13 ms·

I only really care about performance and Wayland hasn’t been very convincing [0] with no discernible improvement over X11. [0] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.ph

by verroq 6y ago

I only really care about performance and Wayland hasn’t been very convincing [0] with no discernible improvement over X11. [0] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-Xorg-Wayland-AMD-Renoir https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-Xo...

ddevault 6y ago
GNOME is not a good representative of Wayland. Wayland is just a protocol - it's up to the compositors to have good performance to distinguish it from Xorg, and GNOME does not do well in this regard. Other compositors, particularly wlroots, enjoy excellent performance. Wayland also opens the door to many performance improvements which are not possible on Xorg, and which take advantage of newer GPU features, especially on embedded systems but moreso every year on desktop and laptop GPUs as well.
- verroq 6y ago
  Is there a benchmark where it blows X11 out of the water?
  - ddevault 6y ago
    I am not aware of any up-to-date benchmarks which make a fair comparison (i.e. not just benchmarking GNOME), but I am intimately familiar with the technology and its performance characteristics.
    - taeric 6y ago
      Gnome is a fair comparison. Since it is the main comparison for many users, it is the most fair comparison. Otherwise, this is starting the benchmark wars with meaningless comparisons at the outset. :(
      - ddevault 6y ago
        It's not a fair comparison. You're benchmarking GNOME, not Wayland, and making generalizations about Wayland based on GNOME benchmarks is a false equivalency. Is GNOME on Wayland worse than GNOME on X11? Perhaps. Is Wayland worse than X11, based on that answer? No.
        taeric 6y ago
        I get your point. But until those benchmarks at least correlate with behavior users see, they are not worth much.
        ddevault 6y ago
        I don't know what you're trying to say, outside of some vauge attempt to avoid admitting a mistake.
        taeric 6y ago
        I'm saying that we get your point. But you seem to be missing ours. Nobody cares about benchmarks that a) don't exist or b) are not indicative of what folks will experience.
        ddevault 6y ago
        Obviously? The disconnect is that you seem to think that we can draw conclusions from nonexistent benchmarks.
        taeric 6y ago
        You are asking us to literally draw conclusions from hypothetical benchmarks where the opposite results will exist. I am sympathetic to the idea that things needed to start over. I'm annoyed with the lack of honesty and self critical approach. As framed by you, Wayland is above criticism. Which immediately raises my suspicions.
- aidenn0 6y ago
  Which embedded systems actually run GLES on Linux stably enough to do anything with Wayland? My experience is the choices are: Use a binary blob that only works with a 3 year old vendor kernel, and works most of the time (but you can't fix it when it doesn't work, and if you are compositing most of the time isn't good enough) Use a mainline Linux kernel that is so buggy that fixing the bugs in it is a full time job Use fbdev
  - ddevault 6y ago
    Wayland has nothing to do with GLES, and some compositors support pixman-based rendering similar to Xorg on embedded devices.
- notankies 6y ago
  Regardless as to whether Gnome "does well" in the regard of performance, you must admit that for some of us choosing a competitor like wlroots over one like Gnome introduces a whole new adventure in replacing all the features of Gnome with standalone applications to use with wlroots. Plus a tiling window manager is a totally different workflow. Not everyone has the time for curating a desktop environment with individual utilities, and not everyone likes tiling WMs. i3 gave me an RSI.
  - ddevault 6y ago
    It's not a particularly arduous "adventure". We maintain a list[0] of programs which use these protocols. And wlroots != tiling window manager: there are multiple wlroots-based compositors which do not use the tiling paradigm, the most developed of which is probably Wayfire[1]. [0]: https://github.com/swaywm/wlr-protocols/wiki https://github.com/swaywm/wlr-protocols/wiki [1]: https://github.com/WayfireWM/wayfire https://github.com/WayfireWM/wayfire
    - notankies 6y ago
      Apologies; I misunderstood one of your links and thought sway had been renamed to wlroots. To be clear the "adventure" I'm talking about is for replacing desktop environment niceties like the ones provided by gsettingsd and the tight integration provided between devices and the system management tools offered in full desktop blown environments like Gnome and KDE. I used i3 for six or seven years and it was never as nicely integrated as Gnome and I spent a LOT of time yak shaving to get it nice and keep it that way. Eventually I gave up. Gnome is really nice these days. But maybe I missed the point of your original comment.
