Tell HN: Gnome on Wayland Is Amazing

My experience is very similar. I tried the first iterations of Gnome 3 and was very disappointed.

At some point I tried Windows+WSL but that was a complete disaster.

A couple of years ago I decided to try Fedora+Gnome+Wayland. It is an outstanding experience. Everything is smooth, the UI is beautiful. Now with PipeWire and Libadwaita things are getting even better. After some stagnation, the Linux desktop is gaining momentum again.

There are a lot of hate comments for Gnome in this post. My advice for those reading is: Try it for yourself! Most of the haters haven't used Gnome since 2004. Just try it!

It is unfortunate that so many of the early comments are negative. Either Wayland is the future, or something that learns from Wayland's mistakes and leverages its ideas is. There is a really fertile field right now for experimentation in the world of compositors but I think people have been scared away by the long dark era of X Windows + binary graphics drivers. Maybe we're going to see a lot more of it on HN in the next decade?

What kept me off Wayland was the screenshots thing, but the argument in favour of the idea is strong. The downside is Wayland's conception of permissions and interactions is too basic and crippled adoption for a few years but the fundamentals (blocking cross-application snooping) is going to be necessary. Operating systems have to be less trusting.

I had to go back to GNOME on Xorg. GNOME on Wayland won't run my 4k display at a consistent 60Hz, which results in horrible issues in games and emulators, as well as massive numbers of dropped frames in 50/60Hz videos. It is set to run at 60Hz in the display settings, but actually seems to run somewhere in the 50s.

The easiest way to see this is checking the "stats for nerds" while watching a 60fps YouTube video and noting the persistent dropped frames. glxgears also doesn't maintain a consistent framerate.

This doesn't happen in Sway, so I can only assume there is some bug in Mutter that has persisted across several versions of GNOME and Fedora. So Wayland might be great, but my experience with GNOME on it has not been.

I still have several issues with Wayland on Ubuntu 21.10:

- windows (especially gnome-terminal and gedit) sometimes randomly extend behind the dock and top bar (apparently this is fixed in a newer GNOME version)

- apps using a recent version of Qt and native Wayland rather than XWayland have an excessively large cursor on HiDPI (fixable by setting an environment variable, but that's a hacky solution)

- Firefox addon popups are cut off on HiDPI

- Oracle SQL Developer just doesn't work at all (the window doesn't show when I try to launch it) [EDIT: this actually seems to work now]

- Onboard (on-screen keyboard, because GNOME's built-in one has a horrible UX) can't be moved around on the screen when using Wayland (which was one of the main reasons I switched from the built-in one)

- Chrome Remote Desktop doesn't work at all on Wayland, and in fact prevents you from logging in to the Wayland session at all once you log out / reboot after installing it

I still try to use Wayland though, because Xorg isn't perfect either:

- colors seem to be more accurate on Wayland

- Diodon (clipboard manager) randomly doesn't trigger with my custom Win+V keyboard shortcut on Xorg

- some apps default to an extremely tiny window on Xorg HiDPI

I love Gnome on Wayland, but don't be a fool like me, and stay away from it if you use any nvidia hardware. The most recent drivers supposedly add support fort proper Wayland (instead of relying on optional extensions) but enabling it under nvidia has caused nothing but trouble for me.

I wouldn't call it the MacOS interface for Linux. It's more of a mix of Windows and macOS paradigms with its own unique spin on things. I strongly dislike the macOS interface with its arbitrary limitations (window snapping? what's that?) and plain weird keyboard shortcuts (hitting enter on a file in Finder renaming the file instead of opening it, for one) and I find the Gnome interface much usable.

Sadly, the gnome people are a weirdly political bunch when it comes to things like server side/client side decorations and other such decisions. There are also comical problems like the lack of a thumbnail preview in the file picker, an issue that has been waiting to be resolved for longer than some of the people here have been alive (https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=141154&, https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/233). In a month the issue will be old enough to vote, drink and drive.

