6 ms·

I really wanted to like wayland as the 'next big thing', but for the life of me I can't. * I've yet to see any actual, honest to god benefits for the end user.

I really wanted to like wayland as the 'next big thing', but for the life of me I can't. * I've yet to see any actual, honest to god benefits for the end user. Literally everything I've seen is the fact that it makes development easier for the wayland devs and harder for literally everyone else. * Trying to use a wayland window manager outside of gnome or kde leaves you reliant on a bunch of hackish utilities (redshift, taskbar, screen recording / sharing, etc) which are available on AUR and basically no where else * Scaling and perf for xwayland apps (i.e. most apps) is pretty bad. Is wayland the future? Maybe, but I'll happily use xorg for the next decade if needed until the user experience is rock solid over on wayland.

guerrilla 4y ago
> * I've yet to see any actual, honest to god benefits for the end user. Literally everything I've seen is the fact that it makes development easier for the wayland devs and harder for literally everyone else. You can see some small benefits in GNOME like movies still playing while window switching, nice shadows, no more tearing, etc. but honestly who cares but aesthetes. None of this was in popular demand. The security is nice but when was that ever exploited in the wild? Mostly I see downsides, like now there's multiple ways (or no way in some compositors) to dim screens... I'm sure eventually we'll get all our features back but for now it's mostly a bunch of small irritations that add up.
- amelius 4y ago
  > but honestly who cares but aesthetes Someone building the next Apple might care.
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    So, aesthetes making up virtually zero percent of Linux desktop users while handicapping the rest for years.
- adrian_b 4y ago
  Under X11, I do not remember to have ever seen any disturbance in movie playing during window switching, but I have also never used GNOME. If Wayland improves movie playing under GNOME, then it solves a GNOME bug, not an X11 bug.
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    I mean in thumbnails and while switching workspaces and all that... There's never any frozen frames, skips or anything. Yes, eventually X got compositing, but not for most of its life and not in mainstream WMs.
    - pantalaimon 4y ago
      Compiz has been around for 16 years now
      - guerrilla 4y ago
        Yeah, I did mention that in my comment and also that it's not Metacity/Mutter, KWin or popular. On the other hand, I've never seen Compiz perform this well.
    - adrian_b 4y ago
      I am using XFCE, which has included a compositor for many years. I think that it counts as a mainstream WM.
solarkraft 4y ago
I used to be a Wayland maximalist and have somewhat given up. X11 works just fine. The theoretical security benefits haven't really been realized and the incompatibility inside of the ecosystem due to the aggressive "out of scope" response by the Wayland team massively killed my enthusiasm. All it has done is cement the Gnome monopoly because instead of general-purpose desktop tools, you now mostly have Gnome shell (or KDE) extensions for everything and all other desktops are left out.
- blueflow 4y ago
  Which terminal emulator did you settle on?
  - amalgamated_inc 4y ago
    I use Alacritty. Works awesome.
- deagle50 4y ago
  X11 only works fine if you don't use multiple monitors and need vsync, or variable refresh, or different scaling settings.
  - adrian_b 4y ago
    I have no experience with variable refresh, but I have been using up to three monitors with different resolutions, up to 4k, under X11, for almost a decade, without any problems whatsoever (mostly with NVIDIA GPUs, where their Settings utility simplifies the configuration of a multi-monitor layout). X11 is very far from an ideal graphics system and I would like to see it replaced by a better system, which would still have to also implement the X protocol for the legacy applications. Nevertheless, I have not seen any argument yet that would indicate that Wayland is the appropriate replacement for X11. On the contrary, some of the ideas on which Wayland was originally based were definitely wrong and they have shown that the Wayland developers lacked experience about how many computers are used. Even if a part of the initial mistakes have been patched meanwhile, that lack of vision at the Wayland origin makes me skeptical even about the quality level of the Wayland parts about which I do not know anything.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
encryptluks2 4y ago
