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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 pe

• 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.
    • xfalcox 4y ago
      There is a Manjaro Sway community flavor if you want to USB boot something preconfigured and check it out.
  • linsomniac 4y ago
    Agreed, I switched to Wayland and Sway when I upgraded to Ubuntu 22.04. It has basically been a drop in replacement and has been working great!
  • d3nj4l 4y ago
    I've moved to using a mac as my primary device, so no more Sway or i3, unfortunately :'( Though, fwiw, I had no issues with screen tearing once I started using picom. I used to have mild tearing before that, but after setting up picom (don't remember how I configured it exactly) I got buttery smooth output!
    • Jiocus 4y ago
      The relevant picom option would be: vsync = true Love picom
  • unrealhoang 4y ago
    is the problem of blurry on XWayland for hidpi solved yet? That one prevented me from migration the last time (still keep sway installed but only login to i3).
    • kaba0 4y ago
      Well, that is an X11 issue though. But I don’t know the current state of that
• kelnos 4y ago
  Yeah, I still have yet to try Wayland (Xfce user here, which I expect may never port), and I never really got the hype. I honestly just don't get all the gripe people have about X11. I think all the current problems (including the security issues) are solvable through new extensions, if someone wanted to take the time to work them out. Given that But no, it's better to throw everything out, start from scratch, create a ton of new work for people, and 12 years later still not have displaced X11. Put another way: do we truly believe that in 12+ years, some motivated hackers couldn't evolve X11 into something better? I get that many of the people involved were burnt out on it, and sure, no one (myself included) stepped up to the plate, but it doesn't seem plausible to me that X11 and Xorg are lost causes.
  • MBCook 4y ago
    In 12 years they probably could have improved X a lot. But the impression I always got (years ago when this was a bigger topic) is it likely would have broken backwards comparability to do right. And if it’s not compatible, is it still X? And would the Wayland haters/holdouts accept it? IDK. I understand the direction they decided to take.
    • noobermin 4y ago
      The issue with screen recording is not due to backwards compatibility
      • kaba0 4y ago
        There is no issue with screen recording.
        • lobocinza 4y ago
          There is. e.g. recording screen from Chromium doesn't work.
          • kaba0 4y ago
• noobermin 4y ago
  At least for me it felt like Xorg as long as it had been felt broken, and we saw those blogposts back then about it and were somewhat optimistic it would be a good fix. As usual though, it didn't really work out and years later things are still broken.
• wmf 4y ago
  Wayland seemed to languish at 90% complete for years. Wayland was on by default in Ubuntu 17.10, then off in 18.04, then back on in 21.04.
  • Gigachad 4y ago
    I have been on Wayland since Fedora switched to it a few years ago. These days I have picked up a few workflows that just don't work on X11 so my opinion has changed to X11 not quite being ready for real use yet.
    • em-bee 4y ago
      interesting, could you elaborate what that is? i am happy on wayland, but i haven't noticed any difference.
  • vetinari 4y ago
    Ubuntu single-handedly delayed Wayland adoption by years. They didn't switch to Wayland by default, because the apps weren't ready. The apps weren't ready, because they ran on current Ubuntu just fine, so why would they change. Chicken, egg. Compare that to Apple macOS. Apple breaks macOS compatibility at the rate that GNOME can gush with envy. But the third parties are quick to update, without dragging their feet for years. So if the signalling was, that Wayland is inevitable by release XX.YY, apps would be ready.
    • fmajid 4y ago
      No one in the Linux community holds that kind of sway (pun intended). Even in the days of proprietary UNIX you had OpenLook vs CDE/Motif. Sometimes the Cathedral does things better.
• zamadatix 4y ago
  Nvidia isn't even a big issue anymore (the proprietary and open drivers both run gnome, plasma, and sway Wayland sessions pretty darn well now) I think there overall was just too big a lag between the "rah rah" and delivery on 95% of the promises so there was a bit of pushback. I went looking for a video demoing the first statement and came across https://youtu.be/sdSFzZCgWp0 https://youtu.be/sdSFzZCgWp0. I'd find a better video but sometimes the worse video is too funny to pass up :).
