10 ms·

Are We Wayland Yet?

96 points by picture 4y ago

smoldesu 4y ago
I'd argue the arrangement of this data is pretty deceptive. They give fields like "Desktop Environments" a green checkmark even though the vast majority are still unsupported. Furthermore, none of this addresses some of the real showstopper bugs like blurry UI scaling, screen locking issues, screensharing being largely unsupported or UB/artifacting problems on legacy apps. I'd like to assume good faith here, but the arrangement of this site is really odd: the first list is comprised of applications, and the "only thing" missing is color management/HDR, which is decidedly not an application. Do your own research. Wayland is an improvement for web browsing and text editing, but I've found it unusable for anything outside of extremely light, limited workloads. YMMV.
- markstos 4y ago
  I’ve been using Wayland for over a year with screen sharing, photo editing, video production. Definitely less Jane resizing windows with Wayland.
yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
Oh sweet, I just have replace most of my applications and DE and everything will just work! /s
- wutbrodo 4y ago
  I have my qualms about Wayland, but this dashboard is quite obviously not directed at you? I don't see any suggestion that everyone should switch over now that there are a small handful of compatible apps per category. But for someone like me, all the software I use is completely fungible except for the browser and DE, and my recent switch to Wayland could've used precisely this dashboard. The real complaint here is that the dashboard is inaccurate, at the very least by omission. The checkbox elides the level of stability implied by "support", for software as central as Chrome
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    That is a possible interpretation, true. It reads to me as somebody trying to show a page full of green check marks to pretend that Wayland is totally ready to use and everybody should switch already. I suppose it might be intended as a list of things that are compatible, in which case yes it's quite useful.
- coconut08 4y ago
  ubuntu and fedora are both shipping wayland out of the box with gnome which covers the overwhelming majority of every day users. most people are already using wayland. it's not our fault you decided that you want to use fluxbox on gentoo
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    > most people are already using wayland I would love to hear how you can possibly know that. > it's not our fault you decided that you want to use fluxbox on gentoo If you like monocultures and arbitrary restrictions, maybe try Darwin?
    - markstos 4y ago
      Maybe they count Chromebooks? Those use Wayland.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
        Hah, I forgot about that. A bit like calling Android Linux, but yes that probably does dwarf the rest of us.
    - csande17 4y ago
      I'd imagine they're basing their conclusions of off telemetry data from Ubuntu and Fedora. After all, Linux is just like Firefox: everyone who uses it absolutely loves sharing information about themselves with corporations! Telemetry data therefore presents an accurate, unbiased picture of the entire userbase.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
        Lol. But it's actually worse than that; Firefox enables telemetry by default and then ignores everyone who opts out, but I'm not aware of any Linux distros that enable it by default (Ubuntu apparently used to, until it silently broke and then they removed it: https://itsubuntu.com/no-more-popularity-contest-package-by-default-ubuntu/ https://itsubuntu.com/no-more-popularity-contest-package-by-...).
- EamonnMR 4y ago
  Reminds me of the early days of Ubuntu with the fierce competition between KDE, Gnome, and Xfce
hossbeast 4y ago
Have been using Wayland as my daily driver for about a year now, on my main PC, which I use for WFH. Big improvement for me.
notatoad 4y ago
Neat dashboard, but for my purposes only one datapoint matters: can I use it. And the answer to that is still no.
- wutbrodo 4y ago
  What is your blocker?I'm curious because I recently switched to swaywm to fix some screen tearing, and I'm still figuring out how ready it is for primetime. It mostly works fine, but I'm getting occasional bugs with critical software like Chrome/Brave. It's giving me a very uncomfortable Ubuntu-in-2007 feeling. It's a testament to desktop Linux's improvement that I haven't felt that way in a decade, and have a much higher stability bar than I do for Windows or my limited Mac usage. But having my browser processes freeze once a week is well below the standards I've come to enjoy, and I'm wondering if I should just switch back to X and deal with the minor graphics hiccups.
  - notatoad 4y ago
    I honestly don't know. I installed fedora, and it wouldn't load to desktop. Switching to an X session fixed my problem, so that was the end of my troubleshooting. I just wanted my computer to work, not to fuss with display managers.
