Should gnome edition default to Wayland session?

Development
#1

Currently Manjaro uses Xorg by default on Gnome edition. Wayland takes a little bit more ram, but runs about 300% smoother. Fedora has been defaulting to Wayland for years now, and we too have been looking for the right time to make the switch. For me, critical show stopper has been Pop-shell not working correctly on Wayland. However, with the latest update, it seems to be stable on Wayland too.

So, does anyone else know of any showstoppers preventing the switch to wayland?

  • Wayland is the way!
  • No, let’s keep using Xorg!

0 voters

@Ste74

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#2

so what is the status for nvidia drivers with wayland ?
also radeon & amdgpu with wayland ?
the last intel with wayland ?

and what about arm driver video with wayland ?

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#3

Switching to wayland by default Is a carefull thing because we don t know where user want run Gnome…

#4

I used Gnome very little, so I’m rather conservative on that matter. Were not lots of applications / settings / etc malfunctioning with Wayland at some point?
I’m not very aware of Wayland progress but I remember it was rather a project “on the work”, promising but not fully ready.
I guess it’s fully mature by now?

#5

I’m also worried about the Wayland compatibility of the proprietary nvidia drivers like @stephane.

#6

Crappy as ever, so gnome automatically disables Wayland for nvidia users. They would not be impacted.

Working nicely afaik.

No idea, but this decision doesn’t impact Arm editions in any way…

#7

I would say wayland is mature at this point, but some extensions might not support gnome perfectly. On the other hand, other extension don’t work correctly without wayland. :man_shrugging: We can’t make sure that all extensions work always, but we do ensure that the ones we ship keep working. So basically the stuff that is directly available in gnome-layout-switcher.

One thing to note is that Manjaro ootb experience as vmware guest is terrible, and Wayland fixes that.

#8

I heard about XWayland. Is it still a thing?

#9

I just decided to give Wayland a try, and discovered that Barrier (keyboard/mouse sharing application) doesn’t work correctly. Barrier server is running on Manjaro, and with Wayland, the Super key appears to get trapped and not passed through to the client, which is MacOS.

EDITED to add a missing word.

1 Like
#10

It is. It means that nonwayland apps still work on wayland.

#11

Thank you, this is exactly the kind of data I was looking for.

#12

And it doesn’t look like support is coming anytime soon, unfortunately:

#13

I guess it’s a good idea. Distribution as big as manjaro will definitely have an impact on the Linux world and especially if you want to make a new standard it’s a good way to encourage developers to adapt. If someone has issues they can turn back to xorg in couple of clicks. Though majority will stay and use wayland fixing it’s bugs, creating issues and polishing it, which is crucial if you want to get rid of xorg and persuade nvidia.

Obviously It’s a good idea only if wayland meets some minimum criteria.

#14

What’s the situation regarding hybrid (optimus) laptops with Wayland? I’ve heard it’s a bit slower for games too. I say let the gamers decide :stuck_out_tongue:

#15

For newbies, it’s best to leave Xorg as the default. But who needs to also go to Wayland in a couple of clicks. :wink:

3 Likes
#16

You’ve got a point :smiley:

#17

A default setting is something that works for most setups. Wayland is not working for many setups and many apps. From that point of view the answer should be clear: The default should stay with Xorg.

6 Likes
#18

Yes it should, because Gnome Search bar fails to search special chars when on X11, trying to input words like “Análise” don’t work correct on Gnome SuperKey Search and not everyone likes or wants to write in English only, trying to change Wayland to be default also does not work, in every system restart I have to login to Gnome Classic and logout so the correct items list “Gnome, Gnome Classic, Gnome X11” appears, before that only “Gnome and Gnome Classic” options are available, and to make it worst the last case always defaults to Gnome on X11 even if I already changed /etc/gdm/custom.conf to enable wayland. Every system restart is the same thing. To make it worst I think this is not only a Manjaro problem, but probably deep embedded in Gnome code, tried on OpenSuse Tumbleweed, also and the same happens, only the Fedora 33 beta works as expected , because they made the “hard coded” option of Wayland by default, Linux world as it seems is full of bugs,lacks developers and have huge amounts of children that loves to show cool wallpapers of linux and that’s it, of all GUI’s I only really liked KDE, powerfull,fast and very reasonable on resources, I just wished it would had the design and simple workflow of Gnome, I really like that, I found that while KDE has a very visible contribution of different Open Source developers that make tons of high quality applications based of qt and KDE frameworks on Gnome GTK apps there’s not many compared and the fact that publicly known Gnome has the contribution of big companies seems more of test playground for their own very specific agenda than really Open Source contribution, making Gnome slow and buggy can be a very strategic defense to keep the existence of companies like Microsoft…

#19

Hi, just tried Fedora 33 Beta (Wayland of course) and feels a tiny bit snappier than Manjaro Gnome with Wayland enabled. What could be the reason of that? Could it be only updated Gnome 3.38 shipped by Fedora Beta?
Well, crazy that it took 10 years and still not ready to replace something like Xorg. Anyway, defaulting to Xorg in Manjaro seems right in 2020.

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#20

Xorg is abandonware Adam Jackson On The State Of The X.Org Server In 2020 - Phoronix

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