GNOME Shell & Mutter Broke Their Good Faith With Ubuntu

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GNOME Shell & Mutter Broke Their Good Faith With Ubuntu

GNOME Shell and Mutter had been covered by Ubuntu's GNOME MicroReleaseException "MRE" policy that allows for new point releases to ship rather easily as stable updates to existing Ubuntu Linux releases. But breaking the camel's back is GNOME 46.1 shipping explicit sync support. Due to landing a "significant new feature" into a point release, the GNOME Shell and Mutter are no longer covered by this exception...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-MRE-Over-Mutter-Shell

[oleid]

Well, given the flickering one experiences using NVidia drivers with XWayland, supporting explicit sync can be considered a bug fix, IMHO.
Sometimes the line between feature and bug fix is slim.

[V1tol]

The faster distros drop GNOME, the better.

[Eberhardt]

Well, given the flickering one experiences using NVidia drivers with XWayland, supporting explicit sync can be considered a bug fix, IMHO.
Sometimes the line between feature and bug fix is slim.

I would agree. Also when looking at the merge request, it basically just adds code and barely changes anything existing. It just adds a feature that has no effect on wayland clients not using it. So even if there were new bugs, it would hardly affect any app if I'm correct. It's also odd that they just figured that out more than a month after the point release...

The faster distros drop GNOME, the better.

I love the logic of phoronix readers. I don't like it, so it must be bad and nobody can objectively think it's good. Why are there so many people pretending to enjoy GNOME? \s

[GraysonPeddie]

Well, given the flickering one experiences using NVidia drivers with XWayland, supporting explicit sync can be considered a bug fix, IMHO.
Sometimes the line between feature and bug fix is slim.

Yeah, I once had that issue under Wayland/XWayland where I experienced eye strain due to flickering during the video call interview. I had to stay with Wayland during the interview or else if I tell them I'm going to switch over to X11, an employer for my future job will look confused and think that I'm not interested in the job. I don't know if that's true, but I'm getting this feeling that Wayland is experimental regardless of which GPU I use. In my case, it's my NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 with the 550 drivers.

[fluke]

Yeah, I once had that issue under Wayland/XWayland where I experienced eye strain due to flickering during the video call interview. I had to stay with Wayland during the interview or else if I tell them I'm going to switch over to X11, an employer for my future job will look confused and think that I'm not interested in the job. I don't know if that's true, but I'm getting this feeling that Wayland is experimental regardless of which GPU I use. In my case, it's my NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 with the 550 drivers.

If you're not using the GPU for heavy gaming you would be much better served by a dirstro such as Fedora which regularly updates the kernel and graphics stacks, thus providing nouveau/nova + NVK updates within weeks or so as opposed to the Ubuntu 6 months wait (which can then still be outdated at release). NVK is still quite slow for gaming but for desktop use it is very good with external displays on nvidia outputs working smoothly.

As the main dev responsible for many ASUS gaming laptop improvements in my limited time, over the last 5 years I've been doing this I've experienced nothing but frustration from purchasers of new laptops trying to run ubuntu and discovering nothing works well for over 6 months or more or they have to jump through PPA hoops (such as install mainline kernel and break nvidia).

The unbuntur release model is not a good model for the rapid pace of hardware we're experiencing. It is forever stuck behind the curve.

[patrick1946]

It is clearly fixing a bug. Did they really want to keep a broken implementation of NVidia for their LTS version? All this patching on their side made it not better. Because of that, I left Ubuntu.

[GraysonPeddie]

If you're not using the GPU for heavy gaming you would be much better served by a dirstro such as Fedora which regularly updates the kernel and graphics stacks, thus providing nouveau/nova + NVK updates within weeks or so...

Yes I do use CachyOS for gaming and I now have explicit sync support if I want to switch to Wayland. I'm okay with X11 for now.

[ffs_]

Hm, is that why they still haven't updated Mutter in their repositories?

[Rovano]

Considering that these patches broke some things for some people around of DEs, I'm not surprised.

Some people still didn't understand that Canonical explicitly states that it doesn't support Wayland yet in 24.04.

If we look at the distributions around with the most modern software, even there some things just don't work as they should for some people.
So why cram this into LTS?