    - magicalhippo 4y ago
      I just tried Wayland last week on my KDE Neon install. Tried playing a movie from my NAS share (smb). Nothing... Local file worked. Switched to X and the NAS file played just fine, exact same steps. No idea how Wayland would affect a Samba share, but like you I just wanted it to work so that was that for now.
    - wutbrodo 4y ago
      Oh, wow, didn't expect it to be that straightforward haha
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  That's not really useful, though. "Is it usable" is not one item, but a list of things that you need it to do. Enumerating those items both makes it easier for you to evaluate and gives you something concrete to point people at when explaining why it sucks.
temptemptemp111 4y ago
jpgvm 4y ago
Ah yes. Nvidia. The green death. At this point my systems are going to be pure AMD until status quo changes. I begrudgingly used Nvidia while they were the better of 2 proprietary blob options but now that AMD GPUs work out of the box with no hassle (for the ones I have tried at-least) and are competitive on performance for what I do (consumer workloads/gaming) then there is no contest. Right now I'm daily driving Wayland + Sway on Arch and it's been mostly good. Only issues I have ran into have been weirdness in the whole Alsa + Pipewire + etc stack which is hairy AF. Configuring Electron things to use Ozone auto detection makes them run native rather than via XWayland which is nice too.
- doodlesdev 4y ago
  > Configuring Electron things to use Ozone auto detection makes them run native rather than via XWayland which is nice too. How did you manage to set this up? Some environment variable? The best I've managed to do was to change the applications .desktop file to include Ozone wayland parameters.
  - jpgvm 4y ago
    On Arch they tend to use flags files in `$HOME/.config` can generally just add `--ozone-platform=wayland` to force it to use Wayland.
    - doubled112 4y ago
      I had mixed results with the flags files. At least the last time I tried, between Arch repos and AUR, I had some versions of Electron that'd pick it up, and some that wouldn't.
- BeetleB 4y ago
  Interesting how the pendulum swings. My first PC I built and used with Linux used an ATI Radeon graphics card (now owned by AMD). It had such poor Linux support that I swore I'd never buy ATI again. Nvidia's drivers were way better in those days.
- 4y ago
akdor1154 4y ago
Nice. I'd appreciate a checkpoint for 'application-managed fractional scaling', i.e. a protocol extension that says "oi, Firefox, the screen you're on wants you to render at 96*1.5=144dpi". There are issues and discussions ongoing regarding this. Everything else Wayland, including app-managed integer scaling, is working fab here. (Pop / Gnome since 40 )
tastysandwich 4y ago
My biggest annoyance at this stage is a few blurry apps when using fractional scaling. Eg Calibre & GIMP. But I don't think that's Wayland's fault - it's up to those apps to upgrade their UI libraries (which might be a monumental task, I'm not sure). I know GIMP is working towards GTK3 and hopefully that fixes the issue. As for Calibre. It uses PyQT. Does anyone know if PyQT supports fractional scaling now? And what it would take for something like Calibre to upgrade to a newer PyQT version?
- anotherhue 4y ago
  That's a consequence of going through Xwayland. If there's a wayland native version of those apps it should be crisp.
- porjo 4y ago
  I recently tried Krita [0] which supposedly supports fractional scaling but still looks blurry on my Fedora 36/Gnome desktop!? [0] https://krita.org https://krita.org
- maxdamantus 4y ago
  > But I don't think that's Wayland's fault - it's up to those apps to upgrade their UI libraries (which might be a monumental task, I'm not sure). Actually, it is Wayland's fault[0], and arguably Xorg is able to handle it better[1]. Basically, the protocol doesn't currently support sending a fraction as the scale to the application, so whenever you've got displays with DPIs that are not integer multiples of one another, the compositor will scale down on at least one of those displays, causing blur. In Xorg, it is normal for applications to simply detect the DPI of the display they're on and render accordingly. In either case, it requires support from the graphical framework used by the application (eg, Qt applications seem to automatically handle this on Xorg). I would quite like to replace one of my monitors in a multi-monitor setup with a HiDPI one, but lack of support for this is what's holding me back. I'd be happy enough if Firefox just added support to Xorg for DPI detection[2], though if Wayland gets this working first, I'll probably switch over to that (I've gone back and forth between Xorg/xmonad and Wayland/sway, and I don't really see any other blockers for me). [0] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/issues/47 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/i... [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/lficfe/wayland_fractional_scaling_may_be_sort_of_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/lficfe/wayland_fractio... [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1679335 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1679335
