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Less Than 10% of Firefox Users on Linux Are Running Wayland

53 points by Tajnymag 5y ago

di4na 5y ago
Worth pointing out that for the longest time, Firefox on Wayland was borking the clipboards regularly, forcing a restart of the whole stack (at least on Gnome). That pushed a lot of people to use the X versin of firefox, even if on Wayland. It seems to be fixed for me now but eh... who knows
- moritonal 5y ago
  Which way around is that? Firefox would be unable to use it's Clipboard and require restarting, or Wayland would require restarting. If it's the later, would it not imply a shaky foundation if an app is able to brick the systems compositor with something as simple as clipboard access?
  - jborean93 5y ago
    At least for me it would hang the app trying to retrieve the clipboard value that was set by Firefox. It would continue to hang until I either a) copied data from another app, or b) reloaded sway.
  - boudin 5y ago
    In Wayland the data of the clipboard stays in the app where it was "added" to the clipboard and only transit between the application where it was copied to the app where it is pasted when pasted. I think the issue was at this transit stage on Firefox side. It didn't have any impact on the compositor, it would behave differently in the receiving app. Some would crash, some would freeze for a bit, some would be totally fine but would just fail to get the data to paste.
    - di4na 5y ago
      Yep exactly this
    - vidarh 5y ago
      > In Wayland the data of the clipboard stays in the app where it was "added" to the clipboard and only transit between the application where it was copied to the app where it is pasted when pasted. Back to the future... This was how the Amiga clipboard functionality worked (at that point it was because it saved memory), though you could push the data into separate clipboard storage if necessary (e.g. if an application was about to close while a clip was active, or because an application requested a paste).
      - TingPing 5y ago
        It's still a reasonable design, it even allows for passing around zero copy buffers, or streaming large data.
- jborean93 5y ago
  This was such a frustrating issue and was glad when it was finally fixed. My next bug bear is screen sharing on Wayland. I use a massive monitor and wlroots/sway (I have no idea where the functionality should lie) doesn’t really offer a nice way to share either a specific window or screen range. Chrome has a nice feature where you can share Chrome itself or a specific tab which somewhat mitigates this problem for me so it would be great if Firefox had the same ability. Ultimately it would be great if I could just share anything but the progress on https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlr-protocols/-/issues/93 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlr-protocols/-/issue... is not quite there yet. I just wish I knew how the stack worked so I could potentially judge what the effort would be but I feel like it would he a massive rabbit hole which I just can’t afford.
  - hansihe 5y ago
    This actually works somewhat today, but it's all a little hit and miss. For Wayland I believe the currently accepted way if doing screen sharing is through xdg-desktop-portal which has a backend for wlroots and a bunch of other common compositors. I have gotten this to work fairly decently with Firefox at least, but some things are a bit hacky. https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr
    - jborean93 5y ago
      Thanks, I use this for sharing the screen but it only allows me to share a specific screen. It does not offer the ability to share a region [1] or specific window [2] on that screen. Supposedly this is due to API limitations in wlroots or some lower component. [1] https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr/issues/154 https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr/issues/15... [2] https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr/issues/107 https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr/issues/10...
  - vbezhenar 5y ago
    I can share the entire screen using Discord/Chrome/Gnome 40/Fedora 34.
- dont__panic 5y ago
  Does Firefox default to Wayland these days on wayland-default distros? I seem to recall, using a Linux laptop for work just a year or so ago, that I had to set a couple of config variables manually that were really really easy to screw up. Ended up using the X version of FF for a while on Wayland until I figured out what was causing issues in my environment.
  - Fronzie 5y ago
    Debian testing is currently still like that. MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 needs to be set before firefox uses wayland.
  - di4na 5y ago
    On Fedora at least yes, they try to default on Wayland for everything by default now
- tinus_hn 5y ago
  Why does Wayland allow an app to break its clipboard that badly?
teekert 5y ago
I always ran wayland (since I got "Ubuntu on Wayland" at the login available), but now my son wants to play minecraft with me so I have to use X. It's just this 1 thing that keeps me off it now. I imaging what the "Why Wayland? Will at some point flip to "Why not Wayland?" When really (almost) everything works.
