What’s new in Fedora 25 Workstation (Fedora Magazine) [LWN.net]

Fedora Magazine has a brief overview of the changes to be found in the workstation version of the Fedora 25 release. "Wayland now replaces the old X11 display server by default. Its goal is to provide a smoother, richer experience when navigating Fedora Workstation. Like all software, there may still be some bugs. You can still choose the old X11 server if required."

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What’s new in Fedora 25 Workstation (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Nov 22, 2016 7:21 UTC (Tue) by mgedmin (guest, #34497) [Link] (24 responses)

One thing that made me run back to X11 when I last tried Wayland was that my $PATH was not set up correctly. Specifically, I'd like things like .desktop files from ~/.local/share/applications/ or the Alt-F2 prompt to be able to run programs installed in ~/.local/bin/ without explicitly spelling out the full pathname. An X11 session sources my ~/.profile, which adjusts $PATH for the entire session. I've no idea how to do the equivalent with Wayland.

(Disclaimer: I'm on Ubuntu GNOME rather than Fedora.)

What’s new in Fedora 25 Workstation (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Nov 22, 2016 10:44 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I run a user systemd session to do it for my X session. I presume that Wayland would be similar. However, I start my session right from a TTY because I couldn't figure out how to get lightdm to just let systemd do its thing rather than relying on some DE startup script.

What’s new in Fedora 25 Workstation (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Nov 22, 2016 12:11 UTC (Tue) by Jonno (guest, #49613) [Link] (1 responses)

> An X11 session sources my ~/.profile, which adjusts $PATH for the entire session. I've no idea how to do the equivalent with Wayland.

Actually, neither X11 session scripts nor Wayland session scripts typically parse ~/.profile before doing their thing, leaving that up to the caller. If you start them from a tty your login shell will have done that, otherwise it is up to the DM. In Debian testing, ssdm will do that for both X11 and Wayland sessions (by calling /usr/share/ssdm/scripts/Xsession or /usr/share/ssdm/scripts/wayland-session, both of which will parse ~/.profile before calling the session script).

If other display managers do that for X11 sessions but not for Wayland sessions that is a bug in the display manager, please report that do your distribution.

What’s new in Fedora 25 Workstation (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Nov 22, 2016 15:35 UTC (Tue) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

In Fedora Gnome at least a shell is executed somewhere along the way with the X11 version of Gnome. I don't know about Wayland.

I know this because I would have small issues when I switched by default shell from /bin/bash to /usr/bin/fish and then when experimenting killed my fish shell. Killing the master fish process kills all the fish processes, which ends up killing Gnome, IIRC. (I 'solved' this by switching the default back to bash and then changing tmux to run fish directly)

If Wayland version avoided kicking off my default shell that would be lovely, but I don't know the 'correct' way to inject variables into the desktop session. Maybe by editing one of the 'systemd --user' service files or editing one of the important '.desktop' file. It would be awesome if this sort of stuff was documented somewhere in some admin manual or whatever.

What’s new in Fedora 25 Workstation (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Nov 22, 2016 19:54 UTC (Tue) by SEJeff (guest, #51588) [Link] (18 responses)

Ubuntu GNOME, or Unity? Big big difference.

What’s new in Fedora 25 Workstation (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Nov 23, 2016 6:31 UTC (Wed) by mgedmin (guest, #34497) [Link] (17 responses)

Ubuntu GNOME, with GDM and everything.

The X11-based GNOME session reads my ~/.profile (by way of /etc/gdm3/Xsession AFAICT), the GNOME on Wayland session doesn't.

It's probably something GDM does. I've no idea if that's upstream behavior, or something distro-specific (/etc/gdm/Xsession seems like a distro-specific thing). I'd like to hear what people experience on other distributions (say, Fedora 25).

What’s new in Fedora 25 Workstation (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Nov 23, 2016 7:42 UTC (Wed) by mgedmin (guest, #34497) [Link] (16 responses)

Oh look, https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=736660

What’s new in Fedora 25 Workstation (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Nov 23, 2016 15:04 UTC (Wed) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link] (11 responses)

OMG. This is why people are so fed up with this stuff. "Let's take something that works just fine, is very simple to understand and use, and has been a standard behavior for 30 years, and make it not work anymore, and then we'll replace it with an impossible to understand and manage sack of crap spread across 4 different projects that we force all our users to ingest before they can get back to doing their actual work again! It's genius!"

*Sigh*.

What’s new in Fedora 25 Workstation (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Nov 23, 2016 16:35 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (10 responses)

It is not a issue of 'it is something that worked just fine and now it does not'.

