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GUI Ubuntu Linux

Linux Mint 21.3: Its First Official Release with Wayland Support (omgubuntu.co.uk) 71

Posted by EditorDavid from the Minty-freshness dept.
Linux Mint 21.3 is now available to download, reports the blog OMG Obuntu.

It's the first version to offer Wayland support in its Cinnamon desktop: Following a successful bout of bug-busting in last month's beta release, Mint devs have gone ahead and rubber-stamped a stable release. Thus, you can reasonably expect to not encounter any major issues when installing or using it... [I]t's based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and continues to use the Linux 5.15 kernel by default, but newer kernels are available to install within the OS...

In my own testing I find Cinnamon's Wayland support to be well-rounded. It's not perfect but I didn't hit any major snafus that prevented me from working (though admittedly I did only attempt 'basic' tasks like web browsing, playing music, and adding applets). However, Cinnamon's Wayland support is in an early state, is not enabled by default, and Linux Mint devs expect it won't be good enough for everyone until the 23.x series (due 2026) at the earliest. Still, try it out yourself and see if it works for you. Select the 'Cinnamon on Wayland (Experimental)' session from the login screen session selector, and then login as normal...

Additionally, the latest version of Mozilla Firefox is pre-installed (as a deb, not a Snap)
Among the new features are a whole new category of desktop add-ons — "Actions" — which upgrade the right-clicking context menu. (So for .iso files there's two new choices: "Verify" or "Make bootable USB stick".)

The article says there's also "a raft of smaller refinements," plus "a bevvy of buffs and embellishments" for Linux Mint's homegrown apps.

Any Linux Mint users reading Slashdot? Share your thoughts or experiences in the comments...
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Linux Mint 21.3: Its First Official Release with Wayland Support More

Linux Mint 21.3: Its First Official Release with Wayland Support

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  • And that's a no-go for me from the get-go (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Sunday January 14, 2024 @03:39PM (#64158239)

    One piece of software I use a lot is a TOTP authenticator that injects the TOTP codes as keyboard events. Wayland doesn't support injecting events.

    So, no Wayland for me.

    It only takes one killer app to make your Xorg-to-Wayland switch a friggin' PITA. So I suggest you make sure all the applications that you care about aren't going to crap out in Wayland.

    • I suggest you make sure all the applications that you care about aren't going to crap out in Wayland.

      Yup, don't want to be waylaid by Wayland. :-)

      • Wayland seems to interfere with my emacs mouse button binding: (global-set-key (kbd "S-") 'my-select-url-email-path) Otherwise I don't see it affecting anything, but I did not do extensive testing. I did test google-earth, and it seemed okay. But I don't see any compelling reason to switch.

    • Re:And that's a no-go for me from the get-go (Score:4, Informative)

      by nickovs ( 115935 ) on Sunday January 14, 2024 @04:22PM (#64158353)

      Wayland doesn't support injecting events.

      Wayland supports injecting events, it just happens to do it differently to the way that X did it, so your TOTP generator needs updating to support the newer API. libei [freedesktop.org] provides one of the easier ways to do event input, in case you ever need to do it yourself.

      • Re:And that's a no-go for me from the get-go (Score:4, Informative)

        by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Sunday January 14, 2024 @04:58PM (#64158409) Journal

        No, wayland does NOT support injecting events. Libinput does, that's different. How does it work if you're running something headless, not connected to /dev/input?

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by nickovs ( 115935 )

          Take a look at the documentaton [freedesktop.org]. libeis sits along side libinput inside the Wayland compositor and processes connect to it through a socket. The EI stack made version 1.0 last July and now seems to be standard in most builds.

          • Right so from the architecture diagram Wayland doesn't support it, but the compositor might. So the window management scheme is now coupled to whether you can automate input. Better hope everyone writing compositors uses libei.

            • Better hope everyone writing compositors uses libei.

              Why? Since when does every piece of software need to support every use case for everyone?

              • Good software design doesn't needlessly couple together functionality. This couples together how you're windows are decorated and stacked with whether you can automate stuff. This makes no sense from a usability point of view.

                It also makes the desktop needlessly fragmented with various random things broken on random desktops.

                We can see how well fragmentation works. Remember the utter shitshow of audio on Linux in piercings years? This is what we have now with Wayland.

