4 ms·

Don’t fear the Wayland. Wait patiently for the pain points to be worked out, and then reap the reward of a smoother and more robust desktop. I’ve been running

by jchw 4y ago

Don’t fear the Wayland. Wait patiently for the pain points to be worked out, and then reap the reward of a smoother and more robust desktop. I’ve been running SwayWM for multiple years and it’s been great. There’s not anything I’m aware of that I can’t do in wlroots compositors; I even have Zoom screenshare working on my work computer under SwayWM. Most stuff, like WebRTC, doesn’t even require manual tweaks; just need the right packages installed. And you get the typical Wayland benefits, like great support for heterogeneous DPI, reduced jank, and potentially better robustness. (Depends on compositor for now; but there is a path towards compositor crash recovery, which should make things far better.) A comparable Wayland compositor to Xmonad will likely rise as a good successor in the future.

octoberfranklin 4y ago
> Wait patiently for the pain points to be worked out Efficient remote desktop. Won't happen, ever. Simply cannot happen. Blits from offscreen to onscreen surfaces bypass the compositor, so it can't implement them as RDP commands and instead has to push the whole image across the pipe every time. This is why xorgxrdp is so crazy fast and responsive compared to every single Wayland RDP server. I use sway (a Wayland compositor) on all my machines. But all of my headless machines run xorgxrdp because there is nothing in the Wayland world that is even close. This is a fundamental problem with Wayland that cannot be fixed until there is a perspective change on the Wayland committees. Sending surface-to-surface-copy commands through the compositor clashes with their worldview, but without it we will never have decent remote display -- even (as they say) as "the task of a higher-layer protocol".
- jchw 4y ago
  That’s fine, but applications that can efficiently do that are slowly disappearing in favor of direct hardware acceleration, with software rendered offscreen rendering as the fallback, so those days are quite numbered now. That said, the best way to go in the future is probably going to be something more like waypipe. edit: People seem skeptical, but… GTK4: https://discourse.gnome.org/t/gtk4-efficiency-and-performance-in-x11-export-remote-drawing-mode/8786/2 https://discourse.gnome.org/t/gtk4-efficiency-and-performanc... Qt 5: https://forum.qt.io/topic/67371/x11-forwarding-slow-on-qt-5-applications https://forum.qt.io/topic/67371/x11-forwarding-slow-on-qt-5-... Electron/Chromium: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/5243 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/5243 Even my terminal emulator of choice; only fallback is software rendering. Hope you can stomach video codecs, because that’s where we’re headed unless you stop updating your software.
  - bandrami 4y ago
    > so those days are quite numbered now. Yes, I've been hearing that for 14 years now about several workflows Wayland broke (remote clients, etc.) and it keeps not happening.
    - jchw 4y ago
      I'm happy to take bets on it.
    - vetinari 4y ago
      Current GNOME has RDP server build-in. It is a bit cumbersome, but it is there, works, and the cumbersomeness will be improved upon.
      - bandrami 4y ago
        RDP is not remotely (no pun intended) the same thing. It solves an entirely different class of problem.
        vetinari 4y ago
        RDP is not that different from networked X11 as you think it is. RDP originally also transmitted GDI commands, just like X11 transmitted X11 commands. RDP can also remote only a single app (it is called RemoteApp), it is not bound to remoting entire desktop. Actually, Wayland apps running under WSLg use RDP underneath to integrate with the Windows desktop.
  - uecker 4y ago
    Yes, it is really heart breaking how the Linux desktop is regressing. Instead of polishing the experience and focusing replacing Xlib with XCB which would make it possible to have excellent native performance, a huge amount of resources are invested in rewriting everything for Wayland. Now more than a decade later, things are still not even working properly (yes, maybe it works for you), with no credible plan for remote desktop, and instead toolkits just getting worse for X11. And then I have to say, from an engineering perspective, I find X to have vastly superior design (despite all the propaganda otherwise).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
Gigachad 4y ago
Been using Wayland for about 6 years now. I'm not sure X11 is ready for use yet. Every time I try it I get terrible screen tearing and can't set the DPI scaling correct for my second monitor. The trackpad also seems to work much worse for some reason.
- lproven 4y ago
  Har de har har. This is part of the thing that annoys me about Wayland boosterism: people complaining about the need to fix stuff I can't see, don't care about and honestly think does not matter to 80%+ of people. Screen tearing? Never seen it. Don't care. Different DPI on different monitors? Can be fixed on X. Works in Cinnamon. Also GNOME and KDE but I find them unusable. HiDPI support? Don't care. Don't own a HD monitor. Don't use anything with a 3D card in it. It's for gamers AFAICS. I'm old and grumpy. It works, there are games, Steam works on Linux now. Trackpads? Oh, those toy things on cheap plastic laptops? Don't care. I use Thinkpads. I turn the toy pointer thing off. For me, this all falls under: Here's a nickel, kid, go buy yourself a console.
  - Comevius 4y ago
    You are just old and grumpy. There is a heck of a lot more use for a GPU other than gaming, including content creation, which also benefits from higher resolution and dynamic range displays, though X and Wayland can't handle HDR yet. Graphics libraries like Skia, browsers, the Android emulator and so on all take advantage of your GPU. OpenCL, CUDA, mixed-precision computing, transcoding, ray-tracing are all accelerated with a GPU.
    - jchw 4y ago
      Wayland can handle HDR, and wlroots/sway supports it too.
      - Comevius 4y ago
        That can't be true, the Wayland people are currently working on a Weston reference implementation before changing the protocol to support HDR. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/weston/-/issues/467 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/weston/-/issues/467 The DRM KMS API can be used to pass HDR metadata to the monitor, so it's not impossible to write a software to take advantage of that, but I don't know any that does.
rawoke083600 4y ago
>Don’t fear the Wayland. Wait patiently for the pain points to be worked out, and then reap the reward of a smoother and more robust desktop. I hear you, and I know there are good parts in Wayland (I just dont know them yet) but dammit, it feels like the Linux desktop has just in the last few years started to become "nice and stable" and predictable compatible with many things, and now we starting from scratch :(
- jchw 4y ago
  Good news: we aren’t really. When I first started using Linux, graphics drivers were mostly drivers for XFree86. Today, the modern Linux graphics stack with kms/drm is used by most drivers, and now Xorg can use kms+drm instead. Same for input drivers… but now most people on Xorg are using libinput, which is what Wayland compositors use, too. Libinput handles your mouse, graphics tablet, touchpad, keyboard, etc. Even Pipewire! When pulseaudio started, a huge obstacle was indeed just buggy audio drivers. Undoubtedly we still have those. But also, it’s a much better situation today than it was. Also, a lot of the ideas already existed in JACK, Pulse, etc. So while a lot of stuff is indeed newer and still needing to mature, the typical Wayland desktop shares a lot in common with a modern Xorg setup thanks to gradual improvements.
rawoke083600 4y ago
This Wayland Vs X11 reminds me of that saying:"The last of the old tech is usually better than the first of the new tech". Sorta like how the state-of-the-art "Ox Cart" was probably better than the very first generation of an automobile. I think we that is where the Wayland-vs-X11 currently is. For what it's worth, I love my Ox Cart with years of patches and bells and whistle that I know just how to kick-and-push to make everything work, even those nvidia-drivers that came of course straight form hell !
- akho 4y ago
  Wayland has been around for 13 years now. That’s an eternity in software years. It still hasn’t caught up with X11 for many use-cases. There’s clearly some sort of problem (I suspect that it’s not a technical one).

