14 ms·

Wayland misconceptions debunked

254 points by ddevault 8y ago

microcolonel 8y ago
> Things like sending pixel buffers to the compositor are already abstracted on Wayland and a network-backed implementation could be easily made. The problem is that no one seems to really care: all of the people who want network transparency drank the anti-Wayland kool-aid instead of showing up to put the work in. If you want to implement this, though, we’re here and ready to support you! Drop by the wlroots IRC channel and we’re prepared to help you implement this. Somebody has actually done this! Erik De Rijcke put together Greenfield [0], which is a Wayland compositor that relays surfaces with H.264 or JPEG over WebRTC. It is exactly as cool as it sounds, and it seems like it actually might work pretty well. It's the sort of thing that could be standardized, with a bit of work. [0]: https://github.com/udevbe/greenfield https://github.com/udevbe/greenfield
johnchristopher 8y ago
Has wayland been released yet ? Does it still freeze the whole gnome desktop when dragging a Firefox tab from one window to another (asking for a friend) ?
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  Wayland the protocol was released a long time ago. Wayland implementations like GNOME are in varying states of completion. I don't know about GNOME in particular, but my compositor - sway - is shipping 1.0 within the next month or two.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - johnchristopher 8y ago
    > https://swaywm.org/ https://swaywm.org/ Looks good ! Do you think fancy animations and tiling could be done (wobling, fading and swiping effects when switch from one pane to the other, etc.)?
    - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
      We're not interested in those for sway, but we work with a project called wayfire via wlroots that you may be interested in: https://wayfire.org/ https://wayfire.org/
      - victornomad 8y ago
        I saw wayfire last week and looks cool, a bit of compiz/beryl revival on wayland :) I think sway is prety nice as it is but I would love to see a few things to make it feel "modern" - round borders - simple drop shadows - a way to add small effects when opening/closing/selecting windows. I was wondering how difficult would it be to allow run custom shaders on those actions. So for example one could implement very easily fade in/outs, gray out all the windows except the selected, and custom effects, etc... just adding something in the config file like on_selected_glsl: 'path_to_fragment.glsl (unixporn community would love it :) Anyway, I'm pretty happy on the current state, so thanks for the amazing work :)
        Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
        https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/3652 https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/3652
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - floatboth 8y ago
      Wayfire (already mentioned by Drew) indeed has wobbly windows, the desktop cube and even the titular fire :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLb7YRKEhWEBUIoT-a29UoJW9mhfzjpNle&v=Ban7wspkrNQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLb7YRKEhWEBUIoT-a29UoJW9...
      - johnchristopher 8y ago
        Cool. I used to love tiling managers (awesome-wm user) and I always thought it was lacking a smoothness factor when transitioning from a pane to another or when rearranging containers. Something that wouldn't make you think you just blinked and the windows were moved, a way to follow where visual objects are going to. Something like that (notice how the resize is smooth and not instantaneous, which allows your eyes to follow movements but the left and right align are instantaneous and feel like something hit you from nowhere since you can't track the transitions with your eyes): https://streamable.com/wb36p https://streamable.com/wb36p
- snazz 8y ago
  It’s the default on a number of Linux distros. I’ve never seen it crash when dragging tabs between windows, but it is still less stable than Xorg, in my experience. Full crashes are very rare as of recently, however. I’m impressed with how much it’s improved, but I don’t use it myself, as it isn’t supported on OpenBSD (where Xenocara is the X11 implementation).
  - johnchristopher 8y ago
    Sure: $ (kubuntu 18.04LTS default install, not tweaky tweaky) loginctl show-session 3 -p Type Type=x11 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1399093 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1399093 To be fair I remember video playback was waaaaaay smoother with wayland than X last time I tried. But this kind of bugs happened to me last year. I don't have time anymore for distribution tweaking, either the current LTS works or I pick up something else (that's why I don't mind running x or wayland these days: whatever works is okay).
    - paulcarroty 8y ago
      Firefox-wayland released in Fedora maybe year ago. Can't remember nothing related in GNOME.
      - johnchristopher 8y ago
        I remember that one https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/1704765 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/1704... (does apply to ff drag and drop too if I recall correctly, carried from 17.10 to 18.04) and https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/issues/895 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/issues/895.
macintux 8y ago
Related ongoing discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19127762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19127762
ubercow13 8y ago
How would something like Easystroke [1] need to be implemented for Wayland? Would this have to be inside the compositor as it's like a global hotkey? [1] https://github.com/thjaeger/easystroke/wiki https://github.com/thjaeger/easystroke/wiki
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  Yes, this would have to live in the compositor, or suitable protocol extensions would have to be developed and implemented.
  - ubercow13 8y ago
    How would you invisage it being implemented in sway for example? It's quite esoteric to be maintained along with a minimalistic compositor like sway, and moreover it probably requires a GUI for configuration. Would a PR implementing it be accepted?
    - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
      It's probably just not a feature we'd support at all in sway.
malvosenior 8y ago
> So in short, people asking for Nvidia proprietary driver support are asking the wrong people to spend hundreds of hours working for free to write and maintain an implementation for one driver which represents a harmful force on the Linux ecosystem and a headache for developers trying to work with it. With respect, my answer is no. I don't see how Wayland can succeed without supporting Nvidia. Yes, they'll have to write several thousand more lines of code, but if you're going to make a desktop environment in 2019, you're going to have to put in that effort to support the graphics card that most people have. It would be great if Nvidia had better Linux support! But they don't and washing your desktop platform's hands of the issue just makes the whole project DOA. Are there any competitors to Wayland that don't take a hard-line stance against supporting the most popular and most powerful graphics cards in the world?
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  Nouveau works. Use it instead. Also: it's possible to have a definition of success which excludes users of the proprietary driver. We don't have the same value system. >the [...] most powerful graphics cards in the world? Citation needed? And the highest of the high end graphics cards are excessive vanity most of the time, you don't need the tip-top to play any modern game at any settings you want.
  - malvosenior 8y ago
    Working and actually taking advantage of the performance I paid for are two different things. This is a very dismissive attitude that embodies the problem with Wayland. Millions of gamers absolutely do need that acceleration they paid for, it's not "vanity". > We don't have the same value system. I just want a usable Linux desktop that leverages the hardware in my machine. The "values" here seem to be: we acknowledge the extra work required to support mainstream graphics cards, we just don't want to do it and it's really your fault as a user for buying it/asking us to support it.
    - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
