Linux Mint bringing Wayland sessions to Cinnamon

Some positive news for a lot of Linux Mint users who have been complaining about the lack of Wayland support. However, as the blog post listed, it's only going to be experimental in the next major update of Version 21. Still, it'll be good to experience the change.

Also, very clever on the naming schemes used by the Debian and Mint teams for their stable and unstable releases.

Funny times: while one distro kicks Xorg overboard, another distro finally includes Wayland as experimental.
- And then there's XFCE
XD Linux devs are such nerds...I love it. Glad to see that Wayland is becoming the standard.
- I've never heard of XD Linux before. I can't even find it on distrowatch.

Ooooh how dare you? Dontyaknow Birdie from Phoronix is struggling to run a window manager from 1983 on a ATi Rage II with Wayland???!?!??
- It's here on Lemmy, too.
  I was down to like -50 on a thread about an X11 vulnerability and all I wrote was, "Imagine still running X."
So, as it's been stated, Wayland is still not universally better than X. There are still bugs in places. Gaming is still an issue. Kwin's implementation still isn't complete enough to be reliably introduced as the default.
This is after years and years of work. Yes, making an entirely new display protocol is hard. However Wayland was introduced as the "eventual X replacement" when I was in high school. I'm 30 now. I've heard some variation of "Wayland is almost ready" since my senior year of college.
At some point it becomes exhausting. At this point when someone says something along the lines of "in a year or two, Wayland will reach a point where X.org will be a thing of the past" my immediate reaction is to call bullshit.
- While I mostly agree with you, adoption and readiness follows a curve and, at some point, that curve begins to steepen. The curve ahead of us is steeper than the curve behind us.
  GNOME defaults to Wayland now and is actually talking about removing X11 support. This Cinnamon post says that they will also do that in a couple of years. KDE is talking about doing it next year with Plasma 6.
  Once GNOME and KDE have switched, the majority of Linux desktop users will be Wayland by default. Not only will that drive the ecosystem to fix remaining problems more quickly but it will just not matter as much.
  In the next 36 months, it is going to go from “when will Wayland be ready” to “who is still using X”?
- I dunno, i daily sway/Wayland & game without issues (including game streaming). Wayland gaining mainstream support across most distros (especially something as "slow" as debian) is proof enough that its not the eventual replacement, it is the replacement.
My only issue with it currently is global hot keys. Push-to-talk on discord only seem to work when a xwayland window is in focus.
- What I've done instead is configured a desktop hotkey that toggles the system-level microphone mute. Two birds with one stone: foolproof PTT and on the same hotkey regardless of Zoom/Meet/Teams/Slack/Discord (consulting is fun)
- My sticking point with Discord in particular is that, at the moment, it's allergic to file drag and drop under Wayland. If I want to drag and drop a file attachment, I have to open the file explorer dialog and drag onto that.
  This is more of a Discord being sluggish to update problem than a Wayland being unstable problem, but it's still extremely irritating.
- The API exists, just waiting for things to catch up.
- Wayland has worked better than Xorg in my experience.
  I tried i3 with Compton and Picom - both compositors for Xorg - and it had major rendering issues, both on AMD (weird lagging) and NVIDIA (colour issues). Meanwhile I tried Hyprland on a spare PC and it provides a great tiled WM with both form and function. If anything'll get me on a tiled WM, it'll be Hyprland now. I'm also looking forward to Wayfire. We need a spiritual successor to Compiz.
What Remote Desktop tool works for you in Wayland? Found none Working well on Wayland (Maybe I did something wrong when I tried VNC and RDP)
- This has been my first struggle with Wayland. Used to be able to enable remote desktop with a single check box in most distros, then VNC into it from a Windows PC no problem. It's a real hassle now and glitchy at best once it's up and going. I gave up and have been using Anydesk to remote access a machine, and even that wasn't simple to get going.
- The only time I RDP is to my Windows machine for gaming and I've had great success with Remmina
- Honest answer? Steam RemotePlay
- Remmina or krdc work fine for me. Also parsec (no hosting there though). Oh if hosting, I'm not sure, but moonlight/sunshine work fine for me, even if it's not the usual desktop sharing app.
I've tried. KDE Plasma on the 4k external screen is giving me big black blocks to the right of windows I move or for the launcher... Like a shadow. Flickering trails of black block shadows if I move windows around. The latest nvidia driver did finally fix the mouse leave trails of black boxes, though. No idea if it works for Gnome, I can't stand Gnome's layout, workflow, and window management.
Gaming. Frame rates on Wayland are horrible as compared to on X11
- Can't replicate your results here. I play on Wayland, and deliberately force some games to run natively on Wayland (SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland) and so far I haven't noticed any framerate changes except statistical noise.

