23 ms·

Are We Wayland Yet?

288 points by fourthark 7y ago

edgyquant 7y ago
Gnome/Wayland on Fedora works pretty well last time I used it. I eventually had to switch back for a few reasons (mouse over the network had no replacement) but that was almost a year ago I'd bet it was even smoother now.
- baroffoos 7y ago
  My work laptop has been on wayland for years now. My desktop was on x11 due to nvidia drivers but now I have an amd card in it so I am back to wayland.
imode 7y ago
I don't agree with the assumption that we need to ditch X11 entirely. Implementations are different from the spec, and a common complaint I have is that certain implementations are gathering code smells like nobody's business. You can fix both an implementation and a spec by continued review and revision, while making choices to either remain backwards compatible or breaking that compatibility with newer revisions. I don't think Wayland is a good solution to this kind of problem, despite it being touted as one in many circles I've witnessed. The competition is nice, though! I have yet to give Wayland a try, but it's on my to-do list some time on a fresh machine.
- cyphar 7y ago
  One of the arguments made by the Wayland spec folks (many of whom were involved in Xorg development for many years) is that the Xorg spec is also a major cause of problems with modern Linux graphics[1]. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQoQE_HDG8g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQoQE_HDG8g
- paulie_a 7y ago
  X has long been a crufty dusty codebase. Due to a small amount of people that obsess about networking it has stayed alive. Hopefully Wayland hits critical mass and x can finally be old yellered as it should have been twenty years ago Due to the down votes let me clarify. X sucks
  - michaelmrose 7y ago
    I want things that only work under x that aren't spacebar heating.
  - erik_seaberg 7y ago
    How many Linux users have only one computer? The MBP work put on my desk is a toy compared to the thousands of Linux boxes they give me access to.
- zzo38computer 7y ago
  I agree with you. X isn't so bad and implementations are different from the spec (see my message about my proposed X12, which makes this more explicit).
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
bsder 7y ago
> Screen recording or sharing apps just don't work. Zoom with XWayland appeared to work, but in reality only shared a blank screen. This was kind of a deal breaker, because sooner or later I will need to use screen sharing in Zoom for work. Isn't this one of they key points FOR Wayland, though? I thought Wayland specifically stops applications from having access to other chunks of the screen without special permissions?
- fake-name 7y ago
  "Doesn't give access by default" is very different from "cannot be made to work". I'd assume the complaint is about the latter, which is a issue. I can't imagine anyone complaining about the first.
  - swalladge 7y ago
    Agreed. The extra security given by the latter is a huge win for Wayland, but it needs to be possible to give access when required.
    - swalladge 7y ago
      s/latter/former
- rotten 7y ago
  Lack of support for screensharing is why I stopped using Wayland.
frio 7y ago
I've been using Wayland full-time (via Sway) since Sway went 1.0. It's been a pretty straightforward experience. The transition took some elbow grease at first (things like getting redshift working, as the author notes), but the last time I fucked around with my graphical config was months ago. I use a display manager, so the "crashes lead to an exposed terminal" thing doesn't matter so much (I've had a total of two crashes, once when I was putsing with XWayland, video games and multi-head -- and the other when building a since-abandoned alternative to kanshi). There are some quirks I need to spend a little more time investigating whether they're caused by Sway/Wayland or just my configuration: drag-and-dropping between windows seems to be busted, and right-click context menus that overflow their host window's boundaries aren't clickable outside those boundaries. But I mainly use the keyboard/terminal/TUIs, so I don't frequently drag and drop, and it's easy enough to right click somewhere else when the second issue occurs. Other than that, for how I use a computer, it's been smooth sailing. I wouldn't say we're Wayland yet for general usage either, but for the group of users who are into tiling window managers, we're maybe Wayland enough for now.
- sjy 7y ago
  For what it's worth, I've also noticed that right-click problem and some glitchiness with dragging and dropping.
  - frio 7y ago
    Thanks, that's useful to know :).
- colordrops 7y ago
  Do you share your config files publicly?
  - frio 7y ago
    Not at this stage, but I've got them all in a git repo in Keybase. The problem is that I've had pretty sloppy discipline re: storing secrets in them (... because Keybase makes that less bad), so I'll need to put some effort in to share them.
young_unixer 7y ago
From what I've read, it seems like Wayland's "controversial design choices" don't stem from developers being inconsiderate of different workflows, but rather from the intention of making a general purpose protocol. Being general purpose means that things like screenshotting capabilities are not the protocol's concern and should be implemented in the upper layer(s) instead. In that case, this general purpose approach seems to me like the right way to tackle the problem, since we won't need a different protocol for use cases that fall outside the traditional desktop paradigm. You can just use Wayland and implement your own business code on top. There'll be a de-facto standard way to do graphics on Linux, no matter your use case. Correct me if I'm wrong about this. I'm not a Wayland expert (I have many articles and books in my to-read list). I'm excited about Wayland for the simple reason that I hate screen tearing.
- roenxi 7y ago
  That means the screenshot application is, to some degree, compositor specific. It leaves the door completely open to the outcome that if you want to stream using a Gnome streaming application you will have to be using the Gnome project's window manager. Or the KDE streaming application will require the KDE window manager. Or the 'best' screenshot application will be tied to the XMonad successor on Wayland. Wayland is a good experiment, and the community may well go with it because X11 is atrocious and Wayland is a viable alternative. But call a spade a spade, they dropped the ball with that design decision. It isn't a big deal. The practical outcome is that there is going to be a screenshot protocol and everything that implements Wayland is going to have to implement that protocol as well. The required negotiation for that to happen is taking/going to take years and delay Wayland adoption. If they'd designed that at the same time as an optional part of the Wayland protocol it would have saved time and confusion.
  - Hello71 7y ago
    there are already a number of screenshot protocols (as TFA explains, slurp and grim can be used for screenshots on sway). the trouble is getting everybody to agree on a single one, or implementing a library to interface with all the protocols, which is the current strategy. https://www.google.com/search?q=wayland+screenshot+protocol https://www.google.com/search?q=wayland+screenshot+protocol but, IMO, this is a good thing, and the only way it could have worked. if every single conceivable protocol was added to the initial specification, then wayland would never have been released. even if it was, people would complain even more about it being "bloated" and "non modular" and "not following the unix philosophy", whatever that means.
daurnimator 7y ago
> The fact is, Wayland is the only viable X11 successor There's at least one other option in the running, Arcan: https://arcan-fe.com/ https://arcan-fe.com/
- fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
  Cool, Arcan looks a lot more viable for me than wayland
- cnasc 7y ago
  I'm a big fan of Arcan (moreso than I am of Wayland), but it's nowhere near as far along as Wayland and I think at this point is still the product of just one person. I think it's fair to call Wayland viable, but I don't think I would say that of Arcan until it's: a) generally usable as a daily driver; and b) maintained by enough people that there isn't a single point of failure. Right now I'm still on X.
Hello71 7y ago
hooray, finally a wayland criticism article that actually put in some effort instead of "muh unix philosophy". most of these issues are real issues for wayland today, and the author might be right to switch back to X for now. however, I'll try to explain some of the issues: > I had consistent font rendering issues. There was this painful issue in sway relating to display scaling that caused fonts (among other things) to be missing, fuzzy, or just terrible in general. yup, still a problem. hidpi doesn't work great on X in the first place, and adding Xwayland definitely makes it worse for X applications. but, once the majority of applications are ported to wayland, hidpi should become much, much better. > NetworkManager GUI tools were strangely buggy with wayland. It wouldn't always crash, but sometimes the only way I could get it to connect to a wifi network was to quit sway, launch i3, connect with nm-applet in i3, then switch back to sway. Bizarre. personally, I recommend using either raw wpa_supplicant or iwd with a separate network management daemon (dhcpcd or systemd-networkd). the wpa_supplicant GUI is very ugly and uses weird terminology (what's a "PSK" -- yes, I know what it is, but if you didn't, you'd have to google it), but if you can get over that hump as well as the initial configuration, it's been 100% reliable for me, unlike NM, which usually works but then sometimes silently fails somewhere. I recently switched to iwd, which has been mostly fine, but, like wayland, still lacking features important for some people. > Sometimes, on my desktop, everything would lock up for 10 seconds or so, the screen would blank, and then come back on and everything would be fine. It appeared to be some issue with the graphics drivers - I don't have that issue on i3, so something deep in Wayland is interacting strangely with it. I would assume you are using intel drivers and are experiencing a GPU reset. check dmesg, but it's quite possible that a poorly behaved application is causing the trouble. > Screen recording or sharing apps just don't work. Zoom with XWayland appeared to work, but in reality only shared a blank screen. This was kind of a deal breaker, because sooner or later I will need to use screen sharing in Zoom for work. yeah, this is definitely a problem. as other commenters have said, ordinary applications aren't allowed to just record the screen, they have to ask the compositor. unfortunately, this has not yet been standardized between different wayland implementations. iirc, gnome has a screen recording api, kde has one, and wlroots has another, and they're all incompatible. my current solution for sway is to use wf-recorder + v4l2loopback, which works fairly well but is a little bit hard to set up. install wf-recorder-git and v4l2loopback-dkms-git, then modprobe v4l2loopback exclusive_caps=1 video_nr=7 && wf-recorder -m v4l2 -f /dev/video7 -c rawvideo --pixel-format=yuv420p. then you'll have a fake camera device which you can select in your streaming application. that works for me on Firefox 70 and Chromium 78, so it should work for Zoom too. the workflow is not as smooth as built-in screen sharing (for one, you can't display two "cameras" at once), but it works well enough for most purposes. > Sometimes, Sway would crash while the screen was locked, leaving my previously secured computer at a logged-in tty. Not great for security! this is actually very easy to solve. solution 1: instead of running sway, run exec sway. solution 2: instead of running swaylock, run physlock. if security is a high priority for you, this is probably better anyways.