- ajkls899 5y ago
  I'd assume minecraft would work in xwayland right? I've been playing a bunch of AAA games (Deus ex games, dying light ect) all on wayland, with sway aswell. I do have an AMD gpu though.
- denysvitali 5y ago
  Can you add more technical details on why Minecraft doesn't work on Wayland?
  - christophilus 5y ago
    Not the op, but I’ve found that Steam + proton is much slower on Wayland. It’s the one thing that makes me log into X every once in a while.
  - teekert 5y ago
    Holy cow, I just tested it and it just works on Wayland! I could have sworn that I tried it in the past and it didn't work... Ok, so that was my last reason to use X...
vidarh 5y ago
The caveats given are pretty major. Anyone know which distributions disable telemetry and whether they default to X11 or Wayland?
- christophilus 5y ago
  Fedora defaults to Wayland, and telemetry is opt in.
- rightbyte 5y ago
  Hopefully no distribution enables "telemetry" without opt-in?
eternityforest 5y ago
I will run Wayland when it is built into Linux Mint. When they have fixed screenshots and color pickers and network transparency and any other hidden things I don't know about.
- christophilus 5y ago
  Screenshots don’t work? They work in vanilla Gnome on Fedora. So do color pickers, from what I’ve seen. Though, maybe I’m only using those with my browser. Not sure what you mean by network transparency, though.
  - nsajko 5y ago
    Gnome supports those independently of Wayland. Wayland itself sadly deems those and other essential features out-of-scope.
    - eternityforest 5y ago
      Pseudostandards are one of my least favorite patterns ever. You take a protocol that works, then you make a new "Modern flexible unopinionated" protocol and invite people to make their own versions with lots of incompatibilities.
- eptcyka 5y ago
  X's network transparency is not feasible when using any modern window manager, since you'll still be slinging pixel buffers over the network, and compositing them together on the client. It's just easier to render on the host and just send a single pixel buffer instead of a bunch of them as this is faster and simpler.
  - eternityforest 5y ago
    Sure, but the main thing is that if you do ssh -X it does kind of work. I can have one individual window integrated with my normal desktop, from a remote machine. It sucks but it's enough to get a few basic things done. Wayland should surely be able to at least match that! Individual pixel buffers should still be faster if only some of them change regularly, right?
allisdust 5y ago
Wayland still doesn't handle fractional scaling as well as x11 (at least for my laptop) and the text blurriness with fractional scaling is really a show stopper. X11 just works though. Hopefully they will iron out the last of the bugs and this 10 year project will finally achieve its potential.
- reactor 5y ago
  I had to upgrade Kernel 5.15 to get 4K multi monitor fractional scaling working with Ubuntu on Wayland. But it works quite well now.
- tuetuopay 5y ago
  Funny, fractional scaling is precisely what convinced me about wayland. Especially with mixed ratios, like you easily get when plugging a laptop to an external screen. My work laptop has a 1080p 14" screen at 1.00 and it's connected to the office's 4K 32" screens with a 1.35 factor, it just works. Good luck getting it to work that well on X11.
  - resonious 5y ago
    Same here. I simply cold not get fractional scaling working comfortably on X11 and that's why I've been on Wayland for years now. The cases where fractional scaling doesn't work on Wayland are when you're running an app through XWayland. In those cases, I'd just find an alternative that works with Wayland. That's also what lead me to switch to Firefox full-time - Chromium's Wayland support lagged behind quite a bit.
  - salamandersauce 5y ago
    Ubuntu's version of GNOME X11 handles it pretty well. You can workaround it similarly in other DEs/WMs by mucking around with xrandr (I forget exactly). I have an Nvidia card and last time I tried Wayland was just not usable. I also hate how at this point we have 3 choices for Wayland WMs compared to what is probably hundreds for X11. I did get frustrated with mixed DPI on Linux and just ended up replacing my 4K monitor with a 1440p one. What's also kinda sad and funny is that X11 has had from day 1 support for different DPIs on different displays. But most programs just ignore X11s DPI setting and assume it's 96ppi. It also conflicts with modern multi-monitor on Linux which essentially fakes one giant display so you can drag windows across. There is some drawbacks but if you config each monitor to be a separate X11 display with the proper DPI and use compatible programs like Alacritty it kinda just sorta works.
anotherhue 5y ago
Sway & Firefox-wl work pretty great on nixos
- mateuszf 5y ago
  Using Gnome and Firefox with Wayland on NixOS as well. No issues whatsover.
- reuben364 5y ago
