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Fresh Wayland Experiences With Weston, GNOME, KDE and Enlightenment

Posted by timothy on from the finding-the-wayland dept.

jones_supa writes: Software developer Pavlo Rudyi has written a blog post about his experiences with the various desktop environments currently supporting Wayland. The results are not a big surprise, but nevertheless it is great to see the continued interest in Wayland and the ongoing work by many different parties in ensuring that Wayland will eventually be able to dominate the Linux desktop. To summarize, Pavlo found Weston to be "good," GNOME is "perfect," KDE is "bad," and Enlightenment is "good." He also created a video from his testing. Have you done any testing? What's your experience?

14 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. Gnome... by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 2

    ...is perfect? Did he not upgrade? Gnome used to be perfect. Now, not so much.

    1. Re:Gnome... by kthreadd · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The first iterations of GNOME 3 was perhaps a bit rough but that's understandable when you're fixing so much at once. Around GNOME 3.8 things got better and since 3.14 it has been really good. If you haven't tried GNOME in a while then now is a good time to look at it with fresh eyes.

    2. Re:Gnome... by Grishnakh · · Score: 2

      I've tried newer versions of it. It still sucks. It's completely minimalistic, there's barely any configuration settings, and it's buggy as hell. I hate it. The only reason I use it at all is because that's what my work machine comes with, and there's no easy way to install KDE (it's CentOS7).

      Honestly, I feel like Gnome is just like Windows Metro: a UI that I hate that people are trying to force on me. On the Windows side, it's MS trying to force their shitty UI on me through their market dominance and the fact that it's pretty hard to get any kind of job that doesn't require you to use Windows in some fashion (even if it's just email and Office). On the Linux side, it's a cabal of distro makers that have all, for some weird unknown reason, decided to push Gnome as the "preferred" UI. For Red Hat, it makes sense because it's their ugly baby (though again, it only makes some sense because it's a shitty UI and doesn't help adoption, esp. in the corporate/government sector that they work in), but this doesn't explain why everyone else including Debian loves it so much. At least Ubuntu tried to do something different, but it's no better.

    3. Re:Gnome... by kthreadd · · Score: 3, Insightful

      RHEL/CentOS 7 used to have GNOME 3.8 and I agree that was far from perfect. Red Hat recently updated it to GNOME 3.14 in the RHEL/CentOS 7.2 update, so that should have fixed most of the issues. Sure if GNOME just isn't for you then that's a matter of taste, it's not something wrong with GNOME by itself.

      By the way, try sudo yum groupinstall 'KDE Desktop' if that's what you want.

    4. Re:Gnome... by mattventura · · Score: 4, Insightful

      But the thing is, Gnome was for me, but then they needlessly took it in an awful direction. If something goes in a different direction, what it tells you is that you're no longer part of their target market and should probably seek a different solution because they no longer want you as a user. I personally jumped ship to XFCE during the awkward window where there really wasn't a good Gnome 2 fork/clone, and haven't looked back.

    5. Re:Gnome... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Same. Happily running XFCE w/ Compton on Debian here.
      It's simple, stays out of my way and doesn't crash every few days.
      Which is pretty much all the "User Experience" I want from a desktop environment.

  2. Poster means Wayland support is perfect by dwheeler · · Score: 2

    Poster just means that Wayland support is perfect, I think. In any case, GNOME 3 has gotten better. I tweak it, and yes I wish that wasn't needed for pleasant use, but once tweaks are added GNOME works reasonably well.

    --
    - David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
    1. Re:Poster means Wayland support is perfect by Uecker · · Score: 2

      After hesitating for years, I switched to xcfe. It is such a relieve from all the new crap.

  3. Re:RebeccaBlackOS by ilsaloving · · Score: 3, Funny

    Well, to be fair... it IS Friday....

  4. KDE is a work in progress by neuro88 · · Score: 5, Informative

    I read the article a few hours ago on my way to work, and I don't recall it being mentioned that the KDE port to Wayland is very much a work in progress, but this is slashdot and no one readons TFA's anyway so it's worth mentioning here. Of course the KDE port to Wayland isn't going to be very good as in a work-in-progress and more of a technology preview at this point.

    I've been meaning to try Gnome 3 under Wayland... This blog post makes me even more interested. Although I should probably try Gnome 3 under X11 first so I have a basis for comparison.

  5. Re:KDE5 crashs anyway even with X11 by jouassou · · Score: 4, Informative

    My experience was that Kubuntu 15.10 (Plasma 5.4) was unstable and crashed a lot. It wasn't a very big issue, because all the open windows always survived the crash and Plasma immediately respawned, but it was nevertheless annoying. However, I've now been running the newest version (Plasma 5.5) under Manjaro for about a month on both my main workstation and laptop, and still haven't experienced a single crash. So whatever was unstable, seems like they fixed it :).

  6. Re:KDE5 crashs anyway even with X11 by vilanye · · Score: 2

    You must be using Kubuntu or some other amateurish distro.

    KDE 5 on OpenSuse Leap is rock solid. I haven't had any crashes, stalling or any other bug.

  7. Re:Wating for the Day by dbIII · · Score: 3, Informative

    Rubbish - extensions were put in as a mechanism so that it could age well.
    Also how is a dumb framebuffer and asking others to do compositors to work with it "new"? It's video game console and MSDOS territory.
    The Wayland developers don't push it as new they push it as more simple. Please try to keep up with the topic you are a fan of.

  8. Re:Wating for the Day by Uecker · · Score: 2

    It is essentially an abstract remove buffer management system, which is still exactly what is needed. So I would say it aged very well and with xrender and more recently DRI3 is supports modern use just cases very well while maintaining compatibility. Wayland is indeed simpler but also breaks compatibility. If Linux distributions make the mistake to adopt it as a replacement for X, this will cause a lot of pain for many of us for almost no gain. I have to disagree in one point though: Wayland developers (at least one of them) push it as far superior as X by spreading FUD about X. (and a lot of clueless phoronix readers help). This sometimes went so far that even rasterman (otherwise a proponent of wayland) had enough and called Daniel Stone a liar in a thread reddit who is setting people up for disappointment.