A set of merge requests were opened that would effectively drop X.Org (X11) session support for the GNOME desktop and once that code is removed making it a Wayland-only desktop environment.
Going along with Fedora 40 looking to disable the GNOME X11 session support (and also making KDE Plasma 6 Wayland-only for Fedora), upstream GNOME is evaluating the prospect of disabling and then removing their X11 session support.
Some concerns were raised already how this could impact downstream desktops like Budgie and Pantheon that haven’t yet fully transitioned over to Wayland. In any event we’ll see where the discussions lead but it’s sure looking like 2024 will be the year that GNOME goes Wayland-only.
Fix the issues with wayland so that we are all able to use it, before forcing us to move for “our good”.
In my experience, most of the issues with wayland are caused by
applicationssoftware not supporting it. If we enter a wayland-only world, developers are pushed towards supporting wayland.I disagree, there are still plenty of bugs regarding Mutter on Wayland that aren’t caused by “not enough applications support Wayland”. One such bug is interoperability with Nvidia, which will take years to fix.
For instance, I can’t attach an external monitor to my laptop when I use Gnome on Wayland. I know Nvidia laptop GPUs suck, but this works fine on X11 and Windows. I don’t know if this is a Wayland protocol thing or a Gnome thing, but either way, I can’t give presentations without switching to X11.
There are also weird bugs regarding waypipe in Gnome I haven’t been able to track down. No matter what I try, when I run a remote application through Waypipe, the “application is not responding” popup will pop up (despite the application working perfectly fine). There’s a hack to disable these messages, but applying that makes it impossible to click inside Firefox minutes after starting it (that sure was a fun bug to find, let me tell you).
I’m also having issues getting Vulkan to work under Wayland. I don’t know what exactly causes the problem, but the result is that Firefox is running without hardware acceleration and playing a Youtube video pegs a core. Games don’t start. Sometimes it occurs, sometimes it doesn’t. Both work fine on X11.
If Gnome decides to stop working on Nvidia, I’ll have to switch to KDE for basic feature support. I’d rather not have to. I want to move to Wayland (the trackpad support makes up for a lot of weird shit!) but I simply can’t right now.
It’s not GNOME’s or wayland’s fault that Nvidia refuses to fix their drivers.
If Mutter segfaults, I have no direct reason to believe Nvidia is at fault. I’ve seen my fair share of Gnome bugs on an AMD GPU over the years, not everything on Linux is Nvidia’s fault.
You are correct in saying that there are still several problems in both Wayland (e.g. lack of drawing tablet support) and mutter (e.g. tearing protocol non yet implemented). But then you proceed to list problems that are Nvidia’s fault.
The first is weird, but it probably depends on Nvidia’s kernel driver.
The second is probably a synchronization issue, so it’s probably due to Nvidia refusing to implement implicit sync, and explicit sync not being yet supported in Linux. But don’t quote me on that.
Vulkan should work. But video acceleration is definitely absent, and is listed by Nvidia itself among current driver limitations. Try this.
The GPU issue is a massive pain. It used to cause a kernel panic, so the screen not being detected is definitely an improvement, but I don’t seem to be the only one suffering from this issue. The combination of iGPU hooked up to a screen and dGPU hooked up to the HDMI port makes for terrible Linux support in general.
I don’t think the popups are a sync issue, as this also happens when I run Gnome on the Intel iGPU.
I’ve got the VAAPI driver (though it’s not supported well) but that didn’t change much. It’s not just video or Firefox, though; tools like
vkinfoalso report strange errors (of the type “I can find one match on Google and it’s in a pastebin file nothing seems to link to”).I don’t know where exactly the problems come from. Half the time, there’s an nvidia log message, the other half the problem seems to indicate a Gnome issue. I think it’s pretty safe to blame Nvidia for all of it, because after all, they are shit at writing Linux drivers. However, that doesn’t make Wayland work in practice.
Sadly, I’m stuck with Nvidia, and I don’t think Gnome/Nvidia development is going fast enough to clear all the breaking issues I encounter before it the Wayland-only version may release. Hopefully they’ll keep the Nvidia exception in?
Choice is good, but progress always beats choice eventually. That’s just how it is.