>Hats off to the Wayland devs. We're cheering you from the sidelines.
Its pretty horrible how much toxic crap gets directed at the people who actually do all of the work. Just look at the amount of abuse has been flung at the SystemD developers from people who largely do not even know what it does.
Then again, mocking and taunting people for using X11, which works great for most people, repeating all over every social media outlet that “X11 is dead use Wayland LOL,” giggling about how once IBM pulls its developers from X11 that “nyaaa nyaaaaahhhhh you’ll have no choice” and other poor marketing decisions, apparently conceived by obnoxious children, have convinced many people to NEVER touch Wayland with a ten foot pole.
It’s like the System D shills - they are HYPER obnoxious. I don’t need software made inside IBM, and I don’t need software which apparently can only gain adoption by obnoxious bullying.
It’s too late for Wayland, much like it’s too late for System D. The hyper childish bullshit chased me, and many others, away.
You could try it in chrome which has wayland support. Wayland support was added to chrome and electron recently but it looks like most electron apps are on old versions.
The only downside is anything running in xwayland (Essentially just apps on old versions of electron and wine) will pick the scale of one of your monitors and not switch when dragged across the border.
For me I have a 60fps 4k monitor and a 1080p monitor. I want a higher refresh rate monitor for gaming but I do not want to drop down to 1440p on my main monitor so I am waiting for 4k high refresh rate monitors to become affordable. Wayland makes it possible to wait that out and doesn't break anything I do.
>if this is really the future of desktop Linux, why doesn't it gain more momentum?
Nvidia is the major blocker here and there is very little wayland devs can do to fix this. Fedora has actively discouraged using the proprietary nvidia driver for a while now and they ship wayland by default since the open source driver works fine. I saw that ubuntu is also shipping wayland by default soon for amd and intel users.
> Nvidia is the major blocker here and there is very little wayland devs can do to fix this
I know, but it can be difficult to understand. I mean, how come we currently have Nvidia drivers for Linux, which work pretty well, and they can't be used for Wayland?
Because the entire linux graphics community uses the same API (GBM) and wayland is mostly built around that, but Nvidia insists on not using it for some reason.
Yes, but why is it not a problem for X.org? Can't Wayland be made to work using whatever Nvidia is currently providing? I guess I read it is, and even something (KDE maybe?) made it possible to run Wayland under proprietary Nvidia, so I don't really understand what's the problem.
Its extremely slow and does not support CUDA. I think the problem is nvidia blocks them somehow from changing the clock speed on the gpu so it gets stuck running in its slowest speed.
The problem has been crippling the Linux desktop for many years now and it still remains unsolved in X which must indicate that either it is not realistically possible or it is so much work that no one is willing to do it and likely never will.
The transition to Wayland is largely finished now. Electron added support last year and eventually the last of the electron apps will update and everything will be done other than nvidia proprietary driver support.
There are so many minor improvements from wayland that are less noticeable like the lack of screen tearing, the possibility of sandboxing apps.
Wayland has existed since more than 10 years and it has still not been able to release a usable system. I'm not willing to lose things that I use everyday just because some idiots want to move their windows between screens and see that they don't change their apparent size. Seriously, this is not a crippling problem. You can easily change the size of one program once it is on the desired screen. What kind of savage keeps moving their windows through different screens?
>Wayland has existed since more than 10 years and it has still not been able to release a usable system.
Fedora has has it on by default for about 4 years now and its perfectly usable. I use it every day.
The problem is much more serious than you are explaining. While using X, on my main monitor, UI and text becomes so small I can not even read it or click the icons. I'm not talking about the window size, but the UI and text size. With wayland the app can switch from 200% scale to 100% scale as it crosses the window border. On X you must pick either 100% or 200% and stick with it on all monitors.
You think that having to close an application in order to move it to a different screen is no big deal, but you think that wayland is lacking critical features? Features more critical than being able to move windows freely?
I really am curious what features you think wayland is lacking. I've been using wayland for years, both using Sway and Gnome, and the thing I've missed the most is xdotool, and perhaps there will be a standardization effort to replicate its functionality securely, but for now it's an understandable omission.
Maybe it's not fair to say that X is broken for mixed-DPI configurations, since I have managed to get it working with X, but it was quite unreliable, whereas on wayland it just works, save for some incompatible electron apps.
