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It's really rich when these types get riled up about software having very obvious flaws. I respect the author and really want to like Wayland, but there's big t

It's really rich when these types get riled up about software having very obvious flaws. I respect the author and really want to like Wayland, but there's big things missing. I recently installed Fedora after my Windows install bombed out after an update. I went to play World of Warcraft with my buddies and found that the mouse handling in Wayland was pretty severely broken, at least for WoW. You move by clicking both of your mouse buttons, which starts moving you forward, and then you turn your mouse to steer. Under X11, your mouse is in the same place after you release your buttons (this is the intended behavior). Under Wayland, only god knows where it's going to pop up; it seems to be following your mouse movement while you turn, but not exactly. I said "whatever, it's a good thing I don't play too much WoW" and made peace with what it was. Then I went to share my screen. I couldn't. Total showstopper -- I use this functionality every single day, and I can't part with it. Wayland is officially off the table. I've been using X11 since. Everything has worked perfectly. I'm not going to suffer through some software that I actually need to use under WINE having fucked up mouse handling, or hold out for multiple years before I can share my screen again. I can't imagine even attempting taking Wayland seriously if I had Nvidia hardware. If somebody's take is that I should go fuck myself for expecting things to work while they tell me that my other options are wrong and bad because it works for "most people" (which is pretty stupid -- even Average Joe has a lot of showstoppers, it's why the Year of the Linux Desktop hasn't happened), they can have fun dumping time into software that's inferior in many regards. EDIT: in response to Drew's flagged and dead comment (which I feel is quite unreasonable, he brings up a point about the compositor having some responsibility here too) -- I am not using Wayland under GNOME -- I switched to KDE and spent a fair amount of time digging through DE, WINE, and software settings trying to get these things working. I'm willing to slog through a lot of shit to get the technically correct solution, but some bridges are too far. I'm not changing my entire DE, GPU, software choices, etc. for the sake of using Wayland, even though it's superior to X11, and I think that's what a lot of proponents of it are missing.

ddevault 6y ago
Author of the OP here. What you're describing is a bad experience with GNOME, not with Wayland. Each of your examples works great on most other Wayland compositors. The ignorance which leads you to blame it on Wayland is a major part of the same frustrations I'm venting in this rant. No one is saying you can go fuck yourself for wanting these use-cases. We're saying you can go fuck yourself because we made these use-cases work for you, and you still blame it on Wayland when GNOME is the one not playing ball.
arepublicadoceu 6y ago
You can't play World of Warcraft well under wine and you call this one of your two big things? The second being, screen sharing broken for you. Well, for me it works really well, maybe you didn't google hard enough? Now I suggest you to google extremely hard on how to make x11 handle displays with mixed DPI. A way more common usecase than running World of Warcraft though a compatibility layer AKA Wine. If you find a good enough answer please reply. I do have an NVIDIA card which forces me to restart my session on x11 everytime I need to play a game because of NVIDIA xenanigans. And everytime I finish playing the game I QUICKLY move out of the mess that is x11. Linux is made of compromises. And While I'm in the low end of being screwed by wayland (have an optimus laptop) I vastly prefer my wayland user session than x11.
- zamadatix 6y ago
  Pure Wayland (no xwayland) sway user here. Screen sharing is a pain, I did get it working on Arch finally though, but it's still a pain at this point. And I only got "screen" sharing i.e. not "app sharing" or "monitor/virtual-monitor sharing" working. Latter part could well be some more config or tweaking I need to do, regardless it's not the users fault if they can't figure this out in Wayland when it works fine everywhere else out of the box. I've gotten it to work well enough for my personal use case but it's definitely not far enough along for the typical use case. X11 isn't that great with monitor setups with multiple DPI. It's certainly one of the biggest user facing "wins" for Wayland but much like you dismiss playing WoW as something you don't do most users don't deal with mixed DPI setups so the biggest "win" really doesn't mean much to most. That doesn't mean it can't be a great reason for you to prefer Wayland though. Sway won't even launch on my Nvidia computers so I've just got them running Windows with WSL. I don't think it's X11/Wayland's fault on this one, Nvidia is just a bit too locked down when it comes to Linux preventing good support from anybody. At the same time the professional hardware is just better so you don't always have a choice to just use an AMD card even if you were willing to change hardware for better support. I really like my Wayland setup but it's important to understand the tradeoffs I was willing to make and the efforts I was willing to put in don't mean Wayland was perfect it means it was better for my situation. For another user it's probably a HORRIBLE fit right now. That's not their fault, nor anyone else's fault, it's just a difference in use case. I think Wayland is getting pretty close (particularly for the less stubborn willing to let xwayland run as well) to being ready for most users but that's what many have been trumpeting for 5 years so it's created a bit of pushback when you say it is now.

ddevault 6y ago

Author of the OP here. What you're describing is a bad experience with GNOME, not with Wayland. Each of your examples works great on most other Wayland compositors. The ignorance which leads you to blame it on Wayland is a major part of the same frustrations I'm venting in this rant. No one is saying you can go fuck yourself for wanting these use-cases. We're saying you can go fuck yourself because we made these use-cases work for you, and you still blame it on Wayland when GNOME is the one not playing ball.

arepublicadoceu 6y ago

You can't play World of Warcraft well under wine and you call this one of your two big things? The second being, screen sharing broken for you. Well, for me it works really well, maybe you didn't google hard enough? Now I suggest you to google extremely hard on how to make x11 handle displays with mixed DPI. A way more common usecase than running World of Warcraft though a compatibility layer AKA Wine. If you find a good enough answer please reply. I do have an NVIDIA card which forces me to restart my session on x11 everytime I need to play a game because of NVIDIA xenanigans. And everytime I finish playing the game I QUICKLY move out of the mess that is x11. Linux is made of compromises. And While I'm in the low end of being screwed by wayland (have an optimus laptop) I vastly prefer my wayland user session than x11.

zamadatix 6y ago
Pure Wayland (no xwayland) sway user here. Screen sharing is a pain, I did get it working on Arch finally though, but it's still a pain at this point. And I only got "screen" sharing i.e. not "app sharing" or "monitor/virtual-monitor sharing" working. Latter part could well be some more config or tweaking I need to do, regardless it's not the users fault if they can't figure this out in Wayland when it works fine everywhere else out of the box. I've gotten it to work well enough for my personal use case but it's definitely not far enough along for the typical use case. X11 isn't that great with monitor setups with multiple DPI. It's certainly one of the biggest user facing "wins" for Wayland but much like you dismiss playing WoW as something you don't do most users don't deal with mixed DPI setups so the biggest "win" really doesn't mean much to most. That doesn't mean it can't be a great reason for you to prefer Wayland though. Sway won't even launch on my Nvidia computers so I've just got them running Windows with WSL. I don't think it's X11/Wayland's fault on this one, Nvidia is just a bit too locked down when it comes to Linux preventing good support from anybody. At the same time the professional hardware is just better so you don't always have a choice to just use an AMD card even if you were willing to change hardware for better support. I really like my Wayland setup but it's important to understand the tradeoffs I was willing to make and the efforts I was willing to put in don't mean Wayland was perfect it means it was better for my situation. For another user it's probably a HORRIBLE fit right now. That's not their fault, nor anyone else's fault, it's just a difference in use case. I think Wayland is getting pretty close (particularly for the less stubborn willing to let xwayland run as well) to being ready for most users but that's what many have been trumpeting for 5 years so it's created a bit of pushback when you say it is now.