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I'm not up to date on the Linux desktop ecosystem. In what sense is Wayland struggling?

by bartvk 4y ago

aidenn0 4y ago
It doesn't work reliably on any GPU I own, for any stable version of a linux distro I use. One GPU is too old, the other is too nvidia.
- vanderZwan 4y ago
  To be fair, I'm on an five-year old laptop with NVIDIA and since last year it almost works well enough to be a daily driver. For some weird reason Chromium doesn't render at all, even though Chrome does. That's the only remaining bug of significance. Whereas when I tried a year before I had to bail after an hour because many applications would just have a black screen. It kind of feels like it will take only one more year for this to work well enough (except then the laptop might be so old hardware support ends up lacking)
- kaba0 4y ago
  Wayland uses linux’s gpu abstraction (drm) to work and that’s it. If it fails to work than linux also does, so your setup has some issues.
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    I have to disable hardware compositing on X11 to get a reliable desktop (and HW rendering in individual apps like firefox). I'm not sure if something similar is possible on Wayland.
    - saturn_vk 4y ago
      It doesn't sound like X11 is running reliably for you either
      - aidenn0 4y ago
        I restart X11 only when either there's a power failure longer than the battery on my UPS, or I upgrade my kernel, so it's reliable enough.
        vetinari 4y ago
        Having to disable compositing doesn't sound very reliable.
        yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
        If it works, it works. And some of us never bothered installing a compositor in the first place, so it's hardly a high bar.
        vetinari 4y ago
        Obviously it doesn't work if your workaround is disabling it. It is either bad hardware, or buggy driver. For the latter, it has to be some obscure hardware; popular hardware would have it fixed.
        yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
        Okay, let's enumerate. Option 1: Wants to used hardware acceleration, fails, allows you to disable it and actually use your computer. Option 2: Wants to use hardware acceleration, fails, refuses to allow you to disable anything, literally cannot display graphics. One of these works, even degraded. The other does not.
        vetinari 4y ago
        I don't dispute that. My claim was, that both options you mention are broken, and for that one "working", "limping" would be a better term. Certainly not something you would architect a display system around.
    - kaba0 4y ago
      That doesn’t depend on the protocol, I think most implementations can simply choose a so-called “dumb” backend instead of hardware composition.
Nzen 4y ago
Dudemanguy wrote about its deficiencies 2022-06-11 [0], ex lack of feature parity with X11 and self imposed limitations like only allowing integer scaling (ie to get 1.5 scaling, it uses x3/x2 scaling). For some perspective, consider checking other hn reader reactions to this post [1]. [0] https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/posts/2022-06-10-wayland-xorg/wayland-xorg.html https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/posts/2022-06-10-wayland-x... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31752760 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31752760
- nani8ot 4y ago
  Fractional scaling was recently merged. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/143 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m...

I'm not up to date on the Linux desktop ecosystem. In what sense is Wayland struggling?

by bartvk 4y ago

I'm not up to date on the Linux desktop ecosystem. In what sense is Wayland struggling?

It doesn't work reliably on any GPU I own, for any stable version of a linux distro I use. One GPU is too old, the other is too nvidia.

vanderZwan 4y ago
To be fair, I'm on an five-year old laptop with NVIDIA and since last year it almost works well enough to be a daily driver. For some weird reason Chromium doesn't render at all, even though Chrome does. That's the only remaining bug of significance. Whereas when I tried a year before I had to bail after an hour because many applications would just have a black screen. It kind of feels like it will take only one more year for this to work well enough (except then the laptop might be so old hardware support ends up lacking)
kaba0 4y ago
Wayland uses linux’s gpu abstraction (drm) to work and that’s it. If it fails to work than linux also does, so your setup has some issues.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  I have to disable hardware compositing on X11 to get a reliable desktop (and HW rendering in individual apps like firefox). I'm not sure if something similar is possible on Wayland.
  - saturn_vk 4y ago
    It doesn't sound like X11 is running reliably for you either
    - aidenn0 4y ago
      I restart X11 only when either there's a power failure longer than the battery on my UPS, or I upgrade my kernel, so it's reliable enough.
      - vetinari 4y ago
        Having to disable compositing doesn't sound very reliable.
        yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
        If it works, it works. And some of us never bothered installing a compositor in the first place, so it's hardly a high bar.
        vetinari 4y ago
        Obviously it doesn't work if your workaround is disabling it. It is either bad hardware, or buggy driver. For the latter, it has to be some obscure hardware; popular hardware would have it fixed.
        yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
        Okay, let's enumerate. Option 1: Wants to used hardware acceleration, fails, allows you to disable it and actually use your computer. Option 2: Wants to use hardware acceleration, fails, refuses to allow you to disable anything, literally cannot display graphics. One of these works, even degraded. The other does not.
        vetinari 4y ago
        I don't dispute that. My claim was, that both options you mention are broken, and for that one "working", "limping" would be a better term. Certainly not something you would architect a display system around.
  - kaba0 4y ago
    That doesn’t depend on the protocol, I think most implementations can simply choose a so-called “dumb” backend instead of hardware composition.

Nzen 4y ago

Dudemanguy wrote about its deficiencies 2022-06-11 [0], ex lack of feature parity with X11 and self imposed limitations like only allowing integer scaling (ie to get 1.5 scaling, it uses x3/x2 scaling). For some perspective, consider checking other hn reader reactions to this post [1]. [0] https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/posts/2022-06-10-wayland-xorg/wayland-xorg.html https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/posts/2022-06-10-wayland-x... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31752760 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31752760

nani8ot 4y ago
Fractional scaling was recently merged. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/143 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m...