• rektide 4y ago
  The problems don't change the fact that it's better & smarter & obvious, and honestly the problems here are... frequently misstated ("Wayland provides no capture APIs"... uhhhh what? this ticket is closed & resolved >2 years ago & webrtc for example works fine.). Leaving X to have a massive rats nest of drivers, and giving every app supreme access to the session, was a terrible situation, and Wayland is a reasonable, far lower surface-area alternative that's far more sensible & leaves far more responsibilities in the kernel's trusting hands. This post projects an idea that there is a new resurgence of push-back & dislike, a failure to come into fruition, but personally I feel there's been a long continual & ongoing history of refusenik/can't-do attitude, like nearly all new technologies & especially sizable open source developments face. And success is widespread. What I see as somewhat new is that the pace in Wayland protocol development has indeed really tapered off, with a large part of that slowness being chalk-up-able to (alas) internal obstructionism. A lot of innovations have been really hotly contested. Rather than independent innovation (which Wayland protocols make imminently possible), there's way more bickering in the various protocol proposals & less getting shit off the ground. There's absolutely a place for getting it right, but the clashes have gotten louder & bigger & it's sapping the energy in the room. Virtual input devices for example have been a shit show and a half, all kinds of hard work & valid proposals getting snubbed & shot down left & right, rudely. Some stuff has just been slow: global hotkeys for example. Even still, I think far more of the problems in this gist relate more to apps that just aren't well maintained (alike your NV gpu that has been a bad actor on the scene), aren't well cared for. Others of these grievances are kind of small & non issues, or just paranoia (eg: conspiracy-theory freak-outs about client side decorations), some are indeed deeply technical sticking points Wayland hasn't specified it's way through yet (hotkeys again), some just seem... wrong (most Intel users don't experience terrible godforsaken tearing all the time?) but a lot of them are just slow apps not doing basic good. Yeah. It takes a long time to improve a vast vast vast vast ecosystem. That said, it's really been about a year that Wayland has been shipping truly genuinely en-masse, so the visibility & noticeability of issues is much much much higher than it had been.
  • hakfoo 4y ago
    I guess what I never understood about Wayland is how they managed to ignore some very obvious problems X11 had, and created brand-new ones. The fact there was no default widget kit is the big one for me. If you're developing a new GUI in the early 2000s, "all the software looks native" is pretty near table stakes. Yeah, not doing so probably avoided a huge holy war, but surely the right thing to do would have been to do Xaw, GTK and Qt flavoured bindings atop some native widget set so you're at least 70% of the way there. The movement from "window manager" to "compositor" is a huge scope creep. I'm going to admit that one of the things that drew me into Unix/Linux in the late '90s was the appeal of highly customized X11 desktops (i. e. Enlightenment v0.15). Now, an X11 "window manager" is probably a within scope of one, or a small team, of moderately competent developers. I think one of the big old O'Reilly X11 reference books actually had a clumsy but functional example with line-by-line commentary. I like that I can run something fairly lightweight (FVWM, for example), instead of having to pull in most of the GNOME or KDE desktop incidentally because I want frames around my windows. A Wayland-style compositor, on the other hand, seems to be a much higher barrier to entry. The whole "nVidia works, but only with the GNOME compositor" sort of stuff reads as a sign that there's way too much involved in there. I don't recall ever seeing "You have to use TWM because AfterStep won't work with your Trident 9440 video card" back in 1998. I wonder if it would have made more sense to go with a paired approach-- a single master compositor implementation, with the complicated and more hardware-sensitive stuff involved, and a pluggable window manager that spoke to it.
• indolering 4y ago
  I have had the opposite experience: fewer people making bad arguments against Wayland and more competent commentary overall. I also can't remember a time when X Windows was seen as being well engineered and not being in need of replacement. Virtually all of the complaints listed in this rant are the result of enforcing a sane security model. > I absolutely detest it when software tries to prevent me from doing what some developer thinks is "a bad idea" but did not consider my use case, e.g., running truss for debugging on FreeBSD needs to run the application as root. These are not compelling arguments for running the GUI as root or allowing different applications to spy on each other. I suspect the rationale behind this rant is motivated by the author's position as a BSD distro manager. BSD people really dislike it when Linux replaces legacy Unix infrastructure with Linux specific technologies. But if Wayland is doomed as an Xorg replacement, then why has development activity dropped off [0][1]? [0]: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=X.Org-Server-2019-Low https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=X.Org-Se... [1]: https://www.openhub.net/p/x https://www.openhub.net/p/x
  • legalcorrection 4y ago
    It's not a sane security model if the product doesn't do what the users need it to do as a result.
    • vetinari 4y ago
      It does. Just not with gates wide open. For example, screenshots. It is still possible to make screenshots. It is not possible to make screenshots without the user knowing. What use case do you have to make screenshots without user knowledge, that benefits the user?
      • hulitu 4y ago
        On my computer i know (except for the web browser) which program makes screenshots. I want all my programs to function properly but not send my data over the internet. So i really don't see the problem Wayland is trying to solve (web browser still executes remote untrusted code).
• neurostimulant 4y ago
  Now that we have pipewire, I don't have any major problem with wayland anymore and use it on both my laptop and desktop.