Hi folks. I wonder If anyone has any knowledge about SideFx`s stance on wayland support. I use Fedora and AFAIK xorg development is stopped. I guess Red Hat related distros will eventually go that direction too . Houdini works fine with xorg but secondary applications can cause problems . I recently had wacom problem on xorg but when I switched to wayland it was fine. Not fatal but kind of disturbing. So should I go back to windows? What do you think?

(I use Red Hat based distros cause of Maya :mad

Bump, looking for any info about wayland support as well.
All distros are shutting down xogr and soon enough wayland will be only available option

Mirko Jankovic
Bump, looking for any info about wayland support as well.
All distros are shutting down xogr and soon enough wayland will be only available option

I guess it is not a big issue for most people. But it would like to know what to expect for future releases.

Well it will become as every major distro is getting rid of x11 as development of it ended as well.
So why not look at it right away instead of waiting for flood gates to open?
Fedora 40 is wayland only, RHEL is following as well, along with every other major distro...

I think most big studios still run Houdini on Centos 8 . So they must think that they are safe for a while.
And they have very skilled IT people. It is a problem if you are a home user .I don`t know.
I posted this message almost a year ago and I still don`t have any clue.

Mirko Jankovic
Fedora 40 is wayland only (...)

I think Fedora will not remove X11 support anytime soon. The following article explains, that it's not that simple and there's still a division in the community and many issues with Wayland awaiting to be addressed, before it finally becomes a solid replacement for X11:

https://lwn.net/Articles/961899/ [lwn.net]

On Debian GNOME, Wayland is disabled by default when the OS detects NVIDIA proprietary drivers. Reportedly because Wayland currently doesn't cooperate well with NVIDIA. Or is it rather the other way around? XFCE doesn't support Wayland at all. It's planned for the future release. But while XFCE development moves steadily, it also moves slowly, so implementation won't happen anytime soon. KDE will still accept X11 contributions, as decided by KDE SIG.

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) agreed to reintroduce X11 support for Fedora 40.

So, for the time being, Xorg all the way, baby.

Fedora 40 at the moment does not have x11 as I can see.
Tur there are ton of options to stay with x11 for a while, but I do also wanna have all the latest bells and whistles like working gaming and HDR support.. things that sort of will be implemented only in x11
Also I didn;t yet dig too dip but I did have issues with cintiw on wayland as well so there is that too.

I guess biggest issue for me personally is that I'm sort if in an limbo between OSs.
Window is.. well windows.. 11 is pile of crap that is getting worse every day, now adding adds even on top of paid system....

Linux is getting better on the other hand but still not there yet, killing x11 that is working but not moving forward at all, and waylaid that is moving but still doesn't work properly. And apps not supporting it yet as well...
Seems like with time OS and all this instead of getting netter is just getting messier

Sort of similar to Houdini honestly.. so many nice things ocmign with 20, but also most of them ar estill like developing.. APEX nowhere near to be production ready, Karma XPU getting there but sitl have a way to go.. takling mostly from user perspective not some tech developer Layout node for exmaple seems nice but there is so many things to desire there user experience wise... Anyway getting way from main topic.

What distro should you good people suggest for stable and solid work with nvidia and Houdini?
Centos was the way but as that one is killed.. yea this stream thing is not going to my comp... Rocky Linux?

Also testing fedora 40 on another small machine jsut to see how it goes.. I could no t get nvidia drivers wokring at all, tried both manual nvidia drivers install and rpmfusion mode.. no luck

Fedora KDE spin removed X11 by default but other spins have X11 . You choose at the login screen. If you want a stable release you can try Rock Linux or Alma Linux. And for me Alma community looks more friendly than Rocky community. For nvidia driver I use rpmfusion one. I dont have any graphics card related problem. X11 fractional scaling is bad and also I would like to have HDR support too. But on the other hand I had problem with wacom driver with wayland. Wayland is promising but it has been 8 years since Fedora made wayland default. And I dont think that there is any development for x11. So wayland is the only way . I am sure sesi people have much better explanation and insight about this . I just want to know what they think.

It's worth checking out https://vfxplatform.com/linux/ [vfxplatform.com] if you're interested in linux distros.

In particular watch https://youtu.be/lA0dZMhqlSo?t=1388 [youtu.be]

Thanks a lot. Actually I had read vfx platform 2022 report before but I was expecting a roadmap for wayland. And after watching and reading vfxplatform sources I understand that Rhel base distros with X11 are still the prefered distros. For wayland update I will wait another year to ask again.

https://github.com/vfxplatform/vfxplatform/wiki/Upgrading-from-RHEL-CentOS-7-to-8-or-9-%E2%80%90-Gotchas-and-Tips [github.com]

I've settled with Rocky linux at the moment. A bit older kernel, stable KDE release... and most important everything seems to work just fine, and nvidia drivers installed without problems from rpmfusion, adn correctly detected in maya so.... does not have all the latest bells and whistles but it works. and stable so far

I installed Hou Apprentice, Nuke and mari non commercial and blender . It is for learning and testing purpose. I have a laptop so Fedora 40 seemed easiest solution. I will switch to rocky when I get a desktop.

https://9to5linux.com/blender-3-4-released-with-native-wayland-support-on-linux-many-improvements [9to5linux.com]

Blender managed to get wayland support couple versions back. Would be great if Houdini gets it as well. Now there are new nvidia drivers supporting wayland as well so everything is moving in that direction...

I found this one. At the end of the talk there is a question about wayland. In general I think It will take 1 to 2 years, I have some expectation for RHEL 10 .
https://youtu.be/pxhc9T2nQcs?si=5mNwS4m1z_JK1Laq&t=2268 [youtu.be]

Not sure if it is due to latest drivers but I've just run Houdini under Wayland on Nobara 39, nvidia 4090 and latest 555 nvidia drivers and seems to work just fine. Nothing special just fired it up

Mirko Jankovic
What distro should you good people suggest for stable and solid work with nvidia and Houdini?

I'm on debian (testing release) houdini works just fine

For me, trying to run houdini on wayland is a strange mixed bag so far: on my laptop (intel i7 from 2017 and gtx 1070) houdini runs more or less stable when I set certain env-vars on launch that e.g point vulkan to nvidia.icd and dealing with forcing to use the dGPU for houdini in general. Same distro (arch with KDE) but on my workstation (amd 7950x and rtx 3090): houdini crashes after putting down a few nodes (see crashlog in attachments). Login into a x11 session results in everything working as it should be. Nuke and Blender for example work (for me) on both x11 and wayland flawlessly. Maybe a SideFX Dev can chime in and give an approximation or something on what to expect for wayland support in the near future?

I never got it to be remotely usuable on ubuntu. The UI flickers all the time on mouse over. 2s after installing the latest LTS, I revert back to x11.

No idea how or why but since today maya got working just fine on wayland. Could be something with latest nvidia drivers but problem that I had with maya where animation graph window did not work at all is gone and maya seems to be working just fine with wayland at the moment.
On the Houdini side well still issues and crashing so.. could it be taht there are some other forces at play and not sidefx alone?

Finally blender never had any issues with wayland at all so.. looking forward to have H working stable as well...

I am hoping that with qt6 support coming later this year, there will also be traction on the wayland front. Fingers crossed!