On Sun, 07 Apr 2019 at 17:59:38 +0200, Adam Borowski wrote:
> * an amd64 desktop:
> * nouveau: way too crashy to be considered "working".
Please report this as a bug in the nouveau driver stack (sorry, I'm
not sure whether the kernel or Mesa is the right place).
If GNOME-on-Xorg doesn't work any better on this hardware than
GNOME-as-Wayland, then this bug isn't relevant to deciding whether GNOME
should default to Wayland mode or X11 mode.
> With xfce, disabling the compositor makes it work. With GNOME, it's
> AFAIK not an option (the fallback is gone, right?).
GNOME Flashback (packaged as gnome-session-flashback in Debian) is the
closest equivalent of the fallback mode in stretch, but isn't really the
GNOME desktop environment: it's more like another GNOME fork alongside
Cinnamon and MATE.
> * nvidia proprietary: doesn't work with new kernels.
My experience has been that it mostly does (SteamOS uses a recent
kernel and nvidia proprietary driver, via DKMS, on a system otherwise
heavily based on Debian 8), but I don't think the user-space part of
the proprietary driver supports Wayland. GNOME is meant to detect the
proprietary driver and fall back to Xorg mode automatically (if it
doesn't, please report that as a bug in gnome-session-bin, which is
where the supported/unsupported GPU detection lives).
> * Pine{64,book}:
> simplefb. GNOME no workie.
>
> * RockPro64, used as a desktop (I'm typing these words on it):
> armsoc. GNOME no workie.
>
> * N900:
> didn't try. I don't suspect it could work, though.
>
> * Gemini:
> libhybris. No way to run Wayland I guess, X GNOME probably either.
GNOME is designed for a desktop or laptop with a working GPU, and these
devices probably aren't that (the N900 certainly isn't). If the Clutter
toolkit used in GNOME Shell doesn't work on this hardware (likely),
then GNOME-on-Xorg won't work there either, which means making GNOME
default to X11 mode wouldn't improve its ability to run on these devices.
> * Omega OAN133:
> crashes with a black screen (although it's been a while since I tried).
Sorry, I don't know what that device is. If it's a desktop or laptop
from the last few years with an otherwise working and supportable GPU,
please report a bug.
> * an i386 desktop (used as a pedestal for RockPro):
> i915 [910GL]. Might or might not run, although the mandatory compositor
> on hardware this old would cause such a slideshow on 2560x1600 that it
> wouldn't be usable.
Wikipedia tells me this is a 2004 Pentium 4 chipset, which I
suspect is much too old for the Clutter toolkit used by GNOME Shell to
work: last time I tried running GNOME on an Intel GPU of comparable age,
I think the problem was that Clutter requires driver/hardware support for
non-power-of-two textures, which wasn't present.
However, if GNOME-on-Xorg doesn't work any better on this hardware than
GNOME-as-Wayland, then it isn't relevant to deciding whether GNOME
should default to Wayland mode or X11 mode.
smcv
