23 ms·

Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

117 points by pmoriarty 4y ago

KerrAvon 4y ago
I’d have a lot more respect for this web page if it concentrated on the truly problematic stuff like lack of BSD support and not so much complaining about Wayland fixing intractable X11 security holes.
- craftkiller 4y ago
  I run wayland (sway) on FreeBSD with intel graphics. It runs fine. My only FreeBSD-specific problem is firefox on wayland on FreeBSD always has a "stuck" tab that you close and it doesn't actually go away. It just becomes non-interactable and wastes space in your tab bar.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jakedata 4y ago
As a resident of Wayland I find that it breaks web searches with irrelevant results about software.
- plaguepilled 4y ago
  What did you mean by this?
  - jakedata 4y ago
    Wayland is the name of a town. Generic internet searches for "Wayland" often yield results about the software rather than the town, especially because my web search history is quite Linux heavy. Of course this was a tongue-in-cheek reply but true nonetheless.
Pakdef 4y ago
When you have too many software engineers, things break.
- xbar 4y ago
  This joke may not be funny, feel free to downvote: were you expecting more from the pandemic?
avg_dev 4y ago
I had this problem a while back where I would screen share on zoom and seemingly leftover memory from videos I’d watched in the browser showed up in certain circumstances to people viewing my screen. Utterly horrific. I believe wayland does in fact fix this issue. Does anybody have more context on what’s going on?
- suby 4y ago
  I've never had that happen, but that does sound pretty terrible. It might be worth installing a second browser exclusively for use with zoom as a possible temporary fix.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  That's nightmare inducing.
- AnotherGoodName 4y ago
  A classic problem to do with hardware overlays. It's also why screenshots of videos sometimes have blacked out video in the screenshot. 'Hardware overlay' is an old video acceleration trick to write processed video straight to the output framebuffer. It bypasses the OS windowing system completely and if you as a developer get it wrong in any way you get video peeking through other apps. Video playing via a hardware overlay' has caused such issues for 30 years now. Not just on xorg or Wayland as you'll sometimes see this on windows too.
  - hakfoo 4y ago
    I recall in the old days, you could get the cheap BT848/878 TV tuner cards. They just merrily piped data into the framebuffer, so if you had things configured right, it would draw a black rectangle, expecting the card to drop video on it, and the actual video would be offset 25 pixels to the left and below the.
    - LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
      And guess what? It worked, even on NetBSD. And you could move it with the tv-stream playing without tearing. And scaling too! Still have one such thing in PCI, gathering dust in some box.
Symmetry 4y ago
Most of those seem like a consequence of good design? I don't want one process to be able to decide that it's windows should be higher priority than another process, or see what's displayed on another processes windows, or steal keystrokes from windows owned by another process. So I think the net effect of that list is to make me less likely to use Xorg.
- armada651 4y ago
  Good security doesn't prevent users from executing a legitimate use case though. A user can have legitimate reasons for wanting to share a certain window or their entire screen with a process like Zoom. Once you start preventing users from executing their use case you turn the user into an adversary. They'll start undermining your security model and you will always lose that fight. This is why permission models exist, make the user aware of the security implications and allow the user to decide on a per-app basis what permissions should be granted. Make the user complimentary to your security model rather than making them an adversary.
  - hackerbrother 4y ago
    Is a standard Google Meet meeting in Chrome for Linux on a Wayland desktop not functional?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - dralley 4y ago
      I use Google Meet on Firefox on Wayland. Screen sharing works fine (now). It didn't for a while, admittedly, but now it does.
      - linsomniac 4y ago
        I'm using Google Meet via Firefox on Ubuntu 22.04 and have not had any success with screen or window sharing, so YMMV.
cp9 4y ago
Counterpoint: wayland has features X will never support
- jmclnx 4y ago
  Care to list what they are ? I know the one missing function, network transparency :)
  - dralley 4y ago
    It can be done https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/emersion/waypipe https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/emersion/waypipe
  - jakogut 4y ago
    Display independent DPI scaling. For instance, if you have multiple monitors of different sizes/resolutions, you can scale them independently to have text and windows appear the same size on all of them.
  - cp9 4y ago
    Different DPI per display is the big one. A security story that isn’t ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - kaba0 4y ago
    That wasn’t really true of Xorg for decades to begin with unless you were using some XMotif applications. Other frameworks’ output is predominantly just bitmaps, good luck using that over anything other than local networks. That problem has a better solution, there really is no reason why the display manager should try to solve it (badly).
  - Mockapapella 4y ago
    I believe Simula is built on wayland due to some wayland specific features
- josephcsible 4y ago
  So? Clearly we don't need them for anything important, since we've managed without them up until now. That isn't true of the features that X has but Wayland doesn't.
PennRobotics 4y ago
I think there are two group opinions in this discussion and both are correct: The concept of Wayland is great and well-implemented. The implementation of Wayland is bad. Now if only the first group would trust the second's experiences with Wayland. It really is trash. Firefox will stop updating the window contents but will still accept clicks and keypresses. You can either start a new Firefox process or go to the application switcher to see the updated window contents. OpenSCAD editor has a one second lag between a keypress and the character appearing. Those are the two that affect me everyday.
- socceroos 4y ago
  In my ~6 years of using Wayland I've never experienced anything like this. In fact, my experience has been that the entire desktop experience was smoother and less buggy. Admittedly, I've steered clear of NVIDIA products which may have helped.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - craftkiller 4y ago
    You also may have a different config. For example, I use fractional scaling on my laptop (1.5x) which means firefox sometimes crashes when I open the menu, but when I'm using my external monitor at 1x scaling it runs fine so you'd never notice. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1693474 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1693474
    - PennRobotics 4y ago
      I have a 30-bit 4K monitor. It's been an adventure learning about environmental flags and how "the root problem is upstream/downstream from our project"
  - yw3410 4y ago
    I used Wayland for almost everything (AMD GPU), but the performance for some applications such as Blender are absolutely abysmal currently. I have to switch to X when using those apps.
duskwuff 4y ago
A lot of these complaints seem to boil down to a couple of key issues: 1) Wayland isn't X11. Applications whose core purpose is interacting with X11 features (e.g. xrandr, xprop, window managers) won't work on Wayland. 2) Screen recording on Wayland remains an incompletely solved problem, and a lot of applications don't support it yet. 3) Global key capture is, similarly, not a solved problem.
- Sakos 4y ago
  If I were PM for a consumer-facing product, number 2 would be a blocker for me and a critical issue. It's such a basic, common, everyday use case that it's mind-boggling to me that they're dropping the ball on it.
  - orwin 4y ago
    At my previous job, we actually recorded screens of users (and kept activity records ~3months). We couldn't serve them wayland, but X11 was enough (it was mostly datascience) (And by the way, it was only in one of our offer, the most expensive one, and sold as a feature, it was not some shady stuff)
  - berkut 4y ago
    Especially in the era of working from home now: I regularly need to share my screen to demo stuff, or record screen recordings of WIP prototypes... Even for code reviews sometimes it's easier to do it via screensharing with a full IDE for jumping around the code...
    - nhumrich 4y ago
      Yes, I was using Wayland fairly comfortably but am now using x again thanks to screen sharing and all the different conference tools everyone uses.
  - dralley 4y ago
    #2 is a solved problem. I use Wayland and screen sharing works fine for every app I use (browser-based video chat, OBS). The problem is adoption of the new APIs, not the lack of a solution.
MBCook 4y ago
While this post is obviously being updated it goes back many years. I know there are people who don’t like Wayland’s design or goals. Same with systemd. But we still hear constant complaining. The big distros appear to have decided on these as the future. You don’t have to like it, you don’t have to use it. But the other (or older) options aren’t going to get much development. I’m not sure such posts are very productive this many years in.
- jrm4 4y ago
  Do you understand that what you are saying is directly and perfectly antithetical to Free and perhaps even merely Open Source, software? (the Wayland people apparently didn't, that's for sure)
  - em-bee 4y ago
    the reverse is true. FOSS developers are free to work on whatever they want. X11 devs decided they didn't like to work on X11 anymore and created wayland instead. you don't have to like it and you are free to contribute to X11 yourself if it is important to you, but wayland devs don't have any obligations here
