We continue talking about the latest release of Ubuntu and what I’m going to haunt you about, brunette, is that if traditionally the LTS versions of the Canonical distribution give a lot of play, this is no exception. If yesterday the topic was Flatpak support on Ubuntu, today it is about NVIDIA and Wayland, although with a different tone.
We gave you the news in the middle of last month and was daring : Ubuntu 22.04 LTS would use Wayland by default even with NVIDIA, an important leap for the system, which finally ventured to offer said graphic configuration by default and in an LTS, for more signs.
However, the truly audacious part of the move was to do it with NVIDIA , a generally controversial scenario that Fedora itself has not yet dared to enter. In fact, it will be in the next version of the Red Hat community distribution, Fedora 36, scheduled for release next week, that he is supposed to make the move.
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS was going to get ahead of it, but in the end it has not been like that and users with NVIDIA graphics who have installed this version will have realized -or not-that the graphic session they are using is the usual one, Xorg through. Not only that, the Wayaland session is not even pre-installed in case someone wants to try it out. Any.
The question, of course, is why one thing was said and the opposite ended up being done… and it wasn’t by Canonical, but by NVIDIA. About. Thus, it was NVIDIA that asked Canonical to use X.Org in conjunction with its proprietary driver . And Canonical agreed… although maybe it shouldn’t have? The debate in this regard is valid.
The story is collected in linuxiac with reference to the specific request, as well as the last minute error that motivates it and that is expected to be resolved in the next update of the driver, although for Ubuntu it looks like it will be late, unless they solve it in a later update.
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with NVIDIA
In short, Wayland support with NVIDIA was expected to get a boost with the adoption of GBM in the proprietary NVIDIA driver, but at least for the time being that doesn’t seem to be the case. Similarly, they point out in the aforementioned medium that there would be an update that recovers the option -only the option- to log in with Wayland, but at the moment it does not seem to be the case either.
The most curious thing about this whole thing: the update has arrived in Ubuntu, but (at least as far as I have been able to test personally) there is no sign of the option to log in with Wayland , even though all the packages necessary for it that option appears on the login screen are installed. Ergo, it is some modification made by Canonical so that this is so, which gives rise to wonder if having done it differently would have been better.
That is, knowing how they spend it on NVIDIA, would it have been better to say no to NVIDIA and urge them to release the patch as soon as possible, despite the risk that many users will find a negative first impression of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS? For, with the experience with NVIDIA? I think not, but surely there are those who think otherwise.
Be that as it may, it’s time to keep waiting for Wayland to be the present and not the future. If for the next LTS version of Ubuntu the Linux desktop is not there yet…
Update : after the arrival of new packages, the option to log in with Wayland using NVIDIA has appeared… but the experience seems to leave a bit to be desired, with applications that do not start, some other strange things… We will continue testing.
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