> Trying to use a wayland window manager outside of gnome or kde leaves you reliant on a bunch of hackish utilities (redshift, taskbar, screen recording / sharing, etc) which are available on AUR and basically no where else. Because redshift is designed for X11. If you want redshift for Wayland then you use gammastep. Taskbar options if you don't want to use whatever is part of a common window manager would be Waybar, swaybar, and i3statusrs. Screen recording works well with OBS. All this works without relying on the AUR BTW.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  > gammastep Nope, wrong, this doesn't work for KDE or GNOME or most of the big compositors for that matter. There really is no standard way as I mentioned in another comment. Anyway, from the gammastep README: > Why doesn't this work with Wayland compositors like Mutter, KWin, Mir, and Enlightenment? > This program supports the wlroots protocol for gamma adjustments, but several Wayland compositors do not support this protocol. GNOME and KDE have their own built-in mechanisms for adjusting color temperature on Wayland. For GNOME, I might as well say here for reference, using gsettings to adjust the keys in org.gnome.desktop.a11y.magnifier seems to work for now, but I'm sure they'll find a reason to remove that soon enough.
  - saghm 4y ago
    The original comment was that redshift was needed outside of Gnome or KDE, so I think the comment you're responding to is addressing that. It still seems like a legitimate gripe that it doesn't work for many other compositors, but I think the inclusion of KDE/Gnome here is a bit of an accidental goal post shift for the parent comment.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - guerrilla 4y ago
      Mmmm okay I see what you mean.
    - 4y ago
mnd999 4y ago
The killer feature for me is setting different scaling for different screens. This just works for me in wayland.
- horsawlarway 4y ago
  I find the general defaults in most Wayland compositors to be much more pleasant than X-org defaults. Libinput and Pipewire in particular solve a huge selection of issues I would routinely run into on linux machines in the 2010's. Not limited to wayland, but definitely pushed by wayland and developed in tandom with a similar set of goals (renovate mostly legacy spaces that are critical in the end-user space). I have also - not ever - had to touch a terminal/file editor to make an external display work with wayland. Which... is just hands down pleasant. And frankly an experience that does not exist with X. For the most part - I just plug it an and things work as expected. Including much better scaling/hidpi support. Honestly - not having to mess with conf files for basic input/output has been a hallmark of my experience with Wayland. I enjoy quite a bit more deep diving in linux than most any typical user (I run arch as a daily driver and host about 15 apps in a k8s cluster in my basement - I'm not afraid of some configuration), but I'm tired of wasting time making devices work like they should. Personally - I don't find that experience enjoyable or satisfying. I'd like my mouse/touchpad/monitor/headset to just work when I connect them, and wayland based compositors seem to get those mostly right. I switched 5 years ago - back when screen sharing was still... rough, and a lot of the benefits weren't present because major applications (namely - browsers) were still running in Xwayland. The experience today is just downright pleasant. I enjoy my wayland boxes far more than my work macbook, and the last hold-out has been a Windows 10 box for games, which thanks to valve and wine will not be getting upgraded to windows 11.
- unshavedyak 4y ago
  It's a pretty big deal for me too, but: 1. I was told to ~piss off~ because i use Nvidia for Blender and don't want to switch to AMD. The hostility was very discouraging. 2. I adjusted my workstation accordingly to not deal with the screen issue long ago. Yea, it would be nice to use differing monitors, but before Wayland was really viable i had to solve the problem properly to keep working. The net result is this killer feature had to be solved by me with hardware before Wayland could even have a chance to solve it with software.
LAC-Tech 4y ago
Trying to use a wayland window manager outside of gnome or kde leaves you reliant on a bunch of hackish utilities (redshift, taskbar, screen recording / sharing, etc) which are available on AUR and basically no where else LOL as a long time "just a WM" user, I don't find any of these to be that hackish.
lnxg33k1 4y ago
I'm using wayland right now not because I give a f*ck about graphic servers, but having a 2K laptop monitor and 2 4K external monitors, I find the "monitor independent scaling" supported by wayland better than "only one scaling per all the monitors" of X11, had just to solve an issue related to screensharing on browsers but following archlinux wiki was straightforward enough for me But yeah I use KDE so probably for other DE is not worth it?
