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Tell HN: Gnome on Wayland Is Amazing
390 points by oxplot on March 21, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 421 comments
I've been using MATE+Compiz on Archlinux since 2015 because I was used to it and it had a lot of GUI features that I didn't find elsewhere. At around the same time, I did give Gnome 3 a spin and found a lot of clunky behavior and bugs. Fast forward to yesterday when I was considering buying a new laptop to replace my ThinkPad x250 which is starting to show its age, I thought I give Gnome on Wayland another try.

OMG! It is nothing like I remember it. To put it succinctly, it's MacOS interface for linux. It's smooth, performant, beautiful and functional. I can do everything I used to have on Compiz, here on Gnome and it's built-in. I haven't actually needed any Gnome Extensions so far.

Well done Wayland, Gnome, GTK and every other project involved in making what's essentially the best Linux Desktop experience I've ever had.

As for getting a new laptop, that idea went out the window fast. My machine feels like new and I can attest to a significant performance boost of GUI apps as the result of switching to Gnome.




My experience is very similar. I tried the first iterations of Gnome 3 and was very disappointed.

At some point I tried Windows+WSL but that was a complete disaster.

A couple of years ago I decided to try Fedora+Gnome+Wayland. It is an outstanding experience. Everything is smooth, the UI is beautiful. Now with PipeWire and Libadwaita things are getting even better. After some stagnation, the Linux desktop is gaining momentum again.

There are a lot of hate comments for Gnome in this post. My advice for those reading is: Try it for yourself! Most of the haters haven't used Gnome since 2004. Just try it!


>My advice for those reading is: Try it for yourself! Most of the haters haven't used Gnome since 2004

Until Gnome philosophy and attitude changes I will not touch it. I have vision disabilities so shit looking cool is zero advantage for me, I prefer function over form.


Unfortunately, my colorblind friends also share this sentiment. They had to leave GNOME after they pulled support for custom stylesheets, which is a really short-sighted move for a DE that's trying to be more accessible.


What are your recommendations for users with vision disability?


>What are your recommendations for users with vision disability?

I use KDE , some of the features:

1 easy to setup global shortcuts , I can trigger my custom scripts just with a key press (so this is not a casual user feature)

2 the Zoom Kwin plugin, I use this all the time, you can set what kebyoard shortcut you want (when I tested Windows 7 the Zoom feature keys are hard coded and you had to use 2 hands to zoom in and out and it had lag, so KDE Zoom is better then Windows (maybe recent windows improved...)) ... no idea about GNOME Zoom , last time I was using Compiz with Gnome to get it.

3 KDE has an easy way to let you set font sizes for Qt and GTK apps, those GNOME assholes will never attempt to support Qt apps on their desktop

4 I use a deprecated KDE app called joview for text to speech, cool feature is it has a queue and I can put stuff in the queue and have it read it to me. I do not care for natural sounding voices, my TTS is setup to max speed anyway so it will sound unnatural anyway.

From what I read from the accessibility mailing list the situation is not as good for blind people, there are still issues that need solving and only volunteers are working on this area , but they will respond and try to fix bugs.

3


> (when I tested Windows 7 the Zoom feature keys are hard coded and you had to use 2 hands to zoom in and out and it had lag, so KDE Zoom is better then Windows (maybe recent windows improved...))

Windows Magnifier keys are still hardcoded (as of Windows 10), but zooming in/out with [Win]+[+] and [Win]+[-] can be done with one hand (using right [Win]) and performance is pretty good once it's running (turning it on or changing mode has a huge delay though).


This seems kind of ironic? Gnome has massive buttons and icons (to the consternation of many users) specifically because it's more accessible.

When was the last time you tried it?


Gnome has big buttons and giant paddings because they target touch screens. But my point is that I don't care about all buttons have exactly same corner radius, I need features like a tray system to be able to access my non Gnome apps quickly(like I need to change the TTS program language), GNOME is good for you if what that big ego designers imposed is what you want, if it is not what you want then even GNOME community will tell you to use some else because GNOME has a vision, minimal features, form over function, excuses for incompetent developers


With about 10 extensions, I can make Gnome perfect. Yes this include bringing systray back.

The trouble is, it will break on every new gnome version, because Gnome devs don't believe in backwards compatibility ever for their extensions APIs. Just imagine if a browser did this.


Have you shared this accessibility feedback with the gnome team directly? There’s been a huge push in recent years to make software more accessible and it’s very likely these frustrations are the result of ignorance more than malice on the part of the developers and designers. I think they’d appreciate your perspective. I know I would as a software engineer.


The gnome team isn't exactly known for being receptive to things outside their vision/interest.


Fedora is a seriously underrated distro. Excellent out of the box experience and up to date packages while still being quite stable.


At Red Hat, they give you a laptop with RHEL on it, then the other engineers tell you to blow it away and install Fedora, so there's a lot dogfooding going on. A buddy who works there got the latest Dell XPS (for more or less personal use) and was able to get the sound card driver merged into the next kernel release by knowing who to ask. I'm more of an Ubuntu user going back for over a decade, but he's got me looking at Fedora.


It's basically immediately downstream from Gnome, systemd, and other core desktop projects that Red Hat invests heavily in. So it gets all of the testing and integration.


As stupid as it sounds, I really think the name has a lot to do with it.


Linus (of Linus media group, not Torvalds) thought it was a meme distro.

The name predates the meme


Linus of LTT is an ascended videogamer. His knowledge ends just past overclocking your watercooled setup to get 2 more FPS out of the latest videogame. He's sometimes entertaining but never informative.


This. Linus knowledge with technical details is very shallow at best. Most of his videos have scripts pre-written and double checked by more knowledgeable members of his teams.

His jokes are not even that funny. The amount of followers he has is insane.

There are only so maany ways you can overclock/mod a build or "accidentally" drop expensive computer parts.


But he is still more likely to have known about fedora than the average "casually tech literate" user , yet he still associated the name to the meme. Compare the name "fedora" to "pop_os" and it becomes clear which one sounds more "normie friendly".

I disagree with you on Linus though. He is still a very reliable source when it comes to product reviews, and his channel is informative when it comes to which part to pick. He realizes that the channel is not very technical, which is why he is investing heavily into equipping and staffing his new test lab.


GIMP has the same problem. I recommended it to someone, and the first minute or two they thought I was joking until they said ‘wow, you are right, it actually has the fetish name’.

I know there was a push to have GIMP renamed GLIMP, but it went nowhere because “people shouldn’t be snowflakes lol”.


Gimp as a name still makes me laugh after all these years, whenever I actively think about it. You'd be hard pressed to find a worse name for your software. not only is it a fetish term, it's simultaneously also a slur against disabled people


English is not my first language.

I didn't know what gimp meant, or that it even meant something. Never gave a thought about it before.

TIL what it means. Expanded my vocabulary. Thanks buddy!

I can now never not think about it whenever I hear gimp.


Yeah names in FOSS are so self defeating sometimes. It might sound superficial to the more practical/technical people who are usually behind those projects... but it has a huge impact! It is starting to get better, and the era of naming everything after weird obscure inside joke acronyms seems to be behind us.

(I get that we need to keep software fun, but you can have a lot of fun with nice names too!)


With other devs I refer to it as GIMP, but sometimes in mixed company (management present) I'll call it "GNU IMP". Just partially expand the acronym.


Yeah, unfortunately, it got the name Fedora a few years before that hat style became closely associated with psychosexual toxicity.


> psychosexual toxicity

The Fedora hat (actually the Trilby hat) usually is associated with socially inept neckbeards. No need to use such strong words, even though it might describe some of them. Not all neckbeards are incels.


WHAT?


https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/fedora-shaming


sometimes a little bit too fast for my taste. Latest example was pipewire which had a super annoying bug for me of sometimes just losing my audio output.

But in general it's been really good for many releases now.


> There are a lot of hate comments for Gnome in this post. My advice for those reading is: Try it for yourself! Most of the haters haven't used Gnome since 2004. Just try it!

GNOME 3 seems to have been where people really started to hate Gnome, and that came out in 2011. I suspect that many of the Gnome haters actually loved Gnome in 2004.

I currently use KDE and I try out various other desktop environments periodically. 2019 was the last time I tried Gnome and it definitely wasn't "for me"

My needs are relatively modest; I rarely game and I use screens that don't require scaling.


Yes, the hate coincided with "lets make Gnome look like OSX instead of Windows".

I'm forced to use Wayland on my laptop, which sadly means I forced to use Gnome 3. To those saying "try it": I do, it's just not for me. It's choices are just plain weird.

To explain, what a good UI looks like largely depends on display size. On a tiny display like a phone there is no space for window decorations or a menu bar going across the entire screen, let alone a 2nd application window. Which is why iOS and Android have no window decorations at all, and often no dedicated menu button either.

Increase the screen real estate a bit, and a dedicated menu bar that makes all functions faster to reach becomes an affordable luxury along with a task switcher to reduce flipping between applications a single click. Hell, you might even allow the user to display multiple windows. That's what the Apple desktop has, and it made sense back in the day when they were first released.

Scale it up further, and running multiple windows on the same display starts making sense. If you do flipping between application now needs zero clicks. And now you can see the app and it's help screen at same time, and you can happily drag and paste from one window to another. With so much space you can easily afford to give each app it's own menu bar, borders that permit scaling and moving of windows, and more besides.

Gnome3 was introduced as a desktop window manager when we were very firmly in the era of HD displays. And for reasons I suspect I'll never don't understand, they chose the same layout the first Mac's used 30 years previously and even more infuriatingly pressed you at every change it got into maximising your window to occupy the entire display - almost as if it was dealing with a phone sized screen.

As soon as mint / cinnamon / lxqt moves to Wayland, I'm gone.


What forces you to use Wayland? Just curious because usually people are forced to stay on X.


The monitor port on my Thinkpad X1 Gen2 does not work under X. It works with Wayland. It's probably because on Gen2 that port is driven by the NVidia card. On the Gen 3 it's driven by the Intel GPU.

By the by, Wayland is a definite improvement on X. It's noticeably faster, and handles scaling better. The lack of network transparency (eg, running gvim with X) doesn't matter because everything still uses X under the hood (via XWayland). I gather they have a workable solution or network transparency now, so the future is looking bright. It's just Gnome3 that's the problem.

I don't know whether it's a coincidence, but Gnome3 copied OSX's look and feel, and systemd copied OSX's launchd, and most of the development of both happens in the same company. There is even a launchctl. If they love OSX then fine, but I would have been happier if that had of scratched that itch by buying themselves Mac's rather than trying to copy them.


> After some stagnation, the Linux desktop is gaining momentum again.

Yeah, I feel the same way.

I guess it's time for gnome 4 :)


GNOME 42 is being released this week.


Does Gnome still force client side decorations?


Well, not sure, but Wayland certainly does in a technical sense, but your window manager handles that for you. If you are asking, whether Gnome apps have dedicated titlebars, then the answer is that most don't.


There are wayland protocol extensions to support server side decorations: https://wayland.app/protocols/xdg-decoration-unstable-v1 https://wayland.app/protocols/kde-server-decoration

They are both unstable, but Gnome has indicated that they are not planning to implement server side decorations even if it was a stable extension: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217


I like Gnome, but this decision always seemed technically wrong to me. From a practical point of view I don't care if GTK or the compositor handles it, but if I put on my programmer hat it seems like the compositor should be doing decorations.


On the other side of the line, both Windows and macOS do client-side decorations too. Most developers do not realize that, but it is being done in process of each client, by the libraries that are mandatory to link to on these platforms.

If is difficult to synchronize two different processes to do frame-perfect rendering. In the end, it is unnecessary complexity, when you can do in-process.


It's not unnecessary complexity as long as applications can hang. Windows papers over this problem by drawing server side decorations once this is detected but it is far from perfect - and it means you need support for server-side decorations anyway.


Once the application hangs, it won't listen for WM_CLOSE (win32), WM_DELETE_WINDOW (x11) or any other event and won't handle that event. Painting decoration then is purely cosmetic.

Mutter, when it detects non-responsive application, will ask whether you want to kill it, or whether you want to wait a while.


Hangs can be temporary - and in fact this is the most common case IME - and with server side decorations you can still move, resize, minimize, etc. the window while the application is otherwise not responsive. The window manager can also handle a failure to respond to to the close request and offer to kill the process instead - for example KWin does this.

Add to that that server side decorations can achieve a degree of consistency that is just not ever going to happen with client side decorations.


You can move windows without any decorations (press the alt key and drag the window); resizing doesn't really work, as there is nothing to handle the repaint.

Consistency is a matter of POV - it is not really consistent, if your decorations have different widgets, or even font rendering (Qt is quite specific in this) than the rest of the app. The apps themselves are not consistent anyway, so having consistent decorations, for the price of dragging entire widget library and font shaping & rendering into the compositor process is not worth it. That's on top of the synchronization.


I kinda disagree - I think the compositor's job is to composite framebuffers of multiple apps together, basically blitting and alpha-blending textures. Imagine if it needed to decorations as well, how much info and dependencies would the pull in - it would need to be aware of the system themes and styles, have some library to draw them, which would be less efficient, since it would need another separate drawing context just for drawing the headers.


Yes and no. On Wayland an app has no access to its context. I.e. location on the screen, or ability to move itself. So dragging by the title bar is the compositor/WMs job. That means the WM has to know where those higher level controls are. It's also not really an applications job to manage its look as in themes.

Is it the toolkits job or the compositor/wm?


And you would rather have that complexity in every application, even those that have no reason to use system styling otherwise like minimalist video players and information displays, games, etc.?


>> And you would rather have that complexity in every application, even those that have no reason to use system styling otherwise like minimalist video players and information displays, games, etc.?

I would rather have system styling be done by the system not in any applications. Doesn't that sound logical?

I would also like the system to remember window placement, since it has responsibility for user dragging and applications no longer have access to their position or the ability to change it.


Yes - that's what libraries are for.

This is a strange argument - replacing the subject matter with something else to demonstrate the absurdity - would you have regex parsing in every application, or would you have regex parsing in a central system process?


The frustration I see most from this is on hiDPI displays and any electron apps (which there are plenty)

Supposedly it's been fixed recently: https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/29618


On Wayland it always uses client side decorations. Some programs do not have a title bar at all, and therefore they draw the decorations client side on X11 too.

Or do you mean the GNOME compositor?


I'm curious what the distros are for the people still seeing issues. Arch and Fedora tend to stay ahead of Ubuntu, for instance. I've been using Arch w/ GNOME for years now and switched silently (i.e. as part of a routine GNOME upgrade, not by doing anything) to Wayland as soon as it became the default for builds with an NVIDIA GPU, I think about a year ago, and have never had any issues.


Every time that I touch a Gnome, I feel it uber confuse, and that have a wastefull usage of screen space.


It is unfortunate that so many of the early comments are negative. Either Wayland is the future, or something that learns from Wayland's mistakes and leverages its ideas is. There is a really fertile field right now for experimentation in the world of compositors but I think people have been scared away by the long dark era of X Windows + binary graphics drivers. Maybe we're going to see a lot more of it on HN in the next decade?