It is silly and broken and accidental that it works at all in the first place. People have become use to the silliness and the brokenness and have learned to live with it and took advantage of it's oddness to work around other idiotic and broken things.

The only reason it seems simple to you is that you are used to X's behavior; which is not simple or intuitive or discoverable at all. It is because you've been using it for so long you've memorized some cursory detail about the behavior of the system and have forgotten what you had to do to discover it in the first place.

Change ONE aspect of the system then it all is broken and you have to re-learn it.

The same exact problem would of occurred if bash shell's behavior on how it reads it's profile files changed. Also it would be broken in the same way if somebody had switched from using bash to zsh or any other shell. In my case I like to use fish, which is certainly not a POSIX-focusing shell and has a different concept of variables and scoping entirely from the 'standard' sh-like behavior typically found in zsh/ksh/bash/etc.

The only thing that will prevent implementation details from affecting users when making massive changes to the OS is never to do any changes at all.

What’s new in Fedora 25 Workstation (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Nov 23, 2016 18:22 UTC (Wed) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link] (9 responses)

> It is silly and broken and accidental that it works at all in the first place.

Completely wrong. Setting your login environment in .profile is how things have always worked, in UNIX, since forever: long before X even existed. Yes, yes, I know about csh but it's been all but irrelevant for decades. When I log in on a console and I want to have my PATH set, or some other environment variables set, I put the changes in my .profile. When I log in to a system via SSH and I want to have my PATH set, I put the changes in my .profile. It's simple, efficient, and well-understood.

So where do people get this notion that somehow, when I log in to a graphical environment, that suddenly setting PATH etc. through .profile is now "silliness and brokenness" and instead I should jump through bizarre hoops and stow snippets of files duplicating the same configuration that I already have when I log in other ways, into random subdirectories that no one has ever heard of before?

It makes absolutely zero sense.

Maybe people could take a little time off from ginning up exciting new ways to break everyone's long-standing environments, and explain exactly _why_ the existing method is so terribly "silly and broken". If it's so obvious then it should be easy to give many good examples.

What’s new in Fedora 25 Workstation (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Nov 24, 2016 12:25 UTC (Thu) by tao (subscriber, #17563) [Link] (4 responses)

Using .profile with bash works great until someone gets the idea of using .bash_profile or .bash_login for something, in which case bash no longer reads .profile. And there was much fun and rejoicing.

What’s new in Fedora 25 Workstation (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Nov 24, 2016 19:21 UTC (Thu) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link]

Breaking the default system is what people complain about; most people are aware that changing the defaults can break things if not done right.

(And it's not like it's hard to make bash read both ~/.bash_profile & ~/.profile if that is what a user wants.)

What’s new in Fedora 25 Workstation (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Nov 24, 2016 20:14 UTC (Thu) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link] (2 responses)

Sure. If you change your login environment in a way that it no longer works the way you want it to work, then it won't work right. I don't see how this justifies adding yet another, never before seen facility to duplicate behavior that's already available.

If Wayland did the same thing as bash did, and said "if some file XYZ exists then read that, else read ~/.profile", that would be absolutely fine with me. Then you'd get the traditional behavior by default but if you were an advanced user and wanted some different behavior for your GUI login from your console login, you could do that too.

What’s new in Fedora 25 Workstation (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Nov 24, 2016 21:39 UTC (Thu) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link] (1 responses)

Wayland has nothing to do here, it is just a display protocol. In particular, it's not a shell. In any case it would be GNOME the one reading your ~/.profile.

What’s new in Fedora 25 Workstation (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Nov 25, 2016 18:23 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

I really don't get this ongoing fad of deflecting blame with petty word games — "Wayland is a protocol", "there's no such thing as KDE 5", "only legacy apps use X11 clipboard conventions" — and magically the bugs get semantically redefined out of existence. How convenient!

But the emperor still has no clothes.

What’s new in Fedora 25 Workstation (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Nov 29, 2016 21:32 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (3 responses)

Setting your login environment in .profile is how things have always worked, in UNIX, since forever: long before X even existed.

Always? Really? How well it works with FTP? Or NFS? Or, really, any other way to log into the system without text shell? Yes, it worked with X sessions by accident, but that's all.

Maybe people could take a little time off from ginning up exciting new ways to break everyone's long-standing environments, and explain exactly _why_ the existing method is so terribly "silly and broken".