      No, they don't. I'm a gamer myself (infrequently these days to be fair). You can have excellent performance with maxed out settings on big ol' 4K displays... on last year's GPUs, which work fine with Nouveau. >it's really your fault as a user for buying it/asking us to support it. Yes, I'm soooo sorry that I don't want to do free work to help you prop up a company that lives to make me suffer as a developer... I'm clearly exagerrating here but I hope the point is made. Like the article says, just keep using X, I don't care.
shmerl 8y ago
> There are two approaches to this endorsed by different camps in Wayland: these Wayland protocols, and a dbus protocol based on Pipewire. Pipewire approach looks the best for screenshots and video recording. I hope all Wayland compositors will settle on it. > Secondary clipboard support <...> wp-primary-selection I guess the standard is very recent. Last time I tried, KWin didn't support it yet. > We fought long and hard over this and we now have a protocol for negotiating client- vs server-side decorations, which is now fairly broadly supported, including among some of its opponents. A major problem with Mutter remains. Mutter developers don't want to depend on GTK for whatever reason, but so are SDL, mpv and other non-GUI applications and toolkits developers. The result are ugly looking windows for such cases in Gnome. > You have to step up, though: no one working on Wayland today seems to care. It's a problem with Wayland in general. The end user gets the short end of the stick, since with removal of some functionality that was in X, some use cases are cut off. But there is no one player like with X server. Tons of compositors are developed by different people. So even raising the issue let alone coming to some consensus takes a very long time. I'm not saying Wayland isn't the way to go, just pointing out it's a very hard transition. > Wayland doesn’t support Nvidia! How is the progress of using Vulkan for Wayland compositors and avoiding the whole EGLstreams mess? I see this: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Docs/issues/294 https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Docs/issues/294 But it's not clear from it whether now there is a way to avoid using GBM or EGLstreams.
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  The problem is that it requires dbus, which not everone is on board with. Our argument is that the Wayland compositor should speak the Wayland protocol. That being said, the software I mentioned can be used to bridge between the two camps. Following your edit: yes, the new standard protocol for primary selection is very new. But everyone supports the GTK protocol and the transition will not be visible to users. Dude, so many edits: "But there is no one player like with X server" -> this player is wlroots Oh my god man, stop editing your comment: "How is the progress of using Vulkan for Wayland compositors and avoiding the whole EGLstreams mess?" -> hard to say now, it's very very early.
  - 8y ago
alexandernst 8y ago
IMHO hotkeys is something basic. I understand Wayland is being designed with security in mind, but Wayland developers must understand that what they're trying to do is to, ultimately, create an X replacement. And X is, mainly, user-oriented. You can't have a graphical, user-oriented, server and tell the user to "hey, just use a shell script and a control binary, and then hook a hotkey into your window manager and make it run that script". That's just not how user friendliness works. Try to find a common ground between Wayland being secure and Wayland being practical.
- ben0x539 8y ago
  I think the wayland devs aren't focusing on replacing absolutely everybody's X-based workflows, but on providing a reasonably engineered component that integrators can build a desktop environment on top of. In practice, we'll probably get a distro shipping a self-contained DE with a centralised hotkey setup, and I expect that will do the job for the vast majority of users. Maybe someone else is building a phone OS and using wayland for the graphical bits and the hotkey thing isn't even going to be on their radar.
  - alexandernst 8y ago
    But why does every single DE has to reinvent the wheel with hotkeys? Why can't we have that provided by Wayland? (or maybe by libhotkey, if you wish). Why so much effort in replicating the same functionality over and over must be wasted in the entire linux ecosystem?
    - veqz 8y ago
      Not ever single DE, but the Compositor a DE uses must have it implemented. Though Compositors may share libraries as well, and a unifying library might very well be developed for this.
amelius 8y ago
Does Wayland support ripping of DRM'ed video streams?
- floatboth 8y ago
  Most compositors don't support DRM (that kind) at all (yet), only recently there was a protocol extension published + a merge request for Weston + I guess something on the driver side?
zbuf 8y ago
I heard that in a world based on the Wayland protocol, applications implement the window decorations. If so, I'm interested in how we can expect consistency; and eg. moving the window of an unresponsive application. This could well be a misconception, which is why now seems a decent time to ask. These seem to be good qualities of X. Wayland has been a number of years in the making, so I have somewhat lost track of my source of this information. Edit: Apologies, I did read the fine article. It appears I must have skipped a section.
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  See discussion about "server-side decorations" in the article.
- naner 8y ago
  Yeah, that's mentioned in the linked article as one of the common misconceptions.
onli 8y ago
What a refreshing difference to other Linux ecosystem changes! Errors like enforcing client side decorations get corrected, there seems to be activity to add the features missing compared to X, and most importantly: Instead of replacing the existing working solution with broken crap because it's modern, Wayland slowly integrates itself into the ecosystem, and it has Xwayland, which should minimize breakage when moving over in a few years. And if I look at the stutter X produces with my window manager every time the compositor is off, and given that said compositor compton is abandoned and there seems to be no better alternative, I understand that there might be a need for a different solution. I got hit by strange Wayland bugs when distros like Ubuntu and Fedora activated it too early and I'm not looking to make the switch anytime soon, but I wish the project the best and am happy to see it seems to be on a good way.
ben0x539 8y ago
What's the status for global push-to-talk for voice chat apps like Discord? Does that also fall under hotkeys/"no one working on Wayland today seems to care"?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- denniskane 8y ago
  I want to start radically experimenting with the entire concept of hotkeys in Linux on the Web[1]. It's just that I've been a one-man operation since I started working on it over 6 years ago, so it takes awhile to get any one thing done. Since the system is now coming into its own, I will be spending more time on HN, trying to build interest in what seems to be a potentially exciting new paradigm that blends together the ideas of traditional general computation and more modern, highly portable web-based approaches. [1] See it live at https://linuxontheweb.org/desk.os https://linuxontheweb.org/desk.os
de9xvnh7 8y ago
Most of the answers are either "well that's true, the protocol doesn't allow it, but implementations do it in non-standard ways" or "we are working on it" or "oh this is not a problem with Wayland, see, Wayland is just a protocol". i.e. at least half of the criticism, as of today, is still practically true.
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  You can't even open application windows on Wayland without a protocol extension. The core Wayland protocol doesn't do these things by design, but that doesn't mean end-users can't do them on Wayland compositors which support these use cases in the places that they're designed to be supported.
  - de9xvnh7 8y ago
    The end user doesn't care about protocols or compositors. The end user wants a system that can replace Xorg and do the same or even a better job. And, as of today, Wayland fails miserably at that.
    - ddevault 8y ago
