Firefox 121 Now Available With Wayland Enabled By Default

[spicfoo]

The future of the "desktop" is in professional workstations that cost tens of thousands of dollars?

The future of the "desktop" is going to be sub-$1500 laptops exactly like it's been for the past 20 years. If GNU/Linux sold out to focus solely on supporting workstation CPUs and GPUs, the OS would virtually disappear.

Nah. The desktop market share of the OS has always remained small anyway unless you are counting Chromebooks. Most of the commercial support that benefits desktop users (who largely don't pay a dime) is driven by high end workstations and now things like gaming devices. There is zero chance the OS will disappear regardless of what desktop Linux users do with it.

[Danny3]

Firefox already supports this. widget.use-xdg-desktop-portal in about:config. It is up to the applications to add support for XDG desktop portal.

I probably should've made the "by default" bold text.
I know that Firefox supports switching to the Qt / KDE file manager / picker, like it does for the Wayland support, but I want it by default, like they did for Wayland!
What's the point of them of not doing this by default when the browser is running on KDE Plasma or on LXQT?
How many bug reports and people need to complain about that GTK file manager that is well subpar and not integrated at all with non-GTK based DEs?
I'm tired to have to fix Firefox every time I reinstall the OS or when I install it on my parents and friends computers.

Good that they at lest now turn on the Wayland support by default, it's one thing less to fix.
But I assume they did it because they had no choice as more and more DEs are getting Wayland support and them or the distros are enabling it by default.

[cynic]

Yes... and no. They are niche cases, but they are the ones where the future of the desktop is: graphical, audio and development workstations. In other words they are the ones where Linux absolutely must be competitive.

My developer workstation was a monochrome green terminal with no graphics at all for years.
I'm pretty sure developers can live pretty well without 3D rotating HDR music vith variable frequency, or whatever the things you're talking about.

[spicfoo]

My developer workstation was a monochrome green terminal with no graphics at all for years.
I'm pretty sure developers can live pretty well without 3D rotating HDR music vith variable frequency, or whatever the things you're talking about.

This isn't really limited to what you personally use or developers in general. HDR displays have a broad spectrum of vendors interested as seen in https://wiki.gnome.org/Hackfests/ShellDisplayNext2023. Red Hat's customers include large corporate workstation users like Dreamworks who are pushing for HDR support for obvious reasons. Same goes for Valve and gaming.

[jacob]

My developer workstation was a monochrome green terminal with no graphics at all for years.
I'm pretty sure developers can live pretty well without 3D rotating HDR music vith variable frequency, or whatever the things you're talking about.

There were developers whose workstation was a deck of punchcards. Once you get to the comfort and increased productivity of having several monitors, a graphical debugger etc, there is no reason to go back. Besides, you may very well be developing a 3D engine or a video editor...

[RAINFIRE]

Not everyone in the Linux community is quite as happy with Wayland...

https://youtu.be/GRd1uJGlNM8?t=354

[cynic]

There were developers whose workstation was a deck of punchcards. Once you get to the comfort and increased productivity of having several monitors, a graphical debugger etc, there is no reason to go back.

sure, I agree on this.
but that's all: several monitors and graphics.

al the remaining things are completely useless for mere developing.

Besides, you may very well be developing a 3D engine or a video editor...

well, yes. if you're developing for graphics of course you need them

[Zajec]

Summary for web developers: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/...x/Releases/121

[openminded]

For starters Linux needs to support 16 bit color channels with complex gamut mappings. Three 8k displays with VRR and HDR and varying refresh rates, subpixel layouts and orientation. Also HDCP 2.2 and asio like low latency support for HDMI Audio. In addition 4-head displays need to support 4-way multiseat in addition to multi seat via RDP and VNC. OpenGL should be faster than native via zink + vulkan, also for all virtualization techs. Also 3d model avatars for zoom and colored borders for the captured window. So this is the bare minimum.

People are so demanding. I'm just glad Plasma and Gnome got fractional scaling at finally okay-ish level, this is leaps and bounds for many people, laptops' users especially. No (reliable) fractional scaling has been a bummer for many, many users.
HDR? VRR? Well, at least we can use Linux for work now.

[Leinad]

For year of linux desktop, linux needs better GUI toolkits and backward compatibility with old apps like windows.

Apple already had 4 different cpu architectures, one complete system rewrite, left openGL and openCL on old version in buggy state, removed all support for 32b applications and supports only a few year old hardware. And with all of that it has its year of desktop.