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by jma05 ( 897351 )

      Injecting keyboard events is a hacky use case. I understand your point, but it reminds me of this.
      https://xkcd.com/1172/ [xkcd.com]

      • Why you would call it hacky, it's just using the unix tools that are designed for that. Here is my implementation of injecting TOTP codes into X PRIMARY selection buffer (such that I can paste them directly with middle button, no need to read the code from screen):

        ~/.bashrc: alias otp="pass otp code EXAMPLE | tr -d '\n' | xsel"

        Where the account EXAMPLE is first added this way: (it asks the secret interactively)
        pass otp insert -e -s --account EXAMPLE:myaddress@example.com EXAMPLE

        Tools:
        pass-otp https://github [github.com]

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jma05 ( 897351 )

          I do it too... in Windows, with using any of the keyboard hook libraries for Python. I used xsel. I have used tools like Autokey, AutoIt, and macro recorder from Windows 3.1 days. And I would be annoyed too if a new Desktop borked my UI automation, as Win95 did.

          I think of this as "hacky" (classical sense) since we are using applications beyond their designed use.
          In a cracker sense of the word, my keyboard hook tools are global keyloggers.

          xsel seems to work in XWayland
          https://www.reddit.com/r/linux... [reddit.com]

      • Injecting keyboard events is a hacky use case. I understand your point, but it reminds me of this.
        https://xkcd.com/1172/ [xkcd.com]

        To be fair, Emacs could be (probably) configured to support that. :-)

    • "Wayland support is in an early state, is not enabled by default, and Linux Mint devs expect it won't be good enough for everyone until the 23.x series (due 2026) at the earliest", so I really don't see the problem here.

  • Wayland is a display protocol, correct? (Score:3)

    by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Sunday January 14, 2024 @03:40PM (#64158243)

    Why should I, as an end user with some basic Linux familiarity, be as excited about this as the frequent postings on Slashdot suggest I should be? What will I notice, or what important items won't I notice that I should still appreciate?

    • I had no idea either what is Wayland. Took reviewing a few of announcement news articles to find one that says what it is etc. No wonder linux for the desktop has issues for non-technical users

    • I heard it supports multi-screen setups much better than X.

      • >"I heard it supports multi-screen setups much better than X."

        For normal people? No, not really.

        • I've been using a multi-monitor setup on Mint for a couple of years now.
          To make it work I plugged them both in, then selected span from the options. Just like in Windows.

      • I heard it supports multi-screen setups much better than X.

        Wayland handles multiple monitors better if, and only if, better means:

        1) Detecting HD monitors as 640x480, claiming Wayland can't, and never will, support anything higher than 640x480.
        2) Placing clickable rectangles at random, and invisible, positions on random monitors; completely separate from the buttons that represent those clickable rectangles.

        If that's what better means, then Wayland is king of the hill.

    • Re:Wayland is a display protocol, correct? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Sunday January 14, 2024 @04:24PM (#64158359)

      You as a responsible Linux user should do your own research, not be excited by what you read in Slashdot.

      Wayland is a very old project at this point (it's 15 years old) and it's been trying to displace X since then.

      It hasn't managed to do it in 15 years because X is even older (40 years old) and so entrenched that it's been about impossible to shift until Xorg because so unmaintainable and such a technological dead-end when it comes to high-performance displays that it kind of forced everybody to consider alternatives. And that alternative was Wayland.

      The other reason why people didn't jump ship years ago - because X has been a nightmare for a long time, it's nothing new - is because Wayland itself is a friggin' mess. It's better in many aspects, but it's a pile of messy code too, and it's not particularly well designed.

      So Wayland is kind of crap, but it's less crap than X at this point. That's why you get to hear about it now: it's become the only halfway decent alternative to move away from X.

      Nobody goes into this with anticipation and excitement. Everybody know it's something that needs to be done, and that's gonna be a lot of new problems that will take years to fix - yes, even after 15 years because Wayland is *that* crappy - just to go back to the level of usability they were used to with X.

      • Re:Wayland is a display protocol, correct? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Sunday January 14, 2024 @05:39PM (#64158491)

        You as a responsible Linux user should do your own research, not be excited by what you read in Slashdot.

        And there it is. The typical response to anything Linux: RTFM! Don't bother giving anything approaching a usable answer. Just brush off the person asking the question and tell them to go elsewhere.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by mjwx ( 966435 )

          You as a responsible Linux user should do your own research, not be excited by what you read in Slashdot.

          And there it is. The typical response to anything Linux: RTFM! Don't bother giving anything approaching a usable answer. Just brush off the person asking the question and tell them to go elsewhere.

          This, As a /.er I'm not scared to get into the nuts and bolts of Linux, I cant debug the source code for myself but can usually solve most issues on Linux. However Linux Mint is meant to be a very user friendly version of Linux (and largely is) so telling people who just need a bit of help to go RTFM is counterproductive.

        • The typical response to anything Linux: RTFM!