Gnome is great when it works for you, but if you give it an honest try and it doesn't, you won't be able to fix it. Luckily, KDE supports Wayland and its niceties as well, and it's quite good for the people that tend to dislike Gnome.

I tried to use Wayland, but simply speaking the way it handles/supersedes earlier input mechanisms - which some seem to call a form of security theatre - is disruptive.

For instance, I have bound keyboard shortcuts to manage windows via `wmctrl`. It's absolutely crucial to my workflow, since I use an ultrawide monitor. wmctrl is mostly impossible with Wayland, and which required me to revert back to X11. Certain apps also sometimes do not work in X11 (e.g. Ubuntu's Software Center, for reasons lost to me), which then forces me to use Wayland.

I've noted a couple of other grievances, so I do not agree that Wayland is absolutely a good thing for now (at least for me).

Here's my short list of KDE features that I use daily:

  - Multiple desktops: Win-Tidle  
  - Move app to next screen: Win-N
  - Move app to next desktop: Shift-Win-N
  - Maximize window: Win-PageUp
  - Switch windows: Alt-Tab
  - Switch windows in application: Alt-Tilde
  - Show all Windows, filter by typing: Win-Tab
  - Launch program: Win-F2, Win-F12
  - Vertical task bar with task manager, analogue clock, system tray, main menu, language switcher indicator.
  - Window always on top toggle
  - Open specific application window with "always on top" activated
  - Open application always on specific desktop
  - Volume down: Win-[
  - Volume up: Win-]

If you tell me that Gnome now supports all that, then I'll invest the time in installing, configuring, and daily driving it for a few weeks.

I fully agree. And Wayland supports HiDPI with fractured scaling very well. Also tablet devices work better on Wayland. If you’re running Linux on a Surface, you should definitely switch to Wayland. It’s really time to ditch XServer and I wonder why Ubuntu and derivates still use it by default.

I've used Gnome on Wayland since first available on Fedora, that's until two days a go! What happened you might ask? Well, I had enough of slow performance, with every release I'm thinking it'll improve, it did but at slow pace.

It's beautiful, and I like the UX, but it's lacking underneath, go ahead and play a 4k clip on Wayland enabled Firefox then move the mouse pointer, it stutters like crazy.

The mouse movements/scrolling in general doesn't feel natural at all, it has some kind of weird acceleration curve, scroll on Wayland enabled Firefox for example and compare that to Firefox under X11, day and night difference, under X11 it's MacOS like smoothness.

For some weird reason, switching to X11 fixes the performance, responsiveness and mouse scrolling/acceleration/movement accuracy, without doing a thing.

Sadly, because of the above and the fact that Gnome 42 no longer does fractional scaling under X11, I had to leave Gnome behind, I'm now on Fedora 36 KDE which I'm liking so far.

* My machine (3900x/rx5500/4k monitor/mx master 3) felt very slow sometimes to the point I was going to get rid of Linux all together and go MacOS or Windows (I dislike both).

* Thanks everyone for the continued work on Desktop GNU/Linux, inc Gnome and Wayland guys.

> it's MacOS interface for linux

Work bought me a MacBook, and after using it for a year I still can't get over how obnoxious the window manager is: No horizontal window splits, and vertical splits only supports two-per-monitor, window switcher hotkey has no positional awareness, there's like two kinds of maximized and some apps don't give you a way to get out of one of them, the list goes on.

I also dislike gnome, but I had never put them together before. I started today disliking two things, and now I realize that they're actually the same thing. Somehow that's better, thanks.

Gnome on Fedora is my daily driver. I occasionally play with KDE and other environments for fun, but when it comes down to something I need to get on with my work I just go with stock default Gnome. It gets out of the way, which is exactly what a DE needs to do.