  I've had a few issues (NixOS, sway). Mainly screen capture. XWayland apps can record windows, but not my whole screen. Wayland apps can record my whole screen but not individual windows. I also don't know how to get XWayland to match my sway display resolution as it is only half the resolution. Also libinput via sway doesn't have a way to disable the touchscreen if I'm using a stylus as far as I'm aware. I'm sure there are solutions to some of these, but given I already spend a significant amount of time fiddling with my NixOS configuration I'm already quite an outlier with regards to the amount of effort I am willing to spend and even I'm exhausted.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    I need to know more about touchscreens and disabling touch but not stylus operations. Where can I find out more about this? What does it mean, physically? Where is the distinction handled?
    - reuben364 5y ago
      The stylus I'm using operates independently from the capacitive touchscreen and is presented as a separate input device by libinput. The stylus needs external power and the input reports not just xy, but z coordinates. Physically I am not sure whats going on, and struggled to find anything authoritative on the subject.
turbinerneiter 5y ago
Doesn't the graph show the opposite? According to the legend the green shows Wayland which is by far the biggest area? Have I forgotten how to read graphs? Edit: Graph starts at 90%, oh how I hate when they do that.
- roenxi 5y ago
  The graph is bad - the y axis is way off.
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    I can't read that graph. It seems to show 100% X11 usage throughout (while also using various Waylands).
  - jart 5y ago
    The article is bad too. I can't decipher this sentence. > X11 is showing to be in use above 90% over the span of this multi-month data and on average seems to be about 93% currently to Wayland at roughly 7%. If the chart was really supplied by the Mozilla Telemetry team then it's quite an embarrassment. When analytics is your profession you should know better than to do things like use red and blue alongside each other. Even if you're not colorblind, #afa7f4 (desaturated blue) and #98b4fe (desaturated purple) are hard to distinguish because Chrome says the contrast ratio is 1.06. See https://personal.sron.nl/~pault/ https://personal.sron.nl/~pault/ to learn more.
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
I really hope wayland doesn't become to x11 what IPV6 is to ipv4. Because after so many years, a lot of the ecosystem hasn't moved, or is even not compatible with it. Good multi display support is missing, and some games don't render well. I want it to succeed, and the project has been progressing non-stop, but it does show how much time and energy such an endeavor takes. I was expecting to be able to use it for years and years. See also: BTRFS
- iqanq 5y ago
  btrfs is a drop-in replacement. Nothing changes for the user when they switch to it. With Wayland many basic features are missing even today. (Yes I know someone will explain here that everything works. Don't make me laugh)
  - krageon 5y ago
    > Nothing changes for the user when they switch to it. You must perform regular maintenance on btrfs or it will quite simply break. This is a huge departure from for example ext4, which is (to the end user at least) hassle free.
    - byhemechi 5y ago
      this is not my experience, btrfs has been just as stable as ext4 and zfs for me. maybe i've just been lucky?
      - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
        Ext4 is transparent for me, but I can confirm BTRFS to have failed me several times. n = 1 of course.
      - pizza234 5y ago
        I'm not sure about the "maintenance" part, however, my experience was: - a few years ago, one system would suddently not boot (due to btrfs); this happened twice - nowadays, on one system, background scrub doesn't start This is anecdata of course, but I've never had a good impression overall. I don't see any reason to use btrfs rather than ZFS, considering that Ubuntu and derivatives are starting to add builtin support.
mateuszf 5y ago
I'm not sure what do the number mean. Percentage of users running Firefox using Wayland WM/DE or percentage of users running Firefox with enabled Wayland support? These numbers in theory could be dramatically different, as Firefox with enabled Wayland is not a default yet.
the8472 5y ago
My FF-related reason for using X11 that drag&drop from FF to Nemo doesn't work under sway but does work under i3. Trying several combinations of environment variables to switch between native and xwayland mode didn't make a difference. The second reason, not related to FF, is that wine-wayland is still experimental.
kwhitefoot 5y ago
Why should a Linux user care whether the display uses X11 or Wayland? Is there a summary somewhere that explains why, or if, it would benefit me to put any effort into switching?
- nsajko 5y ago
