10 ms·

The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

107 points by ingve 3y ago

ykonstant 3y ago
I am on camp 3 : I use a highly customized Cinnamon desktop with bespoke functionality using xdotool, wmctrl, devilspie etc.
hyperman1 3y ago
I recently upgraded to the latest Debian stable, which gave me wayland-based KDE. I thought to give it a try, but running old dosbox or wine based games in full screen doesn't seem to work: They appear in the top left corner, but don't change the resolution. I reverted to X for now. I might give it another try later. Am I just unlucky, or are the wayland edges still this rough?
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  Yes and yes. By which I mean many applications seem to have got things solved now through their dependencies, so it’s possible to see this as unlucky. But there are still some rough edges. Too many applications still need app-specific fixes and workarounds, and those are often complicated by e.g. needing to override the environment inside a Snap or AppImage or whatever. My frustration, heading back to desktop linux after a long break, is the energy spent trying to learn these things feels a bit wasted at my age. I have a couple of needs I want to use Linux for, and I may end up setting up entirely separate machines for each, so that I don’t need to constantly switch environments.
blueflow 3y ago
I tried sway and foot (as replacement for i3 and xterm) and found the input latency to be really bad. Is this a Wayland problem or was i having bad luck with foot?
- bkallus 3y ago
  I switched my 2012 thinkpad from dwm+st to sway+alacritty a couple years ago and noticed no difference in input latency.
- viraptor 3y ago
  The input latency should be good normally. I play steam games on Wayland and they're smooth and responsive. Could be some weird thing for your specific config / hardware, but it's not broken overall.
- voidbert 3y ago
  foot uses software rendering only. How good is your CPU? It may have been Vsync... I think there has been progress on allowing the user to disable it.
- kmac_ 3y ago
  Rather bad luck, I have much better experience with Wayland than X. Generally, moving to Wayland and PipeWire improved my experience with Linux desktop so much it's comparable with Mac/Win.
  - viraptor 3y ago
    Pipewire got comparable to Mac/win months ago and now it's years ahead in terms of capabilities. BT codec switching on request, fully configurable graph of connections, multi input/output, sub-20ms BT delay, jack compatibility, etc. It's the biggest software success I've seen in a really long time and I don't expect other systems to catch up to the current state for many many years.
    - Maken 3y ago
      To be a complete success, PipeWire merely needed to work at all.
- debo_ 3y ago
  I had ever-worsening input lag issues on my daily-driver ubuntu-based laptop for a couple of years. I tried a bunch of finnicky things, with very little benefit. Then I switched to xanmod kernel. It was like I had an entirely new machine. It's remarkable. I kind of wish most newbie-friendly desktop environments recommended installing it on setup (it's easy to do via package manager.)
robinduckett 3y ago
> Suggesting that these people change to a Linux environment with Wayland support is a non-starter; they are presumably using their current environment for good reasons That’s a hell of an assumption
- pipo234 3y ago
  Though so too, when I read it. But I think it's meant to be read in the larger context where the early adopters have already moved, the remaining desktop users are mostly in apathy on this subject (it works, whatever), and it would help if Wayland were to offer some clear merits to break the inertia.
  - b112 3y ago
    The point was made in the context of "Other Unixes". It has nothing to do with Linux users, on Linux distros, not having Wayland support. It has to do with Unix users, not having Wayland support.
- b112 3y ago
  >> Suggesting that these people change to a Linux environment with Wayland support is a non-starter; they are presumably using their current environment for good reasons >That’s a hell of an assumption How.. I don't get how you find this a contentious idea. The context of your quote: "People on Unix environments that don't have Wayland support. They have to use X or not have a graphical experience." You're stating that assuming that people "presumably" are using "BSD, and not Linux" for "good reasons" is a wrong thing to assume? Or some other Unix? I don't see how it could be any other way? Would someone use any Unix, be unaware of Linux, and decide NOT to use Linux without a good reason? Any reason that causes them to prefer their Unix of choice, is a good reason! Did you mean something else?
Almondsetat 3y ago
Wayland should make developers' lives easier, and as such would be adopted and software converted to it without users even noticing. For better of for worse Linux is still in the phase where software which would only interest developers ends up interesting also the end users, just like we have people who don't develop or administer anything and yet have strong opinions on systemd or GCC.
jchw 3y ago
Very true. Wayland is now stable enough to be used in a lot of "production" environments and I've been using Sway as my desktop for years, and yet still, there is work left to be done: - Hardware support. NVIDIA support is spotty still. Easily the biggest issue IMO, though it's better than it was. - Network operation. X will always be better here because it was designed to be (at least with toolkits that can still take advantage of XRender.) That said, Waypipe can work well too, but I find myself needing to tweak it for best performance. Having a better out of box experience would be nice. - Apps. Electron and Chromium still default to XWayland and still have a laundry list of (mostly small) issues. VS Code currently is unstable in native Wayland mode. Qt QDockWidget works poorly in native Wayland: it was unusable in Qt 5. OBS crashes more often in Wayland, on top of being impacted by the dock widget problem. (There are other issues, e.g. no obvious/general answers for automation, but these ones in particular make me weary of generally recommending people switch to Wayland.) Until then, there's no point in pushing harder. These problems are showstoppers for many. P.S.: Not all UNIX environments have good Wayland support but since its a common misconception, Wayland is not inherently limited to Linux and some compositors will run on BSD and there is even one for macOS, albeit more in the vein of XQuartz.
- roenxi 3y ago
  > Network operation. X will always be better here because it was designed to be (at least with toolkits that can still take advantage of XRender.) That is by no means clear cut - X is competing against specialist applications like VNC and there is a real question mark over whether a critical application uses OpenGL. X can easily win on toy benchmarks that play to its strengths, but it is rare in the extreme for that to matter. Why do we need a remote server to provide a GUI that doesn't involve OpenGL? It happens, but not often enough to be an advantage. SSH + VNC is a more reliable and general combination, the X protocol is a maintenance and security liability. Personally if I'm logging in to strange servers I'd rather be learning cross-platform skills that carry between Windows, Mac and Linux.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > X is competing against specialist applications like VNC I stay with X because it lets me have multiple independent logins with their own desktops. The last time I checked, Wayland doesn't support this, and this is well outside of what VNC does. This is a very important facility to me.
ptodorov 3y ago
I'm from the group of people that do switch based on technical merits. I remember a few years back I gave it a try and there were a few usability issues with it. Small things here and there not working, annoyances too small to remember. I've since then always discarded the idea of switching based on that. I have to give it another spin, maybe things have improved in the last few years.
gbin 3y ago
I have Arch Linux + Nvidia (3090 not even something super recent) + KDE. I am very motivated to continue with Wayland but: 1. It disables GPU acceleration on Chromium/Chrome 2. A major regression introduced glitches on all the electron apps (slack, signal etc..) I spent hours trying to troubleshoot those and dozens of flags combinations, nothing works. KDE + Nvidia + Electron/chromium apps is probably a very common set people use... Are the Wayland users still that fringe?
- yorick 3y ago
  Same issue on sway + nvidia, it can be worked around by disabling wayland support for electron apps. Not ideal.
mpsprd 3y ago
The last time I played with Wayland: * It broke screen sharing things * It removed X forwarding * It made my copy-paste life more complicated * It made steam ui ever slower Were these points fixed? what is the current usability of Wayland on these fronts?
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  Steam is doing something wrong on Linux. I can't put my finger on what it is, but on my AMD based machine running a recent-ish Ubuntu it's just..a mess in both X and Wayland. Sometimes it's their annoying chrome-fork, steam-web-runner or whatever in a constant crash-loop in the background, eating all CPU. Other times it seems like if a game or the UI gets launched accidentally or automatically somehow on the integrated graphics, I have to go hunting zombie processes with kill -9 to get things to shut down enough so that I can start them using discrete graphics. Sometimes launches games and they're in odd geometry. Running it on X instead of Wayland sometimes fixes problems. But then other times not. Unpredictable. They're using a chromium based shell, but I don't have these problems with other things like that (Slack, Chrome itself, etc.) And Wayland support in the chromium stack is ... ok? So what gives?
  - ekidd 3y ago
    Weirdly, a lot of Windows games run fine on Proton. There are a couple that only work on the Steam Deck, which is an Arch Linux system. (There's actually a complete Linux desktop UI if you dig for it!) But the Steam client is weirdly dodgy, even though it should just be a web UI that makes a few system calls. It's much worse than an Electron app like Visual Studio Code. There's the next-gen Steam Deck UI which is less buggy but pushes a lot of graphics cards pretty hard.
- Filligree 3y ago
  Now it also breaks Electron apps.
  - enriquto 3y ago
    That could be easily construed as a feature.
diffeomorphism 3y ago
This seems quite besides the point? People don't move or not move to wayland; projects use or not use it and people might move to these projects. In particular, I don't think anybody cares whether users " will be moved by Wayland's technical merits". The question is whether devs will be moved.
alkonaut 3y ago
No one really cares deeply about what a compositor or low level windowing system does since it shouldn't be a thing you notice. Desktop OS'es have simple criteria and user expectations: they should work no worse than Windows or OS X, and that's it. Whether you need Wayland or not to reach feature and performance parity with commercial desktop OSes isn't very interesting to people, only that you actually do.
- qwerty456127 3y ago
  > No one really cares deeply about what a compositor I never even wanted a compositor, I always disable composition (because why have it working if I don't need it) if this can be done easily enough on a system I would use without making it too ugly. KDE has a handy hot key (Shift+Alt+F12 IIRC) for this - it helped me prevent crashes in the past and I still use it even though it became more stable.
- mcv 3y ago
  I care. I've only recently learned about them, and I'm not in any way an expert on any of this, but from what I understand, they do an important job, and the way they do that in X11 either hurts gaming performance or makes them unstable. When I'm playing Cyberpunk 2077, occasionally the game crashes (hasn't happened often, but a few times), and when it does, the compositor fails until I kill the CP process. And while the compositor is failing, only the active window updates. The mouse cursor is invisible outside the active window. It becomes really hard to do anything. Until I kill the hanging CP2077 process. From what I understand, my options are to keep the compositor active in full screen mode, which would hurt performance, because every signal has to pass through the compositor; or I could switch to Wayland which fixes this issue (though I'm not entirely sure how); or I just accept how it is. Because I've got an Nvidia card, I'm sticking with X11 for now and accept the occasional crash. But once Nvidia support for Wayland improves, I'm switching.
