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It's rather sobering that wayland still has substantial issues more than a decade after work on it has started. This leaves me wondering whether aggressively ev

It's rather sobering that wayland still has substantial issues more than a decade after work on it has started. This leaves me wondering whether aggressively evolving Xorg would have been a better choice. Maybe Xorg security wouldn't have been fixed completely that way. But almost 15 years later it hasn't been fixed at all - wayland hasn't arrived.

vbezhenar 5y ago
I'm writing it from Fedora Linux which ships Wayland by default and I didn't experience any issues so far. Wayland definitely arrived to my laptop.
- goldenbikeshed 5y ago
  Yeah I've been running Wayland on my desktop since quite a while now. There were minor issues when Fedora made the switch to wayland as default, but since at least a year i haven't had a problem that switching to xorg would fix.
  - jraph 5y ago
    I still have significant issues with Wayland. Everywhere: - Barrier does not work On KDE Plasma (openSUSE Tumbleweed): - Thunderbird often flickers a lot, rendering it unusable - apps like cheese or kamoso to access the webcam don't work correctly - selection paste now works after years of waiting, but is not shared between GTK and KDE apps - X apps are other slightly blurry when witch scaling DPIs On Phosh on the PinePhone (Mobian): - VNC does not work. It works on Gnome because it is implemented in Gnome's compositor, but back luck, not in Phosh. Each Wayland compositor has to implement this. So there is nothing like scrcpy on Android that I know of on GNU/Linux phones yet, which would come for almost free with X11. Each feature has to be implemented by each compositor. But then it may take years because people rightly seek to build standards that can make it work between all the compositors. And I still rely on X11 for network display of apps, even between two Wayland systems (though it's not an issue for me, but it is a bummer because we can probably do better than this). It seems Wayland works well if you use Gnome and that you don't need anything slightly fancy. It still does not have this "this will work no doubt" feeling that I have with X11. I'm very careful with apps I run and install on my machine. This security-first design is honorable but gets in my way with seemingly no benefits for me.
- petepete 5y ago
  Yeah me too, works flawlessly on my laptop. On my main PC the non-GTK apps go glitchy after resume so I'm back with xorg, but Wayland is very nearly there.
- mnahkies 5y ago
  I did a fresh install of fedora 34 to my 4 year old dell XPS last week, upgrading from fedora 31 or so. I've been really blown away by how much snappier it feels - not sure if it's the wayland, gnome or btrs etc changes but I'm a very happy user. As a side note it's also the first clean install I've done on that laptop where I haven't encountered pain with the nouveau drivers
  - mixmastamyk 5y ago
    Gnome3 had a big performance regression for years that was fixed recently.
- JustFinishedBSG 5y ago
  Must be using Fedora Vanilla/Gnome then, because I use Fedora KDE and it was NOT ready for Wayland as a default
- swiley 5y ago
  Yeah I also have wayland installed. It's still missing features that Xorg has though so I run it on tty4 with xorg on tty7.
- gmueckl 5y ago
  Good for you, but that's merely anecdotal evidence. From the limited data that is available, it appears that more than half of the desktop Linux installations run nvidia GPUs. Wayland is pretty much out on those. And the rest needs to run a distribution that supports wayland and activate it. So wayland simply hasn't reached its goal of replacing Xorg by a long shot.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    Wayland Gnome (and plasma) runs on nvidia gpus as well. But the fact is, linux, the kernel doesn’t support nvidia cards without proprietary blobs, hardly anything to do with Wayland.
  - vetinari 5y ago
    > From the limited data that is available, it appears that more than half of the desktop Linux installations run nvidia GPUs. Where did you get that data? Nvidia doesn't even have that kind of market share (Intel absolutely rules there).
    - mqus 5y ago
      I also had doubts but there are statistics (arguably not representative) that seem to confirm this: https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/fun https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/fun (See GPU drivers and add(might not be the best idea, I know) the nvidia numbers...) It might be machine learning stuff which heavily leans into nvidia hardware
      - vetinari 5y ago
        Just adding them all goes way beyond 100%, so it really is not the best idea. In general, the market share (as in GPUs sold, in total, for all systems, not just Linux) was around 70% Intel, 17% Nvidia and 13% AMD. This was before GPUs turned into inobtaniums, so I guess Nvidia and AMD didn't improve their positions much. Yes, there are ML guys on the Linux side, but that could be compensated by gamers on the Windows side, so I assume that if anything, Windows would have more share of Nvidia than Linux. Miners don't really care for desktop. There is a place where Nvidia achieved significant share - it has 70% in Steam hardware survey. That is to be expected, gamers are heavily biased towards Nvidia.
boudin 5y ago
Wayland is there, but it's always gonna be a step by step approach. Overall it's already in a really good shape. On quite old computers, it's performing quite better than xorg for me. I wonder what would be the current situation though if Canonical would have chosen to invest in Wayland in the first place and Google would have chosen Wayland for its Chromebooks. Things have been moving at a much faster pace lately and I would expect things to mature as Ubuntu is switching to Wayland by default, Chrome and Electron are landing a wayland backend.
kaba0 5y ago
What are the substantial issues? The “article” fails to mention anything concrete (guess the reason for that). Interestingly enough many people use it from day to day without any problem. Screenshots, screenshare works with pipewire, it is even superior to the old way. Chrome does support Wayland now, and even electron apps do, so basically all the old problems are solved.

