When will Manjaro Gnome allow switching to a Wayland session on machines with Nvidia cards by default and what's preventing this?

Non-technical Questions
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As we all know, Nvidia finally abandoned EGLStreams and embraced GBM. In response, Fedora has recently made Wayland default for Nvidia cards, and Ubuntu made Wayland default for hybrid systems with Nvidia and another integrated card.

Does Manjaro have a plan to make Wayland the default or at least available without hacks for Nvidia cards on Gnome? What exactly is preventing this right now?

I’m asking out of simple curiosity, not any particular necessity, but also because Wayland brings important improvements for laptops such as gestures, and is in general less buggy in my experience.

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Why do you want Wayland ? It is still a frickeling piece of beta that has so many errors and mistakes ! Be happy that it is NOT standard.

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Haha, I can see there’s quite a bit of Wayland hate here. I said in my original post, because 1) it has touch pad gestures; 2) because xorg is pretty buggy in my opinion, and Wayland works better on my non-nvidia laptop; though perhaps the problem here isn’t xorg, but nvidia in the first place.

Anyway, it is the default on Manjaro Gnome on non-Nvidia systems, and it’s now the default on Nvidia systems on Fedora, so I was just interested what’s preventing it from becoming the default on Manjaro Gnome for Nvidia systems. Or at the very least - if as you say it’s still beta - why not enable to switch to it from the login screen without making it the default?

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KDE Plasma has supported gestures on X11 for ages already. Just because gestures are new in Wayland doesn’t mean they’d be new in GNU/Linux, or for that matter, any of the BSDs.

You must be kidding, right? Wayland is a still very experimental and unstable platform that lacks many of the features needed in a modern-day UNIX operating system, and several features that have historically always been supported in UNIX but have still not been implemented in Wayland due to how Wayland works.

Performance-wise, Wayland is faster than X11 because it runs a lot of stuff in the kernel’s address space, which means that it doesn’t have to deal with all the different context switches in X11, which only runs part of its code in kernel space, while the rest runs in user space.

However, the more code runs in the kernel’s address space — and thus: with the highest privileges at the processor level — the greater the amount of potential bugs you introduce into that high-privilege environment, and thus, the greater the risk of completely crashing the machine.

By contrast, code running in user space can crash the application but won’t take down the whole machine with it, and can also be restarted again; in the worst case scenario you may have to reboot, but then it’ll be a clean reboot, not a system crash that may cause you to lose your data.

Just because other distributions opt to always go with the Latest & Greatest™ doesn’t mean that this would be the best strategy. It’s only “best” for people who lie awake at night over version numbers and not having the very latest shiny distraction.

Manjaro is a curated rolling-release distribution, and therefore its emphasis lies on usability and stability. Furthermore, Manjaro is partnered up with hardware vendors who sell systems with Manjaro preinstalled on them. It would be a very bad idea to sell Manjaro-branded hardware with buggy operating systems on them, don’t you think? :wink:

I don’t know about GNOME, but in Plasma you can do exactly that. (It’s not the default behavior, though.)

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Not sure, but nvidia does not work on a wayland client smoothly. I guess they enabled Xwayland, so its a X client with an X server unter the wayland compositor. That works and is the default on gnome as see (at least on unstable branch).

Nvidia + Wayland is buggy, unreliable and non-complete. That’s the reason. Therefore in the meantime it runs in Xwayland.

Example:

inxi -G                                                                                  ✔
Graphics:
  Device-1: NVIDIA GP107 [GeForce GTX 1050 Ti] driver: nvidia v: 515.65.01
  Display: x11 server: X.Org v: 21.1.4 with: Xwayland v: 22.1.3
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Fedora has not made wayland default when using nvidia.They have left the option in the login so you can choose xorg or wayland when using nvidia.I agree with whats already been posted I do not choose to use wayland until the bugs have been worked out.

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Thanks for all your replies!

I actually bought a laptop with Manjaro Gnome preinstalled, and the default server was Wayland, because it didn’t have Nvidia graphics. So, Manjaro Gnome in fact already ships with Wayland by default on non-Nvidia isos and laptops. So, I think that proves it’s not as buggy after all.

Perhaps I worded that a bit wrong. As you mention, Wayland is faster than Xorg, and that’s what I meant. Not that it’s less buggy. Still, I’d say it’s fairly bug-free in my very recent experience.

That is very interesting. I didn’t know that!

Yes, I think that’s what Fedora and Ubuntu both do. So, I meant Wayland together with Xwayland when needed, not just pure Wayland.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/WaylandByDefaultOnNVIDIA

Overall, I feel like my main point was missed here somehow. In recent Manjaro Gnome isos, Wayland is already the default, except for Nvidia. So the problem here isn’t that Wayland is not ready, or else it wouldn’t be included by default on any iso, Nvidia or otherwise.