What kept me off Wayland was the screenshots thing, but the argument in favour of the idea is strong. The downside is Wayland's conception of permissions and interactions is too basic and crippled adoption for a few years but the fundamentals (blocking cross-application snooping) is going to be necessary. Operating systems have to be less trusting.


After 10 years I still don't understand why I should switch away from X11. It is mature and is still being developed (latest xorg-server release is from January 2022). It does what I need.

From my perspective, Wayland is like btrfs - it doesn't seem to offer me anything major worth switching for, and there are still gotcha's lurking.


For me, the feature was adaptive dpi scaling done correctly. I have a 4k laptop monitor and some 1080p screens that it connects to, and my solution on X was just to have everything at 1.5 scaling so it was just slightly off on both monitors.

After switching that, and then seeing beautiful crisp fonts everywhere has meant that I haven't even considered going back to X, although I had to uninstall the zoom desktop app in order to screenshare (which works through the web version on chrome).

I jumped pretty early, and almost every problem I had has been sorted out now, so it's just a better experience for me now. (also, screenshots work fine, it's just screensharing on certain old apps that's a problem).


Funny you should mention fractional scaling. I use gnome on wayland and enabling fractional scaling has a warning that it's really not recommended. Part of me wonders if this was simply a carry over from gnome on xorg, but I've mostly just made text larger and use a zoom extension in the browser.


Unless something changed Wayland does not support native fractional scaling and instead renders at nearest higher integer scale then does bitmap scaling down giving blurry output (compared to native fractional scaling as in Windows).


When scaling down, you don't have blurry output. You won't get pixel-perfect, but you get sharp enough. MacOS does the same for fractional scale.

You get blurry when scaling UP. Xwayland does scale up, from 96 dpi to whatever fractional scale is set, so that's the reason why X apps are blurry. Native wayland app are not.


This is incorrect. I use fractional scaling in Gnome Wayland for my 4K monitor. The native Wayland software (Firefox, all the Gnome stuff,...) scales perfectly. Only XWayland applications are somewhat blurry.


Interesting. I gave up on Gnome/Linux long time ago but was watching a relevant wayland bug [0] in the hopes it will be fixed one day but it seems to be still open. Maybe I've been watching a wrong bug?

[0] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/i...

Update:

I can still see open bugs such as https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/1135. Are they outdated?


It is not clear to me what exactly the relevance of the first bug is. Text in all Wayland programs is perfectly clear on my system with 150% fractional scaling.

I can reproduce some of the effects from the second bug when looking at my 4K monitor from an extremely small distance (a few cm). I am not sure if this is really a bug. It looks like antialiased edges that don't perfectly fit the pixel grid. Probably hard to avoid in any scaling scenario. In any case, it is not noticeable at a reasonable viewing distance.


If there is no way to tell Wayland application that it should scale by fraction then application can't render with such scale, no? This leads me to assumption that fractional scaling happens at compositor.

By native scaling I mean absolutely no bitmap scaling. If rendering happened at target scale then all pixels would match grid and no artifacts would be possible. I can't even imagine how ClearType could work with bitmap scaling when it targets individual subpixels.

I think people have wildly different sensitivity to resolution. I know some that can't tell difference between 4k and 1080p and 1080p scaled on 4k screen. Some crazy people even think MacOS has good font rendering.


No, the scaling is definitely done by the applications. I don't know how they do it, but it works.

I don't think it is possible to avoid having lines "in between" pixels when using fractional scaling. The physical pixel grid simply does not always align with the one at "100%" scale.

I specifically bought the 4K monitor to get crisp text rendering. Upscaling from 1080p (e.g. what XWayland does) is very noticeable to me. I don't see any difference between native Wayland fractional scaling, and setting Gnome to native resolution (except for the tiny UI elements).


Sorry, maybe I wasn't clear.

When I was using X11 I had things set to fractional scaling because there wasn't good support for multiple monitors with different resolutions (and had it set to 1.5, where one monitor should be 2, and another should be 1, so I split the difference.)

Now on wayland, I have things set correctly, where scaling is set to 2 on a single monitor, and is set to 1 on the other monitor (and the application respects this and can be moved between monitors with the expected behaviour).

I also remember something about fractional scaling not being recommended on wayland (I believe it increases the amount of processing needed to be done by a lot.)


xwayland is still being actively developed, xserver is in maintenance mode, which isn't a bad thing, especially for such an old, somewhat mature tech, but being actively developed is something else in my understanding. And one just cannot do away its architectural problems, which was the reason for a "from scratch with (some) hindsight" approach in the first place, under which new approaches like Wayland and mir got developed.

> It does what I need.

If the features of neither of those fit your use cases: great, be happy and keep using what works for you.

But I, for one, like to have no tearing anymore, no random apps just stealing my keyboard input or clipboard content, having a more efficient way to operate on (frame) buffers, having active development for new tech features like HDR and that all while still running xwayland for 100% x11 compat; you cannot do the reverse, at least while not also getting the same features.

So, I really like wayland as it gives people the possibility for better security/sandboxing and new features while I can just run x11 apps fine.

> From my perspective, Wayland is like btrfs

The same with btrfs, as RAID0/1/10 its just nice and stable since forever, its architecture is seemingly just a bad fit for RAID5/6, the single possible problematic part since a while, CoW and rebalancing are really nice to have on a server with important data.

Multiple FS catering to different requirements are there for a reason, and not everyone needs to use every type of FS to give it a reason to exist...


The two major points from my perspective would be security (like restricting read-access to the clipboard and input devices) and multi-DPI (like multihead with a 1080p laptop and a 4K monitor - seems practically impossible to get right under X).

EDIT: But as always, if you're happy with what you've got, indeed why should you switch? I really don't get this idea of there being "the one-size-fits-all" and the urge to tell others what to do. A major point of Linux is your freedom to do things your way. OP is just telling others (who may have older now no longer relevant experiences) how much things have changed. No need to get defensive.


I resisted it, just because of having some X configuration, knowing some absolute basics about it, etc.

But I decided to take the plunge in setting up a new laptop, and I wish I'd done it sooner. It's a lot nicer to configure (and especially to test changes in configuration in) sway than X. I don't know what I was worried about really, I should at least have looked into it - the whole thing has been easier so far than any single change I made to my old configuration (keybindings, modmap, etc.).


I wouldn’t call xorg “being developed”. At most it is on life support.


That's just life in the end stage of a mature software project. It's pretty much feature-complete, it doesn't need active development. No point in changing things for the sake of change itself.

The way software (or things in general) get old is by working well. The things with obvious issues get replaced quickly. Having stuck around for a long time is really not a sign something needs to be replaced.


I disagree with you here.

I find that Xorg is really starting to show cracks as new hardware, and especially new inputs, are becoming mainstream.

In particular, I think Xorg does a crappy job with

- Audio in general (but bluetooth specifically)

- Gesture/touchpad input (some folks are trying to fund this still, but Wayland feels about as good as macOS by default - This was my "must have" feature that pushed me to wayland everywhere)

- HiDPI support - it's ok if you have the same resolution on every screen. If you're mixing resolutions, wayland is MILES better. Even XWayland is bad here - this is just truly a limitation of XOrg.

- Privacy. This one is a mixed blessing. XOrg lets apps do a lot of things to other apps. This is nice in some ways, because things like screen-recorders work easily and without permissions. But problematic because it means any app can quietly be a screen recorder.

---

Xorg still wins in terms of overall compatibility, and in user customization. But I think it's pretty clear from the statements from the Xorg & Wayland teams that Xorg is not just "mature" - it's in the process of being slowly replaced with system that most of them feel is better.

I think the more likely scenario is that you are not using the features that really make a distinction (which is a-ok!). In that case stick with what works for you. Xorg isn't going anywhere any time soon, and if your workflow is stable, you aren't missing the new stuff.

But other people absolutely are, and it's not because Xorg is "finished" - it's because it's broken and no longer getting the level of support it used to, that's mostly going to Wayland now (and it REALLY shows, if you use it for a while).


Audio? I believe X has nothing to do with audio. This is a job for ALSA, pulseaudio and most recently pipewire.


Pipewire and Wayland development have gone hand-in-hand for a while now. Mainly - Pipewire is compatible with the security and isolation requirements wayland places on apps, and Pipewire is far more than just a replacement for pulseaudio.

---

Here - to quote the debian wiki (https://wiki.debian.org/PipeWire):

"PipeWire is a server and API for handling multimedia on Linux. Its most common use is for Wayland and Flatpak applications to implement screensharing, remote desktop, and other forms of audio and video routing between different pieces of software. Per the official FAQ, "you can think of it as a multimedia routing layer on top of the drivers that applications and libraries can use."


Addressing each point:

- Xorg hasn't directly handled audio since the days of 2.4 era kernels (anybody remember NAS?). PulseAudio and PipeWire revolve around D-Bus and their concern around the graphical desktop mostly involves seat configuration rather than what's powering the seat (X11, Wayland).

- libinput works on X11 too (and I know I'm using libinput because I accidentally installed synaptics/evdev first xD). I personally love how trackpad scroll on Linux just feels infinitely smoother and more precise than the same hardware on Windows 10.

- HiDPI is in a state of global discohesion structurally speaking at the moment, I think because of some demographic correlations. The art/production/engineering/get-things-done side of the fence was already buying expensive peripherals a decade ago - for example you could play with 3840x2400@41Hz in 2003 if you had $9000 for a 22" IBM T221 and quad-link DVI. That's an extreme example; it didn't take that much enablement to be quite selective about one's productivity tools. However, I don't think many people in this niche used Linux in a predominantly-tinkering use-case - they were too busy getting things done and focusing on sustaining revenue. The Linux users were the kids and teenagers and 20-somethings often found figuring it out on ~decade-old equipment and making the best of random resources they found lying around. Now, HiDPI may seem to have theoretically zeroed the distance between prosumer and some kid working with whatever they've got, but there are three issues: first, software support follows commoditized access to hardware, and given the focus on laptops nowadays (and the inconsistency of the laptop hardware situation at the moment with things like s0ix etc) people are sticking with whatever's in their known-good 5-10+ year old banger or whatever; second, yes, HiDPI has brought the high-end and the low-end together *in hardware*, but done nothing around the current *software* status quo, wherein the high/low-end not-really-a-rift-but-kinda is still kicking around and doesn't quite know what to do with itself yet and people are still finding themselves self-sort into a few common buckets (see also the argument about HiDPI being a "gimmick" and a "premium"); in a couple years when laptops have gotten their acts sorted out and HiDPI displays cost the same as 1920x1080 things will perhaps look a bit different; thirdly, these logistical distractions do not help the already-fragmented world of open source where it's so incredibly easy for new ideas to never gain critical mass because everyone gets hung up on details and bikesheds. I can easily guess that there have probably been a few individual attempts and initiatives to try and fix this that have just never had the chance to get off the ground because so few people with HiDPI screens are willing to play guinea pig for a bit (case in point / mea culpa). So, HiDPI will probably reach a crystallization point right around the moment where hardware accessibility starts to bottom out and software initiatives have had a chance to settle and stabilize, most likely on Wayland where that's already being fostered. Chances are something similar to the libinput "touchpad like macOS" effort will come along and try and backport whatever gets figured out to X11. Good question whether it'll be successful.

- Privacy: See also

  $ eval $(xmodmap -pke | awk '{print"K["$2"]="$4}'); xinput test-xi2 --root | sed -un '/RawKeyPress/{N;N;s/.*detail: \([0-9]\+\).*/\1/;p}' | while read x; do echo ${K[$x]}; done
(Leave it running, go do something else)

:P

Xorg reminds me of the hackable mindset used in the old Lisp machines, where you could (supposedly) tweak anything you wanted. I'm not sure but I think those crazy machines had no memory protection - not that they would have used it anyway, that would have been antithetical to the ideology. X's hackability is I think one of the reasons it has survived as long as it has with such elegance. Sadly this has indeed come at the cost of abject insecurity.

But it's honestly going to be a bit jarring when it's gone. :v

(NB. I don't remember NAS. I learned about its (ex-)existence while playing with the xscope X protocol debugger a while back.)


> PulseAudio and PipeWire revolve around D-Bus and their concern around the graphical desktop mostly involves seat configuration rather than what's powering the seat (X11, Wayland).

No - not really. Wayland doesn't use dbus (outside of some support in XWayland for legacy x11 applications) - it uses its own IPC protocol instead. And that's really where pipewire shines, since the security model it uses (akin to polkit) allows much finer grain control over what applications are reading/recording.

> libinput works on X11 too

Yes - but as an afterthought, basically. Directly from their wiki: "libinput is a library to handle input devices in Wayland compositors"

...

"The X.Org libinput driver is a thin wrapper around libinput and allows for libinput to be used for input devices in X. This driver can be used as as drop-in replacement for evdev and synaptics. Simply build and install in your $PREFIX, then install the config file in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/. Restart X and the libinput driver will take over your devices."

From personal experience - the same hardware running X with libinput does not feel as nice as it does when running libinput with wayland (although I'll admit, this could be mental, since it's close)

---

I have no real idea what you're talking about with regards to hiDPI. It's not 2003 anymore. Every laptop I've used for the last 10 years has come with a screen that requires some sort of scaling, and using them in combination with a standard res external monitor is a SHITSHOW on X.

---

I think we're in pretty solid agreement on the security front. I will also miss some of the nifty things you could do - but I appreciate that Wayland limits a lot of nifty things malicious apps can do :)


I started using it (about 4 or 5 years ago, I think) mostly because I really don't like tearing. I never got a completely tearing-free Xorg setup working for me.


Now that you mentioned tearing, I noticed that I can't even remember when was the last time I saw one. Before switching to Wayland/GNOME and then Wayland/Sway there was a dark era where I was fighting/struggling to keep a tearing-free video experience and crazy config to keep my keyboard layout in-sync when switching desktops/windows etc. Really glad that there is another option on the table.


Fwiw, I have zero tearing on KDE Plasma+Nvidia on X11 with VSync enabled.


I have a Laptop with touchscreen and Hi-DPI. Firefox for Wayland worked perfectly out of the box. Without Wayland I couldn't get a config that did the right thing. I used to use Mint, but not having Wayland is now a showstopper on my new hardware.


What examples do you have of hardware not working on Wayland?


Sorry for the awkward phrasing, what I meant was:

Mint (specifically Cinnamon) doesn't have Wayland support. Not having Wayland means it doesn't work well on my new hardware. Not working on my new hardware is a showstopper. Thus I am no longer using Mint.


They might have used one too many negations, but they had hardware "not working without Wayland".


They said they used to use Mint, implying Mint doesn't have Wayland. But that is software not hardware.

Re-reading, I suspect the new hardware with high-DPI requires Wayland, because X11 has poor support for high-DPI (implying Wayland supports it better).


> After 10 years I still don't understand why I should switch away from X11. It is mature and is still being developed (latest xorg-server release is from January 2022). It does what I need.

The problem is you can't expect X11 to keep up going forward. Developers are not interested in working on a huge and clunky legacy system.


I challenge you to subscribe to the X.Org mailing lists and come back in a month with the same take.


