Yeah this thread is full of people expecting the new thing to immediately surpass the old, ignoring the decades of development and refinement that went into the old solution.
I get that, I really do, but don’t try and push a product that isn’t usable for everyone to everyone. Sure, whoever wants to use it, they can, report bugs, open PRs, whatever, but don’t push this thing like it’s the second comming to everyone out there. One, not everyone needs the features it has, X11 works fine for most people. Two, it’s not backwards compatible, meaning they’d have to abandon a lot of software that just doesn’t work with it (waypipe doesn’t work all the time and with every piece of software there is).
The transition is rushed, everyone feels that. Why? Because a lot of new features that new hardware had couldn’t be implemented in X11. And let’s be honest, this rushing to switch to Wayland is mostly because of gamers. Regarding a lot of things Linux related, they are the de facto standard that dictates whether somethings get’s changed or upgraded. I’m sorry, but not everyone is a gamer. Most people just need a working PC to do whatever. If you can’t be backwards compatible completely with the old UIs, I’m sorry, but that’s a deal breaker for me and I believe most regular users.
Xwayland is a thing, and nobody stops you from installing Xorg if you wanted. They’re just dropping official support so they can focus that energy to Wayland instead.
Also not all Xorg features should be ported.
I have found Wayland will work for 99% of users who aren’t gamers, all the major programs work well, ironically Wayland has been worse for gaming so far for me on the underpowered laptop, but that’s due to it having to run also through xwayland, which will be a problem solved by Valve pretty soon as they don’t have to worry about Xorg anymore and can make proton work better for Wayland.
Tried Xwayland… jump through hoops to get something meant to be run on Wayland on X11… sorry, not for me. And it didn’t work in the end BTW, have no idea why.
Though, I have to admit, this was over a year ago.
Still, my stand point is, this is not a finished product no matter how you look at it. If you don’t have at least 90% of the stuff that are supposed to work, working, without major problems, then yes, but this is more like 50/50. Some things work, some don’t, we really have no idea what does and doesn’t… except Wayland and Nvidia of course, we know that doesn’t work.
Ummm… Sure… Progress takes time, and it won’t speed up at all if everyone says “it’s not ready,” and edge cases never get tested. I mean, the project is sixsteen years old now. It’s been more than just " pretty good" for years at this point.
And I doubt that your distro is going to drop X11 session support anytime soon. So if you reinstall, you may need to do one more step to make that the default. Big whoop.
But the real meat here is that you had a bad experience something like a year ago, and it seems like you’ve developed true hatred over it. Would it help to know that Nvidia and Wayland play nicely now? They have for quite some time.
FWIW, I had very little trouble with xwayland even years ago. It didn’t really require any setup for me. It just kinda worked. Sure, there will always be SOME weirdness, but overall it’s been working really well for years.
Anyways, I’m sure you can still toggle over to your X session for years to come. At least until your DE decides it wants to go wayland only.
TBH, it sounds like you should go with a distro that makes no assumptions. Like an Arch/Endeavor. It definitely sounds like you’re current distro doesn’t meet your needs/ideals if you’re this angry about a default change.
Let’s be fair to the distro maintainers, though. They have the option to either keep shipping and developing against abandoned code, or they move with upstream. Since no one is developing X11 anymore, they’re all moving to the new stuff. Most of them changed defaults years ago, too. Hard to develop new features when X is so long in the tooth.
The writing has been on the wall about the death of X11 for a long time, now. No one stepped up to fork it or take over maintenance. So it goes. But this is Linux, so you’re free to run it forever. Or even fork and maintain it yourself.
FWIW, Wayland+Nvidia was fine for me. Promising, even, considering how new it is. There are bugs to squash, sure, but there always are in new software.
I use Void now, after trying almost everything there is under the sun… and it’s a good choice for me ATM. And as Arch and other distros that leave you at the terminal and you do whatever you wanna do after that, it makes no assumptions. So, as I said, I’m not angry or afraid about anything. I just don’t like the pushy aspect of Wayland almost every other distro has taken.
Hard to develop new features when X is so long in the tooth.
I do agree with that, absolutely. But I was hoping for a more polished user experience from Wayland, which isn’t the case, not even now. Some things work, some don’t 🤷. Excuse me, but when you push something as important as a display server, you should really think long and hard about things like this. You can’t just throw it in the wild and insist on it being the new default when it’s far from a polished product.
The writing has been on the wall about the death of X11 for a long time, now. No one stepped up to fork it or take over maintenance. So it goes. But this is Linux, so you’re free to run it forever. Or even fork and maintain it yourself.
That is true, and I was really hoping Wayland would have almost all of the features of X11 implemented in it (like PipeWire did with PulseAudio). As it turns out, this was never even the plan. The plan was, make something completely new (fine, that was the idea anyway) but not make it backwards compatible… OK, we’ll throw a few plugins here and there for backwards compatibility, but that’s it folks, we don’t plan on working on anything X11 related any more. This is one of the things that actually bugs me about the project. It’s like the freaking GNOME devs have written this thing, we do what we like, and if you like it, jump on board. You don’t? Well, tough luck 🤷.
