Schaller: What to look for in Fedora Workstation 34

[Posted March 16, 2021 by corbet]

Christian Schaller looks forward to the Fedora 34 release with a detailed write-up of the desktop-oriented changes. "The big ticket item we have wanted to close off on was Wayland, because while Wayland has been production ready for most of us for a while, there was still some cases it didn’t cover as well as X.org. The biggest of this was of course the lack of accelerated XWayland support with the binary NVidia driver".

Schaller: What to look for in Fedora Workstation 34

Posted Mar 17, 2021 7:43 UTC (Wed) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (22 responses)

Nowadays it seems most users of nv hardware on Linux either use it for headless compute or for committing irredeemable acts of supervillainy. Neither seems worth holding up the desktop Wayland transition process for, imho.

Schaller: What to look for in Fedora Workstation 34

Posted Mar 17, 2021 7:58 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (8 responses)

The more important question is, does screen sharing finally work in Wayland, so that things like Webex or Teams can be used for remote meetings?
In these pandemic days, it is a sine qua non.

Schaller: What to look for in Fedora Workstation 34

Posted Mar 17, 2021 8:24 UTC (Wed) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't know about nv drivers, but it's worked for at least a year now, probably more.

Schaller: What to look for in Fedora Workstation 34

Posted Mar 18, 2021 8:58 UTC (Thu) by zzxtty (guest, #45175) [Link]

Teams used to crash on my basic DELL laptop (fedora 33) when sharing the screen under Wayland. The functionality was recently removed from the Teams linux client, it only reappears if you switch to X. I haven't tested it in the last few weeks, things could have changed.

Schaller: What to look for in Fedora Workstation 34

Posted Mar 17, 2021 11:09 UTC (Wed) by cozzyd (guest, #110972) [Link] (1 responses)

Last I checked, Zoom screen-sharing on Wayland literally takes screenshots of your desktop and results in black boxes in various places. Hopefully this is fixable with pipewire...

Schaller: What to look for in Fedora Workstation 34

Posted Mar 17, 2021 12:21 UTC (Wed) by Conan_Kudo (subscriber, #103240) [Link]

Yeah, if Zoom migrates to the desktop portal API + PipeWire, then this problem goes away.

Schaller: What to look for in Fedora Workstation 34

Posted Mar 17, 2021 12:17 UTC (Wed) by Conan_Kudo (subscriber, #103240) [Link]

Screen sharing works with all web-based video conferencing. If you use Teams; Bluejeans; Jitsi Meet; WebEx; or Zoom through the browser (either Firefox or Chrome), it will work. At this point, I've used them all and know they work this way.

If you're using the Zoom app, it only works if you use GNOME Wayland, as they're currently using the GNOME Shell specific API rather than the desktop portal API. I've not used the Bluejeans app myself, so I don't know what the state of things is there.

Schaller: What to look for in Fedora Workstation 34

Posted Mar 17, 2021 14:34 UTC (Wed) by darwi (subscriber, #131202) [Link]

Yes, it will work through PipeWire. Check LWN's earlier article on the topic.

Schaller: What to look for in Fedora Workstation 34

Posted Mar 17, 2021 21:42 UTC (Wed) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link] (1 responses)

Screen sharing works for me in the browser with GNOME/Wayland ... as long as I unplug my external monitor. Crashes for me with multiple monitors in F33.

Schaller: What to look for in Fedora Workstation 34

Posted Apr 2, 2021 8:29 UTC (Fri) by daenzer (subscriber, #7050) [Link]

Is there a bug report about that?

Schaller: What to look for in Fedora Workstation 34

Posted Mar 17, 2021 9:42 UTC (Wed) by zyga (subscriber, #81533) [Link] (2 responses)

Or they just have a ThinkPad and need it for video output on their monitor. I would not go and say that it's fine to leave people behind because technology is more important than people. It's either there or not there. It's fine to get partial pieces in place and perhaps Fedora is a place to do that, but the attitude should be inclusive.

