The Trouble with Wayland

Chat about Zorin
22

I think this is crucial point to make, well said. It relates closely to what I mentioned in my previous comment that defaults are extremely powerful.

I don't think we can blame developers from wanting to use Wayland as the default option, precisely because of this. It does work for a lot of people too, after all. But the target audience for a distribution like Zorin OS doesn't necessarily fit in the category of people who really want to dive right into this sort of details.

At one point, I actually felt bad for even asking the question about Flatpaks. I think it was about 6 months ago, for some reason, that a ton of people had issues with them. But... that was it most of the time. And it relates to the above that people don't always have the time to learn about these things, understandably so.

Reliability is key to deliver a good user experience. Choose sane defaults that work well, and leave the door open to curiosity and exploration. And I'm not even talking about computers anymore, this applies to... dare I say, just about anything?

Thanks for the links, that should keep me busy for a while :smiley:

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23

I like that.

I'm no gamer and don't have Nvidia, but if I did, I would see Wayland as default by Zorin (and other distros) as a worrying move, but not as bad as Wayland only.

I wonder if other distro's forums (where Wayland set default) are buzzing with similar Wayland v X stories?

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24

Good video here:

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25

Hello SWARF!

I just watched that video, and I have to say, it was really quite good. It educated me further, in the differences between X11 and Wayland, and it also confirmed my decision as solid, to wait for Zorin OS 18, when Wayland has matured for at least another year.

He sure is right though, about how Linux always falls behind, in bringing out the latest features, like HDR. He said neither X11 nor Wayland supports it yet, and yet HDR has been a thing for what 6-years now?

To be honest, its never a good idea to be an early adopter in technologies, its better to wait for things to mature. And Wayland has been needing a lot of time to mature, due to lack of development prioritization. He even went over which Linux OS's, are currently working on finishing what Wayland started, to make it work for their OS's.

Its a lot like what @Aravisian said in his first post. Wayland is like, ok were here now, we have this thing, but its not finished, and we demand that the OS devs finish it for us, cause its not our responsibility, its yours, cause we said so. So if you can get on that, that would be great......... Oh and, did you file those TPS reports? HAHA

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26

Yes, what was interesting is no screensharing - this is a biggie for Jitsi (and those poor people using Zoom!). So yes. I am currently running Plasma 6 on X11 (neonuser). I noticed when I screwed up X11 after tryinig to run an old game on neonuser, before I got it back by installing proprietary nvidia drivers, I discovered that Wayland could not use my preferred desktop capture/screencast application of vokoscreen-ng without having to install a pipewire plugin (no thanks) plus some other garbage. I will stick with ALSA thank you.

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YKnow, Xorg is still the default for Nvidia and Dual-GPU systems, and a switch back takes like two clicks.

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for what it's worth: with the 550.x drivers, my experience as someone running a GTX 960 is finally actually good, even on Zorin's older GNOME Version, but right now on Plasma 6; I've heard that people running newer cards have it even better, but I can't confirm that.

The only thing that I am getting, and that across (X)Wayland and Xorg, is flickering issues in games. The fix is ironically to run your game with MESA Drivers and Zink, even if you have proprietary nvidia drivers installed, and that works just fine :P
(alternatively, you can downgrade to the 495.x drivers IIRC)

Details regarding MESA + Zink

For those that care, you can add this to any game's launch arguments in your favourite game launcher, they're environment variables that makes any given program run with MESA Drivers, and Zink for OpenGL (Zink is OpenGL-On-Vulkan, comparable to what DXVK does for DirectX)

__GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=mesa GALLIUM_DRIVER=zink MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=zink

so in steam, this would look like:

__GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=mesa GALLIUM_DRIVER=zink MESA_LOADER_DRIVER_OVERRIDE=zink %COMMAND%

If you wanna verify that it worked, run the game with mangohud, it will show you whether it's using Zink.
You don't need to switch to the Open-Source Kernel Driver, you can just add this to your games without a reboot even when running Nvidia's proprietary drivers.

Until May 15th, the next Nvidia Driver Update, I'll just have to cope with these issues :upside_down_face:

it's a bit outdated; As of right now, KDE Plasma 6 has HDR support for fullscreen content.

Xorg is the default on Nvidia GPUs on Zorin, and Zorin 17 is not Wayland-Only; You're good in both departments.

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30

For me most stupid what people using for many years now must believe with Wayland what is more buggy.
People back to Xorg and X11 because problems with screentiling, problems with nvidia gpu and many,many more things.

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31

Yesterday I connected some puzzle about why everyone push to Wayland?
That is simple a business money.
Conclusions are a couple.
I reading KDE Plasma version 6.0 support Wayland.
This HDR is most usable with monitors 2k 4k 8k.
That why EU want closed production projectors with halogen lamps.
Will be only with led implemented with "android spying"?
What you need for monitors with 2k 4k 8k?
Stronger cpu,stronger gpu, better power motherboard.
So my conclusion the About CES in 2024 show us new future with monitors.
What about that all rumour with Wayland.
Well this all expensive monitors will get REC.2020

REC709 is the standard color space used for television and video for many years. It can reproduce a wide range of colors, but not as many as newer color spaces. REC2020 is a newer color space that offers a much wider color gamut than REC709
That why XFCE will be no more support with Zorin brothers. I can be wrong.
So the my conclusions people will be buying better "stuff" for better a colours on a monitor? Guess who uses HDR? Apple and Nvidia.

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Yes a market push for new tech when we are currently consuming 7x of what the Earth has to offer, hence the big push to Mars. Ironically I have downgraded my graphics in order to run PCLinuxOS. I prefer a systemd/elogind system and more than hapoy with Plasma 5.27. Plasma 6 has very limited Wallpapers and the Tiled Menu (like Windows 10) no longer works in Plasma 6, you are just advised to contact the creator to update tiled menu. Again, contributors being railroaded by DE Devs.

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I'm not so sure about this reasoning... I just think that Wayland is backed by organizations with deep pockets and a lot of resources already invested in it, so there's more pressure on them.

Personally I don't see why people are so obsessed with big screens and 2/4/8K video. Yes, of course, I want a better quality picture when I'm watching a movie or whatever, but in reality most of what I watch can be consumed comfortably on a much more modest 360/720/1080p resolution.
It irritates me particularly when I see a full video being loaded only to play some music in the background. One of the reasons I like projects like Invidious, NewPipe or yt-dlp is because I can load only what is required, even the audio track only. It just saves resources on all fronts: bandwidth, electricity, CPU cycles, storage... And all it takes is a couple extra clicks.

I assume you mean systemd-free system?

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Yes, typed in a rush! :blush:

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Are the differences between Wayland and Xorg, visually, very discrepant? From what I understand, Xorg is more fluid? So I will change my display server protocol

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In my experience there isn't much of a difference. But your experience might be very different depending on what you do. If you play games or do work that involves a lot of graphic applications, then you might have a different experience.

On Wayland I've mostly noticed minor glitches like stuttering animations, things like that. Some programs also don't work on Wayland but that's an application-specific issue. At the end of the day, Xorg works for me flawlessly while Wayland does get in the way from time to time.

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37

A reverse situation, I used an Nvidia GPU, with an old proprietary 390xx driver and with Xorg. This disappointed me a little due to the lack of Nvidia/Linux compatibility for this driver version. Even so, I installed some applications. By switching back to Intel + Wayland Integrated GPU. Many applications broke, including my desktop