[HN Gopher] Linux Mint Working on Wayland Support
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       Linux Mint Working on Wayland Support
        
       Author : AdmiralAsshat
       Score  : 29 points
       Date   : 2023-10-26 20:34 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blog.linuxmint.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blog.linuxmint.com)
        
       | xtracto wrote:
       | Too bad. Hopefully they don't move to Wayland, as it is still
       | immature. Just the other day a colleague had the black screen
       | sharing issue https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-fix-black-
       | screen-on...
       | 
       | Also the issue of remote desktop
       | https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/wrq4zh/why_remote_de...
       | 
       | I'd rather wait another 5 to 10 years for wayland to catchup with
       | X functionality.
        
         | deepsun wrote:
         | Discussed previously at:
         | 
         | "I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit (drewdevault.com)"
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26001179
        
           | hedora wrote:
           | The top comment there from AnIdiotOnTheNet clearly explains
           | why the complaints aren't "horseshit".
           | 
           | As far as I can tell, no progress has been made in the last
           | two years (since the problem is organizational, not
           | technical, and the wayland architecture would have to
           | drastically change to meet user expectations).
        
         | jcastro wrote:
         | The article you linked literally shows you that the problem is
         | a setting in the browser that needs to be fixed.
        
         | gizmo686 wrote:
         | > We don't expect it to replace Xorg as default any time soon
        
         | tristan957 wrote:
         | Then you would have to wait forever because it is a goal of
         | Wayland not to implement all of X.
        
           | hedora wrote:
           | I think you just made their point for them.
        
           | josephcsible wrote:
           | Between that and distros and DE's saying they're going to
           | remove X support, it really feels like a giant middle finger
           | to anyone relying on said features.
        
             | fturst wrote:
             | what, inform me please, which distros and DEs say that? I
             | couldnt find it by search.
        
               | pengaru wrote:
               | prolly referring to
               | https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fedora-40-Eyes-
               | No-X11-Session
        
               | johnny22 wrote:
               | the new cosmic DE doesnt support x11 at all. Fedora KDE
               | SIG plans to not offer the x11 session in the session
               | chooser.
        
         | babypuncher wrote:
         | Wayland will not and should not try to replicate all X
         | functionality. Apps should be updated to work with the way
         | Wayland does things.
         | 
         | This is absolutely necessary to reap some of the benefits
         | provided by Wayland. There is no way around it. A big one is
         | Wayland's security model, of which X has none, and adding such
         | access controls to X would end up breaking the same apps.
         | 
         | The longer everyone sticks to X, the further it will fall
         | behind Windows and macOS.
        
         | II2II wrote:
         | It may not be the 5 to 10 years you want, but they did mention
         | support being available in the 2026 timeframe.
         | 
         | As for catching up with X functionality, times change and
         | software changes with it. Not everyone will appreciate that
         | change and it is doubtful that anyone will be entirely
         | satisfied (though some will see the benefits as outweighing
         | what they lose).
         | 
         | Not that that really matters. It looks like Wayland will be the
         | future of graphics on Linux. It is simply a matter of when
         | people choose to adopt it.
        
           | erik_seaberg wrote:
           | With nobody working on remote GPU-accelerated rendering apart
           | from Javascript and Wasm, it looks like the browser will be
           | the future of graphics.
        
       | haunter wrote:
       | >Hypnotix, the TV viewer application
       | 
       | How is that app legal btw? Or more like how is it okay what Mint
       | does? The majority of the streams are pirated. I know the app
       | itself is open source and it's a frontend for Free TV but it's
       | still sharing copyrighted content. https://github.com/Free-
       | TV/IPTV/tree/master/playlists
       | 
       | It would be a different story if it comes "empty" like
       | Transmission but it isn't.
        
         | esrauch wrote:
         | FreeTV seems to claim to only have freely available legal
         | content, is it actually just a false claim and it has pirated
         | content?
        
         | HissingMachine wrote:
         | Well, at least all the channels from my country are either
         | public or advertisement funded channels that you can see for
         | free, can you give some examples of pirated content?
        
       | anotherhue wrote:
       | Generally the worst offenders for Wayland support are closed
       | source / abandoned apps that you should consider replacing. Zoom
       | crashes if I try and screenshare, but google meet (in a chrome-
       | alike) works fine. I don't want zoom anyway.
        
         | michaelmrose wrote:
         | People you need to communicate with especially for work are
         | unlikely to be impressed by your reason why everyone should use
         | a different technology.
        
         | linuxandrew wrote:
         | Have you tried using Zoom in-browser? That worked last time I
         | tried, and you avoid downloading a proprietary non-system
         | package.
        
           | petepete wrote:
           | This is what I need to do to to be able to share my screen in
           | Slack or Teams.
        
