To be clear, many of us will have already been using Firefox in Wayland mode by default, if our distro enabled it.
E.g. Fedora Workstation has had Firefox in Wayland mode since Fedora 31
And it’s thanks to the work of those people that it has finally made it upstream, specially Fedora’s Martin Stránský (who has been doing tons of work on Firefox, including making Fedora the first distro to ship Firefox with VA-API enabled by default).
I want everyone to move over to Wayland too.
I use my Linux PC for gaming. Last time I tried Steam/Nvidia with Wayland I could only get one game to launch. So hopefully those 2 will work on making Wayland happen for us.
NVIDIA has been notoriously problematic with Wayland from what I heard. When I bought my current rig I made sure AMD was powering the graphics.
Nvidia has included a couple of Wayland fixes in at least their 3 most recent driver updates, so hopefully they are taking this seriously and are committed to getting issues on their end fixed.
I haven’t used Wayland with my Nvidia rig, but it sounds like they still have a ways to go even with the most recent fixes.
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There was some noise a while back where Nvidia were going to do just that by moving the proprietary bits to the card and open sourcing the kernel bits.
What ever happened to that anyway?
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They did open source the kernel module:
https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules
But it’s just a code dumb. No real history of development.
Sometimes I wonder what the big hold-up was. I remember NVIDIA wanted one type of renderer while the rest working on Wayland went the other way.
Sometimes I wonder what the big hold-up was.
The holdup has always been NVidia and only NVidia. Roughly 10 or so years ago at some Linux conference (either XDC or Linux Plumbers) all stakeholders were invited to discuss the path for Wayland. Everybody except Nvidia decided to show up (Nvidia wanted to wait and see) and given that attending AMD and Intel already developed their drivers within the regular technology stack, they all agreed that GBM was the easiest way forward. Years (!) later Nvidia decided to act as if they were the champions of open standards and dig up EGLStreams and tried to convince everybody to port their years of work over. Eventually Nvidia realized that porting their driver to support GBM was saner but that took forever.
It’s a shame that history has repeated itself with Implicit sync (AMD/Intel) vs Explicit Sync (Nvidia) - except this time Nvidia is still not going to go for Implicit sync (apparently due to the “unified architecture” of their driver, this would mean switching Windows over to implicit sync as well) so they’re trying to get support for explicit syncing added into most of the compositors/XWayland.
That one flaw is what finally got me to pickup an AMD card this month. Due to the fact that Nvidia is the odd one out, the result is that when using apps through XWayland, you end up with random spots of the application displaying previous frames making it unusable for my case. Talk about a night and day difference that has been.
From what I understand, Nvidia may be right in this case and explicit sync seems to be the better approach.
There is a nice article on Collabora’s blog about it and it sounds plausible to me: https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2022/06/09/bridging-the-synchronization-gap-on-linux/
Sure, but unfortunately from a user-perspective side of things what this meant is that for me XWayland (and thus, Wayland as a whole) has been broken for quite a while just because I happened to use an Nvidia card.
I’ve mentioned in a previous comment a few weeks ago, I do commend the couple of devs (that Nvidia has so graciously allowed to work on the OSS side of things) work into wiring up support for explicit synchronization and getting support added in upstream - but its been very saddening from my point-of-view to watch the discussion over at the related issue constantly go from “Well Nvidia just needs to support implicit sync” to “Well we can’t, but what can we do to get things to work with explicit sync since we do support that” and back and forth on that for a year.
All of this of course, while the community is trying to drop X11 as fast as they possibly can now. If it were just a case of not being able to use Wayland for a bit longer, I would’ve still been a bit upset by it, but I could’ve lived with it. Unfortunately, X11 + Nvidia also doesn’t work that great in my case. I have two 1080p displays that only run at 60Hz, and I could hardly get the desktop itself to run at a stable 60FPS without it constantly dropping frames from just having a web browser open which should not be difficult at all for an RTX 2080. I tried every single tweak on both the Nvidia X-settings side of things, various compositor options for KWin, Mutter, etc - nothing helped. The closest I got was using KDE’s X11 session, disabling compositing from KWin and replacing it with picom… but even that wasn’t great, and came with a whole handful of problems too.
Then surprise surprise, I finally get my AMD card (RX 6700XT so pretty much a lateral move), same monitors - X11 runs just fine for the few occasions where I can’t use Wayland, and at the same time Wayland runs beautifully.
I mean, Nvidia has absolutely no interest in Wayland. Any effort they put into supporting it will net them zero benefits. The fact they changed their initial stance and are supporting it at all is actually surprising.
My guess would be that Wayland has finally got to a place where said effort is finally small enough for Nvidia to make with minimal investment – like, one or two developers working on it part time.
Which means OP shouldn’t hold their breath.