Silhouette 4y ago
IMHO the most frustrating thing about Wayland is how it's fracturing the Linux landscape again. For example Ubuntu switched to using it by default a while back. Unfortunately since Wayland prevents the usual screen sharing in many popular communications applications from working I usually have to go back to X in order to do any real work remotely. Combine that with some significant bugs that seem to happen in recent versions of Ubuntu/X but not Ubuntu/Wayland and now I have no fully working GUI on my Ubuntu machine because both options now have game-stopping problems. I do understand that there are good reasons for Wayland wanting to do what it's doing and breaking the old-fashioned screen sharing is a consequence of those. I understand that applications should be updated and other packages should be used and so on. I hope that these issues can be fixed sooner rather than later and we can all benefit from the technical advantages of Wayland. But if I'm in a conference call with important people about an important subject you can count the number of excuses I care about on the fingers of no hands. Wayland won't be ready for "normal" users until essential functionality works out of the box.
- cowtools 4y ago
  Do you have xdg-desktop-portal-gnome installed? Screen-sharing is working out of the box for me on both gnome and wlroots. File a bug to your distro maintainers if it doesn't.
  - Silhouette 4y ago
    I have a standard, regularly updated Ubuntu 22.04. I do appreciate your response but ironically you're also demonstrating exactly the point I was trying to make. As long as I have to worry about installing x-y-z-beta (but make sure it's the one from two weeks ago because last week's had a regression) to make essential basic functionality work we aren't really talking about a serious offering for normal users. In reality like almost every other Ubuntu user I've talked to in real life about this I just switch back to X if I need to screen share. And if that stops working I'll switch from Ubuntu to something that does. Like building my own PC with micro-optimised component choices, tweaking Linux system software was interesting for a while and sometimes got great results, but life's too short to keep doing that forever. Now I just want something that does its job.
ddtaylor 4y ago
> There is currently no accelerated GLX support when running a GNOME Wayland session no top of the NVIDIA drivers, meaning X11 OpenGL applications will use software rendering. Yikes.
- spystath 4y ago
  I don't think that's true since about a year ago. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests/587 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...
AdmiralAsshat 4y ago
I imagine I'll be on X until Cinnamon decides to switch to Wayland.
Weebs 4y ago
Push to talk is another important one (for me)
- aethe 4y ago
  This was also a big one for me. The best workaround I've come up with so far is to set up a global hotkey to toggle microphone mute in KDE, and then set my Discord (etc.) to have very sensitive "voice activation" settings. Essentially I've replaced push to talk with "push to toggle mute". Not the same thing, but I got used to it pretty quick. Having read some of the threads on the freedesktop wayland gitlab repo about push to talk, I'm not confident push to talk or any other system for applications to register a global hotkey is something they'll deliver any time soon (if ever).
  - oynqr 4y ago
    Have a look at https://github.com/waycrate/swhkd https://github.com/waycrate/swhkd, last time I tried to use it it was still quite janky, but it might have improved since.
phkahler 4y ago
CAD program -> Solvespace. It's been native Wayland for years now ;-)
dopeboy 4y ago
I'm on ubuntu 20.04 and thinking of upgrading to 22.04. Does Zoom work with Wayland?
- oynqr 4y ago
  It probably still abuses the Gnome screenshot API instead of using pipewire, but it might work.
- hkmaxpro 4y ago
  Yes, as of 2 weeks ago. https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/vhw3x3/zoom_can_now_as_of_version_5110_share_screen_on/ https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/vhw3x3/zoom_can_now_...
viraptor 4y ago
> Image editor: Inkscape That entry is both mislabelled and way too short. Inkscape is there for illustrating / vectors, but image editing has other apps.
- syntheweave 4y ago
  It's not even an honest assessment of usability. Tablet support on Wayland is hit-and-miss, depending on your vendor. There are some open issues in Inkscape around it but they might not even be resolvable by the Inkscape devs because of the whose-bug-is-it dependencies involved. But I run xorg for this reason.
sylware 4y ago