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    I haven't tried Cyberpunk 2077, but I play a bit of Minecraft and from my testing KDE's Wayland implementation has about a 25% FPS penalty at least. I keep the FPS capped at 60fps, my display speed, and with X11/kwin the game can maintain that in all but extreme circumstances (e.g. breeding thousands of mobs, or https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MC-226966 https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MC-226966 (ludicrous bug btw)) With Wayland in the same parts of the map my FPS will be in the 40s. This is with numerous performance mods; without those it's much worse. It's not something I care to spend time debugging, since Wayland doesn't give me any other reason to chose it anyway. But I still try it once or twice a year to see if it has improved, and after several years of this I'm starting to think it never will.
ntietz 3y ago
I’m in one of the “other smaller groups not included here”: people who rely on accessibility tooling that isn’t supported by Wayland. My options are: - keep using X and stay healthy - switch to Wayland and get strong nerve pain again - switch to Windows or Mac If Wayland were my only option, I would have to leave Linux for my health. So the technical merits of Wayland truly don’t matter. Accessibility is an oft forgotten requirement and it’s something that can affect all of us at one time or another. We ought not ignore it.
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  I can see how this would be utterly limiting. But even trackpad support is kind of messy at the moment; gestures work but pointer speed just seems weirdly different no matter what.
- lynx23 3y ago
  Wayland kind of reminds me of the CORBA->DBus rewrite. GNOME 2 was awesomely accessible. Then came the "qwe need to switch to DBus" people, and basically destroyed the hard work of many years. For me, GNOME Accessibility never recovered from that blow. And then came Wayland, which made things even worse.
  - NikkiA 3y ago
    Tech's Gen Y seemed to have a big 'NIH' thing about things that predated them, and it seems to have continued with Gen Z. Resulting in a lot of things just being trashed for the sake of it 'not being modern enough'.
- csdreamer7 3y ago
  Would you please talk more about this? * What is your condition exactly? * What were you using on X that made you healthy? * How is it broken on Wayland?
  - ntietz 3y ago
    Various nerve stuff in my arms, limiting my use of keyboards. With an ergonomic keyboard I can get through most days, but I’m having more flare ups lately so I’m doing more voice coding. I use Talon. It simply doesn’t support Wayland, and I believe its maintainer who says that there are issues with Wayland which make support infeasible. Using it on X makes my nerve pain much less.
ilyt 3y ago
X got to the level where it "just works" for me few years before wayland. There is no reason to change and it has more drawbacks than benefits. It also have a lot of very brain-dead decisions like moving a lot of what X did to the external tools and so now everyone making a desktop environment needs to worry about handling various input configuration or even to have working screenshots. X might be crufty code-wise but it was right level of abstraction, allowing WMs and tools built above that to not care all that much about hardware and remain relatively simple.
debo_ 3y ago
Zorin makes it very easy for you to switch between X and Wayland on login. I must have fat-fingered something one day and switched to Wayland, and didn't notice. It's run that way ever since (over 2 years now) and I've only had to switch back to X once or twice to make certain games work on Steam, or just to stop myself from pulling my hair out with OBS. Other than that, it's mostly unnoticeable. Pretty impressive from my perspective.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  One thing that is a huge material difference is better handling of multi-DPI support between monitors, and display switching generally. When I flip back over to X (because of Steam, like you say), I notice right away problems. Plug the laptop into the USB-C dock and everything comes up wrong, fonts all wacked, window sizes distorted. Have to log out and log back in to get things to a working state. I just don't think X was really designed well for this world of transient displays.
roenxi 3y ago
This is hitting on a fundamental issue - Wayland's technical merits are not important. In the early phase I personally think its adoption was crippled early on by the poorly designed screenshot support. Particularly as the computing world turned out to need good video support for 2019-2022 we were lucky to have dodged Wayland. These days that seems to be less of a factor, I gather that a new parallel system of standards have sprung up that technically haven't replaced Wayland but ... for all practical purposes everyone will need to implement the screen-sharing aspects of that world. The parts are slowly being put into place. But final adoption depends precisely on what the distro maintainers think is a good idea with a little dash of whether it is technically possible for Wayland to work. We put up with X, so Wayland has a low bar to clear technically.
legulere 3y ago
X will become more and more an abandonware and people will at some point have to deal with things not working anymore and X being dropped from the repos of distributions.
flohofwoe 3y ago
IMHO for applications it should be completely irrelevant whether they talk to Xlib, XCB, Wayland, or any other future window-system-glue API which sits below widget frameworks like GTK or Qt (just don't require me to use GTK or Qt in an application which just needs a GL or Vulkan canvas instead of a full-blown UI framework). All those choices should just be differently flavoured client-side APIs to do the same thing (opening a window for 3D rendering, and getting input events). Frankly, I don't care what's going on under the hood, just give me an easy ui-framework-agnostic way to open a window to draw into (and most importantly where I don't need to draw the frigging title bar myself).
- qwerty456127 3y ago
  Is this not really this way? Do you mean a person building a GTK or a Qt app actually has to check whether the app is running under Wayland and do something special to support it nowadays?
  - flohofwoe 3y ago
    No that situation is fine. The problems start if you don't want to use GTK or Qt, because in that situation Wayland provides only a subset of features compared to X11 (like not universally supporting window chrome rendering, so a native Wayland application needs to render its own window chrome which won't look consistent with other applications). I actually wonder what happens if you run a Gnome app on KDE, or a KDE app on Gnome on top of Wayland, does the title bar look consistent in that case? I guess I also don't understand why there are even multiple Wayland display server implementations with different feature sets. As if desktop Linux wasn't already fragmented enough.
    - qwerty456127 3y ago
      > application which needs to render its own window chrome I understand this is absolutely subjective but I just hate this phenomenon so much...
      - 3y ago
systems_glitch 3y ago
X11 then, X11 now, X11 forever! I haven't poked at Wayland in years, but when I did `ssh -X` didn't get the job done for many of the applications built for Wayland, even with XWayland.
- smashed 3y ago
  Please correct me if I'm wrong but XWayland is about bringing an X11 app to show up its output under a Wayland desktop. I.e., an app that has not been updated yet to work with Wayland. You can get an entire wayland desktop to display on an X11 backend. This was used in development when there were no display drivers compatible with Wayland but you still wanted to work on app compatibility, etc.. The flow will look like App => Wayland => X11. Not sure how practical it is for your use case.
parasti 3y ago
The premise of the article linked from this one is "Wayland breaks your bad software", which is a funny way of saying it's incompatible with a bunch of irreplaceable software that people still use.
- Qwertious 3y ago
  Minecraft leaks (or used to leak) a prestigious amount of memory and runs poorly on every platform. Some people would say this makes it a bad game, even though it outsold Tetris. The critical component of most software is the design; performance doesn't matter much because half of X's old software was written when your computer having 500MB of RAM was impressive, and past a certain point being snappy is more of a nice-to-have (and yes, it is very nice) than an actual necessity.
- kps 3y ago
  “Unless your workflow (and hardware) comes from 20+ years ago, you have almost no reason to stick with Xorg” Well, I open a bunch of windows, and switch between them, raise, lower, and sometimes move or resize them with a window manager. So yes, my workflow comes from 30+ years ago.
qwerty456127 3y ago
This corresponds my point of view exactly. I'm 99% satisfied with X and see no practical reason in switching to Wayland as long as it breaks anything. I feel sympathetic conceptually but don't want to deal with any additional headaches (which can be expected to occur as many common apps still are not perfectly Wayland-ready) in exchange for purely theoretical (for me) improvements which don't offer any practical value to me. I also use X over SSH (even on Windows!) occasionally and don't really like the idea of loosing this feature.
- b112 3y ago
  And I think, even if Wayland was feature complete, I'd still only be 99% satisfied with it.. because, I cannot think of anything I am 100% satisfied with! Every piece of software has something you have to work around, every piece of software has small issues, bugs, and there's always some issue. Thus, 99% is pretty much "perfect", because you'll never get 100%. And therefore, for me, X11 is literally perfect. I have zero, absolutely zero motivation to change. Frankly, compared to 20 years ago, X is a dream to use. Autoconfig, incredibly rich support for multiple monitors, compared to decades ago. It's wonderful. I love it. I sort of feel like Wayland is in ipv6 turf. Always gaining support, but always blocked in a lot of places for some reason. I fully expect ipv8 to come out, with some sort of additionals for inter-solar routing or some such, before ipv6 gets fully adopted.
causi 3y ago
As a Linux outsider, the X/Wayland thing is bizarre to me. The story I hear over and over is "X is dead, the last stable release was thirteen years ago, Wayland is the future and I love it except for these two hundred things I need that are broken on it." Like what the hell.
- n6h6 3y ago
  The more I learn about Linux, the more I want to wake up from this nightmare. It is a fragmented hellscape.
henearkr 3y ago
I don't understand people saying "X development has stopped". This is false. Bugs continue to be fixed. Yes, features are already there, so they are not developed anymore. Is this bad?
- bitwize 3y ago
  The only version of X still being maintained is -- wait for it -- Xwayland.
  - henearkr 3y ago
    This is false, just plain logically false. Have a look at Xorg's git repo. Please.
kouteiheika 3y ago
This might be a hot take, but you'll have to take X from my cold, dead hands. Or at least until things start breaking, or maybe until Wayland has e.g. stellar HDR support and I'll get a nice OLED monitor. Otherwise, no dice. I know that X is a crusty old spawn of Cthulhu; but honestly, I don't really care? It just works! I set up my system 10 years ago with how the UI works (including my window manager), and it stably works since then without me having to ever fiddle with it. The fact that X's development is dead is also a feature, because there's no churn! And when I see other people complaining what still doesn't work on Wayland (where everything works perfectly for me on X) I'm like, eh, I don't have the time for fiddling around; maybe I'll try it out some other day.
- jgb1984 3y ago
  Same here! I'll keep using X and openbox for as long as I can. It's the way I've been using Debian the past 20 years. Dwm, pekwm, fluxbox, openbox, so many cool windowmanagers... X works perfectly fine for me since ages, Wayland brings no benefits to me it only removes useful software that I enjoy.
- tao_at_garden 3y ago
  As a user of EXWM, I feel this deeply. That Wayland also requires just so much additional tooling to get things like screensharing working properly means that smaller distros, like Clear Linux, don't ship it.
- okamiueru 3y ago
  Is screen tear something that can be avoided in X11? That's mostly the only reason why I bother with Wayland
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    Yes, using a compositor. I use kwin's compositing with Intel graphics, no tearing.
  - Narushia 3y ago
    Yeah. I’m using Fedora 38 / GNOME 44, with two 1440p 170 Hz monitors and one 4K 120 Hz TV. For me it works out of the box, and I have not made any configurations myself to make it work.
michaelt 3y ago
There are some technical problems - especially in areas like introducing new security controls - where the upsides are relatively obscure from the perspective of end users while the downsides are obvious. Changes where there are plenty of chances to garner negative attention, but almost none to garner positive attention, and the ultimate success would be for the work to go completely un-noticed. From an end user's perspective, they used to be able to Y in Z and it's stopped working, they google the problem and that's their first introduction to Wayland or Snap or Pipewire or Systemd or whatever. One of the benefits to a traditional yearly product release cycle is to bundle such changes with a bunch of other, more obviously beneficial changes to sweeten the bitter medicine.