I'd like to use Wayland, but it's not stable enough. I've lost count of the number of times I've lost work due to a segfault and then being logged out. And lots of applications still don't support it for screensharing (looking at you slack).

My bug in particular seems to be related with thunderbolt or USB c connected monitors. A disconnect will prompt a segfault.

I'd like to contribute with a proper bug report and I probably would if I hadn't had everything working with gnome+X. But now I just can't motivate spending time on it over other things in my life. Hope they have telemetry for segfaults at least.

Sway works pretty much perfectly for everything I throw at it (which is mostly alacritty, emacs, firefox and chromium). If you can stomach minimalism, give it a try.

In my opinion, it represents a significantly better UI than Gnome/KDE/MacOS/Windows paradigms. So much that it's probably the largest reason why I live mostly in Linux land instead of Mac right now.

The Gnome-ish shell on Pop 21.04 running on my full AMD laptop (5900hx cpu/apu, 6800m gpu) works smooth as butter. It games great and I'm using with 2 monitors one being 165Hz 1440p and the other 60Hz 4k. I had to enable Wayland on the login manager config files.

No driver installation required. I have no regrets for ditching my Nvidia RTX 3060 hardware.

I like UI minimalism and launch screen, but I don't like some features that they copy from MacOS. For example, separate keys for switching between windows of one application and between different applications. So inconvenient. Poor Mac users.

Also I don't like "(un)natural scrolling", a feature when the content is scrolled in the wrong direction.

Gnome seems to be optimized for high resolution (expensive) displays. On a normal laptop display, everything (buttons, window headers, input fields) seems too large.

Also, Gnome needs better discoverability for its features. For example, on first launch there is an empty desktop and it is not clear that you need to press Windows key to access launch screen.

Gnome is the worst of the wayland compositors in terms of spec compliance. KDE and sway are much better in this regard. What good is having protocol specifications when the reference implementation does not implement it, and Gnome, the biggest Wayland desktop, does its own thing anyway?

I am still waiting for Gnome to implement server-side decorations and for proper drag and drop between windows.

It's like the python3 adoption story again. Wayland compositor with hw acceleration doesn't work well with programs specifically written for x11. I gave up on it fast once I realized that I can't take screenshots or record the desktops.

Wayland... Right, as for now I am still using X, and I like it, and I am way too used to bspwm,

But when I Poked wayland WMs, man, Things felt just... smoother. I probably will move to river+waybar, but, I need to just, do the effort of configuring waybar a bit more, to make it prettier. But that is okay, for now, bspwm as fallback :P

And GNOME.. About the only DE I actually like, so I agree with you lol

I installed Fedora 35 and Pop OS to try them and I've been blown away by the interface (both have the current Gnome). It looks sleek and modern, and the usability is also good. I felt the kind of joy where I want to show other people how cool it is.

Propaganda. Wayland has usability issues they've yet to fix after 10 years. and GNOME is sadly a DE that's just javascript.

The Linux Desktop deserves better than GNOME, and sadly KDE is the one that's gotten massively improved in the last 10 years.

I thought so too, first impression is very good. Unfortunately I couldn't keep using it because you can't screen share in MS Teams with Wayland, and most games don't work in Wayland either.

So it was back to X11. Until screen sharing works in more apps, and until Proton/Wine games work I'm sticking to X11 and I'm not complaining.

What about those of us who don't like macOS UI?

I don't like the dock, I don't like the way it (usually fails) to maximize windows, I don't like full screen apps anywhere other than a laptop, and I especially don't like Finder and every other attempt at representing hierarchy as anything other than a tree view of folders (not files) and a flat list view of files.

Gnome's prediliction for putting UI controls into the titlebar is dreadful, IMO.

However it seems that the designers of every other desktop OS have macOS envy.

It gets better. Seems like Wayland is finally getting closer to delivering on its promise for a silky [0]smooth desktop experience (on Gnome at least).

