A few months ago I wanted to give Wayland a try but then I realized that I’d already been running Wayland without knowing for a couple of years. On Debian unstable it’s been very stable. I haven’t noticed any issues at all.
I really don’t think that Wayland sounds ready for primetime yet. IIRC, it still requires clients to decorate their own windows, which has terrible implications for tiling WMs.
That may be true, but people who use tiling WMs are perfectly able to install X11. I have (mostly) been running on Wayland for two years now. At the beginning, GNOME support was still a bit flaky, especially when plugging monitors, etc. But since then, GNOME with Wayland has been rock solid. At least, if you are running GNOME, it is a good moment to switch.
Will it be completely bug-free? Probably not. But at some point you have to decide that it is good enough to ship to find and iron out the last few problems. It’s not as if X11 does not have a lot of issues.
My only big worry in all of this are NVIDIA users. Despite the awesome work of the Nouveau developers, it is not stable on every GPU (thanks to NVIDIA unwillingness to open specs). NVIDIA’s proprietary drivers have a troubled story when it comes to Wayland support.
I have been using wayland on Fedora. Works great on my old AMD graphics card.
Glad to see debian moving forward with wayland
Once thing I am not clear on (probably the answer is ’no).
But can Wayland improve the situation with speed/latency for remote sessions over ssh (Xorg is not workable even on the home wireless network) ?
Plain X11 is chatty and as such can be slow over less-than-perfect network links. Fortunately there is a solution: X2go [1], based on a modified version of NoMachine’s NX. I’ve used NX (the protocol, not the proprietary bits) and later X2go for many years over everything from modem links to wired ethernet, it works as advertised.
Wayland is dependent on something like VNC for remote access. This works as well but it is not as seamless as NX/X2go. VNC does have the advantage that a single viewer can be used to access anything from Android to Windows where X2go is limited to X11.
Thank you, I will try that out.
I use xrdp on FreeBSD and Linux Fedora, I guess I did not realize that with wayland, it is actually not using X server, but instead using wayland.
On OpenBSD there is only x11vnc, and I could not yet make it go fast enough, to be usable for GUIs (like intelliJ).
A few months ago I wanted to give Wayland a try but then I realized that I’d already been running Wayland without knowing for a couple of years. On Debian unstable it’s been very stable. I haven’t noticed any issues at all.
I really don’t think that Wayland sounds ready for primetime yet. IIRC, it still requires clients to decorate their own windows, which has terrible implications for tiling WMs.
That may be true, but people who use tiling WMs are perfectly able to install X11. I have (mostly) been running on Wayland for two years now. At the beginning, GNOME support was still a bit flaky, especially when plugging monitors, etc. But since then, GNOME with Wayland has been rock solid. At least, if you are running GNOME, it is a good moment to switch.
Will it be completely bug-free? Probably not. But at some point you have to decide that it is good enough to ship to find and iron out the last few problems. It’s not as if X11 does not have a lot of issues.
My only big worry in all of this are NVIDIA users. Despite the awesome work of the Nouveau developers, it is not stable on every GPU (thanks to NVIDIA unwillingness to open specs). NVIDIA’s proprietary drivers have a troubled story when it comes to Wayland support.
I have been using wayland on Fedora. Works great on my old AMD graphics card. Glad to see debian moving forward with wayland
Once thing I am not clear on (probably the answer is ’no). But can Wayland improve the situation with speed/latency for remote sessions over ssh (Xorg is not workable even on the home wireless network) ?
Wayland removes support entirely.
Correct. You have to use VNC now. Some people claim it works better.
that’s not exactly true. Folks are implementing remote desktop via pipewire and xdg-desktop-portal
Plain X11 is chatty and as such can be slow over less-than-perfect network links. Fortunately there is a solution: X2go [1], based on a modified version of NoMachine’s NX. I’ve used NX (the protocol, not the proprietary bits) and later X2go for many years over everything from modem links to wired ethernet, it works as advertised.
Wayland is dependent on something like VNC for remote access. This works as well but it is not as seamless as NX/X2go. VNC does have the advantage that a single viewer can be used to access anything from Android to Windows where X2go is limited to X11.
[1] https://wiki.x2go.org/
Thank you, I will try that out. I use xrdp on FreeBSD and Linux Fedora, I guess I did not realize that with wayland, it is actually not using X server, but instead using wayland. On OpenBSD there is only x11vnc, and I could not yet make it go fast enough, to be usable for GUIs (like intelliJ).