Its almost always cheaper to just buy a mac mini than to rent one out 24/7 though. I think Apple also made a tos change banning renting them by the hour as well.
If you're a small operation, maybe. If you're a big company you probably want to have a service, not extra hardware you have to manage, and the rental cost is a rounding error for your software development costs.
Its different based on what service you use but pretty much all of them just involve dropping a line of curl in to your crontab file to run every minute.
Its a valid comment. I tried to run synapse on a reasonable VM and it was unusably slow. Essentially you either use the main server or you are a large org that can pay for a powerful machine to run it. The average person can not run a matrix server.
Please don't repeat falsehoods like this. The average person can not run anything because software is black magic to them. If you meant the average knowledgeable computer engineer (or similar, as opposed to a large org), then you are simply wrong.
I'm running a Synapse instance for ~25 people (friends and family). We are federated and joined to many large rooms. Synapse is using about 400-600M memory (RSS, varies depending on circumstances) and about 8-10% CPU. This is all on a 2 core Hetzner VPS which costs less than 20 USD per month.
That statement isn’t strictly true in the most literal sense, but neither is it a clear falsehood, specially given that it is prefixed with the word ‘essentially’, meaning that it is a generalization.
It’s also not going to remain true over time.
But it’s not a false characterization in practical terms for most people.
I'm saying it's not true in the general case either. In fact, taking into account other things I've said, my claim is that Synapse can easily run on a home computer or a relatively cheap/weak VPS.
In what sense is it then true that you have to be a large organization and have a powerful machine to be able to run it?
The fact that you are disputed in saying this by multiple comments on this thread suggests it’s not as simple as just accusing someone of spreading falsehoods.
I was not contesting that, I was contesting the claim that you have to be a large organization and/or have a lot of money to be able to run Synapse. This is untrue. Stop moving the goalposts.
This has not been my experience. I run three servers in separate VMs on a Lenovo T420 laptop. These laptops run for about $200USD on Ebay though you'll need to upgrade the ram and the HDD to an SSD, so the cost is about $300USD.
The three servers are federated with each other and the one of them is federated to the broader matrix.org network.
I've found that loading the larger rooms from the matrix.org network can cause a bit of lag for the few dozen or so users on my servers but once the rooms have synced up that issue goes away.
I don't administer the servers personally so I don't know exactly what the issue is but I have a feeling it's due to the limited ram that is provisioned to the VMs running the instances of synapse as there are many other VMs running on that same laptop.
If the instances of Synapse were the only things running on the laptop and they had 12gb of ram each (1/3 the total 32gb limit of the laptop) I would imagine that this issue would go away.
Is seems that this just helps the argument of how inefficient Synapse is. 12GB ram is quite beefy server. the issue is that when you want to federate your server needs to be able to handle similar loads as the server you are federating with....
So not like email where you can have tiny server and still be part if the network.
I have an old laptop running a bunch of different services, three of which are matrix servers. The matrix servers generally run fine with the modest amount of ram provisioned to them (2-4GB IIRC) with the exception of hiccups that occur when a user joins large federated rooms (we're talking several thousand users) and these hiccups only last for a few seconds and until the room has finished syncing to my server. The hiccups manifest as "Unable to connect to server" messages on clients which only delays messages from being transmitted to the server by a few seconds.
From my understanding once a single user has joined these rooms and triggered the server side sync these hiccups will not happen again once another user on my server joins the same rooms as the data is already synced on the server. Furthermore there are relatively few rooms that have the number of users necessary (1000s) to trigger the issue one time join issue.
To remedy this issue and for general network reorganization purposes I intend to migrate non-synapse VMs off of the laptop and onto other hardware and then I would simply delegate the old laptop for the matrix servers and scale the three VMs to give them 1/3 of the available ram whether they need it or not. I mispoke last night when I said 12gb by the way, as the laptop only holds 32gb ram so the available ram could be (32 - (ram for hypervisor) / 3)
To bring it all back to the thing I care most about which is the over all cost, if the laptop cost $300USD and I run 3 servers on it my hardware cost per server is $100 which I consider to be trivial. This is 20 cups of fancy coffee and more importantly many hobbyists already have a spare laptop sitting around or can find one for quite an affordable price.
