8 ms·

Asahi Linux to Users: Please Stop Using X.org

52 points by laktak 3y ago

ldarby 3y ago
> Yes, not every random app and feature you use on Xorg will have a Wayland equivalent. Deal with it. This is straight from the Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers model: https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html.
costco 3y ago
But I wanna use xbindkeys and not have to have everything integrated in the compositor. What do I gain when desktop Linux is poorly sandboxed and thus the theoretical security benefits of Wayland are trivially circumvented anyways?
SquareWheel 3y ago
The original source was posted yesterday. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35928000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35928000
mpol 3y ago
The discussion of phoronix often goes towards flamewar. I hope the discussion here is more civil :) I can understand they want to test their GPU drivers only against the main Wayland compositors. Xorg is quite another beast to support. For all I know, it might come into the context when most bugs have been ironed out in the GPU drivers. I do hope people do not take it as general advice. Not all desktop environments have a Wayland compositor, some are quite buggy and many apps don't work yet with Wayland. I am using Xfce and for the next year at least I will be on Xorg. I do hope Wayland gets better, but it has been an undertaking of many years already. The rest of the process won't be much faster I suspect.
- ykonstant 3y ago
  It is difficult to avoid flamewars when the original post itself contains flaimbait like: Yes, not every random app and feature you use on Xorg will have a Wayland equivalent. Deal with it. The major players in desktop Linux have decided it's time to move on from Xorg, and if you want to go against the tide you're on your own. Not to mention that talking about 'the major players in desktop Linux' is completely against what the OS ethos was supposed to be about; he said the quiet part out loud, and people strike back; it is only fair.
  - mort96 3y ago
    I don't think people understand that Xorg is truly dead. Wayland is essentially X12. Everyone who used to work on X now works in Wayland. You should not have an expectation that Xorg will keep working. You should not have an expectation that bugs will be fixed. You should not have an expectation that new hardware will work well with Xorg. If you want to go against the tide, you truly are on your own. You should expect less and less things to work over time as Xorg's code rots, X backends for GUI frameworks rot, and new hardware and drivers expose X bugs which won't be fixed. If this doesn't scream "it's time to move away", I don't really know what does. Nobody can force anyone to move of course. But the writing truly is on the wall.
    - alanfranz 3y ago
      > I don't really know what does. My desktop not working, or apps being blurred, or slower, or my mouse cursor stuttering, or screen sharing not working, or Java apps not getting the hidpi settings. That’s what drives me away from Wayland, and all of those happened to me. I don’t think anybody is against Wayland “just because”. When it matures and app support is better, we’ll switch.
      - kaba0 3y ago
        Apps being blurred are old x apps running in xwayland compat mode, they are not slower at all (full-screen games can circumvent the compositor for a long time now), and the rest are not typical at all.
        alanfranz 3y ago
        I don’t care about what’s typical, I care about my own workflow. What is the “typical” linux desktop workflow, btw? It’s probably an OS used by a bunch of geeks, everybody’s got his own quirks.
      - mort96 3y ago
        I understand that it might not work for you. That's unfortunate. But you shouldn't expect Xorg to keep working for you either. The time where Xorg is a well-maintained project is past us. That's the point.
tinus_hn 3y ago
At the end of the article there’s a list of complaints about X, and coincidentally it’s a list of things X users probably won’t care about. your desktop tears screen capture is dog slow your media keys stop working one day your speakers sound terrible and tinny or don't even work at all by default (once we ship that) VSync is broken your display looks duller and the colors muted It’s kind of funny though how apparently Wayland is another hydra that tries to get involved with sound and other things it doesn’t really have business with.
- pmontra 3y ago
  On my HP laptop > your desktop tears Maybe but I don't care, I care about a desktop that works. I went back to X on my laptop after testing Wayland because something important didn't work but I can't remember what. > screen capture is dog slow I never realized it. > your media keys stop working one day Brightness controls work with some NVIDIA drivers and don't with others but there are workarounds: hotkeys bound to brightness control scripts. I think that the next three points are specific to the work they are doing on Macs so they don't apply to my experience. > your speakers sound terrible and tinny or don't even work at all by default (once we ship that) > VSync is broken > your display looks duller and the colors muted
josh_ellot 3y ago
At least for me, xorg can't be replaced in several years.
- usernew 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - josephg 3y ago