sprash 7y ago
The biggest hurdle for Wayland adoption is the absolutely brain dead "security model". Commonly used features like hotkey daemons, push to talk, screen recording/streaming/sharing, window management, clipboard history manager or even Wallpapers need to managed by the particular implementation (of there are many) of the Wayland server itself and have mostly no common protocols, at least not official. And when all those protocols after a long process are finally finished I have serious doubts that Wayland will be either less bloated and "messy" or more secure than current X11. The non-existent X11 security model is not really ideal but at least you could mitigate the problem there with access control hooks and as long as you use trusted software (which is 99.9% the case on a typical Linux system) you can use all the above mentioned features today without having too much headaches.
- snagglegaggle 7y ago
  The non-existent X11 security model is irrelevant considering on most systems anything under a uid can debug something else under a uid. Wayland's security is entirely pointless. I suspect Wayland will just become a container for an X11 session.
  - paulddraper 7y ago
    > considering on most systems anything under a uid can debug something else under a uid Right? Couldn't only security hardened distros like SELinux take advantage of this? Or I suppose Docker GUI apps?
    - michaelmrose 7y ago
      Docker isn't a security layer
      - paulddraper 7y ago
        Security isn't the only thing Docker offers, but yes Docker on Linux is a security layer.
  - 7y ago
microcolonel 7y ago
The thing about scaling is a bit difficult. Sway chooses to render XWayland windows in the lower resolution and scales up, rather than the other way around; I think this should be configurable.
- pzone 7y ago
  I don't see what would make such a configuration option particularly difficult. Maybe file a bug report requesting it? The scaling difficulties are fundamentally a problem with XWayland so you're left with two problematic options.
  - microcolonel 7y ago
    > The scaling difficulties are fundamentally a problem with XWayland Well, sort of. There are fundamental issues with having per-display scaling in X. If you plug in a HiDPI display after starting an application, it's my understanding that there is no standard way to signal that to a window. The toolkits, or GTK+3 at least, do handle changing the scale at runtime internally, so it's more of a social problem than a hard engineering one.
jchw 7y ago
Important to note that Sway WM is not Wayland as a whole; I am a happy Sway user, but unfortunately it is not 100% at parity with the experience you will get with GNOME. However, you can always contribute if you have time; it’s fun and the codebase is very nice to work with. You don’t even have to switch to Sway to work on it. (If you are skilled at debugging and use graphics tablets we could use some help trying to figure out some crashing bugs with tablets...) Regarding screen capture: wl_roots actually supports this, but WebRTC doesn’t support the wl_roots protocol for it. I’ve been told Pipewire should solve this problem eventually. Edit: accidentally wrote Waypipe instead of Pipewire. (Waypipe is cool too, though.)
seminatl 7y ago
A good way to think about Wayland is the screen manager brought to you by the people who thought xrandr, Mesa, Cairo, the Linux FireWire stack, and freetype were good things. If you come in with appropriate expectations you’ll be amazed that any of it works at all. Is you think it over for a bit you’ll realize that the real Linux graphics protocol is Android SurfaceFlinger. Wayland is like five orders of magnitude less popular.
- epx 7y ago
  I have had this unpopular opinion since the beginning of the decade: Linux should just adopt AOSP UI, be able to run apps, and that’s it.
  - michaelmrose 7y ago
    The android interface would be hot garbage on desktops/laptops. Not everyone uses a 12in netbook with only a browser window open. The fact that Android is successful does not actually make it good and most of the apps are worthless on a large screen whereas there are lots of actual apps for Linux of note.
  - imtringued 7y ago
    So what stops you from doing just that? (There is ChromeOS, anbox and co)
    - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
      And Android x86, to take it from a slightly different angle
  - umanwizard 7y ago
    Who is "Linux" ? Who exactly do you think should adopt AOSP UI?
nhumrich 7y ago
My biggest problem Wayland, is no screensharing. (i.e. casting on Chromecast, sharing screen on zoom). Apparently this because of security. Is this possible to overcome? Is this something can fixed by simply having chromecast/zoom devs implement something? Or will it never be possible?
- throwaway8941 7y ago
  Take a look into pipewire.
- jchw 7y ago
  Good news actually, it's already being worked on. As mentioned, Pipewire is the current leading solution. Upstream WebRTC has experimental support for Pipewire; in Chromium it can be enabled with a flag and in Firefox it can be enabled with a patch or configuration flag (I believe it is supposedly merged, but not sure if stable versions will compile and work with it.) GitHub is down atm but there's also an xdg-desktop-portal implementation for wlroots which should allow for Pipewire clients to run under Sway (I have not tried this personally, so I have no idea if it actually all works in practice yet.) https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - jasondclinton 7y ago
    Correct. All of this is working out of the box in Fedora 31 which ships Wayland by default.
  - Boulth 7y ago
    It doesn't sound like it's ready (as of June): https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr/issues/4#issuecomment-510622361 https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr/issues/4#...
- baroffoos 7y ago
  Screensharing is possible but it is not part of wayland. The compositor/DE must implement screen sharing and manage how programs are given permission to this.
sjy 7y ago
Summary: yes, unless you use video conferencing and screen sharing software, which is likely to be totally broken (but see Hello71's comment). The author needs to use Zoom, so he reverted to X11.
- zamadatix 7y ago
  That's not at all an accurate summary. I'd cover why but really the article is apt and to the point on doing so without summarization IMO.
zzo38computer 7y ago
I don't really like Wayland and I think X is better in many ways. There are a few problem which is why I had some ideas about X version 12. One is to ensure the implementation and protocol are separate. Another is proxies to implement security features. Another is support for SCM_RIGHTS and SCM_CREDENTIALS (only for local connections; these are obviously not supported for remote connections, which are still possible, if implemented by the server and enabled by the user). And then, also 64-bit numbers in many places. But a lot of it is like the version 11 protool (without all of the extensions they have added), but with a few differences. (I don't really like much of the freedesktop stuff either; I work without a desktop environment, and programs should not assume the existence of one.) Maybe there is even a possibility to implement these different systems over each other when needed. For example, with text rendering. Font path setting is not part of the core protocol (although there may be a XSET extension which can do this on some implementations), nor does the protocol specify font formats (PCF is recommended, but the protocol doesn't actually care so you can implement different formats if wanted). Characters are still sixteen bits, although to allow optional support for some more modern features, there are two flags you can specify when loading fonts: EnableLigatures and EnableAntialiasing. Servers that don't understand these flags can ignore them, and fonts that don't support them would also ignore them. EnableLigatures waives the requirement that a sequence of characters is the same as each of those characters put next to each other, and EnableAntialiasing waives the requirement that text is painted in the specified background and foreground colour only. (EnableLigatures is required to correctly render Unicode text with the X core text rendering system (if the server implements support for Unicode fonts, which is of course optional). Of course you are not required to use the core text rendering (previewer programs should not use it, for example), but if you do, and your program uses Unicode, then this will be needed. In effect, a surrogate pair is treated like a ligature at the protocol level (how it works in the actual implementation may differ, and is independent of the protocol).)
- braindeath 7y ago
  > But a lot of it is like the version 11 protool (without all of the extensions they have added), It’s hard to tease out, but it sounds like you’re advocating for the state of the art drawing model of 1980 in 2019. I don’t think this is going to fly except for a very niche audience.
erik_seaberg 7y ago
Any news on remoting Wayland? This article kinda ignores it, but I don't see how it's not a complete showstopper.
- pabs3 7y ago
  The Waypipe Summer of Code project implemented that recently: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2019-August/040819.html https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2019-Au...
  - erik_seaberg 7y ago
    Outstanding. Are they software rendering at the client and shoving raw images? Remote GPU from scratch strikes me as an even bigger job.
    - aspaceman 7y ago
      Since it’s SOC there was a blog post for it that got posted here. Should be findable with some searching.
      - erik_seaberg 7y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20848334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20848334
Jeaye 7y ago