bsder 4y ago
Wayland needs a restart. I get (and applaud) the aggressive "not in scope" as the developers don't want to be maintaining the universe and dealing with nVidia, AMD, and Intel is difficult enough. I really wonder if implementing this stuff in something other than C/C++ (Go, Nim, D, Ada, Zig, Rust, etc.) would be an improvement as it would force developers to come to grips with "No, you DON'T own that memory and you can't bash on it and people who want to use your system won't either. Figure out how to abstract that." It's become pretty clear that their abstractions aren't correct. If I have to link against a gigantic C library just to get window decorations, we have a deeper problem. (see: http://way-cooler.org/blog/2019/04/29/rewriting-way-cooler-in-c.html http://way-cooler.org/blog/2019/04/29/rewriting-way-cooler-i... for how big it is) > Currently there is 11 THOUSAND lines of Rust in wlroots-rs. All of this code is just wrapper code, it doesn’t do anything but memory management. This isn’t just repeated code either, I defined a very complicated and ugly macro to try to make it easier. > This wrapper code doesn’t cover even half of the API surface of wlroots. It’s exhausting writing wlroots-rs code, memory management is constantly on my mind because that’s the whole purpose of the library. It’s a very boring problem and it’s always at odds with usability - see the motivation for the escape from callback hell described above.
- pengaru 4y ago
  > (see: http://way-cooler.org/blog/2019/04/29/rewriting-way-cooler-i http://way-cooler.org/blog/2019/04/29/rewriting-way-cooler-i... for how big it is) Disclaimer: I don't know Rust beyond println!("Hello World"); C is my preferred language for decades now. The example Rust code in that linked post is just an absolute unreadable horror show. If that's representative of what it's really like to interop C with Rust or just write real Rust code in general, I'm strongly discouraged from bothering to put more effort into the language. Can anyone skilled and experienced enough with Rust to judge what's going on there comment? Is the author just a noob making a mess of things as anyone can do in any language, or is this limited to C interop? Or is Rust normally such an inscrutably verbose disaster?
  - Filligree 4y ago
    I've written a bit of Rust/C interop. It doesn't look like that; most of the time it's... not pleasant, since it's interop, but certainly not this terrible. On the other hand, I can't think of a way to do it better either. wlroots might just be uniquely horrible here.
amalgamated_inc 4y ago
FWIW, I much prefer learning and using 4-5 "hackish utilities" to the giant blob of design-by-committee that is Gnome or KDE. Redshift took like 1 minute to set up once, and has worked flawlessly w/o intervention since. Taskbar is actually better than on any distribution including Mac or Windows, IMO. I can put anything on the system in my task bar with a few minutes of work. Try that anywhere else. Screen recording is still a bit buggy, but usually because projects (like Electron) haven't updated their dependencies. Love Sway. I'd kind of say it the other way around. I don't notice any real downside over X, configuration is much nicer, and apparently it's more secure or something? Why not.
JTBooth 4y ago
I'm a very casual Ubuntu user, but I use external monitors with my laptop closed. I fixed the "5 second input lag when main display is off" bug a bunch of times, it seemed to break again every third time I restarted. Eventually I saw a snarky "or you losers could just switch to Wayland" comment, I tried it, and I haven't had a problem since. I'm learning a lot about the politics of the situation in here! For me, Wayland worked.
jchw 4y ago
Frame perfect rendering, and heterogenous and fractional DPI are the main user benefits today. Future benefits that we might get as a result of the improved stack include better crash recovery for display servers, better multi-GPU and hotplugging functionality, and better support for variable refresh rate/HDR/etc. Also, the new stack is about far more than just the Wayland devs, but as someone who has implemented a Wayland client from scratch in Go, I do not believe it is at all worse than Xorg. The biggest issue I can see today is rough edges where different compositors implement the protocols differently. But, that seems to improve over time, and users of UI toolkits generally needn't care. Most Wayland compositors outside of GNOME, KDE and Weston are wlroots-based. Whether the packages have been added to Arch repos is kind of neither here nor there, a lot of them are reasonably mature and will do what they say. Wlrobs for example will work just fine if you want high performance screen capture inside of wlroots without relying on desktop