Quite glad to see Mint looking forward, good on them.

I was perfectly confident that the Mint team would get around to Wayland support, when it was good and ready. By the time they get it implemented and set as the default, it'll work great.

I like the careful approach. Yes, it's going to take longer. But when it finally arrives, it'll work.

Perfect for their overall philosophy.

It was always just a matter of time. A LOT of time in the case of anything wayland related apparently.

It's gonna get replaced by the next thing before it's even ready.

Its about time! Finally, I've been waiting a long time for this.

I wonder what will happen with the mate desktop? I know xfce is getting wayalnd support so mate might be the odd one out

No, MATE announced Wayland support a while back. Cinnamon was the odd one out until now
- No, MATE announced Wayland support a while back.
  I know progress on that has been slow, but I look in on it every now and again and work does seem to be steady in porting their core components.
  I'm not sure if they're settled on a compositor yet. There was talk (from the Ubuntu MATE devs) about using Mir, but I haven't heard anything about it in ages, and the Mir suggestion was at a time when wlroots was in a much less mature position. With XFCE, Budgie and Raspberry Pi OS all now going the wlroots direction, it's not inconceivable that MATE will go the same way.

I often reread stuff while imagining I'm someone with no knowledge of the topic, the title of this post is a good example of how hilarious things become.

What's to get? Linux's mint candy made a deal with rapper waylo to put cinnamon into their new flavour of linux
- Ah thanks now I get it

Yesss let's go.

I can finally die in peace.

Can someone explain to me what Wayland is? I don't fully understand I read wikis on it but I'm still new to a lot of this

The way for your desktop to communicate with the hardware.
It used to be X11 - A server-client architecture, which meant your desktop was effectively just a client that told the server what to do. The server was the one doing the drawing
Wayland is just a protocol, defining how programs and desktop should communicate with each other - without a middleman that was X11 server. The desktop does the actual drawing here.
- So it's faster, basically?
Software that displays programs on screen. X11 goes way back and is inefficient. Wayland is the new standard but is seeing regular improvement and updates. I know Fedora have already moved to Wayland. I think Ubuntu have now too. Mint going this direction is good news.
TLDR, software that displays apps on screen. X11 is old and awkward. Wayland is new and better but has been slowly becoming standard.
Wayland is basically the graphics system. Technically, Wayland is just the protocol and a “compositor” that implements Wayland acts as the display server—the thing that draws and manages the application windows on your screen.
Wayland replaces X11 ( the X Window System ), if you know what that is.

This is important when windows inevitably dies (subscription-based Windows 12?!) and linux mint gets flooded. Better have the "new" thing from the start

Windows won't die what are you talking about? Windows 12 subscriptions are a) just a rumor and b) not for the entire os, just certain features like AI and stuff
- Trust me bro, Windows is gonna die any day now
  -- Linux forum people, for as long as I can remember
- I heard there will be a ”windows 365". If windows goes full online like office 365 then the underlining OS could be ~~everything~~ Linux.
- I want your crystal ball
- Windows is already dead.
  Just a matter of time until people realize they're on a dead platform.
As long as there is software that only runs on Windows, Windows won't die.
- Honestly most of that software is garbage anyway

Anyone know where the sources for this are? I can't find many references to Wayland in the main Cinnamon repo, at least using GitHub's search.

I wanted to check if they use wlroots for this or are writing yet another compositor from scratch.

Cinnamon uses Muffin, which is a fork of GNOME's Mutter: https://github.com/linuxmint/muffin
yet another compositor from scratch
it's a good thing to have multiple implementations of compositors. that avoids bad practices or making compositor specific programs that wouldn't work with other compositors.
I don't think there are many "compositors from scratch" are there? GNOME and KDE both have their own, Cinnamon uses a GNOME fork, and almost everything else I can think of is wlroots based. The only other one I can think of which isn't is Mir, which has been around almost as long as Wayland has.
- There is also Weston which is the reference implementaion of a Wayland compositor.

Thank god