Trying wayland by default again

I’m on board for Wayland by default @seb128. I definitely think the 21.04 release is the best time to start this push forward. Especially with NVIDIA announcing a few weeks ago that better Wayland support is coming. There will definitely be papercuts along the way as people have mentioned in the comments above, but if eveyone in the community works together we can squash these bugs in time for the LTS. It won’t be easy but I beleive it’s possible because the Ubuntu Community is one of the best Linux community’s around. :slightly_smiling_face:

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These are no bugs, this is a flawed specification. Forcing it on users and industries is simply wrong.

I noticed a few mentions of crashes and other bugs in this thread. Everyone, please be sure to report all of those in new bug reports via the ubuntu-bug command, or if that doesn’t work then file a bug manually.

Any mention of a bug should have an associated bug number so we can investigate it properly and each keeps its own discussion history.

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This is great news.
Wayland is the future.

@KristijanZic No one is forcing you. Being the default session doesn’t mean that you must use it. It’s like forcing a new wallpaper. And we’re talking a non-LTS release. Industrial users mostly live on LTS. Issues with poor support from apps like DaVinci or OBS is a chicken-egg problem. And you can solve it only by breaking the loop: more Wayland users means more interest in adapting apps to it, faster and better feedback. Color management will be implemented too and by modern standards.

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It means that X is being phased out before Wayland is ready and it will be established as a half backed solution that will be impossible to patch and fix in the future. It’s a disaster in the making but who cares, right.

That may be true but it means that thousands of users will experience problems and who knows when will all apps adapt. Maybe in 10 years. Many of them will just drop linux support because what’s the point if you’re a graphic, vfx, film or a photo app and there is no proper color management available in the OS.

If you have followed any debate on this you’d know this is a laughable statement. They don’t care about CM, they didn’t even want to have it in Wayland. None of them have any experience in CM. They don’t listen to the experts in CM on Linux. It’s a terrible situation.

It’s dead already without any release for several years. RH is trying to extract XWayland into a separate project to be able to update/patch it without touching the X itself.

Thousands of users are on 16.04, 18.04 and maybe installing 20.04. Possible future users of 22.04 will just click the cog to use X.

I might even extrapolate that most PC users don’t even care about Linux :smiley:

Right now the priority is to make Wayland work without stuttering, black borders around windows and etc. CM is niche feature and will come later (I have a color calibrated display and use the profile). For this to happen more people need to start using Wayland. And most of them will be happy with improvements Wayland provides like scaling, tearingless, security, etc. Ubuntu have various flavors like Studio, so Xorg support will be taken with care.

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As I recall, when we last introduced Wayland by default, when a user is on a system which Wayland doesn’t support, or is better served by Xorg, when they login, they get an Xorg session. So it’s not that “thousands of users will experience problems” because we mitigate this for those whose GPU doesn’t support Wayland.

It makes sense for us to do this “magic” at login again. It also makes sense for us to determine what those issues are now, ahead of the LTS, so we can put the “magic” in to help those users have a smoother experience.

Also, note that interim releases have way fewer users (by an order of magnitude) than LTS releases. So a smaller set of adventurous users can help test and identify issues so that LTS users don’t get hit with it in a year.

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You probably could check for installed color profiles on upgrade and use Xorg by default in this case, not sure about new installations.

"Anyone who has actually used a color managed system in anger knows that being able to color profile it and keep it in calibration is essential. It is not an option that can be waved away. The fact that all existing desktop application environments support this (and hence all existing applications that depend on color management expect this, and users expect this) is a hint as to the reality of the situation.

And while it’s perfectly reasonable to expect that implementation of a new facility will be incremental, anyone who has architected and participated in standardizing moderately complex systems knows the issues that result by not looking far enough ahead when architecting something. Too often you end up with a mess when you realize that early assumptions and simplifications are wrong, and that foundations need to be ripped up and redone, and/or horrible hacks have to be lived with because of momentum and sunk cost. If this was brand new territory, and everyone was on a learning curve, then a stumbling path to “perfection” is how it has to be, but this is not the case.

You haven’t got a modern Color Management system if there is no standard way of doing Color Management things. The requirements about being able to set the display color profile is not covered by wayland’s protocol. It explicitly states that it does not cover that process, but assumes display profiles are already in place. (Converting pixels from one colorspace to another is not a Color Management system.) Saying “do it some other way” is not going to happen.

Key point is that you can’t make a problem go away by saying they’re out of scope."

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i mean just that, i think that “downscaling” is a word that isnt perhaps telling people what i mean, so thats why i choose to not use that ;).

FWIW OBS does work on Wayland you just need the correct plugin with a pipewire enabled system - https://gitlab.gnome.org/feaneron/obs-xdg-portal (which i believe is bundled with the flatpak and I hope it will be bundled with the snap too).

I hope that Ubuntu doesn’t get cold feet if a few applications do not work correctly, I hope instead that their influence and community can help the open source projects by contributing code to port to Wayland and put pressure on the proprietary ISVs. These apps have had many years to prepare for Wayland and if Ubuntu moves to Wayland for 21.04 they’ll have one year notice before the next LTS, this should be enough time for any major application to migrate. And if it isn’t or a user has very specific requirements they can always fallback to using X11.

Furthermore there are features or improvements that are becoming Wayland only, for example one potentially important one with the redesign for GNOME 40 is the touchpad gestures - on Wayland three finger swipes will move between states of session, overview, appgrid, and workspaces (from my understanding on X11 this won’t exist). Also if Ubuntu want to strengthen the security of snaps, then moving to Wayland needs to happen at some point.

