7 ms·
Wayland is really slow. I don't know if it's the compositing or what but it's unusable on lighter hardware that X ran fine on. This is crazy when you think abo
by goatinaboat 6y ago
Wayland is really slow. I don't know if it's the compositing or what but it's unusable on lighter hardware that X ran fine on.
This is crazy when you think about it. I remember running an X server, Hummingbird I think it was called, on 386 and 486 machines connecting to Suns and it was fine, this was a perfectly acceptable way to work. Couple of xterms, an Emacs, xbiff for email, maybe some xeyes just for fun. Developing with Tcl/Tk and running those applications. Now we have several orders of magnitude more CPU, memory, network and Wayland doesn't even perform as well as that! My mind is truly boggled.
- Flex247A 6y agoWhat could be the reason behind this? Asking as a noob.
- beowulfey 6y agoI personally don’t know, but most likely when you are not forced to think about memory, efficiency, etc... most people just don’t. So if you aren’t actively developing on those lightweight systems your code won’t run efficiently on them.
- Flex247A 6y agoI guess that explains why Electron based apps don't feel as snappy as native ones.
- p_l 6y agoPart of it is toolkits throwing sometimes multiple megabyte bitmaps to draw, which starts to have problems the moment you don't have a zerocopy, gpu accelerated method to draw them. The old core protocol approach extensively used optimized graphic operations on the server side, with clients sending things like "draw me a rectangle/fill a rectangle/draw a bunch of lines" etc. - today you're going to get pretty big bitmap (especially with high dpi). It's the same problem that mobile devices faced, and is related to a lot of issues on how android devices were "janky" (and related to the various hacks that Apple did to make sure your application wasn't capable of overstressing the early iPhones - cause just displaying basic UI was close to doing that.)
- goatinaboat 6y agoWhat could be the reason behind this? Asking as a noob Abstractions piled on top of abstractions. Something that might have been 5 function calls deep on either side with a carefully crafted packet in the middle is now 100s on each side. We have a culture that prizes programmer happiness above all and this means everyone thinks "this is a mess, I'll put my own layer on top to make it nice, then work above that layer". Repeat 100 times and now you have processors literally 2000 times faster that struggle to even keep up with keypresses. But what noone wants to admit, is that it's messy because the problem domain is messy and sometimes you just have to live with the mess and get some real work done. The programmers of old understood this.
- Fnoord 6y agoThe compositor is evil [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24466929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24466929
- pfortuny 6y agoWhen a window bar needs a gradient, you are starting to stress the graphics engine... And that is just a simple bitmap (or not)...
- Const-me 6y agoTechnically what Wayland is doing, using 3D GPU for everything, is the best way forward. Windows is using it since Vista. When done right, gradients mentioned in other comments are free, GPUs have hardware to interpolate values (such as colors) across vertices of triangle, for free. Many other effects are either free or very cheap. Engineering-wise it's really hard. Microsoft reworked GPU driver model introducing WDDM. They invented a new user-facing API for that, introducing Direct3D 10. They did that in close collaboration with all 3 GPU vendors. They made user-mode components like desktop compositor itself, dwm.exe, and higher-level libraries to benefit from all that stuff. Initially they were optional things like WPF, Direct2D, DirectWrite, then with Win8 they introduced WinRT later rebranded to UWP. That one is no longer optional and is the only practical way to render "hello world, GUI edition" in modern Windows (possible to do with DirectWrite or legacy GDI but neither of them is practical). The problem "render nice high-resolution graphics, fast" affects everything, the entire stack. Modern Linux has decent kernel infrastructure (DRM/KMS), but even so, remaining challenges are hard. Linux has less luck with user-facing GPU APIs (Vulkan is not yet universally available, neither is GLES3+ or OpenGL 4.3+). For some GPUs, quality of drivers is less than ideal. OS maintainers oppose stabilizing kernel ABI for drivers. There's no high level GPU-centric graphics libraries, I tried once with moderate success https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac but that only supports one specific Debian Linux on one specific computer which happens to support GLES 3.1, and some important features are missing e.g. no gradient brushes or stroked pens. I don't see any large party interested in making that happen. At least not for desktop Linux. Valve started to do relevant things when they thought Windows 10 is going to kill their Steam business model, then it became apparent Microsoft won't make Win10 into an iOS-style walled garden, and they no longer have much motivation.
- danaris 6y ago> Technically what Wayland is doing, using 3D GPU for everything, is the best way forward. It's great for the common desktop case. It's not as great for some other cases in which Linux is the preferred platform (headless servers, repurposed old hardware, etc). The problem isn't, of course, that there exists a solution for this on Linux. It's that that solution is being pushed as the only one that should be maintained—and thus, exist—going forward.
