[lug] Fedora 25 wayland

[Zan Lynx]

On 08/23/2016 11:08 AM, Michael J. Hammel wrote:
> Does anyone know if it will be possible to upgrade to F25 without
> enabling Wayland?  I simply don't need what it provides - I have more
> need to remotely display windows (as with ssh -X, not RDP) than I have
> to do 3D or even video (which works fine for me under X.org anyway). 
> 
> I've heard that there will be a fallback to X.org but I'm wondering if
> an upgrade will force the switch and then require me to fallback.  I'd
> rather not have it installed at all.  I'm not interested in testing
> Wayland.

> 

Well, as far as I can tell if you were using F24 and your session is set
to Gnome, it will stay in X.org. Although since I switch back and forth
there might be a difference between set to X and never set.

If it does default you to Wayland you should be able to log out back to
the GDM login screen and choose an X session instead of Wayland. It will
stick to it in the future.

I predict that since Gnome's Wayland session includes XWayland you'll
never notice the difference. X is still there, it is just drawing X
clients to Wayland instead of drawing them to the hardware.

> I'm wondering if it might be time to switch distros.  Bleeding edge
> isn't really necessary anymore for me.  Systemd has not been pleasant.
> And now wayland.  It's getting to be like Microsoft was - forcing
> updates for the sake of updating.  For some of us, it's not broken.
> Don't fix it.
>
> I think CentOS or maybe Debian may provide what I need.  Or maybe do
> something more dramatic, like Arch or roll my own.

Well, if you don't enjoy using the new things I don't think you should
be running Fedora. Debian stable, Ubuntu LTS or CentOS do sound like
better options for "not broken, don't fix it".

Although after enough time, five to seven years, you're going to need to
change anyway or do extra work on papering over whatever security bugs
show up in that time. I mean, there's still companies running Windows XP
in locked down, immutable virtual machines.

New hardware gets iffy too although you might be able to cheat with
hacking in a new kernel on an old distro. Ten years from now new
hardware will probably have non-volatile RAM as primary storage and 64
GB of HBM3 mounted with the CPU/GPU driving dual 8K per eye VR displays.
Which will probably require a future version of Wayland.