[roenxi]

Pay attention to the 2nd dot point under known issues. This release uses Wayland, and that has profound implications for screenshot, streaming and remote desktop-ing.

The Wayland protocol apparently made some bold decisions to enforce security through isolation, and apart from the compositor it is all but impossible for anything to sneak a peak at what other programs are doing visually. It'll be interesting to see if that causes users a problem.

[angrygoat]

With Fedora jumping over nearly a year ago to Wayland as default in F25, and now Ubuntu in a non-LTS release, hopefully we'll see a tipping point where software (especially third-party/proprietary software) simply must work well on Wayland in order to have a user base.

Once we've got an Ubuntu LTS and a RHEL/CentOS release out there with Wayland by default, X11 ought to rapidly become a thing of the past. There's Xwayland, but with any luck that'll become something you basically never use, just like happened with Xquartz.

[reacweb]

I have bought a new desktop this spring. The first thing I did was configuring wake on lan (in France, we have 7 days to cancel a purchase). The second one was to configure ssh and gnome to be able to administer it remotely (line DisallowTCP=false in /etc/gdm3/custom.conf).

I use Linux at work since 1999 and I have used a local display less than 1% of the time.

An application that does not work remotely does not exist for me.

[shakna]

Gnome Remote Desktop [0] is coming, it reached Fedora stable on September 30th, but exposes an API that allows Wayland and Gnome to work together over a remote connection.

For all other uses, you always have xwayland [1], until they adopt the new guy.

[0] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1483499

[1] https://wayland.freedesktop.org/xserver.html

[majewsky]

1% of users with very particular requirements should not hold back the experience of the other 99%.

[reacweb]

Where do you get these numbers ? At work, I do not know where the servers are physically located (some VMware ESX in a closet). Most of my colleagues are in the same situation. Even for windows, many people use terminal services for teleworking. At my previous job in Belgium, it was similar (with a different X server).

I have provided support to Nederlands and Portugal using X11VNC.

Outside work, my wife and my mother are using linux. They call me when they have an issue. Hopefully, I can help them remotely 99% of the time.

IMHO, local desktop is the exception in entreprises.

[majewsky]

I'm not arguing against VNC (which is very much possible with Wayland today). I'm arguing against the legacy cruft that is the X11 network protocol.

[castle-bravo]

Something as fundamental as remote desktop should not be sacrificed for the convenience of a tiny minority of developers.

[majewsky]

It appears we have finally found a volunteer for X11 maintenance.

[collinmanderson]

The lack of a reliable UI is one of the main reasons holding me back from using Ubuntu as my main OS. I wouldn’t mind giving up a native Remote Desktop if it means everything else works better.

[sspiff]

I use my Linux desktop through VNC roughly 50% of the time I'm using it (though, honestly, most of the time I work locally on my laptop).

It's convenient to have access to the desktop session I left running the night before remotely if I want to. I mostly use it to sync files/code I forgot to upload when I quit the last time, or to start a download on Steam or something like that.

I'm sure Wayland will eventually support similar usage, but I understand you reluctance to adopt it until it does.

[bandrami]

Yeah, but VNC is light years behind X11-over-network in so many ways. You have to have a full desktop instead of a single application. It's not integrated with your selection buffers or your session manager or your desktop. It's really a blunt object in comparison to X.

[newscracker]

Which VNC server program do you use? Is it free (as in beer) and does it have a GUI for enabling/disabling and managing the configuration? Several months ago I was looking for one like that but didn’t find anything that was maintained in the recent times. Coming from OS X, where turning on VNC/screen sharing is a simple process in System Preferences, I found it surprising that it was difficult to do that on (Ubuntu) Linux (enabling file sharing with Samba also took a bit of fiddling around).

[shakna]

rdesktop is pretty easy to drop-in and use, with a nice GUI. They focus on Windows remote desktop compatibility instead of VNC, which can make it easier for some.

[ASalazarMX]

I'm lost, why is it relevant that "in France, we have 7 days to cancel a purchase"?

[ziotom78]

I think he was trying to explain why he immediately configured wake on lan, ssh and so on: had he encountered problems in the configuration, he could have returned the item to the store.

[makapuf]

Yup, I also wondered if he was craving ethernet to find the refund website?

