5 ms·

Three signs that Wayland is becoming the favored way to get a GUI on Linux

27 points by FPrompt 3y ago

trabant00 3y ago
Fractional scaling is still experimental and CPU consuming in Wayland. I didn't even investigate further as that is a must have feature for me.
- rpodraza 3y ago
  The state of fractional scaling on Linux is abysymal.
  - SomeRndName11 3y ago
    On KDE it is very bearable.Scales very well, almost like Windows, not quite but better than Gnome by a large margin.
- juujian 3y ago
  I can only offer anecdotal evidence, but here it goes. Used to have plenty of issues with scaling under Wayland, particular with my nvidia gpu. Now I am running an intel-only machine (yes I would prefer AMD) with a scaling factor of 1.5, and it runs very well. It's a very efficient machine, too, using only around 6W at idle, sometimes dipping below 5W.
  - medstrom 3y ago
    When talking Wayland, there are no generalities because there is no program called "Wayland" -- can you specify which compositor you used? GNOME, KDE, or a wlroots-based one?
    - juujian 3y ago
      I'm running gnome.
    - silon42 3y ago
      What is a good wlroots based compositor (non tiling)?
      - rascul 3y ago
        Labwc is kind of openboxish https://github.com/labwc/labwc https://github.com/labwc/labwc
        silon42 3y ago
        Thanks... the screenshot looks good (and the setting to disable rounded corners is right there).
      - medstrom 3y ago
        An incomplete list of compositors (they forgot hyprland): https://github.com/solarkraft/awesome-wlroots#compositors https://github.com/solarkraft/awesome-wlroots#compositors Among non-tiling ones are: hopalong, labwc, laikawm, tinybox, waybox, wayfire.
BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
does wayland have a good tiling window manager that supports nvidia gpus yet?
- dathinab 3y ago
  due to changes of how Nvidia handles things I think all maintained WM do so by now, through idk. if this applies to both Nvidia drivers or only one of them.
  - BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
    i tried sway recently with those changes, but it still needed the —unsupported-gpu flag and had lots of flickering. i thought there might be an alternative i don't know about
    - sciolistse 3y ago
      I've had some luck with Hyprland (after following https://wiki.hyprland.org/Nvidia/ https://wiki.hyprland.org/Nvidia/) but it does take some hacks, and I'd imagine results will vary.
      - BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
        i was more charitable about trying unofficial/unsupported nvidia setups that require hacks in the past, but not any more. they take extra work to set up initially, constantly break on updates, and leave a minefield of unknown unknowns that rear their heads when you’re trying to work. the result is a compounding amount of wasted time. official support is the way to go for me, so i’m back on X for the time being
    - victornomad 3y ago
      I'm using wlroots-nvidia package in arch for a few months and made swaywm totally usable. I'm using a ryzen laptop with external display via the nvidia GPU. All good!
  - 3y ago
seba_dos1 3y ago
...and the first sentence of the article calls it "Wayland display server", which it quite obviously is not.
- nsajko 3y ago
  What's your point, though? Seems nit-picky.
  - seba_dos1 3y ago
    Wayland is not a display server and there's no such thing as "the Wayland display server". It's a protocol that's used between clients and display servers ("compositors" in Wayland parlance). Various projects build their own Wayland compositors, as opposed to X11 world where even though there were several implementations of X11 servers, pretty much everyone has used Xorg for many years now. Part of the X11 protocol was that window managers were separated from display server; most Wayland servers don't separate those though, so usually you end up with Wayland compositor provided by DE you use. Most Wayland servers also support X11, by the way (usually through XWayland, which is part of Xorg).
    - PlutoIsAPlanet 3y ago
      There’s nothing really stopping a wayland compositor from having and supporting a separate window manager, it’s just easier to not have it separate. Window managers is a Xism that some DEs brought into the Wayland world (e.g kde) where some have not (e.g gnome). It’s worth noting that a Wayland display server has to implement far less than an X server and as the article mentions there are things like wlroots that do a large chunk of it for you.
      - seba_dos1 3y ago
        > There’s nothing really stopping a wayland compositor from having and supporting a separate window manager, it’s just easier to not have it separate. That's why I said "most" and "usually". That said, while it's certainly possible, I haven't seen any implementation that did it yet. > Window managers is a Xism that some DEs brought into the Wayland world (e.g kde) KDE does not separate its window manager from its compositor (KWin) at all. What it separates is its shell (Plasma). In the GNOME world, mobile shell (phosh) and phoc are separated in similar way.
PurpleRamen 3y ago
15 years and still not success, seems like a sign? And reading through a list of what Wayland breaks[1], it gives me not the best impression. But I'm just a pleb, and all I care is that my tiling WM, my games and my black key handling magic is working. But it seems Wayland will give me significant trouble with this? [1] https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d1f2277 https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d...
- PlutoIsAPlanet 3y ago