Now my question was related to the fact that Nvidia support on Wayland has improved significantly with the latest drivers, starting with 495, and so it’s viable to run it with Wayland now. You can take a look at the following Reddit thread where people are sharing their experiences with Nvidia and Wayland:

While some people are having minor issues, some say it’s perfectly fine. Granted, this doesn’t sound like it would be a good idea to actually make Wayland the default for Nvidia on Manjaro Gnome. But then here’s another question: why don’t Manjaro make it possible to switch to Wayland from the login screen on Nvidia systems by default? Right now it’s not possible without some tweaking. Even Ubuntu 22.04 LTS now allows Nvidia systems to choose a Wayland session from the login screen, even though Wayland is not the default session.

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Yes, same in Gnome. You can do that, but it’s not the default behavior. Why though?

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No, it doesn’t prove this at all — not if you know the players involved in the game. The GNOME developers favor Wayland, but then again, the GNOME developers also have a tendency to regard themselves as the center of the universe, and to hell with everything else.

Their decisions over the years have already been met with loud criticism from the community on more than one occasion, including two very notorious outbursts of anger from Upper Penguin Linus B. Torvalds himself.

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Wayland like any window manager should ALWAYS be a user choice, NOT shoved down one’s throat. No matter the desktop environment it should never be the default.

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Not according to this test:

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Wayland isn’t a Window Manager though? And I can say the same: Xorg shouldn’t be shoved down anyone’s throat. Again, my question wasn’t ‘When will Manjaro start shoving Wayland down everyone’s throats and throw Xorg in the dustbin’.

Have you actually tried using Gnome on Wayland recently? It isn’t a bad experience, not at all. I dunno about Gnome with Nvidia on Wayland. Seems to me kind of weird that Manjaro is still stuck in the past (no disrespect) in not providing the option to switch to a Wayland session in a Nvidia machine by default. Let me reiterate: not actually switching to a Wayland session on Nvidia machines by default - here I’d agree with @Aragorn 's reasoning that it’s still not ready. Just allowing to switch by default. I wonder what’s preventing this? Just allowing the user the choice - one that other distros, even such a slow and stable one like Ubuntu LTS already provide.

Isn’t it a reasonable question?

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Thank you for the article. Very interesting. So, I suppose in games the difference is negligible: some games run better under Xorg, some under Xwayland, according to these benchmarks. He does say Wayland on Gnome and Nvidia runs very well if using the latest drivers, so this article is another proof of my point.

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Indeed; in and of itself, Wayland isn’t a window manager — it’s a display server. It does however come with its own compositing window manager, called Weston.

I don’t see how you could possibly suggest that something which is and has for decades already been the default display server could be regarded as being shoved down anybody’s throat.

No disrespect intended, but saying that X.Org is being shoved down people’s throats is about just as asinine as saying that the Linux kernel is being shoved down the throats of all GNU/Linux users.

Note: X.Org is the current default implementation of the X11 display server protocol, but it’s not the only available one. Up until about the middle of the 2000s, the default X11 implementation in all FLOSS UNIX-family systems — i.e. GNU/Linux and the BSDs — was actually XFree86, but at some point, XFree86 changed its license — I’m not certain of the details anymore, but as I remember it, the new license heavily restricted the user’s freedom in how they could use the software — and then the project was forked into X.Org, with virtually all GNU/Linux distributions and most of the BSDs switching over to X.Org.

I’m not sure whether XFree86 is still being developed — and personally I’m not interested enough to find out about that, but if your curiosity gets the better of you, then :duck::duck::walking_man: is your friend :stuck_out_tongue: — but it is a fact that X.Org quickly became a much better X11 implementation than XFree86 had ever been, and that it evolved much faster, adopting new features and new functionality.

No, I have not. First of all, I’m a Plasma user — I hate GNOME — and secondly, I’m not much into experimenting with a production machine.

For yourself and many others, GNU/Linux is a toy that they’re (usually) running alongside of Microsoft Windows. For myself, GNU/Linux has already been my production operating system for well over two decades, and exclusively so — I don’t use or have any need for Microsoft Windows.

I do all of my work in GNU/Linux, and I’m not going to be experimenting or otherwise messing about with a system that I depend upon for everything I do, and that has all of my data on it. (Yes, I do have backups, of course, but that’s not the point.)

Like Brussels sprouts, it’s an acquired taste, and like those very same Brussels sprouts, a taste that I myself appear unable to acquire. :stuck_out_tongue:

If that is the case — I don’t know, because I don’t have an Nvidia GPU — then it’s probably because of the problems with Wayland on Nvidia. But to the best of my knowledge, Manjaro does offer one the choice to optionally use Wayland — or at least, on non-Nvidia hardware — at login time in both the SDDM and LightDM display managers, while GDM and GNOME already use Wayland by default.

Note: Do bear in mind that only the Plasma edition, the GNOME edition and the XFCE edition are official Manjaro editions. All other GUI choices — e.g. Cinnamon, MATE, et al — are community editions, and their setup may differ from the official editions.

If you want the very latest in everything, then you should switch to the Unstable branch, or alternatively, use Arch instead of Manjaro.

As has been explained already, offering the Latest & Greatest™ is not one of Manjaro’s objectives. Manjaro is cutting-edge, but not bleeding-edge, and there are reasons for that.

