Fedora 40 Eyes Dropping GNOME X11 Session Support

[oiaohm]

Wayland requires KMS..

Someone need to learn to read avis.

Most Wayland compositors only work on systems using Kernel mode setting.

Yes quote from your own link does not say Wayland require KMS. Its clear to say Most Wayland Compositors then not be clear on the ones that work without kernel mode settings KDE wayland is quite a big one that Wayland works without KMS settings and without X11. Arch documentation is not always 100 percent right or 100 percent inform you on a topic.

https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots

wlroots provides backends that abstract the underlying display and input hardware, including KMS/DRM, libinput, Wayland, X11, and headless backends, plus any custom backends you choose to write, which can all be created or destroyed at runtime and used in concert with each other.

Most Wayland compositors support KMS and X11 backends. There is a interesting option most don't even consider. Start up x11 server start no windows manager or x11 compositor then start Wayland compositor as full screen everything. Magic right its totally possible to have wayland compositors with just as much hardware support as a X11 windows manager/X11 DE because they can provide their environment on top of X11 server. This route has a interesting effect you don't need to ship both X11 and Wayland applications any more since Wayland applications work on everything. Yes cull off X11 windows managers and compositors route is very possible.

Most distribution install instructions presume you are not going after the Wayland for hardware compatibility. Yes between Wayland compositors that support operating without KMS in own code and those that support running on X11 server the result is over 95% of wayland compositors can be made work on a system that does not support KMS.

Yes X11 hybrid route is where you run the X11 server bare metal then put the wayland compositor on top of it instead of the X11 compositor and windows manager.

avis there is a maintenance and security questions. Yes Wayland the future could include xwayland per old X11 application so preventing X11 applications from being able to randomly snoop on user data. So wayland compositor on top X11 server can still provide more secure environment to end user than running X11 windows manager or X11 compositor will.

[caligula]

Hm, this is interesting. For me, GDM won't even start in Wayland mode on my desktop computer for some reason. I can log in to Wayland session, but enabling wayland for GDM won't work. It works on my laptop though.

It also seems that the gnome shell isn't ready for multi-seat users. The GDM part is https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-45-rc
But the gnome shell isn't https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome..._requests/2230

[sindex]

I've tried to switch to Wayland many times. Gaming on Wayland is always pretty bad, lots of stutters and lag, it's a little better with KWin than with Mutter. There's also no provision at all against crashes and software does sometimes crash. This is being worked on in Plasma (and QT) but GNOME devs don't even talk about it because they know they'll have to rewrite a substantial amount of the codebase, so they just pretend that everything's fine. Wayland or stated more correctly the implemantion(s) of is NOT ready. And then, there's the slight problem that major software like the most popular browsers are only now approaching stable support for Wayland, but then again very important software like MS Office and the Adobe products don't support Linux at all so there's that.

[Brittle2]

I've tried to switch to Wayland many times. Gaming on Wayland is always pretty bad, lots of stutters and lag, it's a little better with KWin than with Mutter. There's also no provision at all against crashes and software does sometimes crash. This is being worked on in Plasma (and QT) but GNOME devs don't even talk about it because they know they'll have to rewrite a substantial amount of the codebase, so they just pretend that everything's fine. Wayland or stated more correctly the implemantion(s) of is NOT ready. And then, there's the slight problem that major software like the most popular browsers are only now approaching stable support for Wayland, but then again very important software like MS Office and the Adobe products don't support Linux at all so there's that.

what is your gpu?, and linux is technically a competidor to windows so that explain why OFFICE isn't here, now adobe is hard loln maybe someday

[andre30correia]

nobody uses fedora this days, i doubt this is a problem

[oiaohm]

This is being worked on in Plasma (and QT) but GNOME devs don't even talk about it because they know they'll have to rewrite a substantial amount of the codebase, so they just pretend that everything's fine.

Badly incorrect.

http://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/qt6_wayland_robustness/

With the application handling the reconnect logic, they can easily handle the case where compositor feature sets vary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYfzAuRmBjo

Do note that the kde developer doing wayland robustness in this demo uses Gnome. The reality Gnome does not need to fix their code as such as long as the toolkits are fixed to support the wayland robustness features. Yes its just wrap systemd around the compositor and when systemd detects the compostitor has crashed restart another one. Since the wayland socket stays there the applications will connect up the newly started wayland compositor and send across all the information to the Wayland compositor as if they are newly started applications even that they have been running for ages.

There is no massive code base rewrite required to support robustness. It is kind of annoying that Gnome has not allocated a developer to work on this stuff.

KDE developer has done GTK support for Wayland robustness by the way and it not that much code. They KDE developer has moved out of only support restarting kwin transparently to support restarting any Wayland compositor in general.

sindex the Wayland robustness logic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRdnRwPBFBk is covered in the 2021 video by the same KDE developer. The lazy init of the design is so important.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/4073

To make gnome provided applications work we are talking less than 1000 lines of code. The KDE developer has had it working for all the gnome applications.

"substantial amount of the codebase" how is 1000 under lines of code into GTK and less than 1000 lines of code for systemd setup to handle crashing compositor substantial amount of code.

This is more of a case please just allocate a developer to get this code merged and stop expecting a KDE developer to write the GTK code for you and fight though getting it merged.

[user1]

nobody uses fedora this days, i doubt this is a problem

What an asinine assumption. You really think there was a mass exodus of most Fedora users because of the Red Hat fiasco? Can't even tell if you're being serious.

[vancha]

Perfectly legitimate comment mentioning how windows xp still boots on old machines. Similarly, so does every old linux distribution. You can still install ubuntu 9.04 on an old computer and expect it to run just as amazingly as windows xp. See? They're both not that dissimilar.

Good to see that so much work is being put in to supporting wayland, I hope screen sharing and other such apps quickly become supported as well, and we can all pretend the move from x to wayland never happened. Other than that, i don't think i ever encountered anything not working on wayland for a long time.

[Volta]

Exactly. Linux *is* about cutting edge, enthusiasts, experimentation and mess. If people want standards and consistency, then this is exactly what commercial UNIX, BSD and the concept of a stable, solid base is for.

And dozens of unsupported hardware. There are Linux distributions that are way more tested and solid than *BSD have ever been. You forgot to mention all of those bsd's are 'relevant' (if 0,0001% market share is relevant) thanks to Linux emulation and Linux desktop environments. Btw. last time I checked Linux killed so called commercial unix. Only AIX is still relevant, so where are your toys?

People can't play with toys and then complain when the toy breaks.

Yep, that's why there's no BSD, Windows or macOS in HPC or serious computing.

[sindex]

what is your gpu?, and linux is technically a competidor to windows so that explain why OFFICE isn't here, now adobe is hard loln maybe someday

AMD RX 580, so no it's not any NVIDIA specific issue like it's regularly parroted here and elsewhere.

The real reason such important software haven't been ported to Linux is that there's no money in it for those companies. That's also the main reason the Wayland transition is taking so long, not any strictly technical reasons. Linux on the desktop, outside of maybe Chromebooks, is basically nonexistent. PCs have to be sold with Linux for that ever change. But if that were to ever happen, the first years would be rocky, I think. Many would think that their computer is broken or something if they can't run Office for example. Windows has been a monopoly on PCs (not including Macs) for so long that most people don't even intuitively understand that there are other OSes. So no OEM has an incentive to go all in on Linux, many would just buy a different computer.