  It's a pain because of how much legacy content is made to target Xorg and that there isn't just one central authority or toolkit. You have decades of applications and dozens of toolkits that speak to the X Window Server. Unlike Windows and macOS, where you link agaisnt the system toolkits, so when Microsoft/Apple want to change their protocol, they update these toolkits. Any protocol that wasn't X on Linux is always going to be a pain to replace, the biggest issue with Wayland adoption is that it isn't X, yet X is not appropriate for how modern graphics works (why Android does not use it, and uses a system similar to Wayland). Edit: To add on, regarding things like emulated input etc, on other operating systems there are usually standardised protocols for doing this, where on X it just allowed anything (you don't want windows reading the input sent to other windows, think banking). So new protocols have to be invented here, and then support added for them, in many cases the protocol also works on X with an updated window manager/compositor.
  - nsajko 3y ago
    No. The Wayland design is crap through-and-through. To a large extent it was intentionally meant to break things, what with its insane security model ideas. It's not just a matter of "getting the wrinkles ironed out".
    - ChocolateGod 3y ago
      Do you even know anything about the Wayland design? Wayland is more about just getting surfaces from A => B and management of those surfaces, it doesn't really do anything shockingly different from how something like macOS does it.
SomeRndName11 3y ago
tried KDE on Wayland. Di not like the way fonts looked like -fatter and blurrier, as if it was not properly snapping at pixel grid. Reverted to X11.
nsajko 3y ago
One of the big issues with Wayland is the (intentional) fragmentation. Each "Wayland compositor" is really its own window system, with its own peculiarities. This forces applications that would have been trivial to implement on X to either limit support to only a single "compositor", or suffer explosion of compositor-interfacing code. IMO this, on its own, means that pushing Wayland is intentional sabotage of "desktop Linux", because the fragmentation could be deadly for the ecosystem. It's fine, if perhaps short-sighted, for the big corps and desktops that do the pushing, of course, because they're fine with supporting just a single "compositor".
- phendrenad2 3y ago
  It seems to me like this was Wayland's fatal mistake, honestly. They left window management as an "exercise for the reader" (so to speak) because they didn't think that window management was a "serious" domain, and didn't understand how issues could arise from fragmentation there. So we traded the decades of cruft and fragmentation within the X11 spec for baked-in fragmentation at the DE level. I expect that we'll never reach a Mac-like utopia where you can set global keyboard shortcuts for window management (such as next/previous tab) at the OS level, and have it work across Wayland apps, because of this.
- dbeley 3y ago
  > systemd "It removes fragmentation, could be deadly for the ecosystem" > wayland "It adds fragmentation, could be deadly for the ecosystem" Both are now the standard on the most of the biggest linux distributions, so maybe it's not that big of a deal?
- kaba0 3y ago
  Yeah, I’m sure desktop linux was looking so good before Wayland that it needed some expensive sabotage mission from an Apple-Microsoft-FBI collaboration. Come on, literally noone outside the 3% cares at all about linux desktop.
  - joebiden2 3y ago
    > Come on, literally noone outside the 3% cares at all about linux desktop. I care. Wayland doesn't help.
twic 3y ago
I'd never heard of this Budgie desktop environment before. Anyone familiar with it? What's its deal? I'm a GNOME 2 -> Cinnamon guy, but i'm always slightly nervous that Cinnamon on Fedora is a second-class citizen and/or a dead end.
heywoodlh 3y ago
Recently switched to Hyprland (a Wayland tiling window manager) on NixOS. It's beautiful! As a former i3 user, I'm very happy with it. It looks really nice out of the box (especially compared to i3's default appearance) and has a lot of very interesting features. I especially enjoy Hyprland's implementation of special workspaces, which allows me to hide specific application windows and summon them on-demand with a keybinding. My Hyprland config is here for anyone interested: https://github.com/heywoodlh/nixos-configs/blob/master/roles/home-manager/linux/hyprland.nix https://github.com/heywoodlh/nixos-configs/blob/master/roles...
vancan1ty 3y ago
My laptop is a Dell Precision M4800 -- not the newest but is perfectly fast enough for what I need to do. I run KDE under X usually. Tried wayland for the first time recently and there was huge input lag with moving the mouse. I found it unusable. Other people have similar problems [1] [2]. For me at least wayland is a no go until the performance matches X. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/1335gj5/mouse_feels_laggy_and_slow_on_wayland_compared_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/1335gj5/mouse_feels_la... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/wayland/comments/wj7jji/mouse_lag_on_fresh_install_of_2204_lts_bug/ https://www.reddit.com/r/wayland/comments/wj7jji/mouse_lag_o...
- kaba0 3y ago
  That is KDE’s Wayland implementation. If you find safari slow, http is not at fault. Other browsers might be fast - or in this case: gnome, wlroots based ones like sway often improve performance. For what it’s worth, KDE is quite behind in terms of wayland. It has gotten a lot better, but it is not a good fit for evaluating wayland itself.
iampivot 3y ago
Lots of things are possible with wayland that was never possible with X11, just because it's a much more modern graphics stack; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNL6eIoksd8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNL6eIoksd8 Note that the XFree86 developers themselves have abandoned XFree86 development.
Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago
Does zoom screen sharing works with it? For me it's a non starter if that's not fixed. I have a nvidia gpu, so probably it's a nonstarter fullstop, damn nvidia

