Bug#927667: gnome: please confirm or revert choice of Wayland for default desktop

[Laurent Bigonville]

On 19/06/19 22:19, Simon McVittie wrote:
> [...]
> I would very much appreciate input from the rest of the team, particularly:
>
> - Laurent: I know you've had strong opinions about using Wayland for GNOME.
>    Do you feel strongly that Debian should be defaulting to Wayland? Are
>    there any reasons for that default that are missing from my attempt to
>    summarize earlier on the bug?
> [...]

I'm personally using wayland for more than 3 years on my work laptop 
(Intel card) and my home desktop (ATI/AMD with OSS driver) and even if 
there were transient issues at some point, everything is pretty stable 
now with 3.30 (the version that will be released with buster). Like Iain 
the main annoyance I have in my daily use is with the desktop/window 
sharing in firefox.

Wayland has been (re)made the default in debian back in July 2017 
(beginning of the dev cycle for buster), I don't remember receiving any 
objections at the time. The question about using it by default was 
raised by Jonathan in Apr 2019, two months in the (soft) freeze, it was 
already quite late at that point IMHO to switch back. This makes me 
wonder, are there even people using GNOME in sid/testing? Are there 
people testing with the default settings or has everybody switch back to 
X11? Because we had a full development cycle and we didn't have a 
massive number of bugs being filled about this, how should we interpret 
that?

It's also important to note that we are not pioneer in this, Fedora is 
defaulting to GNOME Wayland since Fedora 25 (Nov 2016). Both RHEL 8 
(just released and using GNOME 3.28, so one release lower) and SUSE 
Linux Enterprise Desktop 15 (released in end of June last year using 
GNOME 3.26) are also defaulting to GNOME Wayland.

We could indeed revert to X11 in a point release if things are going 
horribly wrong, some first step could be to put more information about 
this in the release notes. RHEL has 
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html-single/8.0_release_notes/index#desktop 
but I don't think that everything there applies to Debian