Red Hat Planning A Hackfest To Further Advance HDR Support On The Linux Desktop

[RahulSundaram]

You just did a great job explaining why Linux desktop (at least on GNOME) isn't getting anywhere. Being able to upgrade a DE environment without breaking existing software is fundamental for not having a shitty user experience, which I thought GNOME cared about .

FYI, OP is incorrect here. GNOME gets rebased in RHEL to recent upstream releases quite often. Red Hat just updates any extension they ship along with the DE version bumps so there is any breakage on what they support.

[leech]

Screen rotate extension resolves the issue. Still waiting for upstream to apply the fix on core Mutter where the regression occurred.

Thanks! I'll give that a shot. Their really were two things I noticed between Xorg and Wayland on the Yoga 9i; the gestures seemed to stop working (I could swipe with two fingers up and it'd maximize the window), and the transition between GDM to desktop wasn't as smooth.
Just tested the extension, and that works... unfortunately in testing, I discovered one more difference! The onscreen keyboard doesn't pop up at all in Wayland...

[finalzone]

Random side note in reply to the 'Wayland vs Xorg' stuff. I recently bought a Yoga 9i tablet. Tried Ubuntu and Fedora from a liveUSB, Ubuntu supported the screen rotation out of the box, and Fedora did not... But once installed, Ubuntu didn't work either! Discovered it was because Xorg just happily detects the hardware is there for screen rotation, and Wayland does not! It just happened to be that the LiveUSB boot up of Ubuntu used Xorg, but switches to Wayland after the install...

Screen rotate extension resolves the issue. Still waiting for upstream to apply the fix on core Mutter where the regression occurred.

[leech]

You just did a great job explaining why Linux desktop (at least on GNOME) isn't getting anywhere. Being able to upgrade a DE environment without breaking existing software is fundamental for not having a shitty user experience, which I thought GNOME cared about

But really that's what people are asking for, but not wanting, a stable release of the DE to go along with their LTS. KDE just doesn't change that much, and makes tiny ones along the way. They still have a lot of their terrible layout of dialogs from KDE 3.

Their big picture mode (which is what I think you are referring to) along with KDE iirc uses Wayland along with XWayland to run games

Big Picture Mode is something completely different. BPM is what they have been using on the desktop. The Steam Deck has a completely different UI. BPM using XWayland specifically means it IS using Xorg... You just have to wrap it if you're using Wayland.

Completely wrong.

In case you haven't noticed, Valve has hired a lot of Linux devs on the graphics stack to improve the kernel/AMD graphics driver and these improvements are only visible in the latest version of the Linux kernels (and even then they sometimes have to backport changes manually). So the reason why they picked Arch is because due to the nature of Steam Deck, they needed a rolling release distro that is as close to upstream as possible because unlike with MacOS/Windows, the graphics drivers are coupled with the Linux version so you need the latest Linux versions in order to get improvements to graphics drivers.

Ontop of that, packaging on Archlinux with the PKBUILD system is **much much** easier and more iterative than apt on debian. One of Valve's developers went on record to say that developing Linux with Archlinux was much easier. Their reasons for picking both Arch and KDE are completely technical and do note that Valve is not a typical "American" company where unnecessary things are dictated from higher up, their engineers/programmers are the ones that picked Arch/KDE, not the managers.

They literally said they didn't like Debian's package management. And if you're building your own distro, you control the kernel anyhow. So I'm not completely wrong at all. I'm well aware of how much easier it is to use PKGBUILD, I've had to hack a few together myself because the AUR is the wild west where people just drop support for packages. But they are really easy to update and fetch a new build of something.

They don't actually use Arch as a rolling release as well. They snapshot it. Build it, and then dump it as a 'firmware' so to speak. The OS on the Steam Deck is immutable, unless you put it in dev mode. They aren't even keeping it up to date that much (look at how old the Firefox build was until they just switched to using the flatpak).

Anyhow, the Steam Deck is a wonderful piece of hardware, and I 'get' exactly why they switched to KDE over Gnome, it really is, as you said 'more Windows like'.

Funny that you point out the link between Kernel / drivers. It's the very reason why I dislike AMD graphics cards.

I also said it was one of the engineers that didn't like Debian. The Arch base is rather irrelevant as they could have picked anything, no one is building packages for it, things are being built in flatpak. Hell, they could have done what Atari did with the VCS and picked the immutable Apertis base (which is based upon Debian as well).

If you don't think putting a custom kernel into any distro is easy... then you haven't been using Linux long enough

[mdedetrich]

Considering that Redhat is very conservative in their GNOME releases, you could literally stay on the same version of it for years. Just because Ubuntu and Fedora, etc do releases every 6 months doesn't mean you have to upgrade to the latest every time. You could even stick to a specific LTS release of Ubuntu and keep all your gnome extensions working for 5 years! Now should Gnome do a stability release and keep in time with the 2 year release schedule for the main LTS distros? Sure, that's a possibility, but as Gnome is a separate project from any particular linux distribution, it's kind of difficult for them to settle on something like that.