Before I touch on Wayland and X, a brief detour. Let's assume Mozilla finishes servo (their browser in Rust). Let's also assume: - It's faster than Firefox. - It's safer than every other browser out there. How do they get people to use it? Those two are not enough. To the user: - It's different. - Firefox feels plenty safe. This is a real problem and Mozilla faces it now. As a result, they're focusing on what they can do with servo which no browser has done before, like superb VR support. In short, they need features to gain users and they recognize that. Marginal gains are not enough to encourage an entire product switch. Back to Wayland. Aside from the lack of screen tearing, what can we all agree are big wins for the user? I haven't tried it yet (for this reason), but everything I've read suggests that it could be safer, it could be faster, it could bring some more new features, but mostly it's the same shit. The masses, and this definitely includes the GNU/Linux using masses, need more than the same shit to change because change is tough. They are going to need something killer from Wayland, or another competitor, before they give up on X.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- war1025 7y ago
  I believe Mozilla's strategy is to develop new features in Rust on Servo, and then swap them out into Firefox as they go. That way users don't need to change, since they realized that users never would.
  - jdc 7y ago
    For instance, they wrote WebRender for Servo and ported it to Firefox
- m45t3r 7y ago
  This is kind the objective I think. Wayland in most cases (Gnome and KDE) is simply an implementation detail, and Gnome and KDE runs in both X11 and Wayland. The end result is, hopefully, less bugs, more security and more performance, however most people wouldn't care anyway (and I think most people doesn't care, for example Fedora uses Wayland by default). For us using window managers like i3wm the history is different. However in i3wm I am very close to the X11 so there is almost no abstraction, this is why the transition is more painful.
shmerl 7y ago
Not quite overall, at least from my perspective. 1. Adaptive sync still needs Wayland protocol support, before compositors can pick it up. It already works on X. 2. Some major features like common frameworks for screen capturing need to be agreed on, in order to avoid reinventing the wheel in tons of incompatible ways. Did everyone agree to use Pipewire, or it's still bikeshedded with everyone trying to do their own thing? I wasn't following this recently. 3. KWin has some major bugs to fix for the Wayland session, like subsurfaces clipping issue. 4. Support for Wacom drawing tablets is still missing in KWin on Wayland. And so on.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  What I'm hearing is, by the time Wayland is actually on par with X, feature-wise, it will by time for a whole new rewrite because something else will be fundamentally different in the way graphics are rendered. Windows went full compositor with Vista in 2006, with all the features and then some of its predecessor (except you can't have windows with no v-sync). 14 years later Wayland almost has a standardized way of taking screenshots.
  - shmerl 7y ago
    Possibly the part of the problem is, that there is no single owner and no one directs it. Everything seems chaotic, many things are low priority for developers, while in practice they are high priority for users and so on. I suppose that's the natural consequence of Linux desktop stack being developed so collaboratively. And the fact that desktop itself is so fragmented (KDE, Gnome, etc.) doesn't help either. Resources are spread quite thin. The major problem with Wayland is, that unlike X which is a unified point of collaboration, Wayland compositors need to do all the work on their own (unless they figure out how to share the effort, which doesn't go too well so far). So problems of fragmentation and lack of resources are only amplified in Wayland case, causing a huge delay in overall progress. And I'm not saying all the above is a bad thing (some argue choices are good and etc.). But the downsides are obvious. Personally, I'd prefer developers focusing more on KDE, but Gnome users would likely disagree.
  - MayeulC 7y ago
pdonis 7y ago
Please, please, please, people, don't impose your personal choice of font and background color on the rest of us. Faded beige background with light colored font makes this hard enough for me to read that I simply gave up. Yes, I have a particular issue since I'm partly red-green colorblind--but a substantial percentage of people have color perception issues of one sort or another. There's a reason why black text on a white background is so common.
- swalladge 7y ago
  I hear you. Thanks for the feedback. I'm planning on toning down the color scheme a lot now. I'll post further updates on the issue that you or someone else has raised on github: https://github.com/swalladge/swalladge.net/issues/1 https://github.com/swalladge/swalladge.net/issues/1 The site should work nicely in reader view or through an rss reader which could be a temporary option until I can fix it. Sorry for the inconvenience :/
  - markwakeford 7y ago
    Interestingly enough using Chrome on OSX it looked nothing like those screenshots and didn't bother me at all. I am also red green colour blind.
    - Carpetsmoker 7y ago
      It has everything to do with the chosen font and how font-weight: 300 is displayed. The font-family is set to sans-serif and on my Linux system, it selects DejaVu Sans ExtraLight, which looks like that. This is actually one reason to use webfonts, since you can be reasonably(ish) sure it looks more or less the same for everyone.
      - swalladge 7y ago
        Yep I think you've hit it. I've removed the custom font-weight so things should display normally with the user defined browser fonts as expected now.
voldacar 7y ago
Is wayland viable for gaming yet or does it still add an extra frame or two of latency?
tbenst 7y ago
Tried to use Wayland earlier today on Ubuntu 18.04 for fractional scaling support, but sadly there is no support for nvidia drivers. This does not seem well advertised so posting as a PSA to save others from trying to debug the login loop!
- swalladge 7y ago
  To clarify, it does support nvidia through the open source nouveau drivers. It's only the proprietary drivers that aren't supported.
  - michaelmrose 7y ago
    You mean it does not support the drivers that actually work?
    - swalladge 7y ago
      Yes exactly. I don't recommend nvidia.
      - michaelmrose 7y ago
        This is a good reason to select different new hardware but insufficient to get rid of existing hardware. If most people agree we can worry less in 5-10 years. Unless people work around it during this time frame in which case people can continue not caring.
    - boudin 7y ago
      It depends what you call working. Nvidia proprietary driver has a broken wayland implementation (a choice that nvidia made), whereas nouveau has a working one. Better pick AMD or even Intel GPUs on Linux as drivers are much better.
ddtaylor 7y ago
For me KDE has offered the best Wayland experience. It's easy to switch between X or Wayland.
epx 7y ago
I lost the faith, guess Joel law of not rewriting things was again upheld.
Svenstaro 7y ago
This would be a good time to mention that sway doesn't support the nvidia proprietary driver [0]. The author recommends nouveau but this leaves out users that 1) have very modern GPUs 2) need vulkan 3) need CUDA 4) do heavy gaming. The author is also quite spiteful about it and I'm not sure I like that. There is even a flag "--my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia" [1]. Whether or not this is nvidia's fault I can't judge but there are usually two stories to every disagreement and so far at least I haven't heard nvidia's. For me at least, this is a dealbreaker as I don't always get to choose the systems I get to use and I'd like to use the same config/wm everywhere if I can help it and if I sometimes have to alternate between i3 and sway then that won't do for me. [0] https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki#nvidia-users https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki#nvidia-users [1] https://github.com/swaywm/sway/blob/3334d11adc926c0f6d86afc4897117d5559036f5/sway/main.c#L101 https://github.com/swaywm/sway/blob/3334d11adc926c0f6d86afc4...
- sosodev 7y ago
  It’s pretty clearly nvidias fault. Their proprietary driver doesn’t play well with wayland and they haven’t seemed to care.
  - Svenstaro 7y ago
    Well, they've developed their EGLStream approach and that probably cost some resources on their end so the question is why they decided to go that way at all. It seems like a waste to me to develop something nobody is going to use and I don't see the business reason for this particular development.
    - thayne 7y ago
      afaict the only people who really care about EGLStream are nvidia. And while GNOME and KDE might have the resources to support both API's (much as they don't want to), smaller projects like sway simply don't have the resources to worry about that. I think one of the biggest failings of wayland is that it requires so much duplication of effort between different compositors. Ideally, the compositor shouldn't have to care very much about which drivers the user is using for their graphics card.
some1else 7y ago
I'm using the latest Ubuntu to run an art installation. So far I've been unable to launch GUI apps or take screenshots from a remote SSH terminal under Wayland. I had to resort to adding the commands to autostart & rebooting.
harry8 7y ago
What happened to Mir if Wayland is the only viable x11 alternative? A cruel friend has suggested everything touched by Ubuntu billionaire founder Shuttleworth turns to manure but I think this isn't so helpful to understand why Mir seemingly died completely? Even GnuHurd hasn't died so dramatically..?
- gmueckl 7y ago
  Due to the huge PR fuckup that was the Mir announcement, they never gained much traction in the greater community. And a display stack needs a lot of community support across the whole ecosystem: kernel support, kernel drivers, user space drivers, widget libraries, applications etc... none of these parties were willing to support Mir in any way.
- bitwize 7y ago
  Mir is now a Wayland compositor.
proverbialbunny 7y ago
>One point that I totally forgot about, but is now painfully apparent now that I'm back on X11, is screentearing. On Wayland, screentearing is a thing of the past. Everything was so smooth, flicker-free, and tear-free. Now I need to mess around tweaking compositors to get a nice experience on X11 (i3)… So that's a big plus for Wayland. This was my big hold up of using Linux as a whole. The screentearing is horrible, and coming from OSX where everything is as smooth as butter, it is an issue. But thankfully, Mint (which I'm on atm) allows the user to turn off vsync, and because I have an nvidia graphics card, I can turn on full-composition, and have my graphics card do vsync, and BAM! smooth as butter. It's an absolutely lovely and wonderful experience. I don't know what it's like on the AMD or Intel side, but with hardware becoming more powerful and better supported, I don't think the future is Wayland, but instead defaulting to a higher level of gpu acceleration than the default Gnome settings we have today. This removes the latency, the page tearing, and responsiveness issues that X11 has Wayland was created to fix.
- swalladge 7y ago
  > I don't know what it's like on the AMD or Intel side I recently switched to AMD - that, with a compositor (compton/picom), resulted in a super smooth tear-free experience in X for me. My experiences with Intel integrated graphics has always poor performance, and bad screen tearing, sometimes screentearing even with compton running.
