I firmly believe this will be the year of the Wayland Desktop. Everything is shaping up to finishing off the transition for regular people and further stabilisation of the Wayland desktop space.
this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2023
367 points (97.9% liked)
Linux
48072 readers
1 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
This won't be the year of the Wayland desktop for me unless I can afford to replace my Nvidia card this year. I'll never buy one again, but I've still gotta suffer with the one I have a bit longer.
I'd suggest you check out NVK.
NVK is looking to be a viable replacement for general desktop computing in a few months, so long as you don't need NVENC and any of the other stuff.
By the time you're ready to buy a new card, Nvidia might be working well under wayland. They've already made significant changes in the past couple of years, like implementing GBM and hardware accelerated XWayland. To my understanding, this MR will also fix some remaining issues in the future. I don't know how much more work needs to be done after that, but just the fact they are cooperating with the free software ecosystem is a good sign.
Perhaps more importantly, the free nouveau driver can now experimentally reclock nvidia gpus from the 2000 series and newer. With this breakthrough it is possible that nouveau + nvk will be able to compete with the proprietary driver in the near future. If/when we have a well-supported free driver, we will probably have proper wayland support as well.
I'm not really in a hurry to switch to Nvidia. I've been quite happy with my AMD cards so far. But it's definitely a good thing to have the option to buy from any vendor.
Oh yeah, I'm also keeping a eye on that. Every time I see nvidia pop up in my updates, I try logging into Wayland and doing my usual tasks. If it starts working, that'll just let me extend the life of this card. I'll probably still strongly consider switching flavors with my next card.
As someone using Wayland on a HiDPI screen it's not a great experience with legacy apps. You can't completely rely on application-controlled scaling since not all apps support it and if you switch to system-wide scaling everything looks like crap.
Which apps? I've discovered recently Electron apps can enable Wayland support with a command line argument.
Just last time it was free:ac; I had to change to system scaling because it would be unreadable otherwise, and that in turn fucked up Steam that I had managed to configure properly before.
But isn't that still on par with xorg where you can't have any fractional scaling?
To be fair I haven't tried. But I believe even at 2x scaling it looked like shit.
*every application using xWayland looks like crap.
Native Wayland apps work great with fractional scaling.
This is what wayland said every year lol.
KDE 6 will have Wayland by default, on track to release Feb 2024.
Source?
We have been hearing about “The Year of the Linux Desktop” for 20 years I think and Linux has less than 5% share.
In contrast, I do not remember hearing “The Year of the Wayland Desktop” until recently. I have been hearing “Wayland is the future” forever but it has been correct the whole time.
By the time we enter 2025, I am not sure there will be a major desktop environment that does not support Wayland and many distros and DEs will be Wayland by default or even Wayland only. That is already happening. Valve may have ditched X by then and it feels like that is where most new Linux users are going to come from. It seems quite unlikely that Wayland market share on the Linux Desktop will be less than 75%.
I am not saying this is “The Year of the Wayland Desktop” but I would feel foolish publicly betting against it.
load more comments
(6 replies)
No no, this year for real! Because (highly technical reason that doesn't affect most users).
For real though, how Microsoft plays this year could be interesting considering the lukewarm reception to Win11 and the impending ewaste pile of Win10.
Especially if Win12 is cloud-based, like the rumors say, I could see a potential influx of Linux users
Not sure this is the year but my “highly technical reason” is that enough gamers switch.
load more comments
(3 replies)
Microsoft plays just like it has always played - with OEM contracts and being the default OS choice. Linux remains niche as long as Microsoft has this, unless they decide to roll out a mainstream distro themselves.
Sure, but I'm getting the feeling there's a bit of dissent in Windows users, with many vowing never to use Windows 11. If MS keep making user hostile or even just user neutral decisions and Linux starts gaining a reputation of being easy to install, we could see people trying Linux rather than upgrading to Win 11.
Of course, I doubt MS is going to let that happen. They're either going to walk back some of the egregious privacy violations or do a Google and prevent you from installing alternatives.
More techy people migrating to linux would be good, but that won't change the fact that most people don't even know that they can change their os, let alone how to do it.
More techy people joining would mean that we would hopefully get more fixes to issues linux has, as there would be more people bringing attention to them and maybe there would also be more people willing to help fix them.
When those issues are fixed, we might get to step two. Honestly not even sure what that step would be, but maybe it could be that more it-departments switch over to linux, which would get more people familiar with it, which would hopefully make manufacturers more likely to ship computers with linux.
All that is going to take a hell of a lot of time. And honestly seems unlikely to happen in the next 10, heck even 20 years. People are already so used to Microsofts shenanigans that they would have to fuck up majorly to get enough people to switch that it would matter. People are lazy, for good and bad, and as long as Windows at least mostly works fine, they'll just be stuck using it.
The Linux desktop is forever, one year cannot contain it.
Indeed! I'm not planning to go back to Winblows unless I'm being paid for it.
Maybe we'll climb to 4% marketshare!
This is for real the Linux desktop year for me, went through the switch just before the new year. Had to reinstall a couple times but no big deal, and I get to learn as well.
Not sure if out-of-the-box distros are now that user friendly yet or not, but I remember getting Ubuntu running several years ago was frustrating (no sound, bad sound quality etc) and now running EOS was pretty smooth. Pretty sure something like Mint will be user friendly enough for the general population.
It will be a pleasure, like every other year of the Linux Desktop(TM) for more than 20 years now! :-)
Year of the chromeOS desktop maybe, may faith is low
People still use ChromeOS? I just slap Linux on my chromebooks. Cheap new hardware.
Which distros do you like best on them?
Budgie installed fine and had no driver issues at all on the HP Chromebook 11 G5.
load more comments
(1 replies)
I have seen stats that both Linux and ChromeOS have around 3.5% market share.
If ChromeOS continues to converge with proper desktop Linux, I consider it a distro which makes 10%+ possible this year.
The wild card for me is Linux gaming. It may not grow fast but it totally could.
Which had me wondering for the first time I hearing about “The Year of the Linux Desktop”, what percentage do we have to hit for this to be the year?
I don’t really expect us to hit it but, for the first time, I feel like it is possible.
Which had me wondering for the first time I hearing about “The Year of the Linux Desktop”, what percentage do we have to hit for this to be the year?
Imo it's more of a list of things that need to happen, like some mainstream games, apps and devices getting 1st-party Linux support. I suspect this to start happening around the 20% mark, but ofc that's just a guess.
load more comments
(1 replies)
I just did an OS reinstall for the first time in about 4 years. Moving from Manjaro back to Arch. Happy New Year!
Here's to another year of the Linux Desktop! (been ~15 years for me) 🎉
What is the purpose of these copyright lines on comments?
Think AI training. I might write a blurb somewhere that I can link to someday, but that's the gist of it.
Do you have any evidence that writing that line actually works to keep AI from using your comment? If some of the biggest authors alive can’t keep their words out of the algorithm, I’m not convinced that a Lemmy comment stands a chance.
view more: next ›