missing the steam client. So much to do there though: 64bits clean, not crashing without dbus, not bash but sh scripts, removal of the 32bits legacy code, pure and simple ELF64 application (static libstdc++ and libgcc) libdl-ing everything from the system (to maximize distro compatibility, but then a fork of libstdc++ is needed: usual c++ toxicity), wayland->x11 fallback, vulkan->gl->cpu fallback (that said the 64bits steam client is libcef from gogol, then certainly with all those fallbacks already there).
rvz 4y ago
Here we go again. We see multiple fissures in the Linux Desktop ecosystem all because of ONE system component. The same happened with systemd vs init.d and now we have this contraption. The alternatives of alternatives madness with system components not working with each other is why many don't bother supporting users on all 'supported' Linux distros altogether and instead target Windows and macOS. It isn't the early days of the Linux Desktop where people are first discovering that 'Linux' exists; it's been over 20+ years and the same chaos in the Linux Desktop is still present. Wayland is another thing to test against, for these poor app developers (especially Electron app / core developers) discovering issues like these two [0][1] which are still happening on their systems. It is totally impossible to support all these Linux users 100% of the time unlike the other two OSes (macOS and Windows), no matter the many infinite desktop configurations they may have. That is even before I mentioned drivers; especially anything NVIDIA. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30983400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30983400 [1] https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/21147 https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/21147
bravetraveler 4y ago
I am /shrug
georgia_peach 4y ago
Only thing holding me back is Barrier support. https://github.com/debauchee/barrier/issues/109 https://github.com/debauchee/barrier/issues/109
exabrial 4y ago
I have a question because I have not kept up with desktop remix for about 10 years. 10 years ago you could download a proprietary driver for Linux and Nvidia and it would actually work great. Is that still the case today or are you just completely hosed if you have Nvidia graphics?
- JellyBeanThief 4y ago
  That's how it works for me on Fedora 36. I use GNOME and drive four monitors including my laptop's with the 515.57 version of proprietary driver. It works very well for day-to-day use on X11, and very well for day-to-day use on Wayland. Here are my biggest problems: * On X11, after waking from sleep, fonts are sometimes garbled. This is easily fixed by restarting GNOME. I never have to do this with Wayland. * On X11, I always have to manually rearrange my monitors every time I plug them in, because some part of the stack doesn't know how to remember them. They work perfectly on Wayland. * On Wayland, GNOME's Night Light feature does not work. Night Light tints things red in the evening to help me sleep. * On Wayland, some apps misbehave in strange ways. Electron-based apps are sometimes slow to react to input, but updates have been fixing this. Also, Calibre's Ebook Viewer perpetually hangs. I have no idea why. Fortunately, switching between X11 and Wayland is pretty easy--just a log out and then back in after specifying which one I want. Gaming is different. It rarely works on Wayland. Much better on X11. But I don't game very much, so this is not based on a really wide selection.
  - exabrial 4y ago
    So basically Wayland/Nvidia is works pretty well, just no gaming?
vnm 4y ago
Once a year I switch to Wayland for a few hours to see if I can get my work done on it, and the result is always negative.
aasasd 4y ago
So no one thought of making a compatibility layer?
- Tajnymag 4y ago
  Like XWayland?
  - aasasd 4y ago
    Well there it is. If there's a compatibility layer, then what it matters if “we are Weyland” or “not Weyland”.
steve_gh 4y ago
Either Teams etc just work and allow screen sharing, or they doesn't.
- zackmtaylor 4y ago
  On GNOME?
LeanderK 4y ago
I don't use linux but I thought Wayland is old news. I remember the talk about switching to waylaid like 6 years ago. Is it still niche?
butz 4y ago
Why Qt5 problems on GNOME are not mentioned? Am I only one who has problems with KeepassXC on GNOME, where program window does not have correct decorations (shadows) and doesn't appear in window switcher (alt+tab)?
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  Gnome devs pretend Qt doesn't exist, so for them this is not a problem, as you should only be using Gnome/GTK apps according to them (aka "you're holding it wrong") KDE is much better at displaying GTK apps than Gnome is at Qt apps.
- ysleepy 4y ago
  I literally had this problem yesterday. All the label and field text was invisible. For some reason it worked after a snap reinstall of keepassxc. Why it is snap, I have no idea. Apart from lots of display switching and scaling causing quirks everywhere.
KSPAtlas 4y ago
Needs an update, I can run Sway on NVIDIA with a big limitation: XWayland is extremely buggy

