10 ms·

Can you even disable desktop composition in Wayland? One of the reasons I hate Windows is that I'm forced to use composition, which provides nothing to me.

by mspnp 7y ago

sprash 7y ago
Wayland developers specifically prioritize the "every frame is perfect" paradigm over performance and latency. This means there will never be an option to disable things like composition or vsync. Also, even though it is always claimed that "X11 a is messy conglomerate of tacked on technologies and extensions" the Wayland protocol is extremely complex despite severely lacking features. And because of the strange priorities it has worse performance than X11 even for native apps. The self proclaimed "minimalist" wlroots library has more than 50000 LOC, all for moving around a bunch of overlapping windows? A bit much.
- ddevault 7y ago
  The Wayland protocol is actually very simple, much simpler than X. And consider that wlroots+sway is around 100,000 LOC, but it's at least as capable as i3+xorg - which is a million lines of code.
  - ubercow13 7y ago
    Really claiming that it's at least as capable as xorg seems like a complete misrepresentation. Aren't some of the most common and enduring complaints about Wayland about missing features compared to X?
    - ddevault 7y ago
      Uninformed and mostly outdated complaints, generally. What features are left unturned are in progress and have most of the pieces in place, and their realization will not add enough lines of code to come close to Xorg.
- floatboth 7y ago
  > extremely complex Really? I can run any app with WAYLAND_DEBUG=1 and understand every message easily. > because of the strange priorities it has worse performance than X11 If the performance that matters to you is the tiny bit of latency caused by vsync, keep using Xorg, or Windows 95, or whatever. Wayland is inherently much faster because it's asynchronous and doesn't have anything in between the compositor and the clients (e.g.: app <-> Xorg <-> Compiz — xorg is just a glorified message broker!). > wlroots library has more than 50000 LOC, all for moving around a bunch of overlapping windows? A bit much Minus 8.5k for examples, minus 7k for the big example (rootston). It's not just moving windows around. Input is inherently complex, and it supports touchscreens, touchpad gestures, drawing tablets, virtual keyboards, pointer locking (moving the camera with the mouse in first person videogames).. Also, it implements multiple backends — running on KMS/DRM, nested on Wayland and X11, and as an RDP server. Considering that it's all in C, that's a tiny number of lines. More importantly than silly metrics, it's a modern, easy to get into codebase. How much does Xorg have, with its five or however many input systems, multiple legacy ways of direct rendering, and whatever other crap it's accumulated?
- bscphil 7y ago
  > Wayland developers specifically prioritize the "every frame is perfect" paradigm over performance and latency. This means there will never be an option to disable things like composition or vsync. Sorry if I'm misunderstanding, but isn't this terrible? Won't it mean that video games are going to be completely unplayable on Wayland desktops? I've never been able to get acceptable performance in a game on Wayland, but I'd always assumed that this was just because it was a work in progress and the game makers didn't test to ensure proper performance on anything but X.
  - sprash 7y ago
    X11 applications are able to directly render pixels on the screen via OpenGL. In Wayland those pixels are always rendered to a buffer which will then be composed on the screen. This doesn't mean games will be "unplayable". It just means that the performance will depend on the compositor. And since the compositor also includes functionality originally provided by window managers you might get into a situation where you can't use you tiling or whatever desktop for gaming and have to switch compositors for different applications with different priorities. Fun times...
    - Crinus 7y ago
      Note that Wayland introduces latency between input (you doing something) and output (seeing the result of your action), see my other posts for detail. While this latency wont make a game unplayable, it will make the experience worse for fast paced games (especially games where you control the camera directly with the mouse). However this is an issue if you are running a game in a window, the compositor should get out of the way when running fullscreen (or at least i hope it does, but that is the same with X11, some compositors see a fullscreen window and consider it perfectly fine to keep going on).
      - chousuke 7y ago
        Do you actually have benchmarks and evidence showing that Wayland introduces latency over X11, or is it just a guess based on how you think Wayland works? I mean, sure it might in some cases where you can use X11 to "directly" draw stuff on the screen, but most games would be double-buffering or triple-buffering anyway. I don't really see why Wayland would add any latency there, considering all the compositing is going to happen on the GPU anyway.
- ilikehurdles 7y ago
  > there will never be an option to disable things like composition or vsync Wait, is there a coupling between composition and vsync? I do enjoy playing games on linux, and forcing vsync enabled is an absolute non starter for me.
  - nwallin 7y ago
    There is no hard dependency between composition and vsync. You can disable composition with vsync enabled, or you can have composition with novsync. (in practice they tend to be highly correlated) However, Wayland supports neither disabling vsync nor disabling composition. Moreover, it was architected this way; there's not really any hope of disabling the compositor. Freesync looks kinda sorta like vsync if you squint at it right, so maybe there's hope for freesync in the distant future. But right now, Wayland does not support freesync, nor are there plans to implement it. Gaming on Wayland is 'lol nope' at this point, and will remain that way for the forseeable future. This news is deeply troubling.
- tadfisher 7y ago
  > The self proclaimed "minimalist" wlroots library has more than 50000 LOC, all for moving around a bunch of overlapping windows? wlroots is most of a display compositor implementation, so you should be comparing it to all of the X libraries used in a compositor, and of course the server itself. I suspect the combination would easily exceed 1 million lines.
floatboth 7y ago
If visual perfection is nothing to you, if you love screen tearing, slow window redraw when moving, Windows 95-esque window trails, etc. — keep using Xorg. Wayland is a protocol fully designed around composition. Clients have their own buffers, the server composites them. There is no way to draw directly to the screen, because we're not in the 90s with 640K of RAM and there's no reason whatsoever to implement the crappy way of rendering windows.
- Crinus 7y ago
  Composition forces latency tied to the refresh rate of the composited output and is the only reason i do not like it and disable it where possible. For me this latency makes Wayland imperfect. I do not love screen tearing, i just do not mind it at all unless i am watching a movie (where i can enable vsync in the player). Slow window redraw when moving is something i haven't seen since i had a 386. Even my Pentium could blit windows around. Windows 95-esque window trails are only a thing if the process associated with the window is stuck. Note, btw, that there is nothing that forbids the X server to cache such windows if it detects that the client doesn't respond to messages after a while - which btw is what Windows does since XP. It is just that nobody implemented it. > Wayland is a protocol fully designed around composition. Which was a mistake. > Clients have their own buffers Which was a mistake. > the server composites them At some other point after the client has marked its window as being updated, meaning that you have around two frames of latency (first frame is your input being sent to the application while the application is drawing itself, meaning that the input will be processed later so the response to your input is a frame late and second frame is the application notifying the window server that the window is outdated while the window server is drawing the output, meaning that the new contents will be used in the next frame). > There is no way to draw directly to the screen Which was a mistake. > because we're not in the 90s with 640K of RAM If 640KB of RAM didn't limit being able to have direct access to the screen and fast response times, 640GB of RAM shouldn't either. The new design is just misguided garbage that has nothing to do with available resources and everything to do with developers not giving two thoughts about uses outside of their own (note: X11 allows you to have both composited and non-composited output, so people who like composition can use it as can people who dislike it, Wayland forces composited output so people who dislike composition cannot use it). > there's no reason whatsoever to implement the crappy way of rendering windows Yes, wasting resources with every application having to maintain their own buffer for each window's contents even though those contents will not change for the vast majority of the window's lifetime for most windows is crappy. Though that is only a minor reason for why Wayland sucks.