Well they do lose some business in the Linux world to their issues and will probably take some time to recover their reputation in the Linux desktop community. I know not everyone hates them and the Linux Desktop community isn’t huge right now, but there is some incentive to show the world you care about your customers
And if Linux Desktop ever gets super popular and easy for everyone but Nvidia, that’s not a necessary risk Nvidia should take. And the catching up later on could be really slow and painful if Nvidia lets themselves get even further behind. GPUs are among the most complicated hardware components to support and develop drivers and other software for.
The Linux systems where Nvidia makes money don’t use Wayland.
As for desktop Linux… I have a feeling it might not be at the top of their priorities right now. To put it delicately.
Agreed. But it seems like since around two years ago Nvidia finally got the memo that Wayland will happen with GBM, and not EGLStreams. So with the recent changelogs fixing many issues I’m optimistic about Wayland on Nvidia.
I agree desktop is not top priority. And I know their money largely comes outside Desktop. In fact, I would be surprised if consumer products came close to their b2b products. Just saying they have more than zero incentive to care about the Linux desktop. And apparently, Nvidia agrees, because they are finally putting more effort in.
I still use and recommend AMD for Linux desktop, and I’m hoping Intel will become competitive in that space so we have more options and competition. I personally don’t like how closed off, uninvolved, and impassive Nvidia has been in general and I don’t trust them in general to collaborate much, as shown by their history.
When I first attempted to give Wayland a try, it just wouldn’t work. Did some troubleshooting but stuck with X11 for the time being.
About a month ago I gave logging into a Wayland session a try on a whim, and it just worked. Everything was fine, only difference was a change is mouse sensitivity.
When you have a HiDPI screen, wayland is a must. X11 just doesn’t have good support for it in my experience.
There’s a lot of other stuff where Wayland improves the experience. Pretty much everything hotplug works to some extend on X, but it’s all stuff that got bolted on later. Hotplugging an input device with a custom keymap? You probably can get it working somewhat reliably by having udev triggers call your xmodmap scripts - or just use a Wayland compositor handling that.
Similar with xrandr - works a lot of the time nowadays, but still a compositor just dealing with that provides a nicer experience.
Plus it stops clients from doing stupid things - changing resolutions, moving windows around or messing up what is focused is also a thing of the past.
I upgraded my graphics card to an AMD one because of this. It’s been two weeks for me using Linux for gaming and I love it.
I have always liked Nvidia for years. When I moved to Linux, the Nvidia drivers have been working great on X11. I am currently playing Baldur’s Gate 3 and I have DLSS 2 turned on and get frame rates at 100. Looks great and awesome game. But I know Wayland is the future and want Nvidia to work well with it and Steam. I will get an AMD if I have to but my card is still great and I am not looking for a new one yet.
I have had the same problem for a long time but I tried it again last friday, on an nvidia card still, games worked after an update or two
I was waiting for Nvidia drivers 545 to try again, but I checked last weekend and Ubuntu still had 535 drivers. I hear Nvidia did a lot of fixes for wayland on the new drivers.
I am on nobara for all that matters
Does this mean I can stop setting MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND?
Or is it just enabling the compilation of Wayland sections (which I thought happened a while ago?)When it reaches stable (or the release you use, if you go the Beta or Nightly route), yeah you’ll be able to do so.
Please educate me
What’s wayland?
According to https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/wayland
Wayland is a display server protocol. It is aimed to become the successor of the X Window System. You can find a comparison between Wayland and Xorg on Wikipedia.
A compositor. Wikipedia
Potentially related, not sure: does anyone know how I can get touchscreen scrolling working in Firefox on a fresh Ubuntu 23.10 install? Currently it’s just selecting text and it’s driving me up the proverbial wall. Googling was unsuccessful.
I remembered having this problem and found the page that helped me: https://superuser.com/questions/1151161/enable-touch-scrolling-in-firefox
Much appreciated Bucky, I’ll give that a shot and will report back.
Edit: worked like a charm!
Not sure if Firefox supports that… For what I remember, PostmarketOS, Ubuntu touch and other mobile linux distros actually patch Firefox for allowing that behaviour
Requires login. Any word on when it’s making in stable?
Updated the link, hopefully it works now. Weirdly enough I was sure the original link I shared didn’t require it
Huzzah!
When will this hit a stable release?
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Some of those arguments are legit but like half is complaining about wayland being fundamentally different to xorg and obviously you cannot use straight xorg apps on it.
“Linux is inferior because it breaks all my powershell scripts and all my windows only apps. Don’t use linux.”
I mean, to play devil’s advocate here - if functionality that you need is all of a sudden swept out from under you then it doesn’t matter from an end user perspective if it’s not the intended design for Wayland - to the user, Wayland is broken in that regard.
A better equivalent would be if an application you used every day for the last 10 years all of a sudden has an update that kills features you used because that’s no longer part of the dev(s) vision. Or headphone jacks on phones. Or whatever that weird thing with Teslas where they disabled a sensor in an OTA update and replaced it with some other solution(?).
