30 ms·

It's a couple of years old, but this post on "Why I'm not going to switch to Wayland yet."[1] summarizes some of the concerns I have about switching to Wayland:

It's a couple of years old, but this post on "Why I'm not going to switch to Wayland yet."[1] summarizes some of the concerns I have about switching to Wayland: "at the moment there are several types of applications that not only don't work in wayland, but would be very difficult, or impossible to work natively in all major wayland compositors. Examples (in order of importance to me): * Programmatic output configuration (xrandr, arandr, etc.) * CLI clipboard access (xsel, xclip) * Third party app launcher/window switcher (rofi, dmenu, albert, docky). * Clipboard managers (parcellite, klipper, Gpaste, clipman, etc.) * Third party screen shot/capture/share (shutter, OBS, ffmpeg, import, peek, scrot, VNC, etc.) * Color picker (gpick, gcolor3, kcolorchooser) * xdotool Until Wayland has all these (and more) and they are as stable and feature-rich as the existing apps on X, I will not willingly switch to Wayland. [1] - https://old.reddit.com/r/wayland/comments/85q78y/why_im_not_going_to_switch_to_wayland_yet/ https://old.reddit.com/r/wayland/comments/85q78y/why_im_not_...

mnd999 6y ago
I always get downvoted for saying this but anyway. Wayland needs the Nvidia problem to be solved. I don't see how it's sustainable to have to build everything for GBM and EGLStreams.
- jordan_curve 6y ago
  Yep. People can complain about Nvidia’s refusal to comply to standards as much as they want, but at the end of the day, there is never going to be widespread adoption of Wayland until Nvidia hardware is fully supported.
- sergeykish 6y ago
  Probably because it is solved? > EGLStreams (NVIDIA): GNOME, KDE, Weston https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/wayland#Requirements https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/wayland#Requirements
  - account42 6y ago
    > I don't see how it's sustainable to have to build everything for GBM and EGLStreams.
    - sergeykish 6y ago
      That's life. I've checked OpenBSD once, no audio support. I've bought Intel Poulsbo based netbook [1], no video acceleration beyond XOrg 1.9 and kernel 2.6. I've patched source for 3.* compatibility [2] and finally bought new hardware. I would dance if GNOME or KDE had Poulsbo support. Soon (if not already [3]) NVIDIA would be second class citizen on Linux. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Controller_Hub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Controller_Hub [2] http://sergeykish.com/linux-poulsbo-emgd http://sergeykish.com/linux-poulsbo-emgd [3] https://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?module=statistics&view=trends https://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?module=statistics&vi...
emersion 6y ago
I can find Wayland equivalents for my compositor for all of these tools: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/i3-Migration-Guide#common-x11-apps-used-on-i3-with-wayland-alternatives https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/i3-Migration-Guide#commo...
- magicalhippo 6y ago
  Ok so I've mainly used Windows, but I got a secondary machine with Linux, which for the last few years has been running KDE Neon which I rather enjoy. This whole "desktop stack" on Linux always makes my head hurt, so these might be really dumb questions: If I install some distro, Arch say, and I wanted to use Sway, and I then want to run Kile, will Kile then run through XWayland? Will it work just as well as Kile on KDE Neon? I understand KWin has some Wayland support but it also seems not quite ready for prime time the times I've tried it. So was curious about alternatives, just for curiosities sake.
  - chungy 6y ago
    Kile most likely runs as a native Wayland application. Though for any legacy apps/games that use X, yeah they'll run in XWayland and should be seamless.
    - CarelessExpert 6y ago
      Right... seamless... https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/1065 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/1065
  - emersion 6y ago
    >If I install some distro, Arch say, and I wanted to use Sway, and I then want to run Kile, will Kile then run through XWayland? Kile seems to use Qt5, so should work without Xwayland. > Will it work just as well as Kile on KDE Neon? It should, yes. I don't use Kile though, so I haven't checked.
  - josefx 6y ago
    > Kile Since Kile is a KDE application it should run using Qts wayland backend. > Will it work just as well as Kile on KDE Neon? Depends, do you need anything more fancy than mouse and keyboard? No? Then great. Power user functionality like copy paste on the other hand? https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/4007 https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/4007 might want to pray before using that.
deleted 6y ago
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CarelessExpert 6y ago
Hell, I'd be happy if there was just fewer bugs. Case in point: Gnome + Wayland + guake. If you configure guake to use anything less than 100% of the width of the screen, then it suddenly appears in the wrong position. But wait, maybe that's a guake bug, right? Wrong. I tried a couple of other options for similar functionality and they demonstrated the same issue. So odds are it's actually a bug in the compositor. And that's ignoring that basic things like global keybinding don't work (edit: ya ya, the Wayland proponents will tell you that's by design, but it's a) user hateful b) totally different than literally any other desktop OS out there today, and c) breaks apps, right now, in ways that will require major code changes to fix) so I have to put a hack in place to allow F12 to open guake up in the first place. Meanwhile, we only just got the "official" solution for screensharing (what Zoom does is an incredible hack: they just take lots of screenshots! No, I'm not kidding, that's actually how it works, which is why the framerate is so bad) and it involves yet more new stuff (pipewire, et al) that I'm sure will be a source of its own raft of bugs. I'd say "maybe in a year or two", but we've been saying that for a long time, now...
- djsumdog 6y ago
