Ubuntu 21.04: how to enable Wayland?

Question

Hello I have upgraded to Hippo (Ubuntu 21.04), but my session is still using X11. At the login screen, the only choice I have are «Unity» or «Ubuntu». I guess this is probably because my current install is really old, but upgraded every 6 months. On my others computer, Hippo is running under Wayland by default. But is there a way to force Hippo to use Wayland, or at least to have it available as an option at the login screen ? Thanks a lot.

Solution

If your 21.04 system determines that your hardware or environment is on the known-to-be-incompatible-with-Wayland list, then you won't be offered the choice.

If your hardware is not on the list, then you will get a Wayland session by default, and the choice to change to X.

"Forcing" known-to-be-incompatible hardware or environments to use Wayland is a very bad idea unless you are helping the Wayland developers test and debug. (If so, you wouldn't be asking the question here)

Earlier releases of Ubuntu have different behavior: Most defaulted to an X Session (17.10 defaulted to Wayland, reverted to X in 18.04). The transition to Wayland has been planned and tested for several years.

Comments

[Philetjosie]

Ok, many thanks for your answer. My graphic card is a GT Force 1030, its not old, i'm surprised it is not supported. However, I hope I will be able to upgrade to 21.10 and followings, which, if I understand well, will be under wayland.

[user535733]

It's not a question of how old the hardware is. It's a question of how documented and compatible the hardware is. Some manufacturers are better than others. Some hardware and environments will still be incompatible with Wayland in 21.10 (fewer, but still a positive integer).

[Trunk]

I have a similar issue with a persistent live version of Ubuntu 21.04 I put on a USB purely to observe Wayland performance. Your link above says: The divide right now is strictly between two buffer APIs, GBM and EGLStreams. NVIDIA GPUs using the proprietary driver support EGLStreams, while all other graphics cards and driver combinations support GBM. A Wayland compositor needs to explicitly support one or both of these APIs in order to function. I've looked at documentation on my Radeon R7 M445 to no avail as regards "buffer API" . . .

[Paul Jurczak]

I don't see "known-to-be-incompatible" in the link you've posted.

[user535733]

@PaulJurczak see the "Hardware Requirements" section. Nobody, to my knowledge, has volunteered for the thankless and herculean task of maintaining an accurate list by model number.