this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023

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336

Linux Mint bringing Wayland sessions to Cinnamon (blog.linuxmint.com)

submitted 10 months ago by ZcaT@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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[–] heygooberman@lemmy.today 46 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Some positive news for a lot of Linux Mint users who have been complaining about the lack of Wayland support. However, as the blog post listed, it's only going to be experimental in the next major update of Version 21. Still, it'll be good to experience the change.

Also, very clever on the naming schemes used by the Debian and Mint teams for their stable and unstable releases.

[–] Petter1@lemm.ee 11 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Funny times: while one distro kicks Xorg overboard, another distro finally includes Wayland as experimental.

[–] miss_brainfart@lemmy.ml 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

And then there's XFCE

[–] Petter1@lemm.ee 15 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Which is not a distro nor a display server but, like kde and gnome, a desktop environment. They are actively working on wayland support as can be seen here: https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap

So just for clarification 😇

And I recognized now that this post was about cinnamon desktop environment, which comes with mint distro, and not the distro itself. So the comparison to GNOME would have been more fitting from my site (they’ll drop Xorg support soon, but still let it be installed in post).

So, yea, and then there is XFCE where we have no real clue when Wayland support is completely ready. But it seems like it could work with something called xwayland that seem to kinda emulate Xorg on wayland 🧐

[–] miss_brainfart@lemmy.ml 8 points 10 months ago

Oh yeah, I was just mentioning them in general. The most exciting feature of their last big release was being able to change the clocks' font.

I trust XFCE to bring in new features only when they are 100% sure it'll work perfectly. That DE has been nothing but rocksolid for me, and I greatly appreciate that.

Though to push them a little bit, Xorg certainly has flaws when it comes to security, and since pretty much no one will make the effort of working on these flaws anymore, Wayland should be a higher priority for any distro or DE.

[–] QuandaleDingle@lemmy.world 10 points 10 months ago (1 children)

XD Linux devs are such nerds...I love it. Glad to see that Wayland is becoming the standard.

[–] Lord_ToRA@lemmy.world 17 points 10 months ago (3 children)

I've never heard of XD Linux before. I can't even find it on distrowatch.

[–] Czele@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago

He's just Polish

[–] Atemu@lemmy.ml 3 points 10 months ago

[–] QuandaleDingle@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago

My bad, it's supposed to be an emoji! XD

[+] aniki@lemm.ee 29 points 10 months ago (11 children)

[deleted]

[–] AMDIsOurLord@lemmy.ml 22 points 10 months ago (8 children)

Ooooh how dare you? Dontyaknow Birdie from Phoronix is struggling to run a window manager from 1983 on a ATi Rage II with Wayland???!?!??

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[–] hesusingthespiritbomb@lemmy.world 14 points 10 months ago (7 children)

So, as it's been stated, Wayland is still not universally better than X. There are still bugs in places. Gaming is still an issue. Kwin's implementation still isn't complete enough to be reliably introduced as the default.

This is after years and years of work. Yes, making an entirely new display protocol is hard. However Wayland was introduced as the "eventual X replacement" when I was in high school. I'm 30 now. I've heard some variation of "Wayland is almost ready" since my senior year of college.

At some point it becomes exhausting. At this point when someone says something along the lines of "in a year or two, Wayland will reach a point where X.org will be a thing of the past" my immediate reaction is to call bullshit.

[–] LeFantome@programming.dev 5 points 10 months ago

While I mostly agree with you, adoption and readiness follows a curve and, at some point, that curve begins to steepen. The curve ahead of us is steeper than the curve behind us.

GNOME defaults to Wayland now and is actually talking about removing X11 support. This Cinnamon post says that they will also do that in a couple of years. KDE is talking about doing it next year with Plasma 6.

Once GNOME and KDE have switched, the majority of Linux desktop users will be Wayland by default. Not only will that drive the ecosystem to fix remaining problems more quickly but it will just not matter as much.

In the next 36 months, it is going to go from “when will Wayland be ready” to “who is still using X”?

[–] cybersandwich@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

at some point they'll be right though! Right when shmayland is announced as the successor to Wayland--since Wayland is getting long in the tooth.

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[–] cybersandwich@lemmy.world 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I am excited about Wayland. I'm just waiting on PopOS to run it as the default. I've tried using it but I was getting hard locks when I left my computer idle for a while.

The logs made it seem like it was a Wayland issue so I switched back to x11 for now. It hasn't happened since.

I imagine most people don't have a strong opinion one way or the other. They just want their distro and em to work well.

[–] Flaky@iusearchlinux.fyi 7 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Wayland has worked better than X.org in my experience.

I tried i3 with Compton and Picom - both compositors for X.org - and it had major rendering issues, both on AMD (weird lagging) and NVIDIA (colour issues). Meanwhile I tried Hyprland on a spare PC and it provides a great tiled WM with both form and function. If anything'll get me on a tiled WM, it'll be Hyprland now. I'm also looking forward to Wayfire. We need a spiritual successor to Compiz.

[–] cybersandwich@lemmy.world 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I'm glad to hear it. I am ready to start using it. The architecture is so much more modern and secure. I'm assuming(hoping) Cosmic will be on Wayland when it's launched.

[–] Flaky@iusearchlinux.fyi 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I presume so, but there might be an X.org version because of NVIDIA, who still seems to be problematic with Wayland when using their drivers.

[–] Kramt@lemmy.world 8 points 10 months ago (2 children)

My only issue with it currently is global hot keys. Push-to-talk on discord only seem to work when a xwayland window is in focus.

