Debian 10 "Buster" Currently Defaults To GNOME On Wayland, But That Still Could Change

[M@GOid]

As others had already stated, Debian takes stability seriously. Their user base does not care about the newest and shiniest software, they want something that work.

Let other distros with more masochistic user base like Arch or Fedora, dive head first on the bugs. That always has being their way of life, no need to ask others to suffer too.

[kaprikawn]

Why waste resources to gnome3 and wayland which future is the same as Symbian have. Reinventing the wheel with poorer results does not last long. Gnome3 = win8, nobody cares.

Because Xorg is in maintenance mode meaning that it isn't going to get any new features or development, only bugfixes. The Xorg/Wayland developers (who are the same people) have decided that Wayland is the future of the Linux desktop. And as such Wayland is the only technology they're actively developing to bring it up to feature parity with Xorg and add new features. Xorg is now legacy.

Gnome isn't the only desktop moving to Wayland, there's KDE and Sway too amongst others. Between Gnome and KDE, both of which are migrating to Wayland and in the process of deprecating X11, you're looking at a huge proportion of Linux desktops. Wayland is the future and plenty of people care, not least the people developing the most popular DEs on Linux.

I'm happy that you're happy with XFCE, your choice is perfectly valid, but you're not going to get much in terms of new features.

[kaprikawn]

As others had already stated, Debian takes stability seriously. Their user base does not care about the newest and shiniest software, they want something that work.

Let other distros with more masochistic user base like Arch or Fedora, dive head first on the bugs. That always has being their way of life, no need to ask others to suffer too.

Wayland isn't that buggy, especially since xorg-server 1.20 brought in a lot of XWayland fixes. The problem with Wayland is the lack of features like remoting, desktop recording, colour pickers and other things where the Wayland devs have prioritised security over convenience. Most of the features are in the process of being added to bring Wayland compositors up to feature parity with xorg.

I agree that the type of person who runs Debian isn't going to be happy with jumping through hoops to get remoting working or something like that, and that Debian sticking with a X11 default backend is probably prudent at this point. I'm just saying bugs != features.

[kaprikawn]

In your dreams wayland is the future, there are very few native wayland applications, see https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/Wayland/Applications
There is zero wayland game play videos in YouTube, where there is wayland mentioned in the title or description. Only one benchmark video and some private unlabelled videos presented here. Gnome3 and kde are not so popular that you believe.

As the success of Android shows, application support is the key to success. 10 years of wayland development and there is no end to see.

That isn't a complete list of applications that can run natively on Wayland without XWayland. Where is Firefox on that list? You can run Firefox on Wayland without XWayland now, it is the default on Fedora and Arch. Most applications run are either GTK or Kwin applications, and so are Wayland native if up-to-date. And anything that lags and/or has direct X11 calls like Gimp work fine on XWayland. This is true for games too, I run games on Gnome/Wayland just fine.

I don't understand why you think Youtube videos with 'Running on Wayland' in the title or description is a valid metric.

Gnome is the default on Ubuntu, Fedora, Opensuse, PopOS!, RHEL amongst others. KDE is the DE of choice for power users (excluding those on tiling WMs e.g. i3 or Sway). That's the majority of Linux.

[LightBit]

Should be default, the more people use it, the more bugs can be discovered and fixed.

Bugs are already known -> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=745032
gnome-shell is badly designed (monolithic) causing lag with Wayland. But Gnome developers prefer making GUI more retarded instead of fixing bugs.

[kaprikawn]

The default desktop of some distribution does not prove anything. Users are using anything else than gnome3 or kde. Here you see that other desktops are popular too:

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/users/statistics

Beginners use the default desktop and that is the reason why gnome3 and kde are in top of gamingonlinux statistics.



Make wayland gaming videos then. Many games have problems with Xwayland and game developers are not interested to test. Using wrappers that slows down performance is stupid.

I don't trust those statistics, no way is Arch/Manjaro/Antergos a third of installs. And XFCE ahead of Cinnamon for DEs...pffft. Mint is way more popular than that.

[davibu]

I really really hope they go for Wayland.
I mean there were two things with Stretch which were delayed: secure boot and Wayland.
X is just old and unsecure.
Maybe there are 1 or 2 Bugs, but that doesn't mean Wayland it is unstable, stable means it runs and doesn't change rapidly, which is the case for Wayland.
The people act like Wayland is just 1-2years old.
There are people here even arguing about remote connection which is ridiculous, who needs a GUI remote connection to a server and has no 2 seconds to change from Wayland to X?

Everything what isn't implemented in Wayland is pretty much niche and shouldn't be used as an execuse for not shipping it, especially with XWayland in mind.
With such a mentality it will just end like GNU/Hurd.

[LightBit]

Maybe there are 1 or 2 Bugs, but that doesn't mean Wayland it is unstable, stable means it runs and doesn't change rapidly, which is the case for Wayland.

Wayland is fine, but Gnome doesn't work well with Wayland.

[LightBit]

What works then? Nothing for a graphical desktop PC user.

I don't know for KDE, but I'm pretty sure Xfce will work perfectly when they implement Wayland support.

[mpphill2]

Debian may well choose either way and be justified,b this comments section is wild. You really get to see that some people are averse to change, some averse to things staying the same, and a much smaller minority who see both for what they are / can be.

Choose the third option people. As with life, just about every choice you make in Linux has it's pros and cons.