      - sergeykish 6y ago
        wlroots excellent performance => bottleneck is not Wayland. Gnome will catch up some day.
        michaelmrose 6y ago
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- JoshTriplett 6y ago
  Drew, if someone posted a comment saying "there's this Linux feature that's incredibly slow on x86-64", it wouldn't be a refutation to say "it's fast on RISC-V". That would rightfully just produce a response of "that's nice for you, it's still slow on x86-64 and that's what I'm using, so from my perspective the feature is slow in an environment many people use". If you want this to stop, make GNOME's performance better in the ways you envision, because it is the experience most Linux users get. (Quite a lot of work has been going into GNOME Wayland performance lately.) Arguments about Wayland protocol feature politics don't necessarily make the out-of-the-box experience worse; for many people it's a good "Just Works" experience. Stop telling people they need to switch desktop environments to get a better experience; some fraction of people will go "if I have to switch, I'll switch back to Windows/macOS/etc". A vanishingly small fraction of people will go "oh, sure, I should switch to a different window manager and environment that isn't what I'm used to and doesn't necessarily have the integration I'm used to, and switch my apps to match too; this makes me happy", and those people know who they are already.
  - ddevault 6y ago
    "there's this Linux feature that's incredibly slow on x86-64" This isn't the appropriate comparison. What they said is "x86-64 is incredibly slow", and then when you teased them for details, what they meant was "this Linux feature is incredibly slow on x86-64". To which the answer isn't "it's fast on RISC-V", but rather, "that's a problem with Linux, not x86-64". If you have a beef with GNOME, then bring it to GNOME. Don't pin it on a tangentally related technology which bears none of the fault, and which has had hundreds of thousands of hours of work invested in it by volunteers all to make something nice for you to use.
    - JoshTriplett 6y ago
      Is your goal to fix people's terminology or to fix the actual problem? It's not an end user's job to tease apart what specific thing is the root cause. If something changes, and their system feels slower, they're going to reasonably assume the thing that changed is at fault. That's doubly true if there's an easy switch to turn that thing on and off (which there often is, by picking a Wayland or non-Wayland session at login), and they can easily evaluate the difference in isolation. It might be cathartic to spend time yelling at people about who is actually at fault, but fixing the root cause would make there not be a fault to seek blame for. People aren't going to stop running GNOME en-masse. Distributions are not going to abruptly abandon GNOME. If (and I do mean "if") there's some issue with GNOME's Wayland implementation, that's going to be many people's primary exposure to Wayland as a technology. People will continue working on optimizations, to many places in the stack. It doesn't matter where the fault lies or where the fixes need to happen, the net result is people saying things like "I switched to Wayland and things got slower / less smooth / etc", and they're going to continue saying things like that. It'd be nice if people phrased it more that way (slowness associated with switching to Wayland, rather than Wayland being slow), and provided more details about their environment, rather than implying that "Wayland" is a single piece of software which should incur their ire. It'd be even nicer if there were less ire to go around because more things Just Work. It's also entirely possible that some of the people in these various threads have issues with some other piece of software in the stack. > If you have a beef with GNOME, then bring it to GNOME. I'm not the one with a beef with GNOME; you seem to be. If you have a problem with GNOME, take it to GNOME. GNOME works great for me, and I don't care which Wayland protocols it does or doesn't choose to implement. You haven't even specified what precise change you think ought to happen there, just some general complaints about protocol extensions.
- magicalhippo 6y ago
  > GNOME is not a good representative of Wayland. Can you recommend me a good representative of Wayland I could try? I've been running KDE Neon for the past few years, but as you noted elsewhere it seems KDE on Wayland needs more work still.

