Now we wait for the merger with Yutani.
I read so much bad news every day now, and then something nice like this pops up and I think “well gee maybe things aren’t so awful”
No, no, things are still awful.
Gotta celebrate the little victories
I’m confused, how can an application ship with wayland? What if the DE you’re using is on x11?
how can an application ship with wayland?
It can’t. The title is not clear about how Firefox will “Ship with [support for] Wayland [compositors] by default”. Previously this native support was limited to pre-release Firefox builds.
What if the DE you’re using is on x11?
Firefox continues to support X11.
Previously this native support was limited to pre-release Firefox builds.
It has been available in release builds for ages too when enabled with an envorinment variable
What if the DE you’re using is on x11
If that’s the case, now you have to do what us wayland users have had to suffer through this whole time and set an environment variable to tell it to run in X11 mode :)
If an application only ships with Wayland, then… well, I guess you’re using Wayland now.
Wayland is X12 - this is a “get onboard or get left behind” proposition. Nobody’s forcing you to switch to Wayland, but life is going to really start sucking for you soon.
As with all Open Source, it requires someone who wants to continue to support it to do so. If nobody wants to support X11 anymore, then it’s either your responsibility to pick up where they left off and code the X11 stuff yourself (and ideally give back to the community that’s been giving to you this whole time), or pay someone else a lot of money to do it. You don’t get to complain about something being given to you for free suddenly not being maintained otherwise.
Isn’t this just Firefox not using XWayland when you’re in a Wayland session?
If that’s the case, then the answer to “What if the DE you’re using is on x11?” is: nothing new will happen.
That’s exactly the case.
cool, but I was asking as a question out of technical ignorance, not as a complaint about wayland.
That’s understandable, and I did technically answer your question, but 99 times out of 100, when someone asks the question you did, it’s out of spite and anger at Wayland becoming default and then the conversation devolves into massive bickering. I was stopping that before it started. I’m not going to reply nicely in case it’s the 1 out of 100 chance it was just technical ignorance.
Cheers and I hope your day goes well.
As an outsider to that exchange, you DID reply quite nicely, at least until abruptly being quite rude in your very last sentence. :/
Nah, I literally didn’t have any idea. I’m all for wayland adoption. I’m on x11 because my main computer has an nvidia gpu but with wider adoption, I’m sure the fix will come soon.
Depending on how new your GPU is you should be able to try it on the newest Nvidia drivers. :)
You can select it from the login screen (not lock screen), usually it’s a gear icon near the “enter” button on the login screen. Or in the bottom right corner.
If an application only ships with Wayland, then… well, I guess you’re using Wayland now.
If you wanted to though you could run Wayland apps under X11 - you could use something like cage to run the app within it’s own Wayland window. Kinda similar to running X11 apps using XWayland, but not as seamless or pretty, so I wouldn’t recommend it of course.
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Linux distributions compile stuff by themselves. No one uses vendor-provided software if there is a way to compile it.
So, what does that mean exactly? Does that mean we no longer have to use an envvar to get Firefox as a native Wayland window, or simply that Wayland support is more stable now?
Does that mean we no longer have to use an envvar to get Firefox as a native Wayland window?
Precisely
Phew, that’s amazing! I was hoping this will eventually happen. This made my day!
Fedoras FF is waylany by default since years?
Yes, and now, due to the work we’ve (and other distros) done on it, it’s finally going to be upstreamed.
Very nice!
I pray Debian will never include that wayland shit as the default but sadly, I suspect they will.
Debian 12 uses Wayland by default.
I was about to say “no it doesn’t” (having installed bookworm a few weeks ago, and most definitely not having wayland), but actually it seems you’re right, and “by default” just means “if you choose one of the compatible desktop environments”, one of which appears to be the default selection.
If that’s all they plan on doing: awesome, actually, this way anyone can pick what they prefer. I was afraid they were going to pull something like systemd (though ultimately it makes sense, as maintaining sysvinit stuff for all services would have been unfeasible; not so, at least for now, with X11/Wayland).
Thanks !
When was the last time you tried it? Up until recently I have had issues but I’ve been using it for the last few days and it feels good now. All of the problems I had with it the last few times I’ve tried it (drag and drop not working, copy-paste being weird, fractional scaling) have seemingly been fixed.
I cannot try it, as my window manager (and in fact almost the entirety of small lightweight window managers) is not compatible with it, and never will be given the insanely higher requirements to implement a compositor compared to a WM. Wayland supporters say that’ll change; I don’t see how.
There are at least 20 different options to choose from, surely one of them has what you want. And that number is only going to rise. Saying it never will is extremely short-sighted.
I want an openbox/fluxbox look and UI. About the only one I know of is labwc, and it’s shit (despite being proudly on your list). I’m fairly sure that a lot of these, in fact, aren’t close to usable.