You just did a great job explaining why Linux desktop (at least on GNOME) isn't getting anywhere. Being able to upgrade a DE environment without breaking existing software is fundamental for not having a shitty user experience, which I thought GNOME cared about

It's Arch based, but does use KDE in desktop mode, yes. Pretty sure the Game mode UI uses it's own compositor. No clue if it's using Xorg or Wayland for that.

Their big picture mode (which is what I think you are referring to) along with KDE iirc uses Wayland along with XWayland to run games

SteamOS was Debian / Gnome previously. But I'm pretty sure there is a gnome / debian hater they hired to try to maintain it, as they ditched Debian with some articles of 'I hate the packaging system!' and the Gnome complaints could have been anywhere from 'users have no clue because they aimed at Windows users' or 'this is old Debian version that is 'stock' and I'm used to Ubuntu's bastard Unity'

Completely wrong.

In case you haven't noticed, Valve has hired a lot of Linux devs on the graphics stack to improve the kernel/AMD graphics driver and these improvements are only visible in the latest version of the Linux kernels (and even then they sometimes have to backport changes manually). So the reason why they picked Arch is because due to the nature of Steam Deck, they needed a rolling release distro that is as close to upstream as possible because unlike with MacOS/Windows, the graphics drivers are coupled with the Linux version so you need the latest Linux versions in order to get improvements to graphics drivers.

Ontop of that, packaging on Archlinux with the PKBUILD system is **much much** easier and more iterative than apt on debian. One of Valve's developers went on record to say that developing Linux with Archlinux was much easier. Their reasons for picking both Arch and KDE are completely technical and do note that Valve is not a typical "American" company where unnecessary things are dictated from higher up, their engineers/programmers are the ones that picked Arch/KDE, not the managers.

[leech]

Steam Deck is KDE based, right?

It's Arch based, but does use KDE in desktop mode, yes. Pretty sure the Game mode UI uses it's own compositor. No clue if it's using Xorg or Wayland for that.
SteamOS was Debian / Gnome previously. But I'm pretty sure there is a gnome / debian hater they hired to try to maintain it, as they ditched Debian with some articles of 'I hate the packaging system!' and the Gnome complaints could have been anywhere from 'users have no clue because they aimed at Windows users' or 'this is old Debian version that is 'stock' and I'm used to Ubuntu's bastard Unity'

Random side note in reply to the 'Wayland vs Xorg' stuff. I recently bought a Yoga 9i tablet. Tried Ubuntu and Fedora from a liveUSB, Ubuntu supported the screen rotation out of the box, and Fedora did not... But once installed, Ubuntu didn't work either! Discovered it was because Xorg just happily detects the hardware is there for screen rotation, and Wayland does not! It just happened to be that the LiveUSB boot up of Ubuntu used Xorg, but switches to Wayland after the install...

[leech]

Yeah this kind of crap is not acceptable in 2023 and I have no idea why no one from Redhat and/or GNOME has taken this problem seriously. Such a desktop will never be successful if plugins constantly break when a new version of GNOME is released.

Considering that Redhat is very conservative in their GNOME releases, you could literally stay on the same version of it for years. Just because Ubuntu and Fedora, etc do releases every 6 months doesn't mean you have to upgrade to the latest every time. You could even stick to a specific LTS release of Ubuntu and keep all your gnome extensions working for 5 years! Now should Gnome do a stability release and keep in time with the 2 year release schedule for the main LTS distros? Sure, that's a possibility, but as Gnome is a separate project from any particular linux distribution, it's kind of difficult for them to settle on something like that.

It's funny how almost every article on this site about Linux and any sort of desktop tech (this is literally just HDR support) it always devolves into a KDE vs Gnome battle.

[skierpage]

Nobody is using Wayland with KDE in a confident manner

You should be embarrassed to lie so brazenly. I've been running KDE on Wayland for 2 years on the Fedora KDE spin.

The level of toxic hateful hyperbole on this thread is staggering. What a bunch of negative whining losers. I don't use Gnome but it's obviously a working desktop environment with a bunch of interesting ideas. Pissing on other software doesn't make the software you like any better, but it does out you as a sick 11-year-old.

Please people, write reasonable reasoned comments!

[ezst036]

The future is GNOME, and I really doubt that's arguable. When I think of GNOME, I think of Red Hat and Canonical, two of the top Linux distribution providers, who also both ship GNOME first-class. KDE has no such backing.

Steam Deck is KDE based, right?

[ehansin]

Since I've posted a bunch on this thread anyway, I'll bite again in regards to the various Wayland compositor implementations and relate it to my core point I was making earlier. I have been using Gnome some and Sway as well lately, and happy enough with both for what they are. So I guess I am using Mutter and wlroots as compositors right now. I don't use KDE, though have played with it in the past.

In regards to a solid Linux core/base built upon solid, composable pieces, maybe something new will come along that takes all the lessons learned so far with Wayland compositors, and creates something even better. I get the argument that if the Linux desktop is in a state of constant flux and reinventing the wheel, may not make it attractive. I think that is where the composable parts comes in, pieces can evolve and change on there own, and therefore isn't a wholesale ripping apart of the entire system.

Just some thoughts. And by the way, no major complaints on running Gnome and Sway on top of Wayland right now. I'm looking forward to too what possibilities lie ahead.