6 ms·

I use Wayland daily and haven't run into the issues you mention. It has worked better than X11 as a daily driver for a few years now. I appreciate may not work

I use Wayland daily and haven't run into the issues you mention. It has worked better than X11 as a daily driver for a few years now. I appreciate may not work for some <1% of edge use cases but for most people Wayland works just fine. Things like screen tearing, issues with video acceleration, etc are all a thing of the past. To be honest I associate 'barely usable' more with X11. I haven't forgotten the good old days when I had to hack various configuration files just to get a working desktop and then hack some more to work around issues with tearing, video acceleration, etc. Wayland on the other had has just worked right out of the box since Debian 11. I have not touched a single file, line or character to get Wayland to work optiminally. That is a remarkable achievement IMHO which X11 took years and years to achieve.

SoftTalker 3y ago
Your memory of config file nightmares (I had them too) is a decade old now. X11 works without config for the vast majority of users. Yes it took a while to get there, but it's been there for a good while now and not really anything for Wayland to point at as a differentiator.
- lmm 3y ago
  > Your memory of config file nightmares (I had them too) is a decade old now. It's at least 2 decades old, if it was ever a real problem in the first place.
  - justinclift 3y ago
    > ... if it was ever a real problem in the first place. It definitely used to be a huge pain in the arse. There used to be pages after pages after pages of random "HOW TO ..." style guides for people to configure X11 config files around the net (many just working for specific hw). It was an incredible mess, with pretty much nothing positive about it. ;)
    - mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
      I've been using Linux for 20 years now and I've never needed more than 5 lines of Xorg config, only a couple lines of which has had meaningful information.
      - vetinari 3y ago
        I've been using Linux since Slackware 3.0; at the time, there were X servers that were specific to a certain card manufacturers/chipsets and you symlinked the correct one. Then you configured xf86config.
      - justinclift 3y ago
        Maybe I was just one of the many er... unlucky ones then. ;)
  - MattPalmer1086 3y ago
    It was definitely a real problem. Things would work for a while and then break. Sometimes you had to choose between one thing that worked and another. I spent many unhappy hours tweaking X config. But it was indeed around 20 years ago that it was an issue.
- andrewaylett 3y ago
  Indeed, given it's often the same developers working on both, a reasonable amount of the effort put into getting X to work without needing configuration was people actually working on Wayland but also taking the time to pull X along for the ride where possible. X has a lot of code in it which needs to be elsewhere in the design envisaged for Wayland. Once support (for example, for kernel mode setting) is available for Wayland to use it, it makes a lot of sense to also use it with X.
lmm 3y ago
> Wayland on the other had has just worked right out of the box since Debian 11. With a compositor other than the Gnome one?
- growse 3y ago
  Works out of the box on arch, with KDE/plasma. Is that using the Gnome compositor?
- happymellon 3y ago
  Well, that would imply that it's not a Wayland issue but a compositor. Or is all maths broken because I found a calculator that doesn't have a working addition key?
  - orbital-decay 3y ago
    It's more like replacing an old calculator with a new shiny graphing one that can solve ODEs but the basic addition is declared "out of scope" so it doesn't have it. Well, now you need another calculator to add numbers built into your toaster, with every vendor implementing it differently.
  - mrighele 3y ago
    The issue is that Wayland developers decided that a working addition key was not a core feature of a calculator.
    - diffeomorphism 3y ago
      Which makes sense for cars, infotainment etc.. Depending on the use case you have in mind "core feature" can mean very different things.
  - didntcheck 3y ago
    But why is my window manager now also my display server? The (relatively simple) program that decides how to lay out my windows is clearly a separate concern to the (complex) program that actually interfaces with the GPU to render the screen Having to worry if your WM supports your GPU is like having to worry if your web browser supports your NIC
orbital-decay 3y ago
> I use Wayland daily and haven't run into the issues you mention. I appreciate may not work for some <1% of edge use cases Such as having a modern wide gamut/HDR display, or a display without a blue spectrum spike. Or printing anything in color. Or doing photography or digital painting. Or switching to another compositor on a non-default keyboard layout (as Wayland doesn't have the replacement for this basic X functionality, compositors are forced to reinvent the wheel). It's fine to have the "works on my machine" attitude for a user discussing this on the web. I just hope the devs of what is being pushed as a replacement for what works don't have it. (and the signals aren't good)
- growse 3y ago
  > It's fine to have the "works on my machine" attitude for a user discussing this on the web. I just hope the devs of what is being pushed as a replacement for what works don't have it. (and the signals aren't good) The people "pushing" Wayland are the people who previously worked on X. They stopped because it's ancient, broken and untenable.
  - orbital-decay 3y ago
    If Wayland just existed on its own, nobody would have had a problem. The people pushing Wayland are not just its authors, but the distro devs, and the entire fuss is about Wayland being declared as the "future" by certain distro developers recently. This future has an issue - it only supports an opinionated subset of maybe 3/4 use cases of the "past". However broken the past was, replacing it with something that is similarly broken but in different non-overlapping ways is not the proper way forward.
    - growse 3y ago
      I disagree. The distro devs are pushing it because it furthers their mission, which on the face of it (for a lot of them) seems to be "ship software that works for people and have them stop bugging us". > However broken the past was, replacing it with something that is similarly broken but in different non-overlapping ways is not the proper way forward. That "opinion" is well founded. Most people don't care about network transparency (to pick one example), and those that do can club together and keep X alive. Or write an extension for Wayland. Open source is easy in that it gives you many chances and ways to contribute! Personally, I'd prefer those "LOOK IT'S MY DESKTOP OVER THE INTERNET" people kept their weirdness out of my compositor, but that's just my take.