mmerlin 7y ago
VAAPI support on Wayland is painful. I've built a kiosk system that requires videos playing in Chrome/ium (cannot use Firefox because also need web-bluetooth support) Our hardware is Intel NUCs and currently we are rolling these out on Windows OS, but would vastly prefer Linux but hitting so many roadblocks. Trying to get Intel hardware accelerated GPU video decoding working in Chromium running on Wayland has wasted me days of time with no resolution yet (tried ClearLinux and CentOS 8 and Ubuntu 16). With Wayland on Intel hardware, only VLC player can make use of VAAPI but Chromium doesn't seem possible, which results in 100% (Celeron) CPU usage trying to view a local video in the browser using video.js player. I'm going to ditch Wayland (Gnome) and try Xfce on my next attempt.
- ubercow13 7y ago
  Are you sure you’re using a build of Chromium with VAAPI support patched in? Support for hardware video decoding in Firefox on Linux does not exist at all, and Chromium does not support it either except in a set of patches which are not included upstream.
  - mmerlin 7y ago
    yes I am using chromium-vaapi thanks. [edit] I am about to try Arch Linux (or Manjaro) with Xfce to get Chromium-vaapi working https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Chromium#Hardware_video_acceleration https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Chromium#Hardware_video...
- Whatitat90 7y ago
  > only VLC player can make use of VAAPI And mpv with "hwdec=vaapi" in ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf
- aktau 7y ago
  I used to develop something like this (5-6 years ago). By far the best (most stable and performant) solution was the following: - Linux OS (ease of management, installation, introspectability). - Debian (somewhat stripped down), with custom packages. - Puppet for node management. - runit as a process manager. - Chromium to display videos/presentations. - (Custom) NPAPI based plugin (shim) that would load mplayer-vaapi (nowadays it would be mpv I guess) to display videos. It worked because one could get the X window ID of the <video> element via NPAPI, which was then passed to mplayer so it could initialize/render within the sub-window. One of the main benefits was that this avoided lots of resource leaks. The plugin pre-loaded mplayer processes and would shut them down after the video finished playing. Transitions were near to seamless (though required some HTML hacks to avoid white flashing). On our Sandy Bridge machines (small form factor, fanless), we could display 16 1080p videos side-by-side for days and the machine would stay cool. I was so excited when I demonstrated this. The previous interation of this software used the regular <video> (software) implementation and could barely manage a single video without overheating. Of course, NPAPI was deprecated a long time ago and removed from Chromium more than a year ago I think. The "replacement" (at the time) Pepper API AFAIK didn't allow access to the X window which is needed by mplayer. It was also not compatible between browsers. The plugin I made also worked on Firefox. Nowadays access to the necessary resources is so walled off that you'd really need hardware acceleration to be native to the browser. There'd be hard-to-avoid resource leaks, so I'd schedule browser restarts at night-time. I've been out of the loop for a while so maybe there's better stuff. I remember monitoring the Chromium repository to see if they would implement hardware acceleration. I recall they had a branch where this was "working" on ChromeOS and supposedly you could force-enable this for general Linux. I tried building this once, but my machine at the time could barely handle building it (took many hours). Once the binary was built, it would crash at startup. I decided it was too much effort to replace a solution that was working perfectly.
mistaken 7y ago
I've tried wayland around half a year ago, but switched back. Wayland was surprisingly usable, but a couple of features were missing that are essential for me for example color management.
mortdeus 7y ago
Ive been using wayland and sway for about 2 weeks now. My experience is this. If it's compiled to run for Wayland. Fan f-in tastic. No hiccups, no random screen tears or visual glitches of any kind. My logs are surprisingly sparse and when there is a configuration issue it's something trivial i overlooked and easily fixed. Now here is the issue. When it comes to X-Wayland. Well lets just say that my opinion of X-wayland can be boiled down to two major criticisms. 1. It's turning into another X11. I've been trying to get apps that should just work out of the box when running on gtk like Google Chrome. And frankly looking at the bug reports and hack ass solutions to get things like Video Hardware Acceleration to function using X-Wayland... Nightmarish to say the least and glad it's not my job. 2. I think history has shown time and time again with debacles like Apple trying to retain backwards capability for powerpc MacOS or Windows ensuring your archaic MS-DOS application at work doesn't end up need an expensive update.... that any time you try to not throw things away that need to be thrown away, regardless of how sentimental they might be, you always end up a dead hoarder buried somewhere in your house where nobody can find you but they can sure as hell smell you; so they know you are in there somewhere... Where ever the hell that may be. My attitude when it come's to the critics of Wayland is to say build something better or shut up and just not use it and keep letting X11 make the desktop experience on Linux suck on two fronts. The first where nobody who is working on it actually knows how the entire thing works except maybe a handful of people. (all of whom are btw wayland core developers). And the second, where things just don't work like they should out of the box on whichever desktop environment circumstance you may be in. When you have such a complicated API you end up with 50 million different ways 50 million different developers can write bugs into the 50 millionth reimplementation of your system. There is a reason why Unix was the most ripped off and successful operating system in the world. It's not because it had X11...
naranha 7y ago
Most xorg drivers have an option to run in tearfree mode. Another dealbreaker for me (i did the i3 sway journey this summer) is the early stage of remote desktop. With x it is super easy to spin up a nice vncserver. I also miss setxkbmap, xrandr, import etc. Wayland had some nice ideas and some not so useful ones. I'm waiting for something simple to replace xorg and wayland in the future.
- trulyrandom 7y ago
  Tear free mode has never worked for me on multi-monitor setups. All Xorg drivers have this issue in my experience. Nvidia, AMD, Intel and even the modesetting driver. Wayland seems to magically fix it.
  - naranha 7y ago
    Strange, it seems to work fine for me on 2 FHD monitors at least. Maybe I just don't see it...
    - trulyrandom 7y ago
      Hmm. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the refresh rates of my two monitors are not exactly the same.
chris_wot 7y ago
I just cannot get Wayland work on a VirtualBox instance of Ubuntu, with the host being MacOS Catalina on an iMac Retina. The screen just keeps flickering. I would love it if Wayland would work!
phosphophyllite 7y ago
Linux is too fragmented (no to be confused with fermented).
grandinj 7y ago
The problem with Wayland is the extremely long tail of use-cases that it does not cover (yet). (For example, I use VNC extensively and it has a lot of issues there still)
- majewsky 7y ago
  After reading through this thread, my impression is more like VNC being the only use-case that is not covered enough yet. What are the other uncovered use-cases? EDIT: Okay, VNC and xmodmap.
  - grandinj 7y ago
    I believe accessibility integration is still on the to-do list.
mouldysammich 7y ago
on the lack of clipboard history: https://github.com/sentriz/cliphist https://github.com/sentriz/cliphist this exists and is pretty good.
coldtea 7y ago
The discussion in the post, the description of what a technical user had to do to switch, the problems encountered, the X11 problems mentioned (tearing, etc), and the suggestions and workarounds in the comments, should be mandatory reading before someone calls Linux "ready for the desktop". For some reason Linux discussions are bimodal: in some everybody chimes how perfect everything works, and what peace they found switching to it. In others, like this one here, it's all about all kind of problems, hacky solutions, tinkering with system settings, and so on, and still having serious issues.
- olau 7y ago
  If you like tinkering, you can certainly do so, but there's a maintenance cost to customizations, and if you're not willing to shoulder them, then you should go with something closer to the stock install where the distribution will generally have sorted out things for you. Perhaps this is the explanation you're looking for? Actually, I think, and this is perhaps somewhat surprising, that many software developers don't pay terrible much attention to future maintenance costs.
bengalister 7y ago
Here are the issues that I still have (other than that it seems smoother): - I could not make copy/paste work from a Wayland host to Wayland guest in a Qemu/KVM VM. It seems that the guest utilities like spice vagent only work for Xorg. - I noticed that chrome/firefox are still relying on X and run in XWayland (at least on my arch setup). - Fractional scaling make some applications blurry but it seems that they are the ones running in Xwayland.
lasftew 7y ago
Last time I tried to migrate to wayland on a hidpi device, scaling wayland 2x would scale all xwayland windows naively by doubling pixels. In particular, this made graphical emacs fonts blurry. Is there a way to fix that, i.e. letting wayland apps scale natively, but scale xwayland apps using the regular X dpi setting (Xft.dpi and the like)? Emacs may be old and crufty, but unfortunately is my most often used graphical application.
MayeulC 7y ago
> NetworkManager GUI tools were strangely buggy with wayland. It wouldn't always crash, but sometimes the only way I could get it to connect to a wifi network was to quit sway, launch i3, connect with nm-applet in i3, then switch back to sway. I haven't tried using something else than nmtui, TBH > Sometimes, Sway would crash while the screen was locked, leaving my previously secured computer at a logged-in tty Ah! I've had some issues running SysRq+R, then Ctrl+C. The tty intreprets this as my wanting to quit sway :/ I was actually disappointed to find out that screensharing not working was preventing me from using Steam's in-home streaming (or Steam Remote Play, as it's now called). I hope sway can fix that for Xwayland apps at some point.
appleflaxen 7y ago
> Wayland has xwayland, which somehow provides mini embedded X server(s) for GUI apps that don't support wayland yet. I kept this disabled when switching, going for the "pure" Wayland experience. this seems like a really limiting decision in deciding how viable wayland is.

