Re: is Wayland/Weston mature enough to be the default desktop choice in Buster?
On Fri, Apr 05, 2019 at 04:12:22PM +0100, 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
Neither GNOME nor Wayland work on any screen-attached machine I own.
There's usually just a black screen, and/or a return to the login manager
(assuming it does start at all -- which is not granted for gdm3).
My machines are:
* an amd64 desktop:
* nouveau: way too crashy to be considered "working". With my old
monitors (1280x1024 + 1200x1600) it crashed once a few hours, with
new setup (2560x1600 + 1200x1600) it crashes every a couple of hours
with regular work, or 7 times within an hour trying to watch a movie.
With xfce, disabling the compositor makes it work. With GNOME, it's
AFAIK not an option (the fallback is gone, right?).
The crashiness is not a fault of nouveau guys, but our beloved
nVidia Corporation™® and their preciousss Intellectual Property.
* nvidia proprietary: doesn't work with new kernels. Sorry, but I do
a kernel patch once in a while, waiting for proprietary crap to get
updated is not an option.
* (I've recently replaced the graphics card with an oldish AMD one;
didn't get around to trying GNOME yet, sorry.)
* Pine{64,book}:
simplefb. GNOME no workie.
* RockPro64, used as a desktop (I'm typing these words on it):
armsoc. GNOME no workie.
* N900:
didn't try. I don't suspect it could work, though.
* Gemini:
libhybris. No way to run Wayland I guess, X GNOME probably either.
* Omega OAN133:
crashes with a black screen (although it's been a while since I tried).
* an i386 desktop (used as a pedestal for RockPro):
i915 [910GL]. Might or might not run, although the mandatory compositor
on hardware this old would cause such a slideshow on 2560x1600 that it
wouldn't be usable.
* qemu-kvm on work desktop:
[Host GPU is i915 (HD530)]: black screen in default buster's GNOME
(thus Wayland), Cinnamon at least gives a message. Very likely something
with qemu's configuration -- but work time is not supposed to be spent
wrangling desktop environment problems, thus I did not investigate.
* qemu-tcg on home desktop, emulating powerpc, mips64el, ...
GNOME: black screen, Cinnamon: error message. (Tried a while ago.)
On every single of the above setups XFCE works perfectly.
> I think the default should be reconsidered.
+1. With GNOME not working even on some amd64 machines, it's not fit to be
the default. Technical reasons aside, the UI is non-ergonomic and
counter-intuitive, has broken systray, and suffers from CSD.
Once the black screen/crash problem is fixed, you may consider making
Wayland and/or GNOME the default again, but for Buster, that's a pretty bad
idea.
Meow!
--
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