Hutterer: Is Wayland Ready Yet?

[Luke_Wolf]

Why? What makes you think all the software today will suddenly start working on Wayland?
KDE4, 5, Gnome3 each took about 2-3 years from their initial showing till they became stable enough for most users (KDE5 is still not there). Why would you expect Wayland to take less than that?

Now don't get me wrong, I wish some magic/strategic thinking will resolve what's left to be resolved in one fell swoop so we can all start enjoying Wayland. I'm just not expecting it.

Somewhat unrelated: would you want Wayland implementations stabilized today using EGL, with Vulkan just around the corner? Even if it's easy to switch the acceleration layer, that's still work that will need to be done and it's work that cannot be started today.

Actually Plasma 5 is there for most users, other than a few people with driver issues it's as stable as KDE SC 4.x ever was, based on my own experience and what I've observed in these forums. Before Michael posted that troll article, which shifted the dialogue, the consensus was that Plasma 5 was stable but lacking in certain features, but usable for day to day if you wished to.

As to wayland, it being ready depends on what you do and which desktop environment you run, because if you don't run games or hit a few other corner cases Gnome Shell is perfectly ready for wayland right now... today... and when it gets pointer lock support merged in it'll be ready for games, For Plasma 5 support wayland is currently in preview state and will solidify over the next year. These two pieces of software being ready and the big non-Ubuntu-proper distros switching over to them is the only real requirement for year of the wayland desktop.

Now are there still going to be things that need to be smoothed out over the coming years? Sure absolutely, but the same was true of xorg, heck there wasn't even pointer locking support until after 2011 if I'm remember this correctly.

[Guest]

Still no tablet support? I am very disappoint

(didn't read the main article) what kind of tablet support (graphics/drawing tablet or touchscreen AIO)? My touchscreen AIO ran with Wayland, and since the touchscreen worked, I assume that would also be similar to a graphics/drawing tablet input (absolute?)

[jntesteves]

That's a lot of words to say no.
Some very welcome clarifications, but it's clear that you're going to miss some stuff from X if you switch to Wayland today. That's not even unexpected, I'm not sure why most people act like Wayland should have been production ready after a couple of years in development. If you need a foundation for the next 30 years, it needs to be solid. And that takes time.

Is Microsoft Windows (Any version) ready yet?
Is Mac OS X ready yet?
Damn, is Linux ready?

By your definition, none of these are production ready, despite being used in production environments for decades.
Gnome-over-Wayland is certainly production ready, but not yet ready for market inception due to not attending the needs of core target audience as defined by the Gnome project. Wayland was production-ready a couple years into it's development and is already being used in production environments.

[uid313]

Firefox and Chromium aren't Wayland native yet...

You can still run them with XWayland though.

[SpyroRyder]

Firefox and Chromium aren't Wayland native yet...

You can still run them with XWayland though.

Aside from the fact that chromium should be (ozone was a thing that happened) both of those are also huge and unwieldy codebases that have to do custom rendering. Firefox has enough x-specific code that it can't just be rewritten easily and as there is xwayland it isnt the highest of priorities

[bug77]

Actually Plasma 5 is there for most users, other than a few people with driver issues it's as stable as KDE SC 4.x ever was, based on my own experience and what I've observed in these forums. Before Michael posted that troll article, which shifted the dialogue, the consensus was that Plasma 5 was stable but lacking in certain features, but usable for day to day if you wished to.

It's stable enough for me, too. But it still has issues like missing icons after upgrade (could be just my distro), restores windows on the wrong activity on restart and other things like these that just don't fly in 2016.

As to wayland, it being ready depends on what you do and which desktop environment you run, because if you don't run games or hit a few other corner cases Gnome Shell is perfectly ready for wayland right now... today... and when it gets pointer lock support merged in it'll be ready for games, For Plasma 5 support wayland is currently in preview state and will solidify over the next year. These two pieces of software being ready and the big non-Ubuntu-proper distros switching over to them is the only real requirement for year of the wayland desktop.

I'm pretty sure there's software beyond DEs that depends on X. That will need updating, too.

[Luke_Wolf]

It's stable enough for me, too. But it still has issues like missing icons after upgrade (could be just my distro), restores windows on the wrong activity on restart and other things like these that just don't fly in 2016.

Well sure, I'm not saying it doesn't have problems, but I could say the same things about various problems with Windows 10, like the fact that those who just upgrade instead of doing a clean install after will regularly run into this problem where the metro stuff will just crash and not work anymore resulting in things like the start menu refusing to work anymore until they restart the computer.

I'm pretty sure there's software beyond DEs that depends on X. That will need updating, too.

Sure, but only if our goal is a 100% wayland experience, and wayland being ready doesn't mean 100%, it simply means that the experience is good enough that most users can run DEs that use the wayland protocol as opposed to having to run the DE in X11 mode to work with it, which because of XWayland being a thing, doesn't mean that applications necessarily need to be ported for wayland to be ready, the experience simply needs to be good enough until said applications are ported over to using wayland,

[Delgarde]

Firefox has enough x-specific code that it can't just be rewritten easily and as there is xwayland it isnt the highest of priorities

Actually, I think that one's coming along nicely, if not ready for production yet. I've not seen any recent news on the subject, but I believe there are experimental native-Wayland builds available for some distros.

[c117152]

Wayland will be ready as soon as github.com/SirCmpwn/sway compiles and runs under Debian testing.

[CrystalGamma]

(didn't read the main article) what kind of tablet support (graphics/drawing tablet or touchscreen AIO)? My touchscreen AIO ran with Wayland, and since the touchscreen worked, I assume that would also be similar to a graphics/drawing tablet input (absolute?)

Pen/drawing tablet. The article said “Wacom tablet”, but non-Wacom graphics tablets don't work either in my experience (on GNOME).
And I too assumed that it would best be modelled as a special kind of touch, but over a year ago, a GSoC developer working on tablet support said there were too many specialities in high-end graphics tablets (tilt angle, pens/tools with serial numbers being recognized as the same on two different tablets) to model them as touch points without ridiculously complicating the touch subprotocol.