5 ms·

Wayland is a great example of why Linux is always an also-ran in the desktop space. X is cool and has the cachet of being such a venerable piece of software, b

by na85 5y ago

Wayland is a great example of why Linux is always an also-ran in the desktop space. X is cool and has the cachet of being such a venerable piece of software, but it needs replaced. If you actually talk to people who hack on X you'll find (for example) that it's been client-server in name only for quite some time, is full of kludges, etc. Wayland has been around for what, 12 years now? It's still a disaster. When will the Linux community admit that Wayland has failed and move on to something simpler/less ambitious?

WastingMyTime89 5y ago
> Wayland has been around for what, 12 years now? It's still a disaster. Define disaster. Because it's been working fine on my machine under Gnome 3 for years now and now that we have PipeWire that includes everything we could do before working in a nicer way. I don't know why people comment under post about abandoned very technical library like if they were in any way significant. Wayland just works. Just install Fedora or Ubuntu. It ships by default.
- neolog 5y ago
  Can you share screen on video chat?
  - sterwill 5y ago
    I'm using Ubuntu 21.04 with Wayland and, yes, screen sharing works in Google Meet, Slack, and Zoom. I haven't tried Teams in a while, so I don't know about that.
  - WastingMyTime89 5y ago
    Yes, no issue whatsoever with the Teams webapp using Chrome.
- chrismorgan 5y ago
  After a few years on Windows I recently returned to Arch Linux which I previously used with the i3 tiling window manager, and am now using Sway (a Wayland port of i3). It generally works well, but there are many applications that I have to fiddle with to get to work properly. Firefox is still X by default, meaning to me most significantly no high-DPI support or precise scrolling. You can force it to use Wayland via the MOZ_WAYLAND_ENABLE environment variable, but it still has definite issues, like popup windows not being marked as popups, with effects like notifications being added to the non-floating windows and taking focus, rather than floating in the corner of the screen undecorated. (I use Nightly and am test-driving the process-per-site thing and it’s currently got other issues that are probably Wayland-specific, but that’s what you get for using prerelease stuff.) Audacity has utterly crippling issues when run Wayland-native (its default). So I have a wrapper script that first clears the WAYLAND_DISPLAY environment variable so it will use XWayland, where it has fewer issues (it’s still pretty bad in places, e.g. all popup windows are start out at the minimum possible size and have to be resized before you can interact by anything other than keyboard, but I’m running high-DPI XWayland patches and I suspect this is at least partly due to bugs in that). Krita I need to set QT_SCALE_FACTOR to match my XWayland scaling (a high-DPI thing). Note that I can’t set this globally, or else Qt apps that can run under Wayland (e.g. Zeal) will be huge. cq-editor (CadQuery) crashes in Wayland and must be run with `--platform xcb` or with WAYLAND_DISPLAY unset. (Upstream’s distribution is built against a Qt that is not Wayland-enabled, so the problem actually doesn’t arise there, but if you build your own it’ll probably be Wayland-enabled.) Zoom has taken to crashing on joining meetings under Wayland, and only implements some GNOME-specific screen sharing rather than xdg-desktop-portal screen sharing which is, I believe, what everyone else settled on—showing the internal fragmentation problem of Wayland. So because of the crashes, I run Zoom under XWayland, not even losing screen sharing because it was already broken. (Firefox and Chromium do screen sharing without any trouble, but only of whole outputs, not individual windows.) But on the other hand, a few days ago I started i3 so I could do screen sharing on Zoom (of a second display, HDMI-A-1, 1920×1080@60Hz; main display eDP-1 being 2560×1440@165Hz), and ugh, the tearing! Full screen updates in Alacritty pretty consistently do the top half in one frame and then the bottom half in the next frame, and the block cursor moving while typing is super glitchy. I had forgotten how bad this stuff was because Wayland does it perfectly.
  - WastingMyTime89 5y ago
    > returned to Arch Linux which I previously used with the i3 tiling window manager, and am now using Sway (a Wayland port of i3). It generally works well, but there are many applications that I have to fiddle with to get to work properly. Weird cobbled together configuration using esoteric softwares will always have weird issues and things working like they were cobbled together. Just use a properly supported and cohesive desktop environment and everything will be fine.
    - chrismorgan 5y ago
      That these issues occur demonstrates a problem in the Wayland ecosystem, whether with compositors or individual apps. Compositors are supposed to be interchangeable from apps’ perspectives. I believe the problems listed with Firefox, Audacity and cq-editor would apply to any Wayland compositor. I will note that once you’ve done MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1, the remaining Firefox problems are likely to be significantly less obvious in a non-tiling, purely-client-side-decorations window manager. That doesn’t stop them from being bugs. For the Krita one, in a high-DPI environment you’ll either need to use unsupported patches on XWayland and worry about QT_SCALE_FACTOR, or use the stable version and get a terrible result that will be nigh unusable for certain purposes (though normally you’ll just call it ugly and annoying); whereas if you use X right through, you can have proper high-DPI. The Zoom crash, who knows; I certainly don’t, since they don’t make it easy to inspect what’s going wrong. There’s a good chance it’d work properly under at least GNOME. For comparison, under i3 I don’t think I ever experienced general issues like these (that would apply to all WMs), and experienced WM-specific issues only a few times, minor and workaroundable each time. The distinct impression I’m getting is one of immaturity. I’m still using it, because it does solve a couple of things that X didn’t do well that I consider moderately important, and more importantly because I’m an intrepid idiot willing to put up with a lot in the name of daily-driving the future to help iron it out for others. (As another such thing, Firefox Nightly has been my daily driver for just over a decade except for a cumulative total of about a year.)
    - na85 5y ago
      >esoteric softwares Firefox is esoteric nowadays?