[0]. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1441

For me it is the other way around, I stuck with Gnome for a long time since 2003 up until 2020, my problem is that with every update I had to work harder and harder to make unwanted changes go away, especially when you have to cater more users than yourself on the machine. That said, the underlying libraries and systems are amazing in that everything goes smoothly, same can be said for Kde. Nowadays I use LXQt and I am so happy with that it adheres opendesktop standards and is flexible but not changing under my ass. I use Gnome and Kde under the hood and this combination keeps me happy.

Counterpoint: I suspect you're still new to GNOME 3 and are still in the honeymoon phase, and haven't yet noticed the regular app crashes and annoying UI inconsistencies.

Source: Self. I use it daily. It's not the worst. It shows great promise, but it is not really what I would describe as polished.

I like the idea of Wayland and Gnome. It's just that using my Manjaro linux laptop reminds me of windows 95 in terms of stability lately.

- frequent system freezes that don't seem recoverable. Possibly driver related (intel xe with an i5, 5.16 kernel). But really annoying.

- I've had to deal with a weird bug where after standby the laptop would wake up and then lock again after a few seconds. I "fixed" it by disabling screen and lock timeouts for now. I have no idea how this started happening; or why. The workaround is of course not great on a laptop.

- Screen sharing with discord, slack, etc. seems a PITA. I can share a window but not my screen in discord. And then of course Firefox is not among the windows I can actually share.

- A lot of things that would be settings that I'd like to manipulate in Gnome are instead only configurable via perpetually unstable extensions that break between updates; or configuration file. For example, I'd like to get rid of the top bar in gnome because it's a waste of space and a pretty dumb idea on a 1080p screen (sadly the most common form factor for laptops). There's an extension for that that promptly broke with the next Gnome update.

- Key settings related to touchpad configuration (appallingly bad defaults out of the box) don't even have UI. You just need to fiddle with configuration files.

- The gnome terminal has keybindings for switching tabs that don't seem to work. I've no idea why. I'd like that to work in a sane way. I'm experimenting with alternatives but haven't really found anything that comes even close to what I had with iterm2 on mac.

i've been meaning to give wayland another go since my last attempt maybe ~1.5 years ago. there was some promise, but it was still lacking for me:

* i use Kupfer as a quicksilver/alfred replacement. triggering the hotkey made it open the dialog on the bottom left of the window i'd most recently used (rather than centre-screen)

* alt-tabbing in and out of fullscreen-games was much less reliable (if at all possible) - which was weird as i'd have said there was a perceptable increase in latency

* getting wine/proton games to launch was more challenging

* i've modified lots of things on this system to have mac-like keybindings (e.g. "command"-c/v for copy paste in terminal, etc. and not all of these are configuration changes, as in many terminal emulators). i seem to remember wayland behaving strangely with super-based keybinds. i don't think i ever got "command"-w to work properly.

* a myriad of behavioral differences in window/desktop management made it surprisingly painful to persist for any length of time.

which is a shame because it really does feel that wayland is architected better than X11.

Forget Ubuntu and their old software, Fedora GNOME is where its at, finally a forward facing distro for workstations and professionals. I highly recommend giving it a shot.

Fedora is the new Ubuntu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9h_0dnSGWk

The long-term merits of Wayland aside, I must admit that I too find Gnome on Wayland polished, smooth and fun to use. Since 2021, I've preferred using it over the macOS desktop.

Be careful about relying on GNOME shell extensions; they are similar to Firefox XUL extensions in that they can do anything to the internals of GNOME shell, often break on each version upgrade, often are poor quality with memory leaks, often get abandoned upstream and removed from distros etc.

I've been using wayland with Gnome 40 (pop os) for a few months now. Though I can't tell if its better than X11 its definitely not worse. Both seem identical to me except that on wayland drag n drop files into Chrome/Firefox and screen sharing don't seem to work.

I was using GNOME 3 and wayland since it came out.