Again, it’s not that relevant, for now I can still use Xorg. For now.
I can only use Xmonad as a window manager, so I’d like to avoid Wayland. But what Mozilla enables as default is fortunately not relevant.
It’s changing by having a library like wlroots do most of the work.
When you consider the overall picture, “wlroots + compositor” is actually less complex than “X11 + window manager” because you no longer need to consider the insanely high requirements of having to have a team maintaining the spaghetti mess of X11 code.
Wayland-based dwl has roughly the same line count as X11-based dwm (about 2.2k), without having to depend on a whole separate service as big as X11.
But of course, it being a completely different approach, it’s likely that for most smaller projects (ie. not Gnome or KDE) it’s easier to start a new project than creating a layer to maintain two different parallel implementations.
If you want something that’s more or less compatible with openbox, there seems to be this project, labwc, which claims to be inspired by openbox and compatible with its config/themes… though I haven’t personally tried it.
Also keep in mind that openbox (and I expect labwc too) doesn’t include any “panels” / “taskbars” or anything like that… and it’s likely your X11 panels might not work well if they do not explicitly support Wayland (but I believe that, for example, xfce-panel now supports both).
Screen recording/screen sharing and keyboard/window automation are the big ones missing for me.
Why? I don’t understand what it is
Previously, on Linux, your desktop environment is made out of:
- The display server (xorg), in charge of dealing with the video card (by talking with drivers in the kernel through a unified interface, DRI), and handling how to display stuff properly on your particular combination of hardware, including your physical screen and its peculiarities.
- A window manager, in charge of asking software for what they want to draw, then drawing windows, decorating them, etc. and more generally organizing what will be displayed on the screen and how it will be displayed.
- A protocol allowing both to communicate between each other.
That protocol is old, shitty, and insecure. Those are rightful criticisms of it, and it could be argued there is a need for an alternative. This is the often touted justification for wayland.
Note that the way windows and the general desktop environment is handled in the model above is completely distinct from the actual display server; this has a nice advantage: one can write a WM relatively easily, and as such there are hundreds available for linux users to choose from - including some that traditional Windows and Mac users would consider visually exotic and different, such as tiling WMs. This has long been considered a distinct superiority of Linux over, for example, Windows, where all of this is a monolithic block.
Now the dudes that introduced wayland didn’t just decide to secure the protocol; they decided to do away with that separation. Now a “compositor” handles all the stuff both xorg and the WM used to do. This means that almost none of the existing window managers work on this thing (actually the truth is none of them do, but Gnome and a few others for example created whole new compositors - today, you can run “gnome” either with that shit or with Xorg, for example), and that there will be far less of them to pick from in the future. The people implementing wayland didn’t even consider this an issue at first (everyone uses gnome or KDE, right ? imbeciles), so IIRC third party devs eventually tried to implement a library to restore some degree of separation (wlroots). This still requires reimplementing a WM though, and ultimately is extremely limited anyway due to the very “security” concepts the wayland protocol introduces. Some stuff that was trivial on Xorg will not be possible at all.
You might be considering why we’re talking about security in the context of a display server.
Well, the Wayland people noticed that more and more, people were installing software on Linux not through the official repositories of their distributions (which are high quality, somewhat audited, etc.) but from a galaxy of alternatives proposed by a variety of actors: flatpak, AppImage, snap, etc. The reason for this is the quality of software in general has taken a dive, and so has the quality of developers in the open source community; the usual process for someone wanting to be published on, say, debian, would normally have been to follow a few simple rules and to publish your package, accepting it’ll be audited and you may have a few points to work on before it’ll get up on the repos. Many devs these days are not interested, and deploy their software through the alternatives I mentioned above (which are basically all container or chroot based approaches to produce a “minisystem” with a set of defined libraries, meaning only your kernel will differ from the person having published that package).
As a result, a lot of clueless people are now installing shady software like monkeys on their system, coming from anywhere, just like on Windows. As such, the Wayland creators consider stuff such as an application discreetly capable of capturing the screen, or copying the clipboard from another app, to be potential “security issues”. You may be interested to now such “security measures” do not exist on, for example, Windows (but the “security issue” do).
I’m not even trying to argue whether or not they’re wrong here. I think mostly they are - the amount of issues and use cases they didn’t consider is incredibly large, and it’s been biting them in the ass ever since - but it’s irrelevant; in theory this would not be much of a problem because, you can just keep using Xorg and your WM, right ? the fear is that maintainers and support for these will dry up (I doubt that, personally), but also and more cruciallly that as Wayland becomes more and more omnipresent for many users, various features from various critical software - such as the browser - will eventually become problematic for Xorg users.
The contempt and elitism coming off this post is so thick it could be cut with a knife. I sincerely hope this is just you in a bad mood and not routinely how you respond to people asking innocent questions.