[SmellyGeekBoy]

Not to mention HiDPI problems and serious issues with the proprietary nvidia driver. The situation is improving all the time though and hopefully this should mark the beginning of some good times for Wayland. More choice is always a good thing.

Of course, the option is right there on the login screen to start an X session instead, if Wayland doesn't work for you.

[madez]

I recommend everybody intending to run Linux to avoid nvidia GPUs. The experience with amd and intel GPUs is vastly superior.

[rootbear]

I use nothing but Nvidia on Linux. Their performance and stability is greatly superior to AMD on high-end 3D applications such as Maya. I'll admit, I have not revisited AMD cards in a while, so perhaps I'm out of touch with the current generation. I also do not consider the open source nouveau driver to be acceptable. I've had too many problems with it in 3D apps.

[microtonal]

But their proprietary driver is lagging behind a lot of the ecosystem. E.g. until recently their driver did not work with Wayland/mutter because NVIDIA was pushing their own device memory allocator (via the EGLStreams API). It seems that it now finally works, but is very slow.

In contrast, AMD is actively contributing to the open source amdgpu driver.

[plus]

>until recently their driver did not work with Wayland/mutter because NVIDIA was pushing their own device memory allocator (via the EGLStreams API). It seems that it now finally works, but is very slow.

Can you give a source for this? I'd be very much interested in trying out Plasma on Wayland on NVIDIA, but I can't find any information about NVIDIA implementing GBM.

[rootbear]

Yes, I wish Nvidia was a bit more generous with the open source community, but for some situations, they are the best choice, if not the only choice.

[smacktoward]

Your experience is not incompatible with the parent commenter's. On Linux, generally speaking, Intel > NVidia > AMD.

[jrs95]

Unfortunately there's a lot of software that only runs on nvidia GPUs (anything that depends on CUDA, including tensorflow), so some of us really don't have a choice at the moment.

[jandrese]

That's surprising since I've had a hell of a time getting GPU acceleration working on AMD cards while the nVidia cards hum right along with the nVidia driver. For some reason my AMD laptop apparently has blacklisted WebGL support which is a real bummer.

[ganeshkrishnan]

No issues with Gnome 3.26 HiDPI on Wayland using nvidia driver. I was running alpha version of 17.10 on my Dell XPS with minimal issues

[bklaasen]

Which generation XPS is that?

[ganeshkrishnan]

XPS 9560

[hyperbovine]

I'm writing this on 17.10, a 1080Ti and a 4k monitor. Other than the lack of video acceleration in any browser (which is not specific to this setup), it's fine.

[tonyedgecombe]

That's interesting, I was hoping for some improvements in HiDPI support with the shift to Wayland.

[lultimouomo]

On a Debain sid install I was somehow recently bumped from Gnome3 on X11 toi Gnome3 on wayland. Chromium and Qt apps got broken scaling; I solved it by forcing the session to be Gnome3 on X11.

This is just anecdote of course! I would have liked to dig more into it and figure things out, but honestly I just had too much to do and chose whatever was working for me.

[jbicha]

Have you tried again after upgrading to gnome-shell 3.26 (it's only been in Debian unstable for one week)?

[lultimouomo]

Tried right now; QtCreator and chromium are still broken. Curiously, the former is super tiny and the latter huge!

[joelthelion]

I've been using Gnome on Wayland as my primary desktop on Arch and Fedora for several months if not a year. It's a marked improvement over Gnome/Xorg, and most of the issues have now been resolved.

You might need to find new ways to accomplish a few tasks, though. But I can attest it works.

Edit: fix desktop/compositor confusion

[jhasse]

Did it crash yet? That has been the blocker for me so far, since on wayland GNOME Shell crashes will bring down the whole session.

[fmoralesc]

gnome-shell in 3.26 can be reloaded, so in case it crashes it shouldn't take down the session anymore, I think.

[jhasse]

Do you have a source? The bug report about it is still open AFAIK.

[fmoralesc]

Well, myself. I am using the wayland session and just restarted the shell with <Alt-f2>r.

EDIT: Well, I just checked and it turns out I am not running the wayland session! I will have to investigate why...

[runeks]

> It's a marked improvement over Gnome/Xorg […]

How so?

