In response to Wayland Breaks Your Bad Software
I say that the technical merits are irrelevant because I don’t believe that they’re a major factor any more in most people moving or not moving to Wayland.
With only a slight amount of generalization, none of these people will be moved by Wayland’s technical merits. The energetic people who could be persuaded by technical merits to go through switching desktop environments or in some cases replacing hardware (or accepting limited features) have mostly moved to Wayland already. The people who remain on X are there either because they don’t want to rebuild their desktop environment, they don’t want to do without features and performance they currently have, or their Linux distribution doesn’t think their desktop should switch to Wayland yet.
Same. I’m sure its great, but I’m not motivated to spend my time and energy on it. I remember when PulseAudio first came out, it had growing pains too. I jumped on board early because it solved problems I needed to solve. I was a younger nerd back then, and I don’t have the patience for the cutting edge anymore.
I hear it does indeed work with Nvidia now, so I guess I’ll give it another shot next time I distro-hop.
As someone who constantly checks in on the Nvidia + Wayland combination every time there is a Nvidia driver update, it “works” but only by the loosest definition unfortunately.
Yea, I have a 2080 and try to run a Wayland KDE session every now and then, but so far every time the desktop has ended up frozen after a couple minutes. Reboot back into X it is…
Yeah it does technically work as in it functions, but it’s riddled with bugs and missing features. The biggest one preventing me to switch my desktop over to Wayland is the lack of GAMMA_LUT (which enables night light). The issue for this has been open for over a year and there is still no apparent progress, Nvidia really is a pain on Linux.
Meanwhile my AMD laptop works wonders on Wayland and it’s the best experience I’ve had using a computer by far, the touchpad gestures on GNOME +Wayland make me want to get a trackpad for my desktop when I can switch to Wayland.
Yep, the lack of GAMMA_LUT has been a thorn for me as well. I’ve tried getting around it every now and then by putting on some glasses that I picked up a while ago that just have the blue light tinting built in, but eh.
Another massive problem is some applications, electron based especially, basically “rewind” frames every so often. I’m not even sure how to explain it, but for example you can be typing and a few letters will revert, then come back in… it’s very strange. Other applications also just have their UI stop rendering completely until restarted (KDE’s taskbar being an annoying occurrence when it happens).
I have an older MacBook that I occasionally use with Fedora + KDE and Wayland works much better there, it’s only integrated graphics AFAIK so I keep my expectations tempered, but it’s definitely still smoother than Nvidia + Wayland which is just… sad.
I really would love to test it with an AMD card some day, but I have way too many other things to worry about than picking up a new GPU for the time being.
Oh. Womp womp.
I need to refamiliarize myself with the state of AI libraries without CUDA. Last I checked it was still a problem. I’d love to never buy Nvidia again.
I’m not too well versed in the AI/ML industry, but from what I hear CUDA is still the far prevalent / preferred backend - I don’t believe its impossible so to speak, but it definitely involves having to dig a bit deeper for more alternatives.
I hear its also somewhat common to use an AMD GPU for your actual desktop, but then also have an Nvidia GPU strictly for usage of CUDA but of course that’s a bit more expensive and also still involves keeping up with Nvidia’s hardware.
just check out a compatible desktop environment/window manager. you don’t need to do a full distro change.
if the base is the same (ie. debian, arch, etc) there is no point in changing distros anyways.
Or, maybe, not go out of my way to fit my way of working to someone else’s notice of how I should be doing things? If A works and B doesn’t, unless I put in a lot of effort… Why exactly would I?