- hulitu 3y ago
  > introducing new security controls Messing with clipboard has nothing to do with security. I bet the web browser (and other programs who do RCE or phone home) still has access to all my files in wayland, just like in X
  - michaelt 3y ago
    Yeah I was thinking more about the way they broke screen sharing.
MarkusWandel 3y ago
For me it's simple. Most of my machines run a simple <10 line script that keeps x0vncserver ready and waiting for every physical desktop (one machine has three of them using the still working multi-seat stuff). This matters. It lets me debug serious crises on my mom's machine 700km away (serious crisis: Accidentally changed the message sort order in Thunderbird, for example); it lets me reach down from my workplace (indirectly, via a proxy!) to remotely access something, etc. Of course this is, today, considered a security nightmare. But it works and I use it. Give me an equally trivial way to do it on Wayland and I think my last X dependency goes away.
goodpoint 3y ago
The security benefits are massive. X allows *every* application to take screenshots of the whole screen. 40 comments and nobody pointed out this benefit...
- pmarreck 3y ago
  Meanwhile, people who actually have to screen-share are having trouble in Wayland. So maybe this policy of "don't trust any code ever" has some downsides. It's the usual "convenience vs. security" debate all over again
  - dralley 3y ago
    I've not had any issues with screen sharing in, like, 3 years. The problem is that people use video chat clients by vendors that don't give a crap about Linux.
    - pmarreck 3y ago
      The problem is that they don't always have a choice, depending on work context I do share your dismay at those apps, though (I primarily use Linux)
- tocariimaa 3y ago
  Doesn't Wayland WMs have to break those "security benefits" constantly to just be able to take a screenshot?
  - Bu9818 3y ago
    Sensitive features like screenshots, input methods, screen locking and whatnot are behind extensions (or portals). I'm not familiar with the state of GNOME/KDE/Flatpak, but at least on the wlroots side of things it is true that currently these extensions are enabled and accessible by any process that can talk to the Wayland socket (breaking those security benefits, as you say). This is changing with protocols such as security-context that allow a sandbox engine like Flatpak (or your custom scripts) to restrict what features apps can use. (so your browser can't register an input method, or some random app can't lock the screen) https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/68 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m... https://github.com/swaywm/sway/pull/7648 https://github.com/swaywm/sway/pull/7648 https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/pull/4920 https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/pull/4920
rlkf 3y ago
Currently using XFCE on a remote desktop. This configuration has in the last ten years been met with "theoretically, someone could maybe maybe write something one day that makes this work on Wayland". Well, until it is, then I frankly hope that Wayland fails and is abandoned, because as it is now it sucks up all the mindshare of desktop Linux into what it consider a dead end: having each and everyone doing their own owner-draw. One can see the same in all these "cross-platform" toolkits that pops up, where all accessibility and themeability has just been thrown out the window (figuratively). It doesn't matter if "everyone has been doing it like this for the last ten years": That doesn't make it right.
- djha-skin 3y ago
  I can see the frustration that causes, but as a Wayland user my experience is simply better. Screen tearing goes away, and the graphics look cleaner and crisper. I get it's a huge pain for implementers, but I don't see it failing with this improved user experience for most folks. I do miss XFCE, or I thought I would, but KDE is actually gotten a lot faster than it used to be and I haven't been displeased with its performance so that's a win too.
  - rlkf 3y ago
    Screen tearing is completely irrelevant when one doesn't have a desktop. But the Wayland people doesn't care about that.
Arch-TK 3y ago
I would love to switch to Wayland, but so far, Xwayland still works worse for non-96 DPI setups than just X11 with Xft.dpi set to a non-96 value. I can't understand why Xwayland opts to have applications render at 96-dpi and upscale as a default (with the only option to change this apparently involving code for some reason). My current setup of using Xft.dpi just works for me. Where applications support it, they render correctly, where applications don't support it, there is normally some application scaling setting I can easily change.
veidr 3y ago
This article, like many, ignores the reality that lots of setups -- especially workstations with several high-res monitors -- do not work at all, or work with enormous jank-ass caveats even bigger than the ones that come with using Wayland. (Which I admit are also hellacious in may cases.) Case in point: I have to use Wayland, because otherwise my Linux machine just can't reasonably drive my monitors (one 8K, three 4K, and one high-refresh-rate 1440p portable). Upon logging into any modern Linux, like Fedora or Ubuttnu or whatever, X will freak out, jank out with its crank out, and -- only if I am lucky -- finally show the desktop. If I want to switch some/all of those monitors to some other computer for a while... good luck switching back. And there is AFAIK no distro that supports mixed 8K/4K/2K monitors with working font scaling using X. So I need Wayland for all that. Extremely relevant technical merits, for me. Not maybe for you. Unfortunately, my workflow also requires being able to do remote desktop, and share my screen during remote meetings. Which doesn't work a blood clot on Wayland yet. The TL;DR is that both X and Wayland have awful, crippling flaws that prevent pretty basic things from working. Windows has always been able to drive this same setup, and do all of these things, without problem (on the same hardware). Recently, even Macs (M2 onward) can finally do so. Linux cannot. So there are two main graphics/HID subsystems for Linux, and neither one works well for modern desktop computing with high-end/new displays. But, only one of them is likely to someday work well. And it isn't X.
- jstimpfle 3y ago
  > (one 8K, three 4K, and one high-refresh-rate 1440p portable) More power to you, pushing the limits. But frankly with this setup, you are in a tiny minority. What is your use case? What is the technical reason that this works on Wayland but not X? I've had one 4K screen since 2018, never had a problem. Other than the fact that older applications don't respect high-dpi so need manual tweaking, or need to be replaced.
  - veidr 3y ago
    My use case is just regular computer use (browsers/photos/email/3D CAD/video editing), and my day job as a software engineer. I'm just one of those people who likes multiple monitors (one of the 4K is a TV on the wall, so often not in use). I would like all the monitors to be 8K, but that's just too expensive for now).
moody__ 3y ago
Wayland is the poster child for a rewrite that tries to be 'simple' and in doing so over-complicates things by under specification. Other commenters have mentioned that usability extension issues but I wanted to discuss my experience as someone who maintains their own wayland client (for drawterm: https://github.com/9front/drawterm https://github.com/9front/drawterm). There are plenty of technical differences between how KDE, Gnome, and Wlroots that just cause more work for me. Perhaps most popularly Gnome is dying on the hill of "client side decorations", meaning that without mostly Gnome specific code you will get no title bar. KDE and Wlroots do upscaling different, KDE upscales with video in mind, Wlroots upscales with text in mind. There is no way to specify how a client would like this upscaling to be done, so to get consistent display you have to do the upscaling yourself. Some other minor annoyances include having to implement key repeat yourself, and no standard way for programs to cause a mouse movement. Like this article mentions I use wayland because it's the "only game in town", but after porting drawterm I became fairly unimpressed with the technical design.
- slooonz 3y ago
  > There is no way to specify how a client would like this upscaling to be done Isn’t it one of the points of content type hint ? (https://wayland.app/protocols/content-type-v1 https://wayland.app/protocols/content-type-v1)
  - moody__ 3y ago
    It would certainly appear so, I would need to give it a try to know for sure. Based on the compositor support table on that page, this would be even more compositor specific logic as it seems exclusive to KWin. Thank you for the link though, this is the first I had seen someone mention this.
- didntcheck 3y ago
  And what's frustrating is this isn't just down to poor execution, it's fundamental to the design, and it was repeatedly pointed out from the start. I'm glad there's finally been some acknowledgement of issues predicted around a decade ago, but only because the issues have indeed manifested, making it a rather pyrrhic victory A "simple" solution to a necessary complex problem is just kicking the can down the road, and essentially asking everyone to invent their own incompatible wheels to fill in the missing bits. On X, there's enough flexibility for me to pick a DE and window manager separately, due to the standard modularization, whereas on Wayland, I have to check the compatibility of a screenshot tool with my desktop environment [1], and whether my DE even works with my graphics card! Everything becomes tightly coupled due to the lack of standards [1] unlike some I actually do support the move to not let any app read the screen or global KB input, but the interface for those that do should have been part of the Wayland project, not just "not our department!"
djha-skin 3y ago
The thing that really made me get over the pain of switching window managers just so that I could go to Wayland was my multi monitor HiPI setup. I had high DPI monitors at work but two 1080p monitors at home. Switching back and forth between them on x is a huge pain because you have to change the scale factor back to one and then restart the window manager. Wayland allows me to switch the scale factor per monitor on the fly and switch back to low DPI screens. I also noticed that screen tearing went away and everything just looked better on Wayland. I used to use XFCE most of the time but I switched to KDE recently and I noticed it was a lot faster than it used to be. Plasma used to be laggy which is why I switched to XFCE but it's a lot faster now and well-behaved. The last holdout for X for me was the inability to share my screen on Zoom or Google Meet. Once PipeWire became stable, that problem went away as well, which was a huge win for my work experience. The network thing doesn't hold water for me. X11 forwarding has been useful in the past, but nowadays I find little use for it on my day to day. All that said, I believe X will never really go away, and that's a good thing. Open source means the freedom to keep on doing what works for you. Wayland will likely catch up though. A rewrite of this size was always going to be painful, but the tangible benefits for me was worth it.
- jwells89 3y ago
  Even on single monitor setups Wayland handles HiDPI and fractional scaling better in most circumstances, with the exception being apps that don’t support Wayland and are drawn at upscale 1x (mostly just Electron apps where the dev couldn’t be arsed to update their wrapper for some reason). HiDPI isn’t that niche of a thing anymore, having become common on upper midrange and up laptops. If only for that reason moving to Wayland makes sense. Aside from that, with X11 it wasn’t that uncommon to see cases where the layers briefly became distinguishable with things like white flashes other drawing anomalies which made for a less polished sort of hacky feel. That mostly went away when switching off compositing, but most users aren’t going to be doing that.
zamalek 3y ago
> they don't want to do without features and performance they currently have FWIW I do agree about the features problem, especially on Ubuntu - where I can only assume they have altered Wayland/Mutter just enough to break screen sharing. I don't have the problems on my personal NisOS machine, although to be fair I haven't used GNOME on my personal machine in >1y. Then there's also missing functionality, such as input emulation. I can absolutely see why someone wouldn't use Wayland from this perspective, even though I "deal with it" for one major reason: Performance. Wayland uses significantly fewer resources than X - as demonstrated by laptop battery life (like-for-like, GNOME Wayland vs. X). I lose about 30% to X, which is 2 hours during light usage. There's also the latency - where I suspect that people who claim to "not care" have not experienced using a GPU accelerated terminal on a >=144hz display. People are adverse to change (which is fine), haven't tried it in earnest (which is also fine), and yet have strong opinions about how bad it is.