Someone somewhere is using a 2nd hand laptop that just happens to use nv chips. That person may become a contributor if the initial impression is inclusive.

Schaller: What to look for in Fedora Workstation 34

Posted Mar 17, 2021 12:20 UTC (Wed) by Conan_Kudo (subscriber, #103240) [Link]

Both GNOME and KDE Plasma have code to support Wayland on the NVIDIA proprietary driver. GNOME has this code guarded by a runtime disable by default, while KDE Plasma has it enabled by default. Because GNOME has it disabled by default, it'll automatically fall back to the X11 session. I expect this to change to match KDE Plasma's behavior very soon.

Schaller: What to look for in Fedora Workstation 34

Posted Mar 17, 2021 12:34 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> Someone somewhere is using a 2nd hand laptop that just happens to use nv chips. That person may become a contributor if the initial impression is inclusive.

Surely nvidia bears some responsibility for that "inclusive initial impression"?

I mean, I don't expect them to go full-AMD and open everything up, but at the very least they could stop actively hindering the efforts of those folks working on this stuff.

Schaller: What to look for in Fedora Workstation 34

Posted Mar 17, 2021 11:47 UTC (Wed) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link] (7 responses)

AFAIK wayland still doesn't support editing the keyboard layout like I do with xmodmap.

I'm not going to learn a new keyboard layout just because.

Schaller: What to look for in Fedora Workstation 34

Posted Mar 17, 2021 15:08 UTC (Wed) by sjj (guest, #2020) [Link] (2 responses)

It supports xkb. https://wayland-book.com/seat/xkb.html

Schaller: What to look for in Fedora Workstation 34

Posted Mar 18, 2021 16:11 UTC (Thu) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't care about the protocol. What interests me is a cli to configure the thing.

Schaller: What to look for in Fedora Workstation 34

Posted Mar 23, 2021 21:55 UTC (Tue) by sjj (guest, #2020) [Link]

Config file is a no go? Why?

Schaller: What to look for in Fedora Workstation 34

Posted Mar 17, 2021 15:15 UTC (Wed) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] (2 responses)

I thought that things around the Wayland ecosystem supported any keyboard layout, but not client-driven dynamic changes to the layout. I.e., that it isn't going to fully support what you could do with xmodmap, but it does support anything that would ordinarily be described as a single keyboard layout.

Schaller: What to look for in Fedora Workstation 34

Posted Mar 18, 2021 16:14 UTC (Thu) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes but layouts AFAIK are hardcoded in some /usr/share whatever file and as user I can only pick one of those, or change them knowing that the next update will overwrite it.

Schaller: What to look for in Fedora Workstation 34

Posted Mar 18, 2021 17:00 UTC (Thu) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]

That isn't true. The libxkbcommon code will pick up configuration files under $HOME/.config/xkb, $HOME/.xkb, /etc/xkb, or other paths that you can define with environment variables[1]. There are also environment variables for the default rules, model, layout, variant, and options[2]. As long as the Wayland compositor follows recommended best practices and doesn't try to override the default settings you should be able to use whatever XKB configuration you prefer, including ones not present in the system directories. You just need to restart the compositor to apply any changes, unless the compositor (like X11) happens to implement a protocol to modify the XKB context.

[1] https://xkbcommon.org/doc/current/group__include-path.html
[2] https://xkbcommon.org/doc/current/group__context.html

Schaller: What to look for in Fedora Workstation 34

Posted Mar 17, 2021 22:35 UTC (Wed) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

Is ibus an option for you? I know it's heavy bloat (consuming over 100MB of my RAM), but it's a superset of the functionality xcompose/xmodmap provides.

Schaller: What to look for in Fedora Workstation 34

Posted Mar 17, 2021 18:27 UTC (Wed) by adam820 (subscriber, #101353) [Link]

> Nowadays it seems most users of nv hardware on Linux either use it for headless compute

That's not entirely true; I recently left a position that used RHEL desktops, which we had moved to be all-nvidia since hardware 3D acceleration was required and the nvidia drivers were, from a scripting/automation standpoint (workarounds and non-dmks for AMD), easier to deploy.

