4 ms·

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 ple

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.
    - School-Cotton 3y ago
      macOS actually works when I try to use it though. Wayland always has huge issues. What explains that?
      - PlutoIsAPlanet 3y ago
        Try reading my original comment, it explains it perfectly.
      - kaba0 3y ago
        That tiny billionaire dollar company backing it?
  - sophacles 3y ago
    What is crappy about the design?
- WhyNotHugo 3y ago
  You can run Xorg applications on Wayland via XWayland. The experience is very straightforward, you run the application and it show up as a regular window. There's no tinkering or setup required. I run Steam and many games. Only ONE game natively runs on Wayland (factorio), the others all use XWayland and work fine.
  - PlutoIsAPlanet 3y ago
    XWayland on Nvidia is still poo, but it's a complicated issue with no easy fix, that isn't a problem with Wayland itself.
WastingMyTime89 3y ago
They thought they could ignore Nvidia because open source and it turns out they couldn’t.
- PlutoIsAPlanet 3y ago
  Ignoring Nvidia? Nvidia has been plumbing support for the APIs Wayland display servers typically use into their driver, not the other way around.
  - WastingMyTime89 3y ago
    Yes, that's the issue I'm pointing. Now it's 15 years later, Nvidia is still not done and Wayland has seen little adoption.
dbeley 3y ago
Not a success? It's now the default on most biggest Linux distros like Ubuntu and Fedora. The tiling WM ecosystem in particular is thriving on Wayland with sway and hyprland, and I personally haven't had any issues with screen recording with OBS (I use hyprland). Most of the stuff said in the list you linked is "said-X11-only software is not compatible with Wayland" but nothing is said about alternatives : for example instead of redshift I use gammastep.
- firebaze 3y ago
  As "just a user" in terms of using Linux as a DE, I personally had no gains, just losses. For example, I wanted to create a tool to use my old smartphone as a trackpad. After a short time I realized my approach won't work on wayland. I started delving in the available options, /dev/uinput, libevdev etc., and realized it will be to much pain. No (generic) accessibility¹ support means no generic way to do that, and just for my setup it is too much work. So I dropped that. Then I have a set of tools I use for quite some time, amongst which are AnyDesk, TeamViewer, Blue Recorder, Steam. These either don't work, work only with wlroots, or work via the X11 shim. ¹ for me just a nuisance, for all the people who really need accessibility support, well ...
  - PlutoIsAPlanet 3y ago
    You'll probably going to ned to look at using libei https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libei https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libei
    - firebaze 3y ago
      Thanks, looks interesting!
  - dijit 3y ago
    > I personally had no gains, just losses. Depends. Screen tearing gets worse at higher refresh rates and resolutions under Xorg. Additionally fractional scaling and mixed DPI's are something Xorg was having great difficulty supporting. It also gets quite slow (high CPU and especially memory transfers) at high refresh rates and resolutions; I mean, you benefit from this without noticing. You'll notice a loss in functionality (like screen recording) much more than you'll see a benefit like "this will actually work at 8k 120Hz"; but it's not true that there's no gains. Wayland is fine, it fixes a lot of legacy that holds the ecosystem back, people don't like it overwhelmingly because changing esoteric and hacky software that is core to basically everything will be difficult and take time. It might shock you to know though that GNOME and Fedora users are already using Wayland on the popular distros, the transition was completely seamless for those users.
jacknews 3y ago
Exactly and the assertion that it's 'very well designed' needs examining - maybe there's a reason there's been such slow adoption.
- formerly_proven 3y ago
  Wayland was created in 2008 and has afaik never supported and still doesn't support anything other than 3x8 bit implicit sRGB graphics.
  - WhyNotHugo 3y ago
    It does support a lot of other formats. Here's a brief list: https://wayland.app/protocols/wayland#wl_shm:enum:format https://wayland.app/protocols/wayland#wl_shm:enum:format There's plenty of formats that are more than 3x8 bit. There's also been a lot of work recently in getting HDR through (also this requires work in other parts of the Linux graphics stack too).
- medstrom 3y ago
  The reasons are no mystery. As a sibling to your comment said, many programs have been written as if X was going to exist forever, with direct calls to X all over the place. Plus X is mature with a million accumulated bug-fixes, so naturally it takes time to produce a reasonable contender.
  - School-Cotton 3y ago
    Also X works with the leading GPU manufacturer. Wayland does not.
- WhyNotHugo 3y ago
  Adoption and "well designed" have never had any correlation, historically speaking. Inertia to change, marketing, and making good business deals and have almost always been the more important factors for adoption of any technology in the past decades.
stbenjam 3y ago
Lol not a success? Unhinged take.
washadjeffmad 3y ago
I just disabled Wayland on Fedora 38 because of a bug where no videomode is set after login with GDM or switching TTYs. Basic Intel graphics, no proprietary drivers, all stock configs. I'll have to ssh in and purge/reinstall everything, I suppose. Wayland has caused me no other issues, and while Xorg does hold a special place in my heart, it made me chuckle a bit when I realized I'd become the equivalent of the old-timer still skeptical that ext4 is ready for primetime.
emilsedgh 3y ago
Just because it's been 15 years and it hasn't reached 100% adoption/parity doesn't mean it's not a success. The feeling around it when it started was that it's going to many many years for it to reach that and I'd say it's en route. I don't understand the criticism Wayland gets. If you don't like it just don't use it. X.org is fine. Wait for it to get the features/quality you expect. Wayland people _are_ the X.org people. You can't force them to continue developing a technology they don't believe it and not moving forward.