vbezhenar 5y ago

I'm writing it from Fedora Linux which ships Wayland by default and I didn't experience any issues so far. Wayland definitely arrived to my laptop.

goldenbikeshed 5y ago
Yeah I've been running Wayland on my desktop since quite a while now. There were minor issues when Fedora made the switch to wayland as default, but since at least a year i haven't had a problem that switching to xorg would fix.
- jraph 5y ago
  I still have significant issues with Wayland. Everywhere: - Barrier does not work On KDE Plasma (openSUSE Tumbleweed): - Thunderbird often flickers a lot, rendering it unusable - apps like cheese or kamoso to access the webcam don't work correctly - selection paste now works after years of waiting, but is not shared between GTK and KDE apps - X apps are other slightly blurry when witch scaling DPIs On Phosh on the PinePhone (Mobian): - VNC does not work. It works on Gnome because it is implemented in Gnome's compositor, but back luck, not in Phosh. Each Wayland compositor has to implement this. So there is nothing like scrcpy on Android that I know of on GNU/Linux phones yet, which would come for almost free with X11. Each feature has to be implemented by each compositor. But then it may take years because people rightly seek to build standards that can make it work between all the compositors. And I still rely on X11 for network display of apps, even between two Wayland systems (though it's not an issue for me, but it is a bummer because we can probably do better than this). It seems Wayland works well if you use Gnome and that you don't need anything slightly fancy. It still does not have this "this will work no doubt" feeling that I have with X11. I'm very careful with apps I run and install on my machine. This security-first design is honorable but gets in my way with seemingly no benefits for me.
petepete 5y ago
Yeah me too, works flawlessly on my laptop. On my main PC the non-GTK apps go glitchy after resume so I'm back with xorg, but Wayland is very nearly there.
mnahkies 5y ago
I did a fresh install of fedora 34 to my 4 year old dell XPS last week, upgrading from fedora 31 or so. I've been really blown away by how much snappier it feels - not sure if it's the wayland, gnome or btrs etc changes but I'm a very happy user. As a side note it's also the first clean install I've done on that laptop where I haven't encountered pain with the nouveau drivers
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  Gnome3 had a big performance regression for years that was fixed recently.
JustFinishedBSG 5y ago
Must be using Fedora Vanilla/Gnome then, because I use Fedora KDE and it was NOT ready for Wayland as a default
swiley 5y ago
Yeah I also have wayland installed. It's still missing features that Xorg has though so I run it on tty4 with xorg on tty7.
gmueckl 5y ago
Good for you, but that's merely anecdotal evidence. From the limited data that is available, it appears that more than half of the desktop Linux installations run nvidia GPUs. Wayland is pretty much out on those. And the rest needs to run a distribution that supports wayland and activate it. So wayland simply hasn't reached its goal of replacing Xorg by a long shot.
- kaba0 5y ago
  Wayland Gnome (and plasma) runs on nvidia gpus as well. But the fact is, linux, the kernel doesn’t support nvidia cards without proprietary blobs, hardly anything to do with Wayland.
- vetinari 5y ago
  > From the limited data that is available, it appears that more than half of the desktop Linux installations run nvidia GPUs. Where did you get that data? Nvidia doesn't even have that kind of market share (Intel absolutely rules there).
  - mqus 5y ago
    I also had doubts but there are statistics (arguably not representative) that seem to confirm this: https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/fun https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/fun (See GPU drivers and add(might not be the best idea, I know) the nvidia numbers...) It might be machine learning stuff which heavily leans into nvidia hardware
    - vetinari 5y ago
      Just adding them all goes way beyond 100%, so it really is not the best idea. In general, the market share (as in GPUs sold, in total, for all systems, not just Linux) was around 70% Intel, 17% Nvidia and 13% AMD. This was before GPUs turned into inobtaniums, so I guess Nvidia and AMD didn't improve their positions much. Yes, there are ML guys on the Linux side, but that could be compensated by gamers on the Windows side, so I assume that if anything, Windows would have more share of Nvidia than Linux. Miners don't really care for desktop. There is a place where Nvidia achieved significant share - it has 70% in Steam hardware survey. That is to be expected, gamers are heavily biased towards Nvidia.

boudin 5y ago

Wayland is there, but it's always gonna be a step by step approach. Overall it's already in a really good shape. On quite old computers, it's performing quite better than xorg for me. I wonder what would be the current situation though if Canonical would have chosen to invest in Wayland in the first place and Google would have chosen Wayland for its Chromebooks. Things have been moving at a much faster pace lately and I would expect things to mature as Ubuntu is switching to Wayland by default, Chrome and Electron are landing a wayland backend.

kaba0 5y ago

What are the substantial issues? The “article” fails to mention anything concrete (guess the reason for that). Interestingly enough many people use it from day to day without any problem. Screenshots, screenshare works with pipewire, it is even superior to the old way. Chrome does support Wayland now, and even electron apps do, so basically all the old problems are solved.