    > That whole blog post is angry, misinformed about the target market, and talking to no one while telling everyone to eff off. And we shall - not an issue at all. I like the honesty of this take. I think if we’re honest with ourselves as self funded opensource developers, our projects really have a target market of 1. And you’re right - it’s not you. If the entire target market (the asahi Linux dev team) want to use wayland, that is absolutely their prerogative. You and I aren’t customers of theirs. Our needs don’t pay their bills.
  - Kwpolska 3y ago
    Asahi’s target market is neither of those. Asahi Linux is a distro for Apple Silicon Macs. Which means their target market is like-minded tinkerers with too much cash laying around, everyone else would either use macOS, or any other (cheaper, saner) x86_64 PC.
  - viraptor 3y ago
    > On your machine, you have two types of users. The gamer tinkerer, and the professional. So... that's basically an idea you made up, yet you claim the blog is misinformed about the target market?
  - nibbleshifter 3y ago
    Did you literally just make up two categories of guys from thin air.
    - usernew 3y ago
      I did just make up 2 categories who use Linux at home, from the air I've been breathing for my 30+ years of working with people who run Linux at home. That is how opinions based on experience work. Do you have a point to make besides "I want to be contrarian which makes me superior?"
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
anfilt 3y ago
Wayland has lots of problems still, and it's been being worked since what 2008. That aside it gives similar vibes to systemd. Honestly, not a fan of these userland utilities/systems that just throw everything into the kitchen sink. It really effects the modularity of things when suddenly things start depending on them. This not to say X does not have it's own problems and I even find it a bit on the monolithic side.
- kaba0 3y ago
  > That aside it gives similar vibes to systemd In that it solves a hard problem well? > not a fan of these userland utilities/systems that just throw everything into the kitchen sink So I guess you dislike Xorg, then, and prefer the much more “do one thing well” approach of Wayland? Wayland is a tiny protocol only, that builds on kernel APIs to manage buffers instead of reimplementing it in userspace and it’s implementations are much more easier to reason about than the truly monolithic XOrg - which included everything from printing to whatnot.
- josephg 3y ago
  That might be true, but I believe the Asahi Linux team when they say they don’t have time to properly support for both xorg and wayland. It’s their prerogative as opensource developers to decide what they spend their time working on. And generally I think it’s really healthy for everyone when developers boldly refuse to take on too much. The result is more focused work and less maintainer burnout. It also clears the way for someone else to pick up the slack. If xorg support on apple silicon is important to you, you’re welcome to spearhead that work yourself. Nobody else will do it. And at a risk of sounding rude, opensource isn’t a democracy. I don’t get a say in what you work on, and you don’t get a say in what the asahi linux team works on.
  - anfilt 3y ago
    Never did I say what they should or shouldn't do. Having just tried giving wayland an other try last month for the heck of it and still noticing issues. I just found it surprising how blunt they are about this topic. I like to code and code even for fun, but I definitely do understand that people only have so much time to dedicate to something.
themodelplumber 3y ago
> don't come to us asking for help Hmmm. Seems like writing this on Mastodon is practically a sign from the heavens that they will do exactly that. Hopefully for the sake of maintainer sanity, and assuming this really is a resource nightmare, the users in question will at least get to see a formal message somewhere, as in the classic two levels of "are you sure" dialogs, or maybe something novel like an unkillable scorpion guy appearing in their htop interface, etc.
nyanpasu64 3y ago
I'll switch to Wayland once I can build custom crt modelines and blanking intervals (https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlr-protocols/-/blob/master/unstable/wlr-output-management-unstable-v1.xml?ref_type=heads https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlr-protocols/-/blob/... only supports setting dimensions and not blanking intervals, and someone I've talked to reports being altogether unable to set non-EDID resolutions on Sway and wlr-randr), and once I get fractional virtual-pixel window sizes (https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/143 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m... is filled with unconvincing arguments as to why it can't or shouldn't be done), and can setup Qt apps with font DPI scaling (rather than forcing them to deal with non-integer physical pixels per virtual pixel).
- viraptor 3y ago
  I don't think crt modelines/blanking are relevant at all for Asahi. In general, sure, it may be something interesting for you, but in the context of the original post... not really.
panick21_ 3y ago
I'm fine with open source developers not working on these things. I continue to use X simply because the distro I use pushes it. Most of the issues mentioned wouldn't bother me. And if things get to broken I guess I will move at some point. Nobody says you can't use X, you can, just temper your expectation on bugs being fixed and so on.