  The trouble with your guake bug is it might be Gnome + Wayland specific. With the separation between the server and composer, bugs might need to be fixed in multiple places. Some window managers use wlroots, so maybe some bugs can be fixed there, but others have their own forks and implementations. The hotkey thing is big and it's annoying because it's another thing that might need to be implemented/fixed in each and every composer and environment (and it could be different in every environment). I've seen the X11/Wayland talks and I agree Xorg has tons of old crufty garbage in it, and screen locking in Xorg is not very secure. But the Wayland team seems to have made little effort in addressing even the most basic things like hotkeys, screenshots, etc. I'm not sure if "user hateful" is the right term, but they don't seem to be prioritizing the most basic things people are asking for.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    It's not that they're user-hateful it's just that they're (I think rightfully) being aggressive about scoping Wayland to things related to drawing surfaces and handling input events. If people started treating as one domain specific protocol that display servers use for drawing stuff on the screen and not "everything a desktop app might want to do" protocol there would be less conflict. I'm glad they're leaving all the "desktop" stuff out and letting desktops agree on dbus interfaces. I doubt people writing little CLI utilities want to have to create dummy Wayland surfaces to do interact with the display server which is how wl-clipboard works.
creese 6y ago
I switched to Sway recently. I couldn't believe how snappy it is. Some of your issues are solved: CLI clipboard access: wl-clipboard: https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard App launcher: bemenu: https://github.com/Cloudef/bemenu https://github.com/Cloudef/bemenu
- djsumdog 6y ago
  > Wayland is only supported by compositors that implement the wlr-layer-shell protocol. Typically wlroots-based compositors. I'm really concerned about Wayland fragmentation. Will some tools work on only wlroot implementations and not others? X11 apps generally work across window managers, although the weird ones (tiling window managers like i3) may have some interesting things you have to work around. If wlroots became the standard for all window managers on Wayland and everyone used it, I guess it would be fine. But if not, we're going to see a lot of apps that have to be adapted for each and every composer.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    I don't know why people are so afraid of fragmentation in this respect. There are lots of "de specific" protocols that are well supported everywhere like org.freedesktop.Notifications. If the world can agree on Wayland then desktops can agree on some dbus interfaces for doing stuff like screenshots, screencasts, and automation. Wayland is a shiny new thing and lots of people are writing compositors since it's suddenly possible for people to write them in a way that you simply couldn't with X11. The ecosystem will eventually mature but I think it would be a mistake to recreate the Xorg monoculture with wlroots. People seem to see the value of multiple browser implementations agreeing on standard but not display servers.
    - simias 6y ago
      I'm personally concerned because I like to use "niche" tiling WMs (I used Ratpoison then StumpWM for over a decade, then I switched to a rather heavily customized DWM a couple of years ago). Even with a relatively monolithic and "opinionated" protocol such as X11 it's not uncommon to encounter applications that don't play very nicely with alternative paradigms (because they expect a tray to be available, or to be able to place floating windows anywhere they want for instance). Still, overall with a few hacks here and there it works mostly very well. Basically I know that we're 2nd class citizens within the unix desktop world but at least the X11 model gives us enough of preemption to get things working mostly correctly. From what I see of Wayland I'm very concerned in the long run. Not being able to just beat a window into submission X-style seems like it would create a world of troubles. And because tiling environment are fairly niche I don't expect the ecosystem to organically evolve solutions to all of these problems. And if you think "well just stop using tiling WMs and use whatever else is using you weirdo" please do note that these issues are also often the same that are encountered by people with disabilities who need to rig their UIs in certain ways to make them usable. Also you'll have to pry my tiling WM from my cold dead hands, you heathen.
boogies 6y ago
> Until Wayland has all these (and more) and they are as stable and feature-rich as the existing apps on X, I will not willingly switch to Wayland. For me it’s some of those, dwm, sxhkd, keynav, xcape, the Compose key, and simple highlight + middle click/Shift+Insert copypasta. I’m a bit confused about the extent to which the Wayland devs have changed their minds about the last one.
- tincholio 6y ago
  xcape and the compose key are really killer tools. Not having them would really screw with productivity
  - codethief 6y ago
    FYI There are lots of alternatives to xcape (and even better ones because, in my experience, xcape is not compatible with VirtualBox or hot-plugging one's keyboard), e.g.: https://gitlab.com/interception/linux/plugins/dual-function-keys https://gitlab.com/interception/linux/plugins/dual-function-... (currently using this – very powerful) https://gitlab.com/at-home-modifier/at-home-modifier-evdev https://gitlab.com/at-home-modifier/at-home-modifier-evdev (used this for years – works extremely well) Two more projects I've found that should work on Wayland: https://github.com/myfreeweb/evscript https://github.com/myfreeweb/evscript https://github.com/wbolster/evcape https://github.com/wbolster/evcape
    - tincholio 6y ago
      Thanks for the links!
- simias 6y ago
  Man reading this thread confirmed that I probably shouldn't even attempt to use Wayland in the near future, I basically use every single of the features you've listed. So far I basically kept using X11 because it mostly just works for me, but I didn't expect that Wayland was still so far behind.
- akvadrako 6y ago
heinrichhartman 6y ago
I would not consider this examples "Applications", but more configuration tools. I would also not expect to be able to port the OSX Clipboard manager to Windows or the "Displays" utility. From a new window server I would expect to have some ways to configure output, switch applications, manage clip-board but I would not expect to have my existing tools continuing to work. If you are re-architecting a system from the ground-up there is always some fallout expected.