96 points by picture 4y ago

I'd argue the arrangement of this data is pretty deceptive. They give fields like "Desktop Environments" a green checkmark even though the vast majority are still unsupported. Furthermore, none of this addresses some of the real showstopper bugs like blurry UI scaling, screen locking issues, screensharing being largely unsupported or UB/artifacting problems on legacy apps. I'd like to assume good faith here, but the arrangement of this site is really odd: the first list is comprised of applications, and the "only thing" missing is color management/HDR, which is decidedly not an application. Do your own research. Wayland is an improvement for web browsing and text editing, but I've found it unusable for anything outside of extremely light, limited workloads. YMMV.

markstos 4y ago
I’ve been using Wayland for over a year with screen sharing, photo editing, video production. Definitely less Jane resizing windows with Wayland.

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago

Oh sweet, I just have replace most of my applications and DE and everything will just work! /s

wutbrodo 4y ago
I have my qualms about Wayland, but this dashboard is quite obviously not directed at you? I don't see any suggestion that everyone should switch over now that there are a small handful of compatible apps per category. But for someone like me, all the software I use is completely fungible except for the browser and DE, and my recent switch to Wayland could've used precisely this dashboard. The real complaint here is that the dashboard is inaccurate, at the very least by omission. The checkbox elides the level of stability implied by "support", for software as central as Chrome
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  That is a possible interpretation, true. It reads to me as somebody trying to show a page full of green check marks to pretend that Wayland is totally ready to use and everybody should switch already. I suppose it might be intended as a list of things that are compatible, in which case yes it's quite useful.
coconut08 4y ago
ubuntu and fedora are both shipping wayland out of the box with gnome which covers the overwhelming majority of every day users. most people are already using wayland. it's not our fault you decided that you want to use fluxbox on gentoo
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  > most people are already using wayland I would love to hear how you can possibly know that. > it's not our fault you decided that you want to use fluxbox on gentoo If you like monocultures and arbitrary restrictions, maybe try Darwin?
  - markstos 4y ago
    Maybe they count Chromebooks? Those use Wayland.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
      Hah, I forgot about that. A bit like calling Android Linux, but yes that probably does dwarf the rest of us.
  - csande17 4y ago
    I'd imagine they're basing their conclusions of off telemetry data from Ubuntu and Fedora. After all, Linux is just like Firefox: everyone who uses it absolutely loves sharing information about themselves with corporations! Telemetry data therefore presents an accurate, unbiased picture of the entire userbase.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
      Lol. But it's actually worse than that; Firefox enables telemetry by default and then ignores everyone who opts out, but I'm not aware of any Linux distros that enable it by default (Ubuntu apparently used to, until it silently broke and then they removed it: https://itsubuntu.com/no-more-popularity-contest-package-by-default-ubuntu/ https://itsubuntu.com/no-more-popularity-contest-package-by-...).
EamonnMR 4y ago
Reminds me of the early days of Ubuntu with the fierce competition between KDE, Gnome, and Xfce

hossbeast 4y ago

Have been using Wayland as my daily driver for about a year now, on my main PC, which I use for WFH. Big improvement for me.

notatoad 4y ago

Neat dashboard, but for my purposes only one datapoint matters: can I use it. And the answer to that is still no.

wutbrodo 4y ago
What is your blocker?I'm curious because I recently switched to swaywm to fix some screen tearing, and I'm still figuring out how ready it is for primetime. It mostly works fine, but I'm getting occasional bugs with critical software like Chrome/Brave. It's giving me a very uncomfortable Ubuntu-in-2007 feeling. It's a testament to desktop Linux's improvement that I haven't felt that way in a decade, and have a much higher stability bar than I do for Windows or my limited Mac usage. But having my browser processes freeze once a week is well below the standards I've come to enjoy, and I'm wondering if I should just switch back to X and deal with the minor graphics hiccups.
- notatoad 4y ago
  I honestly don't know. I installed fedora, and it wouldn't load to desktop. Switching to an X session fixed my problem, so that was the end of my troubleshooting. I just wanted my computer to work, not to fuss with display managers.
  - magicalhippo 4y ago
    I just tried Wayland last week on my KDE Neon install. Tried playing a movie from my NAS share (smb). Nothing... Local file worked. Switched to X and the NAS file played just fine, exact same steps. No idea how Wayland would affect a Samba share, but like you I just wanted it to work so that was that for now.
  - wutbrodo 4y ago
    Oh, wow, didn't expect it to be that straightforward haha
yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
That's not really useful, though. "Is it usable" is not one item, but a list of things that you need it to do. Enumerating those items both makes it easier for you to evaluate and gives you something concrete to point people at when explaining why it sucks.