    - jrm4 4y ago
      Absolutely. But also, I have no obligations to like or respect what they do either. I think they're going the wrong way and I can say so. The freedom works both ways, and I don't think we should shield them from criticism.
      - em-bee 4y ago
        i strongly disagree. criticism must be constructive and helpful. and developers absolutely should be shielded from criticism, especially FOSS developers, because if we don't then they will stop sharing. basically, ask yourself: is your response friendly and helpful and likely to motivate the developer to consider your issue, or are you venting your frustration. if it's the latter, then please just don't. see here for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31945618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31945618 i made a similar comment a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31679373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31679373 users should be free to be critical of it absolutely not. you can say: "unfortunately, i have this problem, so i can't use this, i am going to go use something else". but that's about it. criticism is the bane of our society. criticism hurts peoples feelings. criticism causes burnout. FOSS maintainers are volunteers and absolutely do not deserve that kind of criticism for just developing software. (that doesn't put them above any criticism. if they are rude or mean to their users, then that may well be criticized. but not if they ignore a problem or are unresponsive. they may well have other things in their life that are more important than to care about your software issue) (and if the developer is paid, direct any criticism at the company, but don't beat up the employee who may not have the freedom to choose what issues to work on) Being open source doesn't mean nobody should dare criticise you if you didn't pay for it, it means exactly that.
ggm 4y ago
I am just popping up here to say from X10R4 onwards, I have never understood why MIT took a concept we understand around client-server, and completely inverted the meaning for anyone approaching it anew. Here i am connecting to a remote device via a telnet, running an xterm to display "back home". Whats the server? the local thing. Whats the client? the thing I run on the remote host: xterm. Now step outside X. whats the client? the xterm. Whats the server? the remote host. Semantic confusion is real folks. "Display server" only partially fixed it because people never remember to vocalise the qualifyer. And then you get Xterminals as physical devices, with "local" clients and now client-server is really really confusing.
- adamius 4y ago
  The only way I understand it and stay sane is to say that "the X server serves out access to a display surface which clients like xterm connect to in order to show what they need to show". The X server runs on my machine since that is the display being shared and my programs need a connection to that display. That's the pragmatic explanation I use. Otherwise, and especially if you think servers are somehow always somewhere out there, you'll get a rude counter example. Server just means provider of service and thats about it. You're tripping up on your own assumption. This is why you can telnet/ssh to a server out there, set the display variable to point back to your machine and xterm will try and connect to your machine. Its wanting a connection to your display to show things and to do so it needs a display server, ie yours. That all probably made sense.
- lokedhs 4y ago
  Let's say you are using a Linux workstation and you fire up ngnix on it to host some web site for testing. You then ssh into a remote server and type "curl https://your-workstation/some-name-here https://your-workstation/some-name-here". In this case, your local machine is the server and curl is the client. This is exactly the same as in the X server case. Your server is running on your machine, and the client is running on the remote machine (which happens to be a server).
- h2odragon 4y ago
  with X, the resource being served is your eyes. That is not the only instance of "well this was technically correct but confusing and now its Enshrined and May never be Touched all Hail Compatibility" or whatever the impulse for wart retention is. However the whole mess goes to show to me that there is no one true Display System and that there need to be more efforts in this arena, obviously there's still unfilled needs and people feel the compromised currently forced by the available choices are constricting. OpenGL needs yet another networking extension. That'll fix it.
saulrh 4y ago
That's a terrifyingly toxic comments thread.
- jrm4 4y ago
  Wayland is/was a terrifyingly toxic way to do software in the FOSS world. If you want to go break things that people love, you might as well go work for Apple or Microsoft.
- kaba0 4y ago
  For some reason Systemd, Wayland, Gnome and Firefox are regularly the target of these.. when all are decent, open-source softwares. One is free to dislike/not use them, but it seems to be attacked most who are supposedly on the “same side”..
plaguepilled 4y ago
Wayland's design reflects it's security model: more news at 11.
jrm4 4y ago
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. And I keep hearing arguments about how broke X is or was and none much seem to carry water. Lots of loud hypothetical security issues and literally no remotely significant problems that I, a 20+ year Linux user, ever encountered. Wayland's just a joke to me now.
- dralley 4y ago
  I, for one, did encounter a lot of problems with Xorg. Primarily videos that were completely unwatchable due to screen tearing in VLC player whereas under a Wayland session everything worked perfectly. And this was years ago before Wayland was even mature.
  - jrm4 4y ago
    This and scaling are literally the only ones I've ever seen "in the wild," and in my experience hasn't been remotely close to a deal breaker for most.
    - commoner 4y ago
      I find the screen tearing on X11 to be distracting, and it's definitely a deal-breaker for me. That and X11's comparatively poor HiDPI handling (especially for fractional scaling) encouraged me to switch to Wayland years ago. Most new laptop displays are now high enough in resolution to require some type of display scaling (often fractional) to accomodate the average person's eyesight, and I want my software to work smoothly with my hardware.
MrWiffles 4y ago
This...seems like complete and total bullshit. It's so bad-faith I'm not going to bother responding to each pseudo-point. They're not wrong in a general sense that Wayland isn't a 1:1 compatible x replacement yet - that part is absolutely true - but this whole "boycott wayland!" nonsense is just done in such a way that I can only conclude malice as the author's objective. Wayland DOES work with fractional scaling values. It's labeled "experimental" right now but in my personal experience it works fine on both GNOME and KDE. "Nothing we can do from the $SOMESOFTWARE side so we're closing this issue." stuff is also bullshit. Yes, there IS something you can do from your side software wise, and that's UPDATE THE GOD DAMN SOFTWARE. Steam w/ Wine works out of the box with Wayland and GNOME on Fedora Workstation 36. I just did daily quests in The Elder Scrolls Online with it earlier today. I can even run Elden Ring in the exact same configuration. With a damn controller, no less. So yeah, this is just bullshit.
- ndiddy 4y ago
  > Wayland DOES work with fractional scaling values. It's labeled "experimental" right now but in my personal experience it works fine on both GNOME and KDE. I'm not sure about how it works in KDE, but at least in GNOME the way it works is kind of a hack IMO. When you do a 150% scale, it renders to a framebuffer at 3x the resolution of your display and then scales the framebuffer down by 1/2, which compromises the video quality, as well as wasting CPU (and battery life if you use a laptop).
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    Is this true for all windows or only ones running in Xwayland?
  - diffeomorphism 4y ago
    > When you do a 150% scale, it renders to a framebuffer at 3x the resolution of your display and then scales the framebuffer down by 1/2, which compromises the video quality, Isn't that exactly how apple does fractional scaling? > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19052960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19052960
d3nj4l 4y ago
I think it's fascinating how general opinion seems to be becoming more neutral on Wayland compared to the rah-rah days I remember, probably around 2018-19. I personally could never use Wayland - I was pretty set in my i3 config, so GNOME switching to Wayland didn't affect me, but I always had PCs with nvidia GPUS (I like playing games, sue me) and while admittedly, nvidia wasn't working on good faith either, I don't think nvidia users deserved the attitude they got from eg. Sway. Despite that, the amount of effusive praise Wayland got on HN and some linux-centric communities had me jealous. What changed over time? I see that this gist was made in 2020, was it the issues with screensharing that became more pronounced due to COVID induced WFH? Did some major distro enable Wayland by default and therefore brought people out of the woodwork? If someone knows what the history is here I'd be delighted to know. Of course, it's entirely possible I'm misreading the history here: Wayland could've been widely despised back then, or maybe this thread is an outlier. Either way, I'd be happy to see if anybody's got a good pulse check.
- blibble 4y ago
  sway is a drop-in replacement for i3 if you want to try again! (and I think the nvidia issue is solved or close to being solved) wayland has been the only way I've managed to get tear free smooth 60fps on Linux (trying intel, nvidia and amd drivers on Xorg)
  - aaronchall 4y ago
    I'm using i3, specifically i3-gaps and I'm rather interested in switching. I don't have nvidia. Where can I learn more?
    - wezm 4y ago
      https://swaywm.org/ https://swaywm.org/