- account42 6y ago
  > I would also not expect to be able to port the OSX Clipboard manager to Windows or the "Displays" utility. I would also not expect people to suggest deprecation OS X in favor of Windows and then shit on people what want to keep using their OS X Clipboard manager. This is the real problem with all this forcing to move people to Wayland / Pulse / SystemD crap: They are new platforms instead of compatible improvements to the existing platform, but somehow you still expect everyone to just jump ship.
mkhalil 6y ago
Wow. I was suprised to read that OBS doesn't work with Wayland. I found some articles [0] on how it runs well using XWayland [1] - which I guess let's you run X-Clients under Wayland - but it seems that the amount of work to get this to work is not trivial, considering the official PR for the work, is on part 3 and that has been open since March![2]. Oh, how did it get so bad? --------------- [0]:https://feaneron.com/2019/11/21/screencasting-with-obs-studio-on-wayland/ https://feaneron.com/2019/11/21/screencasting-with-obs-studi... [1]:https://wayland.freedesktop.org/xserver.html#heading_toc_j_3 https://wayland.freedesktop.org/xserver.html#heading_toc_j_3 [2]:https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/2484#issuecomment-604775154 https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/2484#issuecomm...
markstos 6y ago
I recently switched to Sway on Wayland. Sway has good dynamic output configuration. `wl-clipboard` and `wl-paste` are there for CLI clipboard access. There's a rofi fork that works on Wayland, and can also emulate `dmenu`. `clipman` is Wayland compatible. I use `grimshot` with `rofi` integration for screenshots. I have a HTML Color Picker script for sway that's launched from `rofi` that I should share. `ydotool` and `wtype` emulate the parts of `xdotool` that I care about. Also, there's no longer tearing when I resize windows!
pkulak 6y ago
You kinda just need to use new stuff when it's all so heavily dependent on an X server. * swaymsg (no idea what Gnome or KDE do here) * wl-clipboad * wofi, or a Wayland fork of rofi (https://github.com/lbonn/rofi) * I don't use a clipboard manager, so I'm gonna skip this one. :D * slurp, grim, wf-recorder, mpv (OBS and ffmpeg work fine, not sure about the others) I think I was lucky to get back into Linux this year because I didn't have to unlearn anything to use Wayland. You mention a dozen tools I've never heard of! If I had some X flow I'd been using for years with 10s of tools that no longer work on the other side, that would be overwhelming.
- mikenew 6y ago
  clipman, for a clipboard manager. Also here's a oneliner for color picking: grim -g "$(slurp -p)" - -t png -o | convert png:- -format '%[pixel:s]\n' info:- | awk -F '[(,)]' '{printf("#%02x%02x%02x\n",$2,$3,$4)}'
  - falsaberN1 6y ago
    May I recommend CopyQ as well? I moved to it when Plasma changed Klipper some time ago and I am quite glad I did. Can even install it on Windows in a portable fashion. I can't shake the feeling that I can do so much with it yet I'm barely scratching the surface as user, it's quite powerful.
    - mkhnews 6y ago
      +1 for CopyQ from me, it is awesome.
- account42 6y ago
  Yeah no, requiring users to switch applications makes your display server DOA.
DCKing 6y ago
The problem with Wayland is really that people understand it to be a drop-in replacement of X11, or something close to it. But it's not a replacement of X11. You don't "switch to Wayland", despite what that GDM button seems to indicate. Wayland is just a protocol, whereas X11 is a protocol and entire system around it. So Wayland is not a replacement of X11. Gnome on Wayland should be a replacement for Gnome on X11. KDE on Wayland should be replacement for KDE on X11. Sway on Wayland should be a replacement for i3 and X11. But as you can imagine in this equation, KDE, Gnome and Sway are permitted and required to take on more responsibilities. You might take issue with the fact that a lot more of the display stack gets tied up in specific desktop environments. It's KDE and Gnome and Sway that are not providing you these command line tools/screen recording/clipboard access. I don't mean to say this as nitpicking or that """Wayland""" (whatever that means) is dropping the ball, but this is really the responsibility of the desktop environment (or WM) in Wayland's design. Wayland is just a protocol. What you're observing as shortcomings in Wayland is really a lock of pace and direction of development for (e.g. Freedesktop) standards that standardize clipboard access/screen recording use cases, and the adoption of those standards. The Linux community seems to have been hit by 1) not realizing Wayland does not replace X11 and 2) realizing that, not being to coordinate standardization well of the pieces of the X11 stack that should be replaced as well. If you need to replace X11, you need a lot more than just Wayland. But that seems to keep on catching people by surprise. I think it'd be helpful for the future of the Linux desktop if more people recognized that.
- ubercow13 6y ago
  Deprecating Xorg and providing no replacement standard/protocol for almost everything it does and enables is kind of the whole problem, isn't it?
- andyjpb 6y ago
  No matter how horrible X may be, it has a lot of value for end users. Almost all of this value is in the ecosystem around X. You can't capture an ecosystem unless you provide that value, plus the activation energy needed to persuade people to change. systemd (as an example of a large, recent, change to the "whole system") touched end-users far less than X so the pain was felt mainly by distributors and sysadmins. Time and again, software that's "better" fails in the market because it doesn't provide the things that users need, want or use. Backwards compatibility is usually key when trying to capture a large, long established user base. ...and that means backwards compatibility even (or especially!) with all the "bad" or "wrong" stuff. This is one of the things that makes software "products" much harder than software "engineering" (which in turn is "harder" than computer science). Science is how it works. Engineering is getting it to work and productisation is getting people to adopt it. Wayland has to solve problems that end-users actually care about rather than just being better in technical ways.
deleted 6y ago
