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.
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.
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.
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
Wait, what? I’m on PopOS, with Nvidia GPU, and my “g-sync” VRR works fine.
Source?
We have been hearing about “The Year of the Linux Desktop” for 20 years I think and Linux has less than 5% share.
In contrast, I do not remember hearing “The Year of the Wayland Desktop” until recently. I have been hearing “Wayland is the future” forever but it has been correct the whole time.
By the time we enter 2025, I am not sure there will be a major desktop environment that does not support Wayland and many distros and DEs will be Wayland by default or even Wayland only. That is already happening. Valve may have ditched X by then and it feels like that is where most new Linux users are going to come from. It seems quite unlikely that Wayland market share on the Linux Desktop will be less than 75%.
I am not saying this is “The Year of the Wayland Desktop” but I would feel foolish publicly betting against it.
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.
I have been using X since 1992 with lots of issues. I do not understand the fetish with X11 and why people cling to it so tightly.
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.
Not sure this is the year but my “highly technical reason” is that enough gamers switch.
I’m not going to claim that this year is the year, or that any will be. In regards to gaming though, two years ago the number of games which worked through Proton was quite a bit lower, and the number of anti-cheats which worked was effectively zero.
Anti-cheat support is still far from 100%, but it is significantly higher than it was even six months ago. It looks like it will only get better from here.
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.
Maybe we’ll climb to 4% marketshare!
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.