    - wfleming 4y ago
      The Arch wiki page for Sway is a pretty good starting point: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Sway#Configuration https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Sway#Configuration. FWIW I was also an i3 user for a long time (and xmonad before that), and I’m a very happy convert to Sway.
xedrac 4y ago
I fully support Wayland, but also also recognizing its problems. Most of it boils down to apps that don't natively support Wayland, or incomplete support for some use case. Otherwise I think Wayland has been great.
turboponyy 4y ago
Duh
pcwalton 4y ago
All of this is outweighed by the fact that any application using X11 has complete control of your entire desktop, including other applications. This fact makes Linux desktops using X11 significantly inferior in security to all other operating systems. There is no way to sandbox an application that is allowed to send window events to all other applications, since it can just tell your desktop environment to open a shell and then send commands at will. The only reasonable solution (nested X servers and XSECURITY are not reasonable solutions) is to switch to Wayland.
- happymellon 4y ago
  I had understood that this was also true under ~MacOS and~ Windows. Keylogging and screen monitoring is trivial in Windows. Wayland solves a problem that is present on all systems, but it does it with a sledgehammer. [Edit] I am reminded that MacOS has a sane model for this.
  - MBCook 4y ago
    MacOS does not allow screen sharing (say in Google Chat) of your entire desktop or other windows without user permission. The application has to be added to a list of allowed applications through the System Preferences. Same with intercepting all keyboard input IIRC. Can’t speak to Windows.
    - happymellon 4y ago
      You are correct, I remember now. Although this wasn't always the case, it has been true for a few years now.
      - MBCook 4y ago
        Yeah. Two or three releases I think.
  - pcwalton 4y ago
    macOS has a reasonable security model and it doesn't allow that without explicit (annoying-to-grant) user consent. On Windows, apps that are concerned about RCE can drop privileges and still access the desktop in a secure way. On X11, there is no such option; you have to adopt a Chromium-like content/chrome process model, with the content process having no windowing access whatsoever. Because it's so difficult, almost nobody does this on X11.
MrWiffles 4y ago
Somewhat tangential: I swear I can see the difference in anti-aliasing between X and Wayland. Under the latter it just...looks so much better, smoother, CLEANER. Is that all in my head, or has anyone else noticed that too?
- MBCook 4y ago
  I would assume they have different font rendering paths. Makes sense to me they might look different.
- BearOso 4y ago
  Should be roughly the same. Are you using fractional scaling? That would add an extra layer of supersampling to the screen.
  - MrWiffles 4y ago
    Tried it with and without, and I swear I can see the difference, but it's slight enough that I wouldn't laugh you out of the room if you told me it was psychosomatic. Which is why I asked if anybody else has noticed that same difference :-)
jart 4y ago
Who funds Wayland? I bet it's someone who stands to gain from pouring sand into the Linux desktop engine.
datadata 4y ago
I don't want Wayland to be exactly compatible with Xorg. Progress requires abandoning cruft and committing to a hopefully better design. I moved to Wayland 100% earlier this year and not looking back.
Hizonner 4y ago
Wait, so they fixed the stupid X security holes where any application can steal any other application's keystrokes, read any other application's window content, and interfere with global system behavior by for example grabbing ALL keystrokes... but then they went to client-side window decorations so any application can just impersonate any other? WTF?
- nly 4y ago
  Desktop Linux will never be Android or iOS. Desktop software isn't sand-boxed. If you're running applications you don't fully trust then you've already lost. Every app you install can access your full filesystem, communicate freely with other things on your network, scan your browser history, steal your cookies, and exfiltrate it finds over the internet.
  - Hizonner 4y ago
    Maybe every app YOU install can do all of that stuff... some of us lead more interesting lives. This has always been a problem in X, actually, since there was never an assumption that everything showing on your display would be running on your local computer.
toastal 4y ago
I'll be moving back to X11 soon—and for only one feature: color management. Wayland has no way to handle ICC profiles. There is a working group making slow, but good progress, but is also trying to rethink how color management works in the age of HDR displays. This is a good goal, but if I want to do any color sensitive work now, there's nothing I can do. I also wish there was a clear way to donate to fund this particular effort because the rest of Wayland has been good.
- kaba0 4y ago
  This is a fair criticism I can get behind. But I seriously don’t understand why this football-fan like mentality is so apparent around this thread (and around many open-source programs). Thanks for the level-headed argument (and I also hope that color management will get better)
II2II 4y ago
Sorry, but I don't find the article convincing. The thing about diatribes is that they are a distorted view of reality. My take on Wayland, after using it for several months, is that it is fine for my circumstances. Would I recommend it to other people? No. It doesn't offer a noticeable benefit while the prevalence of software for X suggests that X is the safest bet. On the other hand, Wayland does not deserve the vitriol that is directed towards it.
- charles_kaw 4y ago
  Wayland is pretty much a requirement for any new, high end laptop or desktop setup. X's inconsistent support of hi-dpi displays, mix/match dpi displays, janky hotplug, and hdr makes it almost a non starter for any laptop sold >=2021 that cost more than $1500
  - eadmund 4y ago
    > Wayland is pretty much a requirement for any new, high end laptop or desktop setup. StumpWM is definitely my requirement for using a computer, and it doesn't support Wayland. And yet my laptops and desktop (all of which cost well over $1,500) are pretty wonderfully useful. They would be close to useless if I did not have a Lisp-extensible tiling window manager to run on them.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
DCKing 4y ago
It's a weird strawman to say that Wayland's problem is that it's not a 1:1 replacement for Xorg. I don't think the author understands what Wayland is or what it intends to do, and it's sad that they didn't let that stop them from writing such a piece with incendiary language like this. Wayland isn't a complete replacement of Xorg and has never been intended to be one. Nobody with close knowledge of the project has ever pretended it has - that premise just appears in severe oversimplifications and strawmen. Wayland is just a part of a rethink of how Linux desktop architecture works, together with Freedesktop standards for things like screen casting or window control [1]. The state of complete implementations of those Freedesktop standards - as well as application support - to the point it can replace a lot of X11 is pretty lacking for sure [2]. But that's just unfortunately just what you get when trying to establish such a new architecture in an underfunded and undirected community like the Linux desktop community. No need to "boycott" anything - just use whatever you like on Linux, like you always have. [1]: E.g. contrary to what many people seem to understand, lacking screencasting support is not actually due to faults in """Wayland""", rather apps and desktops not properly supporting a wholly different Freedesktop standard made to work on Wayland compositors and X11 desktops alike (not dependent on any display protocol at all!). Screencasting on macOS, Windows and Wayland is not the display server's job, it's just one of the many things added to the kitchen sink that has become Xorg. [2]: In fairness, it covers enough that it's working for a lot of people's workflows. It should work for way more people though, and I hope we get there.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  > Wayland is just a part of a rethink of how Linux desktop architecture works, together with Freedesktop standards for things like screen casting or window control. Well, that's part of the problem: I think the consensus is that a lot of these solutions are bunk. Wayland doesn't feel like something you'd build a desktop with, it feels like a software API for digital signage or maybe something for an iPad-like UI. This is cool, but shoehorning it into a desktop is a bad idea. The entire desktop space has moved on, Wayland is comparatively low-tech at this point. Quartz is a good example of this. Not only is it more secure than Wayland, it supports features like app indicators and global menus controls. That's a problem. An even bigger problem is that Mutter, the official Wayland implementation, exists exclusively to support GNOME. Other desktop developers are not welcome, instead they're tossed wlroots and told to make do. Developmentally, I think Wayland is a trainwreck. If it is a "rethink", then it should have been used to design a tablet OS instead of a desktop OS that runs desktop software and supposedly supports legacy features/apps. If you disagree, then maybe you'd enjoy Windows 8, which is a similarly brave reimagining of the future of the desktop.
nullc 4y ago
I recently switched back to xorg because of crashing in blender and kdenlive that went away in xorg. (Which I only figured out because I temporarily switched to try to screen record the crashing and found that it went away.) ... but I was shocked at how much faster and responsive Xorg was, -- and because of it have no interest in switching back to wayland even if the crashing issues are resolved.
nsajko 4y ago