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shmerl 6y ago
There are few replacements: * https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard * https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool OBS / ffmpeg and etc. should get integrated with Pipewire I think for screen capture and the like? But I'm not sure how far that progressed.
vidarh 6y ago
For me the only reason is that my window manager would need to change (bspwm) and I have no compelling reason to switch unless it's 100% painless. This is the biggest problem. I accept Wayland brings benefits for some people, but I couldn't care less. Since I don't care about the benefits it brings, it needs to be entirely painless. Until the switch is more painless than holding on to Xorg, there will be a good chunk of users with no incentive to make the move. EDIT: I'd also say that the fact that so many of the tools need to change, rather than e.g. get support added to them to support Wayland compositors is a huge indictment of the whole thing. It seems like no thought was put into planning for transition.
- CountSessine 6y ago
  This is the biggest problem. I accept Wayland brings benefits for some people, but I couldn't care less. Since I don't care about the benefits it brings, it needs to be entirely painless. Until the switch is more painless than holding on to Xorg, there will be a good chunk of users with no incentive to make the move. That depends a lot on how difficult it is to keep Xorg working with modern distros. You might get forced into Wayland when your favourite distro and all acceptable alternatives don’t want to put the work into integrating and patching an aging Xorg. Whether it’s with a carrot or a stick, you’re going to Wayland sooner or later.
  - CountSessine 6y ago
    The good news is that by the time that happens, hopefully the desktop environments will have picked up the slack and the feature-gap will be narrower.
  - account42 6y ago
    If you need to make the alternatives worse in order for people to switch then Wayland has failed.
    - majewsky 6y ago
      No, it means it has succeeded in attracting the X developers over, so the old stack starts bitrotting. Remember, this was not some guys just randomly showing up and pushing their shiny new thing on people. Wayland was started by one of the developers who had already worked on the Xorg stack for several years.
phkahler 6y ago
>> Until Wayland has all these (and more) and they are as stable and feature-rich as the existing apps on X, I will not willingly switch to Wayland. Every time this topic comes up, a bunch of people bring up the things X has that Wayland doesnt yet have, or have in the form they think it should. I'm not sure if it's just me but these comments come across as some combination of defiant, demanding, or I dont know what. It's like they don't understand that the world is moving on and doesnt really give a $h!t about them and their love of X. I mean here is a post from "the guy" whose been keeping X going for a long time saying "this shit is done" and people keep complaining about that as if they have some say in it without actually contributing to the code. It reads like entitlement - some kind of expectation that other people exist just to make things the way they want them to be.
- clusterfish 6y ago
  The comment you're responding to lists very concrete issues. Try accepting constructive criticism instead of accusing people of entitlement just because they dare to disagree with you. Entitled developers who think their work is above criticism just because it's open source are just as annoying as entitled users who think they are owed something.
  - izacus 6y ago
    They also seem to "dare" to disagree with major Linux distribution direction so perhaps it's not the responders opinion that's in the minority? I mean, this really sounds very similar to systemd and pulse audio type gnashing of teeth where the new solutions added plenty of widely required features while compromising on niche use cases which had other workarounds.
    - The_rationalist 6y ago
      So non laggy screensharing is niche use case? Such statement does not make any sense to someone that live in the reality, especially since covid. Wayland bring the risk of having critical bugs on compositor Y and critical missfeatures/missoptimizations. Staying on X does not have any major user facing issue. Therefore choosing to use Wayland right now is an irrational action which pros does not offset the cons. Maybe that it'll make sense in the next 5 years, then I'd reconsider
app4soft 6y ago
> Examples (in order of importance to me): * Image editor, with own modern looking GUI-toolkit built on top of X11 (AzPainter)[0] > Until Wayland has all these (and more) and they are as stable and feature-rich as the existing apps on X, I will not willingly switch to Wayland. Same thing actually decided by AzPainter developer: they already tried to add Wayland support to its GUI-toolkit (additionally to already supported X11), but postponed it due to Wayland still is not fully usable.[1,2] [0] https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter [1] https://aznote.jakou.com/prog/wayland/index.html https://aznote.jakou.com/prog/wayland/index.html [2] http://azsky2.html.xdomain.jp/memo/index.html http://azsky2.html.xdomain.jp/memo/index.html
nsajko 6y ago
I agree those features are essential for an Xorg replacement, but you're missing the fact that the Wayland designers excluded them intentionally, so Wayland is intrinsically hostile to the features and the power-users that use them. See my comment at the top level of this thread.
xvilka 6y ago
For me it's XMonad - there was an attempt to write Wayland alternative Waymonad[1][2] but it is now dead. [1] https://github.com/waymonad/waymonad https://github.com/waymonad/waymonad [2] https://github.com/xmonad/xmonad/issues/193 https://github.com/xmonad/xmonad/issues/193
mFixman 6y ago
This is a good time to ask a question I wondered for a long time: why is does the clipboard depend on the window manager at all? Wouldn't it be easier to make it a separate service instead of having X or Wayland deal with it?
- account42 6y ago
  There is no technical reason why it needs to be in the window system (well in X the clipboard goes away if you if the client that set it exits, but that is unwanted anyway) but from a user perspective it is very close to keyboard input so it makes sense to have it be handled by the same system.

