10 ms·

At the end of the day what is the benefit to the layman of being 100% pure wayland?

by whalesalad 6y ago

colingw 6y ago
The benefit most noticeable to me is the faster user interface.
- sprash 6y ago
  In my experince X11 is faster (as in latency) when run without any compositor.
  - silon42 6y ago
    This seems critical. Could be fixed by turning off vsync?
    - sprash 6y ago
      Not entirely. Despite the fact that no available Wayland compositor allows you to disable vsync at this point Wayland also throws away all the work done by ddx drivers on X11 implementing 2D acceleration. This allows X11 clients to de-facto render to directly to the frontbuffer when no compositor is in use. It is the lowest possible latency you can get.
      - cycloptic 6y ago
        In theory there could be a Wayland implementation that loads Xfree86 drivers, but why? Going forward, the implementations that want high performance and low latency (i.e. VR/XR interfaces) are likely going to target Vulkan, and you will likely never want to disable vsync there.
      - bitwize 6y ago
        DDX is deprecated in favor of GLAMOR for acceleration. Which roughly matches the story on Wayland: use OpenGL on the GPU for acceleration. Then again, Xorg is effectively deprecated in favor of Wayland...
husam212 6y ago
I noticed some weird bugs with clipboard sharing, a pure wayland setup avoids such quirks.
dtx1 6y ago
* Security Benefits, maybe! * No more screen tearing * Multiple Displays with multiple different refresh rates, on some compositors (sway can do it!) * HWVideo Acceleration for firefox (on some setups) * it can be faster in some situations * In the future: More likely support for HDR, VRR etc.
- gspr 6y ago
  Nice bonus I didn't expect when moving to Wayland: my touchpad magically started behaving waaaay more nicely.
- babypuncher 6y ago
  > Multiple Displays with multiple different refresh rates, on some compositors (sway can do it!) Does this mean we can get VRR on our primary display without having to completely disable other monitors when playing games?
  - dtx1 6y ago
    Try it, it could potentially work in Sway, i don't have a VRR card but multiple refresh rates on different displays works there
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - vially 6y ago
    Yes, I've been doing this on sway for a couple of months now without any issues.
nitsky 6y ago
Wayland fixes a number of long standing issues with X, including: * No screen tearing. * Better hidpi support including different scale factors on different monitors. * Improved security, because clients do not have access to all state on the server and servers do not run as root. Separately, I like how with Wayland the compositor is also the server, so from a TTY you can enter a desktop environment by running a single executable with a single configuration file.
- jude- 6y ago
  What happens to your graphical programs when your compositor crashes? At least with X11, if your window manager crashes, your programs keep running (you'd just fire up the WM again).
  - colingw 6y ago
    Sway (the window manager) _is_ the compositor. There is no need for a separate program like compiz or picom.
    - sprash 6y ago
      Which is a mistake. On X11 the server, window manager and compositor are three separate programs. Both window manager and compositor can individually crash, started, stopped and replaced at runtime without any of the other running X11 client instances affected.
      - ubercow13 6y ago
        On the other hand on X11, Xorg cannot crash without the X11 client instances being affected - a much larger chunk of code. It's only because Xorg is older that that doesn't happen much.
        sprash 6y ago
        A chunk of code that is running in production for more than 30 years and should be considered battle tested. In my experience Wayland compositors crash much more often than X11 despite the supposed reduced complexity. The last time X11 server crashed on me was in 2004 if I remember correctly.
levesque 6y ago
One huge drawback for me is no support for proprietary NVidia drivers.
- Rovanion 6y ago
  News just came out they will support it in the next release.
  - TobyBrull 6y ago
    Care to share a link? I could only find this: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-DMA-BUF-Wayland-KDE https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-D... ? That's already a couple month's old, though.
    - wmf 6y ago
      https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-470-Wayland-Friendly https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-4...
- justaguy88 6y ago
  Thats not wayland though, that the choice of the implementation.
hawski 6y ago
To a layman none or almost none direct benefits. But there are non-direct benefits like those listed by sibling comments. However it will, in longer term, simplify work for developers, while in short term it will be or rather it is a complication in the transitional phase. It is an evolutionary step for end users, there is no revolution really. What is the benefit to a layman of a program to change bogies in all trains? He doesn't care about regenerative breaking, so smoother ride? But until almost all of his rides are on this newer platform he would not see a real benefit. Then when it is finally there he will only see its absence. Same with Wayland.
MayeulC 6y ago
I really like no application being in control of other windows besides my compositor. As a side-effect to security improvements (clipboard, keylogger, screnshotter), you get: - Apps cannot arbitrarily modeset (change screen resolution and "mess my desktop up") anymore. - Under sway, apps are the size I want. I can somewhat resize them over/under their limits - No more windows that grab the focus and force their way to the foreground - Apps cannot move my mouse cursor anymore. I hate it when they do, I know some Cadence DKs that do so (position the mouse cursor on the OK button: nice touch, I hate it). - Some apps/games might have crashed when changing workspaces, but I have never once been unable to "alt-tab" or change workspace, change the screen the app was on, etc. Granted, under sway those are just different APIs and are not hardened, but they could be in the future. And I mean the above, I've had to restart the X server (or switch to a TTY and kill the app) due to a misbehaving app numerous times, but this is mostly a thing of the past now. Also, bonus: - easy multiseat under sway: in under 1 minute, given an extra mouse/keyboard, I can theoretically work with someone else on the same computer: I have a window focused, that I can type in, they too. - Easily create headless displays, or nested sessions (sway can run as a wayland, X or DRI client). You can use that to leverage another computer as an external display: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25891464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25891464 - Under sway, the compositor handles configuring input and display. No more xorg.conf (cue https://xkcd.com/963/ https://xkcd.com/963/ though it's less true these days). And on the technical side: - From my understanding, apps should be able to pass GPU buffers around much more efficiently, even drawing directly on the final buffer thanks to dma-buf. This leads to lower-latency and higher performance, especially for high resolutions. In turn, it helps quite a bit with pipewire for screensharing and passing video around, as well as zero-copy hardware video acceleration.