Can you even disable desktop composition in Wayland? One of the reasons I hate Windows is that I'm forced to use composition, which provides nothing to me.

by mspnp 7y ago

Can you even disable desktop composition in Wayland? One of the reasons I hate Windows is that I'm forced to use composition, which provides nothing to me.

sprash 7y ago

Wayland developers specifically prioritize the "every frame is perfect" paradigm over performance and latency. This means there will never be an option to disable things like composition or vsync. Also, even though it is always claimed that "X11 a is messy conglomerate of tacked on technologies and extensions" the Wayland protocol is extremely complex despite severely lacking features. And because of the strange priorities it has worse performance than X11 even for native apps. The self proclaimed "minimalist" wlroots library has more than 50000 LOC, all for moving around a bunch of overlapping windows? A bit much.

ddevault 7y ago
The Wayland protocol is actually very simple, much simpler than X. And consider that wlroots+sway is around 100,000 LOC, but it's at least as capable as i3+xorg - which is a million lines of code.
- ubercow13 7y ago
  Really claiming that it's at least as capable as xorg seems like a complete misrepresentation. Aren't some of the most common and enduring complaints about Wayland about missing features compared to X?
  - ddevault 7y ago
    Uninformed and mostly outdated complaints, generally. What features are left unturned are in progress and have most of the pieces in place, and their realization will not add enough lines of code to come close to Xorg.
floatboth 7y ago
> extremely complex Really? I can run any app with WAYLAND_DEBUG=1 and understand every message easily. > because of the strange priorities it has worse performance than X11 If the performance that matters to you is the tiny bit of latency caused by vsync, keep using Xorg, or Windows 95, or whatever. Wayland is inherently much faster because it's asynchronous and doesn't have anything in between the compositor and the clients (e.g.: app <-> Xorg <-> Compiz — xorg is just a glorified message broker!). > wlroots library has more than 50000 LOC, all for moving around a bunch of overlapping windows? A bit much Minus 8.5k for examples, minus 7k for the big example (rootston). It's not just moving windows around. Input is inherently complex, and it supports touchscreens, touchpad gestures, drawing tablets, virtual keyboards, pointer locking (moving the camera with the mouse in first person videogames).. Also, it implements multiple backends — running on KMS/DRM, nested on Wayland and X11, and as an RDP server. Considering that it's all in C, that's a tiny number of lines. More importantly than silly metrics, it's a modern, easy to get into codebase. How much does Xorg have, with its five or however many input systems, multiple legacy ways of direct rendering, and whatever other crap it's accumulated?
bscphil 7y ago
> Wayland developers specifically prioritize the "every frame is perfect" paradigm over performance and latency. This means there will never be an option to disable things like composition or vsync. Sorry if I'm misunderstanding, but isn't this terrible? Won't it mean that video games are going to be completely unplayable on Wayland desktops? I've never been able to get acceptable performance in a game on Wayland, but I'd always assumed that this was just because it was a work in progress and the game makers didn't test to ensure proper performance on anything but X.
- sprash 7y ago
  X11 applications are able to directly render pixels on the screen via OpenGL. In Wayland those pixels are always rendered to a buffer which will then be composed on the screen. This doesn't mean games will be "unplayable". It just means that the performance will depend on the compositor. And since the compositor also includes functionality originally provided by window managers you might get into a situation where you can't use you tiling or whatever desktop for gaming and have to switch compositors for different applications with different priorities. Fun times...
  - Crinus 7y ago
    Note that Wayland introduces latency between input (you doing something) and output (seeing the result of your action), see my other posts for detail. While this latency wont make a game unplayable, it will make the experience worse for fast paced games (especially games where you control the camera directly with the mouse). However this is an issue if you are running a game in a window, the compositor should get out of the way when running fullscreen (or at least i hope it does, but that is the same with X11, some compositors see a fullscreen window and consider it perfectly fine to keep going on).