      >The end user doesn't care about protocols or compositors Which is why they shouldn't care that the core Wayland protocol doesn't implement it. These use cases WORK!
jancsika 8y ago
> Wayland doesn’t support Nvidia! There is a very high likelihood that when a user complains about Wayland support for Nvidia they mean this: * user already assumes Nvidia is a bad Linux actor * user knows Nvidia only supports buggy blobs * user may even know Nvidia is bad to people trying to unblob the blobs * user already went through the trouble of doing what it takes to get the bad Linux Nvidia blobs to work to play games on their machines * user notices that the bad buggy Linux Nvidia blobs fail to work at all with Wayland * user is understandably even more frustrated than they were before. So they ask you-- a Wayland person-- how can it be even worse for them now when they've already been generating much more complex and power-hungry graphics with their buggy blob than they'd ever do with Wayland. If you're representing Wayland, this problem is your problem whether you want it or not. Perhaps the answer is to make the protocol worse so the the Nvidia user doesn't remain eternally maximally frustrated. Perhaps the answer is that isn't possible and you're stuck in the same boat as the user. Perhaps it means you start a hunger strike or gather thousands of devs to protest outside Nvidia's headquarters until they improve. I have no idea. But please don't do that FLOSS thing where all the devs on a project teach each other to sync on, "Sorry Mario, but your princess is in another castle." That pattern becomes it's own problem and can quickly end up discouraging development even from potential devs who don't care at all about Nvidia support. > Wayland doesn’t support screenshots/capture! What is the current UX for screenshotting, screencapture, and screencapture with audio for the most featureful DE that uses Wayland atm? Is there a program out there that offers push-button access for these three features (choosing the most sensible default format in each case)?
- ddevault 8y ago
  >There is a very high likelihood that when a user complains about Wayland support for Nvidia they mean this As the actual person who receives these complaints... this isn't true. Once it's explained, though, the users still stick around and get angry because they made dumb, uninformed choices as a consumer and think it's our fault. >If you're representing Wayland, this problem is your problem whether you want it or not. It's not. We can just choose not to solve it. Use X and buy smarter when the next harware upgrade comes around, or wait until your hardware is supported by nouveau if you don't want to upgrade any time soon. >What is the current UX for screenshotting, screencapture, and screencapture with audio for the most featureful DE that uses Wayland atm? Is there a program out there that offers push-button access for these three features (choosing the most sensible default format in each case)? I don't really know what the situation is for more noob-friendly DEs like GNOME, but on sway this tool is the i3-equivalent of push-button simplicity: https://wayland.emersion.fr/grim/ https://wayland.emersion.fr/grim/ Push-button screen capture isn't there yet.
meditate 8y ago
Hey Drew (and other contributors), thanks for all your work on this, I switched from i3 to Sway last week and everything has been quite stable. My only gripe has been that screenshotting/screencasting apps can only pull from fullscreen and can't capture from a window yet. The portal APIs seems to support this but the wlroots protocols only allows export from composited outputs, not from un-composited wl_surfaces. Hope this gets some love soon.
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  Sway is a do-ocracy. Get in there and do it! It's not as hard as you think.
  - meditate 8y ago
    I am aware that I may be the one who ends up implementing that :)
sosodev 8y ago
I've been using Sway on my laptop recently and it's been a great experience. It looks great (easily customizable) and runs smooth.
dooglius 8y ago
> So in short, people asking for Nvidia proprietary driver support are asking the wrong people to spend hundreds of hours working for free to write and maintain an implementation for one driver which represents a harmful force on the Linux ecosystem and a headache for developers trying to work with it. With respect, my answer is no. Interestingly, this is more of an indictment of Wayland than anything in the article that's being "debunked". I don't dispute that it is difficult work, but you'll have to choose between making a viable X replacement, and dying on this particular hill.
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  Wayland is flourishing - everywhere except among Nvidia proprietary driver users. In reality it's them who are dying on their hill, left behind on crappy old software.
  - bubblethink 8y ago
    Nvidia's primary Linux user base cares about cuda. As long as those needs are met, I don't see much changing in the short term. Gaming and other use cases are still insignificant in terms of numbers.
  - gpm 8y ago
    No, in reality desktop Linux, including wayland, is floundering. This is contributing to that floundering by splitting the effort, create an environment filled with vitriol on both sides, making it harder for things like games to say they support the set of things called "Linux", etc.
    - ddevault 8y ago
      I'm not here to make Linux succeed. I'm here to make good software. Users who know better will use Linux and users who don't won't. Either way Linux will keep on trucking, as it has for a very long time. It shows no sign of stopping.
      - 8y ago
darkpuma 8y ago
Wayland is a great demonstration that not all change and deviation from tradition in met with vitriolic anger from the linux community (as has been asserted). Wayland meets its fair share of skepticism, but it seems cool heads prevail and the situation stays civil. This gives me confidence in the maturity of the community and the long term viability of Wayland.
- peatmoss 8y ago
  I wonder if some of the ire was bled off by Mir? I mean, when Canonical announced Mir, people mainly responded with anger that they weren’t contributing to Wayland which was a longer-standing attempt to replace X11.
  - darkpuma 8y ago
    That's an interesting hypothesis, I hadn't considered that.
SCdF 8y ago
> Wayland can be keylogged, assuming the attacker can sneak some evil code into your .bashrc I’m not sure what scenarios are being invisioned here, but isn’t that absolutely something a nefarious app could do, because the app will be run as you, and you have write access to your bashrc? As an example, since it’s fresh in my memory, if the folks who put dodgy cryptocurrency stealing code into npm packages had instead put this keylogger in there, that would have worked right? You run npm install, npm runs as you, the package runs as you, the package updates your bashrc.
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  Yes, but that package could also do all sorts of other things, like encrypting your ~ and demanding ransom. It's not Wayland's problem to solve this - sandboxing is a separate matter. Wayland makes it easier to sandbox graphical applications but it is not a complete sandboxing solution.
thinkmassive 8y ago
Wayland doesn’t support full-screen sharing, for example in Google Meet (aka Hangouts). Hopefully this is fixed soon (via dmabuf-export, mentioned in the article) but until then (and for the past couple years) it’s a major hassle for a lot of people who had Wayland forced onto them by their desktop environment. Even if this isn’t Wayland’s fault they would be wise to assist with a fix soon.
pmoriarty 8y ago