         | abrouwers wrote:
         | I haven't had luck with chrom(ium,e) using scaling, or vaapi,
         | natively on Wayland. Firefox is a far better experience for me.
        
           | johnny22 wrote:
           | they'll get that settled properly at some point, since
           | chromeos is switching to a wayland compositor.
        
       | mariusmg wrote:
       | Regarding Wayland support, the gap between KDE/Gnome and these
       | smaller DEs (XFCE, Cinnamon, Mate , LXDE etc etc) is getting
       | wider and wider...
        
         | smoldesu wrote:
         | Yep! Though to be fair, it's mostly because KDE and GNOME are
         | starting to merge really great Wayland support patches.
         | 
         | I'm personally not much of a fan of the way Wayland was rolled
         | out or designed, but I _do_ daily-drive it without issue on
         | Plasma. It 's far-and-away the better option for gesture-
         | oriented workflows and gaming, and it feels more deeply
         | integrated with the DE (for better and worse). It's the new
         | hotness that all the gimmeck-obsessed Windows and Mac converts
         | are going to want. You, me and the UNIX graybeard in the
         | basement might get our feathers ruffled, but Bob and Alice get
         | touchpad gestures.
        
           | jraph wrote:
           | > get touchpad gestures
           | 
           | Which ones?
           | 
           | Is there something beyond pinch zooming (which works on both)
           | that works on Wayland and not on X?
        
             | smoldesu wrote:
             | All the Plasma desktop gestures are broken on x11, and if
             | memory serves it's the same situation on GNOME. I spent a
             | long time on x11 trying to get it to work (via Touchegg et.
             | al) but eventually left for Wayland where it worked out-of-
             | box.
             | 
             | And to be fair, _some_ gestures do work on x11. 2-finger
             | trackpad scrolling isn 't precise but it works, and
             | Chromium/Firefox both seem to work with libinput-gestures.
             | The situation is completely different for native
             | applications and desktops though (unfortunately). On
             | Wayland, gestures work like they do on MacOS and Windows.
             | On x11 they work like they did in Compiz.
        
         | MuffinFlavored wrote:
         | Hot take (and sorry ahead of time): A bunch of open source
         | developers drawing a line in the sand on which project they
         | like to contribute to in a fragmented fashion instead of
         | working together isn't great for the "end user".
         | 
         | Not that people should be forced to spend their time doing
         | anything they don't want to do when it comes to free, volunteer
         | open-source contributions. Just an interesting callout.
         | 
         | It's pretty clear _why_ the gap is getting wider: too few
         | people working on too many ways to skin the same cat.
        
           | mcpackieh wrote:
           | The gap is getting wider for a very specific reason: Wayland.
           | Unlike X.org, it doesn't have a single reference
           | implementation that virtually everybody is using. Furthermore
           | it is under-specified so DEs are forced to implement their
           | own proprietary solutions to common problems until Wayland
           | comes along with a third "official" way of doing it several
           | years layer. These two factors result in deteriorating
           | compatibility between the different desktop environments.
           | 
           | It used to be that if you used Gnome but really liked some
           | KDE applications or utilities, you could just use those KDE
           | applications under Gnome and it was fine. People can and did
           | mix and match whichever parts of the different desktop
           | systems they liked the most. I remember when I first figured
           | out that it worked this way as a teenager, it was absolutely
           | magical. But now, thanks to those two properties of Wayland
           | this interoperability is being ruined. Application developers
           | are burdened to support one, the other, or write even more
           | code to support both. In their pursuit of simplicity, Wayland
           | designers burdened application designers with this
           | complexity.
        
             | MuffinFlavored wrote:
             | Why do there have to be so many different:
             | 
             | C libraries
             | 
             | shells
             | 
             | window managers / desktop environments
             | 
             | package managers
             | 
             | Think of the global man hours wasted achieving basically
             | the same thing slightly different ways
        
         | TacticalCoder wrote:
         | I honestly don't understand your comment at all. I'm not super
         | familiar with Wayland.
         | 
         | Is it possible for a "smaller DE" or a lightweight WM to
         | properly support Wayland or is Wayland support only possible
         | with layers upon layers of bloat?
         | 
         | I'm asking because I'm still on X but I see that either I'll
         | have to quit using Linux or I'll have to eventually move to
         | Wayland. And I like my WM/DE ultra lean and ultra small.
         | 
         | If Wayland implies KDE or Gnome, I'm leaving Linux the day I
         | cannot use X anymore...
        
           | johnny22 wrote:
           | there are many wayland compositors like sway, hyprland, labwc
           | and others i'm not aware of. sway is just i3, but done as a
           | wayland compositor. i would expect you'll see more popular
           | ones in the future. XFCE is goign that way as well, but
           | slowly as expected.
        
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       (page generated 2023-10-26 23:02 UTC)