I think the XKCD reference is in order. The fact that X session was started by a regular shell script which, naturally, read .profile is an implementation detail - and one of unintended consequences was the fact that environament which was supposed to only ever be used in shell was actually executed in completely different context. The fact that it works at all is surprising to me and, I'm sure, it's equally surprising to Wayland developers.

And I'm not even sure I want the graphic environment to deal with shell scripts and all quirks they carry. Bad enough that my sftp sessions may suffer if I have wrong things in .profile, why extend that silliness to GUI?

What’s new in Fedora 25 Workstation (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Nov 29, 2016 23:54 UTC (Tue) by lsl (guest, #86508) [Link] (1 responses)

You need *some* way to reliably set up the environment for your processes. The profile provided that, accidental or not.

If you want to see an example for how *not* to do it, look at OS X. AIUI, the only remaining ways are inherently racy. Previously working (non-shell) approaches got broken for dubious reasons. Do we now get to enjoy the same kind of crap of Linux?

Also, if your $HOME is mounted through NFS, then of course you get your .profile from there. Why wouldn't you?

What’s new in Fedora 25 Workstation (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Dec 3, 2016 0:35 UTC (Sat) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I haven't had problems using After=environment.target in my user units to have everything set up properly.

What’s new in Fedora 25 Workstation (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Nov 30, 2016 13:18 UTC (Wed) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link]

> Always? Really? How well it works with FTP? Or NFS? Or, really, any other way to log into the system without text shell?

Accessing a file over NFS is not "logging in", and your environment is already set up (when you logged in) so you don't need it set up again to access NFS files. FTP isn't "logging in" either; it's a file transfer protocol with an authentication scheme which might happen to use the same username/password as your login. In any event you don't need an environment set up to use FTP.

> Yes, it worked with X sessions by accident, but that's all.

People keep asserting this, with absolutely no proof whatsoever. Do you have any statements or comments from anyone involved with the creation of X that supports this? I'm confident that it was an intentional, conscious choice and not an accident at all. And I actually have evidence that supports my belief (see below).

> The fact that X session was started by a regular shell script which, naturally, read .profile is an implementation detail

That is absolutely not true: .profile is not parsed when you start a regular shell. The X session invocation actually had to take specific steps to ensure that the user's environment was sourced. It was considered and intended to work this way.

> why extend that silliness to GUI?

Because I want to have my environment set properly when my GUI session starts. I want to set my language, my collation order, my time format, my PATH, my personal environment variables that are used by other tools that I invoke. I have already configured this just the way I want it in my .profile. Your suggestion for an improvement is that everyone should also have to dredge through various hidden and non-obvious locations and duplicate that setup somewhere else, in some other format... just so you don't have to touch a shell script? Now that's progress!

What’s new in Fedora 25 Workstation (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Nov 24, 2016 10:40 UTC (Thu) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link] (2 responses)

Oh FFS. I *need* certain environment variables set from my ~/.xsessionrc (which, in turn sources ~/.bash_profile and if I can't do that under Wayland then I'm staying with X11.

What’s new in Fedora 25 Workstation (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Nov 24, 2016 12:29 UTC (Thu) by tao (subscriber, #17563) [Link] (1 responses)

Expecting *Wayland*, which is not X, to read from .xsessionrc, is maaaaybe just a little bit too much.

What’s new in Fedora 25 Workstation (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Nov 24, 2016 17:10 UTC (Thu) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]

Well, as I wrote, my ~/.xsessionrc file sources my ~/.bash_profile, where most of my environment variables are defined. But I'll be more specific. I need *some file* that is sourced by whatever component of the system then goes on to exec my session. I would be fine with a ~/.waylandsessionrc file... I really don't care what it's called.

What’s new in Fedora 25 Workstation (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Dec 1, 2016 15:28 UTC (Thu) by mcatanzaro (subscriber, #93033) [Link]

See also, for a better description of the problem: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F25_bugs#GNOME_Wayl....

What’s new in Fedora 25 Workstation (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Nov 22, 2016 22:00 UTC (Tue) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link] (1 responses)

I had the same problem. I went to all of the PAM files that use "auth required pam_env.so" and added "user_readenv=1" to them.

Then I created a $HOME/.pam_environment file with:
PATH DEFAULT=${HOME}/bin:${HOME}/.local/bin:${HOME}/working/go/bin:${HOME}/working/go-source/go/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin

There's more info in man pam_env and man pam_env.conf

What’s new in Fedora 25 Workstation (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Dec 5, 2016 3:26 UTC (Mon) by robmv (guest, #103765) [Link]

I think it is better to add at the end of the file a

session required pam_env.so user_readenv=1

So it only load the user environment variables when setting up the session, at the end of the PAM stack, and not touch the auth line.