portals. XWayland apps scale fine, they just don't render at high DPI. I agree this is bad if it's most apps. That said, you may not have realized but a lot of apps that start in XWayland today work fine with Wayland/XDG Shell with a command line flag or environment variable. Chromium and Electron apps will switch soon when the ozone platform hint flag is changed to default to "auto". That means that Firefox, Chrome, Electron, SDL, GLFW, Qt 5, Qt 6, GTK 3 and GTK 4 apps can all start in native Wayland assuming the apps themselves don't depend on X11, including many tricky ones like OBS. Even Wine might soon have a native Wayland driver[1], further knocking down the number of apps that hard-depend on X. (For me, the main ones I can think of are Krita and dolphin-emu.) I think the vast majority of Wayland issues today just stem from the NVIDIA experience. And to be fair, that is a completely valid reason to not use Wayland. It's a shame though, because the developers behind Xorg have no interest in maintaining parts of X outside of XWayland. It's tough to break many of these chicken-and-egg problems with 80% of the Linux user base being shafted. Of course, it's not just about Wayland, it's about the whole stack. NVIDIA users had to wait longer to get many basic creature comforts, like KMS support. It's very telling that only one major GPU vendor has issues like this with open source OSes, it's just unfortunate that it has to be the biggest one on desktop. Of course, everything is always just around the bend. But with improving NVIDIA drivers and concrete timelines for apps defaulting to Wayland when possible, 2023 seems like it might just be the turning point. I'm patiently awaiting new NVIDIA driver releases... (But for now, you will have a way, way better time on Intel and AMD. It's leagues ahead.) [1]: https://youtu.be/lZ-MK72Kyp8 https://youtu.be/lZ-MK72Kyp8
deaddodo 4y ago
> * I've yet to see any actual, honest to god benefits for the end user. Literally everything I've seen is the fact that it makes development easier for the wayland devs and harder for literally everyone else. When Wayland was proposed, it’s biggest benefit was for direct rendering. At the time AIGLX was still the main hack to getting decent compositing/GL performance and had some major drawbacks. Wayland was designed in a manner more similar to the DRs in other desktop OSes (Windows and OS X, primarily). But, in its long development and adoption period, X’s DRI/DRM infrastructure has had plenty of time to mature and many of those arguments have been made moot. In fact, it still generally outperforms Wayland in many cases: https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-510-wayland/2 https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-510-wayland/2 Theoretically Wayland is still conceptually superior in that regard; but you’re right, it hasn’t shown the drastic improvement originally promised.
- vially 4y ago
  For what it's worth, most (all?) the comparisons in that phoronix article [1] compare the performance of apps running under XWayland (in a Wayland session) versus an Xorg session. That's because most steam games use SDL 2 which still uses XWayland by default (the default has been changed in SDL 3 though [2]). So using the data from that article to conclude that "[Xorg] still generally outperforms Wayland" seems wrong. A comparison between native Wayland apps vs Xorg apps would have been a lot more relevant though. [1] - https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-510-wayland https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-510-wayland [2] - https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/pull/6362 https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/pull/6362
zamalek 4y ago
> I've yet to see any actual, honest to god benefits for the end user. X11 reduces my laptop battery life to about 33%. Possibly because the refresh rate is 144Hz, I don't know. Battery life is a substantial use-case. The perceived latency is also way lower, resulting in a more pleasurable experience (and that matters). > Trying to use a wayland window manager outside of gnome or kde leaves you reliant on a bunch of hackish utilities That's due to the philosophy of those compositors (compose something bigger with simple tools, i.e. the unix philosophy). Nothing in Wayland is preventing the implementation of a full shell (as Mutter and KWin prove). > Scaling and perf for xwayland apps (i.e. most apps) is pretty bad. The fractional scaling extension is pretty new, but was designed to rectify this. My big peeve with Wayland is Gnome and their f$&#(_ing refusal to implement decorations. And screen sharing is mostly broken on Ubuntu 22.4 (but that's probably because Ubuntu is utter shite, screensharing has been rock-solid on my distro-hopping personal PC).