The xorg-devel list, which has had all of 33 messages posted to it so far this year, you mean?


Just one argument that is hitting me every day: X11 is still missing HDR after all the years it's been around.


Wayland has increased security.

https://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2011/04/linux-securi...

https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/linux.html

https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/guides/linux-harden...


From my perspective both btrfs and wayland have significant benefits: proper touch support on wayland and multi-disk filesystems + snapshots on btrfs. It's all about the use case.


> why I should switch away from X11

Security: https://blog.invisiblethings.org/2011/04/23/linux-security-c....


In the vanishingly unlikely case that that matters, you can just run things in Xephyr. You can even use firejail to automate it, which is probably a good idea anyways if you're running malicious code on your machine.


I prefer running Qubes OS, but Xephyr is of course also a possibility.


Removing the "cross application snooping" is X11 is.. difficult. In a sense, that is equivalent to removing piping and redirection from shell -- "for security".

Now, many people don't mind, but I certainly mind. That is why I still use X11. Definition of trust... you trust what you must. "Operating systems have to be less trusting". But my Operating System must trust me. I give it no choice in the matter. My Operating System must not override my Trust decisions.


What about the screenshots? Flameshot works great.


I use grim, primarily. There is a wrapper of grim and slurp called “grimshot” which is very pleasant to use.


Piping slurp into grim is a one-liner in my sway config. Do you really need a wrapper around this?


Are you sure? On GNOME on Wayland? It works with Sway because of https://github.com/flameshot-org/flameshot/blob/master/docs/... but last I heard GNOME refuses to implement this.


Does it not require re-approving the access to the screen every single time?

I am on Fedora 35 and that was the case just a few weeks/months ago. They locked down the screenshot API to only the GNOME screenshotter.


Huh, and here I am on the other side wanting exactly that (different dist and DE though) but haven't gotten that part figured out yet, everything seems to have access by default... Seems end-user accessible docs still have some gaps eh (:


A lot of the parts about when and how the user is asked for permission is a Wayland compositor dependent implementation details.

E.g. while sway works well it tends to not ask the user and just grants permission as it doesn't really have it's own "HUD" (it has a default task parts, but that just a default program you could run if you want to, there are also other programs).

It's also one of the things which makes most sense to be part of the "HUD" interface of the Wayland compositor so not making it a implementation details doesn't make much sense sadly.


> compositor

Seem to be all over (the place) for XR


I had to go back to GNOME on Xorg. GNOME on Wayland won't run my 4k display at a consistent 60Hz, which results in horrible issues in games and emulators, as well as massive numbers of dropped frames in 50/60Hz videos. It is set to run at 60Hz in the display settings, but actually seems to run somewhere in the 50s.

The easiest way to see this is checking the "stats for nerds" while watching a 60fps YouTube video and noting the persistent dropped frames. glxgears also doesn't maintain a consistent framerate.

This doesn't happen in Sway, so I can only assume there is some bug in Mutter that has persisted across several versions of GNOME and Fedora. So Wayland might be great, but my experience with GNOME on it has not been.


There is no "GNOME on Wayland" - Mutter <b>is</b> the window server - it talks directly to the Direct Render Manager and manages buffers. It's just that most of the GPU interfaces are standardized in mesa and the kernel so there is no need to reinvent the wheel and makes it so Wayland window servers + window managers are feasible to implement, and also why wlroots exists.

You could have implemented Mutter on Windows NT using DirectX and such - Microsoft has done such a thing in WSL2.


I don't know a lot about the graphical stack, window servers, etc. All of my professional work has been on systems with no graphical components. I am trying to understand what you are pointing out. Is it that there is no separate "Wayland service" in the way that there is an Xorg service? That Wayland is just a protocol? Is using Mutter as a Wayland display server not "GNOME on Wayland," even if there is no separate service running?


I still have several issues with Wayland on Ubuntu 21.10:

- windows (especially gnome-terminal and gedit) sometimes randomly extend behind the dock and top bar (apparently this is fixed in a newer GNOME version)

- apps using a recent version of Qt and native Wayland rather than XWayland have an excessively large cursor on HiDPI (fixable by setting an environment variable, but that's a hacky solution)

- Firefox addon popups are cut off on HiDPI

- Oracle SQL Developer just doesn't work at all (the window doesn't show when I try to launch it) [EDIT: this actually seems to work now]

- Onboard (on-screen keyboard, because GNOME's built-in one has a horrible UX) can't be moved around on the screen when using Wayland (which was one of the main reasons I switched from the built-in one)

- Chrome Remote Desktop doesn't work at all on Wayland, and in fact prevents you from logging in to the Wayland session at all once you log out / reboot after installing it

I still try to use Wayland though, because Xorg isn't perfect either:

- colors seem to be more accurate on Wayland

- Diodon (clipboard manager) randomly doesn't trigger with my custom Win+V keyboard shortcut on Xorg

- some apps default to an extremely tiny window on Xorg HiDPI


Honestly - I find Ubuntu desktop a pretty bad experience these days.

I still think they do a pretty solid job with Ubuntu server, but I much prefer something (really anything) other than Ubuntu these days for my daily driver.

I'm not a fan of Snap (I don't hate it, but it's just really not ready yet), and I think they do a bad job of getting required desktop features in place - and have ever since they gave up on Unity, basically. Plus they have a pretty poor track record around user privacy and advertising.

In my opinion - Pop!_OS has kind of taken the role of "Best default" for linux users who just want things to work (they took Ubuntu and drove it back to where it started - a big focus on the DE), and I'm firmly in the Arch camp for anyone who wants the best experience and is willing to put in the time.

Frankly - I'd even recommend a plain Debian install over Ubuntu at this point. The foundations are the same, and the tooling is basically identical, but you have much less cruft.

That said - Wayland is moving really fast still, and I find being on the latest updates on Arch is my preferred experience.


Desktop has been in an absolutely terrible state of affairs for a decade.

Windows with the two-desktop tablet/old desktop dual state of affairs.

OSX basically ignored/abandoned by Apple because iPhones were where the money was, closed expensive hardware, and have fun using hotkeys when switching between OSX and Windows/Linux.

And constant constant constant rewrite churn in Linux land. If it wasn't KDE and Gnome doing total rewrites, it's Wayland and other "guts" being totally rewritten.

PC laptops being stuck several generations behind in port support, display, technology, efficiency.

Thank god all the web "trendy material design" didn't introduce a half-dozen other waves of disruption. Just one or two.

Well, I suppose it's like C++ quote: there are two types of UIs: those people complain about and those that don't get used. But I do feel desktop has completely stagnated and it has been a lost decade of deck chair rearrangement.


I somewhat agree with you.

I think in many ways desktop usage hasn't seen much improvement in the last 10 to 15 years or so - at least not the kind of improvement that really opens new possibilities to the user.

At least from my view - there was a wave of change in priorities that started happening in the early 2000s. Previously, most applications were expected to be single user, offline first, thick clients. At best, every now and then they would send a payload over the network (like syncing with a mail server, or publishing a new revision of a document).

The internet speed-up changed everything. To the point where I would argue that the browser is the real desktop environment in most modern computer work. Documents moved online first, email syncing became real time chat/voice/video. The majority of my day to day application usage is through a website, or a desktop application that's really hiding that fact that it's a website (ex: anything based on a webview).

We still need some foundational pieces that the OS provides, but the DE doesn't matter quite so much when compared to the browser - so companies have been hugely under-investing in this space. Most of the work isn't in user-facing improvements, it's in core pieces that facilitate online/browser based interactions.

If you want to know where all the desktop improvements are... they went to IE, V8, and Chromium (for good or for bad).

In a major way - I think this is why linux desktop is actually so compelling these days. It can run a browser just fine, and by extension access basically all the software a user might need (utterly different from running linux in 2005, where you often had to use completely different, often incompatible software). Games were one of the last stumbling blocks, and Valve has bitten the bullet and really pushed on that front.

---

My hunch is that this isn't going to change unless something like AR/VR (or some other new input/output) genuinely becomes mainstream. In which case we're going to see another wave of interest in UX/UI on the desktop.


Your hunch is likely right. I believe that Minority Report interfaces (or better) are coming where the computer display or programs simply float around you.


The dealbreaker for me is that Snap is hard to disable (across updates), and somehow Snap apps have a tendency of sneaking into my installs. Even when there's a non-snap alternative. But I can always tell when I load up the app and the fonts and scaling are total garbage.


I hate snap. But Ubtuntu still works without (maybe no longer after their April release):

    sudo rm -rf /var/cache/snapd/ && sudo apt autoremove --purge snapd && rm -fr ~/snap
And make sure it never installs again:

    sudo bash -c "cat > /etc/apt/preferences.d/no-snapd.pref" << EOL
    Package: snapd
    Pin: origin ""
    Pin-Priority: -1
    EOL


However, there are an increasing number of packages in Ubuntu that require snap to install, while those packages can be installed normally in Debian.


This was my pain point. I started recommending debian over ubuntu when they replaced the default "chromium" package with a shim that instructs you to install it as a snap.

I don't mind snap - I don't mind them defaulting to snap. I really would still like to use the non-snap variety of certain applications, and I don't want to have to fight the system to do so.


Looks like they're switching Firefox to a similar solution, just a wrapper around Snap. Makes me glad that I've played around with Manjaro enough now to switch over.


> and somehow Snap apps have a tendency of sneaking into my installs. Even when there's a non-snap alternative.

There's a bunch of things in the apt repository that just do a snap install, for example: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1345385/how-can-i-stop-apt-f...


>I still think they do a pretty solid job with Ubuntu server

Apart from the "snapd" debacle I agree :)


> colors seem to be more accurate on Wayland

That's odd. The one difference I can think of is that if your screen is not native sRGB, it likely needs to be color managed for colors to display correctly. Currently, Gnome on Wayland doesn't support color management*, while Gnome on X does. So it's possible that you are just not used to seeing the managed colors for your screen. Edit: or maybe you have an HDR screen (lucky you!) - not sure what the state of play is for that.

On the other hand, it's also possible that Gnome's colord color management software is not using the correct profile for your screen. It is capable of pulling an appropriate profile based on your screen's EDID, but this will be - at best - an approximation of your screen's actual profile. A poor profile can be worse than no profile at all.

* The fault is with Wayland, which still doesn't support a color management protocol for applications running in it. If I remember correctly, Gnome at least loads your profile into your video card's lookup table so that you get white point and gamma correction, but most of the heavy lifting comes from color management supporting applications applying the profile to the colors they display. The protocol to allow them to do that under Wayland doesn't exist yet: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m...


It’s worth noting that Ubuntu will always be a major GNOME release behind the rest.

Regarding Firefox, you can try forcing it into Wayland native by setting MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1


gnome on wayland has mostly been seamless for me. However, I still have this issue with focus following mouse that drives me crazy [1].

Also, in my 20+ years of using X, I have so many small utilities that I can't or don't yet have the energy to replace. Things like devilspie to set stick/utility window status on certain applications. Shortcuts to bring specific applications to the foreground/background (This is really nice for chat windows) and so many others.

The only "benefits" I really notice from wayland are videos don't tear and there is better integration with gestures. This is why I use wayland on my personal laptop where I consume more, but still run X on my workstation.

[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/4877


Use a rolling release distribution, or something like Debian unstable, if you want a better Wayland experience.


I love Gnome on Wayland, but don't be a fool like me, and stay away from it if you use any nvidia hardware. The most recent drivers supposedly add support fort proper Wayland (instead of relying on optional extensions) but enabling it under nvidia has caused nothing but trouble for me.

I wouldn't call it the MacOS interface for Linux. It's more of a mix of Windows and macOS paradigms with its own unique spin on things. I strongly dislike the macOS interface with its arbitrary limitations (window snapping? what's that?) and plain weird keyboard shortcuts (hitting enter on a file in Finder renaming the file instead of opening it, for one) and I find the Gnome interface much usable.

Sadly, the gnome people are a weirdly political bunch when it comes to things like server side/client side decorations and other such decisions. There are also comical problems like the lack of a thumbnail preview in the file picker, an issue that has been waiting to be resolved for longer than some of the people here have been alive (https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=141154&, https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/233). In a month the issue will be old enough to vote, drink and drive.

Gnome is great when it works for you, but if you give it an honest try and it doesn't, you won't be able to fix it. Luckily, KDE supports Wayland and its niceties as well, and it's quite good for the people that tend to dislike Gnome.


> In a month the issue will be old enough to vote, drink and drive.

What an irresponsible issue!


does kde/nvidia/wayland work better for you than gnome?


I haven't tried it recently. There's a good chance it'll work better because the nvidia compatibility bugs seemed to be mostly centered around libmutter.

However, there's just something about the design of KDE and its applications that puts me off. It's hard to put to words, but I always feel like the spacing is off just slightly enough to annoy me. That's not necessarily a critism of KDE, I just personally dislike it, the same way many people dislike Gnome's design.

I should probably give it a go at some point. I do think KDE is superior from a technical perspective, just less aligned with me when it comes to look and feel.


I tried to use Wayland, but simply speaking the way it handles/supersedes earlier input mechanisms - which some seem to call a form of security theatre - is disruptive.

For instance, I have bound keyboard shortcuts to manage windows via `wmctrl`. It's absolutely crucial to my workflow, since I use an ultrawide monitor. wmctrl is mostly impossible with Wayland, and which required me to revert back to X11. Certain apps also sometimes do not work in X11 (e.g. Ubuntu's Software Center, for reasons lost to me), which then forces me to use Wayland.

I've noted a couple of other grievances, so I do not agree that Wayland is absolutely a good thing for now (at least for me).


Being somewhat sarcastic, but Ubuntu’s software center doesn’t work anywhere.


Me too; I have many scripts employing wmctrl both for work and for fun. Some time ago I posted the following on unixporn (the first two minutes are relevant):

https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/ek3cyc/cinnamon_s...

The first two minutes of this were done automatically in Cinnamon using a couple of bash scripts and lots of wmctrl and xdotool; does anyone know if this can be done in a simple manner in Wayland?


fyi there's a tiling plugin for gnome that was also highly regarded on r/unixporn. I know popOS (sys 76's ubuntu distro) also has good support for tiling out of the box.

I often wonder where people get the energy to fiddle with things like this. When I was a student with plenty of time on my hands, I used to tinker a lot. Now I'm older and I just want something that 'works', gets out of my way and let's me get to coding. I only invest time into things that have an immediate improvement on my workflow. If I had a large 4k display I might invest some time on tiling but for now simple L/R splits work fine for me.


I also use keyboard shortcuts to tile windows, but I do it using compiz


Try Wayfire, its compiz for Wayland


wmctrl is X11 specific (it says so itself in it's man page) so it obviously wont work.

(Through yes some X11-specific programs did got wayland support.)

But all(? at least most) of it's functionality is still supported at least on sway.


> But all(? at least most) of it's functionality is still supported at least on sway.

This thread is about gnome and wayland. Sway implements a bunch of extra stuff because wayland itself is unusable. See https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots


The thread has pretty much devolved into a Wayland discussion.