temptemptemp111 4y ago

jpgvm 4y ago

Ah yes. Nvidia. The green death. At this point my systems are going to be pure AMD until status quo changes. I begrudgingly used Nvidia while they were the better of 2 proprietary blob options but now that AMD GPUs work out of the box with no hassle (for the ones I have tried at-least) and are competitive on performance for what I do (consumer workloads/gaming) then there is no contest. Right now I'm daily driving Wayland + Sway on Arch and it's been mostly good. Only issues I have ran into have been weirdness in the whole Alsa + Pipewire + etc stack which is hairy AF. Configuring Electron things to use Ozone auto detection makes them run native rather than via XWayland which is nice too.

doodlesdev 4y ago
> Configuring Electron things to use Ozone auto detection makes them run native rather than via XWayland which is nice too. How did you manage to set this up? Some environment variable? The best I've managed to do was to change the applications .desktop file to include Ozone wayland parameters.
- jpgvm 4y ago
  On Arch they tend to use flags files in `$HOME/.config` can generally just add `--ozone-platform=wayland` to force it to use Wayland.
  - doubled112 4y ago
    I had mixed results with the flags files. At least the last time I tried, between Arch repos and AUR, I had some versions of Electron that'd pick it up, and some that wouldn't.
BeetleB 4y ago
Interesting how the pendulum swings. My first PC I built and used with Linux used an ATI Radeon graphics card (now owned by AMD). It had such poor Linux support that I swore I'd never buy ATI again. Nvidia's drivers were way better in those days.
4y ago

akdor1154 4y ago

Nice. I'd appreciate a checkpoint for 'application-managed fractional scaling', i.e. a protocol extension that says "oi, Firefox, the screen you're on wants you to render at 96*1.5=144dpi". There are issues and discussions ongoing regarding this. Everything else Wayland, including app-managed integer scaling, is working fab here. (Pop / Gnome since 40 )

tastysandwich 4y ago

My biggest annoyance at this stage is a few blurry apps when using fractional scaling. Eg Calibre & GIMP. But I don't think that's Wayland's fault - it's up to those apps to upgrade their UI libraries (which might be a monumental task, I'm not sure). I know GIMP is working towards GTK3 and hopefully that fixes the issue. As for Calibre. It uses PyQT. Does anyone know if PyQT supports fractional scaling now? And what it would take for something like Calibre to upgrade to a newer PyQT version?

anotherhue 4y ago
That's a consequence of going through Xwayland. If there's a wayland native version of those apps it should be crisp.
porjo 4y ago
I recently tried Krita [0] which supposedly supports fractional scaling but still looks blurry on my Fedora 36/Gnome desktop!? [0] https://krita.org https://krita.org
maxdamantus 4y ago
> But I don't think that's Wayland's fault - it's up to those apps to upgrade their UI libraries (which might be a monumental task, I'm not sure). Actually, it is Wayland's fault[0], and arguably Xorg is able to handle it better[1]. Basically, the protocol doesn't currently support sending a fraction as the scale to the application, so whenever you've got displays with DPIs that are not integer multiples of one another, the compositor will scale down on at least one of those displays, causing blur. In Xorg, it is normal for applications to simply detect the DPI of the display they're on and render accordingly. In either case, it requires support from the graphical framework used by the application (eg, Qt applications seem to automatically handle this on Xorg). I would quite like to replace one of my monitors in a multi-monitor setup with a HiDPI one, but lack of support for this is what's holding me back. I'd be happy enough if Firefox just added support to Xorg for DPI detection[2], though if Wayland gets this working first, I'll probably switch over to that (I've gone back and forth between Xorg/xmonad and Wayland/sway, and I don't really see any other blockers for me). [0] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/issues/47 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/i... [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/lficfe/wayland_fractional_scaling_may_be_sort_of_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/lficfe/wayland_fractio... [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1679335 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1679335

