âWhen making references to RHEL, you have to remember that KDE is not supported, only GDM and Gnome, which work with both Wayland and fractional scaling.â
That IS TRUE!! That said, for RHEL to make Wayland, something that is still still under development, the DEFAULT solely because RHEL, the 10 Ton Gorilla in Linux-land, which defaults to GNOME and GDM, while at the same time totally ignoring KDE, the second most popular DE, then say that Wayland is not still Experimental simply because it plays Great with 1 DE that RHEL happens to prefer is kind of shortsighted⌠if not an outright lie. If Wayland breaks the current Standard â X11 â and KDE when it tries to implement Wayland â tells me that Wayland is far from being ready for Prime Time, let alone being being made the DEFAULT for any one OS let alone the 10 Ton Gorilla RHEL.
I am not saying that Wayland may not be a valuable alternative to GDM â a DM I truly detest and something I have had nothing but a bad experience with â some day, but Wayland is clearly NOT ready NOW⌠and I suspect that RH damn well knows this. That said I also suspect that RH, because of their size is trying to drive the technology, even if it is not ready for prime time.
The closest analogy would be RHâs breaking with the /boot/grub2/grub.cfg standard that everyone â other than RH and its derivatives now uses â to use /boot/loader/entries . That is not necessarily a bad thing as GRUB2 sucks, but that it breaks all the known recovery programs, such as grub-customizer, as well as programs that are looking to find /boot/grub2/grub.cfg left up the creek without a paddle. That said that is nothing compared to trying to force the acceptance of Wayland , first started on the 30 Sep 2008, with the first Stable release 1.6.1 coming on the 23 Jan 2015. As of 28 Jan 2022 it has reached 1.25.
Then there is âWestonâ which I am not sure what that is other than a " reference implementation of a Wayland compositor". This means nothing to me.
My take: Wayland â still not at version 2.0 â along with âWestonâ., is / are project /projects that are busy stomping out BUGS.
The smartest thing RH could have done, would have been to have stuck with GDM and X11, while offering Wayland as an experimental alternative for people to play around with should they choose NOT because RH throws it weight around by making this buggy thing the DEFAULT on RHEL.
Had RH the strength of their conviction that Wayland was ready to roll out, they would have nuked X11, and gone solely with Wayland only, but RH seems to know that Wayland is prone to breaking things, including KDE which even if they do not use it , they know plenty of their competitors who do use it. The last thing they want to do is to drive those KDE / RHEL users into the arms of those competitors.
Instead what RH has tried to do is to have their cake and eat it too: by offering both X11 and Wayland knowing full well that since Wayland is still under DEVELOPMENT it is more likely than not, going to break programs that their enterprise customers depend upon. By having X11 as a fall back position they do not leave those customers high and dry.
Me?!? My days of âliving on the âBleeding Edgeââ by being a RH Beta Tester, by using Fedora for years have long since passed. I did not sign up for âCentOS Sreamsâ because I would once again become a RH Beta Tester. The appropriate place for Wayland would have been in either Fedora or CentOS Streams, not in RHEL (RL, Alma, etc.). Wayland is not ready for prime time if its implementation breaks other programs such as SDDM and KDE, and may or may not interfere with X11. RH screwed up by cutting CentOS off at the knees long before CentOS would have reached EOL, which resulted in a mass exodus from RH; now they might force yet another exodus by forcing a bug riddled project like Wayland on its users who are to serve as RH Bug Testers. It does not matter if Wayland works with GDM and GNOME; if you want it to be accepted it had best work with all DE, especially KDE which is the second largest DE behind GNOME⌠without breaking it. The only good thing that RH did was to give a method to access all DE a means to access the X11 variants even if it means it doubles the number of DEâs bringing more chaos to the login page than would be necessary.