And I'm pretty sure there are ways to do so too on Gnome (but idk.).

Sure what is missing is a standardized interface to do so.

But that could still be added as another Wayland protocol, or through desktop-portal or similar.

Just people need to care enough to add such an protocol.


Here's my short list of KDE features that I use daily:

  - Multiple desktops: Win-Tidle  
  - Move app to next screen: Win-N
  - Move app to next desktop: Shift-Win-N
  - Maximize window: Win-PageUp
  - Switch windows: Alt-Tab
  - Switch windows in application: Alt-Tilde
  - Show all Windows, filter by typing: Win-Tab
  - Launch program: Win-F2, Win-F12
  - Vertical task bar with task manager, analogue clock, system tray, main menu, language switcher indicator.
  - Window always on top toggle
  - Open specific application window with "always on top" activated
  - Open application always on specific desktop
  - Volume down: Win-[
  - Volume up: Win-]
If you tell me that Gnome now supports all that, then I'll invest the time in installing, configuring, and daily driving it for a few weeks.


I don't know if this is my config or the default, but on my machine those features are set up like this:

- Multiple desktops: Winkey (list) or ctrl+alt+arrow (left and right) or triple finger drag on the trackpad (wayland)

- Move app to next screen: I know this is possible to configure, don't know the key combo, I move windows between virtual desktops more often

- Move app to next desktop ctrl+alt+shift+arrow keys (similar to switching desktops)

- Switch windows: alt+tab

- Switch windows in app: alt+tilde

- Launch program: alt+F2

- Vertical task bar with widgets: not without a bunch of extensions. You're stuck with a horizontal one in the vanilla config. I've enjoyed the default config Manjaro ships for Gnome myself, which provides a more fully featured task bar than the default setup, so maybe there's an extension that's right for you.

- Windows always on top toggle: in the window menu (when you right click on the window chrome)

- Volume up/down: bound to media keys by default, but I'm sure you can configure the necessary shortcuts. I'd probably bind a shortcut that injects media keys (xdotool?) to ensure compatibility with other programs but you could set up a shortcut to your favourite audio manager if you wish

I don't know about a searchable window list or launching a program always on top. You can configure a shortcut to mark a window as always on top after launching, and for the window list there's probably an extension out there (this seems promising https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1001/window-search-pr...).

Opening a window on a specific desktop should be possible with extensions (I think https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/16/auto-move-windows/ does this?)


I see, thank you very much.

Other than Alt-Tab, I try to avoid using Alt- or Ctrl- for window management or other "OS-level" tasks, because they tend to conflict with IDEs such as Jetbrains. So long as that's configurable it's fine.


I have yet to find a global shortcut that I couldn't reassign in the built-in shortcuts menu. If you want to avoid control and alt, you'll probably be reconfiguring or disabling a lot of shortcuts, though.


> I have yet to find a global shortcut that I couldn't reassign in the built-in shortcuts menu.

Try the media keys, like playpause. You can use dconf though.


Yes, in KDE too I'm reconfiguring and disabling a lot of shortcuts!


XFCE supports all that and more out of the box.


Terrific, thank you! It is always good to know which projects I could jump ship to if needed.


XFCE doesn't support wayland.


Good point ;-)


If you are using KDE on X11 right now, maybe you should give KDE Plasma a try.


Is there a KDE desktop other than Plasma? I do believe that I'm using KDE Plasma.


I'm sorry, I meant specifically KDE's Wayland compositor. I misremembered, it seems Plasma is more general than just the Wayland session


Running KDE on Wayland is afaict still not well-supported.


From what I've seen, it seems to work really well nowadays. AFAIK the Steam Deck even uses the Wayland KDE session for its desktop mode.


Have you tried it yourself? "Wayland support in the KDE Plasma Workspaces is in a tech-preview state. The workspaces have been developed for X11 and much functionality relies on X11. To be able to make proper use of Wayland these bits have to be rewritten." https://community.kde.org/KWin/Wayland


Yeah, I did try it out for a while, a year ago or so. Ended up sticking with sway due to personal preferences, but in general the KDE Wayland session acted the way I expected, and I didn't run into any bugs.


I fully agree. And Wayland supports HiDPI with fractured scaling very well. Also tablet devices work better on Wayland. If you’re running Linux on a Surface, you should definitely switch to Wayland. It’s really time to ditch XServer and I wonder why Ubuntu and derivates still use it by default.


> And Wayland supports HiDPI with fractured scaling very well

Very well only for the apps that cooperate well, e.g. GTK-based apps.

Non-native apps (eg IntelliJ Idea) on my Ubuntu desktop were blurry when I used any kind of scaling - not just fractional scaling but any scaling != 100%. Reducing the display resolution by 2x resulted in much crispier rendering than full resolution with 2x scaling for those apps.


I think that's because "non-native" apps run inside an X server running as a Wayland client. So you're basically getting the X experience :/


That's not the case, intellij text rendering looks perfect on X/Gnome with fractional scaling (at least for me)


But you are still using it as an X app, which uses X configs over wayland’s.


Yep. Gnome on Wayland has been the best HiDPI experience I had on a Linux system so far.

Also includes night mode out of the box.


"Night mode", but nothing else. The GTK devs promised a theming interface as consolation for their libadwaita rollout, but that's trapped in limbo afaict...


nVidia is the dominant discrete GPU vendor, as well as having a fair amount of laptop market share, and their drivers haven't adequately supported it. It's rather difficult to flip the switch when a big chunk of your userbase can't make the move. I finally switched off of nVidia, in part because of the Wayland situation, but the majority of users aren't likely to do so.


Isn't fractional scaling on Wayland done by integer upscaling followed by downscaling? Or is it just a Gnome thing?


That’s only for Xwayland apps. Otherwise it is framework-dependent, but they can at least have a reliable way of reading out the requested zoom level.


Is that a problem? I think macOS works the same way.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19052960


Yes; the quality of such upscaling is noticeably worse than just doing proper upscaling, especially when it comes to text rendering. IIRC macOS does it this way because it historically only had integer upscaling, and when apps depend on that, changing it can be a major break.


Afaik macos doesn’t even have fractional scaling anymore, they only do integer-scaling. But for that retina screens are a must.


I can certainly select fractional settings in the display settings right now (default is 2x). But as mentioned before, the fractional scaling factors are not exposed to any software.

https://imgur.com/a/w4PAipI


I've used Gnome on Wayland since first available on Fedora, that's until two days a go! What happened you might ask? Well, I had enough of slow performance, with every release I'm thinking it'll improve, it did but at slow pace.

It's beautiful, and I like the UX, but it's lacking underneath, go ahead and play a 4k clip on Wayland enabled Firefox then move the mouse pointer, it stutters like crazy.

The mouse movements/scrolling in general doesn't feel natural at all, it has some kind of weird acceleration curve, scroll on Wayland enabled Firefox for example and compare that to Firefox under X11, day and night difference, under X11 it's MacOS like smoothness.

For some weird reason, switching to X11 fixes the performance, responsiveness and mouse scrolling/acceleration/movement accuracy, without doing a thing.

Sadly, because of the above and the fact that Gnome 42 no longer does fractional scaling under X11, I had to leave Gnome behind, I'm now on Fedora 36 KDE which I'm liking so far.

* My machine (3900x/rx5500/4k monitor/mx master 3) felt very slow sometimes to the point I was going to get rid of Linux all together and go MacOS or Windows (I dislike both).

* Thanks everyone for the continued work on Desktop GNU/Linux, inc Gnome and Wayland guys.


> go ahead and play a 4k clip on Wayland enabled Firefox then move the mouse pointer, it stutters like crazy.

Either your DE or your Firefox aren't actually using Wayland because for me it's incredibly smooth, and CPU usage is in the low 10%. Fedora 35 on a 6800 XT here.

Firefox still needs tweaks to have actual complete hardware video acceleration.


I should've been more clear, Firefox is just an example, my problem is the mouse pointer being affected by heavy load of any kind on the GPU/UI thread.

As coldblues said, it's probably Mutter not having an independent thread for the mouse pointer, X11's pointer handling is independent from Mutter/KWin it seems.

See the demo here to know exactly what I'm talking about: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1241


> the mouse pointer being affected by heavy load of any kind on the GPU/UI thread.

It's because of stuff like this that we should treat UIs more like real time systems. There's really no good reason at all that a modern machine can't render every frame perfectly every time regardless of system load --- it's due to inadequate attention paid to isolating real-time-ish paths like mouse cursor movement, composition, input event dispatch, and so on from app-induced loads that we get weird responsiveness issues. X actually did a better job in this particular respect than your typical Wayland compositor --- it used interrupt driven mouse cursor rendering, for example.


Weird, I'm not seeing it, not even with a GPU heavy game being rendered in a window.


I can easily reproduce the stuttering cursor on GNOME Wayland on all of my systems by doing this:

* move the mouse cursor evenly in a straight motion

* while moving press `Super+a` to open the application list

During the animation, i.e. when GNOME Shell is busy, the mouse cursor noticeably stutters for a moment. On my faster systems it's less apparent but still visible, except when I set the CPU governor to `performance`.


I recently tried the new Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and the mouse stuttering was unbearable while running games via Wine. I had to switch back to Xorg to get rid of it.


Smooth mouse input, especially when using high-DPI mice, is something that's been fixed in GNOME 42 due to release soon.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1915


From that link:

> Nothing has been done here to avoid potential wayland event queue overflows, as IIUC this is being worked on separately. Although I should probably also mention that this hasn't been seen in the wild during this work.


Interesting!

What's your monitor like? Sometimes I suspect it's because of my 4K monitor (with 1.5x scaling), that's a lot of pixels to shuffle, especially if the rendering code/pipeline is not optimised[0].

Testing my setup with a 1080p/75hz monitor[1], it's crazy fast and responsive, but mouse acceleration curve (and scroll), not speed, is still weird.

[0]See Ubuntu pushing for triple buffering for example, and other optimisation work on the past.

[1]Apparently that causes huge speedup, as it affects frame scheduling, according to one GUADEC talk by a Mutter dev.


I'm on 4K at 2x scaling.


I wonder if your Firefox is using hardware accelerated video. I know for me I had to play with some about:config knobs before Firefox actually started using hardware accelerated video. It is enabled by default on macOS and Windows, however on Linux it is not. Ensuring that Firefox was using hardware acceleration for video for me improved the performance and battery life enormously.


Firefox was just an example, anything that's heavy on the GPU yields the same problem, and yes I did have the right knobs enabled on Firefox and can confirm that HW was indeed working.

Recently however I had to disable it, see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1759947


The issues you are experiencing with the pointer are due to the fact that on X11, the pointer is on a separate thread. This is not the case on Wayland currently, but I remember seeing some work being done about it.


Yes indeed, I believe you are referring to this WIP: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1241

There is a super nice demo there that sheds light into what I'm trying to convey.


Are you sure you were using wayland firefox? It is not always apparent. Also, follow the sibling comment on hw acceleration.


Yes, along XINPUT2 for improved scrolling.


> it's MacOS interface for linux

Work bought me a MacBook, and after using it for a year I still can't get over how obnoxious the window manager is: No horizontal window splits, and vertical splits only supports two-per-monitor, window switcher hotkey has no positional awareness, there's like two kinds of maximized and some apps don't give you a way to get out of one of them, the list goes on.

I also dislike gnome, but I had never put them together before. I started today disliking two things, and now I realize that they're actually the same thing. Somehow that's better, thanks.


For Mac OS users who care about it, we usually install one of the third-party window management tools: Moom, BetterSnapTool, and Magnet are popular options.

I usually forget that there are even rudimentary tools built in.


i've just started using amethyst; it's a tiling window manager. it's not as powerful as the alternative yabai, but amethyst doesn't require you to disable system integrity protection or modify system files. shockingly simple out-of-the-box experience, very gentle learning curve, trivial to enable or disable on-demand. highly recommend.


I was coming to say exactly this. This is just a criticism of someone not familiar with the Mac ecosystem. I use Moom myself and it's been perfectly adequate for my (Macbook) needs.


That's fair, I have been reluctant to dig into the ecosystem.

This isn't exactly rational, but something about having to install amphetamine to disable system sleep really set me on edge about the MacOS ecosystem. It just felt kind of aggressive: like Apple wanted to ensure that I had somebody other than them to blame for a dead battery, and they wanted this so badly that they removed functionality that is a system setting literally everywhere else.

It made me afraid to let this MacBook contribute to my "for problem W on platform X use config Y on app Z" problem any further. I can't put my finger on it precisely, but something about Apple's design decisions makes me uncomfortable.


My experience has been that tools like this built on top of the accessibility API are laggy and cause jerky window movement. Has that improved any recently?


I use Magnet and I've found it works well, maybe you are pickier than I am (but I'm pretty picky).


I've used Moom and BetterSnaptool and have not run into any jerky movement. neither one required any special security level to install, either.


For what it's worth, there are quite a few tools that can help make macos a usable experience. Magnet helps a ton for window management, for example. But stock macos is pretty booty.


https://rectangleapp.com/ might make your life easier on MacOS


I'm still on Spectacle. Will be until it stops working (still fine on M1).

Installing that and making CAPS LOCK an extra ctrl is pretty much the extent of customization I do on a new Mac. So little it's not worth scripting. Much simpler than wrangling Linux to work halfway OK (which I did for about a decade before finally joining the Mac world).


Also Middle, or Multitouch if you want the extras, from the same author if you're used to middle clicking links/tabs.

Along these lines if resolution and scaling in macOS make you think "I know what I want to do why can't I just do it"™ consider EasyRes (which is refreshingly not trialware).

If you use O365 for work try installing the PWA versions of Teams and Outlook instead of the native apps.

And of course Homebrew to update the ridiculously out of date CLI tooling (as well as pull in additional things you might be familiar with like htop)

Another thing that made it significantly easier to use was finding the secret incantation to make dock and menu auto-hide instant rather than a slow effect. I gave up on trying to find a way to get the fullscreen app views to snap into place quicker though.


i've been using amethyst (https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst) for the past few weeks and i absolutely love it.


The original poster made this comparison, but I don't at all think it's fair to Gnome. I have been using Gnome and or DWM whenever I'm able for at least 5 years now. (I switch between the two)

At work, I've had to switch to Mac.

Gnome is 100% better than Mac's UI. The snapping in Gnome is great, but generally it all just works.

Mac was a huge transition for me, and I'm still annoyed that the command button does so much and the window manager does so little.

Please disregard the Mac comparison. It's not really fair to Gnome.


We share the same opinions of MacOS but I've been using it for years with this setup and I'm very happy with it.

TotalSpaces (for a virtual desktop grid and hotkeys)

BetterTouchTool (glue for hotkeys and gestures to get things just how i want)

Yabai (really nice tiling window manager)

skhd (written by yabai author, lightweight global hotkeys, largely setup for yabai)

Hyperswitch (per window command tab, just like it should be)


> No horizontal window splits, and vertical splits only supports two-per-monitor

I use the `Spectacle` app (which has a newer alternative that I forget the name of) and it will do 1/2 and 1/3 window splits, in vertical or horizontal (though I only use vertical). I find it nearly-mandatory for using OSX, but now that I have it I love it.


it apparently didn't bother you enough, otherwise you would've just do one google search and get rid of the problem entirely


Gnome on Fedora is my daily driver. I occasionally play with KDE and other environments for fun, but when it comes down to something I need to get on with my work I just go with stock default Gnome. It gets out of the way, which is exactly what a DE needs to do.


