3 ms·

> Wayland is just super nice compared to X11 for enough tasks to justify using it. I'd like to hear what makes it better for you in terms of day-to-day experie

> Wayland is just super nice compared to X11 for enough tasks to justify using it. I'd like to hear what makes it better for you in terms of day-to-day experience. I can look at feature lists, but those often don't give a good picture of the reality that people experience. Given your enthusiasm for Wayland, I'd like to hear it!

josteink 10y ago
First and foremost it feels better. Wayland is smoother, does not have graphical glitches and everything performs consistently. Take this (slightly contrived) example: In Gnome 3 you can "zoom" out to panarama view all your running applications, while you have a HTML5 video running in your browser and everything just runs flawlessly, with almost no system-load, and no tearing or any nonsense. All this while you zoom in and out on whatever app or desktop or workspace you want to focus on. A less contrived example: Vertically scrolling a document in your browser or whatever should never ever tear. Ever. On X11 it often does. On Wayland it doesn't. My best simple comparison would be iOS vs Android. There's something about that extra little bit of responsiveness on iOS, that jerkyness you immediately notice on Android when you've gotten used to consistently smooth 60fps interfaces... That difference is something you feel. After using Wayland for a while, you'll notice that feeling yourself on your desktop too.
- jlarocco 10y ago
  Sounds like your graphics card isn't configured correctly, maybe? I use X11 (StumpWM, actually) on three computers with different graphics cards and system configurations, and I don't have jerkyness, tearing while scrolling, or graphical glitches on any of them.
  - josteink 10y ago
    I'm using factory config on well supported Intel GPUs. I can see the difference pretty clearly. Especially when dragging a full-screen window playing youtube or whatever. This works fine with Wayland. With X11 I get tearing. I'm pretty sure this is what everyone else is complaining about too.
    - digi_owl 10y ago
      Best i recall, there is a option called tearfree that one can apply to the adapter section in xorg.conf to alleviate this. Why these things are not enabled by default in the driver i do not know, as it makes X11 seem worse than it really is.
- gens 10y ago
  >Take this (slightly contrived) example: In Gnome 3 you can "zoom" out to panarama view all your running applications, while you have a HTML5 video running in your browser and everything just runs flawlessly, with almost no system-load, and no tearing or any nonsense. Same with a good compositing X11 window manager. In fact wayland does not dictate gpu accelerated rendering nor compositing. And there is much more to look at when talking about wayland vs X11, many details and a few major things. But in general, no, wayland is still not ready. The people leading the desktop wayland parade have to all take a step back and think, while nvidia needs to agree with kernel people on how to manage memory. Then we can start thinking about replacing X (start, as there are still many more details).
- luck_fenovo 10y ago
  These all sound like things that benefit heavyweight desktop environments and don't really impact tiling window managers at all. I use DWM, no graphical glitches, no tearing, no jankiness, absolutely consistently quick (which actually kind of removes "smoothness" from the equation; everything is pretty much instantaneous). Scrolling a document in Chromium very rarely pauses, but only ever when there's some bad JS blocking the UI, which isn't related to the window manager at all.

josteink 10y ago

First and foremost it feels better. Wayland is smoother, does not have graphical glitches and everything performs consistently. Take this (slightly contrived) example: In Gnome 3 you can "zoom" out to panarama view all your running applications, while you have a HTML5 video running in your browser and everything just runs flawlessly, with almost no system-load, and no tearing or any nonsense. All this while you zoom in and out on whatever app or desktop or workspace you want to focus on. A less contrived example: Vertically scrolling a document in your browser or whatever should never ever tear. Ever. On X11 it often does. On Wayland it doesn't. My best simple comparison would be iOS vs Android. There's something about that extra little bit of responsiveness on iOS, that jerkyness you immediately notice on Android when you've gotten used to consistently smooth 60fps interfaces... That difference is something you feel. After using Wayland for a while, you'll notice that feeling yourself on your desktop too.

jlarocco 10y ago
Sounds like your graphics card isn't configured correctly, maybe? I use X11 (StumpWM, actually) on three computers with different graphics cards and system configurations, and I don't have jerkyness, tearing while scrolling, or graphical glitches on any of them.
- josteink 10y ago
  I'm using factory config on well supported Intel GPUs. I can see the difference pretty clearly. Especially when dragging a full-screen window playing youtube or whatever. This works fine with Wayland. With X11 I get tearing. I'm pretty sure this is what everyone else is complaining about too.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Best i recall, there is a option called tearfree that one can apply to the adapter section in xorg.conf to alleviate this. Why these things are not enabled by default in the driver i do not know, as it makes X11 seem worse than it really is.
gens 10y ago
>Take this (slightly contrived) example: In Gnome 3 you can "zoom" out to panarama view all your running applications, while you have a HTML5 video running in your browser and everything just runs flawlessly, with almost no system-load, and no tearing or any nonsense. Same with a good compositing X11 window manager. In fact wayland does not dictate gpu accelerated rendering nor compositing. And there is much more to look at when talking about wayland vs X11, many details and a few major things. But in general, no, wayland is still not ready. The people leading the desktop wayland parade have to all take a step back and think, while nvidia needs to agree with kernel people on how to manage memory. Then we can start thinking about replacing X (start, as there are still many more details).
luck_fenovo 10y ago
These all sound like things that benefit heavyweight desktop environments and don't really impact tiling window managers at all. I use DWM, no graphical glitches, no tearing, no jankiness, absolutely consistently quick (which actually kind of removes "smoothness" from the equation; everything is pretty much instantaneous). Scrolling a document in Chromium very rarely pauses, but only ever when there's some bad JS blocking the UI, which isn't related to the window manager at all.