I’ve been a PopOS fan for years. I was on 22.04 on a laptop that I bought from system76. I decided to pull the trigger and upgrade to 24.04 (that is all they offer on their site now) and I’m a little disappointed.
Wayland is pretty stable for the most part, but the biggest issue are the apps. Most apps run x11 so you will either get something wonky or it won’t launch at all. Pop 24.04 is full on Wayland and doesn’t have xWayland in there at all for compatibility.
I know most of you don’t know the battles with Wayland and x11. tl;dr Wayland is more secure than x11, but basically at the cost of current compatibility with pretty much everything in its current development state.
I wanted to hear others thoughts on this. Are you going to stay on 22.04 or upgrade to 24.04? Possibly switch to a different distro?
One thing that is kind of a deal breaker to me, but not to others is Remote Desktop clients and multi monitor support. It is really flaky or it doesn’t work at all.
My point is there are other projects that in a rewrite stage for Wayland or they simply aren’t going to support Wayland at all. Remmina says they will support it, but we are at the mercy of the devs to get us there and who knows when that is going to be done.
I don’t want to bring up old topics about Wayland. You can google around and go as deep as you want to go into why Wayland is the future. But if it is so great why hasn’t it been widely adopted in over 17 year?
My personal take is shiny things come and go every day. Not saying Wayland is one of those, but if what it’s bringing to the table ain’t big enough of a difference most people will choose to keep the known status quo.
This is compounded by the lack of applications support, as you found out.
Can you make it work? Sure. Worth the effort? To be honest, for me personally not really.
It really isn’t just “new shiny thing”. Wayland adds support for HDR and Variable Refresh Rate. Whether you see these things as important to you is a different story.
Correct. I do not, others may see it differently. Since you mentioned, I am curious what is a practical use case for you for Variable Refresh Rate? As a side note I am on Xorg and NVIDIA G-Sync works for me without any issues whatsoever in gaming and other relevant areas.
By contrast several applications that are important for me in day to day use are Conky, OBS and several applications that allow me to paint directly on the desktop using a tablet, just to name a few. None of those work properly, or at all, in Wayland. Several other Gnome extensions I’ve come to rely upon render poorly, some with serious artifacts, in Wayland.
I expect in a few years as Wayland becomes more mature most of these issues will be solved one way or the other. As it stands, subpixel scaling and HDR isn’t big enough of an appeal for the numerous downsides or headaches to make it work now for me.