by na85 5y ago

WastingMyTime89 5y ago

> Wayland has been around for what, 12 years now? It's still a disaster. Define disaster. Because it's been working fine on my machine under Gnome 3 for years now and now that we have PipeWire that includes everything we could do before working in a nicer way. I don't know why people comment under post about abandoned very technical library like if they were in any way significant. Wayland just works. Just install Fedora or Ubuntu. It ships by default.

neolog 5y ago
Can you share screen on video chat?
- sterwill 5y ago
  I'm using Ubuntu 21.04 with Wayland and, yes, screen sharing works in Google Meet, Slack, and Zoom. I haven't tried Teams in a while, so I don't know about that.
- WastingMyTime89 5y ago
  Yes, no issue whatsoever with the Teams webapp using Chrome.
chrismorgan 5y ago
After a few years on Windows I recently returned to Arch Linux which I previously used with the i3 tiling window manager, and am now using Sway (a Wayland port of i3). It generally works well, but there are many applications that I have to fiddle with to get to work properly. Firefox is still X by default, meaning to me most significantly no high-DPI support or precise scrolling. You can force it to use Wayland via the MOZ_WAYLAND_ENABLE environment variable, but it still has definite issues, like popup windows not being marked as popups, with effects like notifications being added to the non-floating windows and taking focus, rather than floating in the corner of the screen undecorated. (I use Nightly and am test-driving the process-per-site thing and it’s currently got other issues that are probably Wayland-specific, but that’s what you get for using prerelease stuff.) Audacity has utterly crippling issues when run Wayland-native (its default). So I have a wrapper script that first clears the WAYLAND_DISPLAY environment variable so it will use XWayland, where it has fewer issues (it’s still pretty bad in places, e.g. all popup windows are start out at the minimum possible size and have to be resized before you can interact by anything other than keyboard, but I’m running high-DPI XWayland patches and I suspect this is at least partly due to bugs in that). Krita I need to set QT_SCALE_FACTOR to match my XWayland scaling (a high-DPI thing). Note that I can’t set this globally, or else Qt apps that can run under Wayland (e.g. Zeal) will be huge. cq-editor (CadQuery) crashes in Wayland and must be run with `--platform xcb` or with WAYLAND_DISPLAY unset. (Upstream’s distribution is built against a Qt that is not Wayland-enabled, so the problem actually doesn’t arise there, but if you build your own it’ll probably be Wayland-enabled.) Zoom has taken to crashing on joining meetings under Wayland, and only implements some GNOME-specific screen sharing rather than xdg-desktop-portal screen sharing which is, I believe, what everyone else settled on—showing the internal fragmentation problem of Wayland. So because of the crashes, I run Zoom under XWayland, not even losing screen sharing because it was already broken. (Firefox and Chromium do screen sharing without any trouble, but only of whole outputs, not individual windows.) But on the other hand, a few days ago I started i3 so I could do screen sharing on Zoom (of a second display, HDMI-A-1, 1920×1080@60Hz; main display eDP-1 being 2560×1440@165Hz), and ugh, the tearing! Full screen updates in Alacritty pretty consistently do the top half in one frame and then the bottom half in the next frame, and the block cursor moving while typing is super glitchy. I had forgotten how bad this stuff was because Wayland does it perfectly.
- WastingMyTime89 5y ago
  > returned to Arch Linux which I previously used with the i3 tiling window manager, and am now using Sway (a Wayland port of i3). It generally works well, but there are many applications that I have to fiddle with to get to work properly. Weird cobbled together configuration using esoteric softwares will always have weird issues and things working like they were cobbled together. Just use a properly supported and cohesive desktop environment and everything will be fine.
  - chrismorgan 5y ago
    That these issues occur demonstrates a problem in the Wayland ecosystem, whether with compositors or individual apps. Compositors are supposed to be interchangeable from apps’ perspectives. I believe the problems listed with Firefox, Audacity and cq-editor would apply to any Wayland compositor. I will note that once you’ve done MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1, the remaining Firefox problems are likely to be significantly less obvious in a non-tiling, purely-client-side-decorations window manager. That doesn’t stop them from being bugs. For the Krita one, in a high-DPI environment you’ll either need to use unsupported patches on XWayland and worry about QT_SCALE_FACTOR, or use the stable version and get a terrible result that will be nigh unusable for certain purposes (though normally you’ll just call it ugly and annoying); whereas if you use X right through, you can have proper high-DPI. The Zoom crash, who knows; I certainly don’t, since they don’t make it easy to inspect what’s going wrong. There’s a good chance it’d work properly under at least GNOME. For comparison, under i3 I don’t think I ever experienced general issues like these (that would apply to all WMs), and experienced WM-specific issues only a few times, minor and workaroundable each time. The distinct impression I’m getting is one of immaturity. I’m still using it, because it does solve a couple of things that X didn’t do well that I consider moderately important, and more importantly because I’m an intrepid idiot willing to put up with a lot in the name of daily-driving the future to help iron it out for others. (As another such thing, Firefox Nightly has been my daily driver for just over a decade except for a cumulative total of about a year.)
  - na85 5y ago
    >esoteric softwares Firefox is esoteric nowadays?