[gkya]

Just after the upgrade I can say that everything looks crisper. This might be because I just recompiled Emacs for this week (I follow master), or because default fonts changed, or because Gnome 3.24 -> 3.26, or because Wayland, or some of all of these; but there is a noticeable change. And Gnome is way more snappier. I'm really pleased after first reboot.

[joelthelion]

No tearing is a big one.

[majewsky]

Small but important nitpick: Wayland is not a desktop, it's a set of protocols for GUI compositing. "Plasma on Wayland" or "Gnome on Wayland" or Sway or Weston is.

[gtirloni]

Fedora's transition to Wayland was smooth. We work with screen readers here and things just kept working.

[pgeorgi]

screen readers read metadata provided by the UI toolkit, not pixels from the display (which is the issue for screen shots, screen sharing, streaming)

[gtirloni]

Thank you

[krisgenre]

Oh! thanks for the comment about screenshot. I was thinking on upgrading to 17.10 (still on 14.04) and one of my most handy app is Shutter. Looks like it doesn't work on wayland - https://bugs.launchpad.net/shutter/+bug/1502263

[jhasse]

You can still use X11 on 17.10, just select it on the login screen :)

[randallsquared]

I've been using Wayland (with nouveau) in the Artful beta for over a month, and screenshots haven't been an issue... I didn't notice anything was supposed to be wrong, there.

[jbicha]

It depends on the app whether screenshots work. Some apps use the GNOME screenshot API and are fine; other apps assume X.

[ganeshkrishnan]

>. It'll be interesting to see if that causes users a problem.

The only issue I had was Synaptic was crashing. Other than that I have fewer crashes and hangs on wayland compared to X

[asfdsfggtfd]

Hang on did they drop Mir?

[shakna]

You've had both yes and no answers.

The answer is no.

Mir 0.28 landed just in time for 17.10, as a sibling linked. This version includes basic Wayland support.

A read over Mir/Spec [0] shows that though they don't want Wayland to be at the core of Mir, they want to be able to talk and integrate with it at a higher level.

It should be noted that Mir is only installed by default on Ubuntu Touch, and probably won't be integrated into the desktop by default until Unity8 is ready.

[0] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Mir/Spec?action=show&redirect=MirSpe...

[opencl]

"It should be noted that Mir is only installed by default on Ubuntu Touch, and probably won't be integrated into the desktop by default until Unity8 is ready."

Huh? As far as I can tell Unity8 is never going to be ready. The exact words from Mark Shuttleworth were "we will end our investment in Unity8, the phone and convergence shell".

Clearly there are still people working on Mir, it's had ~200 commits in the past month. But I'm confused as to who's left using it.

Ubuntu Touch still exists but seems badly starved of development resources. I haven't followed it too closely other than occasionally flashing onto my old Nexus 4 to check things out but it seems like there's barely been any progress in the past few years, and Canonical dropping their support surely isn't going to help matters. I would love to be wrong about this but the project seems to be barley limping along. Ubuntu Phone is also still based on 15.04 and in the process of transitioning to 16.04 so it seems like it'll take ages for these Mir improvements to land.

[shakna]

Unity8 is practically dead right now. The funding withdrawal ensured it.

But, some of Mir's utility carried over into Canonical's IOT stuff.

No one I've spoken seems to know why Mir still has an active team after the big changes.

There's some speculation of MATE adopting when Mir hits 1.0, but it really is speculative.

I don't know why, but Mir marches on. I doubt we'll see it on desktop anytime soon.

[teekert]

Unity8 is as dead as Ubuntu Phone (if you don't count community forks). Gnome is the future of Ubuntu, there will be no Mir, there will be no Unity8.

[shakna]

As I said, Mir has a fresh release in this release, and continued development. If it's dead in the water... You might want to go tell the team.

[jbicha]

Mir is still used for some of Canonical's IoT products. Since Canonical has paying customers, it's worthwhile to continue maintaining it.

[vacri]

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/?field.tag=unity8-desktop&...

They look like they have only had half a dozen bugs lodged in the last six months. Doesn't seem too vibrant for an actively-developed desktop.

[shakna]

https://bugs.launchpad.net/mir/+bugs?orderby=-date_last_upda...

Mir on the other hand, looks quite active.

[XzetaU8]

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mir-0.28...

[rippsu]

No

[tonyedgecombe]

Yes.