I look forward to testing Wayland on Ubuntu :slight_smile:

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I’m telling you, Wayland will be a lost opportunity if it’s relied on too early. They had the opportunity to develop something great, instead it will just be a headache and make Linux unusable for multimedia work. If users knew what they were getting they’d be up in arms by now but they don’t. They trust Ubuntu and Wayland to do the best decisions for them and to develop something great. Little do they know, they’ll be loosing color management.

Well folks. That’s all from me. It was well while it lasted. To think it has been nearly 15 years… Linux has come a long way but it’s time to get serious and start looking into Macs since Linux missed the train with Wayland and now will end up with an unsuitable solution for graphics, film, vfx, game and 3d work. I just pity the likes of DaVinci Resolve, Blender, Nuke, Unity, Unreal, Natron, Valve who pored millions into porting their software for Linux. And various foss software like Gimp, Krita, Darktable, Inkscape, Rawtherapee, kdenlive, Olive and many others. You’ve all tried to make professional multimedia production programs available on Linux to make Linux better but you’ve been forgotten by Wayland and it’s time to move on.

It’s time to move on to a system that understands that if the most installed Linux app of all time on any Linux app store is a graphics app (Gimp) then probably a proper color management implementation should be a high priority.

But that’s how life works I guess. You win some, you loose some. And Linux lost today. At least for a decade or two until they realize this is a major spec flaw.

Jim Zemlin was completely right all along. If you wanna do multimedia, even to create a simple presentation, use a Mac. Don’t use Linux. Linux vendors don’t care about that stuff, it’s fate is to be locked up in a server room never to even see a light ray let alone any color or color management.

If colour management is all you care about, why don’t you stick with X11? Or better, implement colour management in Wayland (or at least pay someone to implement it).

Finally, someone less who complains about free work done by others. Maybe you can fill a complaint with Apple and make them dump their modern graphics stack and switch to X11. I am sure they will be happy to let any application read all your keyboard input.

How many users of GIMP on Linux care about colour management again? And how many Linux users would like to have a smooth desktop experience à la macOS on the other hand?

If this is true, why are you still complaining about colour management? :slight_smile:

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Exactly, I’m sure that Collabora / Google (ChromeOS) / AMD / Intel and others would be happy to have some extra advise / contributions in developing colour management for Wayland and goals they should acheive, as they state in their recent blog on the topic “If you are an expert on the topics of color management or HDR displays and content, or a developer interested in contributing to the project, you are warmly welcome to join the development.” - https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/blog/2020/11/19/developing-wayland-color-management-and-high-dynamic-range/

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Have you been following Wayland? I think you guys may be having a different idea of things with all the press releases and the hype. It’s not like no experts have stepped up to help and even did a protocol proposal and offered to do the implementation. It’s just that they are being rejected, their contributions and any expert advice the last time there was any serious discussion as far as I know, simple as that.

Here’s the sketch of the proper protocol, it’s not hidden:
https://www.argyllcms.com/waylandcm.xml.txt

I’m done now. Please don’t feel offended. I know many of you guys don’t really care about this but this is how we become a serious platform for serious desktop work (I don’t mean by ranting obviously but by considering the experts opinion I’ve linked to).
I feel like I’ve brought some attention to this issue and made everyone aware and beware. The rest is out of my hands as just a Linux user working in production of multimedia.

In the end, do what you will. I’m sure eventually it’ll get sorted. I just didn’t want to let this slide without a little well intended rant. I wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t shared this on time. I’ve shared it on another thread before too but didn’t get much attention.

Cheers everybody :beers:

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This is the first time I’ve even seen this protocol design. The only one I was aware of was the one proposed to the wayland-protocols project last summer, which was closed by the proposer very shortly after rather than being pursued. As far as I was aware, nobody has seriously done anything for color management and HDR in Wayland yet. :frowning:

FYI the author of the merge request you link there (Vitaly Prosyak [AMD]) is mentioned in the Collabora blog post to be working with them. You can see that in the wayland-protocols WIP proposal https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/14 and other merge requests linked in their blog post. I hope that Google funding colour management and HDR support on Wayland for ChromeOS in collaboration with AMD, Intel, and others is the push this needs to get it across the line.

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When I saw that Wayland was going to be the default for Hirsute, I decided to try it on my Focal 20.04.1 system. Running on my trusty old Lenovo Thinkpad T420, I logged out and back on again with Wayland instead of the default session.

At first everything SEEMED normal but then I started noticing some annoying issues. For one thing, mouse movement was not smooth, it was “herky-jerky” across the screen.

Next, I use a little snap app called “Bucklespring” that makes my laptop sound like my desktop with its IBM Model-M keyboard. The sound kept cutting out… sometimes keystrokes would “click” other times they were silent. Same for the mouse clicks.

Switching through work spaces was also “herky-jerky” and not nearly as smooth and “flowing” as using X. I hope you guys actually get Wayland working at LEAST as well as X. In my experience, “new” isn’t always “better” and right now this is definitely the case with Wayland.

I haven’t even tried it on my desktop AMD system where I run Steam games…

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While I love this idea, there are certain minor details that might need to be addressed. Especially if Wayland is going to be default in the next LTS. For example I just noticed this morning that you don’t have the ability to use system window decoration with the telegram snap application while on Wayland, but I do in x session.