I use Arch with a Gnome desktop. I came back from vacation today and updated my machine and was shocked that they removed the X11 support for Gnome.
I need Gnome on Xorg because Wayland simply doesn’t work. Which options do I have? As far as I see, I could recompile Gnome myself at the moment to get X11 back until it is removed completely.
I’m currently adopting the idea of leaving Arch after 10+ happy years and go to some slower moving distro with which I will hopefully get working X11 + Gnome for some time.
Why did the Gnome developers drop X11 while Wayland is simply unusable? I needed 15 seconds in my desktop session to realize I’m now on wayland due to the many bugs.
Been doing that. But most things happen in applications like KiCAD and they don’t investigate them further because they simply don’t support wayland at all. I spent several hours tracking bugs but most of the tickets I’ve opened are open for several months to years.
I can’t even really find out myself which part of the windowing system to report that to Is it mutter, is it the opengl implementation, is it the GUI framework? I understand too less of the way graphics works under Linux to debug that myself.
Just add or switch to another desktop that still uses X11 (there are still plenty on arch), at least when you use kicad. You don’t need to switch to another distro.
The problem is, that I actually like the workflow I have with gnome. Kicad is not the only application that has a lot of problems. Today I spotted 7 issues in various programs that prevent using them entirely. (Kicad, Firefox, Chromium, Freecad, kgx, General bugs with the clipboard like copying text and pasting broken stuff…). With that quota I’m just shocked that gnome actually removes X11. I mean these things are broken for a lot of people and going from something that worked reasonably well (X11) to something that is broken at every other end is something I can’t understand and bug reports are usually without result.
The only option for me is, to either use Gnome on X11 if I want to keep my workflow (changing distro is the easiest way for now) or using another Desktop Environment but I tried several and I’m not to happy with those either.
Can you detail some of the specific bugs you are running into?
Firefox has always been pretty good on Wayland for me (outside of one issue dealbreaking issue that popped up and that haunted me for a few months, but when I actually decided to properly report the issue with useful information, it was fixed). Chromium has always been iffy. It doesn’t help that Chromium recently made Wayland the default without fixing its issues (hopefully they actually fix them now that its default).
But on the whole Wayland has been a better experience for me compared to Wayland. Smoother and more predictable.
Kicad has a lot of rendering problems: Opengl canvases that don’t render at all etc.
Kicad’s wxwidgets GUI elements sometimes don’t get rendered correctly. E.g. Searching in the “Add component“ dialog. There are results displayed but once you hover over them everything is scrambled etc.
Window titlebars not drawn correctly. I always assumed that GTK was responsible for drawing the window including the titlebar and the close buttons etc. and that this is mostly independent from the windowing system… But as soon as I switch to Wayland they look different or are missing completely, MPV being a nice example: That program does not have any interactable UI at all anymore. Have to exit with ALT+F4 or kill.
keepass: Can’t fill clipboard with copied passwords by pressing the “copy to clipboard“ button. Same issue with other applications that try to fill into clipboard. But no general problem. Works for some other things.
Under certain circumstances CTRL+C is not passed into the kgx terminal anymore. Still trying to figure out why and when. But works with X11.
Screenshares on websites in Firefox and chromium don’t work anymore. Just a black screen is captured. → Complete showstopper for me.
(Firefox has problems playing videos with high resolution. I guess something with the hardware decoding is broken here. So probably no wayland issue but that came with the same update.)
Drawing artifacts in nautilus: when scrolling in a directory some of the pixels of the rendered text stay in place and clutter the screen. Not that dramatic but looks ugly.
Freecad: Some GUI menus are just empty and you cannot click on elements that should be there. → Completely unusable. Shopwstopper
That’s the stuff I came across today. Everything is solved by going to X11.
The issue here is that Gnome on Wayland does not support server side decoration, which is when the the compositor draws things like a titlebar, borders, and shadow. Most other Wayland compositors do through a protocol called xdg-decoration. Gnome doesn’t for philosophical reasons.
Gnome’s GTK apps all draw their own decorations, which is called client side decorations (CSDs). However, mpv does not use GTK, I think it uses a custom toolkit. So it has a fallback set of CSDs. But they kinda suck. I’m not sure why you have to forcibily kill it, there should be an X buttton in the top right.
That’s strange, does it happen with other terminals? Maybe try Ptyxis, it’s the de facto default Gnome term (kgx is the Gnome default, but most distros have overridden this choice because it lacks features).
That’s very strange. Even without hardware acceleration, you should be able to play videos at a high resolution. I had no issues playing 1440p videos on an Intel N100 (a low power 4 core CPU) without GPU acceleration.