Silhouette 4y ago

IMHO the most frustrating thing about Wayland is how it's fracturing the Linux landscape again. For example Ubuntu switched to using it by default a while back. Unfortunately since Wayland prevents the usual screen sharing in many popular communications applications from working I usually have to go back to X in order to do any real work remotely. Combine that with some significant bugs that seem to happen in recent versions of Ubuntu/X but not Ubuntu/Wayland and now I have no fully working GUI on my Ubuntu machine because both options now have game-stopping problems. I do understand that there are good reasons for Wayland wanting to do what it's doing and breaking the old-fashioned screen sharing is a consequence of those. I understand that applications should be updated and other packages should be used and so on. I hope that these issues can be fixed sooner rather than later and we can all benefit from the technical advantages of Wayland. But if I'm in a conference call with important people about an important subject you can count the number of excuses I care about on the fingers of no hands. Wayland won't be ready for "normal" users until essential functionality works out of the box.

cowtools 4y ago
Do you have xdg-desktop-portal-gnome installed? Screen-sharing is working out of the box for me on both gnome and wlroots. File a bug to your distro maintainers if it doesn't.
- Silhouette 4y ago
  I have a standard, regularly updated Ubuntu 22.04. I do appreciate your response but ironically you're also demonstrating exactly the point I was trying to make. As long as I have to worry about installing x-y-z-beta (but make sure it's the one from two weeks ago because last week's had a regression) to make essential basic functionality work we aren't really talking about a serious offering for normal users. In reality like almost every other Ubuntu user I've talked to in real life about this I just switch back to X if I need to screen share. And if that stops working I'll switch from Ubuntu to something that does. Like building my own PC with micro-optimised component choices, tweaking Linux system software was interesting for a while and sometimes got great results, but life's too short to keep doing that forever. Now I just want something that does its job.

ddtaylor 4y ago

> There is currently no accelerated GLX support when running a GNOME Wayland session no top of the NVIDIA drivers, meaning X11 OpenGL applications will use software rendering. Yikes.

spystath 4y ago
I don't think that's true since about a year ago. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests/587 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...

AdmiralAsshat 4y ago

I imagine I'll be on X until Cinnamon decides to switch to Wayland.

Weebs 4y ago

Push to talk is another important one (for me)

aethe 4y ago
This was also a big one for me. The best workaround I've come up with so far is to set up a global hotkey to toggle microphone mute in KDE, and then set my Discord (etc.) to have very sensitive "voice activation" settings. Essentially I've replaced push to talk with "push to toggle mute". Not the same thing, but I got used to it pretty quick. Having read some of the threads on the freedesktop wayland gitlab repo about push to talk, I'm not confident push to talk or any other system for applications to register a global hotkey is something they'll deliver any time soon (if ever).
- oynqr 4y ago
  Have a look at https://github.com/waycrate/swhkd https://github.com/waycrate/swhkd, last time I tried to use it it was still quite janky, but it might have improved since.

phkahler 4y ago

CAD program -> Solvespace. It's been native Wayland for years now ;-)

dopeboy 4y ago

I'm on ubuntu 20.04 and thinking of upgrading to 22.04. Does Zoom work with Wayland?

oynqr 4y ago
It probably still abuses the Gnome screenshot API instead of using pipewire, but it might work.
hkmaxpro 4y ago
Yes, as of 2 weeks ago. https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/vhw3x3/zoom_can_now_as_of_version_5110_share_screen_on/ https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/vhw3x3/zoom_can_now_...

viraptor 4y ago

> Image editor: Inkscape That entry is both mislabelled and way too short. Inkscape is there for illustrating / vectors, but image editing has other apps.

syntheweave 4y ago
It's not even an honest assessment of usability. Tablet support on Wayland is hit-and-miss, depending on your vendor. There are some open issues in Inkscape around it but they might not even be resolvable by the Inkscape devs because of the whose-bug-is-it dependencies involved. But I run xorg for this reason.

