DEV Community

Discussion on: The Linux Desktop Deep Dive

Collapse
 
gergelypolonkai profile image
Gergely Polonkai

All these are pretty Ubuntu specific. For example, Fedora puts the display manager on the first terminal (instead of the 7th). Also, the TTYs are not started unless you switch to a specific terminal, so getty tty2 is only spawned when you press Alt-F2 (or Ctrl-Alt-F2 if you are currently in a graphical environment).

Also, Fedora runs GNOME on Wayland by default, and as far as i know Ubuntu is planning a slow transition, too[citation needed](en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation_(ho...]. Wayland is a completely different beast of which you could write a whole article. GNOME and KDE are actively developed to use Wayland, and there is also an i3 (a popular tiling window manager) replacement for Wayland called Sway.

Collapse
 
l04db4l4nc3r profile image
Angad Sharma

Thanks for the info Gergely. I read up a bit about Wayland after your comment and it amazed me. I tried sway and was (quite amusingly) greeted by the following message:

Alt text

Ubuntu LTS more inclined towards stability. This is the reason why 18.04 did not come with Wayland by default. It does give you an option to switch though. I'll be interested to see if the next LTS comes wayland default

Collapse
 
gergelypolonkai profile image
Gergely Polonkai

Yeah, NVIDIA is notoriously not supporting Linux for some reason. Yes, there is a Linux driver, but it’s far behind the Windows driver in terms of features, plus it doesn’t support a lot of newer interfaces related to Linux. Nuoveau is a good alternative (and is present in Ubuntu 18.04), but still with a lot of missing features.

About Wayland; i guess Ubuntu doesn’t support it by default because their mouth is still a bit sour that MIR (a very similar protocol, developed by Canonical) “lost” against Wayland. Let’s see if they can get pass that, as Wayland is a good way to proceed (although it has its own shortcomings). Also note that 18.04 is exactly two years old now. Wayland grew a lot in the past 2 years, so it may become default (or at least well supported) in the upcoming LTS.