When Wayland lands in RHEL 9, it will be nice to have enterprise-ready drivers that work.

Schaller: What to look for in Fedora Workstation 34

Posted Mar 19, 2021 13:11 UTC (Fri) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]

Well, when I bought the high-end workstation I'm using 2 years ago, nv was the only multi-screen option for graphics. I just looked, didn't change in the mean time.

So, our experience differs.

Schaller: What to look for in Fedora Workstation 34

Posted Mar 18, 2021 13:44 UTC (Thu) by xophos (subscriber, #75267) [Link] (7 responses)

F*CK Nvidia! Who buys that crap anyway?

Schaller: What to look for in Fedora Workstation 34

Posted Mar 18, 2021 13:56 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

Quite a lot of people, given that nVidia currently has ~80% share of the dGPU market.

(and ~15% if integrated GPUs are included)

Schaller: What to look for in Fedora Workstation 34

Posted Mar 18, 2021 14:00 UTC (Thu) by tome (subscriber, #3171) [Link]

> Who buys that crap anyway?

The crap comes bundled with all sorts of otherwise nice stuff.

Schaller: What to look for in Fedora Workstation 34

Posted Mar 18, 2021 21:56 UTC (Thu) by pflugstad (subscriber, #224) [Link] (3 responses)

I do. Because, for the longest time, the AMD driver was utter crap with multiple monitors and/or multiple users. As in, if you try switching users random bad stuff happened - 2nd monitor weird flashing, keyboard completely locked up, etc. And I'd have to reboot the system to get it to recover. This happened with both the binary AMD driver as well as the open source one. This was XUbuntu, probably from 2013/2014 or so. I finally gave up and switched to low end NVidia card and it works just fine - which is still running.

Maybe it's different now, either with newer open source AMD drivers and/or Weston.

But working beats not-working every time.

Schaller: What to look for in Fedora Workstation 34

Posted Mar 20, 2021 1:21 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

Yeah, the closed-source drivers have always been terrible -- but I've been using nothing but AMD cards with the open source drivers since 2009 (discrete until 2019, integrated since then) and they've always been more or less flawless in operation, and more than fast enough for my admittedly modest "light gaming and dammit repaint my multiple monitors full of tiny text" workloads. (But dammit when I spin the view around in _Surviving Mars_ I want it to spin fast. My people are asphyxiating!)

The increasingly large group of people inside AMD who hack on the amdgpu drivers deserve our thanks and our custom, I'd say. They're more or less the only high-performance GPU vendor even *trying* to be open. (Intel are open, but... ah... not really high performance any time I've tried them in the last many years.)

Schaller: What to look for in Fedora Workstation 34

Posted Mar 20, 2021 17:03 UTC (Sat) by thoughtpolice (subscriber, #87455) [Link] (1 responses)

Tiger Lake launched with Xe-LP and it's actually surprisingly good for a mobile iGPU. It's had big increases over the Iris Plus era. I've been pleasantly surprised by most of the Tiger Lake/Xe numbers I've seen, actually.

Intel is going to be launching Xe-HPG soon which will also include extra features like hardware RT and a new process node (TSMC 7nm?) and presumably beefed up "everything" for gaming crowds. If they can launch something reasonably soon while the GPU market is in a frenzy, with open source drivers (and Intel has historically been pretty strong about getting software support lined up early) that can drive a few 4k monitors, I think they're worth keeping an eye on for workstations.

Schaller: What to look for in Fedora Workstation 34

Posted Mar 23, 2021 20:08 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Ah. Ignoring Atom-based Chromebooks (which are *expected* to be low-performance) I haven't had an Intel desktop box since the Ivy Bridge days (my server is a Broadwell-EX, but obviously has no integrated graphics).

I see things have moved on a bit :)

Schaller: What to look for in Fedora Workstation 34

Posted Mar 19, 2021 13:09 UTC (Fri) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]

Me. It was the only multi-screen option for the high-end workstation I'm using.