There are a number of counter arguments to the parent article in "Why I'm not going to switch to Wayland yet."[1] On the subject of leaving the responsibility of taking screenshots to the Wayland compositor: "for simple things using the compositor's screen shot tool is fine. But what if I don't like the screenshot tool for my compositor of choice? My experience with the GNOME screenshot tool (granted this was pre-wayland) was that it wasn't as good as, say, shutter, which has a lot of options, let's you easily crop and edit the screenshot from inside the screenshot tool etc. And then swaygrab doesn't even (currently) have an option to capture a rectangular region." There are some other things "Why I'm not going to switch to Wayland yet" mentions which are important to me, like Wayland's lack of color picker tools and xdotool functionality. The parent article says: "Wayland doesn't have network transparency! This is actually true! But it's not as bad as it's made out to be. Here's why: X11 forwarding works on Wayland. Wait, what? Yep: all mainstream desktop Wayland compositors have support for Xwayland, which is an implementation of the X11 server which translates X11 to Wayland, for backwards compatibility. X11 forwarding works with it! So if you use X11 forwarding on Xorg today, your workflow will work on Wayland unchanged." So why wouldn't I just use xorg to begin with? Overall, Wayland just seems immature to me, and not a viable competitor to Xorg, which has had all of this functionality for decades. As an Xorg user, I really struggle to come up with compelling reasons to switch. [1] - https://old.reddit.com/r/wayland/comments/85q78y/why_im_not_going_to_switch_to_wayland_yet/ https://old.reddit.com/r/wayland/comments/85q78y/why_im_not_...
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  >screenshot quote I addressed this in my article, please read it. And you can select a rectangular region on sway today, using tools which are portable across many Wayland compositors. >So why wouldn't I just use xorg to begin with? You can, no one's stopping you.
- cannabis_sam 8y ago
  It’s still fuckin sad that we haven’t managed to build something lasting..
shmerl 8y ago
Regarding gaming by the way. XWayland works quite well for it already (it's critical since Wine for example still requires X and many older games depend on X as well), but there seems to be some issue with radv at present which requires setting explicit number of back buffers to avoid capping that disregards vsync settings: https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/issues/806 https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/issues/806 If games are using SDL, you can also select Wayland using SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland. But there are some glitches still. I tried doing it for example with ScummVM, and it produced double cursor.
gyger 8y ago
I never understood this complains? The main use cases work, I have almost never found a Linux user that was unhappy with Wayland. Once a while a power user, but that one is smart enough to install X if he needs a special functionality. I never had a problem, and if you upgrade the next time, check the hardware compatibility and buy what you need. Till then, just run a X stack.
pmontra 8y ago
My current showstopper with Wayland is that no screensharing application works with it: Skype, Meet, TeamViewer. I need them to work with my customers so I'm staying on Xorg until that gets implemented.
- zaro 8y ago
  Same here. If Skype and Chrome screen sharing worked in wayland I am switching to wayland right away, as it seems everything else works well.
DiabloD3 8y ago
There are an awful lot of comments on here that are trying to protect Nvidia's anti-Linux position. Nvidia's position, literally, is their GPUs are not Linux compatible. The Linux ecosystem relies on the Mesa stack (Mesa, DRI, DRM, GBM, KMS, etc), and DRM is part of the upstream kernel itself... Nvidia has openly not used any of these APIs. This is exactly equivalent to Nvidia not using WDDM and DXGI. If Nvidia chose to do that, Microsoft would outright ban them from driver certification (thus the platform entirely), so why is it wrong for Linux and Wayland to do the same? The Linux community reached out to Nvidia and help them along with Nouveau, and at one point even threatened to sue them. Linus Torvalds has told them that he doesn't care about them if they won't actually participate in Linux, and will continue to break their drivers because they just don't listen.
- dooglius 8y ago
  > There are an awful lot of comments on here that are trying to protect Nvidia's anti-Linux position. No, you are taking a with-us-or-against-us mentality. Users and application developers want things to work as broadly as possible, regardless of the graphics card or driver being used. Whether that helps or hurts various parties regarding Nvidia's closed-source stance is irrelevant. > Nvidia's position, literally, is their GPUs are not Linux compatible Citation needed. If this is their position, why would they offer Linux driver downloads? Not supporting something in a way Linux would prefer is not the same as not supporting something. >This is exactly equivalent to Nvidia not using WDDM and DXGI. If Nvidia chose to do that, Microsoft would outright ban them from driver certification (thus the platform entirely), so why is it wrong for Linux and Wayland to do the same? Microsoft can get away with this precisely because it sells Windows; it lowers the price to vendors (such as Dell) on the condition that they only use certified drivers. It is entirely possible to run Windows with uncertified drivers. In any case, it is my understanding that this is a licensing issue, and Nvidia would support more APIs if it could do so while keeping the driver proprietary.
  - bubblethink 8y ago
    >Citation needed. If this is their position, why would they offer Linux driver downloads? Not supporting something in a way Linux would prefer is not the same as not supporting something. It's not so much that they are incompatible. It's that they weren't written for linux. They use the same driver for windows which has been adapted for linux. That also allows them to avoid any sort of derivate work clause that would kick in due to the GPL.
josteink 8y ago
Great write up. That said I found the section about nvidia drivers confusing. > All three are necessary for most Wayland compositors. Only the first two are implemented by the Nvidia proprietary driver. Ok. But what about nouveau? Is nvidia supported using the open-source drivers (the only ones I will use) or are these drivers too lacking? Are the wlroots developers completely disregarding nvidia-support over issues only found with the proprietary drivers, or are there actual unworkable nvidia issues regardless of driver used?
- Tharre 8y ago
  Yes, nouveau is of course supported. But nouveau has trouble supporting the newest cards currently, since Nvidia seems to try their best to make their lives hell.
- hsivonen 8y ago
  The Ubuntu 18.04 Gnome Wayland session works well on nouveau. (I've used one consumer card from 2010 or so and a pro card from 2013 or so. Also tried a newer pro card that nouveau didn't support, regardless of Wayland. In that case, the easiest solution was to remove the card and buy AMD.)
  - heavenlyblue 8y ago
    Nouveau does run under 1080gtx ti, but I’ve got a weird setup with 3x4K screens, so the driver needs to increase the GPU clock and it fails as that is a part of the proprietary blob. So it should work with most of the setups until you’re trying to reach a certain performance threshold.
deleted 8y ago
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znpy 8y ago
I am really unstatisfied about the status of remote desktop session on GNU/Linux and other unices in general. RDP on Windows works amazingly, it's really like having your remote machine at your fingertips (as long as network holds). On GNU/Linux on the other hand, most solutions are hacky or cumbersome or non-standard or a linear combination of the previous adjectives. I really wish I could have truly good remote desktop support on GNU/Linux.
- bscphil 8y ago
  Have you ever tried X2Go? I've used it a few times and it's been incredible - instant feedback exactly how you describe RDP. There's also just regular old rdesktop, which seems to work pretty well if you're mostly connecting to Windows servers.
  - znpy 8y ago
    Yes I've tried X2Go and rdesktop with xrdp. Meh. X2Go was cool and worked well, but support for various distro was a bit unclear (only Ubuntu? can't remember, that was like four years ago) as unclear was on which condition you could actually resume your session and how (what if I disconnect unexpectedly? how do I list my current sessions? Is there audio in/out forwarding? clipboard sharing?). The website homepage failed to address many of these questions, ultimately failing to answer the question "can I actually rely on this thing?".
jchw 8y ago
Personal criticism: it's not FUD if it's correct. A lot of the things the author concedes are actually limitations, even if not inherent (did anyone ever claim that?) are reasons I can't use Wayland or at least would be massively inconvenienced.

