On Fri, Apr 05, 2019 at 04:12:22PM +0100, Jonathan Dowland wrote: > I was surprised to learn — by way of synaptic being autoremoved — that > the default desktop in Buster will be GNOME/Wayland. I personally do not > think that Wayland is a sensible choice for the default *yet*; and if > the consequence is that bugs for software that do not work properly with > Wayland have their severity inflated such that they are autoremoved
Neither GNOME nor Wayland work on any screen-attached machine I own. There's usually just a black screen, and/or a return to the login manager (assuming it does start at all -- which is not granted for gdm3). My machines are: * an amd64 desktop: * nouveau: way too crashy to be considered "working". With my old monitors (1280x1024 + 1200x1600) it crashed once a few hours, with new setup (2560x1600 + 1200x1600) it crashes every a couple of hours with regular work, or 7 times within an hour trying to watch a movie. With xfce, disabling the compositor makes it work. With GNOME, it's AFAIK not an option (the fallback is gone, right?). The crashiness is not a fault of nouveau guys, but our beloved nVidia Corporation™® and their preciousss Intellectual Property. * nvidia proprietary: doesn't work with new kernels. Sorry, but I do a kernel patch once in a while, waiting for proprietary crap to get updated is not an option. * (I've recently replaced the graphics card with an oldish AMD one; didn't get around to trying GNOME yet, sorry.) * Pine{64,book}: simplefb. GNOME no workie. * RockPro64, used as a desktop (I'm typing these words on it): armsoc. GNOME no workie. * N900: didn't try. I don't suspect it could work, though. * Gemini: libhybris. No way to run Wayland I guess, X GNOME probably either. * Omega OAN133: crashes with a black screen (although it's been a while since I tried). * an i386 desktop (used as a pedestal for RockPro): i915 [910GL]. Might or might not run, although the mandatory compositor on hardware this old would cause such a slideshow on 2560x1600 that it wouldn't be usable. * qemu-kvm on work desktop: [Host GPU is i915 (HD530)]: black screen in default buster's GNOME (thus Wayland), Cinnamon at least gives a message. Very likely something with qemu's configuration -- but work time is not supposed to be spent wrangling desktop environment problems, thus I did not investigate. * qemu-tcg on home desktop, emulating powerpc, mips64el, ... GNOME: black screen, Cinnamon: error message. (Tried a while ago.) On every single of the above setups XFCE works perfectly. > I think the default should be reconsidered. +1. With GNOME not working even on some amd64 machines, it's not fit to be the default. Technical reasons aside, the UI is non-ergonomic and counter-intuitive, has broken systray, and suffers from CSD. Once the black screen/crash problem is fixed, you may consider making Wayland and/or GNOME the default again, but for Buster, that's a pretty bad idea. Meow! -- ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Did ya know that typing "test -j8" instead of "ctest -j8" ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ will make your testsuite pass much faster, and fix bugs? ⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