by jchw 4y ago

octoberfranklin 4y ago

> Wait patiently for the pain points to be worked out Efficient remote desktop. Won't happen, ever. Simply cannot happen. Blits from offscreen to onscreen surfaces bypass the compositor, so it can't implement them as RDP commands and instead has to push the whole image across the pipe every time. This is why xorgxrdp is so crazy fast and responsive compared to every single Wayland RDP server. I use sway (a Wayland compositor) on all my machines. But all of my headless machines run xorgxrdp because there is nothing in the Wayland world that is even close. This is a fundamental problem with Wayland that cannot be fixed until there is a perspective change on the Wayland committees. Sending surface-to-surface-copy commands through the compositor clashes with their worldview, but without it we will never have decent remote display -- even (as they say) as "the task of a higher-layer protocol".

jchw 4y ago
That’s fine, but applications that can efficiently do that are slowly disappearing in favor of direct hardware acceleration, with software rendered offscreen rendering as the fallback, so those days are quite numbered now. That said, the best way to go in the future is probably going to be something more like waypipe. edit: People seem skeptical, but… GTK4: https://discourse.gnome.org/t/gtk4-efficiency-and-performance-in-x11-export-remote-drawing-mode/8786/2 https://discourse.gnome.org/t/gtk4-efficiency-and-performanc... Qt 5: https://forum.qt.io/topic/67371/x11-forwarding-slow-on-qt-5-applications https://forum.qt.io/topic/67371/x11-forwarding-slow-on-qt-5-... Electron/Chromium: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/5243 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/5243 Even my terminal emulator of choice; only fallback is software rendering. Hope you can stomach video codecs, because that’s where we’re headed unless you stop updating your software.
- bandrami 4y ago
  > so those days are quite numbered now. Yes, I've been hearing that for 14 years now about several workflows Wayland broke (remote clients, etc.) and it keeps not happening.
  - jchw 4y ago
    I'm happy to take bets on it.
  - vetinari 4y ago
    Current GNOME has RDP server build-in. It is a bit cumbersome, but it is there, works, and the cumbersomeness will be improved upon.
    - bandrami 4y ago
      RDP is not remotely (no pun intended) the same thing. It solves an entirely different class of problem.
      - vetinari 4y ago
        RDP is not that different from networked X11 as you think it is. RDP originally also transmitted GDI commands, just like X11 transmitted X11 commands. RDP can also remote only a single app (it is called RemoteApp), it is not bound to remoting entire desktop. Actually, Wayland apps running under WSLg use RDP underneath to integrate with the Windows desktop.
- uecker 4y ago
  Yes, it is really heart breaking how the Linux desktop is regressing. Instead of polishing the experience and focusing replacing Xlib with XCB which would make it possible to have excellent native performance, a huge amount of resources are invested in rewriting everything for Wayland. Now more than a decade later, things are still not even working properly (yes, maybe it works for you), with no credible plan for remote desktop, and instead toolkits just getting worse for X11. And then I have to say, from an engineering perspective, I find X to have vastly superior design (despite all the propaganda otherwise).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