288 points by fourthark 7y ago

Gnome/Wayland on Fedora works pretty well last time I used it. I eventually had to switch back for a few reasons (mouse over the network had no replacement) but that was almost a year ago I'd bet it was even smoother now.

baroffoos 7y ago
My work laptop has been on wayland for years now. My desktop was on x11 due to nvidia drivers but now I have an amd card in it so I am back to wayland.

imode 7y ago

I don't agree with the assumption that we need to ditch X11 entirely. Implementations are different from the spec, and a common complaint I have is that certain implementations are gathering code smells like nobody's business. You can fix both an implementation and a spec by continued review and revision, while making choices to either remain backwards compatible or breaking that compatibility with newer revisions. I don't think Wayland is a good solution to this kind of problem, despite it being touted as one in many circles I've witnessed. The competition is nice, though! I have yet to give Wayland a try, but it's on my to-do list some time on a fresh machine.

cyphar 7y ago
One of the arguments made by the Wayland spec folks (many of whom were involved in Xorg development for many years) is that the Xorg spec is also a major cause of problems with modern Linux graphics[1]. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQoQE_HDG8g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQoQE_HDG8g
paulie_a 7y ago
X has long been a crufty dusty codebase. Due to a small amount of people that obsess about networking it has stayed alive. Hopefully Wayland hits critical mass and x can finally be old yellered as it should have been twenty years ago Due to the down votes let me clarify. X sucks
- michaelmrose 7y ago
  I want things that only work under x that aren't spacebar heating.
- erik_seaberg 7y ago
  How many Linux users have only one computer? The MBP work put on my desk is a toy compared to the thousands of Linux boxes they give me access to.
zzo38computer 7y ago
I agree with you. X isn't so bad and implementations are different from the spec (see my message about my proposed X12, which makes this more explicit).

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

bsder 7y ago

> Screen recording or sharing apps just don't work. Zoom with XWayland appeared to work, but in reality only shared a blank screen. This was kind of a deal breaker, because sooner or later I will need to use screen sharing in Zoom for work. Isn't this one of they key points FOR Wayland, though? I thought Wayland specifically stops applications from having access to other chunks of the screen without special permissions?

fake-name 7y ago
"Doesn't give access by default" is very different from "cannot be made to work". I'd assume the complaint is about the latter, which is a issue. I can't imagine anyone complaining about the first.
- swalladge 7y ago
  Agreed. The extra security given by the latter is a huge win for Wayland, but it needs to be possible to give access when required.
  - swalladge 7y ago
    s/latter/former
rotten 7y ago
Lack of support for screensharing is why I stopped using Wayland.

frio 7y ago

I've been using Wayland full-time (via Sway) since Sway went 1.0. It's been a pretty straightforward experience. The transition took some elbow grease at first (things like getting redshift working, as the author notes), but the last time I fucked around with my graphical config was months ago. I use a display manager, so the "crashes lead to an exposed terminal" thing doesn't matter so much (I've had a total of two crashes, once when I was putsing with XWayland, video games and multi-head -- and the other when building a since-abandoned alternative to kanshi). There are some quirks I need to spend a little more time investigating whether they're caused by Sway/Wayland or just my configuration: drag-and-dropping between windows seems to be busted, and right-click context menus that overflow their host window's boundaries aren't clickable outside those boundaries. But I mainly use the keyboard/terminal/TUIs, so I don't frequently drag and drop, and it's easy enough to right click somewhere else when the second issue occurs. Other than that, for how I use a computer, it's been smooth sailing. I wouldn't say we're Wayland yet for general usage either, but for the group of users who are into tiling window managers, we're maybe Wayland enough for now.

sjy 7y ago
For what it's worth, I've also noticed that right-click problem and some glitchiness with dragging and dropping.
- frio 7y ago
  Thanks, that's useful to know :).
colordrops 7y ago
Do you share your config files publicly?
- frio 7y ago
  Not at this stage, but I've got them all in a git repo in Keybase. The problem is that I've had pretty sloppy discipline re: storing secrets in them (... because Keybase makes that less bad), so I'll need to put some effort in to share them.

young_unixer 7y ago

From what I've read, it seems like Wayland's "controversial design choices" don't stem from developers being inconsiderate of different workflows, but rather from the intention of making a general purpose protocol. Being general purpose means that things like screenshotting capabilities are not the protocol's concern and should be implemented in the upper layer(s) instead. In that case, this general purpose approach seems to me like the right way to tackle the problem, since we won't need a different protocol for use cases that fall outside the traditional desktop paradigm. You can just use Wayland and implement your own business code on top. There'll be a de-facto standard way to do graphics on Linux, no matter your use case. Correct me if I'm wrong about this. I'm not a Wayland expert (I have many articles and books in my to-read list). I'm excited about Wayland for the simple reason that I hate screen tearing.

roenxi 7y ago
That means the screenshot application is, to some degree, compositor specific. It leaves the door completely open to the outcome that if you want to stream using a Gnome streaming application you will have to be using the Gnome project's window manager. Or the KDE streaming application will require the KDE window manager. Or the 'best' screenshot application will be tied to the XMonad successor on Wayland. Wayland is a good experiment, and the community may well go with it because X11 is atrocious and Wayland is a viable alternative. But call a spade a spade, they dropped the ball with that design decision. It isn't a big deal. The practical outcome is that there is going to be a screenshot protocol and everything that implements Wayland is going to have to implement that protocol as well. The required negotiation for that to happen is taking/going to take years and delay Wayland adoption. If they'd designed that at the same time as an optional part of the Wayland protocol it would have saved time and confusion.
- Hello71 7y ago
  there are already a number of screenshot protocols (as TFA explains, slurp and grim can be used for screenshots on sway). the trouble is getting everybody to agree on a single one, or implementing a library to interface with all the protocols, which is the current strategy. https://www.google.com/search?q=wayland+screenshot+protocol https://www.google.com/search?q=wayland+screenshot+protocol but, IMO, this is a good thing, and the only way it could have worked. if every single conceivable protocol was added to the initial specification, then wayland would never have been released. even if it was, people would complain even more about it being "bloated" and "non modular" and "not following the unix philosophy", whatever that means.

daurnimator 7y ago

> The fact is, Wayland is the only viable X11 successor There's at least one other option in the running, Arcan: https://arcan-fe.com/ https://arcan-fe.com/

fiddlerwoaroof 7y ago
Cool, Arcan looks a lot more viable for me than wayland
cnasc 7y ago
I'm a big fan of Arcan (moreso than I am of Wayland), but it's nowhere near as far along as Wayland and I think at this point is still the product of just one person. I think it's fair to call Wayland viable, but I don't think I would say that of Arcan until it's: a) generally usable as a daily driver; and b) maintained by enough people that there isn't a single point of failure. Right now I'm still on X.

Hello71 7y ago

hooray, finally a wayland criticism article that actually put in some effort instead of "muh unix philosophy". most of these issues are real issues for wayland today, and the author might be right to switch back to X for now. however, I'll try to explain some of the issues: > I had consistent font rendering issues. There was this painful issue in sway relating to display scaling that caused fonts (among other things) to be missing, fuzzy, or just terrible in general. yup, still a problem. hidpi doesn't work great on X in the first place, and adding Xwayland definitely makes it worse for X applications. but, once the majority of applications are ported to wayland, hidpi should become much, much better. > NetworkManager GUI tools were strangely buggy with wayland. It wouldn't always crash, but sometimes the only way I could get it to connect to a wifi network was to quit sway, launch i3, connect with nm-applet in i3, then switch back to sway. Bizarre. personally, I recommend using either raw wpa_supplicant or iwd with a separate network management daemon (dhcpcd or systemd-networkd). the wpa_supplicant GUI is very ugly and uses weird terminology (what's a "PSK" -- yes, I know what it is, but if you didn't, you'd have to google it), but if you can get over that hump as well as the initial configuration, it's been 100% reliable for me, unlike NM, which usually works but then sometimes silently fails somewhere. I recently switched to iwd, which has been mostly fine, but, like wayland, still lacking features important for some people. > Sometimes, on my desktop, everything would lock up for 10 seconds or so, the screen would blank, and then come back on and everything would be fine. It appeared to be some issue with the graphics drivers - I don't have that issue on i3, so something deep in Wayland is interacting strangely with it. I would assume you are using intel drivers and are experiencing a GPU reset. check dmesg, but it's quite possible that a poorly behaved application is causing the trouble. > Screen recording or sharing apps just don't work. Zoom with XWayland appeared to work, but in reality only shared a blank screen. This was kind of a deal breaker, because sooner or later I will need to use screen sharing in Zoom for work. yeah, this is definitely a problem. as other commenters have said, ordinary applications aren't allowed to just record the screen, they have to ask the compositor. unfortunately, this has not yet been standardized between different wayland implementations. iirc, gnome has a screen recording api, kde has one, and wlroots has another, and they're all incompatible. my current solution for sway is to use wf-recorder + v4l2loopback, which works fairly well but is a little bit hard to set up. install wf-recorder-git and v4l2loopback-dkms-git, then modprobe v4l2loopback exclusive_caps=1 video_nr=7 && wf-recorder -m v4l2 -f /dev/video7 -c rawvideo --pixel-format=yuv420p. then you'll have a fake camera device which you can select in your streaming application. that works for me on Firefox 70 and Chromium 78, so it should work for Zoom too. the workflow is not as smooth as built-in screen sharing (for one, you can't display two "cameras" at once), but it works well enough for most purposes. > Sometimes, Sway would crash while the screen was locked, leaving my previously secured computer at a logged-in tty. Not great for security! this is actually very easy to solve. solution 1: instead of running sway, run exec sway. solution 2: instead of running swaylock, run physlock. if security is a high priority for you, this is probably better anyways.