lloeki 3y ago
> We aren't going to stop you from running ... no sound server > your speakers sound terrible and tinny or don't even work at all by default (once we ship that) So this sounds completely unrelated to Xorg vs Wayland. Can someone care to explain? I do prefer Xorg currently but I can think I can live with Wayland (I tried a bunch of times before, some things I found better than Xorg, but others were blockers, although they ought to be resolved someday I guess). Both live in userland though. Comparatively, this sounds quite surprising. Is the use of a sound server like pulseaudio or pipewire basically mandated to safely handle the audio hardware? Why should I need those? I'm aware of the design of these Macs audio that can physically destroy speakers if not driven correctly, and I know it's being worked on, but it seems to imply the safety features are handled at the userland (pipewire I guess?) level instead of the kernel/ALSA level (which IMHO is what should be done for something that can irremediably destroy hardware). Thus, while I can understand that it wound be quicker to develop and validate such protections in userland, but ultimately I believe the end goal would be to have safe audio hardware support right in the mainline kernel, or at the very least as an ALSA plugin (which would be equivalent to mesa for graphics support) EDIT: seems like it's pipewire: https://github.com/chadmed/asahi-audio https://github.com/chadmed/asahi-audio
- argsnd 3y ago
  I believe it is essentially to replicate macOS behaviour. Part of the reason MacBooks have great audio is because instead of setting a hard volume limit they model the coil temperatures and modify limits on the fly. That’s something which is too complex to do in kernel.
  - ishvanl 3y ago
    Do you have a source on the MacBook audio thing? That's something I'd very much like to have a look at.
    - lloeki 3y ago
      It was mentioned in one of their reports, and IIRC discussed here and there on some twitter or fediverse thing. https://asahilinux.org/2022/11/november-2022-report/ https://asahilinux.org/2022/11/november-2022-report/
wheybags 3y ago
> Yes, not every random app and feature you use on Xorg will have a Wayland equivalent. Deal with it. This attitude right here is why I don't use desktop Linux anymore. I'm tired of caring about my system components, instead of just using them.
- cntrl 3y ago
  Wouldn't this be solved by just choosing a random linux distros out there and use the options that come preinstalled? Unless one proactively looks for features of the alternative there won't ever be the situation where one has to deal with these kinds of things. Other than that I think having options / alternatives is a great thing. And if option a) intends to replace option b), then there will be compatibility issues in various degrees. It's not that different than with other computer components, like CPU architecture (ARM vs x86/x64), GPU chips (Nvidia vs. AMD) and many more. Choosing the most popular option will usually result in the least amount of potential compatibility issues, but any of those options will work well in most situations.
Shorel 3y ago
User to Wayland: Stop closing all my apps if you have an error. Then I will consider using it.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  I've never even seen that happen. What causes this?
  - kaba0 3y ago
    Basically all wayland implementations went the way of a single server process, and since these processes are basically the compositors, a serious bug that would kill the process, would bring down the whole desktop with every app inside it, losing their state. Xorg has a separate window manager and compositor running, so a fault may end you with an environment of your windows without decorators and without the ability to move them, but you might restart the window manager to get back to where you were. In practice it is very seldom a problem, and the more people use wayland the more stable it becomes. Also, there is nothing inherent in wayland’s design that would make this multi-process architecture impossible, it’s just not worth it.
jeroenhd 3y ago
With the lack of proper multitouch support, using X11 on a laptop feels so terrible. The gestures don't work, and if you make them work, they're delayed and off. There's plenty wrong with the current Wayland system on many platforms (once again looking at you and your drivers, Nvidia) but if the hardware support is there, Wayland just is a lot nicer to use. I bet once the major players switch to Wayland by default, this is just going to be one of those things people will fight over till the very end, like how some people still get enraged if someone doesn't write a SystemV init script for them and only packages a systemd service file. X11 may work because it has become the de facto standard for open GUIs, but it's a weird, janky system being abused for things it wasn't designed to do in the first place. The missing support for some stuff is very annoying, but that will pass. The underlying API design just makes so much more sense than X11 ever did.
butz 3y ago
Been using Wayland since it had became default on Fedora. But some applications are still having issues when running with Wayland compositor under GNOME. Qt applications are the usual suspect, e.g. KeepassXC, OBS Studio and others.