The elephant in the room that most people miss in these discussions is that these problems aren't so much bugs with any specific part of the Wayland stack as they are limitations core to the Wayland design. It's not going to get better, because Wayland is a broken/malicious architecture: the protocol basically does nothing useful, leaving essential interfaces such as screen recording for individual "compositors" to define and implement mutually incompatibly. This means that nontrivial applications don't really target Wayland, rather they only target a finite set of Wayland compositors (or other, completely separate software stacks) that they have support for. This sort of works in favor of "big" DEs like Gnome, but for the rest of the ecosystem it would mean death by fragmentation.
- wmf 4y ago
  Other compositors need to stop fighting and copy GNOME's protocols.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    Controversial comment but it seems quite valid. I have never once seen any kind of debate about why the Gnome spec is not workable. It's all open source and widely integrates with the wider ecosystem. Wayland might not be the place for such specs and another common standard should be adopted.
    - wmf 4y ago
      For one thing, the client-side vs. server-side decorations schism is philosophical and has no right answer. But the community simply doesn't have the resources to implement both so AFAIK the GNOME/CSD side mostly pretends SSD doesn't exist and the SSD side complains about being oppressed.
  - nsajko 4y ago
    Even if all current Wayland compositors adopted Gnome's protocol extensions, that wouldn't really solve anything; because another compositor could appear next week and choose to abide by pure Wayland, ignoring Gnome's quasi-standard. Where does that leave app authors?
brudgers 4y ago
Feeling like the brain cycles I was spending thinking about X v Wayland is part of the reason I decided “fuck it” and went back Windows recently. While systemd was pretty much transparent because it happens around the kernel, Wayland-or-X was regularly in my face. It seemed like ultimately something in my world was going to snap and break…two things I relied on were going to make a stand on opposite sides of the line in the sand. And whatever ethical pleasure I might draw from Linux would always be tainted by the consequences of practical smartphone choices. Ultimately predictability has high value for me and Wayland-or-X was mostly a worry. YMMV.
shmerl 4y ago
Use case I'm missing - clipboard sync with a remote host. ssh -X forwards clipboard from remote where you can use something like neovim and clipboard syncs to local desktop. To work around you need to run local terminal in XWayland mode. Something like that for the native Wayland case would be neat. I'm not going to boycott Wayland though, it's a pointless idea.
EddieDante 4y ago
Wayland will never be 1:1 compatible with Xorg. Nor will it ever support all of the hardware that Xorg supports. I won't believe otherwise until Wayland works on my Thinkpad T60 with its ATI Mobility Radeon X1400.
linsomniac 4y ago
6 weeks ago I upgraded from 20.04/Xorg/i3 to 22.04/Wayland/Sway and I've been really disappointed. The 3 big issues are: I can't screen share, can't screencap, and it flakes out every 1-2 weeks and the session crashes and I need to start over. Compared to Xorg where my sessions could run for months, basically indefinitely, and screen/window sharing and just worked. I've been hoping it being in Ubuntu 22.04 would get it the exposure to get this fixed, but I think I'm going to have to switch back to Xorg.
longrod 4y ago
Just use Xorg if you want 1:1 compatibility. For Wayland to be 1:1 compatible it'd have to bend over backwards and do some ninja turtles kind of moves to create a mess nobody wants. The whole point is to be better and better is mostly always incompatible. Although Wayland isn't completely incompatible either but that difference doesn't matter. However... I am still shocked at the wonder Linux Desktop is. The world has entered into VR/AR, AI, and completely stupifying marvels of engineering but we still haven't gotten the Linux Desktop right. It's a downright fragmented mess. And if that wasn't enough, we had to build another windowing server! Now there's more fragmentation and apps that barely got the funding to work on X or get ported there will never see daylight on Wayland. Yay! Hurrah! We did it! Not to be so condescending but it's truly terrifying how horribly amateurish Linux Desktop is when the underlying system is so amazing. It's almost like JavaScript developers got together and decided to build the desktop part of Linux. Every week they deprecated/overhauled/threw away last weeks changes and started a new in the name of engineering. The result? Nothing ever works predictably on anything. You open one app in X and the same app on Wayland...and there's no surety it'll work the same way on both. Now open the same app on Gnome and KDE (although that difference has slowly been fixed so it's now much better). A lot of things don't work in Linux as they are supposed to. You have to tinker the guts out of them sometimes. Sometimes you may even have to recompile. Props to the way Linux is designed that makes all this possible and not locked down but..man it gets annoying sometimes. I hope one day we'll have some solidity and stability in Linux with everyone building upon an agreed set of foundations so we can actually move forward instead of rebuilding the same wall over and over again.
- amarshall 4y ago
  > And if that wasn't enough, we had to build another windowing server Strictly speaking, Wayland is just the protocol. Pedantry aside, X11 is from 1987, whereas Apple totally redid their display server in 2001 with OS X, and Microsoft in 2006 with Vista. Wayland brings the Linux desktop kicking and screaming into the 21st century. But bazzar development will always be very different than cathedral development, so inevitably Wayland has its problems and rough edges. X11 being longer in the tooth doesn’t help.
  - 4y ago
billconan 4y ago
I wanted to implement detachable tabs, similar to what chrome and sublime text have. I heard it is not possible with wayland, because it doesn't give you the global mouse cursor location.
ac130kz 4y ago
There are still people who post stupid, mostly nowadays irrelevant complaints from 2015 and believe that Wayland is a 1:1 replacement, even though it isn't by design....
kirbyfan64sos 4y ago
Back when this article was first posted, I wrote a rebuttal of some of the key points: https://refi64.com/posts/dont-boycott-wayland.html https://refi64.com/posts/dont-boycott-wayland.html Since then, the situation has largely pretty much improved, in particular both OBS and Zoom have support for the screen sharing portals.
zamadatix 4y ago
Reading the first section of the list (screen recording): - SSR's status seems correct, unimplemented - Green-recorder is fully archived for 2 years, I mean yes it's technically incompatible with Wayland but that's probably not the main concern there. - VokoscreenNG added experimental support in 3.1.0 (currently 3.3.0) - OBS Studio added GA support last summer, the workaround is outdated So just because the list was revised in April doesn't mean it's up to date with April. Wayland was definitely pushed too early, a lot of these issues date back to 2016 and tracked through 2020 for example and it was all too soon. This is especially true if you don't use Gnome or KDE. To this day it's also true Wayland still doesn't have full X11 feature parity and I don't think it ever will. What you'll see is more and more of the important ones like screen recording will start to have answers and overall eventually X11 will lack more Wayland features than Wayland lacks X11 features. Mixed rate screens are already an example and fresh things like HDR (not just deep color) may be the big drivers in the coming years. Neither is likely to ever be a true strict subset of the other. Lists like this do a poor job tracking which is actually better for the user because they are focused solely on finding what doesn't work after having had a bad experience instead of tracking what works in each. At the moment this persons workflow would very likely still come out to a preference for X11 but that doesn't change this type of list being a poor way to conclude that.
midislack 4y ago
I'll never use it because the shilling is intolerable, obnoxious, obvious.
ianbicking 4y ago
Out of curiosity... what is the purpose of X or Wayland at all when Android and ChromeOS seem to produce low-drama display systems that don't use either of these?
tsujp 4y ago
This list sucks. It's basically a complaint that X11 software doesn't work on Wayland while conveniently ignoring patches or alternatives to that same software. This is akin to saying "32 bit x86 is not a 1:1 compatible ARM64 replacement" or "English is not a 1:1 compatible Japanese replacement" or "Writing with your left hand is not a 1:1 compatible right hand replacement". They are different things. Why should they be? Who said they should be? Where was it agreed it should be? I don't see anyone in the Wayland community who actually does work (e.g. maintaining the protocol spec or large projects) saying it should be. Also, there are either maintained forks for these (e.g. redshift-wayland for redshift) or straight up Wayland alternatives (e.g. wlsunset instead of redshift). The author even links to the Arch Linux wiki page for Redshift which at the top in a purple banner says "Note: Redshift does not support Wayland [1]. See Backlight#Wayland for alternatives." so that's some nice cherry picking to say the least. So while the claim "Wayland breaks Redshift" is _technically_ true (even though there's a patch) it is heavy implied, I feel, that there is no alternative which is objectively false and misleading. It's FOSS, go contribute if you are this upset; it's not like you do not have access to the entire protocol specification for Wayland, and the source code for each and every single item listed. This kind of complaint would make sense if it was closed source software where you cannot make changes without extreme effort in reverse engineering and potential legal problems with redistributing those patches. Not the case here.