254 points by ddevault 8y ago

> Things like sending pixel buffers to the compositor are already abstracted on Wayland and a network-backed implementation could be easily made. The problem is that no one seems to really care: all of the people who want network transparency drank the anti-Wayland kool-aid instead of showing up to put the work in. If you want to implement this, though, we’re here and ready to support you! Drop by the wlroots IRC channel and we’re prepared to help you implement this. Somebody has actually done this! Erik De Rijcke put together Greenfield [0], which is a Wayland compositor that relays surfaces with H.264 or JPEG over WebRTC. It is exactly as cool as it sounds, and it seems like it actually might work pretty well. It's the sort of thing that could be standardized, with a bit of work. [0]: https://github.com/udevbe/greenfield https://github.com/udevbe/greenfield

johnchristopher 8y ago

Has wayland been released yet ? Does it still freeze the whole gnome desktop when dragging a Firefox tab from one window to another (asking for a friend) ?

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
Wayland the protocol was released a long time ago. Wayland implementations like GNOME are in varying states of completion. I don't know about GNOME in particular, but my compositor - sway - is shipping 1.0 within the next month or two.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- johnchristopher 8y ago
  > https://swaywm.org/ https://swaywm.org/ Looks good ! Do you think fancy animations and tiling could be done (wobling, fading and swiping effects when switch from one pane to the other, etc.)?
  - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
    We're not interested in those for sway, but we work with a project called wayfire via wlroots that you may be interested in: https://wayfire.org/ https://wayfire.org/
    - victornomad 8y ago
      I saw wayfire last week and looks cool, a bit of compiz/beryl revival on wayland :) I think sway is prety nice as it is but I would love to see a few things to make it feel "modern" - round borders - simple drop shadows - a way to add small effects when opening/closing/selecting windows. I was wondering how difficult would it be to allow run custom shaders on those actions. So for example one could implement very easily fade in/outs, gray out all the windows except the selected, and custom effects, etc... just adding something in the config file like on_selected_glsl: 'path_to_fragment.glsl (unixporn community would love it :) Anyway, I'm pretty happy on the current state, so thanks for the amazing work :)
      - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
        https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/3652 https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/3652
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - floatboth 8y ago
    Wayfire (already mentioned by Drew) indeed has wobbly windows, the desktop cube and even the titular fire :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLb7YRKEhWEBUIoT-a29UoJW9mhfzjpNle&v=Ban7wspkrNQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLb7YRKEhWEBUIoT-a29UoJW9...
    - johnchristopher 8y ago
      Cool. I used to love tiling managers (awesome-wm user) and I always thought it was lacking a smoothness factor when transitioning from a pane to another or when rearranging containers. Something that wouldn't make you think you just blinked and the windows were moved, a way to follow where visual objects are going to. Something like that (notice how the resize is smooth and not instantaneous, which allows your eyes to follow movements but the left and right align are instantaneous and feel like something hit you from nowhere since you can't track the transitions with your eyes): https://streamable.com/wb36p https://streamable.com/wb36p
snazz 8y ago
It’s the default on a number of Linux distros. I’ve never seen it crash when dragging tabs between windows, but it is still less stable than Xorg, in my experience. Full crashes are very rare as of recently, however. I’m impressed with how much it’s improved, but I don’t use it myself, as it isn’t supported on OpenBSD (where Xenocara is the X11 implementation).
- johnchristopher 8y ago
  Sure: $ (kubuntu 18.04LTS default install, not tweaky tweaky) loginctl show-session 3 -p Type Type=x11 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1399093 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1399093 To be fair I remember video playback was waaaaaay smoother with wayland than X last time I tried. But this kind of bugs happened to me last year. I don't have time anymore for distribution tweaking, either the current LTS works or I pick up something else (that's why I don't mind running x or wayland these days: whatever works is okay).
  - paulcarroty 8y ago
    Firefox-wayland released in Fedora maybe year ago. Can't remember nothing related in GNOME.
    - johnchristopher 8y ago
      I remember that one https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/1704765 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/1704... (does apply to ff drag and drop too if I recall correctly, carried from 17.10 to 18.04) and https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/issues/895 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/issues/895.

macintux 8y ago

Related ongoing discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19127762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19127762

ubercow13 8y ago

How would something like Easystroke [1] need to be implemented for Wayland? Would this have to be inside the compositor as it's like a global hotkey? [1] https://github.com/thjaeger/easystroke/wiki https://github.com/thjaeger/easystroke/wiki

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
Yes, this would have to live in the compositor, or suitable protocol extensions would have to be developed and implemented.
- ubercow13 8y ago
  How would you invisage it being implemented in sway for example? It's quite esoteric to be maintained along with a minimalistic compositor like sway, and moreover it probably requires a GUI for configuration. Would a PR implementing it be accepted?
  - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
    It's probably just not a feature we'd support at all in sway.

malvosenior 8y ago

> So in short, people asking for Nvidia proprietary driver support are asking the wrong people to spend hundreds of hours working for free to write and maintain an implementation for one driver which represents a harmful force on the Linux ecosystem and a headache for developers trying to work with it. With respect, my answer is no. I don't see how Wayland can succeed without supporting Nvidia. Yes, they'll have to write several thousand more lines of code, but if you're going to make a desktop environment in 2019, you're going to have to put in that effort to support the graphics card that most people have. It would be great if Nvidia had better Linux support! But they don't and washing your desktop platform's hands of the issue just makes the whole project DOA. Are there any competitors to Wayland that don't take a hard-line stance against supporting the most popular and most powerful graphics cards in the world?

