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

[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.

[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]

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.

[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]

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.

[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.

[Particle]

As long as they don't use XFCE, we can all agree that debianxfce is the worst

Amen. MATE all the way.

[tupelo]

I understand tradition.. I raise my pint glass to the setting sun.

But I enjoy change, I have been using unix since 89.. moved to slackware in 95. . Yes I deal with red hat on a day to day basis.
I like learning new things, It keeps me alive. throw it in front of me.. I will figure the fucker out.

I like wayland, I can dance with X11 all night long.

If you do not like change this is not the hobby/career for you.. Life is change.

You better start swimming or you will sink like a stone.

[R41N3R]

To stick with X11 might sound right for now from a stable point of view, but it doesn't make it right. Instead of leaning back, better get the remaining bugs fixed. He mentions just 2 or 3 in his blog, but no word about open X11 bugs or missing features, I mean really? And then there is the security aspect of it. Maybe they sleep well for now with the security holes of X11, but will they do in some years? Is there still than support from upstream to provide security fixes? It reminds me of their last security hole in their update procedure where https was still not yet the default, who could have thought that a secure network layer could have helped to prevent this. Basically all they need to decide is the default, probably most users wouldn't even notice using Wayland, and if they do and they could still select X11 in the login manager for corner cases. I wouldn't wonder to read next that Debian hired debianxfce to make their sane decisions.

[Danielsan]

Actually they had better to use XFCE4 and X.org as default choice... We really don't need another distro based on Gnome when there are already available Fedora, OpenSuse, PureOS, even GuixSD, Ubuntu and the all the *buntu derivates like POP_OS! or ZorinOS...