117 points by pmoriarty 4y ago

I’d have a lot more respect for this web page if it concentrated on the truly problematic stuff like lack of BSD support and not so much complaining about Wayland fixing intractable X11 security holes.

craftkiller 4y ago
I run wayland (sway) on FreeBSD with intel graphics. It runs fine. My only FreeBSD-specific problem is firefox on wayland on FreeBSD always has a "stuck" tab that you close and it doesn't actually go away. It just becomes non-interactable and wastes space in your tab bar.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jakedata 4y ago

As a resident of Wayland I find that it breaks web searches with irrelevant results about software.

plaguepilled 4y ago
What did you mean by this?
- jakedata 4y ago
  Wayland is the name of a town. Generic internet searches for "Wayland" often yield results about the software rather than the town, especially because my web search history is quite Linux heavy. Of course this was a tongue-in-cheek reply but true nonetheless.

Pakdef 4y ago

When you have too many software engineers, things break.

xbar 4y ago
This joke may not be funny, feel free to downvote: were you expecting more from the pandemic?

avg_dev 4y ago

I had this problem a while back where I would screen share on zoom and seemingly leftover memory from videos I’d watched in the browser showed up in certain circumstances to people viewing my screen. Utterly horrific. I believe wayland does in fact fix this issue. Does anybody have more context on what’s going on?

suby 4y ago
I've never had that happen, but that does sound pretty terrible. It might be worth installing a second browser exclusively for use with zoom as a possible temporary fix.
heavyset_go 4y ago
That's nightmare inducing.
AnotherGoodName 4y ago
A classic problem to do with hardware overlays. It's also why screenshots of videos sometimes have blacked out video in the screenshot. 'Hardware overlay' is an old video acceleration trick to write processed video straight to the output framebuffer. It bypasses the OS windowing system completely and if you as a developer get it wrong in any way you get video peeking through other apps. Video playing via a hardware overlay' has caused such issues for 30 years now. Not just on xorg or Wayland as you'll sometimes see this on windows too.
- hakfoo 4y ago
  I recall in the old days, you could get the cheap BT848/878 TV tuner cards. They just merrily piped data into the framebuffer, so if you had things configured right, it would draw a black rectangle, expecting the card to drop video on it, and the actual video would be offset 25 pixels to the left and below the.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
    And guess what? It worked, even on NetBSD. And you could move it with the tv-stream playing without tearing. And scaling too! Still have one such thing in PCI, gathering dust in some box.

Symmetry 4y ago

Most of those seem like a consequence of good design? I don't want one process to be able to decide that it's windows should be higher priority than another process, or see what's displayed on another processes windows, or steal keystrokes from windows owned by another process. So I think the net effect of that list is to make me less likely to use Xorg.

armada651 4y ago
Good security doesn't prevent users from executing a legitimate use case though. A user can have legitimate reasons for wanting to share a certain window or their entire screen with a process like Zoom. Once you start preventing users from executing their use case you turn the user into an adversary. They'll start undermining your security model and you will always lose that fight. This is why permission models exist, make the user aware of the security implications and allow the user to decide on a per-app basis what permissions should be granted. Make the user complimentary to your security model rather than making them an adversary.
- hackerbrother 4y ago
  Is a standard Google Meet meeting in Chrome for Linux on a Wayland desktop not functional?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - dralley 4y ago
    I use Google Meet on Firefox on Wayland. Screen sharing works fine (now). It didn't for a while, admittedly, but now it does.
    - linsomniac 4y ago
      I'm using Google Meet via Firefox on Ubuntu 22.04 and have not had any success with screen or window sharing, so YMMV.

cp9 4y ago

Counterpoint: wayland has features X will never support

jmclnx 4y ago
Care to list what they are ? I know the one missing function, network transparency :)
- dralley 4y ago
  It can be done https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/emersion/waypipe https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/emersion/waypipe
- jakogut 4y ago
  Display independent DPI scaling. For instance, if you have multiple monitors of different sizes/resolutions, you can scale them independently to have text and windows appear the same size on all of them.
- cp9 4y ago
  Different DPI per display is the big one. A security story that isn’t ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- kaba0 4y ago
  That wasn’t really true of Xorg for decades to begin with unless you were using some XMotif applications. Other frameworks’ output is predominantly just bitmaps, good luck using that over anything other than local networks. That problem has a better solution, there really is no reason why the display manager should try to solve it (badly).
- Mockapapella 4y ago
  I believe Simula is built on wayland due to some wayland specific features
josephcsible 4y ago
So? Clearly we don't need them for anything important, since we've managed without them up until now. That isn't true of the features that X has but Wayland doesn't.

PennRobotics 4y ago

I think there are two group opinions in this discussion and both are correct: The concept of Wayland is great and well-implemented. The implementation of Wayland is bad. Now if only the first group would trust the second's experiences with Wayland. It really is trash. Firefox will stop updating the window contents but will still accept clicks and keypresses. You can either start a new Firefox process or go to the application switcher to see the updated window contents. OpenSCAD editor has a one second lag between a keypress and the character appearing. Those are the two that affect me everyday.

socceroos 4y ago
In my ~6 years of using Wayland I've never experienced anything like this. In fact, my experience has been that the entire desktop experience was smoother and less buggy. Admittedly, I've steered clear of NVIDIA products which may have helped.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- craftkiller 4y ago
  You also may have a different config. For example, I use fractional scaling on my laptop (1.5x) which means firefox sometimes crashes when I open the menu, but when I'm using my external monitor at 1x scaling it runs fine so you'd never notice. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1693474 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1693474
  - PennRobotics 4y ago
    I have a 30-bit 4K monitor. It's been an adventure learning about environmental flags and how "the root problem is upstream/downstream from our project"
- yw3410 4y ago
  I used Wayland for almost everything (AMD GPU), but the performance for some applications such as Blender are absolutely abysmal currently. I have to switch to X when using those apps.

duskwuff 4y ago

A lot of these complaints seem to boil down to a couple of key issues: 1) Wayland isn't X11. Applications whose core purpose is interacting with X11 features (e.g. xrandr, xprop, window managers) won't work on Wayland. 2) Screen recording on Wayland remains an incompletely solved problem, and a lot of applications don't support it yet. 3) Global key capture is, similarly, not a solved problem.

Sakos 4y ago
If I were PM for a consumer-facing product, number 2 would be a blocker for me and a critical issue. It's such a basic, common, everyday use case that it's mind-boggling to me that they're dropping the ball on it.
- orwin 4y ago
  At my previous job, we actually recorded screens of users (and kept activity records ~3months). We couldn't serve them wayland, but X11 was enough (it was mostly datascience) (And by the way, it was only in one of our offer, the most expensive one, and sold as a feature, it was not some shady stuff)
- berkut 4y ago
  Especially in the era of working from home now: I regularly need to share my screen to demo stuff, or record screen recordings of WIP prototypes... Even for code reviews sometimes it's easier to do it via screensharing with a full IDE for jumping around the code...
  - nhumrich 4y ago
    Yes, I was using Wayland fairly comfortably but am now using x again thanks to screen sharing and all the different conference tools everyone uses.
- dralley 4y ago
  #2 is a solved problem. I use Wayland and screen sharing works fine for every app I use (browser-based video chat, OBS). The problem is adoption of the new APIs, not the lack of a solution.

