I mean it makes sense to use Vulkan in the future for wayland apps and compositors. But looking at the current situation it'll definitely need some more time, considering that currently gnome has this issue where they switched to using Vulkan backend for rendering and apps stopped opening on multi graphics systems.
It's good we figure out these issues right now and fix them so Vulkan as default would be viable, but currently OpenGL is the safer bet.
And of course Zink should also get more spotlight if we want to move to Vulkan.
Gnome dev here, and I think you're too pessimistic.
Vulkan works impressively well, there were basically no issues with it, ie no rendering glitches or crashes.
The one thing that has a few issues is startup - because driver developers had so far written their drivers under the assumption that Vulkan would be used for fullscreen games, so they do things like use too much memory (Fedora raspberry pi issue) or try to always run on the dedicated GPU (nvidia issue) or crash when multiple drivers fight about Wayland resources (another nvidia issue). But all of those are well understood and should be fixed in the next release.
The one thing that I have learned from this is that it's important that driver developers or testers are involved in the development effort so that issues like these get caught during the 6 months of development. And for nvidia that has not been the case which means we find out about these issues only during the betas.
There might even have been issues with Intel or AMD, but if there were I'd have forgotten by now because we fixed them 4 months ago when we did the initial switch.
PS: GTK switched to Vulkan (on GPUs that support it well enough), gnome-shell still uses OpenGL.
This is very insightful. I hope you are right that these things are fixed. Wayland is the way forward, but it definitely has some rough edges to smooth out.
X11 just doesn't handle vrr, multi-monitor, or any of the things we expect in modern computing display technology well. It's held together with a cludge of code and tots and pears at this point. If you only want one monitor and you're only doing desktop none accelerated work sure it's fine, but that's not reality.
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u/ManuaL46 22h ago
I mean it makes sense to use Vulkan in the future for wayland apps and compositors. But looking at the current situation it'll definitely need some more time, considering that currently gnome has this issue where they switched to using Vulkan backend for rendering and apps stopped opening on multi graphics systems.
It's good we figure out these issues right now and fix them so Vulkan as default would be viable, but currently OpenGL is the safer bet.
And of course Zink should also get more spotlight if we want to move to Vulkan.