52 points by laktak 3y ago

> Yes, not every random app and feature you use on Xorg will have a Wayland equivalent. Deal with it. This is straight from the Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers model: https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html.

costco 3y ago

But I wanna use xbindkeys and not have to have everything integrated in the compositor. What do I gain when desktop Linux is poorly sandboxed and thus the theoretical security benefits of Wayland are trivially circumvented anyways?

SquareWheel 3y ago

The original source was posted yesterday. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35928000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35928000

mpol 3y ago

The discussion of phoronix often goes towards flamewar. I hope the discussion here is more civil :) I can understand they want to test their GPU drivers only against the main Wayland compositors. Xorg is quite another beast to support. For all I know, it might come into the context when most bugs have been ironed out in the GPU drivers. I do hope people do not take it as general advice. Not all desktop environments have a Wayland compositor, some are quite buggy and many apps don't work yet with Wayland. I am using Xfce and for the next year at least I will be on Xorg. I do hope Wayland gets better, but it has been an undertaking of many years already. The rest of the process won't be much faster I suspect.

ykonstant 3y ago
It is difficult to avoid flamewars when the original post itself contains flaimbait like: Yes, not every random app and feature you use on Xorg will have a Wayland equivalent. Deal with it. The major players in desktop Linux have decided it's time to move on from Xorg, and if you want to go against the tide you're on your own. Not to mention that talking about 'the major players in desktop Linux' is completely against what the OS ethos was supposed to be about; he said the quiet part out loud, and people strike back; it is only fair.
- mort96 3y ago
  I don't think people understand that Xorg is truly dead. Wayland is essentially X12. Everyone who used to work on X now works in Wayland. You should not have an expectation that Xorg will keep working. You should not have an expectation that bugs will be fixed. You should not have an expectation that new hardware will work well with Xorg. If you want to go against the tide, you truly are on your own. You should expect less and less things to work over time as Xorg's code rots, X backends for GUI frameworks rot, and new hardware and drivers expose X bugs which won't be fixed. If this doesn't scream "it's time to move away", I don't really know what does. Nobody can force anyone to move of course. But the writing truly is on the wall.
  - alanfranz 3y ago
    > I don't really know what does. My desktop not working, or apps being blurred, or slower, or my mouse cursor stuttering, or screen sharing not working, or Java apps not getting the hidpi settings. That’s what drives me away from Wayland, and all of those happened to me. I don’t think anybody is against Wayland “just because”. When it matures and app support is better, we’ll switch.
    - kaba0 3y ago
      Apps being blurred are old x apps running in xwayland compat mode, they are not slower at all (full-screen games can circumvent the compositor for a long time now), and the rest are not typical at all.
      - alanfranz 3y ago
        I don’t care about what’s typical, I care about my own workflow. What is the “typical” linux desktop workflow, btw? It’s probably an OS used by a bunch of geeks, everybody’s got his own quirks.
    - mort96 3y ago
      I understand that it might not work for you. That's unfortunate. But you shouldn't expect Xorg to keep working for you either. The time where Xorg is a well-maintained project is past us. That's the point.

tinus_hn 3y ago

At the end of the article there’s a list of complaints about X, and coincidentally it’s a list of things X users probably won’t care about. your desktop tears screen capture is dog slow your media keys stop working one day your speakers sound terrible and tinny or don't even work at all by default (once we ship that) VSync is broken your display looks duller and the colors muted It’s kind of funny though how apparently Wayland is another hydra that tries to get involved with sound and other things it doesn’t really have business with.

pmontra 3y ago
On my HP laptop > your desktop tears Maybe but I don't care, I care about a desktop that works. I went back to X on my laptop after testing Wayland because something important didn't work but I can't remember what. > screen capture is dog slow I never realized it. > your media keys stop working one day Brightness controls work with some NVIDIA drivers and don't with others but there are workarounds: hotkeys bound to brightness control scripts. I think that the next three points are specific to the work they are doing on Macs so they don't apply to my experience. > your speakers sound terrible and tinny or don't even work at all by default (once we ship that) > VSync is broken > your display looks duller and the colors muted

josh_ellot 3y ago

At least for me, xorg can't be replaced in several years.

