It’s a bit hidden in the Nix (the package manager of NixOS) manual. Basically, every time you update NixOS (or a stand-alone Nix package manager if you run it on a different OS), the status of the...
Basically, every time you update NixOS (or a stand-alone Nix package manager if you run it on a different OS), the status of the system you just is of a new generation.
E.g. if I update the first time after the initial install, the system’s state after the update will be generation 2, but if I want to (temporarily or permanently) go back to how the system looked like before the update, I can still choose to roll back to generation 1. In Nix(OS) these stack and stay until you purge old generations (e.g. my system is currently around generation 90 and I think I keep about 5 older generations just in case).
This is possible because when updating Nix (and NixOS) simply stores the new versions of the packages next to any already existing ones, and just links in your “nix profile” (i.e. what is the current system state) to point to the new versions of the packages.
(Open)Suse has something similar in place, but does it via BtrFS snapshots. So in practice, it is more akin to a system backup. Still neat though.
For the Raspberry Pi users in the audience, note that Raspbian Buster is also available. I did an in-place upgrade to Buster on mine already and it went smoothly.
For the Raspberry Pi users in the audience, note that Raspbian Buster is also available. I did an in-place upgrade to Buster on mine already and it went smoothly.
I never used Wayland, but reports I read give me the impression it's usable, but not solid, and it's missing some applications such as screen recorders. What's the advantage in choosing it as default?
I never used Wayland, but reports I read give me the impression it's usable, but not solid, and it's missing some applications such as screen recorders. What's the advantage in choosing it as default?
It depends on which compositor library you use; wlroots is stable as anything, and fixes most problems with X. Plus, you can use screen recorders on it!
It depends on which compositor library you use; wlroots is stable as anything, and fixes most problems with X. Plus, you can use screen recorders on it!
Cool. I use i3, which has sway as a replacement. But there are other screen related stuff that I use and would not wanna replace, such as Rofi, dmenu and Xfce Screenshooter. Wayland may be cool...
Cool. I use i3, which has sway as a replacement. But there are other screen related stuff that I use and would not wanna replace, such as Rofi, dmenu and Xfce Screenshooter. Wayland may be cool but it doesn’t seem to be worth the trouble from my perspective.
TO BE CLEAR: I don’t think it’s bad, I just don’t see what’s the advantage from a user point of view. For me to switch right now being just as good is not enough, it has to be significantly better.
dmenu works on sway just fine (though I personally use bemenu, which is a drop-in replacement), Rofi does too! Sway also has more features than i3 (like, drastically so), including dynamic,...
dmenu works on sway just fine (though I personally use bemenu, which is a drop-in replacement), Rofi does too!
Sway also has more features than i3 (like, drastically so), including dynamic, per-workspace gaps settings, which is a surprisingly popular feature.
Personally, I mostly like it for the improved performance.
Sway's lead developer's primary non-desktop machine is a laptop that turned eleven years old this month, and the performance difference (on wlroots-based compositors, not Weston-based ones)...
It's a drop-in replacement, yeah! You can even carry over your current configuration file with little-to-no changes (though I personally didn't, because Sway's got a few QoL features...
It's a drop-in replacement, yeah! You can even carry over your current configuration file with little-to-no changes (though I personally didn't, because Sway's got a few QoL features configuration-wise that I enjoy and wanted to take advantage of).
How would answer to these concerns on Reddit (permalink):
How would answer to these concerns on Reddit (permalink):
Apparently mouse in all FPS games and some others does not work properly. And others (native or wine) are a stuttering and tearing mess.
Performance in XWayland programs is pretty bad.
Getting copy-paste to work everywhere is a major pain.
Firefox beta is supposed to support Wayland, but in reality it crashes every few minutes and performance is terrible (for me at least, many say it works great). And the xwayland version tears and stutters just like old X.
Edit: This is my experience with the development build of sway on Arch. By saying none of this is accurate, /u/someoneyouusedtokn0w has lost credibility, since the issue in games is not an issue only I am having, but is a known shortcoming of wayland at this time.
I don't play games on my laptop that runs linux, so I am not sure about that one. I do know that mouse grabbing sometimes is a little buggy, iirc wayland doesn't have official support for it, but...
I don't play games on my laptop that runs linux, so I am not sure about that one. I do know that mouse grabbing sometimes is a little buggy, iirc wayland doesn't have official support for it, but I could be wrong.
The only thing I use with Xwayland is Kritta, and I havn't had any issues, although I did just buy my laptop last year.
copy-paste works just fine with wl-clipboard which imo has a better interface than xclip, and even has an xclip wrapper to use with any app that only supports xclip. I have had no issue with copy-paste at all after installing these, so I wouldn't say it's a pain at all.
I use Firefox stable on wayland and I don't have any issues at all. Crashes less than Firefox does on my windows desktop.