27 points by FPrompt 3y ago

Fractional scaling is still experimental and CPU consuming in Wayland. I didn't even investigate further as that is a must have feature for me.

rpodraza 3y ago
The state of fractional scaling on Linux is abysymal.
- SomeRndName11 3y ago
  On KDE it is very bearable.Scales very well, almost like Windows, not quite but better than Gnome by a large margin.
juujian 3y ago
I can only offer anecdotal evidence, but here it goes. Used to have plenty of issues with scaling under Wayland, particular with my nvidia gpu. Now I am running an intel-only machine (yes I would prefer AMD) with a scaling factor of 1.5, and it runs very well. It's a very efficient machine, too, using only around 6W at idle, sometimes dipping below 5W.
- medstrom 3y ago
  When talking Wayland, there are no generalities because there is no program called "Wayland" -- can you specify which compositor you used? GNOME, KDE, or a wlroots-based one?
  - juujian 3y ago
    I'm running gnome.
  - silon42 3y ago
    What is a good wlroots based compositor (non tiling)?
    - rascul 3y ago
      Labwc is kind of openboxish https://github.com/labwc/labwc https://github.com/labwc/labwc
      - silon42 3y ago
        Thanks... the screenshot looks good (and the setting to disable rounded corners is right there).
    - medstrom 3y ago
      An incomplete list of compositors (they forgot hyprland): https://github.com/solarkraft/awesome-wlroots#compositors https://github.com/solarkraft/awesome-wlroots#compositors Among non-tiling ones are: hopalong, labwc, laikawm, tinybox, waybox, wayfire.

