KDE Plasma 5.19 Rolls Out In Beta Form With Many Improvements, Better Wayland Support

[starshipeleven]

The distros the average Phoronix users know about - basically Ubuntu and Fedora - are very unpopular in the real world.

Yeah, on servers you get only Debian, SUSE or RHEL. Or the Oracle RHEL clone.

In the real world of "which distro should I use to put Kodi or PopcornTime on this old laptop and torrent free movies" and "which distro should I put on this ancient desktop to hand over to grandma for playing poker online",

Ubuntu. Look up how many guides there are for installing anything "on Linux" that are targeting Ubuntu or how many proprietary programs support only Ubuntu with their "Linux support".

[Vistaus]

...servers, routers, Android...

Interesting that Android uses X, given the fact that ChromeOS uses Google's own window system.

[starshipeleven]

Interesting that Android uses X, given the fact that ChromeOS uses Google's own window system.

(psst) it was a joke, it doesn't.

[treba]

Interesting that Android uses X, given the fact that ChromeOS uses Google's own window system.

This was about the claim that more systems use X11 compared to the Linux kernel.

[mdedetrich]

Wayland doesn't hate Nvidia. Nvidia hates Wayland, or at least it seems, considering they went their own route rather than following the standard that everyone else adopted and don't give a crap about keeping it maintained and fixing bugs in it. That is why Nvidia support in Wayland is so bad.

While the Wayland developers, Intel, and AMD went with a graphics buffer API called GBM, Nvidia decided to go off and do their own thing with something called EGLStreams. Further, while they did patch Gnome and Plasma to run on Nvidia cards with EGLStreams, they never fixed alot of the major bugs that basically make it completely broken.... And because their drivers are propeitary, there is no way for open source developers to fix those issues themselves, beyond hacky patches in the window managers, which is not good practice as it can cause further issues and dirty code.

Further, due to all that, Sway for example doesn't support Nvidia cards anymore. And even in Xorg you will find performance issues on desktops, quirky bugs, and hacky code patches (specifically in Gnome and Kwin-lowlatency... The developers of Plasma Kwin generally don't accept hardware specific hack jobs) made to try and remedy the Nvidia graphics driver bugs.

So yeah, Nvidia cards are powerful... And can be great value at times... But nvidia really doesn't seem to give a crap about doing things right. AMD and Intel have put alot of work into their Open source drivers and software.

This is crap, and there are technical reasons why.

GBM in its design doesn't work well with NVidia's drivers, if NVidia's blob was to use GBM directly there would be a massive performance hit. EGLStreams predated GBM and is an actual open standard in Kronos. NVidia did suggest to use EGLStreams, they were just ignored (NVidia did presentations on this as well).

GBM as an interface has a very linux'centric view of drivers, basically if you want to use GBM its the linux way or the highway (which works okay if the drivers were built with Linux in mind). NVidia's blob however actually contains a generic binary driver that is shared for all other platforms (Windows/FreeBSD) along with an interface to work with the host OS.

If you want to understand the technical details, you can read https://lobste.rs/s/cfatri/nvidia_sucks_i_m_sick_it .

Also technically/design speaking, Wayland is NOT tied to GBM, its completely antagonistic to it (furthermore the difference between supporting GBM or Wayland is not a lot of code). A lot of the reasoning behind supporting EGLStreams is either political or out of convenience i.e. not maintaining multiple backends (which is fine reason but lets be honest about it and call a spade a spade).

Note that Android uses an in interface very similar to EGLStreams because of power/performance (critical on phones).

[andyprough]

Which distros are used for those puposes? I guess OpenELEC for Kodi. What would you suggest for a (somewhat) dedicated PopcornTime distro? Which distro is suitable for grandma?

You are on the wrong website to find out. Michael doesn't even talk about any of them except Manjaro. What are always the top ones at Distrowatch? MX, Mint, Manjaro, Solus, Deepin... Real users don't want to read Ubuntu or Fedora online guides to watch movies - they want one-click installs. They don't want to learn about how the Linux kernel works - they want helpful forums that will answer their questions without looking down their noses at the "noobs". I'm telling you, it's been more than 10 years since I've met a non-programmer user that uses Fedora, and I've only run into a handful that stick with Ubuntu over the last five years. They've all migrated to Mint and beyond.

[starshipeleven]

You are on the wrong website to find out. Michael doesn't even talk about any of them except Manjaro.

That's the RedHat money conspiracy. The forum colors are green to throw off the scent, but we all know they should be red.

What are always the top ones at Distrowatch?

Yeah, what the fuck is MX linux and why we even look at a random site that ranks Linux distros on the basis of people clicking on them, as if it could give any statistically relevant results.

They don't want to learn about how the Linux kernel works - they want helpful forums that will answer their questions without looking down their noses at the "noobs"

Only the Arch forum is like that.

it's been more than 10 years since I've met a non-programmer user that uses Fedora

I could say the same too, but the only other dude I know that uses Linux is using Gentoo (and a heavily custom Gentoo too, which I guess is more common for Gentoo users). Does that mean Gentoo is more common than most people think it is? Does that mean the Linux community is evenly split between OpenSUSE and Gentoo?

I'd say it is not statistically relevant.

They've all migrated to Mint and beyond.

You misspelled "OpenSUSE".

[andyprough]

I could say the same too, but the only other dude I know that uses Linux is using Gentoo (and a heavily custom Gentoo too, which I guess is more common for Gentoo users). Does that mean Gentoo is more common than most people think it is? Does that mean the Linux community is evenly split between OpenSUSE and Gentoo?

I'd say it is not statistically relevant.

You misspelled "OpenSUSE".

I know tons of people who use it, because they all want to use Kodi and PopcornTime for all the free warezzzzz. openSUSE was a huge hit from ~2000 when I started using it until maybe around 2012? Now it's just another spin like Fedora that only programmers and sysadmins that need to use it for their job are likely to use. I was still using it last spring, but I was a holdout. As far as what MX is, if you ever tried it you would never recommend anything else to any non-techie. It's just too easy. One or two clicks for just about everything.

[starshipeleven]

I know tons of people who use it, because they all want to use Kodi and PopcornTime for all the free warezzzzz

I call bullshit on this. Both applications work fine (usually better as far as hardware acceleration is concerned) on Windows, and it's always easier to install an application than reinstall a whole foreign OS.

openSUSE was a huge hit

It still is.

As far as what MX is, if you ever tried it you would never recommend anything else to any non-techie.

You recommend to reinstall an OS to a non-techie?

[ssokolow]

EGLStreams predated GBM and is an actual open standard in Kronos.

Please read the posts which came before yours, which cover how GBM shows up in Mesa years before either it or EGLStreams show up in Khronos documents and how using EGLStreams for Wayland wasn't proposed until a year after it was submitted to Khronos.

NVidia did suggest to use EGLStreams, they were just ignored (NVidia did presentations on this as well).

Again, it came after there was already a lot of GBM buy-in from Mesa.

Also technically/design speaking, Wayland is NOT tied to GBM, its completely antagonistic to it

If Wayland were "antagonistic" toward GBM, we wouldn't be in this situation. I'm pretty sure the word you meant is "agnostic" (has no stance on).

(furthermore the difference between supporting GBM or Wayland is not a lot of code). A lot of the reasoning behind supporting EGLStreams is either political or out of convenience i.e. not maintaining multiple backends (which is fine reason but lets be honest about it and call a spade a spade).

You're downplaying KDE's experience, which has basically been "nVidia threw some code over the wall, expects us to maintain it going forward, and we keep tripping over bugs that are hard to fix without being able to look at the driver source to see why it's behaving the way it is."