mnd999 6y ago

I always get downvoted for saying this but anyway. Wayland needs the Nvidia problem to be solved. I don't see how it's sustainable to have to build everything for GBM and EGLStreams.

jordan_curve 6y ago
Yep. People can complain about Nvidia’s refusal to comply to standards as much as they want, but at the end of the day, there is never going to be widespread adoption of Wayland until Nvidia hardware is fully supported.
sergeykish 6y ago
Probably because it is solved? > EGLStreams (NVIDIA): GNOME, KDE, Weston https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/wayland#Requirements https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/wayland#Requirements
- account42 6y ago
  > I don't see how it's sustainable to have to build everything for GBM and EGLStreams.
  - sergeykish 6y ago
    That's life. I've checked OpenBSD once, no audio support. I've bought Intel Poulsbo based netbook [1], no video acceleration beyond XOrg 1.9 and kernel 2.6. I've patched source for 3.* compatibility [2] and finally bought new hardware. I would dance if GNOME or KDE had Poulsbo support. Soon (if not already [3]) NVIDIA would be second class citizen on Linux. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Controller_Hub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Controller_Hub [2] http://sergeykish.com/linux-poulsbo-emgd http://sergeykish.com/linux-poulsbo-emgd [3] https://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?module=statistics&view=trends https://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?module=statistics&vi...

emersion 6y ago

I can find Wayland equivalents for my compositor for all of these tools: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/i3-Migration-Guide#common-x11-apps-used-on-i3-with-wayland-alternatives https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/i3-Migration-Guide#commo...

magicalhippo 6y ago
Ok so I've mainly used Windows, but I got a secondary machine with Linux, which for the last few years has been running KDE Neon which I rather enjoy. This whole "desktop stack" on Linux always makes my head hurt, so these might be really dumb questions: If I install some distro, Arch say, and I wanted to use Sway, and I then want to run Kile, will Kile then run through XWayland? Will it work just as well as Kile on KDE Neon? I understand KWin has some Wayland support but it also seems not quite ready for prime time the times I've tried it. So was curious about alternatives, just for curiosities sake.
- chungy 6y ago
  Kile most likely runs as a native Wayland application. Though for any legacy apps/games that use X, yeah they'll run in XWayland and should be seamless.
  - CarelessExpert 6y ago
    Right... seamless... https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/1065 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/1065
- emersion 6y ago
  >If I install some distro, Arch say, and I wanted to use Sway, and I then want to run Kile, will Kile then run through XWayland? Kile seems to use Qt5, so should work without Xwayland. > Will it work just as well as Kile on KDE Neon? It should, yes. I don't use Kile though, so I haven't checked.
- josefx 6y ago
  > Kile Since Kile is a KDE application it should run using Qts wayland backend. > Will it work just as well as Kile on KDE Neon? Depends, do you need anything more fancy than mouse and keyboard? No? Then great. Power user functionality like copy paste on the other hand? https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/4007 https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/4007 might want to pray before using that.

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CarelessExpert 6y ago

Hell, I'd be happy if there was just fewer bugs. Case in point: Gnome + Wayland + guake. If you configure guake to use anything less than 100% of the width of the screen, then it suddenly appears in the wrong position. But wait, maybe that's a guake bug, right? Wrong. I tried a couple of other options for similar functionality and they demonstrated the same issue. So odds are it's actually a bug in the compositor. And that's ignoring that basic things like global keybinding don't work (edit: ya ya, the Wayland proponents will tell you that's by design, but it's a) user hateful b) totally different than literally any other desktop OS out there today, and c) breaks apps, right now, in ways that will require major code changes to fix) so I have to put a hack in place to allow F12 to open guake up in the first place. Meanwhile, we only just got the "official" solution for screensharing (what Zoom does is an incredible hack: they just take lots of screenshots! No, I'm not kidding, that's actually how it works, which is why the framerate is so bad) and it involves yet more new stuff (pipewire, et al) that I'm sure will be a source of its own raft of bugs. I'd say "maybe in a year or two", but we've been saying that for a long time, now...