    - chousuke 7y ago
      Do you actually have benchmarks and evidence showing that Wayland introduces latency over X11, or is it just a guess based on how you think Wayland works? I mean, sure it might in some cases where you can use X11 to "directly" draw stuff on the screen, but most games would be double-buffering or triple-buffering anyway. I don't really see why Wayland would add any latency there, considering all the compositing is going to happen on the GPU anyway.
ilikehurdles 7y ago
> there will never be an option to disable things like composition or vsync Wait, is there a coupling between composition and vsync? I do enjoy playing games on linux, and forcing vsync enabled is an absolute non starter for me.
- nwallin 7y ago
  There is no hard dependency between composition and vsync. You can disable composition with vsync enabled, or you can have composition with novsync. (in practice they tend to be highly correlated) However, Wayland supports neither disabling vsync nor disabling composition. Moreover, it was architected this way; there's not really any hope of disabling the compositor. Freesync looks kinda sorta like vsync if you squint at it right, so maybe there's hope for freesync in the distant future. But right now, Wayland does not support freesync, nor are there plans to implement it. Gaming on Wayland is 'lol nope' at this point, and will remain that way for the forseeable future. This news is deeply troubling.
tadfisher 7y ago
> The self proclaimed "minimalist" wlroots library has more than 50000 LOC, all for moving around a bunch of overlapping windows? wlroots is most of a display compositor implementation, so you should be comparing it to all of the X libraries used in a compositor, and of course the server itself. I suspect the combination would easily exceed 1 million lines.

floatboth 7y ago

If visual perfection is nothing to you, if you love screen tearing, slow window redraw when moving, Windows 95-esque window trails, etc. — keep using Xorg. Wayland is a protocol fully designed around composition. Clients have their own buffers, the server composites them. There is no way to draw directly to the screen, because we're not in the 90s with 640K of RAM and there's no reason whatsoever to implement the crappy way of rendering windows.

Crinus 7y ago
Composition forces latency tied to the refresh rate of the composited output and is the only reason i do not like it and disable it where possible. For me this latency makes Wayland imperfect. I do not love screen tearing, i just do not mind it at all unless i am watching a movie (where i can enable vsync in the player). Slow window redraw when moving is something i haven't seen since i had a 386. Even my Pentium could blit windows around. Windows 95-esque window trails are only a thing if the process associated with the window is stuck. Note, btw, that there is nothing that forbids the X server to cache such windows if it detects that the client doesn't respond to messages after a while - which btw is what Windows does since XP. It is just that nobody implemented it. > Wayland is a protocol fully designed around composition. Which was a mistake. > Clients have their own buffers Which was a mistake. > the server composites them At some other point after the client has marked its window as being updated, meaning that you have around two frames of latency (first frame is your input being sent to the application while the application is drawing itself, meaning that the input will be processed later so the response to your input is a frame late and second frame is the application notifying the window server that the window is outdated while the window server is drawing the output, meaning that the new contents will be used in the next frame). > There is no way to draw directly to the screen Which was a mistake. > because we're not in the 90s with 640K of RAM If 640KB of RAM didn't limit being able to have direct access to the screen and fast response times, 640GB of RAM shouldn't either. The new design is just misguided garbage that has nothing to do with available resources and everything to do with developers not giving two thoughts about uses outside of their own (note: X11 allows you to have both composited and non-composited output, so people who like composition can use it as can people who dislike it, Wayland forces composited output so people who dislike composition cannot use it). > there's no reason whatsoever to implement the crappy way of rendering windows Yes, wasting resources with every application having to maintain their own buffer for each window's contents even though those contents will not change for the vast majority of the window's lifetime for most windows is crappy. Though that is only a minor reason for why Wayland sucks.