by verroq 6y ago

ddevault 6y ago

GNOME is not a good representative of Wayland. Wayland is just a protocol - it's up to the compositors to have good performance to distinguish it from Xorg, and GNOME does not do well in this regard. Other compositors, particularly wlroots, enjoy excellent performance. Wayland also opens the door to many performance improvements which are not possible on Xorg, and which take advantage of newer GPU features, especially on embedded systems but moreso every year on desktop and laptop GPUs as well.

verroq 6y ago
Is there a benchmark where it blows X11 out of the water?
- ddevault 6y ago
  I am not aware of any up-to-date benchmarks which make a fair comparison (i.e. not just benchmarking GNOME), but I am intimately familiar with the technology and its performance characteristics.
  - taeric 6y ago
    Gnome is a fair comparison. Since it is the main comparison for many users, it is the most fair comparison. Otherwise, this is starting the benchmark wars with meaningless comparisons at the outset. :(
    - ddevault 6y ago
      It's not a fair comparison. You're benchmarking GNOME, not Wayland, and making generalizations about Wayland based on GNOME benchmarks is a false equivalency. Is GNOME on Wayland worse than GNOME on X11? Perhaps. Is Wayland worse than X11, based on that answer? No.
      - taeric 6y ago
        I get your point. But until those benchmarks at least correlate with behavior users see, they are not worth much.
        ddevault 6y ago
        I don't know what you're trying to say, outside of some vauge attempt to avoid admitting a mistake.
        taeric 6y ago
        I'm saying that we get your point. But you seem to be missing ours. Nobody cares about benchmarks that a) don't exist or b) are not indicative of what folks will experience.
        ddevault 6y ago
        Obviously? The disconnect is that you seem to think that we can draw conclusions from nonexistent benchmarks.
        taeric 6y ago
        You are asking us to literally draw conclusions from hypothetical benchmarks where the opposite results will exist. I am sympathetic to the idea that things needed to start over. I'm annoyed with the lack of honesty and self critical approach. As framed by you, Wayland is above criticism. Which immediately raises my suspicions.
aidenn0 6y ago
Which embedded systems actually run GLES on Linux stably enough to do anything with Wayland? My experience is the choices are: Use a binary blob that only works with a 3 year old vendor kernel, and works most of the time (but you can't fix it when it doesn't work, and if you are compositing most of the time isn't good enough) Use a mainline Linux kernel that is so buggy that fixing the bugs in it is a full time job Use fbdev
- ddevault 6y ago
  Wayland has nothing to do with GLES, and some compositors support pixman-based rendering similar to Xorg on embedded devices.
notankies 6y ago
Regardless as to whether Gnome "does well" in the regard of performance, you must admit that for some of us choosing a competitor like wlroots over one like Gnome introduces a whole new adventure in replacing all the features of Gnome with standalone applications to use with wlroots. Plus a tiling window manager is a totally different workflow. Not everyone has the time for curating a desktop environment with individual utilities, and not everyone likes tiling WMs. i3 gave me an RSI.
- ddevault 6y ago
  It's not a particularly arduous "adventure". We maintain a list[0] of programs which use these protocols. And wlroots != tiling window manager: there are multiple wlroots-based compositors which do not use the tiling paradigm, the most developed of which is probably Wayfire[1]. [0]: https://github.com/swaywm/wlr-protocols/wiki https://github.com/swaywm/wlr-protocols/wiki [1]: https://github.com/WayfireWM/wayfire https://github.com/WayfireWM/wayfire
  - notankies 6y ago
    Apologies; I misunderstood one of your links and thought sway had been renamed to wlroots. To be clear the "adventure" I'm talking about is for replacing desktop environment niceties like the ones provided by gsettingsd and the tight integration provided between devices and the system management tools offered in full desktop blown environments like Gnome and KDE. I used i3 for six or seven years and it was never as nicely integrated as Gnome and I spent a LOT of time yak shaving to get it nice and keep it that way. Eventually I gave up. Gnome is really nice these days. But maybe I missed the point of your original comment.