  Wayland is the new option, that surprisingly (since X is quite ugly) manages to have a much worse design than X. Wayland (as a consequence of its design) isn't really a single option, rather each DE and WM does it's own implementation of lots of stuff, with different interfaces. So please don't use it as you would be supporting fragmentation and death of the Linux desktop.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    > Wayland is the new option, that surprisingly (since X is quite ugly) manages to have a much worse design than X. Citation needed. And no, it doesn’t support fragmentation - it is a protocol with multiple implementations - which is a good thing! It means that noone will code against the implementation, but the protocol. (And in practice, there are very few non-standard extensions that supposed to be cross-platform. Those are mostly for DE-specific functions)
    - nsajko 5y ago
      TBH I remember your other comments about Wayland across many threads, and most of them have a quality of being confused in such a manner as to provoke long answers and derail the discussion. > a protocol with multiple implementations - which is a good thing The protocol is severely lacking in features. This means the "compositors" end up doing most stuff independently of Wayland, in mutually incompatible way of course. Thus the fragmentation of the Linux desktop: Gnome vs KDE vs wlroots, etc.
      - kaba0 5y ago
        Am I more of a troll than the other low-effort comments claiming false things like “wayland manages to have worse design than X (without any concrete example)”, or that it causes fragmentation in desktop when fragmentation has always been a thing? Good luck using anything dbus-related thing under a minimal wm like dwm.
giords 5y ago
Wayland is the new IPv6
the_duke 5y ago
It's notable that Firefox performance is a lot better on Wayland. Depending on the compositor of course. Which leads to a big misconception that many users have, even here on Hackernews. "Wayland doesn't support Y" or "Z doesn't work on Wayland" statements only make very limited sense. Wayland is just a protocol. Unlike X, there is no shared codebase that is used by all implementations - aka compositors. There are several important compositors, all with their own individual quirks. Which is part of the problem...
- conaclos 5y ago
  > It's notable that Firefox performance is a lot better on Wayland I would like to know more about that. Have you some resources that demonstrate that? > Depending on the compositor of course. Which one do you use?
  - jeppesen-io 5y ago
    Not OP but I concur. If not faster, at least feels much snappier. on Gnome 41
- nsajko 5y ago
  > "Wayland doesn't support Y" or "Z doesn't work on Wayland" statements only make very limited sense. No. Essential features depend on the "compositor" because Wayland doesn't support them. You're mixing up interface and implementation.
- vidarh 5y ago
  X11 is just a protocol too. There's no shared codebase used by all implementations of X11 either. But the reason for that misconception is presumably that what most users would customise with X was replacing the WM - there was little demand for lots of different X servers other than for very specific needs or different platforms. Meanwhile with Wayland, we need a compositor to replace every X wm people still care about. For me, that's the big blocker - as long as there's no drop-in replacement for bspwm, it's a hassle for me to move over and none of the "benefits" of Wayland matter to me. (EDIT: In fact, because of how Wayland shifts responsibilities, Wayland has led to more code being shared between compositors via projects like wlroots because the burden to implement a Wayland compositor is far higher than to implement a window manager for X, and more people care about window management functionality than the low level server functionality; eventually I believe and hope we'll end up with a couple of dominant compositors with a common set of extensions supported for all the "missing" X functionality, including a wm extension, and we'll be back at pretty much parity with X)
GekkePrutser 5y ago
Be aware that some other unixes are often corned as Linux. I use Firefox on FreeBSD and most third party websites identify me as Linux (except Firefox itself). I can't run Wayland because KDE on Wayland is currently broken on FreeBSD :)
tyingq 5y ago
The developer channel version of WSL2 comes with Wayland, which might help push adoption a bit. https://github.com/microsoft/wslg https://github.com/microsoft/wslg
zwog 5y ago
I found no suitable replacement for demnu/j4-menu on Wayland, so I stick to using Gnome on X. It's that simple. I don't know much about window servers and have no idea why I should use Wayland instead of X.
- 42jd 5y ago
  I use bemenu (https://github.com/Cloudef/bemenu https://github.com/Cloudef/bemenu) as my replacement for dmenu.
mateuszf 5y ago
By the way, assuming I'm running Wayland - anyone maybe knows a way for me to check if any of the apps I have/run are using X11?
sylware 5y ago
It is like windoz, the default install on nearly all sold PCs: because x11 is the default for firefox on mainstream distros. What to do: eat the bullet and change the default of the mainstream distros.
roshansingh 5y ago
I was not able to share screen on Wayland so had to switch to X.
aqaq2 5y ago
Shadonototra 5y ago
Unity 8 and MIR died for this...