guerrilla 4y ago

> * I've yet to see any actual, honest to god benefits for the end user. Literally everything I've seen is the fact that it makes development easier for the wayland devs and harder for literally everyone else. You can see some small benefits in GNOME like movies still playing while window switching, nice shadows, no more tearing, etc. but honestly who cares but aesthetes. None of this was in popular demand. The security is nice but when was that ever exploited in the wild? Mostly I see downsides, like now there's multiple ways (or no way in some compositors) to dim screens... I'm sure eventually we'll get all our features back but for now it's mostly a bunch of small irritations that add up.

amelius 4y ago
> but honestly who cares but aesthetes Someone building the next Apple might care.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  So, aesthetes making up virtually zero percent of Linux desktop users while handicapping the rest for years.
adrian_b 4y ago
Under X11, I do not remember to have ever seen any disturbance in movie playing during window switching, but I have also never used GNOME. If Wayland improves movie playing under GNOME, then it solves a GNOME bug, not an X11 bug.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  I mean in thumbnails and while switching workspaces and all that... There's never any frozen frames, skips or anything. Yes, eventually X got compositing, but not for most of its life and not in mainstream WMs.
  - pantalaimon 4y ago
    Compiz has been around for 16 years now
    - guerrilla 4y ago
      Yeah, I did mention that in my comment and also that it's not Metacity/Mutter, KWin or popular. On the other hand, I've never seen Compiz perform this well.
  - adrian_b 4y ago
    I am using XFCE, which has included a compositor for many years. I think that it counts as a mainstream WM.

solarkraft 4y ago

I used to be a Wayland maximalist and have somewhat given up. X11 works just fine. The theoretical security benefits haven't really been realized and the incompatibility inside of the ecosystem due to the aggressive "out of scope" response by the Wayland team massively killed my enthusiasm. All it has done is cement the Gnome monopoly because instead of general-purpose desktop tools, you now mostly have Gnome shell (or KDE) extensions for everything and all other desktops are left out.

blueflow 4y ago
Which terminal emulator did you settle on?
- amalgamated_inc 4y ago
  I use Alacritty. Works awesome.
deagle50 4y ago
X11 only works fine if you don't use multiple monitors and need vsync, or variable refresh, or different scaling settings.
- adrian_b 4y ago
  I have no experience with variable refresh, but I have been using up to three monitors with different resolutions, up to 4k, under X11, for almost a decade, without any problems whatsoever (mostly with NVIDIA GPUs, where their Settings utility simplifies the configuration of a multi-monitor layout). X11 is very far from an ideal graphics system and I would like to see it replaced by a better system, which would still have to also implement the X protocol for the legacy applications. Nevertheless, I have not seen any argument yet that would indicate that Wayland is the appropriate replacement for X11. On the contrary, some of the ideas on which Wayland was originally based were definitely wrong and they have shown that the Wayland developers lacked experience about how many computers are used. Even if a part of the initial mistakes have been patched meanwhile, that lack of vision at the Wayland origin makes me skeptical even about the quality level of the Wayland parts about which I do not know anything.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

encryptluks2 4y ago

> Trying to use a wayland window manager outside of gnome or kde leaves you reliant on a bunch of hackish utilities (redshift, taskbar, screen recording / sharing, etc) which are available on AUR and basically no where else. Because redshift is designed for X11. If you want redshift for Wayland then you use gammastep. Taskbar options if you don't want to use whatever is part of a common window manager would be Waybar, swaybar, and i3statusrs. Screen recording works well with OBS. All this works without relying on the AUR BTW.