- cwillu 3y ago
  Until someone gifts me three 144hz monitors and a graphics card that can meaningfully drive them, I will continue to not care.
AltruisticGapHN 3y ago
> People who could theoretically switch to Wayland and who might gain benefits from doing so, but who have found good reasons (often related to hardware support) that X works better for them ... like, can't click and drag a picture from Google Chrome into Files (Ubuntu 22.04). Switched back to X and it works.
foul 3y ago
The blogpost cited by Chris angered me so much! Author at first glance appears as just a user and developer on Linux, in fact they are a full blown Fedora-GNOME-Wayland follower and what I read was a Fedora advertising piece. Since the inception of systemd (but this trend is older than systemd, take for example Ulrich Drepper's work on glibc) I tend to notice a pattern, and they are the same as the Apple fanboy stereotype (an endangered specie nowadays). However they (oro) made me discover that emulated input arrived on Wayland, so we are nearing the moment where Wayland protocols and overlays ("portals") can reach (through some hacks) real feature parity with Xorg, EFL[1] and Arcan. [1] Enlightenment, despite all its defects in DX, has a standalone compositor that draws on direct KMS
- lolinder 3y ago
  > Author at first glance appears as just a user and developer on Linux, in fact they are a full blown Fedora-GNOME-Wayland follower and what I read was a Fedora advertising piece. I'm assuming you're talking about [0], but I can't for the life of me figure out why you say this. It doesn't mention Fedora once! > Since the inception of systemd (but this trend is older than systemd, take for example Ulrich Drepper's work on glibc) I tend to notice a pattern, and they are the same as the Apple fanboy stereotype (an endangered specie nowadays). There's an insinuation here that should be spelled out rather than being made via oblique references to existing stereotypes. What exactly is the pattern you've noticed? [0] https://orowith2os.gitlab.io/posts/wayland-breaks-your-bad-software/ https://orowith2os.gitlab.io/posts/wayland-breaks-your-bad-s...
bee_rider 3y ago
I think Wayland is very cool. More tightly coupled than X, and stuff like the ssh X forwarding thing is easy enough to work around. And besides, X is ancient crusty code that nobody wants to deal with. But, Zoom screen sharing didn’t work in Wayland. And Nvidia breaks Sway. I’m very willing to believe those are failures on the part of the companies, not Wayland. However, in the end, I can have a working system with X, or a non-working system with Wayland. Me and my computer disagree as to which system is better I guess, and the computer won.
j0057 3y ago
Xorg has very bad support for display scaling (for HiDPI) and multiple displays and especially multiple displays with non-uniform scaling factors. Architecturally speaking, this will never be fixed, even if new maintainers do show up. Wayland may be over-complex or under-complete or under-supported (by Cinnamon and XFCE) (or by Nvidia), but it is as the article says, the only game in town.
gjvc 3y ago
Wayland is the IPv6 of desktop technology
- declnz 3y ago
  This.
amadeuspagel 3y ago
In the future ChromeOS will use Wayland, and Chrome on Linux will be the same as Chrome on ChromeOS. Chrome/Electron will be better supported on Wayland, and that's the only thing that matters.
zajio1am 3y ago
It us unfortunate that there is no hybrid Wayland / X compositor that would offer backwards compatibility for existing WMs, so people could switch to Wayland and keep all existing X-based desktops, while allowing new native Wayland applications. Something like UI-less Wayland compositor that is also an X server, doing 1:1 mapping between top level X windows and Wayland windows. (There is XWayland, but it is AFAIK does not work with WMs and does not map Wayland windows back to X model.)
torginus 3y ago
I feel like one of the biggest issues with Wayland is that the 'mob energy' of the people who really thought who could slay the Microsoft Dragon, and make 'Year of the Linux Desktop' happen just isn't there anymore. These people made things like drawing tablet support on X, as well as had the power of fixing all the little weird use cases you'd need for a truly large user base. It's really funny that open source is bigger than ever, but Desktop Linux development has ground to a halt, and is in the hands of skeleton crews, and stuffy bureaucrats who enforce edicts like 'you aren't allowed to theme your operating system' and 'you must use the text editor built by our specific denomination' on a platform that's supposed to be characterized by being 'free as in speech'.
- jrm4 3y ago
  Nailed it. Seems like forever, the Wayland people are really out here thinking that 100 developers in a trenchcoat can be the same as a Steve Jobs, when, no -- please just make sure all the old stuff works.
jcarrano 3y ago
Generalizing: the technical merits of <whatever> are mostly irrelevant. People use software- or any other tool- to solve actual problems that they have, not because they are prettier technically. For example, I have been using Pipewire for a while now, because I have to use a USB sound card intermittently. I don't think it is bad, but I wish I did not have to switch card so I could use ALSA directly. I don't care if PW is technically "superior", for me ALSA worked and I could get perfect audio even if the computer mostly hanged. I use XCFE because I need to get stuff done and XFCE does not change the UI or move buttons around. It does not support wayland. I don't have time to fiddle with config files or to use a DE that churns the UI on each release. The articles arguing for the technical superiority of <whatever> always sound like they are scorning the user for not recognizing the obvious superiority of the new thing. Almost like they considered anyone who does not adopt the new system stupid.
- lelanthran 3y ago
  > The articles arguing for the technical superiority of <whatever> always sound like they are scorning the user for not recognizing the obvious superiority of the new thing. Almost like they considered anyone who does not adopt the new system stupid. Not just articles. Have you never seen user pjmlp's posts here?
hotnfresh 3y ago
The good news is we’re only 4 years away from Wayland’s replacement being born, if it follows Xfree86/Xorg’s timeline (yeah, that is how far into its existence it is, shocking given the state of it). Not if it follows the X Window protocol’s timeline, but I don’t think it’s on the same level as that, longevity-wise, even if “wayland’s just a protocol” (eyeroll) I’m holding out for that before I do much with the Linux desktop again. This split-desktop-system fiasco has dragged on for years and still sucks every time I pop back in to take a look. Maybe whatever red hat decides we’re all using next will finally get this right.
- nullc 3y ago
  Maybe it'll be like pulseaudio... it never got good, but pipewire is actually quite good.
  - ahartmetz 3y ago
    PulseAudio started as a kind of kitchen sink but badly implemented. It could be fixed by doing it right after all the features were established. Wayland is the opposite.
tristor 3y ago
I’m a very technical person that cares deeply about the details most of the time. I also spend most of my time in a terminal. But when I’m not in a terminal I mostly want things to just work, because I don’t “do” graphics. I have never cared about whether Wayland or X11 is better, I only ever cared that Wayland consistently broke my browser’s interactions with the rest of the system. I still don’t care what is underneath, I just care that my browser works as expected and I can tile a few terminals stacked on a screen with my browser full length on the side so I can view docs while I work. I consider my workflow to be /very/ simple with low requirements and it still breaks with Wayland (or at least did the last time I bothered to try it). These days I feel well served by a Macbook, but am giving Linux another go as soon as my Framework 13 AMD shows up. So I guess I will give Wayland another shot soon enough.
flerchin 3y ago
My last major issue is screen sharing in Wayland on Slack and Teams.
ubuntunooo 3y ago
[flagged]
eternityforest 3y ago
Wayland is pretty much the only shiny new Linux tech I don't want. I have no desire to use sysvinit or non PipeWire sound or anything but NetworkManager.... but Wayland is a step backwards in features, because they delegate things to individual implementations. What about screen sharing? What about global shortcuts? What about -X style network transparency? I am not a fan of fake standards that aren't actually standards and leave important stuff undefined, inviting everyone to just leave out those things.
bitwize 3y ago
From a social standpoint, all of the development and maintenance is going to Wayland. No one wants to fucking support or maintain Xorg anymore. So go ahead, keep clinging to Xorg... and watch things break as other GUI projects either drop support for X or actively stop working in an X environment. (There are GPU drivers in the mainline kernel right now which will refuse to work if they detect they're being opened from X.)
hulitu 3y ago
> There are still some people who would get enough benefit from what Wayland improves over X I'm still waiting to see a list of "what Wayland improves over X". The only things that i heard of is fractional scalling and suppport for bigger colour depths.
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
The exultation of consumeristic convenience & consumption above all else that surrounds this topic is such a powerful lesson in desire & influence & what gets voiced. Externally, seeing chaos & churn is easy, takes no effort. Yes, a lot of screenshots & device emulation protocols were left undefined. But that doesn't seem like a weakness to me. The bazaar finds interesting good approaches, slowly, over time, by way of it's many voices. X extensions also evolved out of some organic growth as well, but gee it sure seems like everyone remotely involved says there's basically no more juice to squeeze, that the limitations of the architecture have come & are hard & fast (and that getting many modern necessities has been hell after hell). Wayland's minimalism is such a great guard against running into deadends. It invents less, uses the OS more (rather than inventing it's own controllers), relies on protocols more. X had to be a perfect cathedral, and it got really far & severed many well, but issues like hidpi, multiple refresh rates, screen tearing a video seemed basically unsolvable. No one had purchase on the monolith to keep things moving forward, and something had to be done. There really wasn't any choice. And it's almost certain a new monolith that tried to be X, that tried to do everything, would have fizzled. Letting the compositors figure stuff out slowly made success possible. Success, progress, has to mature. And that's hard and takes patience. And maybe people don't appreciate the wins, and this being unfrozen; but we were stuck where we were, we couldn't really budge at all, and we found a really smart way to start. Wayland is much less and that's huge. The bazaar iterating forwards is glorious & great, an exchange where we prevent crufting ourselves in like we had in the past. Whatever the technical decisions are here (and I for one see huge wins), theres so many other concerns. Compositors can be remarkably complete for being absolutely tiny, because we actually use the OS now; that's a stunning win that doesn't affect users of a particular env, but actually means so much. Keeping the door open to new futures matters, and Wayland bestows that possibility, something of great importance. The political decision/merit to let protocols work things out over time, to find agreement & allow divergence is as important and even greater a win, a way to insure adaptability forwards, a colossal jump over X monocultures & monolith fiddling. Wayland's merit is that it makes sense in the world. That it is a basis for creation. It's easy as an end user to underrate that, to feel upset over a proprietary hardware vendors lagged adoption and your videoconferencing software's lazy negligence. A viable open ended future isn't much comfort to present suffering. It's still stunning to me the vehemence of such avid consumerdom, such strong consumeristic expectation, such unbroked unwillingness to face difficulty, and such staunch tying oneself to the past. I'm so excited for this future - difficulties and discovery and all - and I want to much to see some respect & appreciation for the technical & political merits of Wayland, of the bazaar, of figuring stuff out, of improving. It matters.