Required?

Posted Nov 22, 2016 9:53 UTC (Tue) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link] (2 responses)

I would have preferred "You can still choose the old X11 server if preferred". But then, Fedora ain't my distro...

Required?

Posted Nov 22, 2016 14:23 UTC (Tue) by zuki (subscriber, #41808) [Link] (1 responses)

You mean by selecting "gnome on Xorg" in the login screen? It's been like this since the beginning. Only the default changed.

Required?

Posted Nov 23, 2016 7:59 UTC (Wed) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link]

Uh -- thanks, and sorry.

Seems I've been unclear. I was rather complaining about the undertone of the message. Let me paraphrase how it reads to me:

"You surely are using X because you /must/, not because you /want/? Our most heartfelt condolences".

But I don't want to extend this much more, just being a small detail in a "press release" kind of thing.

What’s new in Fedora 25 Workstation (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Nov 22, 2016 10:22 UTC (Tue) by jfebrer (guest, #82539) [Link] (8 responses)

I've tested Wayland on Fedora 25 and it's working really great, the only thing I was missing was desktop icons on GNOME, which right now only works under X11 if you activate it on gnome-tweak-tool.

What’s new in Fedora 25 Workstation (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Nov 22, 2016 11:34 UTC (Tue) by marduk (guest, #3831) [Link] (5 responses)

I'm running GNOME 3.22 under Gentoo. There are a few issues however:

* When Firefox draws it's window the first time there is huge black border around the window that goes away after a while.

* Sloppy focus doesn't work correctly. The window gets focus when the mouse hovers over it but when you click on the "titlebar" it doesn't come to front.

* Some of the drawing (e.g. scrolling) seems slower than in X11. This is with Intel graphics.

What’s new in Fedora 25 Workstation (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Nov 23, 2016 9:19 UTC (Wed) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link]

> * Some of the drawing (e.g. scrolling) seems slower than in X11. This is with Intel graphics.

This may be a bug or this may be a consequence of Wayland's "all frame are perfect" philosophy which may increase latency in some case (window resizing)..

What’s new in Fedora 25 Workstation (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Nov 23, 2016 15:08 UTC (Wed) by Seegras (guest, #20463) [Link] (3 responses)

I'm on Debian, and I'll probably only try it when:

* Sloppy focus works correctly.

* Copy/Paste via mouse selection works (no bloody keyboard involved!). I mean, the so-called explanations in here why it doesn't work make me puke: https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/Wayland/PrimarySelection

* The proprietary nvidia-drivers work with it. Apparently they now do; no idea how good.

Maybe I'll give it a try the next days, until I find out the PRIMARY selection support is still broken...

What’s new in Fedora 25 Workstation (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Nov 24, 2016 12:28 UTC (Thu) by tao (subscriber, #17563) [Link]

Hoping for sloppy focus to work properly with GNOME3 on Wayland is, I believe, sadly optimistic, seeing as we're up to version 3.22 of GNOME3 on X now, and it still doesn't have fully working sloppy focus. It *usually* works, but at least a couple of times per day I still end up triggering cases where I have to swoop out, then in the cursor over a window again just to get focus on it.

What’s new in Fedora 25 Workstation (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Dec 5, 2016 12:15 UTC (Mon) by mgedmin (guest, #34497) [Link] (1 responses)

Last time I tried Wayland PRIMARY selection worked fine, as long as I copied and pasted things with the mouse.

I was unable to access it from vim in a terminal (but I could access the clipboard).

What’s new in Fedora 25 Workstation (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Dec 7, 2016 2:13 UTC (Wed) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

That's a bit of an odd case: Vim in a terminal can read/write the X clipboard if it's compiled with X support (despite not being a GUI program), but without that you're at the mercy of the terminal's middle click behaviour. It'd need to add a separate codepath for Wayland.

What’s new in Fedora 25 Workstation (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Nov 22, 2016 12:26 UTC (Tue) by jorgegv (subscriber, #60484) [Link]

Thanks for this info, it's exactly what I was looking for. This is a showstopper for me, since I'm quite used to Desktop icons. So I guess I'll stick with X11 yet.

What’s new in Fedora 25 Workstation (Fedora Magazine)

Posted Nov 22, 2016 12:44 UTC (Tue) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

Been using Wayland on T450s since F24. A few small issues, but mostly works great. Well done Fedora team!