Finally! I really wanted to like Mint, but on multi-monitor setups with different scaling per monitor X11 was really struggling and eating up like 30-40% of my CPU.
Oh I didn’t know Wayland supported multi monitor. This makes me happy to see Mint finally getting it.
This might explain some of the weirdness I’ve seen on Mint.
Yeah, I had to switch to Fedora because my three monitors with two different scaling factors and three different aspect ratios never played nice with Mint. I recognize that this was a bit excessive, but I’m still glad this is going to be fixed.
I have a very similar setup, and ended up on Fedora as well. I’ll give Mint another go soon though, I still really like the simplicity of Debian’s package management and the design decisions by the Mint team.
And it doesn’t support different refresh rates. The refresh rates needs to be the minimum that the monitor supports.
Yay!
Why would i want wayland?
Better security, better fractional scaling, and proper support for mixed refresh rates and VRR, to name some of the bigger reasons.
Steam VR
I started up Steam VR with my Vive a week ago, for the first time since installing Mint. Spent forever trying to get it to work. Eventually got it to connect sometimes when I start Mint in “software rendering” mode. I’m not linux literate enough to know what that means, but man do I see some fun new ways the OS breaks. Usually right after I turn off my headset, so it’s OK.
Try this, under the Ubuntu section: https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/18A4-1E10-8A94-3DDA
Software rendering is slower than hardware rendering, this is certainly not a Linux exclusive.
You’re essentially telling it “Hey! I have no graphical processor or that my graphical processor is so underpowered that I need my CPU to do the rendering at an attempt to speed things up.”
Suggest you sort out your GPU and or GPU drivers because you should not be using software rendering.
I think in this specific context software rendering actually means that SteamVR is having to coordinate with the window manger or whatever to draw the game to the headset’s screens rather than rendering directly to them
SteamVR as of today cannot do desktop capturing on Wayland, as opposed to X11
SteamVR on Wayland environments requires a support for DRM leasing, which to my knowledge is supported by Plasma only (my knowledge here may be out of date though)
First time I fired up my Index on Linux, I was on a fresh install of Zorin. The SteamVR app said it required a Plasma Wayland desktop session. Thankfully, it linked to a guide an moments later I understood a little bit more about the ease of Linux customization.
Since Mint tends to advertise itself as being gaming friendly, or at least people say it is, it would be nice to see them add that desktop to Mint.
X11 and Wayland are the bits that handle windows, mouse inputs and stuff around graphical user interfaces. They’re what makes GUIs work.
X has been around since the 80s and is throughly decrepit and just does not support a lot of modern functionality. If you’ve had some issue with your windows and display being janky or monitors not working properly, it’s probably due to X11. It works for the most part, but there are just a lot of situations where it creates issues.
Wayland fixes a lot off issues because it is built to handle modern situations better. If you want to see an easy example, if you’re on mint with X11, go to settings and set your UI scaling to some uneven value like 136%, you’ll probably see some weird buggy stuff happen. That’s the kind of thing Wayland fixes.
I was shocked to learn a couple days ago when I installed Mint on my wife’s Surface laptop that the UI scaling only had 2 options for scaling in the basic settings. 100% and 200%. I had to click advanced settings, enable fractional scaling or something similar, go back and then I had options for 50, 75, 125, 150, etc. i don’t remember if I saw a box for custom values though.
It’s supported.
I recently loaded T2-Linux Mint Cinnamon onto a 2017 Macbook Pro and honestly it’s a really rad distro. I’d never used it before, but now I think I may give it to my dad to replace is shitty windows install that always gives him grief.
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I’d call that plain engineering; you’ve separated out the independent logic from the point where it actually touches the system. That’s how stuff should be built and operate.
What kinds of things do you guys automate?
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Ah, I hadn’t even considered that Xdotool would be… well for X11. Thanks mentioning this, so I’ll know what the problem is next time I try to use my auto clicker script and it doesn’t work.
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Does this mean I can use HDR for games now? Its been the one thing from Windows I miss. I know there are ways to make it work or other distros but I don’t want to deal with all that.
Can someone please explain what a lambda user like myself will experience, or might experience?
I’m on Mint Cinnamon, I have no clue about windows managers etc.
If you use anything that depends on screen sharing or windows being able to talk to each other like a password manager that’s non-compliant, you might need to upgrade or change those applications. Otherwise, it should work better than X11, and be more secure.
Ideally, nothing should change for you. The Linux Mint team tends to be conservative and responsible in their software choices. If they think Wayland is ready for public use, it probably is.
But if something breaks, you can always go back to X.
Why does anyone care tho?
Because X11 is mostly dead and the guy who’s is trying to keep it alive has a questionable understanding of the programming language it is written in, to the point where he got ejected from the original X11 project for constantly and pointlessly breaking stuff. See also https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/pull/56
That’s truly something lmao
x11 feels like shit compared to wayland