    - sergeykish 6y ago
      wlroots excellent performance => bottleneck is not Wayland. Gnome will catch up some day.
      - michaelmrose 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
JoshTriplett 6y ago
Drew, if someone posted a comment saying "there's this Linux feature that's incredibly slow on x86-64", it wouldn't be a refutation to say "it's fast on RISC-V". That would rightfully just produce a response of "that's nice for you, it's still slow on x86-64 and that's what I'm using, so from my perspective the feature is slow in an environment many people use". If you want this to stop, make GNOME's performance better in the ways you envision, because it is the experience most Linux users get. (Quite a lot of work has been going into GNOME Wayland performance lately.) Arguments about Wayland protocol feature politics don't necessarily make the out-of-the-box experience worse; for many people it's a good "Just Works" experience. Stop telling people they need to switch desktop environments to get a better experience; some fraction of people will go "if I have to switch, I'll switch back to Windows/macOS/etc". A vanishingly small fraction of people will go "oh, sure, I should switch to a different window manager and environment that isn't what I'm used to and doesn't necessarily have the integration I'm used to, and switch my apps to match too; this makes me happy", and those people know who they are already.
- ddevault 6y ago
  "there's this Linux feature that's incredibly slow on x86-64" This isn't the appropriate comparison. What they said is "x86-64 is incredibly slow", and then when you teased them for details, what they meant was "this Linux feature is incredibly slow on x86-64". To which the answer isn't "it's fast on RISC-V", but rather, "that's a problem with Linux, not x86-64". If you have a beef with GNOME, then bring it to GNOME. Don't pin it on a tangentally related technology which bears none of the fault, and which has had hundreds of thousands of hours of work invested in it by volunteers all to make something nice for you to use.
  - JoshTriplett 6y ago
    Is your goal to fix people's terminology or to fix the actual problem? It's not an end user's job to tease apart what specific thing is the root cause. If something changes, and their system feels slower, they're going to reasonably assume the thing that changed is at fault. That's doubly true if there's an easy switch to turn that thing on and off (which there often is, by picking a Wayland or non-Wayland session at login), and they can easily evaluate the difference in isolation. It might be cathartic to spend time yelling at people about who is actually at fault, but fixing the root cause would make there not be a fault to seek blame for. People aren't going to stop running GNOME en-masse. Distributions are not going to abruptly abandon GNOME. If (and I do mean "if") there's some issue with GNOME's Wayland implementation, that's going to be many people's primary exposure to Wayland as a technology. People will continue working on optimizations, to many places in the stack. It doesn't matter where the fault lies or where the fixes need to happen, the net result is people saying things like "I switched to Wayland and things got slower / less smooth / etc", and they're going to continue saying things like that. It'd be nice if people phrased it more that way (slowness associated with switching to Wayland, rather than Wayland being slow), and provided more details about their environment, rather than implying that "Wayland" is a single piece of software which should incur their ire. It'd be even nicer if there were less ire to go around because more things Just Work. It's also entirely possible that some of the people in these various threads have issues with some other piece of software in the stack. > If you have a beef with GNOME, then bring it to GNOME. I'm not the one with a beef with GNOME; you seem to be. If you have a problem with GNOME, take it to GNOME. GNOME works great for me, and I don't care which Wayland protocols it does or doesn't choose to implement. You haven't even specified what precise change you think ought to happen there, just some general complaints about protocol extensions.
magicalhippo 6y ago
> GNOME is not a good representative of Wayland. Can you recommend me a good representative of Wayland I could try? I've been running KDE Neon for the past few years, but as you noted elsewhere it seems KDE on Wayland needs more work still.