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There's also a newer protocol called "Wayland" which aims to avoid some issues with X11 (and is also a general architecture overhaul). GNOME and KDE support it

There's also a newer protocol called "Wayland" which aims to avoid some issues with X11 (and is also a general architecture overhaul). GNOME and KDE support it out of the box and iirc at least GNOME also enables it by default. There are some tradeoffs though. Some things like screen sharing might be worse on Wayland (e.g. I can't share a single window, only whole screens) and some apps don't support Wayland at all (including for example all of the IntelliJ IDEs). The latter can be circumvented by enabling XWayland (basically an X server running side by side with the Wayland compositor to handle X11-only apps). In that case you're left with the X11 security model for apps not running natively on Wayland.

JohnFen 3y ago
And Wayland doesn't support being able to have multiple logons, each with their own independent desktop, simultaneously like X does. I just like to bring that up even though it's not a common use case, because that's what keeps me from using Wayland.
- t0astbread 3y ago
  Interesting. Do you know why? I've only ever tried launching nested instances of Sway (the compositor I use) which each use their own sockets and render as a client to the parent compositor and that worked fine. Does it have something to do with rendering to a real display?
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    I remember this being brought up early in Wayland development. The stance was taken that it wasn't a popular enough use case to be worth putting work into. I don't think there's any real technical reason why it couldn't be done, but I don't know. I'm not familiar with the architecture of Wayland.
    - bandrami 3y ago
      I think seatd allows this now? So it works on the rather small sliver of distros that don't run systemd.
- glandium 3y ago
  > And Wayland doesn't support being able to have multiple logons, each with their own independent desktop, simultaneously like X does. Not sure what you're referring to. I'm using wayland and I can open multiple desktops via gdm.
  - bandrami 3y ago
    I think he means multiple simultaneous seats, and IIRC this is a limitation of systemd-logind, not wayland itself (it works on seatd, though that makes you manage your own XDG_RUNTIME_DIR, so I guess pick your poison).
    - glandium 3y ago
      multiple seats of the same user?
      - bandrami 3y ago
        Sure, if you're willing to multiplex your own XDG_RUNTIME_DIR. Hence "pick your poison".
bandrami 3y ago
There's whole classes of software that just don't make sense on Wayland. Most DAWs won't work because the whole point of a DAW is "be a big box that hosts docked windows of out-of-process audio plugins" which just isn't a concept Wayland has; the only way it would work would be to have Reaper or Ardour or whatever be its own compositor. Maybe somebody some day will write a "libsubcompositor" or something; IDK.

JohnFen 3y ago

And Wayland doesn't support being able to have multiple logons, each with their own independent desktop, simultaneously like X does. I just like to bring that up even though it's not a common use case, because that's what keeps me from using Wayland.

t0astbread 3y ago
Interesting. Do you know why? I've only ever tried launching nested instances of Sway (the compositor I use) which each use their own sockets and render as a client to the parent compositor and that worked fine. Does it have something to do with rendering to a real display?
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I remember this being brought up early in Wayland development. The stance was taken that it wasn't a popular enough use case to be worth putting work into. I don't think there's any real technical reason why it couldn't be done, but I don't know. I'm not familiar with the architecture of Wayland.
  - bandrami 3y ago
    I think seatd allows this now? So it works on the rather small sliver of distros that don't run systemd.
glandium 3y ago
> And Wayland doesn't support being able to have multiple logons, each with their own independent desktop, simultaneously like X does. Not sure what you're referring to. I'm using wayland and I can open multiple desktops via gdm.
- bandrami 3y ago
  I think he means multiple simultaneous seats, and IIRC this is a limitation of systemd-logind, not wayland itself (it works on seatd, though that makes you manage your own XDG_RUNTIME_DIR, so I guess pick your poison).
  - glandium 3y ago
    multiple seats of the same user?
    - bandrami 3y ago
      Sure, if you're willing to multiplex your own XDG_RUNTIME_DIR. Hence "pick your poison".

bandrami 3y ago

There's whole classes of software that just don't make sense on Wayland. Most DAWs won't work because the whole point of a DAW is "be a big box that hosts docked windows of out-of-process audio plugins" which just isn't a concept Wayland has; the only way it would work would be to have Reaper or Ardour or whatever be its own compositor. Maybe somebody some day will write a "libsubcompositor" or something; IDK.