53 points by Tajnymag 5y ago

Worth pointing out that for the longest time, Firefox on Wayland was borking the clipboards regularly, forcing a restart of the whole stack (at least on Gnome). That pushed a lot of people to use the X versin of firefox, even if on Wayland. It seems to be fixed for me now but eh... who knows

moritonal 5y ago
Which way around is that? Firefox would be unable to use it's Clipboard and require restarting, or Wayland would require restarting. If it's the later, would it not imply a shaky foundation if an app is able to brick the systems compositor with something as simple as clipboard access?
- jborean93 5y ago
  At least for me it would hang the app trying to retrieve the clipboard value that was set by Firefox. It would continue to hang until I either a) copied data from another app, or b) reloaded sway.
- boudin 5y ago
  In Wayland the data of the clipboard stays in the app where it was "added" to the clipboard and only transit between the application where it was copied to the app where it is pasted when pasted. I think the issue was at this transit stage on Firefox side. It didn't have any impact on the compositor, it would behave differently in the receiving app. Some would crash, some would freeze for a bit, some would be totally fine but would just fail to get the data to paste.
  - di4na 5y ago
    Yep exactly this
  - vidarh 5y ago
    > In Wayland the data of the clipboard stays in the app where it was "added" to the clipboard and only transit between the application where it was copied to the app where it is pasted when pasted. Back to the future... This was how the Amiga clipboard functionality worked (at that point it was because it saved memory), though you could push the data into separate clipboard storage if necessary (e.g. if an application was about to close while a clip was active, or because an application requested a paste).
    - TingPing 5y ago
      It's still a reasonable design, it even allows for passing around zero copy buffers, or streaming large data.
jborean93 5y ago
This was such a frustrating issue and was glad when it was finally fixed. My next bug bear is screen sharing on Wayland. I use a massive monitor and wlroots/sway (I have no idea where the functionality should lie) doesn’t really offer a nice way to share either a specific window or screen range. Chrome has a nice feature where you can share Chrome itself or a specific tab which somewhat mitigates this problem for me so it would be great if Firefox had the same ability. Ultimately it would be great if I could just share anything but the progress on https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlr-protocols/-/issues/93 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlr-protocols/-/issue... is not quite there yet. I just wish I knew how the stack worked so I could potentially judge what the effort would be but I feel like it would he a massive rabbit hole which I just can’t afford.
- hansihe 5y ago
  This actually works somewhat today, but it's all a little hit and miss. For Wayland I believe the currently accepted way if doing screen sharing is through xdg-desktop-portal which has a backend for wlroots and a bunch of other common compositors. I have gotten this to work fairly decently with Firefox at least, but some things are a bit hacky. https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr
  - jborean93 5y ago
    Thanks, I use this for sharing the screen but it only allows me to share a specific screen. It does not offer the ability to share a region [1] or specific window [2] on that screen. Supposedly this is due to API limitations in wlroots or some lower component. [1] https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr/issues/154 https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr/issues/15... [2] https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr/issues/107 https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr/issues/10...
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  I can share the entire screen using Discord/Chrome/Gnome 40/Fedora 34.
dont__panic 5y ago
Does Firefox default to Wayland these days on wayland-default distros? I seem to recall, using a Linux laptop for work just a year or so ago, that I had to set a couple of config variables manually that were really really easy to screw up. Ended up using the X version of FF for a while on Wayland until I figured out what was causing issues in my environment.
- Fronzie 5y ago
  Debian testing is currently still like that. MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 needs to be set before firefox uses wayland.
- di4na 5y ago
  On Fedora at least yes, they try to default on Wayland for everything by default now
tinus_hn 5y ago
Why does Wayland allow an app to break its clipboard that badly?

teekert 5y ago

I always ran wayland (since I got "Ubuntu on Wayland" at the login available), but now my son wants to play minecraft with me so I have to use X. It's just this 1 thing that keeps me off it now. I imaging what the "Why Wayland? Will at some point flip to "Why not Wayland?" When really (almost) everything works.