[–] pixelscript@lemmy.ml 8 points 10 months ago

My sticking point with Discord in particular is that, at the moment, it's allergic to file drag and drop under Wayland. If I want to drag and drop a file attachment, I have to open the file explorer dialog and drag onto that.

This is more of a Discord being sluggish to update problem than a Wayland being unstable problem, but it's still extremely irritating.

[–] AProfessional@lemmy.world 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The API exists, just waiting for things to catch up.

[–] Atemu@lemmy.ml 7 points 10 months ago (2 children)

In the meantime (how many years did it take Discord to update their electron to a not-quite-as-ancient version the last time?), one thing I'd like to see here would be the option to allow listening to global keypresses for certain apps. Yes, that makes security slightly worse I guess but I'd rather have all the other benefits of Wayland working for me while this one isn't working yet.

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[–] Petter1@lemm.ee 6 points 10 months ago (6 children)

What Remote Desktop tool works for you in Wayland? Found none Working well on Wayland (Maybe I did something wrong when I tried VNC and RDP)

[–] w2tpmf@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago

This has been my first struggle with Wayland. Used to be able to enable remote desktop with a single check box in most distros, then VNC into it from a Windows PC no problem. It's a real hassle now and glitchy at best once it's up and going. I gave up and have been using Anydesk to remote access a machine, and even that wasn't simple to get going.

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[–] PseudoSpock@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 10 months ago

I've tried. KDE Plasma on the 4k external screen is giving me big black blocks to the right of windows I move or for the launcher... Like a shadow. Flickering trails of black block shadows if I move windows around. The latest nvidia driver did finally fix the mouse leave trails of black boxes, though. No idea if it works for Gnome, I can't stand Gnome's layout, workflow, and window management.

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[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 29 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Quite glad to see Mint looking forward, good on them.

[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 4 points 10 months ago

I was perfectly confident that the Mint team would get around to Wayland support, when it was good and ready. By the time they get it implemented and set as the default, it'll work great.

[–] Diplomjodler@feddit.de 21 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I like the careful approach. Yes, it's going to take longer. But when it finally arrives, it'll work.

[–] pastermil@sh.itjust.works 6 points 10 months ago

Perfect for their overall philosophy.

[–] possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip 17 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Its about time! Finally, I've been waiting a long time for this.

I wonder what will happen with the mate desktop? I know xfce is getting wayalnd support so mate might be the odd one out

[–] theshatterstone54@feddit.uk 9 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

No, MATE announced Wayland support a while back. Cinnamon was the odd one out until now

[–] Patch@feddit.uk 3 points 10 months ago

No, MATE announced Wayland support a while back.

I know progress on that has been slow, but I look in on it every now and again and work does seem to be steady in porting their core components.

I'm not sure if they're settled on a compositor yet. There was talk (from the Ubuntu MATE devs) about using Mir, but I haven't heard anything about it in ages, and the Mir suggestion was at a time when wlroots was in a much less mature position. With XFCE, Budgie and Raspberry Pi OS all now going the wlroots direction, it's not inconceivable that MATE will go the same way.

[–] M137@lemm.ee 13 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I often reread stuff while imagining I'm someone with no knowledge of the topic, the title of this post is a good example of how hilarious things become.

[–] tetris11@lemmy.ml 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

What's to get? Linux's mint candy made a deal with rapper waylo to put cinnamon into their new flavour of linux

[–] Secret300@sh.itjust.works 3 points 10 months ago

Ah thanks now I get it

[–] snowraven@sh.itjust.works 10 points 10 months ago

Yesss let's go.

I can finally die in peace.

[–] 2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Anyone know where the sources for this are? I can't find many references to Wayland in the main Cinnamon repo, at least using GitHub's search.

I wanted to check if they use wlroots for this or are writing yet another compositor from scratch.

[–] d_k_bo@feddit.de 11 points 10 months ago

Cinnamon uses Muffin, which is a fork of GNOME's Mutter: https://github.com/linuxmint/muffin

[–] sir_reginald@lemmy.world 10 points 10 months ago

yet another compositor from scratch

it's a good thing to have multiple implementations of compositors. that avoids bad practices or making compositor specific programs that wouldn't work with other compositors.

[–] Patch@feddit.uk 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I don't think there are many "compositors from scratch" are there? GNOME and KDE both have their own, Cinnamon uses a GNOME fork, and almost everything else I can think of is wlroots based. The only other one I can think of which isn't is Mir, which has been around almost as long as Wayland has.

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[–] CodingCarpenter@lemm.ee 8 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Can someone explain to me what Wayland is? I don't fully understand I read wikis on it but I'm still new to a lot of this

[–] gornius@lemmy.world 8 points 10 months ago

The way for your desktop to communicate with the hardware.

It used to be X11 - A server-client architecture, which meant your desktop was effectively just a client that told the server what to do. The server was the one doing the drawing

Wayland is just a protocol, defining how programs and desktop should communicate with each other - without a middleman that was X11 server. The desktop does the actual drawing here.

[–] FrankTheHealer@lemmy.world 6 points 10 months ago

Software that displays programs on screen. X11 goes way back and is inefficient. Wayland is the new standard but is seeing regular improvement and updates. I know Fedora have already moved to Wayland. I think Ubuntu have now too. Mint going this direction is good news.

TLDR, software that displays apps on screen. X11 is old and awkward. Wayland is new and better but has been slowly becoming standard.

[–] LeFantome@programming.dev 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Wayland is basically the graphics system. Technically, Wayland is just the protocol and a “compositor” that implements Wayland acts as the display server—the thing that draws and manages the application windows on your screen.

Wayland replaces X11 ( the X Window System ), if you know what that is.

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