A day many have been waiting for is here. Following on from NVIDIA releasing the NVIDIA 470.42.01 Beta driver that finally supports hardware accelerated OpenGL and Vulkan rendering on Xwayland, a brand new release of XWayland is out now.
XWayland 21.1.2 would have usually been a cleaning up bug-fix release, however when the Release Candidate went out in late June developer Michel Dänzer mentioned:
It's a bit special, as most of the changes are not the usual stable branch fixes material, but are needed for HW accelerated direct rendering with the Nvidia 470 driver (which is currently in open beta).
I'm making an exception, pulling these changes into the 21.1 branch instead of waiting for the next major release, since the changes are mostly specific to the EGLStream backend and do not affect the GBM backend. And they make a big difference for users of the EGLStream backend.
That release has now been made as of today, July 9, where the only difference is "a fix for a long standing issue where Xwayland wouldn't send events to notify clients of RandR configuration changes in some cases".
Hopefully soon various Linux distributions will pick up the new version, so users don't have to do any manual work for enabling hardware accelerated OpenGL and Vulkan rendering on Xwayland with their favourite distribution. Once done, it should mean NVIDIA users see a much better experience on Wayland.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Quoting: BielFPsFinallyVery Nice, now we just need the main distros Debian / Ubuntu lts / Fedora / Arch to default to Wayland sessions, and we are good to go :)
Fedora 34 uses Gnome Wayland by default, also what I'm currently using. (They also immediately patched their XWayland package with this patch for Nvidia 470)
Three weeks in, and I have to say it works significantly better than what I was used to on Plasma Wayland (haven't tried Sway, yet).
XWayland windows are not pixelated when using monitor resolution scaling, even when using fractional scaling.
Compare that to Plasma XWayland, where it is obvious if a window uses Wayland or X.
Last edited by Hooly on 9 July 2021 at 7:33 pm UTC
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slaapliedje Jul 10, 2021
Quoting: BielFPsConsidering this is still a beta driver... nah.FinallyVery Nice, now we just need the main distros Debian / Ubuntu lts / Fedora / Arch to default to Wayland sessions, and we are good to go :)
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Quoting: BielFPsFinallyVery Nice, now we just need the main distros Debian / Ubuntu lts / Fedora / Arch to default to Wayland sessions, and we are good to go :)
Arch with GNOME does by default as well though Plasma needs the plasma-wayland-seesion package to do it.
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Jul 10, 2021
Quoting: slaapliedjeConsidering this is still a beta driver... nah.
Which means absolutely nothing, unless you're a distro maintainer.
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Quoting: HoolyFedora 34 uses Gnome Wayland by default
Quoting: ahoneybunArch with GNOME does by default as well though Plasma needs the plasma-wayland-seesion package to do it.I'm aware of this, I change to gnome because of their wayland support.
Quoting: HoolyThree weeks in, and I have to say it works significantly better than what I was used to on Plasma WaylandIt's nice to know that
Quoting: slaapliedjeConsidering this is still a beta driver... nah.Beta means almost stable, the good part is Nvidia started to show sign of proper Wayland/xWayland support, instead of being deniers about that.
I personally hope the next Ubuntu lts defaults to Wayland, so Wayland support will be probably improve a lot by third party applications.
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slaapliedje Jul 10, 2021
Quoting: BielFPsBeta means almost stable, the good part is Nvidia started to show sign of proper Wayland/xWayland support, instead of being deniers about that.Beta means it isn't going to be packaged by most distributions. Some of us don't have time to muck with betas. I used to, but have too many other permanently beta things going on to mess with my video drivers. Not to mention wayland is still perpetually beta. 😜
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slaapliedje Jul 11, 2021
Quoting: kon14Sure it does. Means me, as a user, may not wish to muck with a non-distribution driver. I am sure once it is marked Stable, then I can install it without adding third party repos, or other garbage that may or may not contain more than the beta driver.Quoting: slaapliedjeConsidering this is still a beta driver... nah.
Which means absolutely nothing, unless you're a distro maintainer.
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Quoting: slaapliedjeBeta means it isn't going to be packaged by most distributions. Some of us don't have time to muck with betas.Which distro you're maintainer?
Quoting: slaapliedjeNot to mention wayland is still perpetually beta. 😜"beta" or not, it's the x11 replacement.
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Quoting: slaapliedjeMeans me, as a user, may not wish to muck with a non-distribution driver.
Except distros often package these in their official repos as testing packages.
Quoting: slaapliedjeI am sure once it is marked Stable...
rofl man, if your distro flair is any indication then you'd be stuck with nvidia-driver-418.197.02-1 according to Debian Buster's package indexing.
Pray tell how you update your ancient, but stable, driver. Do you pin packages from testing/sid or is that also too much of a cheat for you?