But around 2 years ago there was an update of gjs that crashed GDM but was required for GNOME and GTK itself. It was kind of a paradox because gjs is used everywhere, and it crashed everything losely related to GTK4.

So there I was, unable to start any wayland session that had any GTK in it, and decided that I'm gonna retry migrating to i3.

Never regretted my decision. Now I'm using i3 or sway everywhere, depending on driver support (age) of the system.

But if you rely on conventions that a Desktop Environment offers, I wouldn't recommend it unless you're willing to write a lot of shell scripts and bindings and config files.

"It's MacOS interface for linux."

Yeah, you lost me right there. Everything I've seen here amounts to "it's pretty."

No mention of the stuff that matters to a lot of us, and I would be so bold as to suggest that it's more important -- namely "backwards compatibility with X." Look, a LOT of stuff relies on it, especially if you've tweaked your desktop in a way that works for you.

It's like you're offering me a Lamborghini, but I need my Toyota Tacoma because I have things to do.

I'd love to use Wayland but so far I couldn't make input switching work reliably. In X I have a global shortcut to change my fcitx input to e.g., Japanese or Chinese and in Wayland the applications appear to have to implement a lot more and as such it works in some apps but not in others.

Screen sharing in Zoom works quite well if I go through Firefox instead of the Zoom client, which I even do under X, otherwise my machine eventually crashes (probably a memory leak)

Gnome on PopOS has been perfect for me for the last couple years. It feels as productive, functional and out of your way as Windows 7 used to feel. The settings and other menus are all consistent and easy to find things inside. The file manager does exactly what it needs to do and nothing more. I have no complaints at all and wouldn't change a thing.

I really wish GNOME Wayland supported crash resilience like Arcan does, so it could cope with GPU hangs and driver crashes etc.

https://arcan-fe.com/2017/12/24/crash-resilient-wayland-comp...

My experience has been nothing like yours. In my experience with Ubuntu 21.10, Wayland is still a glitchy, bug-ridden mess, despite more than a full decade of work. Just some random things that don't work:

- If I alt-tab, I need to move the mouse before I can use my scroll wheel. If I try to scroll before moving the mouse, nothing happens. It's almost as if I need to move the mouse for Gnome to realize that a different window has focus

- Basic Gnome commands (like restarting) are unavailable

- For some reason, Gnome on Wayland can't handle Bluetooth as well as Gnome on X11. I used to have pretty regular Bluetooth disconnections on Wayland. Switching back to X cured the problem

It's tempting to say that Gnome is the problem, but Gnome on X11 works just fine.

To put it succinctly, it's MacOS interface for linux.

Yes, insofar as recent versions of MacOS have also been glitchy, bug-ridden messes.

I had to switch back to Xorg in my Framework laptop mostly because of the screen share, but also because of an issue with the mouse lagging.

The mouse lagging turned out to be a problem with Panel Self Refresh, so I had to disable it: <https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Ubuntu+21.10+Installation+on...>

Now it's fixed (although I would like to have the PSR back), and I don't think I'll try Wayland until I can get:

1) Google Chrome Teams screen share working or a good, native, official client for Teams

2) Discord screen share (well, I use the Snap version, I should try the Flatpak version)

I would like to use Wayland 24/7, but probably won't get to try it again for a few months

How is the HDPI experience? I am using KDE with a lot of hacks [1] currently, would love to try something that is more native.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30752499

Gnome comes stock with RHEL, so I'm not bothered to use other desktops as most of my time is spent in the terminal. I did get into some of the minimalist desktops at some point to see how little I could get away with. In that regard, OpenBox is pretty good, yet there are other more extreme minimalist desktops if you want.

Having said that, I have yet to have anything crash while running Gnome, but have had to limit a couple services provided by Gnome over time...sometimes -- maybe bugs in updates -- they can get resource hungry even while idle, but nothing beyond what an obsessive admin or power user might care about.