sprash 7y ago

The biggest hurdle for Wayland adoption is the absolutely brain dead "security model". Commonly used features like hotkey daemons, push to talk, screen recording/streaming/sharing, window management, clipboard history manager or even Wallpapers need to managed by the particular implementation (of there are many) of the Wayland server itself and have mostly no common protocols, at least not official. And when all those protocols after a long process are finally finished I have serious doubts that Wayland will be either less bloated and "messy" or more secure than current X11. The non-existent X11 security model is not really ideal but at least you could mitigate the problem there with access control hooks and as long as you use trusted software (which is 99.9% the case on a typical Linux system) you can use all the above mentioned features today without having too much headaches.

snagglegaggle 7y ago
The non-existent X11 security model is irrelevant considering on most systems anything under a uid can debug something else under a uid. Wayland's security is entirely pointless. I suspect Wayland will just become a container for an X11 session.
- paulddraper 7y ago
  > considering on most systems anything under a uid can debug something else under a uid Right? Couldn't only security hardened distros like SELinux take advantage of this? Or I suppose Docker GUI apps?
  - michaelmrose 7y ago
    Docker isn't a security layer
    - paulddraper 7y ago
      Security isn't the only thing Docker offers, but yes Docker on Linux is a security layer.
- 7y ago

microcolonel 7y ago

The thing about scaling is a bit difficult. Sway chooses to render XWayland windows in the lower resolution and scales up, rather than the other way around; I think this should be configurable.

pzone 7y ago
I don't see what would make such a configuration option particularly difficult. Maybe file a bug report requesting it? The scaling difficulties are fundamentally a problem with XWayland so you're left with two problematic options.
- microcolonel 7y ago
  > The scaling difficulties are fundamentally a problem with XWayland Well, sort of. There are fundamental issues with having per-display scaling in X. If you plug in a HiDPI display after starting an application, it's my understanding that there is no standard way to signal that to a window. The toolkits, or GTK+3 at least, do handle changing the scale at runtime internally, so it's more of a social problem than a hard engineering one.

jchw 7y ago

Important to note that Sway WM is not Wayland as a whole; I am a happy Sway user, but unfortunately it is not 100% at parity with the experience you will get with GNOME. However, you can always contribute if you have time; it’s fun and the codebase is very nice to work with. You don’t even have to switch to Sway to work on it. (If you are skilled at debugging and use graphics tablets we could use some help trying to figure out some crashing bugs with tablets...) Regarding screen capture: wl_roots actually supports this, but WebRTC doesn’t support the wl_roots protocol for it. I’ve been told Pipewire should solve this problem eventually. Edit: accidentally wrote Waypipe instead of Pipewire. (Waypipe is cool too, though.)

seminatl 7y ago

A good way to think about Wayland is the screen manager brought to you by the people who thought xrandr, Mesa, Cairo, the Linux FireWire stack, and freetype were good things. If you come in with appropriate expectations you’ll be amazed that any of it works at all. Is you think it over for a bit you’ll realize that the real Linux graphics protocol is Android SurfaceFlinger. Wayland is like five orders of magnitude less popular.

epx 7y ago
I have had this unpopular opinion since the beginning of the decade: Linux should just adopt AOSP UI, be able to run apps, and that’s it.
- michaelmrose 7y ago
  The android interface would be hot garbage on desktops/laptops. Not everyone uses a 12in netbook with only a browser window open. The fact that Android is successful does not actually make it good and most of the apps are worthless on a large screen whereas there are lots of actual apps for Linux of note.
- imtringued 7y ago
  So what stops you from doing just that? (There is ChromeOS, anbox and co)
  - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
    And Android x86, to take it from a slightly different angle
- umanwizard 7y ago
  Who is "Linux" ? Who exactly do you think should adopt AOSP UI?

nhumrich 7y ago

My biggest problem Wayland, is no screensharing. (i.e. casting on Chromecast, sharing screen on zoom). Apparently this because of security. Is this possible to overcome? Is this something can fixed by simply having chromecast/zoom devs implement something? Or will it never be possible?

throwaway8941 7y ago
Take a look into pipewire.
jchw 7y ago
Good news actually, it's already being worked on. As mentioned, Pipewire is the current leading solution. Upstream WebRTC has experimental support for Pipewire; in Chromium it can be enabled with a flag and in Firefox it can be enabled with a patch or configuration flag (I believe it is supposedly merged, but not sure if stable versions will compile and work with it.) GitHub is down atm but there's also an xdg-desktop-portal implementation for wlroots which should allow for Pipewire clients to run under Sway (I have not tried this personally, so I have no idea if it actually all works in practice yet.) https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- jasondclinton 7y ago
  Correct. All of this is working out of the box in Fedora 31 which ships Wayland by default.
- Boulth 7y ago
  It doesn't sound like it's ready (as of June): https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr/issues/4#issuecomment-510622361 https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr/issues/4#...
baroffoos 7y ago
Screensharing is possible but it is not part of wayland. The compositor/DE must implement screen sharing and manage how programs are given permission to this.

sjy 7y ago

Summary: yes, unless you use video conferencing and screen sharing software, which is likely to be totally broken (but see Hello71's comment). The author needs to use Zoom, so he reverted to X11.

zamadatix 7y ago
That's not at all an accurate summary. I'd cover why but really the article is apt and to the point on doing so without summarization IMO.

zzo38computer 7y ago

I don't really like Wayland and I think X is better in many ways. There are a few problem which is why I had some ideas about X version 12. One is to ensure the implementation and protocol are separate. Another is proxies to implement security features. Another is support for SCM_RIGHTS and SCM_CREDENTIALS (only for local connections; these are obviously not supported for remote connections, which are still possible, if implemented by the server and enabled by the user). And then, also 64-bit numbers in many places. But a lot of it is like the version 11 protool (without all of the extensions they have added), but with a few differences. (I don't really like much of the freedesktop stuff either; I work without a desktop environment, and programs should not assume the existence of one.) Maybe there is even a possibility to implement these different systems over each other when needed. For example, with text rendering. Font path setting is not part of the core protocol (although there may be a XSET extension which can do this on some implementations), nor does the protocol specify font formats (PCF is recommended, but the protocol doesn't actually care so you can implement different formats if wanted). Characters are still sixteen bits, although to allow optional support for some more modern features, there are two flags you can specify when loading fonts: EnableLigatures and EnableAntialiasing. Servers that don't understand these flags can ignore them, and fonts that don't support them would also ignore them. EnableLigatures waives the requirement that a sequence of characters is the same as each of those characters put next to each other, and EnableAntialiasing waives the requirement that text is painted in the specified background and foreground colour only. (EnableLigatures is required to correctly render Unicode text with the X core text rendering system (if the server implements support for Unicode fonts, which is of course optional). Of course you are not required to use the core text rendering (previewer programs should not use it, for example), but if you do, and your program uses Unicode, then this will be needed. In effect, a surrogate pair is treated like a ligature at the protocol level (how it works in the actual implementation may differ, and is independent of the protocol).)

braindeath 7y ago
> But a lot of it is like the version 11 protool (without all of the extensions they have added), It’s hard to tease out, but it sounds like you’re advocating for the state of the art drawing model of 1980 in 2019. I don’t think this is going to fly except for a very niche audience.

erik_seaberg 7y ago

Any news on remoting Wayland? This article kinda ignores it, but I don't see how it's not a complete showstopper.

pabs3 7y ago
The Waypipe Summer of Code project implemented that recently: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2019-August/040819.html https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2019-Au...
- erik_seaberg 7y ago
  Outstanding. Are they software rendering at the client and shoving raw images? Remote GPU from scratch strikes me as an even bigger job.
  - aspaceman 7y ago
    Since it’s SOC there was a blog post for it that got posted here. Should be findable with some searching.
    - erik_seaberg 7y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20848334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20848334

Jeaye 7y ago

Before I touch on Wayland and X, a brief detour. Let's assume Mozilla finishes servo (their browser in Rust). Let's also assume: - It's faster than Firefox. - It's safer than every other browser out there. How do they get people to use it? Those two are not enough. To the user: - It's different. - Firefox feels plenty safe. This is a real problem and Mozilla faces it now. As a result, they're focusing on what they can do with servo which no browser has done before, like superb VR support. In short, they need features to gain users and they recognize that. Marginal gains are not enough to encourage an entire product switch. Back to Wayland. Aside from the lack of screen tearing, what can we all agree are big wins for the user? I haven't tried it yet (for this reason), but everything I've read suggests that it could be safer, it could be faster, it could bring some more new features, but mostly it's the same shit. The masses, and this definitely includes the GNU/Linux using masses, need more than the same shit to change because change is tough. They are going to need something killer from Wayland, or another competitor, before they give up on X.