          And most of the time there is no manual, because writing documentation is boring.

      • Meh.

        The complaints about X are somewhat oversold. It's not inherently technological dead end. It's just that for some reason people lose their shit about adding new APIs because it called them "extensions"since API wasn't a term in 1987. It's also de-facto dead end. Technologically though most of the accusations are FUD.

        As for the code, well Xorg may be a mess but it was the Wayland devs who wrote it so that bodes well!

        The other reason why people didn't jump ship years ago - because X has been a nightmare

        • >"The complaints about X are somewhat oversold."

          ^^^^ THIS

          >"Combine that with some of the Wayland devs being very opinionated about how GUIs should look and you find that even after 15 years, it only support the things the Wayland devs thought of."

          Exactly. Probably the same people who think Gnome desktop is actually usable or desirable. And when you point out the things that Wayland CAN'T do or doesn't do well or easily, it is just a hand-wave-off that we "shouldn't be doing that" or they offer some

          • Exactly. Probably the same people who think Gnome desktop is actually usable or desirable.

            I've never met one. From my experience, Linux users fall into two broad camps, the inveterate defaulters and inveterate customizers. The latter run niche WMs and spend time crafting their UX. The former will never touch a default setting, and will spend time complaining about it. Neither side understands why the other side waste so much time. I'm the latter, I've worked with plenty of the former. The former are the onl

      • You also ignore the fact that the wayland devs decided that some core functionality, that some people use every day wasn't going to be implemented.

        I think that it has now, reluctantly been implemented, but it left a sour taste for many X users.

      • Finally someone says it. Thanks Rosco.

    • > what important items won't I notic

      Under Wayland every app can't steal your passwords (or other secrets) that come from your input devices.

      If you're on X11 try launching xev and watch what happens.

      A few chained exploits could give any webpage that ability. Yikes!

      • X has security infrastructure, and if you connect as an untrusted session, that sniffing is not possible. Ssh is the only thing that routinely sets up untrusted sessions. The functionality is there in X and Xorg had a quite sound security system inside, just no one uses it.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 )

      be as excited about

      You shouldn't ever be excited about any OS ever. The OS is there to serve you applications that you use. It should be an entirely forgettable experience. And that's kind of the point, when basic things such as displays with different refresh rates require endless fucking around in config files, you're not forgetting about the OS, it's actively hindering you.

      You shouldn't need to care about this.

    • Why should I, as an end user with some basic Linux familiarity, be as excited about this as the frequent postings on Slashdot suggest I should be? What will I notice, or what important items won't I notice that I should still appreciate?

      If you just use Linux and you're not particularly interested in the technical details, I wouldn't worry about it at all. There's a lot of things going on under hood that make for ./ stories because that's what people care about here, but for a casual end user who just wants a functional OS it won't really matter.

      It's like the systemd stories. If you just use Linux as desktop OS, it probably seems weird how passionate people are over the issue. That's because they're system admins and power users and it actu

    • Dunno, there is a good chance there is nothing to be excited about as an end user with some basic Linux familiarity. Slashdot is a site that describes itself as "News for nerds, stuff that matters", not "News for end users with some basic Linux familiarity, stuff that matters".

  • Not to pick nits, but ... (Score:5, Informative)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Sunday January 14, 2024 @03:54PM (#64158279)

    Following a successful bout of bug-busting in last month's beta release, Mint devs have gone ahead and rubber-stamped a stable release. Thus, you can reasonably expect to not encounter any major issues when installing or using it.

    While the stamp may, in fact, have been made of rubber, the term"rubber stamp" generally/colloquially means (in English anyway), "to officially approve a decision or plan without thinking about it." The TFS, quoting TFA, clearly states that a bunch of work was actually done, presumably by the devs, and, as a result, there should be few problems. It doesn't sound like anything was rubber stamped, by the devs. Just sayin' ...

    • Re:Not to pick nits, but ... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Sunday January 14, 2024 @04:03PM (#64158307)

      Yep. The correct phrase to have used would be "Mint devs have gone ahead and given a stamp of approval to a stable release".

      But language proficiency at this level of journalism just doesn't exist any longer - it seems to be whoever is willing to type up copy and charge less than an AI for it will get the job.

      • But language proficiency at this level of journalism just doesn't exist any longer - it seems to be whoever is willing to type up copy and charge less than an AI for it will get the job.

        The phrase is pretty well-known, but, unfortunately, I get it. I reserve the right, though, to be cranky about it and complain when, for example, future youngsters use the phrase "clockwise" to mean "a clock that knows things" or someone who is "good at telling time." :-)

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by HiThere ( 15173 )

          Instead of clockwise you should say "deasil" and instead of counterclockwise, "widdershins".