MBCook 4y ago

While this post is obviously being updated it goes back many years. I know there are people who don’t like Wayland’s design or goals. Same with systemd. But we still hear constant complaining. The big distros appear to have decided on these as the future. You don’t have to like it, you don’t have to use it. But the other (or older) options aren’t going to get much development. I’m not sure such posts are very productive this many years in.

jrm4 4y ago
Do you understand that what you are saying is directly and perfectly antithetical to Free and perhaps even merely Open Source, software? (the Wayland people apparently didn't, that's for sure)
- em-bee 4y ago
  the reverse is true. FOSS developers are free to work on whatever they want. X11 devs decided they didn't like to work on X11 anymore and created wayland instead. you don't have to like it and you are free to contribute to X11 yourself if it is important to you, but wayland devs don't have any obligations here
  - jrm4 4y ago
    Absolutely. But also, I have no obligations to like or respect what they do either. I think they're going the wrong way and I can say so. The freedom works both ways, and I don't think we should shield them from criticism.
    - em-bee 4y ago
      i strongly disagree. criticism must be constructive and helpful. and developers absolutely should be shielded from criticism, especially FOSS developers, because if we don't then they will stop sharing. basically, ask yourself: is your response friendly and helpful and likely to motivate the developer to consider your issue, or are you venting your frustration. if it's the latter, then please just don't. see here for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31945618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31945618 i made a similar comment a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31679373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31679373 users should be free to be critical of it absolutely not. you can say: "unfortunately, i have this problem, so i can't use this, i am going to go use something else". but that's about it. criticism is the bane of our society. criticism hurts peoples feelings. criticism causes burnout. FOSS maintainers are volunteers and absolutely do not deserve that kind of criticism for just developing software. (that doesn't put them above any criticism. if they are rude or mean to their users, then that may well be criticized. but not if they ignore a problem or are unresponsive. they may well have other things in their life that are more important than to care about your software issue) (and if the developer is paid, direct any criticism at the company, but don't beat up the employee who may not have the freedom to choose what issues to work on) Being open source doesn't mean nobody should dare criticise you if you didn't pay for it, it means exactly that.

ggm 4y ago

I am just popping up here to say from X10R4 onwards, I have never understood why MIT took a concept we understand around client-server, and completely inverted the meaning for anyone approaching it anew. Here i am connecting to a remote device via a telnet, running an xterm to display "back home". Whats the server? the local thing. Whats the client? the thing I run on the remote host: xterm. Now step outside X. whats the client? the xterm. Whats the server? the remote host. Semantic confusion is real folks. "Display server" only partially fixed it because people never remember to vocalise the qualifyer. And then you get Xterminals as physical devices, with "local" clients and now client-server is really really confusing.

adamius 4y ago
The only way I understand it and stay sane is to say that "the X server serves out access to a display surface which clients like xterm connect to in order to show what they need to show". The X server runs on my machine since that is the display being shared and my programs need a connection to that display. That's the pragmatic explanation I use. Otherwise, and especially if you think servers are somehow always somewhere out there, you'll get a rude counter example. Server just means provider of service and thats about it. You're tripping up on your own assumption. This is why you can telnet/ssh to a server out there, set the display variable to point back to your machine and xterm will try and connect to your machine. Its wanting a connection to your display to show things and to do so it needs a display server, ie yours. That all probably made sense.
lokedhs 4y ago
Let's say you are using a Linux workstation and you fire up ngnix on it to host some web site for testing. You then ssh into a remote server and type "curl https://your-workstation/some-name-here https://your-workstation/some-name-here". In this case, your local machine is the server and curl is the client. This is exactly the same as in the X server case. Your server is running on your machine, and the client is running on the remote machine (which happens to be a server).
h2odragon 4y ago
with X, the resource being served is your eyes. That is not the only instance of "well this was technically correct but confusing and now its Enshrined and May never be Touched all Hail Compatibility" or whatever the impulse for wart retention is. However the whole mess goes to show to me that there is no one true Display System and that there need to be more efforts in this arena, obviously there's still unfilled needs and people feel the compromised currently forced by the available choices are constricting. OpenGL needs yet another networking extension. That'll fix it.

saulrh 4y ago

That's a terrifyingly toxic comments thread.

jrm4 4y ago
Wayland is/was a terrifyingly toxic way to do software in the FOSS world. If you want to go break things that people love, you might as well go work for Apple or Microsoft.
kaba0 4y ago
For some reason Systemd, Wayland, Gnome and Firefox are regularly the target of these.. when all are decent, open-source softwares. One is free to dislike/not use them, but it seems to be attacked most who are supposedly on the “same side”..

plaguepilled 4y ago

Wayland's design reflects it's security model: more news at 11.

jrm4 4y ago

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. And I keep hearing arguments about how broke X is or was and none much seem to carry water. Lots of loud hypothetical security issues and literally no remotely significant problems that I, a 20+ year Linux user, ever encountered. Wayland's just a joke to me now.

dralley 4y ago
I, for one, did encounter a lot of problems with Xorg. Primarily videos that were completely unwatchable due to screen tearing in VLC player whereas under a Wayland session everything worked perfectly. And this was years ago before Wayland was even mature.
- jrm4 4y ago
  This and scaling are literally the only ones I've ever seen "in the wild," and in my experience hasn't been remotely close to a deal breaker for most.
  - commoner 4y ago
    I find the screen tearing on X11 to be distracting, and it's definitely a deal-breaker for me. That and X11's comparatively poor HiDPI handling (especially for fractional scaling) encouraged me to switch to Wayland years ago. Most new laptop displays are now high enough in resolution to require some type of display scaling (often fractional) to accomodate the average person's eyesight, and I want my software to work smoothly with my hardware.

MrWiffles 4y ago

This...seems like complete and total bullshit. It's so bad-faith I'm not going to bother responding to each pseudo-point. They're not wrong in a general sense that Wayland isn't a 1:1 compatible x replacement yet - that part is absolutely true - but this whole "boycott wayland!" nonsense is just done in such a way that I can only conclude malice as the author's objective. Wayland DOES work with fractional scaling values. It's labeled "experimental" right now but in my personal experience it works fine on both GNOME and KDE. "Nothing we can do from the $SOMESOFTWARE side so we're closing this issue." stuff is also bullshit. Yes, there IS something you can do from your side software wise, and that's UPDATE THE GOD DAMN SOFTWARE. Steam w/ Wine works out of the box with Wayland and GNOME on Fedora Workstation 36. I just did daily quests in The Elder Scrolls Online with it earlier today. I can even run Elden Ring in the exact same configuration. With a damn controller, no less. So yeah, this is just bullshit.

ndiddy 4y ago
> Wayland DOES work with fractional scaling values. It's labeled "experimental" right now but in my personal experience it works fine on both GNOME and KDE. I'm not sure about how it works in KDE, but at least in GNOME the way it works is kind of a hack IMO. When you do a 150% scale, it renders to a framebuffer at 3x the resolution of your display and then scales the framebuffer down by 1/2, which compromises the video quality, as well as wasting CPU (and battery life if you use a laptop).
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Is this true for all windows or only ones running in Xwayland?
- diffeomorphism 4y ago
  > When you do a 150% scale, it renders to a framebuffer at 3x the resolution of your display and then scales the framebuffer down by 1/2, which compromises the video quality, Isn't that exactly how apple does fractional scaling? > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19052960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19052960

d3nj4l 4y ago

I think it's fascinating how general opinion seems to be becoming more neutral on Wayland compared to the rah-rah days I remember, probably around 2018-19. I personally could never use Wayland - I was pretty set in my i3 config, so GNOME switching to Wayland didn't affect me, but I always had PCs with nvidia GPUS (I like playing games, sue me) and while admittedly, nvidia wasn't working on good faith either, I don't think nvidia users deserved the attitude they got from eg. Sway. Despite that, the amount of effusive praise Wayland got on HN and some linux-centric communities had me jealous. What changed over time? I see that this gist was made in 2020, was it the issues with screensharing that became more pronounced due to COVID induced WFH? Did some major distro enable Wayland by default and therefore brought people out of the woodwork? If someone knows what the history is here I'd be delighted to know. Of course, it's entirely possible I'm misreading the history here: Wayland could've been widely despised back then, or maybe this thread is an outlier. Either way, I'd be happy to see if anybody's got a good pulse check.

blibble 4y ago
sway is a drop-in replacement for i3 if you want to try again! (and I think the nvidia issue is solved or close to being solved) wayland has been the only way I've managed to get tear free smooth 60fps on Linux (trying intel, nvidia and amd drivers on Xorg)
- aaronchall 4y ago
  I'm using i3, specifically i3-gaps and I'm rather interested in switching. I don't have nvidia. Where can I learn more?
  - wezm 4y ago
    https://swaywm.org/ https://swaywm.org/
  - wfleming 4y ago
    The Arch wiki page for Sway is a pretty good starting point: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Sway#Configuration https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Sway#Configuration. FWIW I was also an i3 user for a long time (and xmonad before that), and I’m a very happy convert to Sway.

