Why Wayland?

I’m curious why Wayland is the default for both Gnome and KDE. Is there some sort of benefit to using it?

In my experience it doesn’t support a lot, so it is limiting and I’m concerned that X11 support may be dropped at some point, given how Wayland is already the default.

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It seams to be more secure, as Fedora is famous for security they also use secure technologies. The development is going ahead just if people use it and fix what is not working.

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Why Wayland anyway ? | Goings on

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Thanks for that link! :slight_smile:

I like the security aspect but I hope that they work on adding some more features, at least ones I consider basic like screen mirroring.

I’ll see if I can +1 some feature requests and file a bug report or two to help out.

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I think there had been somehow the ‘promise’ that Wayland would be developed towards stability in the course of Fedora 34. Screen mirroring and fractional scaling would be fantastic features that could even convince some Apple users to switch to Linux.

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Wow, looking in to this more it seems Wayland can screen mirror… but I can’t set up the config I want using the settings UI in Gnome or KDE.

I’ve always used xrandr in the past, but that doesn’t work with wayland. I’ll try to find another way.

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I do prefer this article, @fizzlefuze , to explain whats going on with Wayland:

Never worked for me, still not working for me in Fedora 34(multi-monitors). Kinda funny to read that on Fedora 25 the developers hopped “no one would notice the difference between xorg or waylland session”

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Thanks for that article. While I don’t fully agree with the author, there are a lot of valid points and its good to read more about it.

I think what that article and your own comment are really talking about is the disconnect between developers and users. Unfortunately that disconnect is often quite drastic.

What you said about the developers hoping that no one would notice the difference tells me that they think highly of their software but don’t have a realistic understanding of how it is used. I run in to this mindset a lot and it is very frustrating.

On my latest system update, wayland disappeared as an option on my login screen. I don’t know why but it isn’t my priority right now. I’ve had some other problems crop up which I need to deal with first.

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What is now called “GNOME” when you choose a session is Wayland by default and you have another one called “GNOME on Xorg”. I think it’s the case since some releases. So maybe you have Wayland but not noticing it ?
Or, since wayland it not compatible with NVidia drivers, it does not show in case the drivers are installed.

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Hmm, interesting! I only have “GNOME” and “GNOME Classic” for options now, and it looks like “GNOME” is X11 according to this:

$ loginctl show-session 2 -p Type
Type=x11

I don’t have any NVidia hardware, but maybe my old ATI card is triggering the same behaviour of making Wayland unavailable?

I had a few installations without the Wayland-option likewise.
You can disable this manually in the config-files. A couple of guides are available for the “things to do after the installation” of Fedora.

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In case you mean screen sharing on wayland: This is implemented in F34 with pipewire+GNOME shell and works with some applications (e.g. Firefox) already and more will follow. Chromium has experimental support.

Yes, there is a crappy proprietary conferencing app which I need to use for work and which cannot spy on my wayland apps because it X11 only. Only downside is that I need to start programs in X11 mode if I want to do screen share with that crappy app. Luckily I do not need to share content often anyways, so it is nice that I cannot accidentally do it (or have the app maliciously do it…).

Another benefit: My audio works out of the box on gnome with wayland. With x11 audio is completely broken (well, last time I checked a couple weeks ago anyways, maybe some update has fixed it by then).

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Ugh, that app sounds nasty. It’s great that you can work around potential security problems with wayland like this though.

I’m not really sure what X11 has to do with audio, but I hope you can get that sorted out. :slight_smile:

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