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this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
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Awesome. Perhaps now there will be some renewed focus on screen reader support?
They've been doing quite a bit of work in the past year, on Newton, the future a11y stack, Spiel, for a better pipeline for speech synthesis (basically as an easy way to get more natural-sounding voice models) and on implementing AccessKit (the most recent stable a11y stack that is the same one the folks working on COSMIC are using).
They are working on screen reader support, there was a blog post about that 2-5 days ago I think.
This is cool, but half the software I need to use still doesn’t work on Wayland for some inexplicable reason.
I know this is the responsibility of the software maintainer to fix their compatibility, but as a business user I don’t have time to go around filing detailed bug reports and waiting for the next release when it’s fixed.
The solution for me is to switch back to X11 and move along, then in another year I try Wayland again after installing a new distro. After a few hours I find something that isn’t working on Wayland, rinse and repeat.
That something being probably Microsoft Teams piece of crap app or similar bullshit like Discord, all of which FOSS devs can’t do anything about even if they could. Or simply your system incompatibility like NVIDIA proprietary drivers.
If you expect everything to just work as if it was consumer OS that is fully supported by 3rd parties, Linux might not be the best choice for you in general.
I’m talking about FOSS software incompatibilities, I don’t have any expectation for mega corporate apps like Discord and Teams to adopt it. Those are a lost cause, I just use the browser versions and pray.
I truly do think this is a cool feature, but after seeing all the comments saying stuff like “now there’s ZERO excuse not to use Wayland!”, I felt like it was appropriate to share my perspective as a professional user who uses their computer a little differently than a FOSS enthusiast or hobbyist/casual user. I’m not getting paid to go around submitting bug reports and making PRs, so when things don’t “just work” it can be a big issue.
“Zero excuse” is a bit of a stretch, I aggree, but most things work really well now in my, and a lot others experience, at least recently. I also do my work full time on Linux, it’s mostly devops/sysadm work so a lot of what I use is terminal, web browser and well… Teams and Slack (the first one work well with an unofficial client, the latter got fixed recently), so it’s really not that hard to switch to Wayland. On my private machine I do mostly gaming, consuming content, some basic audio production and editing and there I rely a lot on X11 programs some running through Wine. They all work fine on Xwayland, recently even including HiDPI support (at least with simple one screen scenario). It’s really hard to find completely broken use case unless it’s something like automation scripts that move windows around, emit click or capture keyboard input globally and were designed strictly for X11. Oh, and apps that have multiple windows and request certain positioning - that is currently still missing and WIP.
On the other hand, the topic was originally about VR. While still kinda early, gimmicky and niche, it’s pretty cool modern tech. Good luck with that on X. Even more common cases like high refresh rates with multi screen setups, VRR, all suck on X11 while working nicely on Wayland for some time now, at least with good drivers.
Felt. VR took priority over color management with ICC profiles & HDR which is more important for commercial & general entertainment applications. I've had to switch back to X11 too.
Did you just come here to complain about Wayland in general? Which apps works with VR headsets under X11?
I truly do think this is a cool feature, but after seeing all the comments saying stuff like “now there’s ZERO excuse not to use Wayland!”, I felt like it was appropriate to share my perspective as a professional user who uses their computer a little differently than a FOSS enthusiast or hobbyist/casual user. I’m not getting paid to go around submitting bug reports and making PRs, so when things don’t “just work” it can be a big issue.
He came here to complain about priorities.
The thing is, volunteers work on what they want/specialize. Unless you are their boss and are paying them to work on something, you can't force their hand.
I don't use VR but I feel like this could help people trying to run VR games.
What would be interesting is if you could run gnome desktop on a VR headset
This is actually pretty huge, props to the GNOME developers for this.
Hopefully VR support will improve on linux, literally the only reason I keep a windows drive around is for vr and nothing more.
I just play VR on Linux, don't really have many problems with it. Only small ones like sometimes SteamVR doesn't recognize my headset the first time I start it so I need to restart it once.
The games have stuttering and soft laggs. Blade and Sorcery is the worst in terms of frame rate and lag.
(Details: i5-8600k, AMD FX 6750xt, Plasma 6 Wayland, Arch Linux, Valve Index)
Maybe you have a CPU bottleneck?
Yeah, thats why its so smooth on Windows?!
For some reason, on Linux, the GPU performance mode isn't set to high automatically. You can use CoreCTRL to manually set it to high. That eliminated those issues for me.
Which VR headset do you have?
Valve Index
This often happens to me on Windows with the Index so it might not even be a Linux specific issue
Does the index support any wireless contraption?
I think there is an unofficial wireless addon but it's very expensive. I don't mind the cable anyway tho.
Yeah I have an Oculus Rift S and the hardware support is pretty bad and I haven't really gotten it to work. Obviously a vendor issue, and i don't see meta open sourcing or releasing any drivers for linux anytime soon.
Considering they specifically removed Linux support of the earlier headsets, I doubt it too.
Yeah, I have a Valve Index, which is officialy supported on Linux, so I don't have any issues in that regard. I think the only headsets that work well on Linux are the two with official support (HTC Vive and Valve Index) and the Quest headsets because of ALVR.
Yup, this is huge. Wayland gaming is now a possibility. With Explicit Sync (needed for NVIDIA users) and VRR, there's now no excuse to keep gaming in X11 in both DEs.
it has been possible for quite some time now
In KDE, I agree. I have an AMD video card and I've been gaming in KDE Wayland for quite a while now.
In Gnome too. I've been doing it.
Yes, no VRR (by default anyway) was a mild inconvenience, but it doesn't exactly make games unplayable. It's not like everybody hated gaming before gsync/freesync became widespread.
For me, VRR is crucial as I play a lot of FPS games or else, I don't feel that the mouse is the extension of my hand. That's why I switched from Gnome to KDE.