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.
  - School-Cotton 3y ago
    macOS actually works when I try to use it though. Wayland always has huge issues. What explains that?
    - PlutoIsAPlanet 3y ago
      Try reading my original comment, it explains it perfectly.
    - kaba0 3y ago
      That tiny billionaire dollar company backing it?
- sophacles 3y ago
  What is crappy about the design?
WhyNotHugo 3y ago
You can run Xorg applications on Wayland via XWayland. The experience is very straightforward, you run the application and it show up as a regular window. There's no tinkering or setup required. I run Steam and many games. Only ONE game natively runs on Wayland (factorio), the others all use XWayland and work fine.
- PlutoIsAPlanet 3y ago
  XWayland on Nvidia is still poo, but it's a complicated issue with no easy fix, that isn't a problem with Wayland itself.

WastingMyTime89 3y ago

They thought they could ignore Nvidia because open source and it turns out they couldn’t.

PlutoIsAPlanet 3y ago
Ignoring Nvidia? Nvidia has been plumbing support for the APIs Wayland display servers typically use into their driver, not the other way around.
- WastingMyTime89 3y ago
  Yes, that's the issue I'm pointing. Now it's 15 years later, Nvidia is still not done and Wayland has seen little adoption.

dbeley 3y ago

Not a success? It's now the default on most biggest Linux distros like Ubuntu and Fedora. The tiling WM ecosystem in particular is thriving on Wayland with sway and hyprland, and I personally haven't had any issues with screen recording with OBS (I use hyprland). Most of the stuff said in the list you linked is "said-X11-only software is not compatible with Wayland" but nothing is said about alternatives : for example instead of redshift I use gammastep.

firebaze 3y ago
As "just a user" in terms of using Linux as a DE, I personally had no gains, just losses. For example, I wanted to create a tool to use my old smartphone as a trackpad. After a short time I realized my approach won't work on wayland. I started delving in the available options, /dev/uinput, libevdev etc., and realized it will be to much pain. No (generic) accessibility¹ support means no generic way to do that, and just for my setup it is too much work. So I dropped that. Then I have a set of tools I use for quite some time, amongst which are AnyDesk, TeamViewer, Blue Recorder, Steam. These either don't work, work only with wlroots, or work via the X11 shim. ¹ for me just a nuisance, for all the people who really need accessibility support, well ...
- PlutoIsAPlanet 3y ago
  You'll probably going to ned to look at using libei https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libei https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libei
  - firebaze 3y ago
    Thanks, looks interesting!
- dijit 3y ago
  > I personally had no gains, just losses. Depends. Screen tearing gets worse at higher refresh rates and resolutions under Xorg. Additionally fractional scaling and mixed DPI's are something Xorg was having great difficulty supporting. It also gets quite slow (high CPU and especially memory transfers) at high refresh rates and resolutions; I mean, you benefit from this without noticing. You'll notice a loss in functionality (like screen recording) much more than you'll see a benefit like "this will actually work at 8k 120Hz"; but it's not true that there's no gains. Wayland is fine, it fixes a lot of legacy that holds the ecosystem back, people don't like it overwhelmingly because changing esoteric and hacky software that is core to basically everything will be difficult and take time. It might shock you to know though that GNOME and Fedora users are already using Wayland on the popular distros, the transition was completely seamless for those users.

jacknews 3y ago

Exactly and the assertion that it's 'very well designed' needs examining - maybe there's a reason there's been such slow adoption.

formerly_proven 3y ago
Wayland was created in 2008 and has afaik never supported and still doesn't support anything other than 3x8 bit implicit sRGB graphics.
- WhyNotHugo 3y ago
  It does support a lot of other formats. Here's a brief list: https://wayland.app/protocols/wayland#wl_shm:enum:format https://wayland.app/protocols/wayland#wl_shm:enum:format There's plenty of formats that are more than 3x8 bit. There's also been a lot of work recently in getting HDR through (also this requires work in other parts of the Linux graphics stack too).
medstrom 3y ago
The reasons are no mystery. As a sibling to your comment said, many programs have been written as if X was going to exist forever, with direct calls to X all over the place. Plus X is mature with a million accumulated bug-fixes, so naturally it takes time to produce a reasonable contender.
- School-Cotton 3y ago
  Also X works with the leading GPU manufacturer. Wayland does not.
WhyNotHugo 3y ago
Adoption and "well designed" have never had any correlation, historically speaking. Inertia to change, marketing, and making good business deals and have almost always been the more important factors for adoption of any technology in the past decades.

stbenjam 3y ago

Lol not a success? Unhinged take.

washadjeffmad 3y ago

I just disabled Wayland on Fedora 38 because of a bug where no videomode is set after login with GDM or switching TTYs. Basic Intel graphics, no proprietary drivers, all stock configs. I'll have to ssh in and purge/reinstall everything, I suppose. Wayland has caused me no other issues, and while Xorg does hold a special place in my heart, it made me chuckle a bit when I realized I'd become the equivalent of the old-timer still skeptical that ext4 is ready for primetime.

emilsedgh 3y ago

Just because it's been 15 years and it hasn't reached 100% adoption/parity doesn't mean it's not a success. The feeling around it when it started was that it's going to many many years for it to reach that and I'd say it's en route. I don't understand the criticism Wayland gets. If you don't like it just don't use it. X.org is fine. Wait for it to get the features/quality you expect. Wayland people _are_ the X.org people. You can't force them to continue developing a technology they don't believe it and not moving forward.