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
Nouveau works. Use it instead. Also: it's possible to have a definition of success which excludes users of the proprietary driver. We don't have the same value system. >the [...] most powerful graphics cards in the world? Citation needed? And the highest of the high end graphics cards are excessive vanity most of the time, you don't need the tip-top to play any modern game at any settings you want.
- malvosenior 8y ago
  Working and actually taking advantage of the performance I paid for are two different things. This is a very dismissive attitude that embodies the problem with Wayland. Millions of gamers absolutely do need that acceleration they paid for, it's not "vanity". > We don't have the same value system. I just want a usable Linux desktop that leverages the hardware in my machine. The "values" here seem to be: we acknowledge the extra work required to support mainstream graphics cards, we just don't want to do it and it's really your fault as a user for buying it/asking us to support it.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
    No, they don't. I'm a gamer myself (infrequently these days to be fair). You can have excellent performance with maxed out settings on big ol' 4K displays... on last year's GPUs, which work fine with Nouveau. >it's really your fault as a user for buying it/asking us to support it. Yes, I'm soooo sorry that I don't want to do free work to help you prop up a company that lives to make me suffer as a developer... I'm clearly exagerrating here but I hope the point is made. Like the article says, just keep using X, I don't care.

shmerl 8y ago

> There are two approaches to this endorsed by different camps in Wayland: these Wayland protocols, and a dbus protocol based on Pipewire. Pipewire approach looks the best for screenshots and video recording. I hope all Wayland compositors will settle on it. > Secondary clipboard support <...> wp-primary-selection I guess the standard is very recent. Last time I tried, KWin didn't support it yet. > We fought long and hard over this and we now have a protocol for negotiating client- vs server-side decorations, which is now fairly broadly supported, including among some of its opponents. A major problem with Mutter remains. Mutter developers don't want to depend on GTK for whatever reason, but so are SDL, mpv and other non-GUI applications and toolkits developers. The result are ugly looking windows for such cases in Gnome. > You have to step up, though: no one working on Wayland today seems to care. It's a problem with Wayland in general. The end user gets the short end of the stick, since with removal of some functionality that was in X, some use cases are cut off. But there is no one player like with X server. Tons of compositors are developed by different people. So even raising the issue let alone coming to some consensus takes a very long time. I'm not saying Wayland isn't the way to go, just pointing out it's a very hard transition. > Wayland doesn’t support Nvidia! How is the progress of using Vulkan for Wayland compositors and avoiding the whole EGLstreams mess? I see this: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Docs/issues/294 https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Docs/issues/294 But it's not clear from it whether now there is a way to avoid using GBM or EGLstreams.

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
The problem is that it requires dbus, which not everone is on board with. Our argument is that the Wayland compositor should speak the Wayland protocol. That being said, the software I mentioned can be used to bridge between the two camps. Following your edit: yes, the new standard protocol for primary selection is very new. But everyone supports the GTK protocol and the transition will not be visible to users. Dude, so many edits: "But there is no one player like with X server" -> this player is wlroots Oh my god man, stop editing your comment: "How is the progress of using Vulkan for Wayland compositors and avoiding the whole EGLstreams mess?" -> hard to say now, it's very very early.
- 8y ago

alexandernst 8y ago

IMHO hotkeys is something basic. I understand Wayland is being designed with security in mind, but Wayland developers must understand that what they're trying to do is to, ultimately, create an X replacement. And X is, mainly, user-oriented. You can't have a graphical, user-oriented, server and tell the user to "hey, just use a shell script and a control binary, and then hook a hotkey into your window manager and make it run that script". That's just not how user friendliness works. Try to find a common ground between Wayland being secure and Wayland being practical.

ben0x539 8y ago
I think the wayland devs aren't focusing on replacing absolutely everybody's X-based workflows, but on providing a reasonably engineered component that integrators can build a desktop environment on top of. In practice, we'll probably get a distro shipping a self-contained DE with a centralised hotkey setup, and I expect that will do the job for the vast majority of users. Maybe someone else is building a phone OS and using wayland for the graphical bits and the hotkey thing isn't even going to be on their radar.
- alexandernst 8y ago
  But why does every single DE has to reinvent the wheel with hotkeys? Why can't we have that provided by Wayland? (or maybe by libhotkey, if you wish). Why so much effort in replicating the same functionality over and over must be wasted in the entire linux ecosystem?
  - veqz 8y ago
    Not ever single DE, but the Compositor a DE uses must have it implemented. Though Compositors may share libraries as well, and a unifying library might very well be developed for this.

amelius 8y ago

Does Wayland support ripping of DRM'ed video streams?

floatboth 8y ago
Most compositors don't support DRM (that kind) at all (yet), only recently there was a protocol extension published + a merge request for Weston + I guess something on the driver side?

zbuf 8y ago

I heard that in a world based on the Wayland protocol, applications implement the window decorations. If so, I'm interested in how we can expect consistency; and eg. moving the window of an unresponsive application. This could well be a misconception, which is why now seems a decent time to ask. These seem to be good qualities of X. Wayland has been a number of years in the making, so I have somewhat lost track of my source of this information. Edit: Apologies, I did read the fine article. It appears I must have skipped a section.

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
See discussion about "server-side decorations" in the article.
naner 8y ago
Yeah, that's mentioned in the linked article as one of the common misconceptions.

onli 8y ago

What a refreshing difference to other Linux ecosystem changes! Errors like enforcing client side decorations get corrected, there seems to be activity to add the features missing compared to X, and most importantly: Instead of replacing the existing working solution with broken crap because it's modern, Wayland slowly integrates itself into the ecosystem, and it has Xwayland, which should minimize breakage when moving over in a few years. And if I look at the stutter X produces with my window manager every time the compositor is off, and given that said compositor compton is abandoned and there seems to be no better alternative, I understand that there might be a need for a different solution. I got hit by strange Wayland bugs when distros like Ubuntu and Fedora activated it too early and I'm not looking to make the switch anytime soon, but I wish the project the best and am happy to see it seems to be on a good way.

ben0x539 8y ago

What's the status for global push-to-talk for voice chat apps like Discord? Does that also fall under hotkeys/"no one working on Wayland today seems to care"?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
denniskane 8y ago
I want to start radically experimenting with the entire concept of hotkeys in Linux on the Web[1]. It's just that I've been a one-man operation since I started working on it over 6 years ago, so it takes awhile to get any one thing done. Since the system is now coming into its own, I will be spending more time on HN, trying to build interest in what seems to be a potentially exciting new paradigm that blends together the ideas of traditional general computation and more modern, highly portable web-based approaches. [1] See it live at https://linuxontheweb.org/desk.os https://linuxontheweb.org/desk.os

de9xvnh7 8y ago

Most of the answers are either "well that's true, the protocol doesn't allow it, but implementations do it in non-standard ways" or "we are working on it" or "oh this is not a problem with Wayland, see, Wayland is just a protocol". i.e. at least half of the criticism, as of today, is still practically true.