xedrac 4y ago

I fully support Wayland, but also also recognizing its problems. Most of it boils down to apps that don't natively support Wayland, or incomplete support for some use case. Otherwise I think Wayland has been great.

turboponyy 4y ago

Duh

pcwalton 4y ago

All of this is outweighed by the fact that any application using X11 has complete control of your entire desktop, including other applications. This fact makes Linux desktops using X11 significantly inferior in security to all other operating systems. There is no way to sandbox an application that is allowed to send window events to all other applications, since it can just tell your desktop environment to open a shell and then send commands at will. The only reasonable solution (nested X servers and XSECURITY are not reasonable solutions) is to switch to Wayland.

happymellon 4y ago
I had understood that this was also true under ~MacOS and~ Windows. Keylogging and screen monitoring is trivial in Windows. Wayland solves a problem that is present on all systems, but it does it with a sledgehammer. [Edit] I am reminded that MacOS has a sane model for this.
- MBCook 4y ago
  MacOS does not allow screen sharing (say in Google Chat) of your entire desktop or other windows without user permission. The application has to be added to a list of allowed applications through the System Preferences. Same with intercepting all keyboard input IIRC. Can’t speak to Windows.
  - happymellon 4y ago
    You are correct, I remember now. Although this wasn't always the case, it has been true for a few years now.
    - MBCook 4y ago
      Yeah. Two or three releases I think.
- pcwalton 4y ago
  macOS has a reasonable security model and it doesn't allow that without explicit (annoying-to-grant) user consent. On Windows, apps that are concerned about RCE can drop privileges and still access the desktop in a secure way. On X11, there is no such option; you have to adopt a Chromium-like content/chrome process model, with the content process having no windowing access whatsoever. Because it's so difficult, almost nobody does this on X11.

MrWiffles 4y ago

Somewhat tangential: I swear I can see the difference in anti-aliasing between X and Wayland. Under the latter it just...looks so much better, smoother, CLEANER. Is that all in my head, or has anyone else noticed that too?

MBCook 4y ago
I would assume they have different font rendering paths. Makes sense to me they might look different.
BearOso 4y ago
Should be roughly the same. Are you using fractional scaling? That would add an extra layer of supersampling to the screen.
- MrWiffles 4y ago
  Tried it with and without, and I swear I can see the difference, but it's slight enough that I wouldn't laugh you out of the room if you told me it was psychosomatic. Which is why I asked if anybody else has noticed that same difference :-)

jart 4y ago

Who funds Wayland? I bet it's someone who stands to gain from pouring sand into the Linux desktop engine.

datadata 4y ago

I don't want Wayland to be exactly compatible with Xorg. Progress requires abandoning cruft and committing to a hopefully better design. I moved to Wayland 100% earlier this year and not looking back.

Hizonner 4y ago

Wait, so they fixed the stupid X security holes where any application can steal any other application's keystrokes, read any other application's window content, and interfere with global system behavior by for example grabbing ALL keystrokes... but then they went to client-side window decorations so any application can just impersonate any other? WTF?

nly 4y ago
Desktop Linux will never be Android or iOS. Desktop software isn't sand-boxed. If you're running applications you don't fully trust then you've already lost. Every app you install can access your full filesystem, communicate freely with other things on your network, scan your browser history, steal your cookies, and exfiltrate it finds over the internet.
- Hizonner 4y ago
  Maybe every app YOU install can do all of that stuff... some of us lead more interesting lives. This has always been a problem in X, actually, since there was never an assumption that everything showing on your display would be running on your local computer.

toastal 4y ago

I'll be moving back to X11 soon—and for only one feature: color management. Wayland has no way to handle ICC profiles. There is a working group making slow, but good progress, but is also trying to rethink how color management works in the age of HDR displays. This is a good goal, but if I want to do any color sensitive work now, there's nothing I can do. I also wish there was a clear way to donate to fund this particular effort because the rest of Wayland has been good.

kaba0 4y ago
This is a fair criticism I can get behind. But I seriously don’t understand why this football-fan like mentality is so apparent around this thread (and around many open-source programs). Thanks for the level-headed argument (and I also hope that color management will get better)

II2II 4y ago

Sorry, but I don't find the article convincing. The thing about diatribes is that they are a distorted view of reality. My take on Wayland, after using it for several months, is that it is fine for my circumstances. Would I recommend it to other people? No. It doesn't offer a noticeable benefit while the prevalence of software for X suggests that X is the safest bet. On the other hand, Wayland does not deserve the vitriol that is directed towards it.

charles_kaw 4y ago
Wayland is pretty much a requirement for any new, high end laptop or desktop setup. X's inconsistent support of hi-dpi displays, mix/match dpi displays, janky hotplug, and hdr makes it almost a non starter for any laptop sold >=2021 that cost more than $1500
- eadmund 4y ago
  > Wayland is pretty much a requirement for any new, high end laptop or desktop setup. StumpWM is definitely my requirement for using a computer, and it doesn't support Wayland. And yet my laptops and desktop (all of which cost well over $1,500) are pretty wonderfully useful. They would be close to useless if I did not have a Lisp-extensible tiling window manager to run on them.
  - deleted 4y ago
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DCKing 4y ago

It's a weird strawman to say that Wayland's problem is that it's not a 1:1 replacement for Xorg. I don't think the author understands what Wayland is or what it intends to do, and it's sad that they didn't let that stop them from writing such a piece with incendiary language like this. Wayland isn't a complete replacement of Xorg and has never been intended to be one. Nobody with close knowledge of the project has ever pretended it has - that premise just appears in severe oversimplifications and strawmen. Wayland is just a part of a rethink of how Linux desktop architecture works, together with Freedesktop standards for things like screen casting or window control [1]. The state of complete implementations of those Freedesktop standards - as well as application support - to the point it can replace a lot of X11 is pretty lacking for sure [2]. But that's just unfortunately just what you get when trying to establish such a new architecture in an underfunded and undirected community like the Linux desktop community. No need to "boycott" anything - just use whatever you like on Linux, like you always have. [1]: E.g. contrary to what many people seem to understand, lacking screencasting support is not actually due to faults in """Wayland""", rather apps and desktops not properly supporting a wholly different Freedesktop standard made to work on Wayland compositors and X11 desktops alike (not dependent on any display protocol at all!). Screencasting on macOS, Windows and Wayland is not the display server's job, it's just one of the many things added to the kitchen sink that has become Xorg. [2]: In fairness, it covers enough that it's working for a lot of people's workflows. It should work for way more people though, and I hope we get there.

smoldesu 4y ago
> Wayland is just a part of a rethink of how Linux desktop architecture works, together with Freedesktop standards for things like screen casting or window control. Well, that's part of the problem: I think the consensus is that a lot of these solutions are bunk. Wayland doesn't feel like something you'd build a desktop with, it feels like a software API for digital signage or maybe something for an iPad-like UI. This is cool, but shoehorning it into a desktop is a bad idea. The entire desktop space has moved on, Wayland is comparatively low-tech at this point. Quartz is a good example of this. Not only is it more secure than Wayland, it supports features like app indicators and global menus controls. That's a problem. An even bigger problem is that Mutter, the official Wayland implementation, exists exclusively to support GNOME. Other desktop developers are not welcome, instead they're tossed wlroots and told to make do. Developmentally, I think Wayland is a trainwreck. If it is a "rethink", then it should have been used to design a tablet OS instead of a desktop OS that runs desktop software and supposedly supports legacy features/apps. If you disagree, then maybe you'd enjoy Windows 8, which is a similarly brave reimagining of the future of the desktop.

nullc 4y ago

I recently switched back to xorg because of crashing in blender and kdenlive that went away in xorg. (Which I only figured out because I temporarily switched to try to screen record the crashing and found that it went away.) ... but I was shocked at how much faster and responsive Xorg was, -- and because of it have no interest in switching back to wayland even if the crashing issues are resolved.

nsajko 4y ago

The elephant in the room that most people miss in these discussions is that these problems aren't so much bugs with any specific part of the Wayland stack as they are limitations core to the Wayland design. It's not going to get better, because Wayland is a broken/malicious architecture: the protocol basically does nothing useful, leaving essential interfaces such as screen recording for individual "compositors" to define and implement mutually incompatibly. This means that nontrivial applications don't really target Wayland, rather they only target a finite set of Wayland compositors (or other, completely separate software stacks) that they have support for. This sort of works in favor of "big" DEs like Gnome, but for the rest of the ecosystem it would mean death by fragmentation.