djsumdog 6y ago
The trouble with your guake bug is it might be Gnome + Wayland specific. With the separation between the server and composer, bugs might need to be fixed in multiple places. Some window managers use wlroots, so maybe some bugs can be fixed there, but others have their own forks and implementations. The hotkey thing is big and it's annoying because it's another thing that might need to be implemented/fixed in each and every composer and environment (and it could be different in every environment). I've seen the X11/Wayland talks and I agree Xorg has tons of old crufty garbage in it, and screen locking in Xorg is not very secure. But the Wayland team seems to have made little effort in addressing even the most basic things like hotkeys, screenshots, etc. I'm not sure if "user hateful" is the right term, but they don't seem to be prioritizing the most basic things people are asking for.
- Spivak 6y ago
  It's not that they're user-hateful it's just that they're (I think rightfully) being aggressive about scoping Wayland to things related to drawing surfaces and handling input events. If people started treating as one domain specific protocol that display servers use for drawing stuff on the screen and not "everything a desktop app might want to do" protocol there would be less conflict. I'm glad they're leaving all the "desktop" stuff out and letting desktops agree on dbus interfaces. I doubt people writing little CLI utilities want to have to create dummy Wayland surfaces to do interact with the display server which is how wl-clipboard works.

creese 6y ago

I switched to Sway recently. I couldn't believe how snappy it is. Some of your issues are solved: CLI clipboard access: wl-clipboard: https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard App launcher: bemenu: https://github.com/Cloudef/bemenu https://github.com/Cloudef/bemenu

djsumdog 6y ago
> Wayland is only supported by compositors that implement the wlr-layer-shell protocol. Typically wlroots-based compositors. I'm really concerned about Wayland fragmentation. Will some tools work on only wlroot implementations and not others? X11 apps generally work across window managers, although the weird ones (tiling window managers like i3) may have some interesting things you have to work around. If wlroots became the standard for all window managers on Wayland and everyone used it, I guess it would be fine. But if not, we're going to see a lot of apps that have to be adapted for each and every composer.
- Spivak 6y ago
  I don't know why people are so afraid of fragmentation in this respect. There are lots of "de specific" protocols that are well supported everywhere like org.freedesktop.Notifications. If the world can agree on Wayland then desktops can agree on some dbus interfaces for doing stuff like screenshots, screencasts, and automation. Wayland is a shiny new thing and lots of people are writing compositors since it's suddenly possible for people to write them in a way that you simply couldn't with X11. The ecosystem will eventually mature but I think it would be a mistake to recreate the Xorg monoculture with wlroots. People seem to see the value of multiple browser implementations agreeing on standard but not display servers.
  - simias 6y ago
    I'm personally concerned because I like to use "niche" tiling WMs (I used Ratpoison then StumpWM for over a decade, then I switched to a rather heavily customized DWM a couple of years ago). Even with a relatively monolithic and "opinionated" protocol such as X11 it's not uncommon to encounter applications that don't play very nicely with alternative paradigms (because they expect a tray to be available, or to be able to place floating windows anywhere they want for instance). Still, overall with a few hacks here and there it works mostly very well. Basically I know that we're 2nd class citizens within the unix desktop world but at least the X11 model gives us enough of preemption to get things working mostly correctly. From what I see of Wayland I'm very concerned in the long run. Not being able to just beat a window into submission X-style seems like it would create a world of troubles. And because tiling environment are fairly niche I don't expect the ecosystem to organically evolve solutions to all of these problems. And if you think "well just stop using tiling WMs and use whatever else is using you weirdo" please do note that these issues are also often the same that are encountered by people with disabilities who need to rig their UIs in certain ways to make them usable. Also you'll have to pry my tiling WM from my cold dead hands, you heathen.

boogies 6y ago

> Until Wayland has all these (and more) and they are as stable and feature-rich as the existing apps on X, I will not willingly switch to Wayland. For me it’s some of those, dwm, sxhkd, keynav, xcape, the Compose key, and simple highlight + middle click/Shift+Insert copypasta. I’m a bit confused about the extent to which the Wayland devs have changed their minds about the last one.

tincholio 6y ago
xcape and the compose key are really killer tools. Not having them would really screw with productivity
- codethief 6y ago
  FYI There are lots of alternatives to xcape (and even better ones because, in my experience, xcape is not compatible with VirtualBox or hot-plugging one's keyboard), e.g.: https://gitlab.com/interception/linux/plugins/dual-function-keys https://gitlab.com/interception/linux/plugins/dual-function-... (currently using this – very powerful) https://gitlab.com/at-home-modifier/at-home-modifier-evdev https://gitlab.com/at-home-modifier/at-home-modifier-evdev (used this for years – works extremely well) Two more projects I've found that should work on Wayland: https://github.com/myfreeweb/evscript https://github.com/myfreeweb/evscript https://github.com/wbolster/evcape https://github.com/wbolster/evcape
  - tincholio 6y ago
    Thanks for the links!
simias 6y ago
Man reading this thread confirmed that I probably shouldn't even attempt to use Wayland in the near future, I basically use every single of the features you've listed. So far I basically kept using X11 because it mostly just works for me, but I didn't expect that Wayland was still so far behind.
akvadrako 6y ago

heinrichhartman 6y ago

I would not consider this examples "Applications", but more configuration tools. I would also not expect to be able to port the OSX Clipboard manager to Windows or the "Displays" utility. From a new window server I would expect to have some ways to configure output, switch applications, manage clip-board but I would not expect to have my existing tools continuing to work. If you are re-architecting a system from the ground-up there is always some fallout expected.

account42 6y ago
> I would also not expect to be able to port the OSX Clipboard manager to Windows or the "Displays" utility. I would also not expect people to suggest deprecation OS X in favor of Windows and then shit on people what want to keep using their OS X Clipboard manager. This is the real problem with all this forcing to move people to Wayland / Pulse / SystemD crap: They are new platforms instead of compatible improvements to the existing platform, but somehow you still expect everyone to just jump ship.

