I’m running Fedora 21 with Wayland, and so far (almost) everything is working just fine

 I'm running Fedora 21 with GNOME 3.14 and the Wayland display server. Everything is minimized at the moment.

I’m running Fedora 21 with GNOME 3.14 and the Wayland display server. Everything is minimized at the moment.


After saying I wouldn’t jump into a Fedora 21 upgrade, I rather quickly had a change of heart and mind, ran a Fedup upgrade and am now running Fedora 21 on my go-to HP Pavilion g6 laptop.

With Wayland.

Yep, one of the new features of the GNOME 3.14-running Fedora 21 is a preview of the next-generation, post-X Window Wayland display manager, and you can choose “GNOME with Wayland” in the login/session manager.

I’m running Wayland right now. I’ve heard the caveat many times: Not all applications will work in Wayland. But so far, every application I’ve tried (Firefox, Gedit, Transmission, FileZilla, VLC, Files/Nautilus, Liferea, Yumex, Google Chrome, Geany, even apps in Wine) has run in Wayland with no trouble.

I’ve been running Fedora 21 for a few days now, spending most of my time in the non-Wayland world of Xfce and GNOME with X, and the system is as solid as ever. And by that I mean pretty damn solid.

The only glitch I’ve had with Wayland has been in suspend/resume, which is pretty touchy anyway with my hardware. (I’ve probably written 50 posts about it since I got this laptop.) When running Wayland, the laptop will suspend and then resume, but I’m seemingly “detached” from my session and have to log in again. At this point I’m logged in twice. This doesn’t happen in X. If this is the only thing I can find wrong with Wayland, I’ll still consider it pretty remarkable.

Just from a “look and feel” perspective, GNOME 3.14 is working better and faster than version 3.10 did in Fedora 20. I’m not saying I’m going to throw Xfce over for it, but the environment is more usable than ever. I moved to the Adiwata Dark theme while still in F20, and everything looks that much better in F21.

As I’ve said since I began running Fedora 18 on this laptop and upgrading via Fedup to each subsequent release, a system as forward-looking as Fedora shouldn’t be anywhere near as stable as it is. It’s a tribute to the developers for Fedora and the many upstream projects that go into the distribution.

Today marks only nine days since Fedora 21 went stable, and my system is running like a well-maintained watch.

So if you think of yourself as the adventurous type, someone who likes everything to be pretty new all the time but doesn’t really want to deal with a lot of breakage and is curious about Wayland in the real world, give Fedora 21 a try.

Later: You know what got fixed in Fedora 21 that was broken in F20? Mounting of Apple iOS 8 devices.

6 thoughts on “I’m running Fedora 21 with Wayland, and so far (almost) everything is working just fine

  1. I’m sorry, but I feel it’s highly unlikely you are actually running wayland (weston). Firefox to run under weston it needs to be built against gtk3, and with several patches and even then this is supposed to be the end result: https://bug635134.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=8445765
    See the related bug is also not marked fixed:
    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=635134

    What GPU do you have? I’m just guessing here, without actually looking into what Fedora/Gnome has done, but my guess is you have a GPU with a driver that is explicitly not supported by Wayland so after the login you are switched back to X.

    • You’re probably right about being switched back to X. I expect that Linux is going to be running with X as a fallback on a per-application basis for quite some time.

      In related news, I think that Fedora will be shipping the gtk3 version of Firefox in F22. It will really bring things together, theme wise. Right now I’m using the Adiwata Dark theme, and for Firefox to look “right,” I need to bolt on a theme via Firefox add-ins. I’d rather it look great out of the box.

  2. Most of those apps are being launched under Xwayland – it’s still an achievement though – seamless

  3. What about the performance? Have you tested it with 2 screens? Not sure if wayland is still too beta.

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