BaculumMeumEst 3y ago

does wayland have a good tiling window manager that supports nvidia gpus yet?

dathinab 3y ago
due to changes of how Nvidia handles things I think all maintained WM do so by now, through idk. if this applies to both Nvidia drivers or only one of them.
- BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
  i tried sway recently with those changes, but it still needed the —unsupported-gpu flag and had lots of flickering. i thought there might be an alternative i don't know about
  - sciolistse 3y ago
    I've had some luck with Hyprland (after following https://wiki.hyprland.org/Nvidia/ https://wiki.hyprland.org/Nvidia/) but it does take some hacks, and I'd imagine results will vary.
    - BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
      i was more charitable about trying unofficial/unsupported nvidia setups that require hacks in the past, but not any more. they take extra work to set up initially, constantly break on updates, and leave a minefield of unknown unknowns that rear their heads when you’re trying to work. the result is a compounding amount of wasted time. official support is the way to go for me, so i’m back on X for the time being
  - victornomad 3y ago
    I'm using wlroots-nvidia package in arch for a few months and made swaywm totally usable. I'm using a ryzen laptop with external display via the nvidia GPU. All good!
- 3y ago

seba_dos1 3y ago

...and the first sentence of the article calls it "Wayland display server", which it quite obviously is not.

nsajko 3y ago
What's your point, though? Seems nit-picky.
- seba_dos1 3y ago
  Wayland is not a display server and there's no such thing as "the Wayland display server". It's a protocol that's used between clients and display servers ("compositors" in Wayland parlance). Various projects build their own Wayland compositors, as opposed to X11 world where even though there were several implementations of X11 servers, pretty much everyone has used Xorg for many years now. Part of the X11 protocol was that window managers were separated from display server; most Wayland servers don't separate those though, so usually you end up with Wayland compositor provided by DE you use. Most Wayland servers also support X11, by the way (usually through XWayland, which is part of Xorg).
  - PlutoIsAPlanet 3y ago
    There’s nothing really stopping a wayland compositor from having and supporting a separate window manager, it’s just easier to not have it separate. Window managers is a Xism that some DEs brought into the Wayland world (e.g kde) where some have not (e.g gnome). It’s worth noting that a Wayland display server has to implement far less than an X server and as the article mentions there are things like wlroots that do a large chunk of it for you.
    - seba_dos1 3y ago
      > There’s nothing really stopping a wayland compositor from having and supporting a separate window manager, it’s just easier to not have it separate. That's why I said "most" and "usually". That said, while it's certainly possible, I haven't seen any implementation that did it yet. > Window managers is a Xism that some DEs brought into the Wayland world (e.g kde) KDE does not separate its window manager from its compositor (KWin) at all. What it separates is its shell (Plasma). In the GNOME world, mobile shell (phosh) and phoc are separated in similar way.

PurpleRamen 3y ago

15 years and still not success, seems like a sign? And reading through a list of what Wayland breaks[1], it gives me not the best impression. But I'm just a pleb, and all I care is that my tiling WM, my games and my black key handling magic is working. But it seems Wayland will give me significant trouble with this? [1] https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d1f2277 https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d...

PlutoIsAPlanet 3y ago
It's a pain because of how much legacy content is made to target Xorg and that there isn't just one central authority or toolkit. You have decades of applications and dozens of toolkits that speak to the X Window Server. Unlike Windows and macOS, where you link agaisnt the system toolkits, so when Microsoft/Apple want to change their protocol, they update these toolkits. Any protocol that wasn't X on Linux is always going to be a pain to replace, the biggest issue with Wayland adoption is that it isn't X, yet X is not appropriate for how modern graphics works (why Android does not use it, and uses a system similar to Wayland). Edit: To add on, regarding things like emulated input etc, on other operating systems there are usually standardised protocols for doing this, where on X it just allowed anything (you don't want windows reading the input sent to other windows, think banking). So new protocols have to be invented here, and then support added for them, in many cases the protocol also works on X with an updated window manager/compositor.
- nsajko 3y ago
  No. The Wayland design is crap through-and-through. To a large extent it was intentionally meant to break things, what with its insane security model ideas. It's not just a matter of "getting the wrinkles ironed out".
  - ChocolateGod 3y ago
    Do you even know anything about the Wayland design? Wayland is more about just getting surfaces from A => B and management of those surfaces, it doesn't really do anything shockingly different from how something like macOS does it.

