I firmly believe this will be the year of the Wayland Desktop. Everything is shaping up to finishing off the transition for regular people and further stabilisation of the Wayland desktop space.
This won’t be the year of the Wayland desktop for me unless I can afford to replace my Nvidia card this year. I’ll never buy one again, but I’ve still gotta suffer with the one I have a bit longer.
I’d suggest you check out NVK.
NVK is looking to be a viable replacement for general desktop computing in a few months, so long as you don’t need NVENC and any of the other stuff.
By the time you’re ready to buy a new card, Nvidia might be working well under wayland. They’ve already made significant changes in the past couple of years, like implementing GBM and hardware accelerated XWayland. To my understanding, this MR will also fix some remaining issues in the future. I don’t know how much more work needs to be done after that, but just the fact they are cooperating with the free software ecosystem is a good sign.
Perhaps more importantly, the free nouveau driver can now experimentally reclock nvidia gpus from the 2000 series and newer. With this breakthrough it is possible that nouveau + nvk will be able to compete with the proprietary driver in the near future. If/when we have a well-supported free driver, we will probably have proper wayland support as well.
I’m not really in a hurry to switch to Nvidia. I’ve been quite happy with my AMD cards so far. But it’s definitely a good thing to have the option to buy from any vendor.
Oh yeah, I’m also keeping a eye on that. Every time I see nvidia pop up in my updates, I try logging into Wayland and doing my usual tasks. If it starts working, that’ll just let me extend the life of this card. I’ll probably still strongly consider switching flavors with my next card.
As someone using Wayland on a HiDPI screen it’s not a great experience with legacy apps. You can’t completely rely on application-controlled scaling since not all apps support it and if you switch to system-wide scaling everything looks like crap.
Which apps? I’ve discovered recently Electron apps can enable Wayland support with a command line argument.
Just last time it was free:ac; I had to change to system scaling because it would be unreadable otherwise, and that in turn fucked up Steam that I had managed to configure properly before.
But isn’t that still on par with xorg where you can’t have any fractional scaling?
To be fair I haven’t tried. But I believe even at 2x scaling it looked like shit.
Integer scaling works perfectly, even with legacy apps. Fractional scaling works great with native apps.
*every application using xWayland looks like crap.
Native Wayland apps work great with fractional scaling.
As someone who dabbles in Linux but is ultimately a regular people, what’s the advantage of this?
A unified, bug-free, performant and featureful display stack to ensure people can use things like Variable refresh rate, which, iirc, is an impossibility on X11.
That’s pretty awesome. I imagine this would be a huge advantage with the growth of Linux gaming too
I suppose the Steam Deck experience would be a bit worse if it wasn’t running on Wayland 👍
The games on Steam Deck are already running in Wayland using gamescope IIRC
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Yeah, it could be and it will be
Wait, what? I’m on PopOS, with Nvidia GPU, and my “g-sync” VRR works fine.
PopOS uses GNOME which hopefully uses Wayland
I can confirm that PopOS 22.04 is definitely running on X. wayland is officially coming when Cosmic releases.
That said, I see that Wayland is “available” if I want to manually switch to it - but it is definitely disabled as a default (and current) setting.
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This is what wayland said every year lol.
KDE 6 will have Wayland by default, on track to release Feb 2024.
nobody would say that one year ago far as my memory goes, and it’s reasonable thing to say now. Personally I expected some break-throughs that have happened in 2023 to take much longer.
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I don’t understand this fetish. Every day I read about problems people have with Wayland, while I’ve been using X for the past 15 years without any issues.
Wayland is better at segmenting each app. On X any app could potentially see/record what happen on the entire screen while on Wayland that requires you do manually grant the rights. Similar to how macOS is requesting you to give each app the possibility to record your screen or not.
That’s an improvement. But
risk = impact * probability. Realistically, the probability of installing such an app from repos is virtually non-existent. My point is that Wayland comes with some improvements, but I’ve been seeing comments like the one I replied to for almost 15 years, as if Wayland will revolutionize Linux desktop. It won’t. Probably most users won’t see any difference, except for bugs caused by the migration.The probability of abuse is much higher with closed-source applications though. Almost all popular games are closed-source, and many are riddled with ads and spyware.
No no, this year for real! Because (highly technical reason that doesn’t affect most users).
For real though, how Microsoft plays this year could be interesting considering the lukewarm reception to Win11 and the impending ewaste pile of Win10.
Especially if Win12 is cloud-based, like the rumors say, I could see a potential influx of Linux users
Microsoft plays just like it has always played - with OEM contracts and being the default OS choice. Linux remains niche as long as Microsoft has this, unless they decide to roll out a mainstream distro themselves.
