Unfortunately, if you want Wayland — and I do, as it really has made all my vsync/stuttering/tearing issues go away; Fedora is now as smooth as my mac/windows — your choices are limited. Sway is starting to look good but otherwise there’s not much at the minimal end of the spectrum.
If I have to choose between GNOME and KDE, I pick GNOME for the same reasons the author of this piece does. I was hoping the tips would come down to more than “uninstall tracker, evolution daemons et al. and hope for the best”. I’ve done that before on Fedora and ended up wrangling package dependancies in yum. I really wish GNOME/Fedora would take this sort of article to heart and offer a “minimal GNOME” option which is effectively just gnome-shell.
Why is Wayland so poorly implemented? Is it because few distributions have it as default or is it because it’s harder? I see many tilling wm written in 50 different languages and it seems that sway is getting slowly it’s way to a usable wm, but it seems like a slow adoption from my point of view.
It is a slow adoption, I’m not particularly sure why. Most (all?) of the tiling wms for X leverage Xlib or XCB, right? Perhaps it’s just needed some time for a similarly mature compositor lib to appear for Wayland (indeed, Sway is replacing their initial use of wlc with wlroots which may end up being that).
As for why Wayland in general isn’t more prevalent, I’d guess compatibility. X is just so well established that replacing it is inherently a lot of work in the “last mile”. Fedora/GNOME/Wayland works great for me with my in-kernel open AMD driver. Maybe it’s not as good for Intel iGPUs? Maybe it’s not so good on Nvidia systems? Maybe it doesn’t work at all on arm SoC things? I have no idea, but I can easily understand distros holding off on making it default.
Just a data point: I’ve got a new thinkpad recently, installed linux on it, together with gnome3. Only yesterday I’ve discovered it was running on wayland the whole time, with no apparent problems what-so-ever. And that includes working with a dock with two further displays attached, and steam games. Even the touch panel on the screen works without any further config.
Unfortunately, if you want Wayland — and I do, as it really has made all my vsync/stuttering/tearing issues go away; Fedora is now as smooth as my mac/windows
And effortless support for multiple displays with different DPIs, plus better isolation of applications. I completely agree, when I switched to Wayland on Fedora 25 or 26, it was the first time I felt in a long time that the Linux desktop is on par again with macOS and Windows (minus some gnome-shell bugs that seem to have been mostly fixed now).
At some point, I might switch to Sway. But with Sway 0.15, X.org applications are still scaled up and blurry on a HiDPI screen (whereas they work fine in GNOME). I’ll give it another go once Sway 1.0 is out.
Most compositors use libinput to read from input devices, and libinput:
reads from evdev devices (via libevdev but that’s a really thin lib). We have evdev support in many drivers, including Synaptics (with TrackPoint support).
For GPU acceleration, compositors need a modern DRM/KMS/GBM stack with PRIME and whatnot. We have that.
Do NVidia’s drivers use the same stack, or are they incompatible with the Wayland port? I’d give Wayland a try, but it seems hard to find a starting point… I’m running CURRENT with custom Poudriere-built packages, so patches or non-standard options aren’t a problem, I just can’t find any info on how to start.
No, proprietary nvidia drivers are not compatible. Nvidia still does not want to support GBM, so even on Linux, support is limited (you can only use compositors that implemented EGLStreams, like… sway 0.x I think?) Plus, I’m not sure about the mode setting situation (nvidia started using actual proper KMS on Linux recently I think?? But did they do it on FreeBSD?)
It should be easy to import Nouveau to drm-next though, someone just has to do it :)
Also, you can get it to work without hardware acceleration (there is an scfb patch for Weston), but I think software rendering is unacceptable.
I tried to give Wayland a try twice, on both my media PC and a new Laptop. It’s still really not there yet. I use i3 on X11 and Sway is really buggy, lacks a lot of backwards compatibility stubs (notification tray icons are a big one) and just doesn’t quite match i3 yet. Weston, the reference window manager, had a lot of similar problems when using it with my media PC.
I want to move on to Wayland, and I might give that other i3 drop-in for Wayland a try in the future, but right now it’s still not there yet.
Wait, are you telling me fractional scaling actually works in Gnome on Fedora?!
(It doesn’t on Ubuntu, and it’s been keeping me in a state of stunned amazement that they’ve been shipping a desktop unusable on mainstream hardware for two consecutive releases now, and none of the reviewers have given it as much as a sideline mention. I guess I’m the only person in the world trying to run Ubuntu on an exceedingly rare Thinkpad X1 Carbon.)
Missed the most important customisation of them all: disabling that drafted hot corner!
I don’t really get the user extension hate however. Sure we all have to bash JavaScript, but the fact that gnome shell is scriptable and extensible would be a draw to most “power users” imo. And I’m certain disabling user extensions does nothing more than not searching the extension directory in startup and certainly does not disable any core parts of the shell.
Wow, that’s a lot of bloat, and a great demonstration of why I don’t use Gnome (or KDE).
I’m much happier with StumpWM, which just does its job and doesn’t try to integrate with everything.
Unfortunately, if you want Wayland — and I do, as it really has made all my vsync/stuttering/tearing issues go away; Fedora is now as smooth as my mac/windows — your choices are limited. Sway is starting to look good but otherwise there’s not much at the minimal end of the spectrum.
If I have to choose between GNOME and KDE, I pick GNOME for the same reasons the author of this piece does. I was hoping the tips would come down to more than “uninstall tracker, evolution daemons et al. and hope for the best”. I’ve done that before on Fedora and ended up wrangling package dependancies in yum. I really wish GNOME/Fedora would take this sort of article to heart and offer a “minimal GNOME” option which is effectively just gnome-shell.