107 points by ingve 3y ago

I am on camp 3 : I use a highly customized Cinnamon desktop with bespoke functionality using xdotool, wmctrl, devilspie etc.

hyperman1 3y ago

I recently upgraded to the latest Debian stable, which gave me wayland-based KDE. I thought to give it a try, but running old dosbox or wine based games in full screen doesn't seem to work: They appear in the top left corner, but don't change the resolution. I reverted to X for now. I might give it another try later. Am I just unlucky, or are the wayland edges still this rough?

bemusedthrow75 3y ago
Yes and yes. By which I mean many applications seem to have got things solved now through their dependencies, so it’s possible to see this as unlucky. But there are still some rough edges. Too many applications still need app-specific fixes and workarounds, and those are often complicated by e.g. needing to override the environment inside a Snap or AppImage or whatever. My frustration, heading back to desktop linux after a long break, is the energy spent trying to learn these things feels a bit wasted at my age. I have a couple of needs I want to use Linux for, and I may end up setting up entirely separate machines for each, so that I don’t need to constantly switch environments.

blueflow 3y ago

I tried sway and foot (as replacement for i3 and xterm) and found the input latency to be really bad. Is this a Wayland problem or was i having bad luck with foot?

bkallus 3y ago
I switched my 2012 thinkpad from dwm+st to sway+alacritty a couple years ago and noticed no difference in input latency.
viraptor 3y ago
The input latency should be good normally. I play steam games on Wayland and they're smooth and responsive. Could be some weird thing for your specific config / hardware, but it's not broken overall.
voidbert 3y ago
foot uses software rendering only. How good is your CPU? It may have been Vsync... I think there has been progress on allowing the user to disable it.
kmac_ 3y ago
Rather bad luck, I have much better experience with Wayland than X. Generally, moving to Wayland and PipeWire improved my experience with Linux desktop so much it's comparable with Mac/Win.
- viraptor 3y ago
  Pipewire got comparable to Mac/win months ago and now it's years ahead in terms of capabilities. BT codec switching on request, fully configurable graph of connections, multi input/output, sub-20ms BT delay, jack compatibility, etc. It's the biggest software success I've seen in a really long time and I don't expect other systems to catch up to the current state for many many years.
  - Maken 3y ago
    To be a complete success, PipeWire merely needed to work at all.
debo_ 3y ago
I had ever-worsening input lag issues on my daily-driver ubuntu-based laptop for a couple of years. I tried a bunch of finnicky things, with very little benefit. Then I switched to xanmod kernel. It was like I had an entirely new machine. It's remarkable. I kind of wish most newbie-friendly desktop environments recommended installing it on setup (it's easy to do via package manager.)

robinduckett 3y ago

> Suggesting that these people change to a Linux environment with Wayland support is a non-starter; they are presumably using their current environment for good reasons That’s a hell of an assumption

pipo234 3y ago
Though so too, when I read it. But I think it's meant to be read in the larger context where the early adopters have already moved, the remaining desktop users are mostly in apathy on this subject (it works, whatever), and it would help if Wayland were to offer some clear merits to break the inertia.
- b112 3y ago
  The point was made in the context of "Other Unixes". It has nothing to do with Linux users, on Linux distros, not having Wayland support. It has to do with Unix users, not having Wayland support.
b112 3y ago
>> Suggesting that these people change to a Linux environment with Wayland support is a non-starter; they are presumably using their current environment for good reasons >That’s a hell of an assumption How.. I don't get how you find this a contentious idea. The context of your quote: "People on Unix environments that don't have Wayland support. They have to use X or not have a graphical experience." You're stating that assuming that people "presumably" are using "BSD, and not Linux" for "good reasons" is a wrong thing to assume? Or some other Unix? I don't see how it could be any other way? Would someone use any Unix, be unaware of Linux, and decide NOT to use Linux without a good reason? Any reason that causes them to prefer their Unix of choice, is a good reason! Did you mean something else?

Almondsetat 3y ago

Wayland should make developers' lives easier, and as such would be adopted and software converted to it without users even noticing. For better of for worse Linux is still in the phase where software which would only interest developers ends up interesting also the end users, just like we have people who don't develop or administer anything and yet have strong opinions on systemd or GCC.

jchw 3y ago

Very true. Wayland is now stable enough to be used in a lot of "production" environments and I've been using Sway as my desktop for years, and yet still, there is work left to be done: - Hardware support. NVIDIA support is spotty still. Easily the biggest issue IMO, though it's better than it was. - Network operation. X will always be better here because it was designed to be (at least with toolkits that can still take advantage of XRender.) That said, Waypipe can work well too, but I find myself needing to tweak it for best performance. Having a better out of box experience would be nice. - Apps. Electron and Chromium still default to XWayland and still have a laundry list of (mostly small) issues. VS Code currently is unstable in native Wayland mode. Qt QDockWidget works poorly in native Wayland: it was unusable in Qt 5. OBS crashes more often in Wayland, on top of being impacted by the dock widget problem. (There are other issues, e.g. no obvious/general answers for automation, but these ones in particular make me weary of generally recommending people switch to Wayland.) Until then, there's no point in pushing harder. These problems are showstoppers for many. P.S.: Not all UNIX environments have good Wayland support but since its a common misconception, Wayland is not inherently limited to Linux and some compositors will run on BSD and there is even one for macOS, albeit more in the vein of XQuartz.

roenxi 3y ago
> Network operation. X will always be better here because it was designed to be (at least with toolkits that can still take advantage of XRender.) That is by no means clear cut - X is competing against specialist applications like VNC and there is a real question mark over whether a critical application uses OpenGL. X can easily win on toy benchmarks that play to its strengths, but it is rare in the extreme for that to matter. Why do we need a remote server to provide a GUI that doesn't involve OpenGL? It happens, but not often enough to be an advantage. SSH + VNC is a more reliable and general combination, the X protocol is a maintenance and security liability. Personally if I'm logging in to strange servers I'd rather be learning cross-platform skills that carry between Windows, Mac and Linux.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > X is competing against specialist applications like VNC I stay with X because it lets me have multiple independent logins with their own desktops. The last time I checked, Wayland doesn't support this, and this is well outside of what VNC does. This is a very important facility to me.

ptodorov 3y ago

I'm from the group of people that do switch based on technical merits. I remember a few years back I gave it a try and there were a few usability issues with it. Small things here and there not working, annoyances too small to remember. I've since then always discarded the idea of switching based on that. I have to give it another spin, maybe things have improved in the last few years.

gbin 3y ago

I have Arch Linux + Nvidia (3090 not even something super recent) + KDE. I am very motivated to continue with Wayland but: 1. It disables GPU acceleration on Chromium/Chrome 2. A major regression introduced glitches on all the electron apps (slack, signal etc..) I spent hours trying to troubleshoot those and dozens of flags combinations, nothing works. KDE + Nvidia + Electron/chromium apps is probably a very common set people use... Are the Wayland users still that fringe?

yorick 3y ago
Same issue on sway + nvidia, it can be worked around by disabling wayland support for electron apps. Not ideal.

mpsprd 3y ago

The last time I played with Wayland: * It broke screen sharing things * It removed X forwarding * It made my copy-paste life more complicated * It made steam ui ever slower Were these points fixed? what is the current usability of Wayland on these fronts?