guerrilla 4y ago
> gammastep Nope, wrong, this doesn't work for KDE or GNOME or most of the big compositors for that matter. There really is no standard way as I mentioned in another comment. Anyway, from the gammastep README: > Why doesn't this work with Wayland compositors like Mutter, KWin, Mir, and Enlightenment? > This program supports the wlroots protocol for gamma adjustments, but several Wayland compositors do not support this protocol. GNOME and KDE have their own built-in mechanisms for adjusting color temperature on Wayland. For GNOME, I might as well say here for reference, using gsettings to adjust the keys in org.gnome.desktop.a11y.magnifier seems to work for now, but I'm sure they'll find a reason to remove that soon enough.
- saghm 4y ago
  The original comment was that redshift was needed outside of Gnome or KDE, so I think the comment you're responding to is addressing that. It still seems like a legitimate gripe that it doesn't work for many other compositors, but I think the inclusion of KDE/Gnome here is a bit of an accidental goal post shift for the parent comment.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    Mmmm okay I see what you mean.
  - 4y ago

mnd999 4y ago

The killer feature for me is setting different scaling for different screens. This just works for me in wayland.

horsawlarway 4y ago
I find the general defaults in most Wayland compositors to be much more pleasant than X-org defaults. Libinput and Pipewire in particular solve a huge selection of issues I would routinely run into on linux machines in the 2010's. Not limited to wayland, but definitely pushed by wayland and developed in tandom with a similar set of goals (renovate mostly legacy spaces that are critical in the end-user space). I have also - not ever - had to touch a terminal/file editor to make an external display work with wayland. Which... is just hands down pleasant. And frankly an experience that does not exist with X. For the most part - I just plug it an and things work as expected. Including much better scaling/hidpi support. Honestly - not having to mess with conf files for basic input/output has been a hallmark of my experience with Wayland. I enjoy quite a bit more deep diving in linux than most any typical user (I run arch as a daily driver and host about 15 apps in a k8s cluster in my basement - I'm not afraid of some configuration), but I'm tired of wasting time making devices work like they should. Personally - I don't find that experience enjoyable or satisfying. I'd like my mouse/touchpad/monitor/headset to just work when I connect them, and wayland based compositors seem to get those mostly right. I switched 5 years ago - back when screen sharing was still... rough, and a lot of the benefits weren't present because major applications (namely - browsers) were still running in Xwayland. The experience today is just downright pleasant. I enjoy my wayland boxes far more than my work macbook, and the last hold-out has been a Windows 10 box for games, which thanks to valve and wine will not be getting upgraded to windows 11.
unshavedyak 4y ago
It's a pretty big deal for me too, but: 1. I was told to ~piss off~ because i use Nvidia for Blender and don't want to switch to AMD. The hostility was very discouraging. 2. I adjusted my workstation accordingly to not deal with the screen issue long ago. Yea, it would be nice to use differing monitors, but before Wayland was really viable i had to solve the problem properly to keep working. The net result is this killer feature had to be solved by me with hardware before Wayland could even have a chance to solve it with software.

LAC-Tech 4y ago

Trying to use a wayland window manager outside of gnome or kde leaves you reliant on a bunch of hackish utilities (redshift, taskbar, screen recording / sharing, etc) which are available on AUR and basically no where else LOL as a long time "just a WM" user, I don't find any of these to be that hackish.

lnxg33k1 4y ago

I'm using wayland right now not because I give a f*ck about graphic servers, but having a 2K laptop monitor and 2 4K external monitors, I find the "monitor independent scaling" supported by wayland better than "only one scaling per all the monitors" of X11, had just to solve an issue related to screensharing on browsers but following archlinux wiki was straightforward enough for me But yeah I use KDE so probably for other DE is not worth it?