wmf 4y ago
Other compositors need to stop fighting and copy GNOME's protocols.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Controversial comment but it seems quite valid. I have never once seen any kind of debate about why the Gnome spec is not workable. It's all open source and widely integrates with the wider ecosystem. Wayland might not be the place for such specs and another common standard should be adopted.
  - wmf 4y ago
    For one thing, the client-side vs. server-side decorations schism is philosophical and has no right answer. But the community simply doesn't have the resources to implement both so AFAIK the GNOME/CSD side mostly pretends SSD doesn't exist and the SSD side complains about being oppressed.
- nsajko 4y ago
  Even if all current Wayland compositors adopted Gnome's protocol extensions, that wouldn't really solve anything; because another compositor could appear next week and choose to abide by pure Wayland, ignoring Gnome's quasi-standard. Where does that leave app authors?

brudgers 4y ago

Feeling like the brain cycles I was spending thinking about X v Wayland is part of the reason I decided “fuck it” and went back Windows recently. While systemd was pretty much transparent because it happens around the kernel, Wayland-or-X was regularly in my face. It seemed like ultimately something in my world was going to snap and break…two things I relied on were going to make a stand on opposite sides of the line in the sand. And whatever ethical pleasure I might draw from Linux would always be tainted by the consequences of practical smartphone choices. Ultimately predictability has high value for me and Wayland-or-X was mostly a worry. YMMV.

shmerl 4y ago

Use case I'm missing - clipboard sync with a remote host. ssh -X forwards clipboard from remote where you can use something like neovim and clipboard syncs to local desktop. To work around you need to run local terminal in XWayland mode. Something like that for the native Wayland case would be neat. I'm not going to boycott Wayland though, it's a pointless idea.

EddieDante 4y ago

Wayland will never be 1:1 compatible with Xorg. Nor will it ever support all of the hardware that Xorg supports. I won't believe otherwise until Wayland works on my Thinkpad T60 with its ATI Mobility Radeon X1400.

linsomniac 4y ago

6 weeks ago I upgraded from 20.04/Xorg/i3 to 22.04/Wayland/Sway and I've been really disappointed. The 3 big issues are: I can't screen share, can't screencap, and it flakes out every 1-2 weeks and the session crashes and I need to start over. Compared to Xorg where my sessions could run for months, basically indefinitely, and screen/window sharing and just worked. I've been hoping it being in Ubuntu 22.04 would get it the exposure to get this fixed, but I think I'm going to have to switch back to Xorg.

longrod 4y ago

Just use Xorg if you want 1:1 compatibility. For Wayland to be 1:1 compatible it'd have to bend over backwards and do some ninja turtles kind of moves to create a mess nobody wants. The whole point is to be better and better is mostly always incompatible. Although Wayland isn't completely incompatible either but that difference doesn't matter. However... I am still shocked at the wonder Linux Desktop is. The world has entered into VR/AR, AI, and completely stupifying marvels of engineering but we still haven't gotten the Linux Desktop right. It's a downright fragmented mess. And if that wasn't enough, we had to build another windowing server! Now there's more fragmentation and apps that barely got the funding to work on X or get ported there will never see daylight on Wayland. Yay! Hurrah! We did it! Not to be so condescending but it's truly terrifying how horribly amateurish Linux Desktop is when the underlying system is so amazing. It's almost like JavaScript developers got together and decided to build the desktop part of Linux. Every week they deprecated/overhauled/threw away last weeks changes and started a new in the name of engineering. The result? Nothing ever works predictably on anything. You open one app in X and the same app on Wayland...and there's no surety it'll work the same way on both. Now open the same app on Gnome and KDE (although that difference has slowly been fixed so it's now much better). A lot of things don't work in Linux as they are supposed to. You have to tinker the guts out of them sometimes. Sometimes you may even have to recompile. Props to the way Linux is designed that makes all this possible and not locked down but..man it gets annoying sometimes. I hope one day we'll have some solidity and stability in Linux with everyone building upon an agreed set of foundations so we can actually move forward instead of rebuilding the same wall over and over again.

amarshall 4y ago
> And if that wasn't enough, we had to build another windowing server Strictly speaking, Wayland is just the protocol. Pedantry aside, X11 is from 1987, whereas Apple totally redid their display server in 2001 with OS X, and Microsoft in 2006 with Vista. Wayland brings the Linux desktop kicking and screaming into the 21st century. But bazzar development will always be very different than cathedral development, so inevitably Wayland has its problems and rough edges. X11 being longer in the tooth doesn’t help.
- 4y ago

billconan 4y ago

I wanted to implement detachable tabs, similar to what chrome and sublime text have. I heard it is not possible with wayland, because it doesn't give you the global mouse cursor location.

ac130kz 4y ago

There are still people who post stupid, mostly nowadays irrelevant complaints from 2015 and believe that Wayland is a 1:1 replacement, even though it isn't by design....

kirbyfan64sos 4y ago

Back when this article was first posted, I wrote a rebuttal of some of the key points: https://refi64.com/posts/dont-boycott-wayland.html https://refi64.com/posts/dont-boycott-wayland.html Since then, the situation has largely pretty much improved, in particular both OBS and Zoom have support for the screen sharing portals.

zamadatix 4y ago

Reading the first section of the list (screen recording): - SSR's status seems correct, unimplemented - Green-recorder is fully archived for 2 years, I mean yes it's technically incompatible with Wayland but that's probably not the main concern there. - VokoscreenNG added experimental support in 3.1.0 (currently 3.3.0) - OBS Studio added GA support last summer, the workaround is outdated So just because the list was revised in April doesn't mean it's up to date with April. Wayland was definitely pushed too early, a lot of these issues date back to 2016 and tracked through 2020 for example and it was all too soon. This is especially true if you don't use Gnome or KDE. To this day it's also true Wayland still doesn't have full X11 feature parity and I don't think it ever will. What you'll see is more and more of the important ones like screen recording will start to have answers and overall eventually X11 will lack more Wayland features than Wayland lacks X11 features. Mixed rate screens are already an example and fresh things like HDR (not just deep color) may be the big drivers in the coming years. Neither is likely to ever be a true strict subset of the other. Lists like this do a poor job tracking which is actually better for the user because they are focused solely on finding what doesn't work after having had a bad experience instead of tracking what works in each. At the moment this persons workflow would very likely still come out to a preference for X11 but that doesn't change this type of list being a poor way to conclude that.

midislack 4y ago

I'll never use it because the shilling is intolerable, obnoxious, obvious.

ianbicking 4y ago

Out of curiosity... what is the purpose of X or Wayland at all when Android and ChromeOS seem to produce low-drama display systems that don't use either of these?

tsujp 4y ago

This list sucks. It's basically a complaint that X11 software doesn't work on Wayland while conveniently ignoring patches or alternatives to that same software. This is akin to saying "32 bit x86 is not a 1:1 compatible ARM64 replacement" or "English is not a 1:1 compatible Japanese replacement" or "Writing with your left hand is not a 1:1 compatible right hand replacement". They are different things. Why should they be? Who said they should be? Where was it agreed it should be? I don't see anyone in the Wayland community who actually does work (e.g. maintaining the protocol spec or large projects) saying it should be. Also, there are either maintained forks for these (e.g. redshift-wayland for redshift) or straight up Wayland alternatives (e.g. wlsunset instead of redshift). The author even links to the Arch Linux wiki page for Redshift which at the top in a purple banner says "Note: Redshift does not support Wayland [1]. See Backlight#Wayland for alternatives." so that's some nice cherry picking to say the least. So while the claim "Wayland breaks Redshift" is _technically_ true (even though there's a patch) it is heavy implied, I feel, that there is no alternative which is objectively false and misleading. It's FOSS, go contribute if you are this upset; it's not like you do not have access to the entire protocol specification for Wayland, and the source code for each and every single item listed. This kind of complaint would make sense if it was closed source software where you cannot make changes without extreme effort in reverse engineering and potential legal problems with redistributing those patches. Not the case here.