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
Steam is doing something wrong on Linux. I can't put my finger on what it is, but on my AMD based machine running a recent-ish Ubuntu it's just..a mess in both X and Wayland. Sometimes it's their annoying chrome-fork, steam-web-runner or whatever in a constant crash-loop in the background, eating all CPU. Other times it seems like if a game or the UI gets launched accidentally or automatically somehow on the integrated graphics, I have to go hunting zombie processes with kill -9 to get things to shut down enough so that I can start them using discrete graphics. Sometimes launches games and they're in odd geometry. Running it on X instead of Wayland sometimes fixes problems. But then other times not. Unpredictable. They're using a chromium based shell, but I don't have these problems with other things like that (Slack, Chrome itself, etc.) And Wayland support in the chromium stack is ... ok? So what gives?
- ekidd 3y ago
  Weirdly, a lot of Windows games run fine on Proton. There are a couple that only work on the Steam Deck, which is an Arch Linux system. (There's actually a complete Linux desktop UI if you dig for it!) But the Steam client is weirdly dodgy, even though it should just be a web UI that makes a few system calls. It's much worse than an Electron app like Visual Studio Code. There's the next-gen Steam Deck UI which is less buggy but pushes a lot of graphics cards pretty hard.
Filligree 3y ago
Now it also breaks Electron apps.
- enriquto 3y ago
  That could be easily construed as a feature.

diffeomorphism 3y ago

This seems quite besides the point? People don't move or not move to wayland; projects use or not use it and people might move to these projects. In particular, I don't think anybody cares whether users " will be moved by Wayland's technical merits". The question is whether devs will be moved.

alkonaut 3y ago

No one really cares deeply about what a compositor or low level windowing system does since it shouldn't be a thing you notice. Desktop OS'es have simple criteria and user expectations: they should work no worse than Windows or OS X, and that's it. Whether you need Wayland or not to reach feature and performance parity with commercial desktop OSes isn't very interesting to people, only that you actually do.

qwerty456127 3y ago
> No one really cares deeply about what a compositor I never even wanted a compositor, I always disable composition (because why have it working if I don't need it) if this can be done easily enough on a system I would use without making it too ugly. KDE has a handy hot key (Shift+Alt+F12 IIRC) for this - it helped me prevent crashes in the past and I still use it even though it became more stable.
mcv 3y ago
I care. I've only recently learned about them, and I'm not in any way an expert on any of this, but from what I understand, they do an important job, and the way they do that in X11 either hurts gaming performance or makes them unstable. When I'm playing Cyberpunk 2077, occasionally the game crashes (hasn't happened often, but a few times), and when it does, the compositor fails until I kill the CP process. And while the compositor is failing, only the active window updates. The mouse cursor is invisible outside the active window. It becomes really hard to do anything. Until I kill the hanging CP2077 process. From what I understand, my options are to keep the compositor active in full screen mode, which would hurt performance, because every signal has to pass through the compositor; or I could switch to Wayland which fixes this issue (though I'm not entirely sure how); or I just accept how it is. Because I've got an Nvidia card, I'm sticking with X11 for now and accept the occasional crash. But once Nvidia support for Wayland improves, I'm switching.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  I haven't tried Cyberpunk 2077, but I play a bit of Minecraft and from my testing KDE's Wayland implementation has about a 25% FPS penalty at least. I keep the FPS capped at 60fps, my display speed, and with X11/kwin the game can maintain that in all but extreme circumstances (e.g. breeding thousands of mobs, or https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MC-226966 https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MC-226966 (ludicrous bug btw)) With Wayland in the same parts of the map my FPS will be in the 40s. This is with numerous performance mods; without those it's much worse. It's not something I care to spend time debugging, since Wayland doesn't give me any other reason to chose it anyway. But I still try it once or twice a year to see if it has improved, and after several years of this I'm starting to think it never will.

ntietz 3y ago

I’m in one of the “other smaller groups not included here”: people who rely on accessibility tooling that isn’t supported by Wayland. My options are: - keep using X and stay healthy - switch to Wayland and get strong nerve pain again - switch to Windows or Mac If Wayland were my only option, I would have to leave Linux for my health. So the technical merits of Wayland truly don’t matter. Accessibility is an oft forgotten requirement and it’s something that can affect all of us at one time or another. We ought not ignore it.

bemusedthrow75 3y ago
I can see how this would be utterly limiting. But even trackpad support is kind of messy at the moment; gestures work but pointer speed just seems weirdly different no matter what.
lynx23 3y ago
Wayland kind of reminds me of the CORBA->DBus rewrite. GNOME 2 was awesomely accessible. Then came the "qwe need to switch to DBus" people, and basically destroyed the hard work of many years. For me, GNOME Accessibility never recovered from that blow. And then came Wayland, which made things even worse.
- NikkiA 3y ago
  Tech's Gen Y seemed to have a big 'NIH' thing about things that predated them, and it seems to have continued with Gen Z. Resulting in a lot of things just being trashed for the sake of it 'not being modern enough'.
csdreamer7 3y ago
Would you please talk more about this? * What is your condition exactly? * What were you using on X that made you healthy? * How is it broken on Wayland?
- ntietz 3y ago
  Various nerve stuff in my arms, limiting my use of keyboards. With an ergonomic keyboard I can get through most days, but I’m having more flare ups lately so I’m doing more voice coding. I use Talon. It simply doesn’t support Wayland, and I believe its maintainer who says that there are issues with Wayland which make support infeasible. Using it on X makes my nerve pain much less.

ilyt 3y ago

X got to the level where it "just works" for me few years before wayland. There is no reason to change and it has more drawbacks than benefits. It also have a lot of very brain-dead decisions like moving a lot of what X did to the external tools and so now everyone making a desktop environment needs to worry about handling various input configuration or even to have working screenshots. X might be crufty code-wise but it was right level of abstraction, allowing WMs and tools built above that to not care all that much about hardware and remain relatively simple.

debo_ 3y ago

Zorin makes it very easy for you to switch between X and Wayland on login. I must have fat-fingered something one day and switched to Wayland, and didn't notice. It's run that way ever since (over 2 years now) and I've only had to switch back to X once or twice to make certain games work on Steam, or just to stop myself from pulling my hair out with OBS. Other than that, it's mostly unnoticeable. Pretty impressive from my perspective.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
One thing that is a huge material difference is better handling of multi-DPI support between monitors, and display switching generally. When I flip back over to X (because of Steam, like you say), I notice right away problems. Plug the laptop into the USB-C dock and everything comes up wrong, fonts all wacked, window sizes distorted. Have to log out and log back in to get things to a working state. I just don't think X was really designed well for this world of transient displays.

roenxi 3y ago

This is hitting on a fundamental issue - Wayland's technical merits are not important. In the early phase I personally think its adoption was crippled early on by the poorly designed screenshot support. Particularly as the computing world turned out to need good video support for 2019-2022 we were lucky to have dodged Wayland. These days that seems to be less of a factor, I gather that a new parallel system of standards have sprung up that technically haven't replaced Wayland but ... for all practical purposes everyone will need to implement the screen-sharing aspects of that world. The parts are slowly being put into place. But final adoption depends precisely on what the distro maintainers think is a good idea with a little dash of whether it is technically possible for Wayland to work. We put up with X, so Wayland has a low bar to clear technically.

legulere 3y ago

X will become more and more an abandonware and people will at some point have to deal with things not working anymore and X being dropped from the repos of distributions.

flohofwoe 3y ago

IMHO for applications it should be completely irrelevant whether they talk to Xlib, XCB, Wayland, or any other future window-system-glue API which sits below widget frameworks like GTK or Qt (just don't require me to use GTK or Qt in an application which just needs a GL or Vulkan canvas instead of a full-blown UI framework). All those choices should just be differently flavoured client-side APIs to do the same thing (opening a window for 3D rendering, and getting input events). Frankly, I don't care what's going on under the hood, just give me an easy ui-framework-agnostic way to open a window to draw into (and most importantly where I don't need to draw the frigging title bar myself).

qwerty456127 3y ago
Is this not really this way? Do you mean a person building a GTK or a Qt app actually has to check whether the app is running under Wayland and do something special to support it nowadays?
- flohofwoe 3y ago
  No that situation is fine. The problems start if you don't want to use GTK or Qt, because in that situation Wayland provides only a subset of features compared to X11 (like not universally supporting window chrome rendering, so a native Wayland application needs to render its own window chrome which won't look consistent with other applications). I actually wonder what happens if you run a Gnome app on KDE, or a KDE app on Gnome on top of Wayland, does the title bar look consistent in that case? I guess I also don't understand why there are even multiple Wayland display server implementations with different feature sets. As if desktop Linux wasn't already fragmented enough.
  - qwerty456127 3y ago
    > application which needs to render its own window chrome I understand this is absolutely subjective but I just hate this phenomenon so much...
    - 3y ago

systems_glitch 3y ago

X11 then, X11 now, X11 forever! I haven't poked at Wayland in years, but when I did `ssh -X` didn't get the job done for many of the applications built for Wayland, even with XWayland.

smashed 3y ago
Please correct me if I'm wrong but XWayland is about bringing an X11 app to show up its output under a Wayland desktop. I.e., an app that has not been updated yet to work with Wayland. You can get an entire wayland desktop to display on an X11 backend. This was used in development when there were no display drivers compatible with Wayland but you still wanted to work on app compatibility, etc.. The flow will look like App => Wayland => X11. Not sure how practical it is for your use case.

parasti 3y ago

The premise of the article linked from this one is "Wayland breaks your bad software", which is a funny way of saying it's incompatible with a bunch of irreplaceable software that people still use.

