Mint 19 and wayland, what future?

[minitux]

Hi, questions for developer

Mint 19 will follow Ubuntu in the use of wayland as default session? And can you choose to start the session to use, or will it only hold one of the two sessions?

It seems to me that both XFCE and MATE do not support wayland, and Cinnamon supports it?

For now, wayland is very problematic with root graphical applications such as Synaptic, Gparted, Gdebi (for Ubuntu also Nautilus and Gedit) etc ... to run them on wayland I have to use a workaround , the command

Code: Select all

xhost SI:localuser:root

in startup applications to manage the programs listed on wayland

What will be the direction of Mint 19?

[Pjotr]

The big question is: what will Ubuntu 18.04 LTS do? Being an LTS, and therefore also aimed at the conservative corporate market, it remains to be seen if it'll have Wayland by default as well.

[minitux]

Ubuntu road would look like that ... but I'm not sure .... But I think Ubuntu tip on applications like Disks and Gnome Software that have no problems with wayland.

I love Synaptic, Gparted and Gdebi and I'm sorry that developers of these programs do not yet have them wayland support....and who knows if they will do it?

[Pjotr]

Ubuntu road would look like that ... but I'm not sure .... But I think Ubuntu tip on applications like Disks and Gnome Software that have no problems with wayland.

I love Synaptic, Gparted and Gdebi and I'm sorry that developers of these programs do not yet have them wayland support....and who knows if they will do it?

That's unknown. But there's always Mint: Mint 19 could be made to default to Xorg. Which would be probable, given the fact that Mint's Update Manager is using Synaptic. Unless Synaptic would be made fit for Wayland, in which case the problem would decrease....

[JosephM]

The big question is: what will Ubuntu 18.04 LTS do? Being an LTS, and therefore also aimed at the conservative corporate market, it remains to be seen if it'll have Wayland by default as well.

It doesn't really matter to Mint what Ubuntu does in this regard. Very few desktop environments support Wayland and none of the default Mint options do right now.

Having tried Ubuntu 17.10 with gnome shell and wayland, I'm not sure it's ready yet. I've run into several annoying little issue running it and it still does not support the use of Nvidia graphics drivers. That alone makes it a no go for many people.

[minitux]

Yes many troubles, I also seem to have read on the Ubuntu Italian forum that with Nvidia graphics cards ( I have Intel integrated) the wayland session is not even shown in GDM, there is only the Xorg session

[Mick-Cork]

Clem, 25th Oct 17, when asked whether there was any plan to support Wayland...

Well, from a Mint point of view we’ve no plan to use it just yet. Xorg is a much better solution still in the scope of our distribution. Wayland is promising because it will solve some important issues we’re having with Xorg but it’s far from ready in terms of what it supports and what supports it.

From a development point of view nobody’s really asking for it, Arch, Fedora are happy to use MATE and Cinnamon as they are.. and nobody’s really working on it whether it’s in MATE or Cinnamon.

We’re not opposed to seeing it happen, it’s just something that “might” work “one day” and it’s not a priority. It’s also something that requires a significant amount of work so it doesn’t make sense to look into it much at the moment. Things might change in the future, but this is the current situation.

Reading into that I'd say there'd have to be some fairly dramatic improvements in Wayland before LM adopts it, whether as default or a second option. I guess things will change when it solves more problems than it causes.

[mr_raider]

Only the gnome edition is scheduled to move to Wayland. I think kubuntu is staying on xorg.

[JosephM]

Yes many troubles, I also seem to have read on the Ubuntu Italian forum that with Nvidia graphics cards

It works with Nvidia cards but only if you use the open source driver. This isn't really an option on the newest cards.