Why is Wayland so poorly implemented? Is it because few distributions have it as default or is it because it’s harder? I see many tilling wm written in 50 different languages and it seems that sway is getting slowly it’s way to a usable wm, but it seems like a slow adoption from my point of view.
It is a slow adoption, I’m not particularly sure why. Most (all?) of the tiling wms for X leverage Xlib or XCB, right? Perhaps it’s just needed some time for a similarly mature compositor lib to appear for Wayland (indeed, Sway is replacing their initial use of wlc with wlroots which may end up being that).
As for why Wayland in general isn’t more prevalent, I’d guess compatibility. X is just so well established that replacing it is inherently a lot of work in the “last mile”. Fedora/GNOME/Wayland works great for me with my in-kernel open AMD driver. Maybe it’s not as good for Intel iGPUs? Maybe it’s not so good on Nvidia systems? Maybe it doesn’t work at all on arm SoC things? I have no idea, but I can easily understand distros holding off on making it default.
Exactly, the proprietary driver does not support GBM, they’ve been pushing their own thing (EGLStreams) that compositors don’t want.
Everything works great with any open drivers, including VC4 for the RPi.
Just a data point: I’ve got a new thinkpad recently, installed linux on it, together with gnome3. Only yesterday I’ve discovered it was running on wayland the whole time, with no apparent problems what-so-ever. And that includes working with a dock with two further displays attached, and steam games. Even the touch panel on the screen works without any further config.
Unfortunately, if you want Wayland — and I do, as it really has made all my vsync/stuttering/tearing issues go away; Fedora is now as smooth as my mac/windows
And effortless support for multiple displays with different DPIs, plus better isolation of applications. I completely agree, when I switched to Wayland on Fedora 25 or 26, it was the first time I felt in a long time that the Linux desktop is on par again with macOS and Windows (minus some gnome-shell bugs that seem to have been mostly fixed now).
At some point, I might switch to Sway. But with Sway 0.15, X.org applications are still scaled up and blurry on a HiDPI screen (whereas they work fine in GNOME). I’ll give it another go once Sway 1.0 is out.
Weston! :)
My fork even has fractional scaling (Mac/GNOME style downscaling) and FreeBSD support.
There’s a Wayland for FreeBSD? I thought Wayland had a lot of Linux specific stuff in it?
Sure, there is some, but who said you can’t reimplement that stuff?
libwayland, the reference implementation of client and server libraries, usesepoll. We have an epoll implementation on top of kqueue.libinputto read from input devices, andlibinput:evdevdevices (vialibevdevbut that’s a really thin lib). We have evdev support in many drivers, including Synaptics (with TrackPoint support).libudevfor device lookup and hotplug. We have a partial libudev implementation on top of devd.weston-launch) is pretty trivial to modify to support FreeBSD, that’s how Weston and Sway work right nowweston-launchclone: loginwkwin_waylandto work on this??logindfor BSD, but they didn’t go anywhere…Do NVidia’s drivers use the same stack, or are they incompatible with the Wayland port? I’d give Wayland a try, but it seems hard to find a starting point… I’m running CURRENT with custom Poudriere-built packages, so patches or non-standard options aren’t a problem, I just can’t find any info on how to start.
No, proprietary nvidia drivers are not compatible. Nvidia still does not want to support GBM, so even on Linux, support is limited (you can only use compositors that implemented EGLStreams, like… sway 0.x I think?) Plus, I’m not sure about the mode setting situation (nvidia started using actual proper KMS on Linux recently I think?? But did they do it on FreeBSD?)
It should be easy to import Nouveau to drm-next though, someone just has to do it :)
Also, you can get it to work without hardware acceleration (there is an scfb patch for Weston), but I think software rendering is unacceptable.
I tried to give Wayland a try twice, on both my media PC and a new Laptop. It’s still really not there yet. I use i3 on X11 and Sway is really buggy, lacks a lot of backwards compatibility stubs (notification tray icons are a big one) and just doesn’t quite match i3 yet. Weston, the reference window manager, had a lot of similar problems when using it with my media PC.
I want to move on to Wayland, and I might give that other i3 drop-in for Wayland a try in the future, but right now it’s still not there yet.
Wait, are you telling me fractional scaling actually works in Gnome on Fedora?!
(It doesn’t on Ubuntu, and it’s been keeping me in a state of stunned amazement that they’ve been shipping a desktop unusable on mainstream hardware for two consecutive releases now, and none of the reviewers have given it as much as a sideline mention. I guess I’m the only person in the world trying to run Ubuntu on an exceedingly rare Thinkpad X1 Carbon.)
It doesn’t really. It just renders everything at one size larger than you need, and then uses in-GPU scaling.
The same approach that iOS and macOS took, and the complete opposite of the Windows, Qt, Android, and HTML 5 approach.
It’s horses for courses; both approaches have their merits.
Well, as long as it works, I’m fine :-)
I don’t know how Unity does it (which is what I’m using now), but I suspect it’s essentially the same, and it does look crisp at any scale factor.
Missed the most important customisation of them all: disabling that drafted hot corner!
I don’t really get the user extension hate however. Sure we all have to bash JavaScript, but the fact that gnome shell is scriptable and extensible would be a draw to most “power users” imo. And I’m certain disabling user extensions does nothing more than not searching the extension directory in startup and certainly does not disable any core parts of the shell.
I just did a fresh install of Ubuntu 18.04. I picked the new “minimal” option. It appears that most of the packages he removes are already missing.
The funny thing about this post is that this is the most positive take I’ve seen on Gnome 3 in a while.