mkhalil 6y ago

Wow. I was suprised to read that OBS doesn't work with Wayland. I found some articles [0] on how it runs well using XWayland [1] - which I guess let's you run X-Clients under Wayland - but it seems that the amount of work to get this to work is not trivial, considering the official PR for the work, is on part 3 and that has been open since March![2]. Oh, how did it get so bad? --------------- [0]:https://feaneron.com/2019/11/21/screencasting-with-obs-studio-on-wayland/ https://feaneron.com/2019/11/21/screencasting-with-obs-studi... [1]:https://wayland.freedesktop.org/xserver.html#heading_toc_j_3 https://wayland.freedesktop.org/xserver.html#heading_toc_j_3 [2]:https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/2484#issuecomment-604775154 https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/2484#issuecomm...

markstos 6y ago

I recently switched to Sway on Wayland. Sway has good dynamic output configuration. `wl-clipboard` and `wl-paste` are there for CLI clipboard access. There's a rofi fork that works on Wayland, and can also emulate `dmenu`. `clipman` is Wayland compatible. I use `grimshot` with `rofi` integration for screenshots. I have a HTML Color Picker script for sway that's launched from `rofi` that I should share. `ydotool` and `wtype` emulate the parts of `xdotool` that I care about. Also, there's no longer tearing when I resize windows!

pkulak 6y ago

You kinda just need to use new stuff when it's all so heavily dependent on an X server. * swaymsg (no idea what Gnome or KDE do here) * wl-clipboad * wofi, or a Wayland fork of rofi (https://github.com/lbonn/rofi) * I don't use a clipboard manager, so I'm gonna skip this one. :D * slurp, grim, wf-recorder, mpv (OBS and ffmpeg work fine, not sure about the others) I think I was lucky to get back into Linux this year because I didn't have to unlearn anything to use Wayland. You mention a dozen tools I've never heard of! If I had some X flow I'd been using for years with 10s of tools that no longer work on the other side, that would be overwhelming.

mikenew 6y ago
clipman, for a clipboard manager. Also here's a oneliner for color picking: grim -g "$(slurp -p)" - -t png -o | convert png:- -format '%[pixel:s]\n' info:- | awk -F '[(,)]' '{printf("#%02x%02x%02x\n",$2,$3,$4)}'
- falsaberN1 6y ago
  May I recommend CopyQ as well? I moved to it when Plasma changed Klipper some time ago and I am quite glad I did. Can even install it on Windows in a portable fashion. I can't shake the feeling that I can do so much with it yet I'm barely scratching the surface as user, it's quite powerful.
  - mkhnews 6y ago
    +1 for CopyQ from me, it is awesome.
account42 6y ago
Yeah no, requiring users to switch applications makes your display server DOA.

DCKing 6y ago

The problem with Wayland is really that people understand it to be a drop-in replacement of X11, or something close to it. But it's not a replacement of X11. You don't "switch to Wayland", despite what that GDM button seems to indicate. Wayland is just a protocol, whereas X11 is a protocol and entire system around it. So Wayland is not a replacement of X11. Gnome on Wayland should be a replacement for Gnome on X11. KDE on Wayland should be replacement for KDE on X11. Sway on Wayland should be a replacement for i3 and X11. But as you can imagine in this equation, KDE, Gnome and Sway are permitted and required to take on more responsibilities. You might take issue with the fact that a lot more of the display stack gets tied up in specific desktop environments. It's KDE and Gnome and Sway that are not providing you these command line tools/screen recording/clipboard access. I don't mean to say this as nitpicking or that """Wayland""" (whatever that means) is dropping the ball, but this is really the responsibility of the desktop environment (or WM) in Wayland's design. Wayland is just a protocol. What you're observing as shortcomings in Wayland is really a lock of pace and direction of development for (e.g. Freedesktop) standards that standardize clipboard access/screen recording use cases, and the adoption of those standards. The Linux community seems to have been hit by 1) not realizing Wayland does not replace X11 and 2) realizing that, not being to coordinate standardization well of the pieces of the X11 stack that should be replaced as well. If you need to replace X11, you need a lot more than just Wayland. But that seems to keep on catching people by surprise. I think it'd be helpful for the future of the Linux desktop if more people recognized that.

ubercow13 6y ago
Deprecating Xorg and providing no replacement standard/protocol for almost everything it does and enables is kind of the whole problem, isn't it?
andyjpb 6y ago
No matter how horrible X may be, it has a lot of value for end users. Almost all of this value is in the ecosystem around X. You can't capture an ecosystem unless you provide that value, plus the activation energy needed to persuade people to change. systemd (as an example of a large, recent, change to the "whole system") touched end-users far less than X so the pain was felt mainly by distributors and sysadmins. Time and again, software that's "better" fails in the market because it doesn't provide the things that users need, want or use. Backwards compatibility is usually key when trying to capture a large, long established user base. ...and that means backwards compatibility even (or especially!) with all the "bad" or "wrong" stuff. This is one of the things that makes software "products" much harder than software "engineering" (which in turn is "harder" than computer science). Science is how it works. Engineering is getting it to work and productisation is getting people to adopt it. Wayland has to solve problems that end-users actually care about rather than just being better in technical ways.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

shmerl 6y ago

There are few replacements: * https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard * https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool OBS / ffmpeg and etc. should get integrated with Pipewire I think for screen capture and the like? But I'm not sure how far that progressed.