deleted 7y ago
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war1025 7y ago
I believe Mozilla's strategy is to develop new features in Rust on Servo, and then swap them out into Firefox as they go. That way users don't need to change, since they realized that users never would.
- jdc 7y ago
  For instance, they wrote WebRender for Servo and ported it to Firefox
m45t3r 7y ago
This is kind the objective I think. Wayland in most cases (Gnome and KDE) is simply an implementation detail, and Gnome and KDE runs in both X11 and Wayland. The end result is, hopefully, less bugs, more security and more performance, however most people wouldn't care anyway (and I think most people doesn't care, for example Fedora uses Wayland by default). For us using window managers like i3wm the history is different. However in i3wm I am very close to the X11 so there is almost no abstraction, this is why the transition is more painful.

shmerl 7y ago

Not quite overall, at least from my perspective. 1. Adaptive sync still needs Wayland protocol support, before compositors can pick it up. It already works on X. 2. Some major features like common frameworks for screen capturing need to be agreed on, in order to avoid reinventing the wheel in tons of incompatible ways. Did everyone agree to use Pipewire, or it's still bikeshedded with everyone trying to do their own thing? I wasn't following this recently. 3. KWin has some major bugs to fix for the Wayland session, like subsurfaces clipping issue. 4. Support for Wacom drawing tablets is still missing in KWin on Wayland. And so on.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
What I'm hearing is, by the time Wayland is actually on par with X, feature-wise, it will by time for a whole new rewrite because something else will be fundamentally different in the way graphics are rendered. Windows went full compositor with Vista in 2006, with all the features and then some of its predecessor (except you can't have windows with no v-sync). 14 years later Wayland almost has a standardized way of taking screenshots.
- shmerl 7y ago
  Possibly the part of the problem is, that there is no single owner and no one directs it. Everything seems chaotic, many things are low priority for developers, while in practice they are high priority for users and so on. I suppose that's the natural consequence of Linux desktop stack being developed so collaboratively. And the fact that desktop itself is so fragmented (KDE, Gnome, etc.) doesn't help either. Resources are spread quite thin. The major problem with Wayland is, that unlike X which is a unified point of collaboration, Wayland compositors need to do all the work on their own (unless they figure out how to share the effort, which doesn't go too well so far). So problems of fragmentation and lack of resources are only amplified in Wayland case, causing a huge delay in overall progress. And I'm not saying all the above is a bad thing (some argue choices are good and etc.). But the downsides are obvious. Personally, I'd prefer developers focusing more on KDE, but Gnome users would likely disagree.
- MayeulC 7y ago

pdonis 7y ago

Please, please, please, people, don't impose your personal choice of font and background color on the rest of us. Faded beige background with light colored font makes this hard enough for me to read that I simply gave up. Yes, I have a particular issue since I'm partly red-green colorblind--but a substantial percentage of people have color perception issues of one sort or another. There's a reason why black text on a white background is so common.

swalladge 7y ago
I hear you. Thanks for the feedback. I'm planning on toning down the color scheme a lot now. I'll post further updates on the issue that you or someone else has raised on github: https://github.com/swalladge/swalladge.net/issues/1 https://github.com/swalladge/swalladge.net/issues/1 The site should work nicely in reader view or through an rss reader which could be a temporary option until I can fix it. Sorry for the inconvenience :/
- markwakeford 7y ago
  Interestingly enough using Chrome on OSX it looked nothing like those screenshots and didn't bother me at all. I am also red green colour blind.
  - Carpetsmoker 7y ago
    It has everything to do with the chosen font and how font-weight: 300 is displayed. The font-family is set to sans-serif and on my Linux system, it selects DejaVu Sans ExtraLight, which looks like that. This is actually one reason to use webfonts, since you can be reasonably(ish) sure it looks more or less the same for everyone.
    - swalladge 7y ago
      Yep I think you've hit it. I've removed the custom font-weight so things should display normally with the user defined browser fonts as expected now.

voldacar 7y ago

Is wayland viable for gaming yet or does it still add an extra frame or two of latency?

tbenst 7y ago

Tried to use Wayland earlier today on Ubuntu 18.04 for fractional scaling support, but sadly there is no support for nvidia drivers. This does not seem well advertised so posting as a PSA to save others from trying to debug the login loop!

swalladge 7y ago
To clarify, it does support nvidia through the open source nouveau drivers. It's only the proprietary drivers that aren't supported.
- michaelmrose 7y ago
  You mean it does not support the drivers that actually work?
  - swalladge 7y ago
    Yes exactly. I don't recommend nvidia.
    - michaelmrose 7y ago
      This is a good reason to select different new hardware but insufficient to get rid of existing hardware. If most people agree we can worry less in 5-10 years. Unless people work around it during this time frame in which case people can continue not caring.
  - boudin 7y ago
    It depends what you call working. Nvidia proprietary driver has a broken wayland implementation (a choice that nvidia made), whereas nouveau has a working one. Better pick AMD or even Intel GPUs on Linux as drivers are much better.

ddtaylor 7y ago

For me KDE has offered the best Wayland experience. It's easy to switch between X or Wayland.

epx 7y ago

I lost the faith, guess Joel law of not rewriting things was again upheld.

Svenstaro 7y ago

This would be a good time to mention that sway doesn't support the nvidia proprietary driver [0]. The author recommends nouveau but this leaves out users that 1) have very modern GPUs 2) need vulkan 3) need CUDA 4) do heavy gaming. The author is also quite spiteful about it and I'm not sure I like that. There is even a flag "--my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia" [1]. Whether or not this is nvidia's fault I can't judge but there are usually two stories to every disagreement and so far at least I haven't heard nvidia's. For me at least, this is a dealbreaker as I don't always get to choose the systems I get to use and I'd like to use the same config/wm everywhere if I can help it and if I sometimes have to alternate between i3 and sway then that won't do for me. [0] https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki#nvidia-users https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki#nvidia-users [1] https://github.com/swaywm/sway/blob/3334d11adc926c0f6d86afc4897117d5559036f5/sway/main.c#L101 https://github.com/swaywm/sway/blob/3334d11adc926c0f6d86afc4...

sosodev 7y ago
It’s pretty clearly nvidias fault. Their proprietary driver doesn’t play well with wayland and they haven’t seemed to care.
- Svenstaro 7y ago
  Well, they've developed their EGLStream approach and that probably cost some resources on their end so the question is why they decided to go that way at all. It seems like a waste to me to develop something nobody is going to use and I don't see the business reason for this particular development.
  - thayne 7y ago
    afaict the only people who really care about EGLStream are nvidia. And while GNOME and KDE might have the resources to support both API's (much as they don't want to), smaller projects like sway simply don't have the resources to worry about that. I think one of the biggest failings of wayland is that it requires so much duplication of effort between different compositors. Ideally, the compositor shouldn't have to care very much about which drivers the user is using for their graphics card.

some1else 7y ago

I'm using the latest Ubuntu to run an art installation. So far I've been unable to launch GUI apps or take screenshots from a remote SSH terminal under Wayland. I had to resort to adding the commands to autostart & rebooting.

harry8 7y ago

What happened to Mir if Wayland is the only viable x11 alternative? A cruel friend has suggested everything touched by Ubuntu billionaire founder Shuttleworth turns to manure but I think this isn't so helpful to understand why Mir seemingly died completely? Even GnuHurd hasn't died so dramatically..?

gmueckl 7y ago
Due to the huge PR fuckup that was the Mir announcement, they never gained much traction in the greater community. And a display stack needs a lot of community support across the whole ecosystem: kernel support, kernel drivers, user space drivers, widget libraries, applications etc... none of these parties were willing to support Mir in any way.
bitwize 7y ago
Mir is now a Wayland compositor.

proverbialbunny 7y ago

>One point that I totally forgot about, but is now painfully apparent now that I'm back on X11, is screentearing. On Wayland, screentearing is a thing of the past. Everything was so smooth, flicker-free, and tear-free. Now I need to mess around tweaking compositors to get a nice experience on X11 (i3)… So that's a big plus for Wayland. This was my big hold up of using Linux as a whole. The screentearing is horrible, and coming from OSX where everything is as smooth as butter, it is an issue. But thankfully, Mint (which I'm on atm) allows the user to turn off vsync, and because I have an nvidia graphics card, I can turn on full-composition, and have my graphics card do vsync, and BAM! smooth as butter. It's an absolutely lovely and wonderful experience. I don't know what it's like on the AMD or Intel side, but with hardware becoming more powerful and better supported, I don't think the future is Wayland, but instead defaulting to a higher level of gpu acceleration than the default Gnome settings we have today. This removes the latency, the page tearing, and responsiveness issues that X11 has Wayland was created to fix.

swalladge 7y ago
> I don't know what it's like on the AMD or Intel side I recently switched to AMD - that, with a compositor (compton/picom), resulted in a super smooth tear-free experience in X for me. My experiences with Intel integrated graphics has always poor performance, and bad screen tearing, sometimes screentearing even with compton running.