Qwertious 3y ago
Minecraft leaks (or used to leak) a prestigious amount of memory and runs poorly on every platform. Some people would say this makes it a bad game, even though it outsold Tetris. The critical component of most software is the design; performance doesn't matter much because half of X's old software was written when your computer having 500MB of RAM was impressive, and past a certain point being snappy is more of a nice-to-have (and yes, it is very nice) than an actual necessity.
kps 3y ago
“Unless your workflow (and hardware) comes from 20+ years ago, you have almost no reason to stick with Xorg” Well, I open a bunch of windows, and switch between them, raise, lower, and sometimes move or resize them with a window manager. So yes, my workflow comes from 30+ years ago.

qwerty456127 3y ago

This corresponds my point of view exactly. I'm 99% satisfied with X and see no practical reason in switching to Wayland as long as it breaks anything. I feel sympathetic conceptually but don't want to deal with any additional headaches (which can be expected to occur as many common apps still are not perfectly Wayland-ready) in exchange for purely theoretical (for me) improvements which don't offer any practical value to me. I also use X over SSH (even on Windows!) occasionally and don't really like the idea of loosing this feature.

b112 3y ago
And I think, even if Wayland was feature complete, I'd still only be 99% satisfied with it.. because, I cannot think of anything I am 100% satisfied with! Every piece of software has something you have to work around, every piece of software has small issues, bugs, and there's always some issue. Thus, 99% is pretty much "perfect", because you'll never get 100%. And therefore, for me, X11 is literally perfect. I have zero, absolutely zero motivation to change. Frankly, compared to 20 years ago, X is a dream to use. Autoconfig, incredibly rich support for multiple monitors, compared to decades ago. It's wonderful. I love it. I sort of feel like Wayland is in ipv6 turf. Always gaining support, but always blocked in a lot of places for some reason. I fully expect ipv8 to come out, with some sort of additionals for inter-solar routing or some such, before ipv6 gets fully adopted.

causi 3y ago

As a Linux outsider, the X/Wayland thing is bizarre to me. The story I hear over and over is "X is dead, the last stable release was thirteen years ago, Wayland is the future and I love it except for these two hundred things I need that are broken on it." Like what the hell.

n6h6 3y ago
The more I learn about Linux, the more I want to wake up from this nightmare. It is a fragmented hellscape.

henearkr 3y ago

I don't understand people saying "X development has stopped". This is false. Bugs continue to be fixed. Yes, features are already there, so they are not developed anymore. Is this bad?

bitwize 3y ago
The only version of X still being maintained is -- wait for it -- Xwayland.
- henearkr 3y ago
  This is false, just plain logically false. Have a look at Xorg's git repo. Please.

kouteiheika 3y ago

This might be a hot take, but you'll have to take X from my cold, dead hands. Or at least until things start breaking, or maybe until Wayland has e.g. stellar HDR support and I'll get a nice OLED monitor. Otherwise, no dice. I know that X is a crusty old spawn of Cthulhu; but honestly, I don't really care? It just works! I set up my system 10 years ago with how the UI works (including my window manager), and it stably works since then without me having to ever fiddle with it. The fact that X's development is dead is also a feature, because there's no churn! And when I see other people complaining what still doesn't work on Wayland (where everything works perfectly for me on X) I'm like, eh, I don't have the time for fiddling around; maybe I'll try it out some other day.

jgb1984 3y ago
Same here! I'll keep using X and openbox for as long as I can. It's the way I've been using Debian the past 20 years. Dwm, pekwm, fluxbox, openbox, so many cool windowmanagers... X works perfectly fine for me since ages, Wayland brings no benefits to me it only removes useful software that I enjoy.
tao_at_garden 3y ago
As a user of EXWM, I feel this deeply. That Wayland also requires just so much additional tooling to get things like screensharing working properly means that smaller distros, like Clear Linux, don't ship it.
okamiueru 3y ago
Is screen tear something that can be avoided in X11? That's mostly the only reason why I bother with Wayland
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  Yes, using a compositor. I use kwin's compositing with Intel graphics, no tearing.
- Narushia 3y ago
  Yeah. I’m using Fedora 38 / GNOME 44, with two 1440p 170 Hz monitors and one 4K 120 Hz TV. For me it works out of the box, and I have not made any configurations myself to make it work.

michaelt 3y ago

There are some technical problems - especially in areas like introducing new security controls - where the upsides are relatively obscure from the perspective of end users while the downsides are obvious. Changes where there are plenty of chances to garner negative attention, but almost none to garner positive attention, and the ultimate success would be for the work to go completely un-noticed. From an end user's perspective, they used to be able to Y in Z and it's stopped working, they google the problem and that's their first introduction to Wayland or Snap or Pipewire or Systemd or whatever. One of the benefits to a traditional yearly product release cycle is to bundle such changes with a bunch of other, more obviously beneficial changes to sweeten the bitter medicine.

hulitu 3y ago
> introducing new security controls Messing with clipboard has nothing to do with security. I bet the web browser (and other programs who do RCE or phone home) still has access to all my files in wayland, just like in X
- michaelt 3y ago
  Yeah I was thinking more about the way they broke screen sharing.

MarkusWandel 3y ago

For me it's simple. Most of my machines run a simple <10 line script that keeps x0vncserver ready and waiting for every physical desktop (one machine has three of them using the still working multi-seat stuff). This matters. It lets me debug serious crises on my mom's machine 700km away (serious crisis: Accidentally changed the message sort order in Thunderbird, for example); it lets me reach down from my workplace (indirectly, via a proxy!) to remotely access something, etc. Of course this is, today, considered a security nightmare. But it works and I use it. Give me an equally trivial way to do it on Wayland and I think my last X dependency goes away.

goodpoint 3y ago

The security benefits are massive. X allows *every* application to take screenshots of the whole screen. 40 comments and nobody pointed out this benefit...

pmarreck 3y ago
Meanwhile, people who actually have to screen-share are having trouble in Wayland. So maybe this policy of "don't trust any code ever" has some downsides. It's the usual "convenience vs. security" debate all over again
- dralley 3y ago
  I've not had any issues with screen sharing in, like, 3 years. The problem is that people use video chat clients by vendors that don't give a crap about Linux.
  - pmarreck 3y ago
    The problem is that they don't always have a choice, depending on work context I do share your dismay at those apps, though (I primarily use Linux)
tocariimaa 3y ago
Doesn't Wayland WMs have to break those "security benefits" constantly to just be able to take a screenshot?
- Bu9818 3y ago
  Sensitive features like screenshots, input methods, screen locking and whatnot are behind extensions (or portals). I'm not familiar with the state of GNOME/KDE/Flatpak, but at least on the wlroots side of things it is true that currently these extensions are enabled and accessible by any process that can talk to the Wayland socket (breaking those security benefits, as you say). This is changing with protocols such as security-context that allow a sandbox engine like Flatpak (or your custom scripts) to restrict what features apps can use. (so your browser can't register an input method, or some random app can't lock the screen) https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/68 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m... https://github.com/swaywm/sway/pull/7648 https://github.com/swaywm/sway/pull/7648 https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/pull/4920 https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/pull/4920

rlkf 3y ago

Currently using XFCE on a remote desktop. This configuration has in the last ten years been met with "theoretically, someone could maybe maybe write something one day that makes this work on Wayland". Well, until it is, then I frankly hope that Wayland fails and is abandoned, because as it is now it sucks up all the mindshare of desktop Linux into what it consider a dead end: having each and everyone doing their own owner-draw. One can see the same in all these "cross-platform" toolkits that pops up, where all accessibility and themeability has just been thrown out the window (figuratively). It doesn't matter if "everyone has been doing it like this for the last ten years": That doesn't make it right.

djha-skin 3y ago
I can see the frustration that causes, but as a Wayland user my experience is simply better. Screen tearing goes away, and the graphics look cleaner and crisper. I get it's a huge pain for implementers, but I don't see it failing with this improved user experience for most folks. I do miss XFCE, or I thought I would, but KDE is actually gotten a lot faster than it used to be and I haven't been displeased with its performance so that's a win too.
- rlkf 3y ago
  Screen tearing is completely irrelevant when one doesn't have a desktop. But the Wayland people doesn't care about that.

Arch-TK 3y ago

I would love to switch to Wayland, but so far, Xwayland still works worse for non-96 DPI setups than just X11 with Xft.dpi set to a non-96 value. I can't understand why Xwayland opts to have applications render at 96-dpi and upscale as a default (with the only option to change this apparently involving code for some reason). My current setup of using Xft.dpi just works for me. Where applications support it, they render correctly, where applications don't support it, there is normally some application scaling setting I can easily change.

veidr 3y ago

This article, like many, ignores the reality that lots of setups -- especially workstations with several high-res monitors -- do not work at all, or work with enormous jank-ass caveats even bigger than the ones that come with using Wayland. (Which I admit are also hellacious in may cases.) Case in point: I have to use Wayland, because otherwise my Linux machine just can't reasonably drive my monitors (one 8K, three 4K, and one high-refresh-rate 1440p portable). Upon logging into any modern Linux, like Fedora or Ubuttnu or whatever, X will freak out, jank out with its crank out, and -- only if I am lucky -- finally show the desktop. If I want to switch some/all of those monitors to some other computer for a while... good luck switching back. And there is AFAIK no distro that supports mixed 8K/4K/2K monitors with working font scaling using X. So I need Wayland for all that. Extremely relevant technical merits, for me. Not maybe for you. Unfortunately, my workflow also requires being able to do remote desktop, and share my screen during remote meetings. Which doesn't work a blood clot on Wayland yet. The TL;DR is that both X and Wayland have awful, crippling flaws that prevent pretty basic things from working. Windows has always been able to drive this same setup, and do all of these things, without problem (on the same hardware). Recently, even Macs (M2 onward) can finally do so. Linux cannot. So there are two main graphics/HID subsystems for Linux, and neither one works well for modern desktop computing with high-end/new displays. But, only one of them is likely to someday work well. And it isn't X.

jstimpfle 3y ago
> (one 8K, three 4K, and one high-refresh-rate 1440p portable) More power to you, pushing the limits. But frankly with this setup, you are in a tiny minority. What is your use case? What is the technical reason that this works on Wayland but not X? I've had one 4K screen since 2018, never had a problem. Other than the fact that older applications don't respect high-dpi so need manual tweaking, or need to be replaced.
- veidr 3y ago
  My use case is just regular computer use (browsers/photos/email/3D CAD/video editing), and my day job as a software engineer. I'm just one of those people who likes multiple monitors (one of the 4K is a TV on the wall, so often not in use). I would like all the monitors to be 8K, but that's just too expensive for now).

moody__ 3y ago

Wayland is the poster child for a rewrite that tries to be 'simple' and in doing so over-complicates things by under specification. Other commenters have mentioned that usability extension issues but I wanted to discuss my experience as someone who maintains their own wayland client (for drawterm: https://github.com/9front/drawterm https://github.com/9front/drawterm). There are plenty of technical differences between how KDE, Gnome, and Wlroots that just cause more work for me. Perhaps most popularly Gnome is dying on the hill of "client side decorations", meaning that without mostly Gnome specific code you will get no title bar. KDE and Wlroots do upscaling different, KDE upscales with video in mind, Wlroots upscales with text in mind. There is no way to specify how a client would like this upscaling to be done, so to get consistent display you have to do the upscaling yourself. Some other minor annoyances include having to implement key repeat yourself, and no standard way for programs to cause a mouse movement. Like this article mentions I use wayland because it's the "only game in town", but after porting drawterm I became fairly unimpressed with the technical design.