I'd like to use Wayland, but it's not stable enough. I've lost count of the number of times I've lost work due to a segfault and then being logged out. And lots of applications still don't support it for screensharing (looking at you slack).

My bug in particular seems to be related with thunderbolt or USB c connected monitors. A disconnect will prompt a segfault.

I'd like to contribute with a proper bug report and I probably would if I hadn't had everything working with gnome+X. But now I just can't motivate spending time on it over other things in my life. Hope they have telemetry for segfaults at least.


I was tinkering with building a wayland hello world a few weeks ago (on manjaro+gnome), and I could reliably hang the desktop by starting to create a window but not finishing the handshake. Many reboots later, even after finishing the handshake, running my app would break mouse input across the system until reboot. I never did figure that one out.

The experience left me feeling that any misbehaving app/driver can break the desktop. And since you can't restart the window manager without losing your session, you'll lose a bunch of time every time something goes wrong.

btw I should say I was seriously impressed by the UI in general and how smooth everything felt, but stability is ultimately more important for me.


I haven't got a single Wayland seg fault since I moved back to Linux in October 2021. Not one.


I imagine this is very dependent on your hardware. In my case, I'm using a Lenovo P1 (gen 3).

To be honest, I could have survived the segfault thing if I could predict when they would occur. But coupled with the fact that my laptop draws >100W at peak and that my monitors only supply ~70W or so over thunderbolt, my laptop disconnects the peripherals attached over thunderbolt on power peaks. When this happens, Gnome segfaults and I lose whatever I was doing outside of tmux :)

X stays out of my way and allows me to get work done.


So perhaps you should use your power supply instead of the monitor power because it's clearly not getting enough power at peak?


Yep, that's one solution. Another is using X :)


I get them every 5 minutes on some of my systems. Much like... everything else in Linux, its really hardware-dependant


> Much like... everything else in Linux, its really hardware-dependant

Much like... everything in any OS, its really hardware-dependant

Fixed that for you.


Listen, I'm a Linux advocate to the core. I despise Windows and MacOS from the bottom of my heart, and I genuinely find them insufferable to work on. However, their issues don't stem from a lack of support. When you run either of those OSes on supported hardware, it will work. These bugs get ironed out before they ship. From the lowest-end $200 Asus laptops to the highest-end Macbook Pros, you won't encounter issues like your compositor crashing. Critical bugs like that slip through the cracks on Linux; their stability isn't even remotely comparable. For me, it's not the end of the world. For a casual user? This is a show-stopper. If Wayland continues to reduce the scope of hardware/software combos it works well on, it will critically hinder it's adoption in the already-minuscule demographic of desktop Linux users.


I don't understand what you are talking about. My Linux-first laptop (Librem 15) has been working flawlessly for many years with no issues whatsoever. Suspend, WiFi, GUI work as expected 100% of the time.


That's great to hear. Now, compare that to the sample size of people running Linux on custom-built desktops, Chromebooks, cheap-o laptops and Macbooks, all of which are "supported" by the Linux kernel. Starting to get the picture?

Furthermore, even some commercial "designed for Linux" laptops like the Dell XPS Developer Edition have critical features missing like suspend/sleep, both of which work better on unofficially supported machines like Thinkpads. You're welcome to support whichever hardware vendors you choose, but you absolutely can't pretend like all hardware works "fine" on Linux to the same degree it would on MacOS or Windows.


Did you try to run Windows on a Macbook? Do you expect that it should work flawlessly? Will you blame Microsoft or Apple for its problems? Same with Linux.

Linux tries to support "all" hardware, but you should not expect that it's possible to actually do it perfectly.

> commercial "designed for Linux" laptops like the Dell XPS Developer Edition have critical features missing like suspend/sleep

So you should stop trusting Dell with their hardware. Why do you blame the Linux community for not supporting proprietary hardware without documentation flawlessly?

> pretend like all hardware works "fine" on Linux

I never said that all hardware worked fine on Linux. There is no OS with which all hardware works fine, and can't be. I'm just suggesting to rely on actually supported hardware, which is rare but pretty much possible to find. See also: System76.


> And lots of applications still don't support it for screensharing (looking at you slack).

Good point. This is the only issue keeping me from using Wayland, because OBS just won't work with it yet.


Native wayland support through pipewire landed in OBS last September: https://obsproject.com/blog/obs-studio-27-released


It absolutely works with Wayland... I just recorded a screencast yesterday with OBS on Wayland. The only thing that changes is you have to explicitly grant OBS rights to your display/window when it starts.


What exactly is the issue? OBS (currently version 27.2.3) works perfectly fine on my machine using Gnome Wayland.


The issue is that capturing the screen puts OBS on ~40% CPU utilization. I wouldn't call that "perfectly fine" nor is that even an option to be considered for me.


I've been using Gnome/Wayland via Ubuntu LTS releases for the past 4 years now on my Dell XPS 13 and not once have I experienced a segfault.

I think I've had maybe two instances where I had to do a hard reboot in those years and those both involved me doing something a tad aggressive with multiple containers on my system, which is an ultrabook and really isn't speced to handle a lot of them.


I’ve been using a 5k thunderbolt monitor with Fedora since 33 and haven’t once had an issue. My guess is it’s a kernel version or driver issue. I use Intel and Nvidea, and Intel is definitely smoother sailing. I’ll say this, though. Fedora has gotten much better support for Nvidia lately.


Wayland is just a protocol. The desktop environment or application is likely your actual problem.


Yes, I was a bit imprecise. It is Gnome's Wayland support that is too unstable. Given the thread topic, I didn't think to be explicit :)


Correct me if I'm wrong, but Wayland, the protocol, doesn't support restarting and reconnecting to running apps. That means any little bug and you lose your entire session. X11 does support this, even Windows supports it (win+ctrl+shift+b). I wish wayland had a way to make things robust in the face of bugs, because bugs are inevitable.


Yes a protocol that has no standardized way to share screen content. And as such it is completely usless for todays workflow which is dominated by video call meetings.


Then how come I use both teams and zoom just fine under wayland?

Pipewire support is there for a long time now.


> long time

Considering the age of Wayland it's not that long. Besides that, Pipewire is not part of the Wayland protocol. This means external protocols now have to jump in fixing the deficiencies of Wayland.


No, it means that a problem best solved elsewhere is solved.. elsewhere. Screen sharing is streaming, where audio is also relevant and the two have to be synced. It would be plain incorrect to solve the two thing separately.


The composited image of the desktop is only available to the compositor. Hence it needs to be solved at the compositor. Since Wayland is essentially nothing more than a multiprocess negotiation protocol for video memory access it is exactly the right place where it should be solved.


But at the end pipewire does get the output from the compositor, doesn’t it? Not specifying a general API can be a good and a bad thing — see eg. the linux kernel’s stance on driver interfaces.


Sway works pretty much perfectly for everything I throw at it (which is mostly alacritty, emacs, firefox and chromium). If you can stomach minimalism, give it a try.

In my opinion, it represents a significantly better UI than Gnome/KDE/MacOS/Windows paradigms. So much that it's probably the largest reason why I live mostly in Linux land instead of Mac right now.


Curious, are you on a laptop?

If so, how much of a time investment was it to reach the point where you were no longer customising to reach parity with "batteries included" desktop environments (battery bar, sane sleep/wake-ups, volume control)? And how does it handle being plugged/unplugged from external monitors?

I have tried to switch to tiling WMs several times, but I have always found myself going back to Gnome as soon as it's a rabbit-hole of config files to do something "simple" like, adjust volume, or organise monitors. That is, features that are quite discoverable in standard DEs.


Once you start looking into them, "simple" things like adjusting volume and organizing monitors turn out to be more complicated that one would think. Proprietary OSs like MacOS and Windows put enormous effort into hiding these complexities and figuring out sane defaults. They make it look easy, but it's not.

Coming from i3, transitioning to Sway was easy. Previously, I'd transferred from Xfce to i3, and more recently I transitioned from ALSA to Pipewire. Each of these transitions took some effort, say an hour or two initially, and then another hour or two spread over a few weeks to work out edge cases. But the thing is, once I've worked out the edge cases, my desktop is rock solid. I don't cringe when I run a system update, I'm confident it will work. And if an update were to cause Sway to break (which hasn't happened to me yet), Sway's internals are accessible enough that I'm confident I'd be able to quickly resolve the issue.

This is quite the opposite of my experience with GNOME or KDE. These DEs make an attempt to match the accessibility and intuitiveness of proprietary interfaces, but in my experience they lack the resources. The inherent complexity is papered over and becomes exposed as soon as you try to do something even slightly off the beaten path. And if something does happen to break (which happened to me frequently when running GNOME), fixing the issue is a deep rabbit hole of undocumented or semi-documented options and bugzilla reports.

Having said that, I'm open to the notion that one or both of them have improved a lot since then. I really hope they have because running a minimalist desktop like Sway isn't for everyone.


On laptop, sometimes attached to a larger screen.

I estimate that I've spent 10 hours last year on finding and tinkering the best fit software for my use case. But perhaps we have to consider that I've been using Linux in some form since 1996, so it's very possible that I've grown calluses all over the place.

External monitor plugging/unplugging works amazingly well, I'd almost say perfectly. I don't think that it required any configuration from me. I use Displayport over USB-C, and I don't remember it failing ever. Specifically it works much much better than xorg ever did.

I have two different Thinkpads: T490 and E14/AMD.


Manjaro Sway Edition ( https://github.com/Manjaro-Sway/manjaro-sway ) has lots of "batteries included".


Working with sway on a Thinkpad since 2 years now. Stuff like media/brightness buttons and multimonitor setups (now with kanshi) each took a bit of learning/trying but running perfectly now. Since I am using NixOS my config always just improves and will always be available in a Git repo for when I switch to a new machine or finally also change my gaming desktop from Ubuntu to NixOS.


Haven’t tried multiple monitors or power-saving yet, but in general you can steal from someone’s config on GitHub. Works mostly fine, including battery indicators, brightness, volume control and whatnot.

But it definitely requires more tinkering to reach similar levels of, hm, “convenience”.


sway laptop user here (for almost 2 years I think?).

I spent a little while on this, but I migrated from i3, so I just ported every little section of my config bit by bit.

In terms of battery bar and other "bar" type things, I use waybar[0] which basically does all the things you'd expect by default (just install and it "works").

For multi-monitor, config, I initially setup with wdisplays[1] (think arandr for wayland) and then manually copied the positions into my sway config. Monitor positioning was the only thing I needed to setup (and telling it that one monitor was HDPI) and then all of the scaling and everything worked perfectly. This was my biggest selling point for wayland, I now get nice crisp fonts and application scaling works nicely (which was not the case with X).

volume control from the keyboard took no time, just a couple of extra lines.

There was some stuff to do with the clipboard (wl-clipboard[2]) and screenshots (grim[3] + slurp[4]) that required some setup, but again, just a few lines, and didn't take much mental load.

Oh and I needed to change my notifications daemon(dunst[5]), and chose to change my program launcher to one with a nicer interface and cleaner fonts (wofi[6]).

I think that's all the tweaking that I did. Oh, and I needed to do something with pipewire to sort out screensharing at the start, don't remember that too well though...

[0] https://github.com/Alexays/Waybar

[1] https://github.com/artizirk/wdisplays

[2] https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard

[3] https://github.com/emersion/grim

[4] https://github.com/emersion/slurp

[5] https://github.com/dunst-project/dunst

[6] https://hg.sr.ht/~scoopta/wofi


The Gnome-ish shell on Pop 21.04 running on my full AMD laptop (5900hx cpu/apu, 6800m gpu) works smooth as butter. It games great and I'm using with 2 monitors one being 165Hz 1440p and the other 60Hz 4k. I had to enable Wayland on the login manager config files.

No driver installation required. I have no regrets for ditching my Nvidia RTX 3060 hardware.


Fedora 36 releasing next month will ship with Wayland enabled by default for NVIDIA as well.


Beware if you depend on the tiling window management and keyboard shortcuts from the Pop shell. Gnome developers apparently randomly decided to change just enough about how they handle workspaces and shortcuts that it breaks/changes Pop shell. This occurred on the Gnome3 version that ships with 21.10.

I ended up switching to i3 after that. Currently on Ubuntu 21.10 with i3wm.


Ubuntu 21.10 (and therefore presumably Pop!_OS) ships with GNOME 40, not GNOME 3.


Thank you, that is a meaningful distinction I should've paid more attention to.

This reddit thread sums up my issue: https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/o27q4z/gnome_3_vs_gn...

Forcing horizontal workspaces, and requiring an extension to go back to vertical, seems like a regression.


It's kind of a coincidence that the big Shell UI changes happened at the same time as the big version number jump, but it is a convenient coincidence.


You probably mean Hertz instead of Megahertz


Fixed. Thanks.


I like UI minimalism and launch screen, but I don't like some features that they copy from MacOS. For example, separate keys for switching between windows of one application and between different applications. So inconvenient. Poor Mac users.

Also I don't like "(un)natural scrolling", a feature when the content is scrolled in the wrong direction.

Gnome seems to be optimized for high resolution (expensive) displays. On a normal laptop display, everything (buttons, window headers, input fields) seems too large.

Also, Gnome needs better discoverability for its features. For example, on first launch there is an empty desktop and it is not clear that you need to press Windows key to access launch screen.


Poor mac user here; just want to weigh in with the opposite: I feel bad for Windows users with their single key combination and inability to discern between cycling windows and cycling applications. Just to show that this kind of variability between DEs is good and healthy, as it better reflects the broad spectrum of user preferences.


Why should I want a key that focuses a window (app) on a separate hidden workspace that doesn't also cycle to that workspace? What am I supposed to even do with a focused app where all the open work is somewhere else?

Every Apple fan argues that Mac shortcuts are superior but instead I, a rabid shortcut enthusiast, end up using the mouse on MacOS for almost everything because the shortcuts are so goddamned brainless.


How many monitors do you have? Do you never need to switch between multiple terminal windows or text editors or PDFs or word documents? I with cmd-` I can swap between just the windows inside the application context, and with cmd-tab I can swap between application contexts. This mental model works for me: which was my whole point; different (key) strokes for different folks.


> Also, Gnome needs better discoverability for its features. For example, on first launch there is an empty desktop and it is not clear that you need to press Windows key to access launch screen.

It defaults to the activity overview.

Just to point out that this is no longer true.


> Also I don't like "(un)natural scrolling", a feature when the content is scrolled in the wrong direction.

Are you using a Trackpad? I feel like every os (windows, macos, gnome/Linux) does natural scrolling by default now


> separate keys for switching between windows of one application and between different applications

This is configurable, but in a bizarrely obscure way: if the "Switch applications" keyboard shortcut is disabled, then the "Switch windows" shortcut will cycle through all windows on the current workspace.


