Some interesting Linux industry news for you here, as the long road towards Wayland by default everywhere is taking another big step with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) removing the Xorg server and other X servers (except Xwayland) from RHEL 10 and the following releases.
From their announcement by developer Carlos Soriano Sanchez posted November 27th:
We want to recognize the significant effort all these organizations and individuals have made, especially the rest of the upstream community, without whom this project would never be so mature. This effort gave us the confidence to first make Wayland default for most use cases in RHEL 8, followed up with the deprecating of Xorg server in RHEL 9, with the intention of its removal in a future release. Earlier this year (2023), as part of our RHEL 10 planning, we made a study to understand Wayland’s status, not only from an infrastructure perspective, but also from an ecosystem perspective. The result of this evaluation is that, while there are still some gaps and applications that need some level of adaptation, we believe the Wayland infrastructure and ecosystem are in good shape, and that we’re on a good path for the identified blockers to be resolved by the time RHEL 10 is out, planned to be released on the first half of 2025.
With this, we’ve decided to remove Xorg server and other X servers (except Xwayland) from RHEL 10 and the following releases. Xwayland should be able to handle most X11 clients that won’t immediately be ported to Wayland, and if needed, our customers will be able to stay on RHEL 9 for its full life cycle while resolving the specifics needed for transitioning to a Wayland ecosystem. It’s important to note that “Xorg Server” and “X11” are not synonymous, X11 is a protocol that will continue to be supported through Xwayland, while the Xorg Server is one of the implementations of the X11 protocol.
Red Hat and their engineers have their fingers in many pies across the Linux space, so this is a pretty big move, and one they say will enable them to "tackle problems such as HDR, increased security, setups with mixed low and high density displays or very high density displays, better GPU/Display hot-plugging, better gestures and scrolling, and so on" — which of course will end up benefiting everyone because that's how open source works.
Have you fully switched over to Wayland yet?
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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slaapliedje Dec 8, 2023
I used one method last night, and Gnome / KDE on Xorg wouldn't start, it'd just kick back to GDM. With nvidia and GSync, it was literally just a checkbox in the nvidia-settings. AMD would definitely be nicer to actually just auto-enable certain things, or at the very least detect things correctly. Though there's this weird middle-ground where a monitor may support Gsync, but not Freesync, which is amusing, since Gsync requires a bit more hardware, and made the monitors more pricey...There apparently are ways to enable Freesync within Xorg... I know G-Sync worked when I had nvidia. All three of my monitors support GSync but according to xrandr, only one of them supports Freesync. Wayland requires the DE apparently to enable it?Input lag can be caused by a whole host of other things, outside of what software you're using even. There's a spreadsheet out there somewhere detailing all of the input lag of just using specific game pads versus another set of gamepads. I've never had any issues with input lag on gaming myself, though that could be because I'm too old to notice. But then if I don't notice, does it matter if it's there? It's like a fart you don't smell.input lag from vsync has squat to do with refresh rate honesly
It has a lot to do with that I'd say. If refresh rate is low (60 Hz) and compositor waits for vertial sync, you'll notice lag. Tearing means compositor doesn't wait and draws even if it will result in jagged image, so you'll see updates before the full refresh cycle even happens, which in practice means lower latency (lag). That kind of scenario benefits from enabling tearing.
Scenario when your refresh rate is 144 Hz and more reduces the period of blanks low enough that you don't notice anything even if compositor waits for it. But more importantly, you need to have adaptive sync (VRR) in order to avoid unnecessary waits. That's an improvement of the old style vsync.
There was a thread about it here: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/forum/topic/5185/
Here is a useful diagram:
Which is why for me KDE trumps GNOME as Freesync works out the box on wayland. Last time I tried gnome don't think freesync worked thus the bad experience on top of using vsync
Amusingly, the main reason I flip between gnome/kde right now is because File-roller is broken as far as being able to drag / drop files into Nautilus at the moment (something about the transition to a new GTK or something is lagging behind). So when I am attempting to copy software over to a CF card for my DOS/Win9x machines, I flip to KDE. This is where I don't really notice any difference whether I'm using wayland or xorg, gnome or kde. I guess if I were bored stiff, I could run some benchmarks on some games to see if Wayland+KDE or Wayland+Gnome or Xorg+KDE or Xorg+Gnome can inch out a few more FPS here or there, or have less lag... but frankly don't give a crap. I've listed the reasons why Wayland 'doesn't quite work for me yet' and that I still need Xorg for over and over again.
I've said many times over, there should be a DE somewhere in between KDE and Gnome. Gnome seems to go for the simplistic, get out of your way desktop environment, and has some useful little quirks in it. KDE goes for the 'give you all the options you could ever think of, and 10x more that you couldn't, because someone else on the internet thought it up.' approach. Both approaches are valid, but I think there would be a lot to say about a DE that could hit right in the middle of that. Or even if KDE could figure out a 'simplified' way.
I used to prefer Gnome over KDE because GTK had cooler themes / and felt less like Windows. Now Gnome just reminds me of macOS, which I have learned to despise :P
Yes thats true input lag can because by many things but in my case I think its a mixture of being locked to using Vsync and not having proper Freesync support in GNOME on wayland and the games I tend to play I notice the lag thus why KDE is just better in this regard. Honestly haven't liked GNOME since they have started down the path of mimicking Apple/macOS in every way possible.. the good, bad and the ugly.
