Bug#927667: gnome: please confirm or revert choice of Wayland for default desktop
Package: gnome
Version: 1:3.30+1
Severity: important
X-Debbugs-Cc: Jonathan Dowland <jmtd@debian.org>, debian-gtk-gnome@lists.debian.org, debian-desktop@lists.debian.org
On the debian-devel mailing list, Jonathan Dowland wrote:
> I was surprised to learn — by way of synaptic being autoremoved — that
> the default desktop in Buster will be GNOME/Wayland. I personally do not
> think that Wayland is a sensible choice for the default *yet*; and if
> the consequence is that bugs for software that do not work properly with
> Wayland have their severity inflated such that they are autoremoved (and
> thus potentially removed entirely from Buster), a decision that — in
> isolation — makes sense to me; although Synaptic is quite a high profile
> package within Debian for this to happen.
>
> I think the default should be reconsidered.
I am not exactly a core member of the team (I joined to help to maintain
GLib), and I didn't make the decision to stop diverging from upstream
on this particular point, so I haven't been able to articulate why that
decision was made.
I can completely understand if other GNOME team members don't want to
interact with the -devel thread, given the amount of negativity it is
attracting from people who don't like GNOME and wouldn't use it whatever
we did; but I think it would be good to reassess the costs and benefits
of Wayland vs. X11 by default, and either make a positive decision to
keep Wayland as the default, or diverge from upstream and switch back
to Xorg by default like Debian stretch and Ubuntu 18.04 did.
We are now in hard freeze, so if the team does want to go back to Xorg
as the default, this is our last chance.
(As the maintainer of flatpak in Debian, I would be sad to see us go
back to a display protocol where every app can copy other apps' window
contents, inject fake input events or be a keylogger... but I'm also
aware that some programs rely on X11 not providing meaningful privilege
separation, and that the Wayland compositor model exacerbates any bugs
that cause GNOME Shell to crash.)
smcv
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