I'll go down the list real quick: The mouse should work just fine, it's the controllers that are having the issue (Wayland uses libinput instead of evdev, which means that everything is a mouse)....
I'll go down the list real quick:
Apparently mouse in all FPS games and some others does not work properly. And others (native or wine) are a stuttering and tearing mess.
The mouse should work just fine, it's the controllers that are having the issue (Wayland uses libinput instead of evdev, which means that everything is a mouse).
The stuttering part sounds like he has a driver misconfigured.
Performance in XWayland programs is pretty bad
Sounds like another misconfig; seems to work fine for everyone else.
Getting copy-paste to work everywhere is a major pain.
Has been solved since.
Firefox beta is supposed to support Wayland, but in reality it crashes every few minutes and performance is terrible (for me at least, many say it works great). And the xwayland version tears and stutters just like old X.
The XWayland version doesn't, at least anymore. Firefox's native Wayland support is geared more toward Weston and has a few kinks on wlroots-based systems.
I'm on Void, and that's from seven months ago on Arch. Sway gets a dot release like every week; it's pretty small, even if you tried it and didn't like it overall/didn't like it for gaming, you could always uninstall it, or start a game fullscreen in a separate tty over X to get it to work.
Even GNOME Boxes has issues with mouse capturing on Wayland. If I allow my cursor to be captured once, it'll be permanently hidden as long as it stays over the window, even if it's not captured...
Even GNOME Boxes has issues with mouse capturing on Wayland. If I allow my cursor to be captured once, it'll be permanently hidden as long as it stays over the window, even if it's not captured anymore. I also have issues with the actual mouse cursor still existing and getting stuck on the edges of my monitor while its in the middle of the virtual screen. Mouse capturing had some work to be done still.
Well, typing this from firefox (Nightly) on wayland which works wonderfully, I'd say so long as you use nightly (or maybe a newer beta? not sure how often they get released) firefox should be...
Well, typing this from firefox (Nightly) on wayland which works wonderfully, I'd say so long as you use nightly (or maybe a newer beta? not sure how often they get released) firefox should be comparable to the experience on X. Xwayland performance (using gnome, which should carry over to sway but ymmv) is usually on par with regular X, with a couple notable exceptions - for example, games (which do seem to work in general with mouse grabbing and such for me, maybe it's a gnome/wlroots discrpency?) can't always set a displays resolution like they can on X (i.e. display/desktop at 4K, game at 1080p), but otherwise perform just as well. Copy-paste also seems to work well here (again, on gnome wayland), though I also use a clipboard manager, which may have something to do with it.
It helps push adoption, I guess. We have to move off Xorg sooner or later, preferably sooner and when Debian defaults something new people might take a bit more notice because of Debian's...
It helps push adoption, I guess. We have to move off Xorg sooner or later, preferably sooner and when Debian defaults something new people might take a bit more notice because of Debian's reputation for reliability. If WeirdDistro15 uses Wayland nobody notices but when it's in Debian Stable it's closer to hitting mainstream.
Last time I tried Wayland was a while ago and it was fairly wobbly, I should probably log out and back in again to see if it's got better.
What's the support for older hardware like? I'm running Jessie on a Lenovo T410s Thinkpad, and I coulnd't upgrade to Stretch because it kept overheating my machine. No joy. If Buster can run on...
What's the support for older hardware like? I'm running Jessie on a Lenovo T410s Thinkpad, and I coulnd't upgrade to Stretch because it kept overheating my machine. No joy. If Buster can run on machine without causing it to overheat, I'll be overjoyed.
I have a T440s which has been running Buster for years with no problems (I track 'testing', the codenames are confusing). Mine might be slightly more beefy than your machine, not sure quite what...
I have a T440s which has been running Buster for years with no problems (I track 'testing', the codenames are confusing). Mine might be slightly more beefy than your machine, not sure quite what that extra 30 between 410 and 440 buys you in terms of Thinkpad power.
And HTTPs apt is supported by default! Looks like another solid release.
Very impressed with their progress on reproducible builds as well.
Given we almost have full reproducible builds should we expect features like generations in Guix/Nix anytime soon?
I did some searching but wasn't able to quite tell, what are generations?
It’s a bit hidden in the Nix (the package manager of NixOS) manual.
Basically, every time you update NixOS (or a stand-alone Nix package manager if you run it on a different OS), the status of the system you just is of a new generation.
E.g. if I update the first time after the initial install, the system’s state after the update will be generation 2, but if I want to (temporarily or permanently) go back to how the system looked like before the update, I can still choose to roll back to generation 1. In Nix(OS) these stack and stay until you purge old generations (e.g. my system is currently around generation 90 and I think I keep about 5 older generations just in case).
