Some positive news for a lot of Linux Mint users who have been complaining about the lack of Wayland support. However, as the blog post listed, it's only going to be experimental in the next major update of Version 21. Still, it'll be good to experience the change.
Also, very clever on the naming schemes used by the Debian and Mint teams for their stable and unstable releases.
I seriously don't understand the Wayland hate. I'm running it on all my machines that run displays with the exception of my HA panels running on Raspbian.
So, as it's been stated, Wayland is still not universally better than X. There are still bugs in places. Gaming is still an issue. Kwin's implementation still isn't complete enough to be reliably introduced as the default.
This is after years and years of work. Yes, making an entirely new display protocol is hard. However Wayland was introduced as the "eventual X replacement" when I was in high school. I'm 30 now. I've heard some variation of "Wayland is almost ready" since my senior year of college.
At some point it becomes exhausting. At this point when someone says something along the lines of "in a year or two, Wayland will reach a point where X.org will be a thing of the past" my immediate reaction is to call bullshit.
While I mostly agree with you, adoption and readiness follows a curve and, at some point, that curve begins to steepen. The curve ahead of us is steeper than the curve behind us.
GNOME defaults to Wayland now and is actually talking about removing X11 support. This Cinnamon post says that they will also do that in a couple of years. KDE is talking about doing it next year with Plasma 6.
Once GNOME and KDE have switched, the majority of Linux desktop users will be Wayland by default. Not only will that drive the ecosystem to fix remaining problems more quickly but it will just not matter as much.
In the next 36 months, it is going to go from “when will Wayland be ready” to “who is still using X”?
I dunno, i daily sway/Wayland & game without issues (including game streaming). Wayland gaining mainstream support across most distros (especially something as "slow" as debian) is proof enough that its not the eventual replacement, it is the replacement.
I am excited about Wayland. I'm just waiting on PopOS to run it as the default. I've tried using it but I was getting hard locks when I left my computer idle for a while.
The logs made it seem like it was a Wayland issue so I switched back to x11 for now. It hasn't happened since.
I imagine most people don't have a strong opinion one way or the other. They just want their distro and em to work well.
Wayland has worked better than X.org in my experience.
I tried i3 with Compton and Picom - both compositors for X.org - and it had major rendering issues, both on AMD (weird lagging) and NVIDIA (colour issues). Meanwhile I tried Hyprland on a spare PC and it provides a great tiled WM with both form and function. If anything'll get me on a tiled WM, it'll be Hyprland now. I'm also looking forward to Wayfire. We need a spiritual successor to Compiz.
What I've done instead is configured a desktop hotkey that toggles the system-level microphone mute. Two birds with one stone: foolproof PTT and on the same hotkey regardless of Zoom/Meet/Teams/Slack/Discord (consulting is fun)
My sticking point with Discord in particular is that, at the moment, it's allergic to file drag and drop under Wayland. If I want to drag and drop a file attachment, I have to open the file explorer dialog and drag onto that.
This is more of a Discord being sluggish to update problem than a Wayland being unstable problem, but it's still extremely irritating.
This has been my first struggle with Wayland. Used to be able to enable remote desktop with a single check box in most distros, then VNC into it from a Windows PC no problem. It's a real hassle now and glitchy at best once it's up and going. I gave up and have been using Anydesk to remote access a machine, and even that wasn't simple to get going.
Remmina or krdc work fine for me. Also parsec (no hosting there though). Oh if hosting, I'm not sure, but moonlight/sunshine work fine for me, even if it's not the usual desktop sharing app.
I've tried. KDE Plasma on the 4k external screen is giving me big black blocks to the right of windows I move or for the launcher... Like a shadow. Flickering trails of black block shadows if I move windows around. The latest nvidia driver did finally fix the mouse leave trails of black boxes, though. No idea if it works for Gnome, I can't stand Gnome's layout, workflow, and window management.
Can't replicate your results here. I play on Wayland, and deliberately force some games to run natively on Wayland (SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland) and so far I haven't noticed any framerate changes except statistical noise.
I was perfectly confident that the Mint team would get around to Wayland support, when it was good and ready. By the time they get it implemented and set as the default, it'll work great.
I know progress on that has been slow, but I look in on it every now and again and work does seem to be steady in porting their core components.
I'm not sure if they're settled on a compositor yet. There was talk (from the Ubuntu MATE devs) about using Mir, but I haven't heard anything about it in ages, and the Mir suggestion was at a time when wlroots was in a much less mature position. With XFCE, Budgie and Raspberry Pi OS all now going the wlroots direction, it's not inconceivable that MATE will go the same way.
I often reread stuff while imagining I'm someone with no knowledge of the topic, the title of this post is a good example of how hilarious things become.
The way for your desktop to communicate with the hardware.
It used to be X11 - A server-client architecture, which meant your desktop was effectively just a client that told the server what to do. The server was the one doing the drawing
Wayland is just a protocol, defining how programs and desktop should communicate with each other - without a middleman that was X11 server. The desktop does the actual drawing here.
Software that displays programs on screen. X11 goes way back and is inefficient. Wayland is the new standard but is seeing regular improvement and updates. I know Fedora have already moved to Wayland. I think Ubuntu have now too. Mint going this direction is good news.
TLDR, software that displays apps on screen. X11 is old and awkward. Wayland is new and better but has been slowly becoming standard.
Wayland is basically the graphics system. Technically, Wayland is just the protocol and a “compositor” that implements Wayland acts as the display server—the thing that draws and manages the application windows on your screen.
Wayland replaces X11 ( the X Window System ), if you know what that is.
it's a good thing to have multiple implementations of compositors. that avoids bad practices or making compositor specific programs that wouldn't work with other compositors.
I don't think there are many "compositors from scratch" are there? GNOME and KDE both have their own, Cinnamon uses a GNOME fork, and almost everything else I can think of is wlroots based. The only other one I can think of which isn't is Mir, which has been around almost as long as Wayland has.
This is important when windows inevitably dies (subscription-based Windows 12?!) and linux mint gets flooded. Better have the "new" thing from the start
Windows won't die what are you talking about? Windows 12 subscriptions are a) just a rumor and b) not for the entire os, just certain features like AI and stuff