Gnome is the worst of the wayland compositors in terms of spec compliance. KDE and sway are much better in this regard. What good is having protocol specifications when the reference implementation does not implement it, and Gnome, the biggest Wayland desktop, does its own thing anyway?

I am still waiting for Gnome to implement server-side decorations and for proper drag and drop between windows.


> I am still waiting for Gnome to implement server-side decorations [...]

This decision of the Gnome folks really means a very bad fragmentation of the Wayland infrastructure


> Gnome is the worst of the wayland compositors in terms of spec compliance. KDE and sway are much better in this regard. What good is having protocol specifications when the reference implementation does not implement it, and Gnome, the biggest Wayland desktop, does its own thing anyway?

The point of extensions being extension and not being a part of core protocol is being optional, you know. On the other hand, compliant clients have to run and behave correctly without them being present.

> I am still waiting for Gnome to implement server-side decorations

Sorry little wizard, you are going to wait for a while. Don't hold your breath meanwhile :/

That being said, it is not going to be implemented anytime soon. Intentionally. For a good reasons.


It's like the python3 adoption story again. Wayland compositor with hw acceleration doesn't work well with programs specifically written for x11. I gave up on it fast once I realized that I can't take screenshots or record the desktops.


It can do both of those things now, courtesy of Pipewire.


Screenshots and desktop recording has been supported since years.

Initially with non-standard Wayland protocols (so it was quite hit or miss wrt. which capture programs worked under which Wayland compositor).

Since a while there are now standardized ways using PipeWire and the desktop-portal interface.

(Through at least a few month ago sway still did only support full screen capture, and not per-window capture (out of the box), but that's not a Wayland but a sway problem. As far as I can tell currently there is simple no one who 1. cares about it 2. wants to implement it 3. has the time/skill to do so. On KDE/Gnome it per-window capture works. On sway it might still work with some workarounds, just not out-of-the box.)


What's an example of an X11 program you're having troubles with?

I just tested this with Wireshark and rest of the desktop. In fact, there is a built-in shortcut Ctrl+Alt+Shift+R which starts a screen recording and dumps it in the home directory. Worked flawlessly!


Zoom. I can't share my screen. If it works, it has way less options than in x11.

You can't share a display or app, only a region.

Autokey shortcuts don't seem to trigger on Wayland, works with x11

Parcellite, I can't make it show up with shortcuts.

Those are the ones that made me revert to x11


The Zoom issue is related to the API they chose to use on Wayland. There's an API for sharing stuff like screens and windows, but Zoom is calling the GNOME (not even standard) screenshot API in a loop instead. As you might expect, that doesn't exactly work smoothly; performance is lacking and window coordinates would need to be tracked manually.

There's a whole thread about it here (https://community.zoom.com/t5/Meetings/Wayland-screen-sharin...) but I don't think Zoom cares enough about their Linux client to fix these issues.

I don't know about the shortcut issues you're facing, my guess would be the key logger protections built into wayland prevent your shortcut daemon from capturing the necessary keys. Autokey certainly runs into that problem (https://github.com/autokey/autokey/issues/87). Other programs seem to get similar features working, but not everyone had the time or expertise to bring out compatible versions of their software.


As someone mentioned, looks like https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#WebRTC_screen_shar... solves the screen casting issues.


You can’t take a screenshot is different than Zoom not being able to.

You basically can take screenshots/record your screen in every major wayland compositor. On the other hand, screen recording by applications require interfacing with pipewire, which is pretty much done by many programs (including chrome (and thus electron), firefox, obs, etc), but plenty electron apps do not use the necessary flag.

If you don’t want to tinker with rebuilds I recommend using the web version of zoom in an up-to-date browser.


> On the other hand, screen recording by applications require interfacing with pipewire, which is pretty much done by many programs

And why doesn't xwayland support it out of the box? Is crippling existing X11 programs intentional or is it just an inherent limitation of the way wayland works?


Because seeing other windows is a fundamentally privileged action. Also, the implementation of xwayland is basically a nested X - so by using the X screen recording api, it will simply see other X windows.


The problematic one was called "simplescreenrecorder", I wanted to record an area or window. I couldn't get the inbuilt screen recorder to work using the shortcut. But perhaps it was not mature enough yet.


Security, X11 has a unfix-able problem with keylogging/clipboard scrapping and running less trusted applications making it somewhat incompatible with "proper" application sandboxing (what flatpack, snap might become). There are workarounds but they have other problems. (And yes I know we are not quite at the "proper" application sandboxing point yet).

A common misleading counter point to this is, that you can still keylog easily under Wayland using non-Wayland specific means. But this is a stupid argument IMHO, as if you don't start improving things you will never reach the goal and all the "key logging alternatives" are non DM specific and as such need non DM specific fixes (which already exists btw. just aren't often setup by default).

Then there are docents of improvements for developers, like the X11 code base is close to being unmaintainable (from what some of the X11 maintainers say, but I forgot who did so).

There are also improvements for a bunch of features you likely won't care about as a normal users, around multi-seat setups and some embedding specific stuff.

Or implementation details only relevant for people implementing the Wayland compositor.

Theoretically there can be performance/latency improvements for modern applications running on modern hardware. Practically this depends on the hardware/driver, Wayland compositor implementation and client program.

Also by now Wayland-only programs already start to pop up. For now mainly for some special purpose applications, but it's just a matter of time until this can become a problem for some users, needing to use some specific software.

Weather people like it or hate it, X11 on Linux is dying. Wayland will replace it. Incremental improvements will (and often already have) remove many of the limitations people have with it.

I don't see a successor for Wayland for years to come (for normal desktop usage). Through I guess there could be some "label" like "Wayland XXX" which is just the same Wayland but requiring more of the optional available protocols to be implemented. I think currently there is some form of living (incremental improving) standard of standardized Wayland protocols compositors "really"-should implement.

Already now I feel a lot of the complains fall into 4 categories:

- outdated, was fixed quite a while ago

- "my" X11 specific tool doesn't work under Wayland (but there is a Wayland specific tool which has nearly the same features but "I" don't care because "I" don't want to both switching over/porting my config).

- Ubuntu (somehow it really often pops up when people have problems with Wayland)

- fractional HDPI (got already better, will still get better)

I hope in the near future we will be left with only (mostly) the first two categories.

EDIT: Also with how PipeWire develops it's just a question of time until all kind of multimedia/audio/streaming/screen sharing applications will just work much more smoothly on Wayland with much less work required from developers of applications using/managing it.


I suppose I am too stupid to realize that because I take screenshots and record the desktop just fine.


What WM and screenshot tool are you using?

I'm using Plasma on Wayland and there doesn't seem to be any screenshot tool that works properly.

Grim only works on Sway. Flameshot's GUI mode doesn't recognize the secondary screen. Spectacle fails to copy the screenshot to clipboard when running in background mode. KSnip doesn't have a region select mode. Shutter only works in X.

Out of Spectacle and Flameshot, Spectacle is more responsive and works across both screens. I'm thinking I can work around the clipboard issue by having it save to a temporary file, and use `inotifywait` to monitor that file and copy to clipboard with `wl-copy`. I wish I wouldn't have to use such workarounds though.


If anyone else finds themselves in my situation re: Spectacle, I put together this script which may or may not work (I've only tested it by dry-running it so far): https://github.com/Sharparam/dotfiles/blob/master/bin/sharps...


Specifically, I record the browser window or the terminal window to demonstrate bugs and accomplished tasks for projects. (I don't have to, but it feels like a nice jest and documents things clearly)

Do you know of a program which does that on wayland with hw acceleration? I admit I couldn't do it a few months ago and haven't tried since.


Kooha has replaced Peek for me as a screen recorder on Wayland. OBS also works, but it's not exactly designed for quick and easy screen recording.


OBS Studio via PipeWire.


That is a good alternative. Yes I could set up a scene in OBS.

Or maybe I could fallback to x where things work.


Wayland... Right, as for now I am still using X, and I like it, and I am way too used to bspwm,

But when I Poked wayland WMs, man, Things felt just... smoother. I probably will move to river+waybar, but, I need to just, do the effort of configuring waybar a bit more, to make it prettier. But that is okay, for now, bspwm as fallback :P

And GNOME.. About the only DE I actually like, so I agree with you lol


I installed Fedora 35 and Pop OS to try them and I've been blown away by the interface (both have the current Gnome). It looks sleek and modern, and the usability is also good. I felt the kind of joy where I want to show other people how cool it is.


Propaganda. Wayland has usability issues they've yet to fix after 10 years. and GNOME is sadly a DE that's just javascript.

The Linux Desktop deserves better than GNOME, and sadly KDE is the one that's gotten massively improved in the last 10 years.


> Propaganda. Wayland has usability issues they've yet to fix after 10 years.

This. Sadly. I have tried switching numerous times.

The problem for me is libinput which seems to suffer from the "we know better" syndrome that seems to have become more prevalent in recent years on Linux. The author even openly states so in the FAQ [0]. Certain features will NEVER be implemented, because you are wrong to want them. Looks like Apple to me. On X I luckily still have synaptics which provides the knobs I need.

Aside from that Wayland still randomly crashes.

[0] https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/latest/faqs.htm...


Yeah the libinput team's insistence on "your use case is invalid" and the wayland team's classic "this is a job for the compositor" are making the next generation of linux desktops more locked down than iOS for regular users.

Pushing so much responsibility onto compositors means we'll never get even close to the variety of DEs that we had before. Even the two biggest DEs don't have feature parity with X11 despite owning their compositors.


Did you just label your comment with the first word? Thanks!

Gnome is not just javascript, it uses js as a scripting engine similarly to how AAA games use C#/Lua.


When did you last try it? Nobody can factor in 'usability issues' into their considerations, since one person's 'issue' may not matter to another.

From my perspective it has been working well for years, and the alternative stacks all appear to be dying off since Ubuntu has also blessed it.


Would you mind saying what those usability issues are?

Sometimes it's very useful to flag these things up so that they can either be acknowledged or fixed.

Sometimes, if you're lucky, they actually have been solved since the last time you checked.


Lio, this naivety, that is to say, the supposition of cooperation on behalf of the Gnome developers, hurts me to read. ;_; Gnome does not function like other free software projects. They do not actually listen to their users, this is the root of so so many problems with the software suite, they just do what is in their own interest.


> Propaganda

You just accused me of writing up "information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view".


Except from the "political" part of the definition, which everyone understands from the current context that this does not apply, what part do you disagree with?

You are saying "everything works amazingly well". Others are reporting "simple things don't work, sometimes it just segfaults". Of course those other people can perceive your post as a form of propaganda.

I have never used Wayland (I don't have a good reason to try it), so I don't know whether you or GP is correct. But there is obviously a possibility that GP is correct. You could even both be correct, if there are hardware-related bugs that you just happen to not experience.


Even a little experience with it would raise the chance the three paras you wrote on the topic might be worth reading.


> The Linux Desktop deserves better than GNOME

Speak for yourself. I want the macOS lite experience on Linux, not the Windows lite one, thank you very much.

GNOME at least tries to have a cohesive and consistent design, instead of the whole kitchen sink approach of Windows and KDE.

To be fair I have a great deal of appreciation and respect for KDE, but its users are quick to shit on GNOME whenever they can. Nobody is forcing it on you.


> Nobody is forcing it on you.

But is that really the case? </TIK>

Gnome/Gtk developers have sabotaged integration efforts since many years. The negative attitude against their products does not come à propos nothing. It is deserved as it follows naturally from their anti-user and anti-cooperative behaviour.


Quit calling it anti user. Am I not a user, or I do not count as much as other Linux users because I like GNOME?

There is absolutely nothing wrong in a DE wanting to go their own way instead of supporting any type of weird crazy configuration users might ask for. I want an opinionated desktop environment, I don't go complain to KDE devs that they should get rid of menus and adopt a headerbar because I dislike menus. Yet the opposite happens every time.

GNOME is exploring a UI paradigm different from any other else, and some really dislike them because of it. How dare they, the hubris of these developers!


Quit playing a victim and misdirecting/mischaracterising the points I wrote about.

This isn't about "exploring a UI paradigm", this is about users of the other DEs actually being treated badly by the Gnome/Gtk developers. The criticism will continue until they adopt the mindset that is prevalent in the F/OSS community and stop offloading their externalities, so that a user's choice of an opinionated DE does not negatively affect another user's choice of a configurable DE.


> Nobody is forcing it on you.

Funny, my company actually is forcing me to use Gnome once we migrate to CentOS 8. Something about how RHEL is no longer supporting other desktop managers and it's too difficult to harden other ones. I am a Mate user and am not pleased.


To each it's own... I strongly prefer Windows (<=7) to MacOS UI.


> and GNOME is sadly a DE that's just javascript.

Why is that sad? It's just a scripting engine...

> and sadly KDE is the one that's gotten massively improved in the last 10 years.

Why is that sad? Sounds like a good thing...

I'm starting to think your definition of "sadly" is different to mine...


I thought so too, first impression is very good. Unfortunately I couldn't keep using it because you can't screen share in MS Teams with Wayland, and most games don't work in Wayland either.

So it was back to X11. Until screen sharing works in more apps, and until Proton/Wine games work I'm sticking to X11 and I'm not complaining.


Have you tried Pipewire for screen sharing:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#WebRTC_screen_shar...


Doesn't help, Teams doesn't support pipewire yet.


I use Sway (and therefore Wayland) for everything except gaming; for that I switch to i3 (X11) on TTY2. Works great for me.


Back in the start of the century I used to run two X servers. One with a Linux desktop (tried various stuff) and one with Nvidia's proprietary kernel module, purely to play games, and have any crashes not lock up my whole machine. It worked beautifully. Eventually I switched to the red side, and I stayed there as much as possible.


I use Gnome+Wayland for gaming. I only had one problem for years that I used it. Something related to "Failed to initialize parser".


You can if you use it from an up-to-date web browser (or if microsoft would use an up-to-date electron build as a base).


This is absurd. Why would the browser matter for such a basic system functionality as screenshoting?


Because screenshotting is very security sensitive.


I don't think that's the problem. Browsers can do screenshotting correctly. MS Teams' Electron app can't. You can use the web version of teams in a browser to get around this issue.


Because it is an electron app, built on top of a browser that doesn’t use the correct build flags?


But why does the nature of the program matter at all? If a program writes a file on my home directory, I can read that file with other programs, regardless of the build flags of the first program. Why isn't my screen just the same? A program writes pixels to it, then I use another program to read them.

Having the pixels of your screen be more "sacred" than the files on your $HOME is a disturbingly bizarre security model.


Try writing to a file using linux kernel calls on windows — APIs matter.

Also, please have a look at here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30735099 This simply should not happen, any random executable having access to your $HOME is a terrible terrible practice.


> any random executable having access to your $HOME is a terrible terrible practice.

Running random executables is the only terrible practice here. If I run "cat" over a file on my $HOME, then I expect to see its contents, regardless of which program wrote the file. Similarly, if a program writes pixels on my screen, then I expect to be able to screenshot them.