ajkls899 5y ago
I'd assume minecraft would work in xwayland right? I've been playing a bunch of AAA games (Deus ex games, dying light ect) all on wayland, with sway aswell. I do have an AMD gpu though.
denysvitali 5y ago
Can you add more technical details on why Minecraft doesn't work on Wayland?
- christophilus 5y ago
  Not the op, but I’ve found that Steam + proton is much slower on Wayland. It’s the one thing that makes me log into X every once in a while.
- teekert 5y ago
  Holy cow, I just tested it and it just works on Wayland! I could have sworn that I tried it in the past and it didn't work... Ok, so that was my last reason to use X...

vidarh 5y ago

The caveats given are pretty major. Anyone know which distributions disable telemetry and whether they default to X11 or Wayland?

christophilus 5y ago
Fedora defaults to Wayland, and telemetry is opt in.
rightbyte 5y ago
Hopefully no distribution enables "telemetry" without opt-in?

eternityforest 5y ago

I will run Wayland when it is built into Linux Mint. When they have fixed screenshots and color pickers and network transparency and any other hidden things I don't know about.

christophilus 5y ago
Screenshots don’t work? They work in vanilla Gnome on Fedora. So do color pickers, from what I’ve seen. Though, maybe I’m only using those with my browser. Not sure what you mean by network transparency, though.
- nsajko 5y ago
  Gnome supports those independently of Wayland. Wayland itself sadly deems those and other essential features out-of-scope.
  - eternityforest 5y ago
    Pseudostandards are one of my least favorite patterns ever. You take a protocol that works, then you make a new "Modern flexible unopinionated" protocol and invite people to make their own versions with lots of incompatibilities.
eptcyka 5y ago
X's network transparency is not feasible when using any modern window manager, since you'll still be slinging pixel buffers over the network, and compositing them together on the client. It's just easier to render on the host and just send a single pixel buffer instead of a bunch of them as this is faster and simpler.
- eternityforest 5y ago
  Sure, but the main thing is that if you do ssh -X it does kind of work. I can have one individual window integrated with my normal desktop, from a remote machine. It sucks but it's enough to get a few basic things done. Wayland should surely be able to at least match that! Individual pixel buffers should still be faster if only some of them change regularly, right?

allisdust 5y ago

Wayland still doesn't handle fractional scaling as well as x11 (at least for my laptop) and the text blurriness with fractional scaling is really a show stopper. X11 just works though. Hopefully they will iron out the last of the bugs and this 10 year project will finally achieve its potential.

reactor 5y ago
I had to upgrade Kernel 5.15 to get 4K multi monitor fractional scaling working with Ubuntu on Wayland. But it works quite well now.
tuetuopay 5y ago
Funny, fractional scaling is precisely what convinced me about wayland. Especially with mixed ratios, like you easily get when plugging a laptop to an external screen. My work laptop has a 1080p 14" screen at 1.00 and it's connected to the office's 4K 32" screens with a 1.35 factor, it just works. Good luck getting it to work that well on X11.
- resonious 5y ago
  Same here. I simply cold not get fractional scaling working comfortably on X11 and that's why I've been on Wayland for years now. The cases where fractional scaling doesn't work on Wayland are when you're running an app through XWayland. In those cases, I'd just find an alternative that works with Wayland. That's also what lead me to switch to Firefox full-time - Chromium's Wayland support lagged behind quite a bit.
- salamandersauce 5y ago
  Ubuntu's version of GNOME X11 handles it pretty well. You can workaround it similarly in other DEs/WMs by mucking around with xrandr (I forget exactly). I have an Nvidia card and last time I tried Wayland was just not usable. I also hate how at this point we have 3 choices for Wayland WMs compared to what is probably hundreds for X11. I did get frustrated with mixed DPI on Linux and just ended up replacing my 4K monitor with a 1440p one. What's also kinda sad and funny is that X11 has had from day 1 support for different DPIs on different displays. But most programs just ignore X11s DPI setting and assume it's 96ppi. It also conflicts with modern multi-monitor on Linux which essentially fakes one giant display so you can drag windows across. There is some drawbacks but if you config each monitor to be a separate X11 display with the proper DPI and use compatible programs like Alacritty it kinda just sorta works.