Sure, but I’m getting the feeling there’s a bit of dissent in Windows users, with many vowing never to use Windows 11. If MS keep making user hostile or even just user neutral decisions and Linux starts gaining a reputation of being easy to install, we could see people trying Linux rather than upgrading to Win 11.
Of course, I doubt MS is going to let that happen. They’re either going to walk back some of the egregious privacy violations or do a Google and prevent you from installing alternatives.
More techy people migrating to linux would be good, but that won’t change the fact that most people don’t even know that they can change their os, let alone how to do it.
More techy people joining would mean that we would hopefully get more fixes to issues linux has, as there would be more people bringing attention to them and maybe there would also be more people willing to help fix them.
When those issues are fixed, we might get to step two. Honestly not even sure what that step would be, but maybe it could be that more it-departments switch over to linux, which would get more people familiar with it, which would hopefully make manufacturers more likely to ship computers with linux.
All that is going to take a hell of a lot of time. And honestly seems unlikely to happen in the next 10, heck even 20 years. People are already so used to Microsofts shenanigans that they would have to fuck up majorly to get enough people to switch that it would matter. People are lazy, for good and bad, and as long as Windows at least mostly works fine, they’ll just be stuck using it.
The Linux desktop is forever, one year cannot contain it.
Indeed! I’m not planning to go back to Winblows unless I’m being paid for it.
Maybe we’ll climb to 4% marketshare!
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This is for real the Linux desktop year for me, went through the switch just before the new year. Had to reinstall a couple times but no big deal, and I get to learn as well.
Not sure if out-of-the-box distros are now that user friendly yet or not, but I remember getting Ubuntu running several years ago was frustrating (no sound, bad sound quality etc) and now running EOS was pretty smooth. Pretty sure something like Mint will be user friendly enough for the general population.
It will be a pleasure, like every other year of the Linux Desktop™ for more than 20 years now! :-)
Year of the chromeOS desktop maybe, may faith is low
People still use ChromeOS? I just slap Linux on my chromebooks. Cheap new hardware.
I actually really like Chrome OS myself. For the people around me who are less tech literate, Chrome OS is actually great. It’s quite easy to support. It’s fast, and it’s got a really good ecosystem now thanks to all the integrations.
Which distros do you like best on them?
Budgie installed fine and had no driver issues at all on the HP Chromebook 11 G5.
I just did an OS reinstall for the first time in about 4 years. Moving from Manjaro back to Arch. Happy New Year!
Have you guys fixed your graphics stack to keep up with current High-DPI and HDR displays yet? No? LOL happy new year of the eyesore desktop to you too
What are you even going on about? Proprietary Nvidia graphics drivers updates are released at basically the same time as the windows version, and amd has always worked flawlessly. I have 2 2k 144hz monitors with HDR and both work and look just as good on Linux as on Windows.
The only issues with high dpi monitors is that some apps don’t both detecting the monitor dpi and need to be adjusted manually… but there are very few that that is still an issue for, and windows has the same problem because it’s an app problem not an OS problem
Some apps? “Very few” apps? Buddy, you either aren’t running much software at all or are delusional. Entire Desktop Environments to this day have ass fractional scaling that can’t render things correctly without eating up resources and making them look horribly blurry. Fonts look terrible and have bad kerning even with all anti-aliasing settings correctly set. Even colors are dull across the board by default. Not to mention there will always be random glitches and your graphics card fan will always be on full power unless you turn it off because of shit throttling even with official Nvidia drivers.
Just try using browsers and file managers between Linux distros and Windows on default settings on medium-tier, 5-year-old machines side-by-side, the difference will be starkly visible - from responsiveness and animations to general look quality.
Why come into the Linux community just to start an argument? It’s not 2010 anymore, the brand faction internet tribalism is so bloody tiring these days.
It’s not just to start an argument. I have tried so, so hard to shift to Linux. Nuked perfectly working setups just to take the jump to the “free” side (including Arch, btw).
It all only ended in frustration and disappointment. So everytime people toot “year of the Linux desktop” it only makes me laugh.
Then don’t use it 👍
Stating problems you’ve had as if they are things that will effect everybody makes you looks very silly. I could do the same thing by stating that Windows is garbage because it doesn’t boot with rebar enabled and it bluescreens non stop. It’s also consistently slower to boot, open any software, and less responsive overall. The default file manager is also pathetic, and the software management is frustrating.
It sounds like you had some significant problems with your setup, but the way you’re describing it, it sounds like you didn’t properly troubleshoot it.
GNOME and Plasma both have great fractional scaling support with Wayland. I have never had whatever problems you’re describing with font rendering. On my machine it looks slightly better than windows, and slightly worse than MacOS. I used an Nvidia GPU with Linux for 4 years and never had any performance problems with the official driver.
Please realize your experience isn’t the be-all and end-all that decides whether using Linux can be a good experience.