          • Instead of clockwise you should say "deasil" and instead of counterclockwise, "widdershins".

            Reminding me of this exchange in Chapter 30 (s3e4), "The Snowplow" of The Good Place [wikipedia.org]:

            [The gang is now in Australia instead of the U.S.]

            Simone Garnett: Jason? Are you okay there, mate?

            Jason Mendoza: No. I have to watch the Jaguars games alone on my computer at, like, two in the morning on Mondays. It's so annoying. Everything here is in a... I don't know how to describe it. Like, a different zone of time. No, that sounds stupid. A different clock land.

        • Young 'uns already don't know what 'clockwise' means because they can only tell time from digital clocks.

          I have 9-year-old grandchildren who have no idea what the time is on an analog clock and consistently guess wrong (instead of being able to work it out).

          Mind you, I was taught how to read a clock in first grade but I suspect teachers these days don't know how to read analog clocks either.

      • [...] language proficiency at this level of journalism just doesn't exist any longer - it seems to be whoever is willing to type up copy and charge less than an AI for it will get the job.

        Perhaps you mean an em-dash rather than a hyphen there, and you /certainly/ mean to use "whomever" rather than "whoever".

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward
          The use of "whoever" is correct. "Whomever" would be wrong, as "whomever" is used for the object, but "whoever" here appears as the subject. Not only that, it appears as the subject in a noun phrase that itself appears as the subject. If you're going to use grammar as an excuse to be a dick, at least have the decency to get your grammar right.

    • Since it's talking about Wayland, maybe "rubber stamp" is accidentally correct.

  • Wayland is slowly getting there. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by GeorgeY ( 9486967 ) on Sunday January 14, 2024 @04:19PM (#64158349)
    This is a good decision, provided they still allow logging with X11 as Ubuntu does. I use Ubuntu and initially Wayland was completely unusable, with Zoom breaking, instabilities, etc. So I used X11 for a long time but eventually they got their act together and now Wayland is (almost) fine. The only time I login into X11 now, if I play 32-bit game via WINE, Wayland still does not change the resolutions in full screen.
    With Mint switching to Wayland by default the fixes for bugs and missing features will appear faster.
  • Doesn't have $X feeture /s

  • No thanks (Score:5, Insightful)

    by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Sunday January 14, 2024 @06:16PM (#64158573)

    >"It's the first version to offer Wayland support in its Cinnamon desktop:"

    Yawn

    >"Any Linux Mint users reading Slashdot? Share your thoughts"

    Yes, of course. Myself included. My thoughts are that I don't care at all about Wayland. Love Mint/Cinnamon.

    • Mint user here, for 12 years, I have occasionally found apps like Waydroid that need Wayland. So I'm happy Wayland is supported now, and I'm also happy that it's not the default until 2026. Wayland is kind of terrible at the moment.

    • My thoughts are that I don't care at all about Wayland.

      And you shouldn't. Your desktop should just work and do what you want without you having to ever know what's running under it.

  • Mint 2.13 seems fine so far but I also haven't enabled Wayland just yet.

    I'll give Wayland a whirl from the login screen and see what happens. I'm not expecting anything dramatic or even noticeable (which would be great).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Pieroxy ( 222434 )

      One thing I've noticed is Java apps freezing several times a day with Wayland. That's dBeaver, SmartGit, etc. Haven't noticed it with IntelliJ though.

      Anyway, I just changed my preferences to XOrg and everything works now.

      All in all, your experience will depend on whether or not all of your apps support Wayland.

  • After installing Mint 21.3 and running a wayland session I tested out all of the apps which seemed to work well with a slight boost in performance in areas. My only real issue was running a Steam game which did work but wayland didn't support the keyboard layout chosen by xorg so some of my keys were missing.
  • And people get mad when I say I will never try Linux, no matter what flavor ! lolol. Waiting on rootbeer, then maybe. When you read thru comments, it backs up my opinion.

  • I switched from Windows to Ubuntu back in the late aughts. I switched to Mint in the mid teens. I've been running four monitors on Mint for several years now. It's backed up my requirement that "it just works" quite well. I don't need an absolutely perfect interface; I need one that is good enough. Mint more than satisfies that requirement. Mint also satisfies my many other requirements, mainly in using the computer as a way to perform certain tasks (working with software defined radios, learning C and C++

  • linux mint or any Linux Distro needs to make it easy to turn on / off show windows contents while dragging. The second I install any Linux Distro, I find myself on Google trying to find out how to "do this" / "do that" and that is why Windows as much as I dislike it will stay on the top of the install list.

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