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
You can't even open application windows on Wayland without a protocol extension. The core Wayland protocol doesn't do these things by design, but that doesn't mean end-users can't do them on Wayland compositors which support these use cases in the places that they're designed to be supported.
- de9xvnh7 8y ago
  The end user doesn't care about protocols or compositors. The end user wants a system that can replace Xorg and do the same or even a better job. And, as of today, Wayland fails miserably at that.
  - ddevault 8y ago
    >The end user doesn't care about protocols or compositors Which is why they shouldn't care that the core Wayland protocol doesn't implement it. These use cases WORK!

jancsika 8y ago

> Wayland doesn’t support Nvidia! There is a very high likelihood that when a user complains about Wayland support for Nvidia they mean this: * user already assumes Nvidia is a bad Linux actor * user knows Nvidia only supports buggy blobs * user may even know Nvidia is bad to people trying to unblob the blobs * user already went through the trouble of doing what it takes to get the bad Linux Nvidia blobs to work to play games on their machines * user notices that the bad buggy Linux Nvidia blobs fail to work at all with Wayland * user is understandably even more frustrated than they were before. So they ask you-- a Wayland person-- how can it be even worse for them now when they've already been generating much more complex and power-hungry graphics with their buggy blob than they'd ever do with Wayland. If you're representing Wayland, this problem is your problem whether you want it or not. Perhaps the answer is to make the protocol worse so the the Nvidia user doesn't remain eternally maximally frustrated. Perhaps the answer is that isn't possible and you're stuck in the same boat as the user. Perhaps it means you start a hunger strike or gather thousands of devs to protest outside Nvidia's headquarters until they improve. I have no idea. But please don't do that FLOSS thing where all the devs on a project teach each other to sync on, "Sorry Mario, but your princess is in another castle." That pattern becomes it's own problem and can quickly end up discouraging development even from potential devs who don't care at all about Nvidia support. > Wayland doesn’t support screenshots/capture! What is the current UX for screenshotting, screencapture, and screencapture with audio for the most featureful DE that uses Wayland atm? Is there a program out there that offers push-button access for these three features (choosing the most sensible default format in each case)?

ddevault 8y ago
>There is a very high likelihood that when a user complains about Wayland support for Nvidia they mean this As the actual person who receives these complaints... this isn't true. Once it's explained, though, the users still stick around and get angry because they made dumb, uninformed choices as a consumer and think it's our fault. >If you're representing Wayland, this problem is your problem whether you want it or not. It's not. We can just choose not to solve it. Use X and buy smarter when the next harware upgrade comes around, or wait until your hardware is supported by nouveau if you don't want to upgrade any time soon. >What is the current UX for screenshotting, screencapture, and screencapture with audio for the most featureful DE that uses Wayland atm? Is there a program out there that offers push-button access for these three features (choosing the most sensible default format in each case)? I don't really know what the situation is for more noob-friendly DEs like GNOME, but on sway this tool is the i3-equivalent of push-button simplicity: https://wayland.emersion.fr/grim/ https://wayland.emersion.fr/grim/ Push-button screen capture isn't there yet.

meditate 8y ago

Hey Drew (and other contributors), thanks for all your work on this, I switched from i3 to Sway last week and everything has been quite stable. My only gripe has been that screenshotting/screencasting apps can only pull from fullscreen and can't capture from a window yet. The portal APIs seems to support this but the wlroots protocols only allows export from composited outputs, not from un-composited wl_surfaces. Hope this gets some love soon.

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
Sway is a do-ocracy. Get in there and do it! It's not as hard as you think.
- meditate 8y ago
  I am aware that I may be the one who ends up implementing that :)

sosodev 8y ago

I've been using Sway on my laptop recently and it's been a great experience. It looks great (easily customizable) and runs smooth.

dooglius 8y ago

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
Wayland is flourishing - everywhere except among Nvidia proprietary driver users. In reality it's them who are dying on their hill, left behind on crappy old software.
- bubblethink 8y ago
  Nvidia's primary Linux user base cares about cuda. As long as those needs are met, I don't see much changing in the short term. Gaming and other use cases are still insignificant in terms of numbers.
- gpm 8y ago
  No, in reality desktop Linux, including wayland, is floundering. This is contributing to that floundering by splitting the effort, create an environment filled with vitriol on both sides, making it harder for things like games to say they support the set of things called "Linux", etc.
  - ddevault 8y ago
    I'm not here to make Linux succeed. I'm here to make good software. Users who know better will use Linux and users who don't won't. Either way Linux will keep on trucking, as it has for a very long time. It shows no sign of stopping.
    - 8y ago

darkpuma 8y ago

Wayland is a great demonstration that not all change and deviation from tradition in met with vitriolic anger from the linux community (as has been asserted). Wayland meets its fair share of skepticism, but it seems cool heads prevail and the situation stays civil. This gives me confidence in the maturity of the community and the long term viability of Wayland.

peatmoss 8y ago
I wonder if some of the ire was bled off by Mir? I mean, when Canonical announced Mir, people mainly responded with anger that they weren’t contributing to Wayland which was a longer-standing attempt to replace X11.
- darkpuma 8y ago
  That's an interesting hypothesis, I hadn't considered that.

SCdF 8y ago

> Wayland can be keylogged, assuming the attacker can sneak some evil code into your .bashrc I’m not sure what scenarios are being invisioned here, but isn’t that absolutely something a nefarious app could do, because the app will be run as you, and you have write access to your bashrc? As an example, since it’s fresh in my memory, if the folks who put dodgy cryptocurrency stealing code into npm packages had instead put this keylogger in there, that would have worked right? You run npm install, npm runs as you, the package runs as you, the package updates your bashrc.

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
Yes, but that package could also do all sorts of other things, like encrypting your ~ and demanding ransom. It's not Wayland's problem to solve this - sandboxing is a separate matter. Wayland makes it easier to sandbox graphical applications but it is not a complete sandboxing solution.

thinkmassive 8y ago

Wayland doesn’t support full-screen sharing, for example in Google Meet (aka Hangouts). Hopefully this is fixed soon (via dmabuf-export, mentioned in the article) but until then (and for the past couple years) it’s a major hassle for a lot of people who had Wayland forced onto them by their desktop environment. Even if this isn’t Wayland’s fault they would be wise to assist with a fix soon.

pmoriarty 8y ago

There are a number of counter arguments to the parent article in "Why I'm not going to switch to Wayland yet."[1] On the subject of leaving the responsibility of taking screenshots to the Wayland compositor: "for simple things using the compositor's screen shot tool is fine. But what if I don't like the screenshot tool for my compositor of choice? My experience with the GNOME screenshot tool (granted this was pre-wayland) was that it wasn't as good as, say, shutter, which has a lot of options, let's you easily crop and edit the screenshot from inside the screenshot tool etc. And then swaygrab doesn't even (currently) have an option to capture a rectangular region." There are some other things "Why I'm not going to switch to Wayland yet" mentions which are important to me, like Wayland's lack of color picker tools and xdotool functionality. The parent article says: "Wayland doesn't have network transparency! This is actually true! But it's not as bad as it's made out to be. Here's why: X11 forwarding works on Wayland. Wait, what? Yep: all mainstream desktop Wayland compositors have support for Xwayland, which is an implementation of the X11 server which translates X11 to Wayland, for backwards compatibility. X11 forwarding works with it! So if you use X11 forwarding on Xorg today, your workflow will work on Wayland unchanged." So why wouldn't I just use xorg to begin with? Overall, Wayland just seems immature to me, and not a viable competitor to Xorg, which has had all of this functionality for decades. As an Xorg user, I really struggle to come up with compelling reasons to switch. [1] - https://old.reddit.com/r/wayland/comments/85q78y/why_im_not_going_to_switch_to_wayland_yet/ https://old.reddit.com/r/wayland/comments/85q78y/why_im_not_...