Conversely, if I write a file in my $HOME, then I expect that other programs that I run will be able to read it. Similarly, if I write pixels on my screen, I should not be surprised that my other programs can read them.

Call me conspiracist, but this silly wayland security theater seems like a side of a multi-pronged attack to destroy the very principles of unix. First, screens; then, files. But you know what? You'll pry fopen and fread from my cold, dead hands!


> Similarly, if a program writes pixels on my screen, then I expect to be able to screenshot them.

You can screenshot it. Zoom or whatever else can’t do so without calling the respective APIs with the respective security policy (which by default is: giving you a popup to allow the request)

Have you seen my linked thread? Ok, let’s say `cat` works on behalf of you. Does `apt`, `npm` etc also do what it does on behalf of you? The problem is not only third-party code, but third-party data — any bug in the program can hijack the whole program at which point it no longer works on your behalf.


It isn't necessary that any particular program have access to $HOME, is it? That's often the most straightforward way for things to work, but anything can be run in a chroot jail or simply as another user.


What about those of us who don't like macOS UI?

I don't like the dock, I don't like the way it (usually fails) to maximize windows, I don't like full screen apps anywhere other than a laptop, and I especially don't like Finder and every other attempt at representing hierarchy as anything other than a tree view of folders (not files) and a flat list view of files.

Gnome's prediliction for putting UI controls into the titlebar is dreadful, IMO.

However it seems that the designers of every other desktop OS have macOS envy.


> What about those of us who don't like macOS UI?

Uhh, choose from countless other desktop environments out there for linux?!! Like I mentioned in the post, I used MATE desktop which is Gnome 2 style with classical UI metaphors. Works and is well supported.

> Gnome's prediliction for putting UI controls into the titlebar is dreadful, IMO.

It bothered me for an hour and then it was fine (as soon as I realized, it didn't interfere with dragging the window around). I'm talking about Gnome 40+ btw.

> However it seems that the designers of every other desktop OS have macOS envy.

Because it turns out the majority love it. Every developer/entrepreneur/maker soon realizes that having focus is crucial to success. In a lot of scenarios, that translates into accommodating the masses and if time and cost permits, allow for future customization.


I very much dislike macOS, and I like GNOME.

- GNOME doesn't have a dock.

- You can maximise windows by dragging them to the top of the screen (or by pressing Super+Up), and if a new window opens that's almost the size of the screen, GNOME maximises it automatically.

- You can make a window fullscreen if you want to, but you don't have to.

- GNOME's Files app doesn't have a tree view of folders; but in my opinion it's far easier to use than Finder.

- GNOME doesn't have titlebars. It has headerbars, which are toolbars with the window's close button integrated.


XFCE. Don't be fooled by the apparent barebones aspect. It is very customizable. I have tiling WM settings, for example (stock XFCE).


Use KDE or something else? There’s no shortage of options on Linux (unlike macOS).


I'm using KDE for more than a decade and it's the ultimate flexible DE. I don't dislike GNOME, but KDE provides unprecedented customizability.


People who don't like Gnome seems to love KDE, and vice versa.


It gets better. Seems like Wayland is finally getting closer to delivering on its promise for a silky [0]smooth desktop experience (on Gnome at least).

[0]. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1441


For me it is the other way around, I stuck with Gnome for a long time since 2003 up until 2020, my problem is that with every update I had to work harder and harder to make unwanted changes go away, especially when you have to cater more users than yourself on the machine. That said, the underlying libraries and systems are amazing in that everything goes smoothly, same can be said for Kde. Nowadays I use LXQt and I am so happy with that it adheres opendesktop standards and is flexible but not changing under my ass. I use Gnome and Kde under the hood and this combination keeps me happy.


Counterpoint: I suspect you're still new to GNOME 3 and are still in the honeymoon phase, and haven't yet noticed the regular app crashes and annoying UI inconsistencies.

Source: Self. I use it daily. It's not the worst. It shows great promise, but it is not really what I would describe as polished.


It's actually cutting edge GNOME 41 on Arch Linux and I hear Ubuntu folks run an older version. But you are right in that I haven't used this for long at all. However, I have run every application and use case I do every day and so far, no issues at all.


I like the idea of Wayland and Gnome. It's just that using my Manjaro linux laptop reminds me of windows 95 in terms of stability lately.

- frequent system freezes that don't seem recoverable. Possibly driver related (intel xe with an i5, 5.16 kernel). But really annoying.

- I've had to deal with a weird bug where after standby the laptop would wake up and then lock again after a few seconds. I "fixed" it by disabling screen and lock timeouts for now. I have no idea how this started happening; or why. The workaround is of course not great on a laptop.

- Screen sharing with discord, slack, etc. seems a PITA. I can share a window but not my screen in discord. And then of course Firefox is not among the windows I can actually share.

- A lot of things that would be settings that I'd like to manipulate in Gnome are instead only configurable via perpetually unstable extensions that break between updates; or configuration file. For example, I'd like to get rid of the top bar in gnome because it's a waste of space and a pretty dumb idea on a 1080p screen (sadly the most common form factor for laptops). There's an extension for that that promptly broke with the next Gnome update.

- Key settings related to touchpad configuration (appallingly bad defaults out of the box) don't even have UI. You just need to fiddle with configuration files.

- The gnome terminal has keybindings for switching tabs that don't seem to work. I've no idea why. I'd like that to work in a sane way. I'm experimenting with alternatives but haven't really found anything that comes even close to what I had with iterm2 on mac.


> Manjaro linux

I see the problem. I’d go straight Arch or Fedora. Manjaro always gave me problems.

I run Fedora on my 2 Dell Laptops and on a custom built desktop with no problems at all, but I did pick all three for their Linux compatibility.

I’d suggest giving Fedora a spin and seeing if it works out of the box for you.


Manjaro isn't known for its stability. The Linux desktop would have a better reputation if people first tried the big name distros instead of small derivatives.


Manjaro's best boast is its stability. And I simply can't accept that the second most commonly used linux distribution is a 'small derivative'.

https://www.tecmint.com/top-most-popular-linux-distributions...


The DistroWatch ranking used on that site is known to be bogus. I assure you, MX Linux is not the most used distribution in the world, nor Manjaro is second. This ranking doesn't even show Arch Linux in the top 10 spots, what?

I'm on mobile, so I can't do a proper research, but I reckon the _desktop_ Linux distro ranking would look a bit like: Ubuntu, Arch Linux, Linux Mint, Fedora, Debian, Pop OS, Manjaro, etc.


> Manjaro

Try Ubuntu or Fedora. Manjaro isn't very stable.


i've been meaning to give wayland another go since my last attempt maybe ~1.5 years ago. there was some promise, but it was still lacking for me:

* i use Kupfer as a quicksilver/alfred replacement. triggering the hotkey made it open the dialog on the bottom left of the window i'd most recently used (rather than centre-screen)

* alt-tabbing in and out of fullscreen-games was much less reliable (if at all possible) - which was weird as i'd have said there was a perceptable increase in latency

* getting wine/proton games to launch was more challenging

* i've modified lots of things on this system to have mac-like keybindings (e.g. "command"-c/v for copy paste in terminal, etc. and not all of these are configuration changes, as in many terminal emulators). i seem to remember wayland behaving strangely with super-based keybinds. i don't think i ever got "command"-w to work properly.

* a myriad of behavioral differences in window/desktop management made it surprisingly painful to persist for any length of time.

which is a shame because it really does feel that wayland is architected better than X11.


Forget Ubuntu and their old software, Fedora GNOME is where its at, finally a forward facing distro for workstations and professionals. I highly recommend giving it a shot.

Fedora is the new Ubuntu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9h_0dnSGWk


The long-term merits of Wayland aside, I must admit that I too find Gnome on Wayland polished, smooth and fun to use. Since 2021, I've preferred using it over the macOS desktop.


Be careful about relying on GNOME shell extensions; they are similar to Firefox XUL extensions in that they can do anything to the internals of GNOME shell, often break on each version upgrade, often are poor quality with memory leaks, often get abandoned upstream and removed from distros etc.


Mostly avoid them because the GNOME devs refuse to make a stable extention API, though. Or, use them liberally in protest of that stupid mentality and watch them recoil in horror!


This is a good argument in favor of stable/LTS distros on the desktop. You can basically pin specific releases of GTK/Gnome/Adwaita for multiple years, and then just put the whole perpetually-churning Gnome conversation on "mute".


I've been using wayland with Gnome 40 (pop os) for a few months now. Though I can't tell if its better than X11 its definitely not worse. Both seem identical to me except that on wayland drag n drop files into Chrome/Firefox and screen sharing don't seem to work.


That really sounds like worse to me.


There is a workaround for screen sharing but I couldn't find any for the drag n drop issue.


Kinda an essential feature if you're going to give up thumbnails in the filepicker...


I was using GNOME 3 and wayland since it came out.

But around 2 years ago there was an update of gjs that crashed GDM but was required for GNOME and GTK itself. It was kind of a paradox because gjs is used everywhere, and it crashed everything losely related to GTK4.

So there I was, unable to start any wayland session that had any GTK in it, and decided that I'm gonna retry migrating to i3.

Never regretted my decision. Now I'm using i3 or sway everywhere, depending on driver support (age) of the system.

But if you rely on conventions that a Desktop Environment offers, I wouldn't recommend it unless you're willing to write a lot of shell scripts and bindings and config files.


What distro? Haven’t had any issues with Fedora. Just put Arch on my box this weekend (because, you know, that itch happens sometimes). But this kind of issue is my biggest hesitation with Arch.


"It's MacOS interface for linux."

Yeah, you lost me right there. Everything I've seen here amounts to "it's pretty."

No mention of the stuff that matters to a lot of us, and I would be so bold as to suggest that it's more important -- namely "backwards compatibility with X." Look, a LOT of stuff relies on it, especially if you've tweaked your desktop in a way that works for you.

It's like you're offering me a Lamborghini, but I need my Toyota Tacoma because I have things to do.


In fact, the 'does what I want, does it well, and does little else" is very much the reason I like it. Whatever you think of it under the hood (and I have opinions, both positive and negative here), I do like using it.

It's the first 'desktop' I wanted to use, and have used for more than a few weeks, approximately 10 years now. I've generally liked the changes and improvements over time. It finally budged me off of (wait for it) vtwm.gamma.

To each his cup of tea.


> Everything I've seen here amounts to "it's pretty."

First: pretty matters to me and incidentally to a lot of us.

Second: Look harder. I've noted performance multiple times to the point that it saved me $2000 buying a new laptop.


> backwards compatibility with X.

XWayland works just fine.


I'd love to use Wayland but so far I couldn't make input switching work reliably. In X I have a global shortcut to change my fcitx input to e.g., Japanese or Chinese and in Wayland the applications appear to have to implement a lot more and as such it works in some apps but not in others.

Screen sharing in Zoom works quite well if I go through Firefox instead of the Zoom client, which I even do under X, otherwise my machine eventually crashes (probably a memory leak)


Gnome on PopOS has been perfect for me for the last couple years. It feels as productive, functional and out of your way as Windows 7 used to feel. The settings and other menus are all consistent and easy to find things inside. The file manager does exactly what it needs to do and nothing more. I have no complaints at all and wouldn't change a thing.


I really wish GNOME Wayland supported crash resilience like Arcan does, so it could cope with GPU hangs and driver crashes etc.

https://arcan-fe.com/2017/12/24/crash-resilient-wayland-comp...


You used to be able to press alt-f2 and then "r"/"restart" if/when your compositor shit the bed, but that was removed without replacement in Wayland... a complete blocker to me using it on certain devices where Wayland support is poor and crashes happen every 5 minutes.


That doesn't seem to be a Wayland issue, switching to a text console (and back) seems to work fine, no different than last time I did that in X11.


You're right, it's a GNOME issue. Doesn't make it any less critical though, I'd like to restart my compositor without taking my entire window server down with it.


My experience has been nothing like yours. In my experience with Ubuntu 21.10, Wayland is still a glitchy, bug-ridden mess, despite more than a full decade of work. Just some random things that don't work:

- If I alt-tab, I need to move the mouse before I can use my scroll wheel. If I try to scroll before moving the mouse, nothing happens. It's almost as if I need to move the mouse for Gnome to realize that a different window has focus

- Basic Gnome commands (like restarting) are unavailable

- For some reason, Gnome on Wayland can't handle Bluetooth as well as Gnome on X11. I used to have pretty regular Bluetooth disconnections on Wayland. Switching back to X cured the problem

It's tempting to say that Gnome is the problem, but Gnome on X11 works just fine.

To put it succinctly, it's MacOS interface for linux.

Yes, insofar as recent versions of MacOS have also been glitchy, bug-ridden messes.


> Wayland is still a glitchy, bug-ridden mess, despite

That sucks. As to your specific points:

> If I alt-tab, I need to move the mouse before I can use my scroll wheel.

Just tested this, doesn't seem to affect me.

> Basic Gnome commands (like restarting) are unavailable.

I can tap Command and then type restart and it shows up as an item on the drawer. Fastest way to restart short of assigning a shortcut for me.

> For some reason, Gnome on Wayland can't handle Bluetooth as well as Gnome on X11.

Too early to say for me, but so far, Bluetooth has been equally solid. As a bonus, I discovered Pipewire from the comments on this post and now I can use the headset mode of my Airpods Pro!

> Yes, insofar as recent versions of MacOS have also been glitchy, bug-ridden messes.

The issue with Mac is that a glitch or a bug isn't something you can hope to fix even if you have the skills. Linux affords you that which is very powerful.

EDIT: I run Arch Linux btw.


> I can tap Command and then type restart and it shows up as an item on the drawer. Fastest way to restart short of assigning a shortcut for me.

Then you're not using GNOME on Wayland. Or are you mistaking restarting GNOME with restarting your whole operating system? GNOME is rather buggy, so for years you've been able to restart it (when running under X11) with Alt+F2 and typing restart. This keeps your login session, all your running apps, it just restarts the bugged out GNOME. Very convenient. And in case you want to develop GNOME extensions, almost essential. This is simply not available under Wayland, unless there have been very recent changes?


> Or are you mistaking restarting GNOME with restarting your whole operating system?

Whole OS. In 15 years of using linux, I don't remember having to only restart my desktop environment. But then again, I don't develop extensions.


For me, the lack of window menu accelerators is a dealbreaker: I'm used to being able to hit alt-space then x to maximize, alt-space then c to close, and so on. Most windowing systems support these keystrokes. Gnome doesn't, and because the window menu is rendered using a non-GTK toolkit (because of course it is), it's surprisingly annoying to add these accelerators.

It's not just this one thing either: every single time I try Gnome, I last about two hours before I run into some random thing I want that the Gnome developers won't let me do because they have Design and Vision and know better than I do how my desktop environment should function.

I keep trying KDE once in a while too and hit different issues, usually related to stability or clutter.

I miss Unity actually. But it was a huge effort to patch every app to support top menus and launcher badges, and I don't blame Canonical for giving up.

Right now, I'm using Cinnamon, which is both unstable and unfeatureful in some ways, but that at least doesn't continually annoy me in ways that Gnome and KDE do.