Gigachad 4y ago

Been using Wayland for about 6 years now. I'm not sure X11 is ready for use yet. Every time I try it I get terrible screen tearing and can't set the DPI scaling correct for my second monitor. The trackpad also seems to work much worse for some reason.

lproven 4y ago
Har de har har. This is part of the thing that annoys me about Wayland boosterism: people complaining about the need to fix stuff I can't see, don't care about and honestly think does not matter to 80%+ of people. Screen tearing? Never seen it. Don't care. Different DPI on different monitors? Can be fixed on X. Works in Cinnamon. Also GNOME and KDE but I find them unusable. HiDPI support? Don't care. Don't own a HD monitor. Don't use anything with a 3D card in it. It's for gamers AFAICS. I'm old and grumpy. It works, there are games, Steam works on Linux now. Trackpads? Oh, those toy things on cheap plastic laptops? Don't care. I use Thinkpads. I turn the toy pointer thing off. For me, this all falls under: Here's a nickel, kid, go buy yourself a console.
- Comevius 4y ago
  You are just old and grumpy. There is a heck of a lot more use for a GPU other than gaming, including content creation, which also benefits from higher resolution and dynamic range displays, though X and Wayland can't handle HDR yet. Graphics libraries like Skia, browsers, the Android emulator and so on all take advantage of your GPU. OpenCL, CUDA, mixed-precision computing, transcoding, ray-tracing are all accelerated with a GPU.
  - jchw 4y ago
    Wayland can handle HDR, and wlroots/sway supports it too.
    - Comevius 4y ago
      That can't be true, the Wayland people are currently working on a Weston reference implementation before changing the protocol to support HDR. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/weston/-/issues/467 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/weston/-/issues/467 The DRM KMS API can be used to pass HDR metadata to the monitor, so it's not impossible to write a software to take advantage of that, but I don't know any that does.

rawoke083600 4y ago

>Don’t fear the Wayland. Wait patiently for the pain points to be worked out, and then reap the reward of a smoother and more robust desktop. I hear you, and I know there are good parts in Wayland (I just dont know them yet) but dammit, it feels like the Linux desktop has just in the last few years started to become "nice and stable" and predictable compatible with many things, and now we starting from scratch :(

jchw 4y ago
Good news: we aren’t really. When I first started using Linux, graphics drivers were mostly drivers for XFree86. Today, the modern Linux graphics stack with kms/drm is used by most drivers, and now Xorg can use kms+drm instead. Same for input drivers… but now most people on Xorg are using libinput, which is what Wayland compositors use, too. Libinput handles your mouse, graphics tablet, touchpad, keyboard, etc. Even Pipewire! When pulseaudio started, a huge obstacle was indeed just buggy audio drivers. Undoubtedly we still have those. But also, it’s a much better situation today than it was. Also, a lot of the ideas already existed in JACK, Pulse, etc. So while a lot of stuff is indeed newer and still needing to mature, the typical Wayland desktop shares a lot in common with a modern Xorg setup thanks to gradual improvements.

rawoke083600 4y ago

This Wayland Vs X11 reminds me of that saying:"The last of the old tech is usually better than the first of the new tech". Sorta like how the state-of-the-art "Ox Cart" was probably better than the very first generation of an automobile. I think we that is where the Wayland-vs-X11 currently is. For what it's worth, I love my Ox Cart with years of patches and bells and whistle that I know just how to kick-and-push to make everything work, even those nvidia-drivers that came of course straight form hell !

akho 4y ago
Wayland has been around for 13 years now. That’s an eternity in software years. It still hasn’t caught up with X11 for many use-cases. There’s clearly some sort of problem (I suspect that it’s not a technical one).