bsder 4y ago

Wayland needs a restart. I get (and applaud) the aggressive "not in scope" as the developers don't want to be maintaining the universe and dealing with nVidia, AMD, and Intel is difficult enough. I really wonder if implementing this stuff in something other than C/C++ (Go, Nim, D, Ada, Zig, Rust, etc.) would be an improvement as it would force developers to come to grips with "No, you DON'T own that memory and you can't bash on it and people who want to use your system won't either. Figure out how to abstract that." It's become pretty clear that their abstractions aren't correct. If I have to link against a gigantic C library just to get window decorations, we have a deeper problem. (see: http://way-cooler.org/blog/2019/04/29/rewriting-way-cooler-in-c.html http://way-cooler.org/blog/2019/04/29/rewriting-way-cooler-i... for how big it is) > Currently there is 11 THOUSAND lines of Rust in wlroots-rs. All of this code is just wrapper code, it doesn’t do anything but memory management. This isn’t just repeated code either, I defined a very complicated and ugly macro to try to make it easier. > This wrapper code doesn’t cover even half of the API surface of wlroots. It’s exhausting writing wlroots-rs code, memory management is constantly on my mind because that’s the whole purpose of the library. It’s a very boring problem and it’s always at odds with usability - see the motivation for the escape from callback hell described above.

pengaru 4y ago
> (see: http://way-cooler.org/blog/2019/04/29/rewriting-way-cooler-i http://way-cooler.org/blog/2019/04/29/rewriting-way-cooler-i... for how big it is) Disclaimer: I don't know Rust beyond println!("Hello World"); C is my preferred language for decades now. The example Rust code in that linked post is just an absolute unreadable horror show. If that's representative of what it's really like to interop C with Rust or just write real Rust code in general, I'm strongly discouraged from bothering to put more effort into the language. Can anyone skilled and experienced enough with Rust to judge what's going on there comment? Is the author just a noob making a mess of things as anyone can do in any language, or is this limited to C interop? Or is Rust normally such an inscrutably verbose disaster?
- Filligree 4y ago
  I've written a bit of Rust/C interop. It doesn't look like that; most of the time it's... not pleasant, since it's interop, but certainly not this terrible. On the other hand, I can't think of a way to do it better either. wlroots might just be uniquely horrible here.

amalgamated_inc 4y ago

FWIW, I much prefer learning and using 4-5 "hackish utilities" to the giant blob of design-by-committee that is Gnome or KDE. Redshift took like 1 minute to set up once, and has worked flawlessly w/o intervention since. Taskbar is actually better than on any distribution including Mac or Windows, IMO. I can put anything on the system in my task bar with a few minutes of work. Try that anywhere else. Screen recording is still a bit buggy, but usually because projects (like Electron) haven't updated their dependencies. Love Sway. I'd kind of say it the other way around. I don't notice any real downside over X, configuration is much nicer, and apparently it's more secure or something? Why not.

JTBooth 4y ago

I'm a very casual Ubuntu user, but I use external monitors with my laptop closed. I fixed the "5 second input lag when main display is off" bug a bunch of times, it seemed to break again every third time I restarted. Eventually I saw a snarky "or you losers could just switch to Wayland" comment, I tried it, and I haven't had a problem since. I'm learning a lot about the politics of the situation in here! For me, Wayland worked.