anotherhue 5y ago

Sway & Firefox-wl work pretty great on nixos

mateuszf 5y ago
Using Gnome and Firefox with Wayland on NixOS as well. No issues whatsover.
reuben364 5y ago
I've had a few issues (NixOS, sway). Mainly screen capture. XWayland apps can record windows, but not my whole screen. Wayland apps can record my whole screen but not individual windows. I also don't know how to get XWayland to match my sway display resolution as it is only half the resolution. Also libinput via sway doesn't have a way to disable the touchscreen if I'm using a stylus as far as I'm aware. I'm sure there are solutions to some of these, but given I already spend a significant amount of time fiddling with my NixOS configuration I'm already quite an outlier with regards to the amount of effort I am willing to spend and even I'm exhausted.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  I need to know more about touchscreens and disabling touch but not stylus operations. Where can I find out more about this? What does it mean, physically? Where is the distinction handled?
  - reuben364 5y ago
    The stylus I'm using operates independently from the capacitive touchscreen and is presented as a separate input device by libinput. The stylus needs external power and the input reports not just xy, but z coordinates. Physically I am not sure whats going on, and struggled to find anything authoritative on the subject.

turbinerneiter 5y ago

Doesn't the graph show the opposite? According to the legend the green shows Wayland which is by far the biggest area? Have I forgotten how to read graphs? Edit: Graph starts at 90%, oh how I hate when they do that.

roenxi 5y ago
The graph is bad - the y axis is way off.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  I can't read that graph. It seems to show 100% X11 usage throughout (while also using various Waylands).
- jart 5y ago
  The article is bad too. I can't decipher this sentence. > X11 is showing to be in use above 90% over the span of this multi-month data and on average seems to be about 93% currently to Wayland at roughly 7%. If the chart was really supplied by the Mozilla Telemetry team then it's quite an embarrassment. When analytics is your profession you should know better than to do things like use red and blue alongside each other. Even if you're not colorblind, #afa7f4 (desaturated blue) and #98b4fe (desaturated purple) are hard to distinguish because Chrome says the contrast ratio is 1.06. See https://personal.sron.nl/~pault/ https://personal.sron.nl/~pault/ to learn more.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

I really hope wayland doesn't become to x11 what IPV6 is to ipv4. Because after so many years, a lot of the ecosystem hasn't moved, or is even not compatible with it. Good multi display support is missing, and some games don't render well. I want it to succeed, and the project has been progressing non-stop, but it does show how much time and energy such an endeavor takes. I was expecting to be able to use it for years and years. See also: BTRFS

iqanq 5y ago
btrfs is a drop-in replacement. Nothing changes for the user when they switch to it. With Wayland many basic features are missing even today. (Yes I know someone will explain here that everything works. Don't make me laugh)
- krageon 5y ago
  > Nothing changes for the user when they switch to it. You must perform regular maintenance on btrfs or it will quite simply break. This is a huge departure from for example ext4, which is (to the end user at least) hassle free.
  - byhemechi 5y ago
    this is not my experience, btrfs has been just as stable as ext4 and zfs for me. maybe i've just been lucky?
    - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
      Ext4 is transparent for me, but I can confirm BTRFS to have failed me several times. n = 1 of course.
    - pizza234 5y ago
      I'm not sure about the "maintenance" part, however, my experience was: - a few years ago, one system would suddently not boot (due to btrfs); this happened twice - nowadays, on one system, background scrub doesn't start This is anecdata of course, but I've never had a good impression overall. I don't see any reason to use btrfs rather than ZFS, considering that Ubuntu and derivatives are starting to add builtin support.

mateuszf 5y ago

I'm not sure what do the number mean. Percentage of users running Firefox using Wayland WM/DE or percentage of users running Firefox with enabled Wayland support? These numbers in theory could be dramatically different, as Firefox with enabled Wayland is not a default yet.

the8472 5y ago

My FF-related reason for using X11 that drag&drop from FF to Nemo doesn't work under sway but does work under i3. Trying several combinations of environment variables to switch between native and xwayland mode didn't make a difference. The second reason, not related to FF, is that wine-wayland is still experimental.

kwhitefoot 5y ago

Why should a Linux user care whether the display uses X11 or Wayland? Is there a summary somewhere that explains why, or if, it would benefit me to put any effort into switching?

