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Ubuntu 24.10 to Default to Wayland for Nvidia Users

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Re: Ubuntu 24.10 to Default to Wayland for Nvidia Users

#51

Is there a good Wayland post-mortem style write-up detailing what went wrong and why it's taken this long and still isn't solid?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect

Also, the people who originally developed X were brilliant and X was brilliant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

In general:

- Brilliant people in the eighties will still write better code than typical people in the 2020s.

- Ditto for brilliant code. A lot of this is actually pretty random. Sometimes an idiot will architect something great by accident, and vice-versa.

- Most things written in the eighties still used are really, really good in some way (or they would have been replaced many times over).

So most attempts to replace classic technologies end up with dramatically inferior replacements. Classic Unix was really, really good. It survived not because OSes in the sixties and seventies were any good (most weren't), but because if you build many of them, one will turn out great.

I'm not sure there's much more than that.

Re: Ubuntu 24.10 to Default to Wayland for Nvidia Users

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to look it up but if anyone is curious, Sway is a Wayland-based drop in replacement for i3, a tiling window manager. I always wanted to get in to i3, but traditional window managers seem to work better with my brain.

The high learning curve for tiling window managers is definitely worth the effort in the end. I'm a sway user, used to be an i3 user, and will never return to GNOME or KDE Plasma Workspaces.

I'd add that it's way easier if you already have a hotkey mindset. Basically if someone is part of the cult of vim they will probably do just fine with a tiler, otherwise there will be a bit of a struggle.

Re: Ubuntu 24.10 to Default to Wayland for Nvidia Users

#53
post #33
post #15

This week I tried Wayland with Nvidia again on Arch and it was terrible, I experienced lag, bad performance and weird glitches like a jumping cursor. I admit that I only played with this for an hour or so. Maybe I didn't do some of the necessary configs to get a good experience, I just followed the Arch wiki instructions. I hope it's better on Ubuntu.

What DE did you use? I have been using KDE Plasma 6 (Wayland) on arch, with proprietary Nvidia drivers, and, I'm seeing no issues, even games run good.

Not the OP, but Wayland experience was horrible for me too when I moved to KF6/Plasma last week on my manjaro

Zoom in Chrome sent my CPU usage to 100%, screen sharing was annoying and some of the options in that portal selection dialog weren't working.. Video playback in Firefox was freezing.

Switched back to X11 after an hour and things started working normally again.

Re: Ubuntu 24.10 to Default to Wayland for Nvidia Users

#54
post #22

As a long time Xorg user, I am finding it very hard to switch to Wayland. I’ve tried twice over the years and each time it only lasted about a day before I got too frustrated and went back to Xorg. The biggest annoyance by far is all the little scripts I’ve created over the years which use `xdotool` magic for sizing, positioning, and minimizing-and-restoring. My other annoyance is Wayland has no `easystroke` like app…

Depending what you use xdotool for ydotool may work. If it's almost all window management stuff though that's a tougher answer as it more or less really comes down to "find a window manager that lets you do those kinds of customations natively instead putting the same amount of work into migrating into another workaround" which is not necessarily a minor change, particularly when you've already worked out a solution on your current window manager and gotten used to it. Finding one that lets you do those kinds of action usually the easy part, e.g. i3/sway will let you directly script any action you like and you can bit it to any keys you like or externally trigger it via message bus... the hard part is more the "and it also comes with these changes" like those two being focused on tiling use cases while you may (or may not) be looking for something more exactly like some other window manager just with customizable hotkeys.

I don't have much advice on the gesture stuff as I only use "plain" gestures so haven't looked into it. Technically there isn't anything about this that should require X11 but that doesn't mean anyone has actually made a nice convenient tool for it.

Of course, no reason to jump immediately just because it'll be the default in the non-lts versions. Waiting some more may make the above less work to figure out. Two years ago it would have been many times more difficult and two years prior to that a "maybe this git branch will work" adventure for basic things.

Re: Ubuntu 24.10 to Default to Wayland for Nvidia Users

#55
post #19

Wayland breaks the GlobalProtect™ VPN client. Quite annoying.

I'd recommend giving openconnect a try. It was originally meant for Cisco VPNs, but has also supported GlobalProtect for a while now. It integrates with the NetworkManager GUI if you use that.

It worked flawlessly with the GlobalProtect VPN we had to use at my last job. A few folks ended up switching to using openconnect on Mac too. The official client seems to be quite bad on both platforms.

Re: Ubuntu 24.10 to Default to Wayland for Nvidia Users

#56

Can anyone explain how Wayland and X(?) relate to Linux? Like what’s the windows equivalent? I’ve used Ubuntu desktop a few times, I keep liveUSB versions of mint, Suse, and Ubuntu on my ventoy, but I just don’t understand what the deal is with the constant discussion of Wayland and X…

Wayland is somewhat akin to DWM in Windows. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_Window_Manager

Re: Ubuntu 24.10 to Default to Wayland for Nvidia Users

#57

As an end user, is there any immediate usability gains to be had with Wayland today? I understand X is old and crufty, but if I embraced the switch do I gain anything? Or more it sets the stage for future improvements kind of thing?

Most of it's really for developers IMO, but the biggest gains users is better multi-monitor handling, better security potential (so apps can't spy on each other) and the the upcoming support for HDR which will never happen on xorg.

Re: Ubuntu 24.10 to Default to Wayland for Nvidia Users

#58

Is there a good Wayland post-mortem style write-up detailing what went wrong and why it's taken this long and still isn't solid?

I can't imagine someone being able to write one without being flamed on all sides because there are so many guilty parties including the potential users themselves.

I don't think it helped that the core protocols were so minimal though or that the reference implementation was really just that. Both GNOME and KDE went their own way on building their own compositors and I think that was sad :(

Re: Ubuntu 24.10 to Default to Wayland for Nvidia Users

#59

As an end user, is there any immediate usability gains to be had with Wayland today? I understand X is old and crufty, but if I embraced the switch do I gain anything? Or more it sets the stage for future improvements kind of thing?

For me there's two obvious improvements:

- Support for multiple monitors with different scale factors, eg. a high-DPI internal laptop screen and a low-DPI external screen. Dragging windows between each display is seamless with Wayland, which is better than you can even say for Windows.

- Touchpad scrolling in web browsers is now smooth tear-free 60fps+. For some reason, both Firefox and Chromium-based browsers had frame pacing issues with Xorg, especially on low-powered hardware or with full desktop composition. These issues were so well known that testufo.com refuses to give results on Linux browsers. But both browsers work about as well with Wayland as they do in macOS and Windows.

Re: Ubuntu 24.10 to Default to Wayland for Nvidia Users

#60

Can anyone explain how Wayland and X(?) relate to Linux? Like what’s the windows equivalent? I’ve used Ubuntu desktop a few times, I keep liveUSB versions of mint, Suse, and Ubuntu on my ventoy, but I just don’t understand what the deal is with the constant discussion of Wayland and X…

Wayland & X provide the graphics interface. Windows no longer has any such separation, but in the old days Windows ran on top of DOS, Linux still splits the GUI & CLI up.

In practice Linux is even more granular, with multiple options at many more layers of the stack.

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