- folkhack 6y agoYeah - I have no clue why you're being downvoted. I have the exact same professional experience where Wayland is slow out-of-box vs X. I also share the experience of getting X to work on ancient hardware without much difficulty. Let's be real here - if you're needing something to "just work" you're going to install X. Sorry Wayland, you're just not there yet.
- DyslexicAtheist 6y ago> Yeah - I have no clue why you're being downvoted. I didn't downvote but it's because parents comment are anecdotal and not providing further data one might be able to engage/confirm/refute ... and therefore I learned nothing from reading it. I'm also running a dual setup of i3/sway and the only reason why I still keep i3 around is screen-sharing in jitsi and similar. and my experience is that wayland has a lower use of CPU/memory than when running X (i3) but it's not why I prefer sway. (I'm using sway with "xwayland disable" so maybe this is where a lot of resources are saved). But the whole discussion is pointless without verifiable benchmarks.
- asveikau 6y agoWell, the anecdotes are kind of real, and vast in numbers. I suspect many readers here never used X on a 90s PC or workstation, so they could be forgiven for not realizing it was up to the task on hardware that is now pitiful. Another example I like is the Nokia N900, which ran X on a phone no less, phone hardware from 2009, and it was pretty good there. Part of the problem is surely software bloat over time on higher parts of the stack, rather than X itself. You couldn't get the 486 in the comment above to run recent gnome or a recent browser. But you could run software of the era well.
- tutfbhuf 6y agoMaybe someone could try to install Wayland on an old device, where latest Xorg works fast, and see if Wayland also does. Comparison video would be nice.
- gnufx 6y agoFor what it's worth, Exceed was never fine in my experience, and you were better off with the Cygwin server. At one time, the first thing to ask about certain sorts of Emacs problems that were reported was "Are you running Exceed?", with high probability the answer would be "Yes". I never understood why "we" paid for it. But, yes, X did always run on relatively low-resource machines. (I can't comment on how Wayland compares.)
- adwn 6y agoFor what it's worth, whenever I tunneled X over a non-local SSH connection, it was slow as molasses. That's because almost all contemporary GUI applications render to a bitmap anyway. Those that actually use the outdated X vector graphics operations look like utter garbage compared to anything post-1995. Frankly, I'd rather my applications are at least somewhat aesthetically pleasing.
- jleahy 6y agoI routinely use modern X applications running on a remote (25 miles) machine, all day long as part of my job. It works flawlessly if you have a reasonable amount of bandwidth and reasonable latency. Sure, it doesn’t work over dial-up.
- MayeulC 6y agoHonestly, X forwarding doesn't work that well in my experience, unless you have a very stable connection, with quite a bit of bandwidth (~1Mbps at the very least). I've had more success using xpra for forwarding, as I'm often connecting over Wi-Fi (hostel, campus rooms...). It's also rather complicated to set-up on the server side (xauth, magic cookie, etc). waypipe, on the other hand, was a breeze to use, even though it's very young. I tried with Firefox and 500Mbps of upload capacity, it worked fine as long as the window wasn't too large.
- ajsnigrutin 6y ago> It's also rather complicated to set-up on the server side (xauth, magic cookie, etc). you mean "ssh -Y user@host..."?
- MayeulC 6y agoNo, that is the client side. I went back and looked at the documentation, I was wrong and conflated two ways of doing it: - X forwarding over SSH: this only requires changing X11Forwarding in OpenSSH sshd's config - Plain X over network, which is secured with `xhost`, insecure, and needs transfering the magic cookie or other authentication information So, not nearly as complex to setup as I recalled, though it's much simpler to run a nested wayland compositor (which waypipe does) than a X11 server (which xpra does). The difference between X11 and Wayland remote access thins when xpra is involved. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37157097/how-does-x11-authorization-works-mit-magic-cookie https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37157097/how-does-x11-au...
- flyinghamster 6y agoI think much of the problem is that today's systems have vast amounts of eye candy that was all but nonexistent back in the 80s and 90s. X terminals and 486s don't have the resources to throwing fancy visual effects on the screen, and sometimes might not even be color displays.
- pmontra 6y agoAnecdotally I run X11 on several Sun workstations (Motorola 680xx), a Dec Alpha (some RISC), HP X terminals, etc. All of them were reasonably fast or at least not any slower than the Windows and Mac boxes of the time (1990/95.) We played videogames on them. Does anybody remember Netrek, Xtanks, and a F16 vs MIG flight simulator which I can't remember the name of?
- swiley 6y agoI feel like I should point out I was thinking of my 64bit core-i5 machine when I made that comment. A 386 won't even run a modern Linux kernel.