Let’s talk about #Linux on the desktop, #Gnome and the state of #Wayland in 2024.
If you avoid Nvidia, it have been ready for many years. And to be honset, not sure X11 was really stable with Nvidia either. My main issue with Wayland, is that X doesn’t have multi dpi support… and for that I really cannot blame Wayland. Also, Skype doesn’t have screensharing, well, they actually had for a while, but then removed it… still, hard to blame on Wayland.
But as a general rule, if you have Nvidia, then you are not allowed to complain about anything… that was your choice, and with Nvidia under Linux, all bets are off. I thought that was clear a long time a go, especially after Linus not so subtle outburst.
Gnome has been pretty great on Wayland for a while.
Personally I’ve been using it since 2017, and besides a stint with a 1080 Ti that was constantly causing issues, it’s been pretty good besides screen sharing in some programs. Speaking of…
I just wish Discord would fix their shitty app or people would abandon that shitty app. Unfortunately neither looks likely.
Right, actually you can use Discord natively on Wayland just passing the flags mentioned in the post. The only issue I have found with the official Discord client is that it doesn’t support streaming audio alongside to streaming your screen, but vesktop does the trick for that.
How is the state of tilig WMs? Last time I ried Wayland, mixing and matching WMs and status bars was really flakey, with font scaling and rendering issues. There are certain things I will no longer compromise on in a WM, and if I wanted to be forced to use a specific desktop to get a working graphical environment (functioning scaling, for instance), I’d use a Mac.
Herbstluftwm hasn’t been ported - is there a similar configuration file-less tiling WM? On X, I could also settle for bspwm; both WMs are completely configurable on the command line. How about bars? I’m using polybar right now, but there are a dozen to choose from under X, any of which I can use with whichever WM (and have it function properly).
Again, mere months ago, trying to get font scaling to work properly with the same scaling in all applications was messed up. Under X, if I set a font and size in any program (that supports font selection), I get the same apparent font size - because programs get fonts from X and the same code does all font rendering which makes everything consistent. How is that on Wayland, now, because that was a major deal-breaker last a couple of months ago.
Using wayfire (disabling the fancy resources eating plugins) + waybar + plus a bunch wlr utilities (some from sway).
I’m using integrated intel gpus. There’s a laptop with both the integrated intel gpu and a nvidia discrete one, but I had to configure the bios to only use the inegrated one, both the binary nvidia drivers, and the open source nvidia drivers fail to set
fbdev=1(the external hdmi monitor is the one associated to the nvidia gpu, and it gets a blank screen), which is required for enabling KMS, which is required for wayland, so no luck. Nouveau actually works, but it’s not stable enough, after some time of use the monitor turn off and there’s no way to turn it back on, and it feels slow or lagging compared to the intel gpu, although it should be the opposite. So I gave up on nvidia on that laptop, and any other box only has the integrated intel gpu anyways. I’ve read of successful stories with nvidia, both with the binary and the open drivers, but I think it’s not a generic thing that all nvidia gpus will work well on wayland with nvidia drivers. The noveau drivers are the only ones working for some gpus, but not stable enough. So I stick with the recommendation to stay away from nvidia if using wayland…I guess although WM still applies, on the wayland jargon they’re called compositors, and the wayland compositors are not as light as the Xorg WMs, since there’s no Xorg server, and part of the responsibility of the server goes to the compositors on wayland…
There’s labwc, which is the compositor I would have chosen, but the developer decided to stick with xml configuration equivalent to the the openbox one, and also with the openbox themes/styles, which I never liked. On Xorg I used fluxbox + tint2 + …, and I tried openbox, but totally disliked it compared to fluxbox… But other than config and theming, I like its idea of being a light compositor.
Actually by disabling the plugins I am on wayfire, it’s pretty much labwc but with new decent config (I really like its config BTW), and using the gui toolkit theming, so no specific wayfire theming at all, which is nice, as opposed to the labwc own theming… Still, labwc is also an option for some.
Wayfire and labwc are not tiling compositors as most of all others, :)
