Google Chrome 50 Released With Wayland Support

[Krejzi]

Browser support is the only thing keeping me from switching over to Wayland (gnome-shell) full-time. Under native X11, I have a choice between several performant browsers, with accelerated compositing. [tear-free 60Hz scrolling is something very difficult to give up once you're used to it!] Even Epiphany, which officially "works" under Wayland, doesn't. The situation may be better under KF5, and I believe the EFL Webkit port does support hw accel under Wayland, maybe it's time to try the new Enlightenment/Wayland...

Epiphany isn't yet accelerated on wayland. It's a work in progress. You can track it at https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=115803

[Krejzi]

Sadly, it won't run under wayland. I've installed 50.0.2661.75 and ldd shows that chrome isn't linked to wayland libraries, but it is linked to gtk+2 ones, which won't work under pure wayland.

[lakerssuperman]

Works for me, and all existing Linux users.

Wayland does not, even after 10 years of development. It is better on paper and fixes many things that are not very nice in X, but since X is NOT broken, no one has been forced to upgrade and Wayland provides very little, since it is only slightly better on the technical side, but is missing features (which means broken in real life).

I would respectfully disagree, given that I'm writing this from Fedora 23 using the Wayland session and everything, by and large, works just like I was in the Gnome Shell X session. 10 years, in the grand scheme of things isn't that long of a period of time to introduce something that is as big as an entirely new display server.

With regard to X, I guess it depends on what your definition of broken is. I consider X broken due to the overhead it brings to do modern compositing, tearing, security issues and general headaches that using X can entail.

Feature parity is an interesting topic as well because Wayland is a protocol and X is a server. The Wayland protocol is pretty solid for doing the general daily tasks on a computer. Yes, it still needs a few things, but it is in good shape. The problem becomes that the individual programs and desktop environments have to adapt their software to use the Wayland protocol which means tossing out a bunch of X stuff and redoing it to work in the Wayland world. It's not that those things can't be implemented, just that they haven't.

I'm greatly looking forward to living in an all Wayland world (desktop environment, browser typical desktop programs) for the smooth, tear free secure experience that it brings. I can't wait to try out Fedora 24 when it comes out to see how far Wayland has come from F23 that I'm running. I'll probably also try Gnome 3.20 on Antergos when it hits to play around with it.

[unixfan2001]

X is NOT broken

That's news to me.
I guess if you like sluggishness, tearing and inherent insecurity, it's indeed not broken...

[asdfblah]

I don't think nVidia ever cared enough about Wayland to make VDPAU not dependent of X

Mesa (? I don't know much about the graphics stack...) + radeon supports both VDPAU and VAAPI. I suppose it doesn't really depend on X there, does it?

[s_j_newbury]

Mesa (? I don't know much about the graphics stack...) + radeon supports both VDPAU and VAAPI. I suppose it doesn't really depend on X there, does it?

libvdpau does indeed have a hard dependency upon X; AFAIK: try "ldd /usr/lib64/libvdpau.so". VA-API works fine with Wayland.

[microcode]

Could you be specific and tell us what it is that you yourself are trying to do in X which you cannot do because X is broken and won't do what you're trying to do with it?

Zero-copy compositing, input transformation, multi-surface windows, flexible refresh rates, secure screen locking(even when a context menu is open), input isolation, sane accelerated graphics bringup, reasonably-performing remote desktop. Heck, mere maintenance of the X server and client libraries is an intense chore.

[microcode]

Works for me, and all existing Linux users.

Wayland does not, even after 10 years of development. It is better on paper and fixes many things that are not very nice in X, but since X is NOT broken, no one has been forced to upgrade and Wayland provides very little, since it is only slightly better on the technical side, but is missing features (which means broken in real life).

Wayland has not been in development for 10 years. The first commit is from 2008, and the first basic release was done in 2012.

[Duve]

Zero-copy compositing, input transformation, multi-surface windows, flexible refresh rates, secure screen locking(even when a context menu is open), input isolation, sane accelerated graphics bringup, reasonably-performing remote desktop. Heck, mere maintenance of the X server and client libraries is an intense chore.

There is likely more to that list, 30+ years of code that can't deviate from protocol.... That is some Ugly code to maintain.

[Ericg]

There is likely more to that list, 30+ years of code that can't deviate from protocol.... That is some Ugly code to maintain.

You can add to that list...

* Different monitors can't have different scaling (you have a new 4K monitor, and an old 1080p monitor)
* The entire extension protocol isn't versioned, so it's a complete diceroll if different parts of an application support different versions of a given extension. The canonical example was Flash only supported certain versions of Input, but Firefox supported a higher one... which version did you get? No one knows.