advantages of wayland more... if we want not to happen something like systemd debates or just to inform us

If Wayland fixes the window drag lag I and other people have with Xorg that would already be more than enough of benefit.


https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/t...n-gnome-unity/

Where does this notion come from? In native Wayland (not Xwayland tough) windows are never 'redirected' in the first place.

Because the Gnome developer who's working on mutter to implement this has said it everytime Michael did a round of Wayland/Xwayland/Xorg benchmarks. http://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum...641#post573641

[89c51]

Request for usability "benchmark" (how well it works) between gnome Enlightenment20 kde or other wayland desktop.

[drago01]

Where does this notion come from? In native Wayland (not Xwayland tough) windows are never 'redirected' in the first place.

Sure they are. On wayland everything is redirected (that's the whole point of having a compositor to begin with). And there is zero difference between Xwayland and native wayland windows when it comes to this.