At the end of the day what is the benefit to the layman of being 100% pure wayland?

colingw 6y ago

The benefit most noticeable to me is the faster user interface.

sprash 6y ago
In my experince X11 is faster (as in latency) when run without any compositor.
- silon42 6y ago
  This seems critical. Could be fixed by turning off vsync?
  - sprash 6y ago
    Not entirely. Despite the fact that no available Wayland compositor allows you to disable vsync at this point Wayland also throws away all the work done by ddx drivers on X11 implementing 2D acceleration. This allows X11 clients to de-facto render to directly to the frontbuffer when no compositor is in use. It is the lowest possible latency you can get.
    - cycloptic 6y ago
      In theory there could be a Wayland implementation that loads Xfree86 drivers, but why? Going forward, the implementations that want high performance and low latency (i.e. VR/XR interfaces) are likely going to target Vulkan, and you will likely never want to disable vsync there.
    - bitwize 6y ago
      DDX is deprecated in favor of GLAMOR for acceleration. Which roughly matches the story on Wayland: use OpenGL on the GPU for acceleration. Then again, Xorg is effectively deprecated in favor of Wayland...

husam212 6y ago

I noticed some weird bugs with clipboard sharing, a pure wayland setup avoids such quirks.

dtx1 6y ago

* Security Benefits, maybe! * No more screen tearing * Multiple Displays with multiple different refresh rates, on some compositors (sway can do it!) * HWVideo Acceleration for firefox (on some setups) * it can be faster in some situations * In the future: More likely support for HDR, VRR etc.

gspr 6y ago
Nice bonus I didn't expect when moving to Wayland: my touchpad magically started behaving waaaay more nicely.
babypuncher 6y ago
> Multiple Displays with multiple different refresh rates, on some compositors (sway can do it!) Does this mean we can get VRR on our primary display without having to completely disable other monitors when playing games?
- dtx1 6y ago
  Try it, it could potentially work in Sway, i don't have a VRR card but multiple refresh rates on different displays works there
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- vially 6y ago
  Yes, I've been doing this on sway for a couple of months now without any issues.