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
>screenshot quote I addressed this in my article, please read it. And you can select a rectangular region on sway today, using tools which are portable across many Wayland compositors. >So why wouldn't I just use xorg to begin with? You can, no one's stopping you.
cannabis_sam 8y ago
It’s still fuckin sad that we haven’t managed to build something lasting..

shmerl 8y ago

Regarding gaming by the way. XWayland works quite well for it already (it's critical since Wine for example still requires X and many older games depend on X as well), but there seems to be some issue with radv at present which requires setting explicit number of back buffers to avoid capping that disregards vsync settings: https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/issues/806 https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/issues/806 If games are using SDL, you can also select Wayland using SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland. But there are some glitches still. I tried doing it for example with ScummVM, and it produced double cursor.

gyger 8y ago

I never understood this complains? The main use cases work, I have almost never found a Linux user that was unhappy with Wayland. Once a while a power user, but that one is smart enough to install X if he needs a special functionality. I never had a problem, and if you upgrade the next time, check the hardware compatibility and buy what you need. Till then, just run a X stack.

pmontra 8y ago

My current showstopper with Wayland is that no screensharing application works with it: Skype, Meet, TeamViewer. I need them to work with my customers so I'm staying on Xorg until that gets implemented.

zaro 8y ago
Same here. If Skype and Chrome screen sharing worked in wayland I am switching to wayland right away, as it seems everything else works well.

DiabloD3 8y ago

There are an awful lot of comments on here that are trying to protect Nvidia's anti-Linux position. Nvidia's position, literally, is their GPUs are not Linux compatible. The Linux ecosystem relies on the Mesa stack (Mesa, DRI, DRM, GBM, KMS, etc), and DRM is part of the upstream kernel itself... Nvidia has openly not used any of these APIs. This is exactly equivalent to Nvidia not using WDDM and DXGI. If Nvidia chose to do that, Microsoft would outright ban them from driver certification (thus the platform entirely), so why is it wrong for Linux and Wayland to do the same? The Linux community reached out to Nvidia and help them along with Nouveau, and at one point even threatened to sue them. Linus Torvalds has told them that he doesn't care about them if they won't actually participate in Linux, and will continue to break their drivers because they just don't listen.

dooglius 8y ago
> There are an awful lot of comments on here that are trying to protect Nvidia's anti-Linux position. No, you are taking a with-us-or-against-us mentality. Users and application developers want things to work as broadly as possible, regardless of the graphics card or driver being used. Whether that helps or hurts various parties regarding Nvidia's closed-source stance is irrelevant. > Nvidia's position, literally, is their GPUs are not Linux compatible Citation needed. If this is their position, why would they offer Linux driver downloads? Not supporting something in a way Linux would prefer is not the same as not supporting something. >This is exactly equivalent to Nvidia not using WDDM and DXGI. If Nvidia chose to do that, Microsoft would outright ban them from driver certification (thus the platform entirely), so why is it wrong for Linux and Wayland to do the same? Microsoft can get away with this precisely because it sells Windows; it lowers the price to vendors (such as Dell) on the condition that they only use certified drivers. It is entirely possible to run Windows with uncertified drivers. In any case, it is my understanding that this is a licensing issue, and Nvidia would support more APIs if it could do so while keeping the driver proprietary.
- bubblethink 8y ago
  >Citation needed. If this is their position, why would they offer Linux driver downloads? Not supporting something in a way Linux would prefer is not the same as not supporting something. It's not so much that they are incompatible. It's that they weren't written for linux. They use the same driver for windows which has been adapted for linux. That also allows them to avoid any sort of derivate work clause that would kick in due to the GPL.

josteink 8y ago

Great write up. That said I found the section about nvidia drivers confusing. > All three are necessary for most Wayland compositors. Only the first two are implemented by the Nvidia proprietary driver. Ok. But what about nouveau? Is nvidia supported using the open-source drivers (the only ones I will use) or are these drivers too lacking? Are the wlroots developers completely disregarding nvidia-support over issues only found with the proprietary drivers, or are there actual unworkable nvidia issues regardless of driver used?

Tharre 8y ago
Yes, nouveau is of course supported. But nouveau has trouble supporting the newest cards currently, since Nvidia seems to try their best to make their lives hell.
hsivonen 8y ago
The Ubuntu 18.04 Gnome Wayland session works well on nouveau. (I've used one consumer card from 2010 or so and a pro card from 2013 or so. Also tried a newer pro card that nouveau didn't support, regardless of Wayland. In that case, the easiest solution was to remove the card and buy AMD.)
- heavenlyblue 8y ago
  Nouveau does run under 1080gtx ti, but I’ve got a weird setup with 3x4K screens, so the driver needs to increase the GPU clock and it fails as that is a part of the proprietary blob. So it should work with most of the setups until you’re trying to reach a certain performance threshold.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

znpy 8y ago

I am really unstatisfied about the status of remote desktop session on GNU/Linux and other unices in general. RDP on Windows works amazingly, it's really like having your remote machine at your fingertips (as long as network holds). On GNU/Linux on the other hand, most solutions are hacky or cumbersome or non-standard or a linear combination of the previous adjectives. I really wish I could have truly good remote desktop support on GNU/Linux.

bscphil 8y ago
Have you ever tried X2Go? I've used it a few times and it's been incredible - instant feedback exactly how you describe RDP. There's also just regular old rdesktop, which seems to work pretty well if you're mostly connecting to Windows servers.
- znpy 8y ago
  Yes I've tried X2Go and rdesktop with xrdp. Meh. X2Go was cool and worked well, but support for various distro was a bit unclear (only Ubuntu? can't remember, that was like four years ago) as unclear was on which condition you could actually resume your session and how (what if I disconnect unexpectedly? how do I list my current sessions? Is there audio in/out forwarding? clipboard sharing?). The website homepage failed to address many of these questions, ultimately failing to answer the question "can I actually rely on this thing?".

jchw 8y ago

Personal criticism: it's not FUD if it's correct. A lot of the things the author concedes are actually limitations, even if not inherent (did anyone ever claim that?) are reasons I can't use Wayland or at least would be massively inconvenienced.