It is what it is. :man_shrugging:

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I didn’t suggest that. I compared someone else’s comment that Wayland was being shoved down someone’s throat to this - I believe both statements are asinine. No disrespect to the commenter who suggested that.

I’m not running Windows and haven’t been for 1.5 years by now. Though perhaps I’m still in the euphoric state where Linux indeed seems like a ‘toy’. But a very fun one at that. But don’t you think you’re a little biased to be making pronouncements about Gnome and whether Manjaro should allow switching to Wayland by default on Nvidia machines when running a Gnome DE? I hate Windows now, so I wouldn’t tell people running Windows that they shouldn’t switch to Windows 11 because Windows 10 is better. You see the metaphor here?

It’s a very funny comparison, because I love Brussels sprouts!

Right. That’s the way it’s been for a long time. But recently seems like those problems were solved in the Nvidia 495 driver (we’re at 515 by now). Testament to that - Ubuntu LTS allows switching to a Wayland session by default on Nvidia. I can see that Fedora is a Latest & Greatest™ distro. But Ubuntu LTS is by no means one.

So I thought there might be some actual technical issues only appearing in Manjaro/Arch? Or maybe some specific reason Manjaro devs have that Ubuntu and Fedora devs didn’t? As I said in the opening post, I’m really JUST CURIOUS.

And it is great! I’ve been using it for half a year now, and it’s my favorite so far :slight_smile:

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i still don’t know what’s the intention of this thread. really, there are more common things to talk about than an egg that still isn’t breeded.
wayland is still in beta, nvidia still don’t offer open-source-driver even if they have announced so all in it isn’t worth a second to talk about. if you wanna use wayland so do, if others don’t want so it is.
what the heck do you wanna talk about with this thread ?

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No, I’m not. I’ve been involved with FLOSS environment for well over two decades as a voluntary GNU/Linux newbie helper and a FLOSS advocate, and I know what and whom I’m talking about.

I’m also quite familiar with the attitudes of the GNOME and GTK developers, and I can’t say that their attitude has managed to garner them any sympathy from me.

This does of course not imply in any way, shape or form that you or anyone else should be feeling the same about things as I do. Diversity is what spices up life, and everyone is free to choose whatever they like. Thank the universe that we’re all different. :slight_smile:

As I wrote higher up already, Manjaro does default to Wayland in its GNOME edition. If it does not do that on Nvidia hardware, then it’s because there would be a good reason for that, and that the developer team decided that it would be safer to use X.Org by default in that case.

But nothing is written in stone, and if Nvidia becomes better at supporting Wayland, then I don’t see why it could not become the default for GNOME under those conditions. I’m not one of the Manjaro developers, so it’s not my call. :man_shrugging:

However, even then still, nothing prevents you from switching to Wayland on Nvidia now. It’s just not the default — yet.

Thank you for appreciating my sense of humor. :wink:

However, I must rectify something here. In reality, it is not true that Brussels sprouts would be an acquired taste. As the matter of fact — and I am being serious here — scientific research has shown that a like or dislike for Brussels sprouts is actually genetic. Some people absolutely love them — my mother did — and others are absolutely disgusted by them. I happen to fall into the latter category.

I have a similar reaction to seafood, by the way. But I digress. :wink:

I can only suspect that it’s because of the Manjaro-branded hardware and the team deciding that they wouldn’t want to risk putting something out there that breaks, and that then in the process would then also damage Manjaro’s reputation.

But I cannot speak for the team in that regard, because — again — I’m not a developer.

I’ve been using Manjaro for over three years now, and it is the perfect distribution for myself as an individual, with my background, my taste and my requirements. I had been using other distributions in the past on both servers and workstations, although Ubuntu has never been one of them.

I’ve even dabbled with Gentoo, but that’s high-maintenance, given that you have to compile everything from sources, and so you end up compiling the whole time.

Imagine this scenario…: You’ve just started compiling Firefox or Chromium — which takes several hours, even on a fast machine — and by the time you’re done compiling you notice there’s a new version out already.

Ugh…! :roll_eyes: :man_facepalming:

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:poop: happens but how does that belong to wayland or x11 ?
again, i don’t understand the intention of this thread.

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Well, I’ll probably wait for it to appear in the login screen session switcher. My Nvidia machine is my main machine and I don’t want to tweak anything here.

That is hilarious. Who would’ve thought scientists have researched something like this.

I thought maybe actual Manjaro devs might explain my question about Wayland, but does not seem like it’ll happen. Well, I guess the Manjaro-branded hardware explanation sounds like the most probable one.

Sooo, should I close the issue somehow? Or just leave it as is and it’s fine?

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manjaro is as all others the distro-packager and none can predict the future. again if you want to use wayland, so do and if you want to use x11 than do so. it’s the power of a distro that let’s YOU decide and not the distro. same discussion is flatpak,snap or none of them. you can do what you want and you’re not dependent what the distro-maker think might be best. there are distros that are quite stricter and don’t let you choose and that is not the way it should be.

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