nsajko 5y ago
Wayland is the new option, that surprisingly (since X is quite ugly) manages to have a much worse design than X. Wayland (as a consequence of its design) isn't really a single option, rather each DE and WM does it's own implementation of lots of stuff, with different interfaces. So please don't use it as you would be supporting fragmentation and death of the Linux desktop.
- kaba0 5y ago
  > Wayland is the new option, that surprisingly (since X is quite ugly) manages to have a much worse design than X. Citation needed. And no, it doesn’t support fragmentation - it is a protocol with multiple implementations - which is a good thing! It means that noone will code against the implementation, but the protocol. (And in practice, there are very few non-standard extensions that supposed to be cross-platform. Those are mostly for DE-specific functions)
  - nsajko 5y ago
    TBH I remember your other comments about Wayland across many threads, and most of them have a quality of being confused in such a manner as to provoke long answers and derail the discussion. > a protocol with multiple implementations - which is a good thing The protocol is severely lacking in features. This means the "compositors" end up doing most stuff independently of Wayland, in mutually incompatible way of course. Thus the fragmentation of the Linux desktop: Gnome vs KDE vs wlroots, etc.
    - kaba0 5y ago
      Am I more of a troll than the other low-effort comments claiming false things like “wayland manages to have worse design than X (without any concrete example)”, or that it causes fragmentation in desktop when fragmentation has always been a thing? Good luck using anything dbus-related thing under a minimal wm like dwm.

giords 5y ago

Wayland is the new IPv6

the_duke 5y ago

It's notable that Firefox performance is a lot better on Wayland. Depending on the compositor of course. Which leads to a big misconception that many users have, even here on Hackernews. "Wayland doesn't support Y" or "Z doesn't work on Wayland" statements only make very limited sense. Wayland is just a protocol. Unlike X, there is no shared codebase that is used by all implementations - aka compositors. There are several important compositors, all with their own individual quirks. Which is part of the problem...

conaclos 5y ago
> It's notable that Firefox performance is a lot better on Wayland I would like to know more about that. Have you some resources that demonstrate that? > Depending on the compositor of course. Which one do you use?
- jeppesen-io 5y ago
  Not OP but I concur. If not faster, at least feels much snappier. on Gnome 41
nsajko 5y ago
> "Wayland doesn't support Y" or "Z doesn't work on Wayland" statements only make very limited sense. No. Essential features depend on the "compositor" because Wayland doesn't support them. You're mixing up interface and implementation.
vidarh 5y ago
X11 is just a protocol too. There's no shared codebase used by all implementations of X11 either. But the reason for that misconception is presumably that what most users would customise with X was replacing the WM - there was little demand for lots of different X servers other than for very specific needs or different platforms. Meanwhile with Wayland, we need a compositor to replace every X wm people still care about. For me, that's the big blocker - as long as there's no drop-in replacement for bspwm, it's a hassle for me to move over and none of the "benefits" of Wayland matter to me. (EDIT: In fact, because of how Wayland shifts responsibilities, Wayland has led to more code being shared between compositors via projects like wlroots because the burden to implement a Wayland compositor is far higher than to implement a window manager for X, and more people care about window management functionality than the low level server functionality; eventually I believe and hope we'll end up with a couple of dominant compositors with a common set of extensions supported for all the "missing" X functionality, including a wm extension, and we'll be back at pretty much parity with X)

GekkePrutser 5y ago

Be aware that some other unixes are often corned as Linux. I use Firefox on FreeBSD and most third party websites identify me as Linux (except Firefox itself). I can't run Wayland because KDE on Wayland is currently broken on FreeBSD :)

tyingq 5y ago

The developer channel version of WSL2 comes with Wayland, which might help push adoption a bit. https://github.com/microsoft/wslg https://github.com/microsoft/wslg

zwog 5y ago

I found no suitable replacement for demnu/j4-menu on Wayland, so I stick to using Gnome on X. It's that simple. I don't know much about window servers and have no idea why I should use Wayland instead of X.

42jd 5y ago
I use bemenu (https://github.com/Cloudef/bemenu https://github.com/Cloudef/bemenu) as my replacement for dmenu.

mateuszf 5y ago

By the way, assuming I'm running Wayland - anyone maybe knows a way for me to check if any of the apps I have/run are using X11?

sylware 5y ago

It is like windoz, the default install on nearly all sold PCs: because x11 is the default for firefox on mainstream distros. What to do: eat the bullet and change the default of the mainstream distros.

roshansingh 5y ago

I was not able to share screen on Wayland so had to switch to X.

aqaq2 5y ago

Shadonototra 5y ago

Unity 8 and MIR died for this...