usernew 3y ago
[flagged]
- josephg 3y ago
  > That whole blog post is angry, misinformed about the target market, and talking to no one while telling everyone to eff off. And we shall - not an issue at all. I like the honesty of this take. I think if we’re honest with ourselves as self funded opensource developers, our projects really have a target market of 1. And you’re right - it’s not you. If the entire target market (the asahi Linux dev team) want to use wayland, that is absolutely their prerogative. You and I aren’t customers of theirs. Our needs don’t pay their bills.
- Kwpolska 3y ago
  Asahi’s target market is neither of those. Asahi Linux is a distro for Apple Silicon Macs. Which means their target market is like-minded tinkerers with too much cash laying around, everyone else would either use macOS, or any other (cheaper, saner) x86_64 PC.
- viraptor 3y ago
  > On your machine, you have two types of users. The gamer tinkerer, and the professional. So... that's basically an idea you made up, yet you claim the blog is misinformed about the target market?
- nibbleshifter 3y ago
  Did you literally just make up two categories of guys from thin air.
  - usernew 3y ago
    I did just make up 2 categories who use Linux at home, from the air I've been breathing for my 30+ years of working with people who run Linux at home. That is how opinions based on experience work. Do you have a point to make besides "I want to be contrarian which makes me superior?"

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

anfilt 3y ago

Wayland has lots of problems still, and it's been being worked since what 2008. That aside it gives similar vibes to systemd. Honestly, not a fan of these userland utilities/systems that just throw everything into the kitchen sink. It really effects the modularity of things when suddenly things start depending on them. This not to say X does not have it's own problems and I even find it a bit on the monolithic side.

kaba0 3y ago
> That aside it gives similar vibes to systemd In that it solves a hard problem well? > not a fan of these userland utilities/systems that just throw everything into the kitchen sink So I guess you dislike Xorg, then, and prefer the much more “do one thing well” approach of Wayland? Wayland is a tiny protocol only, that builds on kernel APIs to manage buffers instead of reimplementing it in userspace and it’s implementations are much more easier to reason about than the truly monolithic XOrg - which included everything from printing to whatnot.
josephg 3y ago
That might be true, but I believe the Asahi Linux team when they say they don’t have time to properly support for both xorg and wayland. It’s their prerogative as opensource developers to decide what they spend their time working on. And generally I think it’s really healthy for everyone when developers boldly refuse to take on too much. The result is more focused work and less maintainer burnout. It also clears the way for someone else to pick up the slack. If xorg support on apple silicon is important to you, you’re welcome to spearhead that work yourself. Nobody else will do it. And at a risk of sounding rude, opensource isn’t a democracy. I don’t get a say in what you work on, and you don’t get a say in what the asahi linux team works on.
- anfilt 3y ago
  Never did I say what they should or shouldn't do. Having just tried giving wayland an other try last month for the heck of it and still noticing issues. I just found it surprising how blunt they are about this topic. I like to code and code even for fun, but I definitely do understand that people only have so much time to dedicate to something.

themodelplumber 3y ago

> don't come to us asking for help Hmmm. Seems like writing this on Mastodon is practically a sign from the heavens that they will do exactly that. Hopefully for the sake of maintainer sanity, and assuming this really is a resource nightmare, the users in question will at least get to see a formal message somewhere, as in the classic two levels of "are you sure" dialogs, or maybe something novel like an unkillable scorpion guy appearing in their htop interface, etc.

nyanpasu64 3y ago

I'll switch to Wayland once I can build custom crt modelines and blanking intervals (https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlr-protocols/-/blob/master/unstable/wlr-output-management-unstable-v1.xml?ref_type=heads https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlr-protocols/-/blob/... only supports setting dimensions and not blanking intervals, and someone I've talked to reports being altogether unable to set non-EDID resolutions on Sway and wlr-randr), and once I get fractional virtual-pixel window sizes (https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/143 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m... is filled with unconvincing arguments as to why it can't or shouldn't be done), and can setup Qt apps with font DPI scaling (rather than forcing them to deal with non-integer physical pixels per virtual pixel).

viraptor 3y ago
I don't think crt modelines/blanking are relevant at all for Asahi. In general, sure, it may be something interesting for you, but in the context of the original post... not really.

panick21_ 3y ago

I'm fine with open source developers not working on these things. I continue to use X simply because the distro I use pushes it. Most of the issues mentioned wouldn't bother me. And if things get to broken I guess I will move at some point. Nobody says you can't use X, you can, just temper your expectation on bugs being fixed and so on.