Haven’t seen that myself. Which graphics card do you have and which driver versions? Setting the environmental variable GSK_RENDERER=gl might fix the issue if your graphics card and/or driver version is old.
I have several systems all with the same systematic bugs. these include:
My main Machine with a Ryzen 7 9700X and a dedicated AMD GPU
Another machine with a Ryzen 7 with iGPU
An i7 6700k with Intel’s iGPU
A thinkpad with an i7 4th generation and the built-in iGPU
They all run separate arch installations that show the same issues when using wayland. Most systems I own are new enough for me to be just using the mesa package and a recent kernel. I usually don’t install 3rd party graphics drivers.
It should give you built-in window controls. If it doesn’t, report it, coz it’s a bug.
Are you sure your window is focused when you press it? Otherwise I dunno why that wouldn’t work. It also doesn’t make much sense for it to be tied to display server. But yeah, try it with Ptyxis (you can get it via flathub) and see if it works there. If it does, file bug to kgx
Seems to have something to do with the Ctrl key. Exiting screen with CTRL A K is also not possible.
The Problem with filing bugs is that I get send from one place to another. The applications blame the desktop environments. Mutter etc don’t know what the problem is because I can’t pinpoint the failure to any component. See that kicad bug linked above: Works in X11, doesn’t work in wayland. Tried disabling Hardware opengl, tried kde, tried different PCs. Nothing helped. To me it feels like a bug in kicad. But kicad closed the issue telling me I should report it to GNOME.
Which components of GNOME do I report that some random window inside an application has problems triggering the rendering of an opengl canvas? You see the problem? I guess it’s not a Mutter problem, as the issue is also present in KDE. Been working in that for 3 months and nothing helped.
Well, if people contributing to Kicad don’t want to acknowledge the issue, then there’s nothing you can do (aside from contributing relevant patches, but I take it that you’re not a developer).
If the project is on GNOME Gitlab, the issue can be moved.
That indeed sounds like an application issue or some issue in the toolkit they are using. If they don’t consider Wayland supported, it is strange that they would enable the Wayland backend though. You can try disabling it yourself and force the application to fall back to use X11 via Xwayland. Not entirely sure how to do that for applications usng wxWidgets, but setting the GDK_BACKEND=x11 environment variable for that application might work since wxWidgets uses gtk/gdk in its backend on Linux.
I’m not very knowledgable in the whole UI stuff and don’t really get it. But I spent several hours compiling KiCAD, wxwidgets, Mutter and digging through with a debugger to compare stuff between x11 and wayland. But I couldn’t find anything and that’s all I can do.
If I bet money on it, I’d day it’s within wxwidgets or the underlying GTK. But I couldn’t find anything weird.
I’m on Arch Linux with Gnome Shell, running on a AMD 7xxx CPU & GPU.
mpv doesn’t show window borders but it will show window controls in the top right corner of the window, if you move the mouse. SDL provides these. You need sdl2-compat installed for this. If you never replaced the obsoleted sdl2 with sdl2-compat you won’t have window controls on SDL apps like mpv. There’s also Celluloid, a Gtk4 mpv front-end, as maybe an alternative.
You could use KeePassXC instead: Documentation and FAQ – KeePassXC . Copy to clipboard button works fine for me with that. There’s a papercut with KeePassXC that it doesn’t show in the dash until some seconds after starting because of a bug in Qt5. They are working on upgrading to Qt6 which will solve that. KeePassXC runs as a Xwayland client unless you set Qt to use Wayland (e.g., run echo ‘QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland’ > ~/.config/environment.d/qt-wayland.conf and on next log in your Qt apps will use Wayland).
I haven’t noticed that in Ptyxis, you could try that. Both kgx and Ptyxis use VTE so if you see the same issue on Ptyxis as on kgx, it’s possibly something in VTE.
I don’t use Kicad or Freecad or do screensharing with Firefox, and I don’t have a 4k display (or what do you consider a high resolution video?) so have no suggestions for the rest. Very annoying what you sum up though. With various distros switching to Wayland only I’d expect it would get more attention.
For 8, your Nautilus scrolling issue, very odd that you have this both with AMD and Intel graphics. I haven’t see the same and I have some big directories I scroll through. If restarting Nautilus with nautilus -q && env GSK_RENDERER=gl nautilus still shows the issue, do you maybe have a custom font or some Nautilus extensions which could play a role?
The annoying thing with those bugs is, that I try to file bug reports but I don’t know where because I don’t know where in the chain of tools it breaks. Kicad suggests I should report the issue to gnome. But it does not work on KDE either. So I guess it’s not a mutter / Gnome problem.
Is it mutter, is it the opengl implementation, is it the GUI framework? I understand too less of the way graphics works under Linux to debug that myself.