mmerlin 7y ago

VAAPI support on Wayland is painful. I've built a kiosk system that requires videos playing in Chrome/ium (cannot use Firefox because also need web-bluetooth support) Our hardware is Intel NUCs and currently we are rolling these out on Windows OS, but would vastly prefer Linux but hitting so many roadblocks. Trying to get Intel hardware accelerated GPU video decoding working in Chromium running on Wayland has wasted me days of time with no resolution yet (tried ClearLinux and CentOS 8 and Ubuntu 16). With Wayland on Intel hardware, only VLC player can make use of VAAPI but Chromium doesn't seem possible, which results in 100% (Celeron) CPU usage trying to view a local video in the browser using video.js player. I'm going to ditch Wayland (Gnome) and try Xfce on my next attempt.

ubercow13 7y ago
Are you sure you’re using a build of Chromium with VAAPI support patched in? Support for hardware video decoding in Firefox on Linux does not exist at all, and Chromium does not support it either except in a set of patches which are not included upstream.
- mmerlin 7y ago
  yes I am using chromium-vaapi thanks. [edit] I am about to try Arch Linux (or Manjaro) with Xfce to get Chromium-vaapi working https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Chromium#Hardware_video_acceleration https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Chromium#Hardware_video...
Whatitat90 7y ago
> only VLC player can make use of VAAPI And mpv with "hwdec=vaapi" in ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf
aktau 7y ago
I used to develop something like this (5-6 years ago). By far the best (most stable and performant) solution was the following: - Linux OS (ease of management, installation, introspectability). - Debian (somewhat stripped down), with custom packages. - Puppet for node management. - runit as a process manager. - Chromium to display videos/presentations. - (Custom) NPAPI based plugin (shim) that would load mplayer-vaapi (nowadays it would be mpv I guess) to display videos. It worked because one could get the X window ID of the <video> element via NPAPI, which was then passed to mplayer so it could initialize/render within the sub-window. One of the main benefits was that this avoided lots of resource leaks. The plugin pre-loaded mplayer processes and would shut them down after the video finished playing. Transitions were near to seamless (though required some HTML hacks to avoid white flashing). On our Sandy Bridge machines (small form factor, fanless), we could display 16 1080p videos side-by-side for days and the machine would stay cool. I was so excited when I demonstrated this. The previous interation of this software used the regular <video> (software) implementation and could barely manage a single video without overheating. Of course, NPAPI was deprecated a long time ago and removed from Chromium more than a year ago I think. The "replacement" (at the time) Pepper API AFAIK didn't allow access to the X window which is needed by mplayer. It was also not compatible between browsers. The plugin I made also worked on Firefox. Nowadays access to the necessary resources is so walled off that you'd really need hardware acceleration to be native to the browser. There'd be hard-to-avoid resource leaks, so I'd schedule browser restarts at night-time. I've been out of the loop for a while so maybe there's better stuff. I remember monitoring the Chromium repository to see if they would implement hardware acceleration. I recall they had a branch where this was "working" on ChromeOS and supposedly you could force-enable this for general Linux. I tried building this once, but my machine at the time could barely handle building it (took many hours). Once the binary was built, it would crash at startup. I decided it was too much effort to replace a solution that was working perfectly.

mistaken 7y ago

I've tried wayland around half a year ago, but switched back. Wayland was surprisingly usable, but a couple of features were missing that are essential for me for example color management.

mortdeus 7y ago

Ive been using wayland and sway for about 2 weeks now. My experience is this. If it's compiled to run for Wayland. Fan f-in tastic. No hiccups, no random screen tears or visual glitches of any kind. My logs are surprisingly sparse and when there is a configuration issue it's something trivial i overlooked and easily fixed. Now here is the issue. When it comes to X-Wayland. Well lets just say that my opinion of X-wayland can be boiled down to two major criticisms. 1. It's turning into another X11. I've been trying to get apps that should just work out of the box when running on gtk like Google Chrome. And frankly looking at the bug reports and hack ass solutions to get things like Video Hardware Acceleration to function using X-Wayland... Nightmarish to say the least and glad it's not my job. 2. I think history has shown time and time again with debacles like Apple trying to retain backwards capability for powerpc MacOS or Windows ensuring your archaic MS-DOS application at work doesn't end up need an expensive update.... that any time you try to not throw things away that need to be thrown away, regardless of how sentimental they might be, you always end up a dead hoarder buried somewhere in your house where nobody can find you but they can sure as hell smell you; so they know you are in there somewhere... Where ever the hell that may be. My attitude when it come's to the critics of Wayland is to say build something better or shut up and just not use it and keep letting X11 make the desktop experience on Linux suck on two fronts. The first where nobody who is working on it actually knows how the entire thing works except maybe a handful of people. (all of whom are btw wayland core developers). And the second, where things just don't work like they should out of the box on whichever desktop environment circumstance you may be in. When you have such a complicated API you end up with 50 million different ways 50 million different developers can write bugs into the 50 millionth reimplementation of your system. There is a reason why Unix was the most ripped off and successful operating system in the world. It's not because it had X11...

naranha 7y ago

Most xorg drivers have an option to run in tearfree mode. Another dealbreaker for me (i did the i3 sway journey this summer) is the early stage of remote desktop. With x it is super easy to spin up a nice vncserver. I also miss setxkbmap, xrandr, import etc. Wayland had some nice ideas and some not so useful ones. I'm waiting for something simple to replace xorg and wayland in the future.

trulyrandom 7y ago
Tear free mode has never worked for me on multi-monitor setups. All Xorg drivers have this issue in my experience. Nvidia, AMD, Intel and even the modesetting driver. Wayland seems to magically fix it.
- naranha 7y ago
  Strange, it seems to work fine for me on 2 FHD monitors at least. Maybe I just don't see it...
  - trulyrandom 7y ago
    Hmm. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the refresh rates of my two monitors are not exactly the same.

chris_wot 7y ago

I just cannot get Wayland work on a VirtualBox instance of Ubuntu, with the host being MacOS Catalina on an iMac Retina. The screen just keeps flickering. I would love it if Wayland would work!

phosphophyllite 7y ago

Linux is too fragmented (no to be confused with fermented).

grandinj 7y ago

The problem with Wayland is the extremely long tail of use-cases that it does not cover (yet). (For example, I use VNC extensively and it has a lot of issues there still)

majewsky 7y ago
After reading through this thread, my impression is more like VNC being the only use-case that is not covered enough yet. What are the other uncovered use-cases? EDIT: Okay, VNC and xmodmap.
- grandinj 7y ago
  I believe accessibility integration is still on the to-do list.

mouldysammich 7y ago

on the lack of clipboard history: https://github.com/sentriz/cliphist https://github.com/sentriz/cliphist this exists and is pretty good.

coldtea 7y ago

The discussion in the post, the description of what a technical user had to do to switch, the problems encountered, the X11 problems mentioned (tearing, etc), and the suggestions and workarounds in the comments, should be mandatory reading before someone calls Linux "ready for the desktop". For some reason Linux discussions are bimodal: in some everybody chimes how perfect everything works, and what peace they found switching to it. In others, like this one here, it's all about all kind of problems, hacky solutions, tinkering with system settings, and so on, and still having serious issues.

olau 7y ago
If you like tinkering, you can certainly do so, but there's a maintenance cost to customizations, and if you're not willing to shoulder them, then you should go with something closer to the stock install where the distribution will generally have sorted out things for you. Perhaps this is the explanation you're looking for? Actually, I think, and this is perhaps somewhat surprising, that many software developers don't pay terrible much attention to future maintenance costs.

bengalister 7y ago

Here are the issues that I still have (other than that it seems smoother): - I could not make copy/paste work from a Wayland host to Wayland guest in a Qemu/KVM VM. It seems that the guest utilities like spice vagent only work for Xorg. - I noticed that chrome/firefox are still relying on X and run in XWayland (at least on my arch setup). - Fractional scaling make some applications blurry but it seems that they are the ones running in Xwayland.

lasftew 7y ago

Last time I tried to migrate to wayland on a hidpi device, scaling wayland 2x would scale all xwayland windows naively by doubling pixels. In particular, this made graphical emacs fonts blurry. Is there a way to fix that, i.e. letting wayland apps scale natively, but scale xwayland apps using the regular X dpi setting (Xft.dpi and the like)? Emacs may be old and crufty, but unfortunately is my most often used graphical application.

MayeulC 7y ago

> NetworkManager GUI tools were strangely buggy with wayland. It wouldn't always crash, but sometimes the only way I could get it to connect to a wifi network was to quit sway, launch i3, connect with nm-applet in i3, then switch back to sway. I haven't tried using something else than nmtui, TBH > Sometimes, Sway would crash while the screen was locked, leaving my previously secured computer at a logged-in tty Ah! I've had some issues running SysRq+R, then Ctrl+C. The tty intreprets this as my wanting to quit sway :/ I was actually disappointed to find out that screensharing not working was preventing me from using Steam's in-home streaming (or Steam Remote Play, as it's now called). I hope sway can fix that for Xwayland apps at some point.

appleflaxen 7y ago

> Wayland has xwayland, which somehow provides mini embedded X server(s) for GUI apps that don't support wayland yet. I kept this disabled when switching, going for the "pure" Wayland experience. this seems like a really limiting decision in deciding how viable wayland is.