Also KDE does have it in the plans to make a simplified settings app and just app settings in general for folks that just want the out the box experience and basic customization.. and have the rest the settings toggled on with a advanced toggle or something... Theres an Youtuber thats a KDE dev that talked about it some months back on one of his videos
The wayland compositor for the DE needs to support it.. thus for GNOME they need to add it to mutter I think. KDE added it to kwin_wayland ages ago. as far as wayland goes KDE is quite ahead of GNOME as they will be adding HDR in plasma 6 on wayland.. I tried to enable freesync on xorg before I completely swapped to wayland but could never get it to work properly.. on plasma wayland was a simple setting on the display configuration in the settings app
My 77" OLED downstairs supports both natively, though I haven't connected an AMD up to it to see how it looks there, just my 3080 RTX I pulled out of the computer that was down there (that is now driving 4 monitors on my gaming table because my projector didn't like being pointed downward....)
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I'm really surprised to hear KDE has better Wayland support than GNOME nowadays. GNOME used to be years ahead with implementing Wayland, right?
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Has there been any further work on the flickering issue when using adaptive / free sync? Last time I tried turning it on my monitor (3440x1440 144hz) it had noticeable flickering that made in totally unusable. I don't know if my monitor is to blame specifically, but just a quick search online brings up a ton of support threads all over the place discussing it.
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RHEL distributions have got to be 95% headless (complete guess), so how big is this particular Wayland announcement anyway?
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slaapliedje Dec 11, 2023
RHEL distributions have got to be 95% headless (complete guess), so how big is this particular Wayland announcement anyway?That's what I was asking earlier. Like how many people use it as their actual workstation. Likely the ones that due use it for nvidia cuda stuff... and since nvidia and Wayland still don't play 100% together... I guess Red Hat is wanting a more 'Red Team' friendliness?
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People that use CUDA are using recent software, not RHEL... generally speaking of course.RHEL distributions have got to be 95% headless (complete guess), so how big is this particular Wayland announcement anyway?That's what I was asking earlier. Like how many people use it as their actual workstation. Likely the ones that due use it for nvidia cuda stuff... and since nvidia and Wayland still don't play 100% together... I guess Red Hat is wanting a more 'Red Team' friendliness?
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slaapliedje Dec 12, 2023
Nvidia went through all the trouble to have repositories for 8 / 9 for RH, so I'm assuming 'someone' must be using it for that. I'd think most people that would buy Quadros would do such things.People that use CUDA are using recent software, not RHEL... generally speaking of course.RHEL distributions have got to be 95% headless (complete guess), so how big is this particular Wayland announcement anyway?That's what I was asking earlier. Like how many people use it as their actual workstation. Likely the ones that due use it for nvidia cuda stuff... and since nvidia and Wayland still don't play 100% together... I guess Red Hat is wanting a more 'Red Team' friendliness?
People think "RHEL has old software", sure, but the vendor stuff is going to be packaged specifically for RH (and based systems) which is why EL exists at all. The software that these guys use are going to be perfectly recent, just built for a long supported base so they don't have random breakages.
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Where I work, software developers and DevOps type people complain often of the repos having older software, and when they're not given a solution (they usually ask for Ubuntu), proceed to compile and then manually install from source. Heh. Annoying. So that's my experience.Nvidia went through all the trouble to have repositories for 8 / 9 for RH, so I'm assuming 'someone' must be using it for that. I'd think most people that would buy Quadros would do such things.People that use CUDA are using recent software, not RHEL... generally speaking of course.RHEL distributions have got to be 95% headless (complete guess), so how big is this particular Wayland announcement anyway?That's what I was asking earlier. Like how many people use it as their actual workstation. Likely the ones that due use it for nvidia cuda stuff... and since nvidia and Wayland still don't play 100% together... I guess Red Hat is wanting a more 'Red Team' friendliness?
People think "RHEL has old software", sure, but the vendor stuff is going to be packaged specifically for RH (and based systems) which is why EL exists at all. The software that these guys use are going to be perfectly recent, just built for a long supported base so they don't have random breakages.
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slaapliedje Dec 13, 2023
Oh, same here. Though in general we're forced to use Windows / macOS... But there's definitely a difference between what an engineer would use on their workstation and what sits on a server in a datacenter, which is where the RHEL based systems are still king. Well, at least until RH/IBM decided to be dicks.Where I work, software developers and DevOps type people complain often of the repos having older software, and when they're not given a solution (they usually ask for Ubuntu), proceed to compile and then manually install from source. Heh. Annoying. So that's my experience.Nvidia went through all the trouble to have repositories for 8 / 9 for RH, so I'm assuming 'someone' must be using it for that. I'd think most people that would buy Quadros would do such things.People that use CUDA are using recent software, not RHEL... generally speaking of course.RHEL distributions have got to be 95% headless (complete guess), so how big is this particular Wayland announcement anyway?That's what I was asking earlier. Like how many people use it as their actual workstation. Likely the ones that due use it for nvidia cuda stuff... and since nvidia and Wayland still don't play 100% together... I guess Red Hat is wanting a more 'Red Team' friendliness?
People think "RHEL has old software", sure, but the vendor stuff is going to be packaged specifically for RH (and based systems) which is why EL exists at all. The software that these guys use are going to be perfectly recent, just built for a long supported base so they don't have random breakages.
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RHEL distributions have got to be 95% headless (complete guess), so how big is this particular Wayland announcement anyway?
Red Hat is a major driving force behind Xorg maintainance. By announcing that Xorg will be dropped in RHEL 10. Red Hat also signals that they won't work on it anymore when RHEL 9 reaches EOL. When that happens, Xorg is pretty much abandonware.
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