Note from: MuyLinux.
To read Eduardo Medina’s original in Spanish, click here.
For a little over a year I have been trying to complete my transition to Wayland, the graphical protocol destined to succeed Xorg. Being a closed user of the GNOME default experience and running it on Intel and Radeon graphics paves the way for me a lot, and although I admit that at general levels I am quite satisfied, there is a very specific point that has me somewhat displeased.
From my experience, the GNOME session on Wayland is pretty finished, and I don’t mean to use it for half an hour and then go back to Xorg, but I am talking about long-term experiences, with sessions that exceed 10 hours in a single day and in which I do practically everything: office automation with LibreOffice, web browsing (Firefox in Fedora is especially pleasant) with marathon sessions of Amazon Prime Video, video games surpassed from beginning to end (both native and executed using Proton), virtualization, programming with Visual Studio Code, the use of the official and portable version of Telegram Desktop, Evolution for mail and calendar and video editing with Kdenlive, Shotcut and Cinelerra GG (I currently use the latter). I am not going to give them to myself as an expert because I am a “master Liendre, who knows everything and understands nothing.”
Yes, everything I have mentioned in the previous paragraph I do from Wayland, from the beginning to the end, with projects that sometimes take me several hours, and the experience is more than satisfactory, without notable defects. However, there is one thing that has me a bit bitter: the recording with OBS Studio, especially the screencasting.
When I have to record with OBS Studio, I have to go back to Xorg. This situation makes me a bit sad because OBS Studio is practically the last stone on the road to complete my transition to Wayland, since at present I do everything from there except what I have to do with OBS Studio.
I’ve tried going back to Xorg, but I don’t want to for two reasons: First, because Wayland allows me to bypass the unsolvable security problems present in Xorg. Second, because of the enormous fluidity that Wayland gives me, which gives me a feeling of a premium product. Linux users have become accustomed to using graphical stacks that offer a “regular” experience compared to Windows and macOS, but I am much more demanding in that sense, and that is why Wayland plays an important role for me.
And what about OBS Studio support for Wayland? The work is progressing, but it seems that there are too many things ahead to have them finished in a short time. The main contributor to getting OBS Studio running on Wayland is George Stavracas, who also contributes to GNOME’s screencasting support and is a fan of the environment. Among the reviewers is Aleix Pol, current president of KDE eV (the foundation that supports the KDE project), so we can guess that efforts are being made with the intention that OBS Studio support for Wayland is not tied to an environment desktop in particular.
It is a pity that such a satisfactory experience is clouded by such a specific point, a point that for many common users is not important, but it is important for a little youtuber like me. I know that what I post on my channel are not prodigious things, but they are things that depend on OBS Studio to get ahead.
I hope and hope that the work to support Wayland in OBS Studio does not take too long and that it arrives in the best possible condition (the second being more important than the first). For now, I just have to resign myself, wait and throw Xorg when I want to use OBS Studio, even though Xorg makes me feel just as safe as shaking a bottle full of nitroglycerin.