I had to switch back to Xorg in my Framework laptop mostly because of the screen share, but also because of an issue with the mouse lagging.

The mouse lagging turned out to be a problem with Panel Self Refresh, so I had to disable it: <https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Ubuntu+21.10+Installation+on...>

Now it's fixed (although I would like to have the PSR back), and I don't think I'll try Wayland until I can get:

1) Google Chrome Teams screen share working or a good, native, official client for Teams

2) Discord screen share (well, I use the Snap version, I should try the Flatpak version)

I would like to use Wayland 24/7, but probably won't get to try it again for a few months


I run Ubuntu 21.10 on a Dell XPS laptop. Smooth as silk. Works with docking station and multiple monitors. MS Teams beta is good except for screen share. I just use brave browser for teams meetings and can share screens and individual windows.


How is the HDPI experience? I am using KDE with a lot of hacks [1] currently, would love to try something that is more native.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30752499


Hm, I have to look into this (HDPI, >>fractional scaling<<) again.

- Last time I looked into it, there was no Wayland protocol for clients being able to handle the scaling themself (if they want to) and as such do it "properly" (e.g. for font rendering). Through I think now there is, I think Gnome supports it, KDE and Sway might but I'm not sure either way.

- This still needs to be supported by the client, which it should be for modern Qt,GTK applications.

- If not supported by the client it will render at a non-fractional scaling and then scale the image.

- Here the quality can change depending on the algorithm used (e.g. downscaling vs. upscaling and if downscaling how much "bigger" the image is rendered before downscaling and what algorithm is used there). Last time I checked (very long ago) the algorithm sway used on my laptop (could be GPU dependent) was bad, like really bad, but this was also very long ago. So there is a high chance this improved.

Given that I'm going to setup a new HDPI laptop soon, I guess I have to check this points again soon ;)

As a side note: Non-fractional scaling works perfectly fine on at least sway since years.


I can't speak about KDE, but properly working HDPI (4k monitor, and a couple of 1080p monitors) is what brought me to wayland (sway) and has required almost no setup (I think I enabled a setting for chrome, and might have installed a different emacs with wayland compatibility).

It's been absolutely fantastic, and it's the primary reason I can't go back to X.


Gnome comes stock with RHEL, so I'm not bothered to use other desktops as most of my time is spent in the terminal. I did get into some of the minimalist desktops at some point to see how little I could get away with. In that regard, OpenBox is pretty good, yet there are other more extreme minimalist desktops if you want.

Having said that, I have yet to have anything crash while running Gnome, but have had to limit a couple services provided by Gnome over time...sometimes -- maybe bugs in updates -- they can get resource hungry even while idle, but nothing beyond what an obsessive admin or power user might care about.


I switched to Fedora Gnome a few months ago after using Ubuntu and derivatives for ~14 years. Everything just works.

My only complaint with Gnome is that Nautilus doesn't support splitting panes. So, I use Nemo instead.


After having enough of Microsoft about 8 weeks ago I've tested several distros. I have a wide screen monitor and need fractional scaling of 1.25.

With wayland all non native apps were blurry.

Ubuntu LTS worked best, but I dislike Snap so I ended up with Linux Mint.

Nevertheless, if the fractional scaling issues with wayland are solved I'd like to give Fedora a try.

P.S.: I'm more than happy with Linux. Really, night and day compared to Windows. 15 years ago everything was easy with Windows and hard with Linux Desktop. Now it's the opposite.


Every time I used Gnome 3 I ended up leaving it after few months, it always get slower with time, especially with Firefox, and yet I couldn't find any memory leaks in it.


Give it a month and it'll start hurting. It always does.


Thanks for wishing me pain and suffering.


I'm reflecting on my own pain and suffering. Sorry :)


I'm still running blackbox on x11. I have looked at Wayland from time to time but nothing has yet convinced me to change what I have been using for decades.


I used sway as my daily driver for about a year. It was great, and I never thought I'd move back to xorg. Unfortunately I built a new machine with a discrete nvidia gpu, and the choices are: - Use sway with the nvidia driver and accept massive numbers of artefacts - Use sway with the (open source) nouveau driver and leave performance on the table - Switch back to xorg + awesomewm. I chose the last one :(


FWIW, I'm using Sway with Nvidia right now and it's as smooth as silk with no white flashes. The wlroots-eglstreams package is key to avoiding the artifacts. The only issue I have is Zoom - but that's hopefully being solved by the Zoom guys themselves. Arch:

lib32-nvidia-utils 510.54-1 lib32-opencl-nvidia 510.54-1 nvidia 510.54-7 nvidia-utils 510.54-1 wlroots-eglstreams-git 0.16.0.r5388.0558b203-1 sway-git r6897.1e79088a-1

Good luck!


for what it's worth, I used to use the nvidia driver and eglstreams but a few months ago (I think shortly after nvidia started supporting gbm), that started crashing, and I had to uninstall wlroots-eglstreams and switch to the nouveau driver to keep a working system.

I no longer have the patience to deal with nvidia bullshit, and will happily leave perf on the table to not have to deal with that, so I'm sticking with nouveau for now.

(Obviously this is just my experience, and it's possible that it was somehow a me-problem, but it took some diagnosing and the fix I did was the only permutation that worked. I am on arch, so rolling release and bleeding age e.t.c. YMMV)


Oh, interesting... I thought that since nvidia had added GDM support, the eglstreams stuff was obsolete, but I will give it a go. Thanks! Edit - That did it, thanks!


After upgrading Ubuntu from 21.04 to 21.10, the shipped Gnome3 version apparently included a bunch of new shortcuts and a change in workspace management functionality such that the Pop OS shell management worked significantly worse. I gave up and went to i3wm after that. It's not perfect and requires some time to configure but at least I can count on the configuration and functionality to remain stable.


You might like Regolith.


I tried it in a VM before, definitely enjoyed it.

I always worry about bundled distributions like this. You're subject to the whims of the maintainer in terms of implementation choices, packaging, and whether or not long term support exists.


Absolutely.

The Regolith website puts the full iso front and center (for some reason), but you can also just add the PPA and install one of the `regolith-desktop-*` packages - mostly config with dependencies on gnome, i3, and picom. It easy to drop back to vanilla ubu/gnome when the project goes stale or you find something that doesn't play nicely with tiling WM like Unity editor.


Is remote desktop still in the same, sorry state on Wayland? Then it is simply a non-starter, no matter how tear-less window dragging is locally.


The tools to build a decent remote desktop (less tricks to conserve bandwidth than X, but with sound support) are likely there now with Pipewire et al, but as far as I know noone has puzzled the pieces together for a comprehensive solution yet.


If you mean “network transparency” (even though X isn’t it either unless you restrict yourself to xmotif. It pretty much sends bitmaps very often), then no, wayland isn’t network transparent. But it can use the litany of streaming protocols allowing for much better responsiveness.


I switched from macos to gnome (on a tablet PC no less) nine months ago, and while there's annoyances it is getting mature enough to consider trying.

I left a comment explaining why and with some helpful links here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30364919


I really want to like GNOME since it’s the desktop that gets the most attention and everything just works, but the interface just doesn’t work for me. I always end up coming back to a more traditional desktop sooner or later and it just feels like home. I know I can force it to be one with extensions, but those never feel as good as the real thing.


I like it but there is (at least on Ubuntu + Intel graphics) some strange bug with Firefox, Google Meet and screen sharing that when I do it Slack start become unresponsive and clipboard copy from Firefox stops working until I kill Firefox and restart it. It's super-weird and I might be the only one suffering from that (I have a Dell XPS 9300)


Maybe this problem: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1722369 and yes it's annoying.


It totally sounds like that but I'm on FF 98.0.1 and still happens, but maybe it needs a GTK update which I might just get in Ubuntu 22.04?


Yes, I understand the cause of this problem is in GTK - (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/4340). So yeah, upgrade to latest Ubuntu should help. Probably worth to check first if latest Ubuntu use GTK version with this patch.


Let's see, looks like it has been merged in a 3.24.x release, Ubuntu 21.10 is already on 3.24 but most probably the patch didn't land in an official repo bugfix version.


> I can do everything I used to have on Compiz

Can you do the color manipulation a la Redshift[1]? Can you take a proper screenshot? Can you limit the size of top bars like you could in Ubuntu Unity? Most importantly, does it have the cube?

[1] http://jonls.dk/redshift/


Redshifting is built in. Although to be honest, recently it has been a bit unstable for me in the sense that some applications seem to cause it to disappear. Don't know what's up with that.

Screenshot works fine for me, but I guess you have a specific problem since it's not working for you.

Cube - yes, there's a plugin for that. I'm not using it, but there is another one called "Burn My Windows"

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4679/burn-my-windows/

which I'll admit to having installed since it was just so easy. Now, when I go home, my windows explode. I was never into the Compiz thing, but I'm enjoying those exploding windows. I just tweaked the animation length slightly and turned off a couple of the effects. It looks much better than that genie effect on MacOS.


The latest Gnome on X looks no less gorgeous.

And Wayland is still mostly unusable with Nvidia cards (and no, “buy another card” is not an answer, sorry). Though at least it is technically working, which is already a major improvement. I am optimistic that I will be able to use Wayland in the next 2 years or so.


Does anyone have this problem with VMware Workstation Player in Gnome/Wayland, where the VM keyobard shortcut are captured by the host?

Like ALT-TAB inside a Windows VM actually does ALT-TAB in the Gnome destkop?

Had to switch to Gnome/Xorg for that to disappear


I didn't have any issues with wayland untill I started to have many. My basic toolset on Ubuntu refuses to work on Wayland.

1. Zoom - screenshare doesn't work or crashes - I can't remember now

2. Peek - cannot capture gif recordings

3. Flameshot - cannot take screenshots


1. There are reports here that Zoom works fine with Pipewire in the browser.

2. Have you tried: https://github.com/SeaDve/Kooha ?


> 1. Zoom - screenshare doesn't work or crashes - I can't remember now

Some (all?) browsers lack the ability to talk with Wayland's screensharing system. A quick workaround that worked for me (using Zoom at least) was to launch that browser session and the windows to be shared in XWayland.

A perhaps more convenient workaround is exposing your entire Wayland session as a fake webcam. I don't remember the name of the software that lets you do this, but it works quite well.


Most browsers have the ability: firefox and chrome have pipewire support for a long time now, so if they are run as wayland applications (sometimes people don’t even realize what version they are using) they will be able to screenshare just fine.


Wow, I hadn't noticed! That's great news! (For anyone else reading: Firefox has had support since version 84.)


As mentioned many times — the compositor can take screenshots just fine, but an application running under wayland can only do so if it speaks the protocol.

So try the web version of zoom, it will just work. I don’t know the other programs but pipewire is the relevant API they should implement.


screenshotting & screencasting are built-in (to GNOME anyway)

https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/screen-shot-r...


I tried Wayland out in December 2021. Unfortunately, screensharing in Slack and Zoom (and Google Meet IIRC?) did not work for me, which makes it an instant no-go for anything work related for me.


Sway (i3 but Wayland) is also great.

I can't stand looking at X anymore, with its screen tearing. It's like back in the 90s where some monitors were set to 50Hz and it just hurt to look at.


Does screen sharing via video conf apps work yet? Last time I tried Wayland it didn't support any of the common apps sharing screen. Was just blank (obviously)


I did not try Zoom, but I was trying team viewer to help my dad install a printer and had to boot into X for it.


If you want a macOS-style application menu bar, though, you'll need to go over to Plasma. Latte Dock feels like a better replacement dock than GNOME's.


When will I be able to run Linux on my M1 iMac and should I? I read about Asahi Linux supporting it, but I don’t know about performance.


> it's MacOS interface for linux

If this is something you want I recommend you just use macOS. It will always be the best macOS experience.


I want the user interface and experience but that's it. I need a linux kernel and I need the customization and openness afforded by a linux system. My workflow, business and more is tied up heavily in that ecosystem.


Run Linux in a vm on macOS.


No thanks


Why not? You can ssh into it and also run X applications in your Macos session.


It's obviously difficult to compare, but how's the RAM usage of this new setup compared to MATE on Archlinux?


In context of 16GB of RAM, I can't tell the difference.


Thanks for saving me the time. I definitely don't want a "MacOS interface for Linux".


When Gnome crashes, which happens a lot, you can't restart it in wayland without logging out


[flagged]


> hardware

The person said GNOME is like Mac OS. They didn't say their laptop is like a Mac.

> software

Insomuch that GNOME is not Mac OS, and Mac OS is not GNOME, yes that's true.

> user experience

Is a personal preference. There are a lot of completely asinine choices on both GNOME and Mac OS, and it usually comes down to what you are used to and what you are willing to tolerate.

> design

see above.

> ecosystem

this is definitely a huge thing. I personally prefer to stay without any ecosystem because I consider it putting all my eggs in one large basket, but the convenience is undeniable.


That is just as silly as it gets.

Not a JS developer. Run a beast of a machine. Use Ubuntu & Gnome.


What a silly statement. That's like saying a Mac is an overpriced machine for developers that are forced to use Xcode. Different strokes for different folks.


The different folks are called poor people. Nobody is turning down a macbook pro for a dusty thinkpad running linux. Get real.


It's not silly. The target market for GNOME is nobody (except maybe GNOME developers themselves).


Guess I’m nobody, then. I really like Gnome. It works and gets out of my way. I don’t have to spend days configuring it or researching edge cases (like in WMs) and I don’t have to fiddle like crazy to make it look consistent (like on other DEs).

One of the nice things about Linux is, I can choose Gnome and you can choose whatever it is that you like. There’s plenty of room for diversity of opinion.


I personally don't use GNOME either but I believe Linux isn't only used by JS developers.


Gnome is a javascript macOS, they took everything wrong from macOS and made it even more wrong and bad

They needed the help of Canonical to fix the stupid performance issues

Whenever i have to use a GTK client with the stupid giant headers, i want to nuke my linux partition

It is a stupid desktop environment, and they have a stupid gui library that is infecting every distro

With gnome, there is no way linux will become mainstream

The only time linux managed to penetrate the mainstream market was Ubuntu with Unity7

Thanks to red hat, everything got killed

Keep pushing gnome if you want windows to still dominate despite it being a virus


You are already bad at the javascript word.. just look up the gnome-shell code base, it uses js as a scripting language, nothing performant-oriented is implemented in it for God’s sake.

Is luascript the bottleneck of AAA games as well?


Seems like some good points and knowledge combined with an emotional over reaction. I use Gnome for the "Hide Top Bar" extension minimalism. The large window title bars are indeed ugly as can be and I guess must be a reflection of some of the disorganization you refer to.


A little bit of history note here: the macOS design is in most part copied from gnome 2, which i'm pretty sure was not javascript anything.


> With gnome, there is no way linux will become mainstream

You can ship turd and make it mainstream (as Microsoft has demonstrated time and time again). Shipping computers linux pre-installed is what makes any OS/desktop adopted in large scale, not design/quality. Ubuntu shipped pre-installed on Dell and a bunch of other computers with strong push from Canonical.


GNOME can be good for new users joining, expecting a new UI




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