Can you elaborate more on discussions about XLibre being banned on here? Are accounts that mention it getting banned? Is there just mass downvoting by partisans with some kind of agenda?
I get that X11 has security issues, but NVIDIA drivers and Wayland still seem to have no support now and no support planned for the future, so Wayland is a non-negotiable non-option for many (most?) Linux desktop users, including myself.
That said, with the custodian of X11 refusing to merge 1000+ patches including various bug fixes and security fixes, I'm excited for the prospect of XLibre - this is exactly what Open Source, as an idea, was invented to facilitate - user choice.
I have an RTX 4060 Ti with latest drivers installed, KDE on Debian. On the login screen, I can select X11 or Wayland. Selecting X11 lets me log in fine, selecting Wayland and logging in results in a black screen and the only thing I can do to get any video out at all is switching to another TTY.
I have an RTX 4060 with latest drivers, KDE, and Arch. Wayland works perfectly for me. Maybe Debian has some outdated packages that haven't caught up yet?
Wasn't suggesting at all that you use my distro or that you can't use X11 as your solution. Debian is great and I use it for all of my servers. I'm just responding to the assertion that Wayland doesn't work with NVIDIA today, which is really only true if you are using older packages for a more stable distro. Nothing wrong with that, but it's not accurate to represent the current state of Wayland based on a distro known for using older packages.
Listen, I run Debian too. But I'm not going to get online and complain out X Y Z not working when I'm running a package from 3 years ago. Please, be for real.
You don't have to preach Debian to the choir man - I run Debian.
We're talking about very new developments here. You're running years old packages. Okay? That's not going to work.
When you're running Debian, it's expected you're going to be 3-5 years behind the Linux userspace status quo. So it's absolutely fine you're on X11. I have a desktop on Bookworm running X11 on Nvidia - works great, I love it. I also have a very, very new laptop running Tumbleweed on Wayland and kernel 6.15. X really struggles with new hardware in a way Wayland does not. For me on that computer, Wayland is better in a plethora of ways. I am a bit forced to run a very new kernel and Mesa and all that due to running bleeding edge hardware.
I've been totally breaking Linux installs trying to get Nvidia to work for 15 years now, and that's on X11. On the other hand I recently did the first OS upgrade that I've ever done successfully without breaking Nvidia and that was running Wayland.
Nvidia is just really really bad on Linux in general, so it's always a coin toss if you'll be able to boot your system after messing with their drivers, regardless of display server.
Nvidia under Linux has had a long and hard history.
For most purposes, including gaming, it is best to avoid Nvidia hardware. Using Intel for laptops and AMD for dedicated GPUs is kinda the best general approach if you are planning on using Linux.
Of course if you have a need for CUDA then Nvidia is the only game in town, but that is a different issue then Wayland support.
For a while Nvidia was fighting the Xorg/Wayland devs over GBM vs EGLStreams which has delayed Wayland support. This has to do with the API extensions that allowed Wayland to manage application output buffers.
Gnome was the only Wayland environment to try to support EGLStreams for Nvidia, but it really didn't do them any good.
A while ago Nvidia eventually switched over to GBM and EGLStreams is dead, which helped out a lot of people running non-Gnome Wayland desktops. But there are lots of problems with Nvidia drivers besides that right now.
The reality is that Nvidia doesn't care about consumer Linux desktop. Their primary focus is on Enterprise users in terms of people needing graphically accelerated desktops.
So right now if you are running Linux on your personal workstations/desktops/laptops you are essentially beta testers for whenever Enterprise Linux distros make the switch to Wayland.
> The reality is that Nvidia doesn't care about consumer Linux desktop. Their primary focus is on Enterprise users in terms of people needing graphically accelerated desktops.
What does this actually mean in terms of technology? What is Nvidia providing that works for RHEL but doesn't work for Fedora, or whatever?
Wayland is a ridiculously simple protocol: I could run it on pencil and paper. It doesn't require anything I'd describe as a "hardware backdoor". What are you on about?
> Can you elaborate more on discussions about XLibre being banned on here? Are accounts that mention it getting banned? Is there just mass downvoting by partisans with some kind of agenda?
YC moderators are hiding the articles from the front page.
x11libre got 2 active discussions here according to
A highly controversial guy making controversial patches to a somewhat heated topic around these parts is going to get flagged by users too, how are you so certain it's the admins doing the hiding? Even when not flagged the score to comment ratios will drag those off the front page quickly.
Both threads devolved into politics, and that's likely the reasons why they got flagged. There's no evidence these were hidden by moderators, as opposed to because regular users flagged threads.
Having seen some of your comments on one of those threads, there's a decent chance your comments contributed to getting those posts flagged.
The [flagged] indicator on a submission usually indicates user flagging. Moderators and algorithms just quietly downweight submissions without any visible indicator. So this isn't an HN moderator position, the question to resolve is why users would flag it.
In this case, I'd have flagged them too if I saw them. The "long live" post is an aggressive tirade that reflects poorly on the author and led to a poor-quality discussion. The second is a link to a git commit history, which is weird in its own right and provides no explanation, and the context provided in the comments shows that a generally dislikable figure with extreme political views is now leading a fork of X11 that has yet to prove itself viable. So I'd probably have flagged that one too as pointless drama until proven otherwise.
I get that X11 has security issues, but NVIDIA drivers and Wayland still seem to have no support now and no support planned for the future, so Wayland is a non-negotiable non-option for many (most?) Linux desktop users, including myself.
That said, with the custodian of X11 refusing to merge 1000+ patches including various bug fixes and security fixes, I'm excited for the prospect of XLibre - this is exactly what Open Source, as an idea, was invented to facilitate - user choice.