lloeki 3y ago

> We aren't going to stop you from running ... no sound server > your speakers sound terrible and tinny or don't even work at all by default (once we ship that) So this sounds completely unrelated to Xorg vs Wayland. Can someone care to explain? I do prefer Xorg currently but I can think I can live with Wayland (I tried a bunch of times before, some things I found better than Xorg, but others were blockers, although they ought to be resolved someday I guess). Both live in userland though. Comparatively, this sounds quite surprising. Is the use of a sound server like pulseaudio or pipewire basically mandated to safely handle the audio hardware? Why should I need those? I'm aware of the design of these Macs audio that can physically destroy speakers if not driven correctly, and I know it's being worked on, but it seems to imply the safety features are handled at the userland (pipewire I guess?) level instead of the kernel/ALSA level (which IMHO is what should be done for something that can irremediably destroy hardware). Thus, while I can understand that it wound be quicker to develop and validate such protections in userland, but ultimately I believe the end goal would be to have safe audio hardware support right in the mainline kernel, or at the very least as an ALSA plugin (which would be equivalent to mesa for graphics support) EDIT: seems like it's pipewire: https://github.com/chadmed/asahi-audio https://github.com/chadmed/asahi-audio

argsnd 3y ago
I believe it is essentially to replicate macOS behaviour. Part of the reason MacBooks have great audio is because instead of setting a hard volume limit they model the coil temperatures and modify limits on the fly. That’s something which is too complex to do in kernel.
- ishvanl 3y ago
  Do you have a source on the MacBook audio thing? That's something I'd very much like to have a look at.
  - lloeki 3y ago
    It was mentioned in one of their reports, and IIRC discussed here and there on some twitter or fediverse thing. https://asahilinux.org/2022/11/november-2022-report/ https://asahilinux.org/2022/11/november-2022-report/

wheybags 3y ago

> Yes, not every random app and feature you use on Xorg will have a Wayland equivalent. Deal with it. This attitude right here is why I don't use desktop Linux anymore. I'm tired of caring about my system components, instead of just using them.

cntrl 3y ago
Wouldn't this be solved by just choosing a random linux distros out there and use the options that come preinstalled? Unless one proactively looks for features of the alternative there won't ever be the situation where one has to deal with these kinds of things. Other than that I think having options / alternatives is a great thing. And if option a) intends to replace option b), then there will be compatibility issues in various degrees. It's not that different than with other computer components, like CPU architecture (ARM vs x86/x64), GPU chips (Nvidia vs. AMD) and many more. Choosing the most popular option will usually result in the least amount of potential compatibility issues, but any of those options will work well in most situations.

Shorel 3y ago

User to Wayland: Stop closing all my apps if you have an error. Then I will consider using it.

jeroenhd 3y ago
I've never even seen that happen. What causes this?
- kaba0 3y ago
  Basically all wayland implementations went the way of a single server process, and since these processes are basically the compositors, a serious bug that would kill the process, would bring down the whole desktop with every app inside it, losing their state. Xorg has a separate window manager and compositor running, so a fault may end you with an environment of your windows without decorators and without the ability to move them, but you might restart the window manager to get back to where you were. In practice it is very seldom a problem, and the more people use wayland the more stable it becomes. Also, there is nothing inherent in wayland’s design that would make this multi-process architecture impossible, it’s just not worth it.

jeroenhd 3y ago

With the lack of proper multitouch support, using X11 on a laptop feels so terrible. The gestures don't work, and if you make them work, they're delayed and off. There's plenty wrong with the current Wayland system on many platforms (once again looking at you and your drivers, Nvidia) but if the hardware support is there, Wayland just is a lot nicer to use. I bet once the major players switch to Wayland by default, this is just going to be one of those things people will fight over till the very end, like how some people still get enraged if someone doesn't write a SystemV init script for them and only packages a systemd service file. X11 may work because it has become the de facto standard for open GUIs, but it's a weird, janky system being abused for things it wasn't designed to do in the first place. The missing support for some stuff is very annoying, but that will pass. The underlying API design just makes so much more sense than X11 ever did.

butz 3y ago

Been using Wayland since it had became default on Fedora. But some applications are still having issues when running with Wayland compositor under GNOME. Qt applications are the usual suspect, e.g. KeepassXC, OBS Studio and others.