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Quoting: BielFPsActually, for Debian this happened with the Buster release, back in 2019.FinallyVery Nice, now we just need the main distros Debian / Ubuntu lts / Fedora / Arch to default to Wayland sessions, and we are good to go :)
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slaapliedje Jul 12, 2021
Quoting: kon14Where I need stable (my server) I enable backports. Not that I use any special driver outside of a kernel one there.Quoting: slaapliedjeMeans me, as a user, may not wish to muck with a non-distribution driver.
Except distros often package these in their official repos as testing packages.
Quoting: slaapliedjeI am sure once it is marked Stable...
rofl man, if your distro flair is any indication then you'd be stuck with nvidia-driver-418.197.02-1 according to Debian Buster's package indexing.
Pray tell how you update your ancient, but stable, driver. Do you pin packages from testing/sid or is that also too much of a cheat for you?
Even if I did, it is at 460. https://packages.debian.org/buster-backports/nvidia-driver
Also, outside of a few features here and there, do you NEED the latest driver? Really only for newer hardware support.
By the way, the 470 driver is in experimental, so if I want to grab it on my desktop, (which runs sid with a few things pulled from experimental) I can do that. Do I have the patience for it coming into sid or backports? Yup, sure do. Was there a point in time when I would have removed the Debian installed driver and just installed it straight off of nvidia.com, or had to compile a shim for other GPUs? Yes. It just isn't something I have time for these days. Haha, people make me laugh. When I started using Linux, XFree86 wasn't even compiled for some of the distributions, Xorg wasn't even a thing for Wayland to "be so much better!" And the kenrnel was just barely getting to 2.0, I remember being excited for 2.0. Then 2.2 was supposed to save the world...
Maybe I am just old and crusty and prefer a working system, and not having to deal with black screens anymore.
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slaapliedje Jul 12, 2021
Quoting: whizseYeah, I think it detects if you are running nvidia, and if you are, would default to Xorg. If not, you get Wayland.Quoting: BielFPsActually, for Debian this happened with the Buster release, back in 2019.FinallyVery Nice, now we just need the main distros Debian / Ubuntu lts / Fedora / Arch to default to Wayland sessions, and we are good to go :)
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slaapliedje Jul 12, 2021
Quoting: BielFPsWhy would I have to be a distro maintainer to want to have a stable system? Nvidia marked their release as beta for a reason. Usually because they want people to test the new features and make sure they're stable before releasing a driver that everyone can enjoy. THIS is the purpose of flagging software as 'beta'. Yes, it means something when a company releases something and tags it as beta. More than just 'hey distribution creators, don't include this in your distributions.'Quoting: slaapliedjeBeta means it isn't going to be packaged by most distributions. Some of us don't have time to muck with betas.Which distro you're maintainer?
Quoting: slaapliedjeNot to mention wayland is still perpetually beta. 😜"beta" or not, it's the x11 replacement.
If I feel like testing it, I'll test it. I have other projects I'm working on though, and need my computer to not do random things.
Wayland may eventually be the X11 replacement, but until they can get the stability, driver support, and feature parity with Xorg, then it simply doesn't work for some people and won't replace X11. It's as simple as that.
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slaapliedje Jul 12, 2021
Quoting: kon14Pray tell how you update your ancient, but stable, driver. Do you pin packages from testing/sid or is that also too much of a cheat for you?Figured I'd create a separate reply to just how shitty this is.
Never pin shit from testing/sid if you want your system to be stable. Also, don't throw random ppa's into your repos. If you have to use a third party repository for something, make sure it is for new packages that don't replace things in your distribution. I've been running mostly Debian in my 24~ years of running Linux, and have broken it many times by many things, while messing with testing/sid. If you're gonna go for the rolling release, and you don't mind some breaks here and there, run Sid. If you want rolling release, but stable, use Testing. If you want something that lasts a few years with security / bug fixes and is rock solid, you use stable. It's as simple as that. If you want rock solid+newer software, you now can use stable+backports.
I run Sid on my desktop, bullseye (testing) in some VMs, and I run Buster on servers. You want ancient, and self-packaged stuff, you run a RHEL based distribution. Debian hasn't been an 'oh, they just have old shit' in them since the last few releases. Just remember, Ubuntu takes Debian Unstable every 6 months and slaps it together for a release. Clearly 'the favorite' must be so much newer than Debian, right?? Just because some Rando on the internet made a name for himself at one point and created a ppa for installing beta nvidia drivers, doesn't mean he isn't still just some rando.
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Quoting: slaapliedjeIf you have to use a third party repository for something, make sure it is for new packages that don't replace things in your distribution.Out of interest, does Debian have ppa-purge? It tracks which versions of packages come from a PPA rather than repositories so that if you want to stop using a PPA it can automatically switch you back to the repository version. Much cleaner than the can't-downgrade dependency issues from the before times when people would add full repositories to their sources.list.
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I notice no difference from the old xwayland, gnome still works okish with it, and plasma is still pretty mutch completely broken in wayland with nvidia.
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