sylware 4y ago

missing the steam client. So much to do there though: 64bits clean, not crashing without dbus, not bash but sh scripts, removal of the 32bits legacy code, pure and simple ELF64 application (static libstdc++ and libgcc) libdl-ing everything from the system (to maximize distro compatibility, but then a fork of libstdc++ is needed: usual c++ toxicity), wayland->x11 fallback, vulkan->gl->cpu fallback (that said the 64bits steam client is libcef from gogol, then certainly with all those fallbacks already there).

rvz 4y ago

Here we go again. We see multiple fissures in the Linux Desktop ecosystem all because of ONE system component. The same happened with systemd vs init.d and now we have this contraption. The alternatives of alternatives madness with system components not working with each other is why many don't bother supporting users on all 'supported' Linux distros altogether and instead target Windows and macOS. It isn't the early days of the Linux Desktop where people are first discovering that 'Linux' exists; it's been over 20+ years and the same chaos in the Linux Desktop is still present. Wayland is another thing to test against, for these poor app developers (especially Electron app / core developers) discovering issues like these two [0][1] which are still happening on their systems. It is totally impossible to support all these Linux users 100% of the time unlike the other two OSes (macOS and Windows), no matter the many infinite desktop configurations they may have. That is even before I mentioned drivers; especially anything NVIDIA. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30983400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30983400 [1] https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/21147 https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/21147

bravetraveler 4y ago

I am /shrug

georgia_peach 4y ago

Only thing holding me back is Barrier support. https://github.com/debauchee/barrier/issues/109 https://github.com/debauchee/barrier/issues/109

exabrial 4y ago

I have a question because I have not kept up with desktop remix for about 10 years. 10 years ago you could download a proprietary driver for Linux and Nvidia and it would actually work great. Is that still the case today or are you just completely hosed if you have Nvidia graphics?

JellyBeanThief 4y ago
That's how it works for me on Fedora 36. I use GNOME and drive four monitors including my laptop's with the 515.57 version of proprietary driver. It works very well for day-to-day use on X11, and very well for day-to-day use on Wayland. Here are my biggest problems: * On X11, after waking from sleep, fonts are sometimes garbled. This is easily fixed by restarting GNOME. I never have to do this with Wayland. * On X11, I always have to manually rearrange my monitors every time I plug them in, because some part of the stack doesn't know how to remember them. They work perfectly on Wayland. * On Wayland, GNOME's Night Light feature does not work. Night Light tints things red in the evening to help me sleep. * On Wayland, some apps misbehave in strange ways. Electron-based apps are sometimes slow to react to input, but updates have been fixing this. Also, Calibre's Ebook Viewer perpetually hangs. I have no idea why. Fortunately, switching between X11 and Wayland is pretty easy--just a log out and then back in after specifying which one I want. Gaming is different. It rarely works on Wayland. Much better on X11. But I don't game very much, so this is not based on a really wide selection.
- exabrial 4y ago
  So basically Wayland/Nvidia is works pretty well, just no gaming?

vnm 4y ago

Once a year I switch to Wayland for a few hours to see if I can get my work done on it, and the result is always negative.

aasasd 4y ago

So no one thought of making a compatibility layer?

Tajnymag 4y ago
Like XWayland?
- aasasd 4y ago
  Well there it is. If there's a compatibility layer, then what it matters if “we are Weyland” or “not Weyland”.

steve_gh 4y ago

Either Teams etc just work and allow screen sharing, or they doesn't.

zackmtaylor 4y ago
On GNOME?

LeanderK 4y ago

I don't use linux but I thought Wayland is old news. I remember the talk about switching to waylaid like 6 years ago. Is it still niche?

butz 4y ago

Why Qt5 problems on GNOME are not mentioned? Am I only one who has problems with KeepassXC on GNOME, where program window does not have correct decorations (shadows) and doesn't appear in window switcher (alt+tab)?

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
Gnome devs pretend Qt doesn't exist, so for them this is not a problem, as you should only be using Gnome/GTK apps according to them (aka "you're holding it wrong") KDE is much better at displaying GTK apps than Gnome is at Qt apps.
ysleepy 4y ago
I literally had this problem yesterday. All the label and field text was invisible. For some reason it worked after a snap reinstall of keepassxc. Why it is snap, I have no idea. Apart from lots of display switching and scaling causing quirks everywhere.

KSPAtlas 4y ago

Needs an update, I can run Sway on NVIDIA with a big limitation: XWayland is extremely buggy