Ubuntu 21.04 Released With Wayland By Default, New Dark Theme

[royce]

Finally Wayland! What are your guys experience with Wayland? Do you prefer it to X.Org or do you still prefer X.Org Server?
I still had some minor issues with GNOME on Wayland not positioning windows the way X did.

If you like me has a setup comprised of displays that need different scales, you can only really do it well with wayland. For instance, a 4K 15.6" laptop display at scale 2 and an external 1080p 24" scale 1 display.

It is too bad that PHP in Ubuntu 21.04 is outdated, it is version 7.4 not 8.0. 😢

Ondrej Sury is Debian's php maintainer: https://launchpad.net/~ondrej/+archive/ubuntu/php

[andyprough]

I'm old enough to remember when Ubuntu 13.10 was supposed to use mir by default. Good times.

[oiaohm]

Other flavours of Ubuntu contain DEs which do not support Wayland (aside from Kubuntu).

That is also wrong. Ubuntu is gnome with Wayland support. Kubuntu is KDE with wayland support of course. Ubuntu Kylin is ukui a fork off KDE that has been building wayland by default for the past 2 years. Ubuntu Studio is KDE again.

So 4 out of the 8 official flavours of Ubuntu are like to be Wayland by default very quickly.

There is a important catch here. The other flavours of Ubuntu have no control on LTS maintenance only the core Ubuntu distribution decides what is on the official LTS maintained package list. If core does not need X11 server bare metal that does not need to be maintained for the LTS time frame .

Wayland by default with Ubuntu will put more pressure to Mate to move their Wayland support plan forwards a bit faster. Canonical has killed off Ubuntu flavours in the past for not being able to keep up.

[dlq84]

Waiting for Kubuntu !
Nice that the kernel and Mesa were upgraded.
Too bad developers didn't try to switch to Pipewire, IWD and Firefox 88, even by delaying the release a bit.

Ubuntu is not a bleeding edge distro. If you want bleeding edge, use something else

[vegabook]

Finally Wayland! What are your guys experience with Wayland? Do you prefer it to X.Org or do you still prefer X.Org Server?
I still had some minor issues with GNOME on Wayland not positioning windows the way X did.

I really look forward to the upcoming Ubuntu 21.10 in October with GNOME 40 or GNOME 42 and GTK 4. I find it exciting!

It is too bad that PHP in Ubuntu 21.04 is outdated, it is version 7.4 not 8.0. 😢

I was very wary of Wayland but have moved to it for default session for 20.04. I lose Teamviewer and other screen sharing, for which I have to log out and go back to X, and Flameshot, that brilliant screen capture tool, doesn't work (it's updated for wayland buy very buggy). By contrast, I get _much better_ heterogenous high-dpi support (different DPIs of three monitors in my setup) which makes it more than worthwhile (X just doesn't work on my setup with different DPIs). Other than screenshare/capture, I have had zero problems so I'm quite happy.

[oiaohm]

XfCE has only a roadmap for wayland support so it will take time.
Don't know the state of mate wayland(i think still in a early stage
LXQT the same

Mate is early stages but they have a some what functional prototype and budgie is also in the functional prototype stage with wayland support this is ahead of Xfce and LXQt.

Xfce roadmap include a option to just come a collection of applications going forwards .
Yes LXQt and Xfce as DE might disappear. At this stage XFCE and LXQt does not even have a functional prototype of a Wayland compositor for them.

[mppix]

Waiting for Kubuntu !
Too bad developers didn't try to switch to Pipewire, IWD and Firefox 88, even by delaying the release a bit.

This is mainly because Debian is frozen. I'd expect the availability of these packages soon after Debian 11 is released.
We'll have to see when Debian/Ubuntu makes pipewire (audio) the default...

[mppix]

Pipewire ain't anywhere near ready to replace pulseaudio yet. Firefox 88 will come up shortly (browsers aren't version locked in Ubuntu) and I know iwd has been tested in the community but still glitchy for some. I don't know what the plan is with it.

What are you talking about?
Sure, Debian (and therefore Ubuntu) does not have the packages, yet, but this is mainly because Debian testing is frozen.
Fedora beta and Arch users will tell you that pipewire and its pulse/jack/buetooth packages work well...

[adlerhn]

What about Nvidia users? I guess we are still stuck on X.Org, right?

[oiaohm]

What about Nvidia users? I guess we are still stuck on X.Org, right?

Nvidia is hoping to get drivers out this year with Wayland support. Now that Wayland come default Nvidia no longer in the location where they can keep on pushing back support while at the same time demarding different features to everyone else.

So we could be under 12 months to where Nvidia users can use Wayland desktop with closed source drivers that work.