vidarh 6y ago

For me the only reason is that my window manager would need to change (bspwm) and I have no compelling reason to switch unless it's 100% painless. This is the biggest problem. I accept Wayland brings benefits for some people, but I couldn't care less. Since I don't care about the benefits it brings, it needs to be entirely painless. Until the switch is more painless than holding on to Xorg, there will be a good chunk of users with no incentive to make the move. EDIT: I'd also say that the fact that so many of the tools need to change, rather than e.g. get support added to them to support Wayland compositors is a huge indictment of the whole thing. It seems like no thought was put into planning for transition.

CountSessine 6y ago
This is the biggest problem. I accept Wayland brings benefits for some people, but I couldn't care less. Since I don't care about the benefits it brings, it needs to be entirely painless. Until the switch is more painless than holding on to Xorg, there will be a good chunk of users with no incentive to make the move. That depends a lot on how difficult it is to keep Xorg working with modern distros. You might get forced into Wayland when your favourite distro and all acceptable alternatives don’t want to put the work into integrating and patching an aging Xorg. Whether it’s with a carrot or a stick, you’re going to Wayland sooner or later.
- CountSessine 6y ago
  The good news is that by the time that happens, hopefully the desktop environments will have picked up the slack and the feature-gap will be narrower.
- account42 6y ago
  If you need to make the alternatives worse in order for people to switch then Wayland has failed.
  - majewsky 6y ago
    No, it means it has succeeded in attracting the X developers over, so the old stack starts bitrotting. Remember, this was not some guys just randomly showing up and pushing their shiny new thing on people. Wayland was started by one of the developers who had already worked on the Xorg stack for several years.

phkahler 6y ago

>> Until Wayland has all these (and more) and they are as stable and feature-rich as the existing apps on X, I will not willingly switch to Wayland. Every time this topic comes up, a bunch of people bring up the things X has that Wayland doesnt yet have, or have in the form they think it should. I'm not sure if it's just me but these comments come across as some combination of defiant, demanding, or I dont know what. It's like they don't understand that the world is moving on and doesnt really give a $h!t about them and their love of X. I mean here is a post from "the guy" whose been keeping X going for a long time saying "this shit is done" and people keep complaining about that as if they have some say in it without actually contributing to the code. It reads like entitlement - some kind of expectation that other people exist just to make things the way they want them to be.

clusterfish 6y ago
The comment you're responding to lists very concrete issues. Try accepting constructive criticism instead of accusing people of entitlement just because they dare to disagree with you. Entitled developers who think their work is above criticism just because it's open source are just as annoying as entitled users who think they are owed something.
- izacus 6y ago
  They also seem to "dare" to disagree with major Linux distribution direction so perhaps it's not the responders opinion that's in the minority? I mean, this really sounds very similar to systemd and pulse audio type gnashing of teeth where the new solutions added plenty of widely required features while compromising on niche use cases which had other workarounds.
  - The_rationalist 6y ago
    So non laggy screensharing is niche use case? Such statement does not make any sense to someone that live in the reality, especially since covid. Wayland bring the risk of having critical bugs on compositor Y and critical missfeatures/missoptimizations. Staying on X does not have any major user facing issue. Therefore choosing to use Wayland right now is an irrational action which pros does not offset the cons. Maybe that it'll make sense in the next 5 years, then I'd reconsider

app4soft 6y ago

> Examples (in order of importance to me): * Image editor, with own modern looking GUI-toolkit built on top of X11 (AzPainter)[0] > Until Wayland has all these (and more) and they are as stable and feature-rich as the existing apps on X, I will not willingly switch to Wayland. Same thing actually decided by AzPainter developer: they already tried to add Wayland support to its GUI-toolkit (additionally to already supported X11), but postponed it due to Wayland still is not fully usable.[1,2] [0] https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter https://github.com/Symbian9/azpainter [1] https://aznote.jakou.com/prog/wayland/index.html https://aznote.jakou.com/prog/wayland/index.html [2] http://azsky2.html.xdomain.jp/memo/index.html http://azsky2.html.xdomain.jp/memo/index.html

nsajko 6y ago

I agree those features are essential for an Xorg replacement, but you're missing the fact that the Wayland designers excluded them intentionally, so Wayland is intrinsically hostile to the features and the power-users that use them. See my comment at the top level of this thread.

xvilka 6y ago

For me it's XMonad - there was an attempt to write Wayland alternative Waymonad[1][2] but it is now dead. [1] https://github.com/waymonad/waymonad https://github.com/waymonad/waymonad [2] https://github.com/xmonad/xmonad/issues/193 https://github.com/xmonad/xmonad/issues/193

mFixman 6y ago

This is a good time to ask a question I wondered for a long time: why is does the clipboard depend on the window manager at all? Wouldn't it be easier to make it a separate service instead of having X or Wayland deal with it?

account42 6y ago
There is no technical reason why it needs to be in the window system (well in X the clipboard goes away if you if the client that set it exits, but that is unwanted anyway) but from a user perspective it is very close to keyboard input so it makes sense to have it be handled by the same system.