GNOME 40 Will Now Handle XWayland On-Demand By Default

[Alexmitter]

What's the state of Wayland in KDE? Is it even there? I have desktop with KDE but I didn't changed anything, don't want to break things in my work machine, I have xorg there by default.

Its around the state of 2016 Gnome. It works, its now at the state of not constantly crashing anymore I heard and some big bugs are still present. The Qt base is as always not helping at all.

[Paradigm Shifter]

I don't think anyone hates X11, they are simply eager to move on to the new tech stack since X11 is aging. X11 served its purpose well at the time, but it's old and it has issues that are resolved in Wayland. For example, on my machine Gnome animations are very sluggish on X11 with two monitors, whereas on Wayland I get smooth animations even with 3 monitors.

Interesting. Is this just a Gnome thing? I ran dual monitors for years in Linux at work, and I ran triple 1200p for about five years and triple 1440p for two (two different systems) without any sluggishness on the desktop. XFCE, Unity and Cinnamon at different times. If I tried Gnome on there (I might have, but honestly can't remember!) and saw it being slow, I would just put it down to Gnome being rubbish, as I dislike Gnome Shell intensely. I still test it every so often, though, just to see if they've tweaked things that annoy me, to make things better or worse.

It might also be the woefully underpowered Intel iGPU, I suppose, as the performance of the 4400 iGPU on my Yoga 2 Pro was astonishingly poor at the screens native res, if I plugged in another monitor via the mini-HDMI port. The triple screen desktops were all running nVidia GPUs because of my need for CUDA.

[sarmad]

Does screencast in Google Meet and Zoom work now under Wayland?

Partially. It depends on how you run them. If you use a recent enough version of Chrome (maybe Chromium as well), then Meet and Zoom can share a window, but not the entire screen. And it allows sharing some windows but not others. Not sure what causes some windows to be missing from the lis; maybe related to XWayland or something, but that's just a guess.
If you use the Zoom desktop app then you have two different issues: First, it can only share the entire screen; you can't select to share only a single window. Second, it only works on some distros. For example, it works on Ubuntu but not on PopOS even though PopOS is derived from Ubuntu.

[sarmad]

Interesting. Is this just a Gnome thing? I ran dual monitors for years in Linux at work, and I ran triple 1200p for about five years and triple 1440p for two (two different systems) without any sluggishness on the desktop. XFCE, Unity and Cinnamon at different times. If I tried Gnome on there (I might have, but honestly can't remember!) and saw it being slow, I would just put it down to Gnome being rubbish, as I dislike Gnome Shell intensely. I still test it every so often, though, just to see if they've tweaked things that annoy me, to make things better or worse.

It might also be the woefully underpowered Intel iGPU, I suppose, as the performance of the 4400 iGPU on my Yoga 2 Pro was astonishingly poor at the screens native res, if I plugged in another monitor via the mini-HDMI port. The triple screen desktops were all running nVidia GPUs because of my need for CUDA.

Note that I'm not talking about sluggishness of the system, I'm only talking about smoothness of the desktop animations. But to answer your question, I haven't tried KDE on this specific hardware, but I remember trying both Gnome and KDE on different hardwares and the animations sluggishness was only in Gnome, not KDE.
However, here we are talking the same Gnome build on the same hardware and in Wayland it runs smoother than in X11. My guess is that the issue is related to vsync with multiple monitors, and that Wayland enables Gnome to do the right thing when it comes to preventing screen tearing.

[Alexmitter]

without any sluggishness on the desktop. ... Cinnamon at different times. If I tried Gnome on there and saw it being slow, I would just put it down to Gnome being rubbish, as I dislike Gnome Shell intensely.

You dislike Gnome Shell intensely, but the moment someone skins Gnome Shell by literally only baking some extensions right into it and calling it Cinnamon, you seem to completely forget your intense dislike.

[vegabook]

Partially. It depends on how you run them. If you use a recent enough version of Chrome (maybe Chromium as well), then Meet and Zoom can share a window, but not the entire screen. And it allows sharing some windows but not others. Not sure what causes some windows to be missing from the lis; maybe related to XWayland or something, but that's just a guess.
If you use the Zoom desktop app then you have two different issues: First, it can only share the entire screen; you can't select to share only a single window. Second, it only works on some distros. For example, it works on Ubuntu but not on PopOS even though PopOS is derived from Ubuntu.

Unfortunately this means I'll wait. Really want to get onto Wayland but last time I tried, in the middle of sensitive meetings, all of a sudden I'm fighting the technology. With X I have zero problems of this type. Here's hoping this gets fixed soon.

[sarmad]

Unfortunately this means I'll wait. Really want to get onto Wayland but last time I tried, in the middle of sensitive meetings, all of a sudden I'm fighting the technology. With X I have zero problems of this type. Here's hoping this gets fixed soon.

Yeah, I agree. It's really frustrating. Clearly the Wayland implementation for screen sharing is complete in Gnome, but apps aren't being updated to properly use it.

[ssokolow]

You dislike Gnome Shell intensely, but the moment someone skins Gnome Shell by literally only baking some extensions right into it and calling it Cinnamon, you seem to completely forget your intense dislike.

It's called combining quality assurance and features which meet market demand in the same product... something GNOME doesn't seem to understand.

(i.e. Taking responsibility for ensuring a minimum level of reliability and function in the configurations users actually want to use because, otherwise, the more you push your product as suitable for purpose, the more they'll be predisposed to seeing you as negligent or actively antagonistic.)

[Paradigm Shifter]

Note that I'm not talking about sluggishness of the system, I'm only talking about smoothness of the desktop animations. But to answer your question, I haven't tried KDE on this specific hardware, but I remember trying both Gnome and KDE on different hardwares and the animations sluggishness was only in Gnome, not KDE.
However, here we are talking the same Gnome build on the same hardware and in Wayland it runs smoother than in X11. My guess is that the issue is related to vsync with multiple monitors, and that Wayland enables Gnome to do the right thing when it comes to preventing screen tearing.

Thanks!

You dislike Gnome Shell intensely, but the moment someone skins Gnome Shell by literally only baking some extensions right into it and calling it Cinnamon, you seem to completely forget your intense dislike.

Amazingly, while they might share a common back-end, they look and feel very different in daily use.

When features I liked, and used regularly, in Gnome 2 were missing in Gnome Shell - and worse, a mission critical application had problems with it - I went looking elsewhere. For a while I toyed with KDE, which I want to like, but always seems to take me too long to get tweaked to my liking. Then I used XFCE, which I liked, but unfortunately it didn't like triple-monitor. Unity and KDE were actually the best behaved desktops for triple-monitor, but I had the urge to try something new. I actually tried Cinnamon expecting not to like it all that much... and was pleased to discover that the default configuration in Mint was almost exactly how I wanted my desktop set up.

It's called combining quality assurance and features which meet market demand in the same product... something GNOME doesn't seem to understand.

(i.e. Taking responsibility for ensuring a minimum level of reliability and function in the configurations users actually want to use because, otherwise, the more you push your product as suitable for purpose, the more they'll be predisposed to seeing you as negligent or actively antagonistic.)

Agreed.

[omer666]

Fanboys always seem to get this wrong.

Trolls always seem to get this wrong. Just because some people actually like using modern paradigms doesn't mean they are fanboys. That's called tastes.