This is possible because when updating Nix (and NixOS) simply stores the new versions of the packages next to any already existing ones, and just links in your “nix profile” (i.e. what is the current system state) to point to the new versions of the packages.
(Open)Suse has something similar in place, but does it via BtrFS snapshots. So in practice, it is more akin to a system backup. Still neat though.
For the Raspberry Pi users in the audience, note that Raspbian Buster is also available. I did an in-place upgrade to Buster on mine already and it went smoothly.
Same for Armbian, for any non-R-Pi ARM boards. I will probably upgrade my servers in the coming few days.
I never used Wayland, but reports I read give me the impression it's usable, but not solid, and it's missing some applications such as screen recorders. What's the advantage in choosing it as default?
It depends on which compositor library you use;
wlrootsis stable as anything, and fixes most problems with X. Plus, you can use screen recorders on it!Cool. I use i3, which has sway as a replacement. But there are other screen related stuff that I use and would not wanna replace, such as Rofi, dmenu and Xfce Screenshooter. Wayland may be cool but it doesn’t seem to be worth the trouble from my perspective.
TO BE CLEAR: I don’t think it’s bad, I just don’t see what’s the advantage from a user point of view. For me to switch right now being just as good is not enough, it has to be significantly better.
dmenu works on sway just fine (though I personally use bemenu, which is a drop-in replacement), Rofi does too!
Sway also has more features than i3 (like, drastically so), including dynamic, per-workspace gaps settings, which is a surprisingly popular feature.
Personally, I mostly like it for the improved performance.
How better is wayland performance, and in what way?I have a weak machine and such an improvement would be welcome.
Sway's lead developer's primary non-desktop machine is a laptop that turned eleven years old this month, and the performance difference (on wlroots-based compositors, not Weston-based ones) represents that pretty well.
Plus, another benefit: even if you're on drastically old hardware, there'll be no screen-tearing. It's really quite pleasant.
That changes everything. I’ll look into sway. If it supports all features I use on i3, that’s a no-brainer for me.
It's a drop-in replacement, yeah! You can even carry over your current configuration file with little-to-no changes (though I personally didn't, because Sway's got a few QoL features configuration-wise that I enjoy and wanted to take advantage of).
How would answer to these concerns on Reddit (permalink):
I'll go down the list real quick:
The mouse should work just fine, it's the controllers that are having the issue (Wayland uses libinput instead of evdev, which means that everything is a mouse).
The stuttering part sounds like he has a driver misconfigured.
Sounds like another misconfig; seems to work fine for everyone else.
Has been solved since.
The XWayland version doesn't, at least anymore. Firefox's native Wayland support is geared more toward Weston and has a few kinks on wlroots-based systems.
I'm on Void, and that's from seven months ago on Arch. Sway gets a dot release like every week; it's pretty small, even if you tried it and didn't like it overall/didn't like it for gaming, you could always uninstall it, or start a game fullscreen in a separate tty over X to get it to work.
Even GNOME Boxes has issues with mouse capturing on Wayland. If I allow my cursor to be captured once, it'll be permanently hidden as long as it stays over the window, even if it's not captured anymore. I also have issues with the actual mouse cursor still existing and getting stuck on the edges of my monitor while its in the middle of the virtual screen. Mouse capturing had some work to be done still.
Well, typing this from firefox (Nightly) on wayland which works wonderfully, I'd say so long as you use nightly (or maybe a newer beta? not sure how often they get released) firefox should be comparable to the experience on X. Xwayland performance (using gnome, which should carry over to sway but ymmv) is usually on par with regular X, with a couple notable exceptions - for example, games (which do seem to work in general with mouse grabbing and such for me, maybe it's a gnome/wlroots discrpency?) can't always set a displays resolution like they can on X (i.e. display/desktop at 4K, game at 1080p), but otherwise perform just as well. Copy-paste also seems to work well here (again, on gnome wayland), though I also use a clipboard manager, which may have something to do with it.
My i3 configurations are far from basic and I’m also on an old/unmaintained version. But let’s see.
It helps push adoption, I guess. We have to move off Xorg sooner or later, preferably sooner and when Debian defaults something new people might take a bit more notice because of Debian's reputation for reliability. If WeirdDistro15 uses Wayland nobody notices but when it's in Debian Stable it's closer to hitting mainstream.
Last time I tried Wayland was a while ago and it was fairly wobbly, I should probably log out and back in again to see if it's got better.
What's the support for older hardware like? I'm running Jessie on a Lenovo T410s Thinkpad, and I coulnd't upgrade to Stretch because it kept overheating my machine. No joy. If Buster can run on machine without causing it to overheat, I'll be overjoyed.
I have a T440s which has been running Buster for years with no problems (I track 'testing', the codenames are confusing). Mine might be slightly more beefy than your machine, not sure quite what that extra 30 between 410 and 440 buys you in terms of Thinkpad power.