Or to modify the example you put, if Windows killed the cmd shell and only left powershell in a Windows Update.
I have an application that I need to use at work which will never fit Wayland’s design, short of me either finding a new job, keeping a Windows install around, or using a really old version of Linux around in a VM when X11 has completely disappeared from all distros (which won’t really work) - there will be nothing that I can do about it on the Wayland side because it’s highly unlikely the devs will update it to be compatible (since it’s a shock that they actually even had Linux support in the first place).
As it is, I currently just pop into an X11 session whenever I’m on working hours, it will suck that I can’t do that with Fedora come next release when they completely drop X from the repos.
This is literally comedy lmao.
Most points are just complaining that tools specifically designed for X don’t work on Wayland. That’s like hanging onto your childhood pants and complaining they don’t fit anymore.
And one of the first points is how Wayland crash will bring down all running applications - yep, just like on X11! But it’s somehow Wayland’s fault.
Besides the fact that on Wayland running apps can survive a compositor crash (I think new KDE will have that feature), which I doubt can be done on X11.
And I had exactly zero crashes of Wayland in my life, on any device.
An X session depends on the main user process. Unless a DE picks the compositor as the main process then no, a compositor crash won’t affect the session. But they don’t do that, for obvious reasons, since the compositor is just a feature among others. They typically have a special program that takes that role, for example
xfce4-session.And one of the first points is how Wayland crash will bring down all running applications - yep, just like on X11! But it’s somehow Wayland’s fault.
They said that a Wayland window manager will bring down all apps, not a Wayland crash. Which, again, is not like it works on X, as I explained above. The window manager on X, like the compositor, is just another feature. If it crashes it just gets replaced and the session continues.
This is not what they are saying.
A crash in the window manager takes down all running applications
This does not happen on Xorg. If the WM crashes, it’s possible to kill it and restart it without exiting running applications.
A WM crash does not bring down all the other applications… but an X11 server crash definitely does!
In wayland they are the same program (a.k.a. the compositor). User applications can be designed to survive a compositor crash, though many are not able yet
But many of those are actively used by people. I use screen recording, screen sharing, global menus, key automation and window automation every day. Even if I wanted to use Wayland I couldn’t. What exactly is it that you want me to do?
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Wayland does not work properly on NVidia hardware
That’s a feature, stop buying hardware from vendors that treat GNU/Linux and *BSD users as second-class citizens and locks them into proprietary drivers.
Wayland is biased toward Linux and breaks BSD
Seems to work just fine on FreeBSD.
Wayland breaks games
Games are developed for X11. And if you run a game on Wayland, performance is subpar due to things like forced vsync. Only recently, some Wayland implementations (like KDE KWin) let you disable that.
Gaming performance is actually better on Wayland.
That’s a feature, stop buying hardware from vendors that treat GNU/Linux and *BSD users as second-class citizens and locks them into proprietary drivers.
Nowadays I buy a new graphics card maybe twice a decade. I’m not changing the card for software.
Also, we’re all using proprietary hardware. Be serious. If you tried to never use anything proprietary you’d never use anything. You’re using like a dozen of them right now.
Also, we’re all using proprietary hardware
Sure, I have proprietary bits on my kernel and my AMD GPU needs proprietary firmware loaded to work, but that’s a hell lot different than the situation NVIDIA shoves users into. It’s one thing to have small proprietary components that don’t bother me or break my workflow, it’s another to have black box drivers that can bork my setup if I dare to update my packages.
Gaming performance is actually better on Wayland.
*on some games…
Did you read your own source? They covered:
Cyberpunk2077 (slight advantage to Wayland on AMD, slight advantage to X.Org on Nvidia)
DiRT Rally 2.0 ( X.Org is clear winner…)
F1 22 (Slight advantage to Wayland on AMD, clear advantage to X.Org on Nvidia)
GTA V (Clear advantage to X.Org Nvidia only… Since AMD was having driver issues with this game)
Hitman 3 (Slight advantage to Wayland on AMD, clear advantage to X.Org on Nvidia)
Metro Last Light Redux (Slight advantage to Wayland on AMD, clear advantage to X.Org on Nvidia)
Shadow of the Tomb Raider (Slight advantage to Wayland on AMD, clear advantage to X.Org on Nvidia)
Total War: Three Kingdoms (Slight advantage to Wayland on AMD, clear advantage to X.Org on Nvidia)
X-Plane 12 (Slight advantage to Wayland on AMD, clear advantage to X.Org on Nvidia)
Quake 2 RTX (slight advantage to Wayland on AMD, slight advantage to X.Org on Nvidia)Where “slight” is within a few frames… let’s call it 0-5 frames… and clear advantage is ~10 frames+…
It’s clear that X.org is better overall. It’s capable of giving the user more options in hardware with less bullshit.