SomeRndName11 3y ago

tried KDE on Wayland. Di not like the way fonts looked like -fatter and blurrier, as if it was not properly snapping at pixel grid. Reverted to X11.

nsajko 3y ago

One of the big issues with Wayland is the (intentional) fragmentation. Each "Wayland compositor" is really its own window system, with its own peculiarities. This forces applications that would have been trivial to implement on X to either limit support to only a single "compositor", or suffer explosion of compositor-interfacing code. IMO this, on its own, means that pushing Wayland is intentional sabotage of "desktop Linux", because the fragmentation could be deadly for the ecosystem. It's fine, if perhaps short-sighted, for the big corps and desktops that do the pushing, of course, because they're fine with supporting just a single "compositor".

phendrenad2 3y ago
It seems to me like this was Wayland's fatal mistake, honestly. They left window management as an "exercise for the reader" (so to speak) because they didn't think that window management was a "serious" domain, and didn't understand how issues could arise from fragmentation there. So we traded the decades of cruft and fragmentation within the X11 spec for baked-in fragmentation at the DE level. I expect that we'll never reach a Mac-like utopia where you can set global keyboard shortcuts for window management (such as next/previous tab) at the OS level, and have it work across Wayland apps, because of this.
dbeley 3y ago
> systemd "It removes fragmentation, could be deadly for the ecosystem" > wayland "It adds fragmentation, could be deadly for the ecosystem" Both are now the standard on the most of the biggest linux distributions, so maybe it's not that big of a deal?
kaba0 3y ago
Yeah, I’m sure desktop linux was looking so good before Wayland that it needed some expensive sabotage mission from an Apple-Microsoft-FBI collaboration. Come on, literally noone outside the 3% cares at all about linux desktop.
- joebiden2 3y ago
  > Come on, literally noone outside the 3% cares at all about linux desktop. I care. Wayland doesn't help.

twic 3y ago

I'd never heard of this Budgie desktop environment before. Anyone familiar with it? What's its deal? I'm a GNOME 2 -> Cinnamon guy, but i'm always slightly nervous that Cinnamon on Fedora is a second-class citizen and/or a dead end.

heywoodlh 3y ago

Recently switched to Hyprland (a Wayland tiling window manager) on NixOS. It's beautiful! As a former i3 user, I'm very happy with it. It looks really nice out of the box (especially compared to i3's default appearance) and has a lot of very interesting features. I especially enjoy Hyprland's implementation of special workspaces, which allows me to hide specific application windows and summon them on-demand with a keybinding. My Hyprland config is here for anyone interested: https://github.com/heywoodlh/nixos-configs/blob/master/roles/home-manager/linux/hyprland.nix https://github.com/heywoodlh/nixos-configs/blob/master/roles...

vancan1ty 3y ago

My laptop is a Dell Precision M4800 -- not the newest but is perfectly fast enough for what I need to do. I run KDE under X usually. Tried wayland for the first time recently and there was huge input lag with moving the mouse. I found it unusable. Other people have similar problems [1] [2]. For me at least wayland is a no go until the performance matches X. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/1335gj5/mouse_feels_laggy_and_slow_on_wayland_compared_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/1335gj5/mouse_feels_la... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/wayland/comments/wj7jji/mouse_lag_on_fresh_install_of_2204_lts_bug/ https://www.reddit.com/r/wayland/comments/wj7jji/mouse_lag_o...

kaba0 3y ago
That is KDE’s Wayland implementation. If you find safari slow, http is not at fault. Other browsers might be fast - or in this case: gnome, wlroots based ones like sway often improve performance. For what it’s worth, KDE is quite behind in terms of wayland. It has gotten a lot better, but it is not a good fit for evaluating wayland itself.

iampivot 3y ago

Lots of things are possible with wayland that was never possible with X11, just because it's a much more modern graphics stack; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNL6eIoksd8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNL6eIoksd8 Note that the XFree86 developers themselves have abandoned XFree86 development.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y ago

Does zoom screen sharing works with it? For me it's a non starter if that's not fixed. I have a nvidia gpu, so probably it's a nonstarter fullstop, damn nvidia