nitsky 6y ago

Wayland fixes a number of long standing issues with X, including: * No screen tearing. * Better hidpi support including different scale factors on different monitors. * Improved security, because clients do not have access to all state on the server and servers do not run as root. Separately, I like how with Wayland the compositor is also the server, so from a TTY you can enter a desktop environment by running a single executable with a single configuration file.

jude- 6y ago
What happens to your graphical programs when your compositor crashes? At least with X11, if your window manager crashes, your programs keep running (you'd just fire up the WM again).
- colingw 6y ago
  Sway (the window manager) _is_ the compositor. There is no need for a separate program like compiz or picom.
  - sprash 6y ago
    Which is a mistake. On X11 the server, window manager and compositor are three separate programs. Both window manager and compositor can individually crash, started, stopped and replaced at runtime without any of the other running X11 client instances affected.
    - ubercow13 6y ago
      On the other hand on X11, Xorg cannot crash without the X11 client instances being affected - a much larger chunk of code. It's only because Xorg is older that that doesn't happen much.
      - sprash 6y ago
        A chunk of code that is running in production for more than 30 years and should be considered battle tested. In my experience Wayland compositors crash much more often than X11 despite the supposed reduced complexity. The last time X11 server crashed on me was in 2004 if I remember correctly.

levesque 6y ago

One huge drawback for me is no support for proprietary NVidia drivers.

Rovanion 6y ago
News just came out they will support it in the next release.
- TobyBrull 6y ago
  Care to share a link? I could only find this: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-DMA-BUF-Wayland-KDE https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-D... ? That's already a couple month's old, though.
  - wmf 6y ago
    https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-470-Wayland-Friendly https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-4...
justaguy88 6y ago
Thats not wayland though, that the choice of the implementation.

hawski 6y ago

To a layman none or almost none direct benefits. But there are non-direct benefits like those listed by sibling comments. However it will, in longer term, simplify work for developers, while in short term it will be or rather it is a complication in the transitional phase. It is an evolutionary step for end users, there is no revolution really. What is the benefit to a layman of a program to change bogies in all trains? He doesn't care about regenerative breaking, so smoother ride? But until almost all of his rides are on this newer platform he would not see a real benefit. Then when it is finally there he will only see its absence. Same with Wayland.

MayeulC 6y ago

I really like no application being in control of other windows besides my compositor. As a side-effect to security improvements (clipboard, keylogger, screnshotter), you get: - Apps cannot arbitrarily modeset (change screen resolution and "mess my desktop up") anymore. - Under sway, apps are the size I want. I can somewhat resize them over/under their limits - No more windows that grab the focus and force their way to the foreground - Apps cannot move my mouse cursor anymore. I hate it when they do, I know some Cadence DKs that do so (position the mouse cursor on the OK button: nice touch, I hate it). - Some apps/games might have crashed when changing workspaces, but I have never once been unable to "alt-tab" or change workspace, change the screen the app was on, etc. Granted, under sway those are just different APIs and are not hardened, but they could be in the future. And I mean the above, I've had to restart the X server (or switch to a TTY and kill the app) due to a misbehaving app numerous times, but this is mostly a thing of the past now. Also, bonus: - easy multiseat under sway: in under 1 minute, given an extra mouse/keyboard, I can theoretically work with someone else on the same computer: I have a window focused, that I can type in, they too. - Easily create headless displays, or nested sessions (sway can run as a wayland, X or DRI client). You can use that to leverage another computer as an external display: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25891464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25891464 - Under sway, the compositor handles configuring input and display. No more xorg.conf (cue https://xkcd.com/963/ https://xkcd.com/963/ though it's less true these days). And on the technical side: - From my understanding, apps should be able to pass GPU buffers around much more efficiently, even drawing directly on the final buffer thanks to dma-buf. This leads to lower-latency and higher performance, especially for high resolutions. In turn, it helps quite a bit with pipewire for screensharing and passing video around, as well as zero-copy hardware video acceleration.