Yeah this thread is full of people expecting the new thing to immediately surpass the old, ignoring the decades of development and refinement that went into the old solution.
I get that, I really do, but don’t try and push a product that isn’t usable for everyone to everyone. Sure, whoever wants to use it, they can, report bugs, open PRs, whatever, but don’t push this thing like it’s the second comming to everyone out there. One, not everyone needs the features it has, X11 works fine for most people. Two, it’s not backwards compatible, meaning they’d have to abandon a lot of software that just doesn’t work with it (waypipe doesn’t work all the time and with every piece of software there is).
The transition is rushed, everyone feels that. Why? Because a lot of new features that new hardware had couldn’t be implemented in X11. And let’s be honest, this rushing to switch to Wayland is mostly because of gamers. Regarding a lot of things Linux related, they are the de facto standard that dictates whether somethings get’s changed or upgraded. I’m sorry, but not everyone is a gamer. Most people just need a working PC to do whatever. If you can’t be backwards compatible completely with the old UIs, I’m sorry, but that’s a deal breaker for me and I believe most regular users.
Xwayland is a thing, and nobody stops you from installing Xorg if you wanted. They’re just dropping official support so they can focus that energy to Wayland instead.
Also not all Xorg features should be ported.
I have found Wayland will work for 99% of users who aren’t gamers, all the major programs work well, ironically Wayland has been worse for gaming so far for me on the underpowered laptop, but that’s due to it having to run also through xwayland, which will be a problem solved by Valve pretty soon as they don’t have to worry about Xorg anymore and can make proton work better for Wayland.
Tried Xwayland… jump through hoops to get something meant to be run on Wayland on X11… sorry, not for me. And it didn’t work in the end BTW, have no idea why.
Though, I have to admit, this was over a year ago.
Still, my stand point is, this is not a finished product no matter how you look at it. If you don’t have at least 90% of the stuff that are supposed to work, working, without major problems, then yes, but this is more like 50/50. Some things work, some don’t, we really have no idea what does and doesn’t… except Wayland and Nvidia of course, we know that doesn’t work.
Ummm… Sure… Progress takes time, and it won’t speed up at all if everyone says “it’s not ready,” and edge cases never get tested. I mean, the project is sixsteen years old now. It’s been more than just " pretty good" for years at this point.
And I doubt that your distro is going to drop X11 session support anytime soon. So if you reinstall, you may need to do one more step to make that the default. Big whoop.
But the real meat here is that you had a bad experience something like a year ago, and it seems like you’ve developed true hatred over it. Would it help to know that Nvidia and Wayland play nicely now? They have for quite some time.
FWIW, I had very little trouble with xwayland even years ago. It didn’t really require any setup for me. It just kinda worked. Sure, there will always be SOME weirdness, but overall it’s been working really well for years.
Anyways, I’m sure you can still toggle over to your X session for years to come. At least until your DE decides it wants to go wayland only.
I just don’t like how every distro out there is pushy about it. Give us a choice, fine, but don’t make it the default.
My distro is not gonna drop support for X11 for a very long time. I’m not worried about that part.
Not according to what I’ve read. There were people complaining about Nvidia and Wayland in this thread as well.
And I don’t even own an Nvidia GPU, most of my GPUs are onboard, Intel.
TBH, it sounds like you should go with a distro that makes no assumptions. Like an Arch/Endeavor. It definitely sounds like you’re current distro doesn’t meet your needs/ideals if you’re this angry about a default change.
Let’s be fair to the distro maintainers, though. They have the option to either keep shipping and developing against abandoned code, or they move with upstream. Since no one is developing X11 anymore, they’re all moving to the new stuff. Most of them changed defaults years ago, too. Hard to develop new features when X is so long in the tooth.
The writing has been on the wall about the death of X11 for a long time, now. No one stepped up to fork it or take over maintenance. So it goes. But this is Linux, so you’re free to run it forever. Or even fork and maintain it yourself.
FWIW, Wayland+Nvidia was fine for me. Promising, even, considering how new it is. There are bugs to squash, sure, but there always are in new software.
I use Void now, after trying almost everything there is under the sun… and it’s a good choice for me ATM. And as Arch and other distros that leave you at the terminal and you do whatever you wanna do after that, it makes no assumptions. So, as I said, I’m not angry or afraid about anything. I just don’t like the pushy aspect of Wayland almost every other distro has taken.
I do agree with that, absolutely. But I was hoping for a more polished user experience from Wayland, which isn’t the case, not even now. Some things work, some don’t 🤷. Excuse me, but when you push something as important as a display server, you should really think long and hard about things like this. You can’t just throw it in the wild and insist on it being the new default when it’s far from a polished product.
That is true, and I was really hoping Wayland would have almost all of the features of X11 implemented in it (like PipeWire did with PulseAudio). As it turns out, this was never even the plan. The plan was, make something completely new (fine, that was the idea anyway) but not make it backwards compatible… OK, we’ll throw a few plugins here and there for backwards compatibility, but that’s it folks, we don’t plan on working on anything X11 related any more. This is one of the things that actually bugs me about the project. It’s like the freaking GNOME devs have written this thing, we do what we like, and if you like it, jump on board. You don’t? Well, tough luck 🤷.