SoftTalker 3y ago

Your memory of config file nightmares (I had them too) is a decade old now. X11 works without config for the vast majority of users. Yes it took a while to get there, but it's been there for a good while now and not really anything for Wayland to point at as a differentiator.

lmm 3y ago
> Your memory of config file nightmares (I had them too) is a decade old now. It's at least 2 decades old, if it was ever a real problem in the first place.
- justinclift 3y ago
  > ... if it was ever a real problem in the first place. It definitely used to be a huge pain in the arse. There used to be pages after pages after pages of random "HOW TO ..." style guides for people to configure X11 config files around the net (many just working for specific hw). It was an incredible mess, with pretty much nothing positive about it. ;)
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
    I've been using Linux for 20 years now and I've never needed more than 5 lines of Xorg config, only a couple lines of which has had meaningful information.
    - vetinari 3y ago
      I've been using Linux since Slackware 3.0; at the time, there were X servers that were specific to a certain card manufacturers/chipsets and you symlinked the correct one. Then you configured xf86config.
    - justinclift 3y ago
      Maybe I was just one of the many er... unlucky ones then. ;)
- MattPalmer1086 3y ago
  It was definitely a real problem. Things would work for a while and then break. Sometimes you had to choose between one thing that worked and another. I spent many unhappy hours tweaking X config. But it was indeed around 20 years ago that it was an issue.
andrewaylett 3y ago
Indeed, given it's often the same developers working on both, a reasonable amount of the effort put into getting X to work without needing configuration was people actually working on Wayland but also taking the time to pull X along for the ride where possible. X has a lot of code in it which needs to be elsewhere in the design envisaged for Wayland. Once support (for example, for kernel mode setting) is available for Wayland to use it, it makes a lot of sense to also use it with X.

lmm 3y ago

> Wayland on the other had has just worked right out of the box since Debian 11. With a compositor other than the Gnome one?

growse 3y ago
Works out of the box on arch, with KDE/plasma. Is that using the Gnome compositor?
happymellon 3y ago
Well, that would imply that it's not a Wayland issue but a compositor. Or is all maths broken because I found a calculator that doesn't have a working addition key?
- orbital-decay 3y ago
  It's more like replacing an old calculator with a new shiny graphing one that can solve ODEs but the basic addition is declared "out of scope" so it doesn't have it. Well, now you need another calculator to add numbers built into your toaster, with every vendor implementing it differently.
- mrighele 3y ago
  The issue is that Wayland developers decided that a working addition key was not a core feature of a calculator.
  - diffeomorphism 3y ago
    Which makes sense for cars, infotainment etc.. Depending on the use case you have in mind "core feature" can mean very different things.
- didntcheck 3y ago
  But why is my window manager now also my display server? The (relatively simple) program that decides how to lay out my windows is clearly a separate concern to the (complex) program that actually interfaces with the GPU to render the screen Having to worry if your WM supports your GPU is like having to worry if your web browser supports your NIC

orbital-decay 3y ago

> I use Wayland daily and haven't run into the issues you mention. I appreciate may not work for some <1% of edge use cases Such as having a modern wide gamut/HDR display, or a display without a blue spectrum spike. Or printing anything in color. Or doing photography or digital painting. Or switching to another compositor on a non-default keyboard layout (as Wayland doesn't have the replacement for this basic X functionality, compositors are forced to reinvent the wheel). It's fine to have the "works on my machine" attitude for a user discussing this on the web. I just hope the devs of what is being pushed as a replacement for what works don't have it. (and the signals aren't good)

growse 3y ago
> It's fine to have the "works on my machine" attitude for a user discussing this on the web. I just hope the devs of what is being pushed as a replacement for what works don't have it. (and the signals aren't good) The people "pushing" Wayland are the people who previously worked on X. They stopped because it's ancient, broken and untenable.
- orbital-decay 3y ago
  If Wayland just existed on its own, nobody would have had a problem. The people pushing Wayland are not just its authors, but the distro devs, and the entire fuss is about Wayland being declared as the "future" by certain distro developers recently. This future has an issue - it only supports an opinionated subset of maybe 3/4 use cases of the "past". However broken the past was, replacing it with something that is similarly broken but in different non-overlapping ways is not the proper way forward.
  - growse 3y ago
    I disagree. The distro devs are pushing it because it furthers their mission, which on the face of it (for a lot of them) seems to be "ship software that works for people and have them stop bugging us". > However broken the past was, replacing it with something that is similarly broken but in different non-overlapping ways is not the proper way forward. That "opinion" is well founded. Most people don't care about network transparency (to pick one example), and those that do can club together and keep X alive. Or write an extension for Wayland. Open source is easy in that it gives you many chances and ways to contribute! Personally, I'd prefer those "LOOK IT'S MY DESKTOP OVER THE INTERNET" people kept their weirdness out of my compositor, but that's just my take.