jchw 4y ago

Frame perfect rendering, and heterogenous and fractional DPI are the main user benefits today. Future benefits that we might get as a result of the improved stack include better crash recovery for display servers, better multi-GPU and hotplugging functionality, and better support for variable refresh rate/HDR/etc. Also, the new stack is about far more than just the Wayland devs, but as someone who has implemented a Wayland client from scratch in Go, I do not believe it is at all worse than Xorg. The biggest issue I can see today is rough edges where different compositors implement the protocols differently. But, that seems to improve over time, and users of UI toolkits generally needn't care. Most Wayland compositors outside of GNOME, KDE and Weston are wlroots-based. Whether the packages have been added to Arch repos is kind of neither here nor there, a lot of them are reasonably mature and will do what they say. Wlrobs for example will work just fine if you want high performance screen capture inside of wlroots without relying on desktop portals. XWayland apps scale fine, they just don't render at high DPI. I agree this is bad if it's most apps. That said, you may not have realized but a lot of apps that start in XWayland today work fine with Wayland/XDG Shell with a command line flag or environment variable. Chromium and Electron apps will switch soon when the ozone platform hint flag is changed to default to "auto". That means that Firefox, Chrome, Electron, SDL, GLFW, Qt 5, Qt 6, GTK 3 and GTK 4 apps can all start in native Wayland assuming the apps themselves don't depend on X11, including many tricky ones like OBS. Even Wine might soon have a native Wayland driver[1], further knocking down the number of apps that hard-depend on X. (For me, the main ones I can think of are Krita and dolphin-emu.) I think the vast majority of Wayland issues today just stem from the NVIDIA experience. And to be fair, that is a completely valid reason to not use Wayland. It's a shame though, because the developers behind Xorg have no interest in maintaining parts of X outside of XWayland. It's tough to break many of these chicken-and-egg problems with 80% of the Linux user base being shafted. Of course, it's not just about Wayland, it's about the whole stack. NVIDIA users had to wait longer to get many basic creature comforts, like KMS support. It's very telling that only one major GPU vendor has issues like this with open source OSes, it's just unfortunate that it has to be the biggest one on desktop. Of course, everything is always just around the bend. But with improving NVIDIA drivers and concrete timelines for apps defaulting to Wayland when possible, 2023 seems like it might just be the turning point. I'm patiently awaiting new NVIDIA driver releases... (But for now, you will have a way, way better time on Intel and AMD. It's leagues ahead.) [1]: https://youtu.be/lZ-MK72Kyp8 https://youtu.be/lZ-MK72Kyp8

deaddodo 4y ago

> * I've yet to see any actual, honest to god benefits for the end user. Literally everything I've seen is the fact that it makes development easier for the wayland devs and harder for literally everyone else. When Wayland was proposed, it’s biggest benefit was for direct rendering. At the time AIGLX was still the main hack to getting decent compositing/GL performance and had some major drawbacks. Wayland was designed in a manner more similar to the DRs in other desktop OSes (Windows and OS X, primarily). But, in its long development and adoption period, X’s DRI/DRM infrastructure has had plenty of time to mature and many of those arguments have been made moot. In fact, it still generally outperforms Wayland in many cases: https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-510-wayland/2 https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-510-wayland/2 Theoretically Wayland is still conceptually superior in that regard; but you’re right, it hasn’t shown the drastic improvement originally promised.

vially 4y ago
For what it's worth, most (all?) the comparisons in that phoronix article [1] compare the performance of apps running under XWayland (in a Wayland session) versus an Xorg session. That's because most steam games use SDL 2 which still uses XWayland by default (the default has been changed in SDL 3 though [2]). So using the data from that article to conclude that "[Xorg] still generally outperforms Wayland" seems wrong. A comparison between native Wayland apps vs Xorg apps would have been a lot more relevant though. [1] - https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-510-wayland https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-510-wayland [2] - https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/pull/6362 https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/pull/6362

zamalek 4y ago

> I've yet to see any actual, honest to god benefits for the end user. X11 reduces my laptop battery life to about 33%. Possibly because the refresh rate is 144Hz, I don't know. Battery life is a substantial use-case. The perceived latency is also way lower, resulting in a more pleasurable experience (and that matters). > Trying to use a wayland window manager outside of gnome or kde leaves you reliant on a bunch of hackish utilities That's due to the philosophy of those compositors (compose something bigger with simple tools, i.e. the unix philosophy). Nothing in Wayland is preventing the implementation of a full shell (as Mutter and KWin prove). > Scaling and perf for xwayland apps (i.e. most apps) is pretty bad. The fractional scaling extension is pretty new, but was designed to rectify this. My big peeve with Wayland is Gnome and their f$&#(_ing refusal to implement decorations. And screen sharing is mostly broken on Ubuntu 22.4 (but that's probably because Ubuntu is utter shite, screensharing has been rock-solid on my distro-hopping personal PC).