slooonz 3y ago
> There is no way to specify how a client would like this upscaling to be done Isn’t it one of the points of content type hint ? (https://wayland.app/protocols/content-type-v1 https://wayland.app/protocols/content-type-v1)
- moody__ 3y ago
  It would certainly appear so, I would need to give it a try to know for sure. Based on the compositor support table on that page, this would be even more compositor specific logic as it seems exclusive to KWin. Thank you for the link though, this is the first I had seen someone mention this.
didntcheck 3y ago
And what's frustrating is this isn't just down to poor execution, it's fundamental to the design, and it was repeatedly pointed out from the start. I'm glad there's finally been some acknowledgement of issues predicted around a decade ago, but only because the issues have indeed manifested, making it a rather pyrrhic victory A "simple" solution to a necessary complex problem is just kicking the can down the road, and essentially asking everyone to invent their own incompatible wheels to fill in the missing bits. On X, there's enough flexibility for me to pick a DE and window manager separately, due to the standard modularization, whereas on Wayland, I have to check the compatibility of a screenshot tool with my desktop environment [1], and whether my DE even works with my graphics card! Everything becomes tightly coupled due to the lack of standards [1] unlike some I actually do support the move to not let any app read the screen or global KB input, but the interface for those that do should have been part of the Wayland project, not just "not our department!"

djha-skin 3y ago

The thing that really made me get over the pain of switching window managers just so that I could go to Wayland was my multi monitor HiPI setup. I had high DPI monitors at work but two 1080p monitors at home. Switching back and forth between them on x is a huge pain because you have to change the scale factor back to one and then restart the window manager. Wayland allows me to switch the scale factor per monitor on the fly and switch back to low DPI screens. I also noticed that screen tearing went away and everything just looked better on Wayland. I used to use XFCE most of the time but I switched to KDE recently and I noticed it was a lot faster than it used to be. Plasma used to be laggy which is why I switched to XFCE but it's a lot faster now and well-behaved. The last holdout for X for me was the inability to share my screen on Zoom or Google Meet. Once PipeWire became stable, that problem went away as well, which was a huge win for my work experience. The network thing doesn't hold water for me. X11 forwarding has been useful in the past, but nowadays I find little use for it on my day to day. All that said, I believe X will never really go away, and that's a good thing. Open source means the freedom to keep on doing what works for you. Wayland will likely catch up though. A rewrite of this size was always going to be painful, but the tangible benefits for me was worth it.

jwells89 3y ago
Even on single monitor setups Wayland handles HiDPI and fractional scaling better in most circumstances, with the exception being apps that don’t support Wayland and are drawn at upscale 1x (mostly just Electron apps where the dev couldn’t be arsed to update their wrapper for some reason). HiDPI isn’t that niche of a thing anymore, having become common on upper midrange and up laptops. If only for that reason moving to Wayland makes sense. Aside from that, with X11 it wasn’t that uncommon to see cases where the layers briefly became distinguishable with things like white flashes other drawing anomalies which made for a less polished sort of hacky feel. That mostly went away when switching off compositing, but most users aren’t going to be doing that.

zamalek 3y ago

> they don't want to do without features and performance they currently have FWIW I do agree about the features problem, especially on Ubuntu - where I can only assume they have altered Wayland/Mutter just enough to break screen sharing. I don't have the problems on my personal NisOS machine, although to be fair I haven't used GNOME on my personal machine in >1y. Then there's also missing functionality, such as input emulation. I can absolutely see why someone wouldn't use Wayland from this perspective, even though I "deal with it" for one major reason: Performance. Wayland uses significantly fewer resources than X - as demonstrated by laptop battery life (like-for-like, GNOME Wayland vs. X). I lose about 30% to X, which is 2 hours during light usage. There's also the latency - where I suspect that people who claim to "not care" have not experienced using a GPU accelerated terminal on a >=144hz display. People are adverse to change (which is fine), haven't tried it in earnest (which is also fine), and yet have strong opinions about how bad it is.

cwillu 3y ago
Until someone gifts me three 144hz monitors and a graphics card that can meaningfully drive them, I will continue to not care.

AltruisticGapHN 3y ago

> People who could theoretically switch to Wayland and who might gain benefits from doing so, but who have found good reasons (often related to hardware support) that X works better for them ... like, can't click and drag a picture from Google Chrome into Files (Ubuntu 22.04). Switched back to X and it works.

foul 3y ago

The blogpost cited by Chris angered me so much! Author at first glance appears as just a user and developer on Linux, in fact they are a full blown Fedora-GNOME-Wayland follower and what I read was a Fedora advertising piece. Since the inception of systemd (but this trend is older than systemd, take for example Ulrich Drepper's work on glibc) I tend to notice a pattern, and they are the same as the Apple fanboy stereotype (an endangered specie nowadays). However they (oro) made me discover that emulated input arrived on Wayland, so we are nearing the moment where Wayland protocols and overlays ("portals") can reach (through some hacks) real feature parity with Xorg, EFL[1] and Arcan. [1] Enlightenment, despite all its defects in DX, has a standalone compositor that draws on direct KMS

lolinder 3y ago
> Author at first glance appears as just a user and developer on Linux, in fact they are a full blown Fedora-GNOME-Wayland follower and what I read was a Fedora advertising piece. I'm assuming you're talking about [0], but I can't for the life of me figure out why you say this. It doesn't mention Fedora once! > Since the inception of systemd (but this trend is older than systemd, take for example Ulrich Drepper's work on glibc) I tend to notice a pattern, and they are the same as the Apple fanboy stereotype (an endangered specie nowadays). There's an insinuation here that should be spelled out rather than being made via oblique references to existing stereotypes. What exactly is the pattern you've noticed? [0] https://orowith2os.gitlab.io/posts/wayland-breaks-your-bad-software/ https://orowith2os.gitlab.io/posts/wayland-breaks-your-bad-s...

bee_rider 3y ago

I think Wayland is very cool. More tightly coupled than X, and stuff like the ssh X forwarding thing is easy enough to work around. And besides, X is ancient crusty code that nobody wants to deal with. But, Zoom screen sharing didn’t work in Wayland. And Nvidia breaks Sway. I’m very willing to believe those are failures on the part of the companies, not Wayland. However, in the end, I can have a working system with X, or a non-working system with Wayland. Me and my computer disagree as to which system is better I guess, and the computer won.

j0057 3y ago

Xorg has very bad support for display scaling (for HiDPI) and multiple displays and especially multiple displays with non-uniform scaling factors. Architecturally speaking, this will never be fixed, even if new maintainers do show up. Wayland may be over-complex or under-complete or under-supported (by Cinnamon and XFCE) (or by Nvidia), but it is as the article says, the only game in town.

gjvc 3y ago

Wayland is the IPv6 of desktop technology

declnz 3y ago
This.

amadeuspagel 3y ago

In the future ChromeOS will use Wayland, and Chrome on Linux will be the same as Chrome on ChromeOS. Chrome/Electron will be better supported on Wayland, and that's the only thing that matters.

zajio1am 3y ago

It us unfortunate that there is no hybrid Wayland / X compositor that would offer backwards compatibility for existing WMs, so people could switch to Wayland and keep all existing X-based desktops, while allowing new native Wayland applications. Something like UI-less Wayland compositor that is also an X server, doing 1:1 mapping between top level X windows and Wayland windows. (There is XWayland, but it is AFAIK does not work with WMs and does not map Wayland windows back to X model.)

torginus 3y ago

I feel like one of the biggest issues with Wayland is that the 'mob energy' of the people who really thought who could slay the Microsoft Dragon, and make 'Year of the Linux Desktop' happen just isn't there anymore. These people made things like drawing tablet support on X, as well as had the power of fixing all the little weird use cases you'd need for a truly large user base. It's really funny that open source is bigger than ever, but Desktop Linux development has ground to a halt, and is in the hands of skeleton crews, and stuffy bureaucrats who enforce edicts like 'you aren't allowed to theme your operating system' and 'you must use the text editor built by our specific denomination' on a platform that's supposed to be characterized by being 'free as in speech'.

jrm4 3y ago
Nailed it. Seems like forever, the Wayland people are really out here thinking that 100 developers in a trenchcoat can be the same as a Steve Jobs, when, no -- please just make sure all the old stuff works.

jcarrano 3y ago

Generalizing: the technical merits of <whatever> are mostly irrelevant. People use software- or any other tool- to solve actual problems that they have, not because they are prettier technically. For example, I have been using Pipewire for a while now, because I have to use a USB sound card intermittently. I don't think it is bad, but I wish I did not have to switch card so I could use ALSA directly. I don't care if PW is technically "superior", for me ALSA worked and I could get perfect audio even if the computer mostly hanged. I use XCFE because I need to get stuff done and XFCE does not change the UI or move buttons around. It does not support wayland. I don't have time to fiddle with config files or to use a DE that churns the UI on each release. The articles arguing for the technical superiority of <whatever> always sound like they are scorning the user for not recognizing the obvious superiority of the new thing. Almost like they considered anyone who does not adopt the new system stupid.

lelanthran 3y ago
> The articles arguing for the technical superiority of <whatever> always sound like they are scorning the user for not recognizing the obvious superiority of the new thing. Almost like they considered anyone who does not adopt the new system stupid. Not just articles. Have you never seen user pjmlp's posts here?

hotnfresh 3y ago

The good news is we’re only 4 years away from Wayland’s replacement being born, if it follows Xfree86/Xorg’s timeline (yeah, that is how far into its existence it is, shocking given the state of it). Not if it follows the X Window protocol’s timeline, but I don’t think it’s on the same level as that, longevity-wise, even if “wayland’s just a protocol” (eyeroll) I’m holding out for that before I do much with the Linux desktop again. This split-desktop-system fiasco has dragged on for years and still sucks every time I pop back in to take a look. Maybe whatever red hat decides we’re all using next will finally get this right.

nullc 3y ago
Maybe it'll be like pulseaudio... it never got good, but pipewire is actually quite good.
- ahartmetz 3y ago
  PulseAudio started as a kind of kitchen sink but badly implemented. It could be fixed by doing it right after all the features were established. Wayland is the opposite.

tristor 3y ago

I’m a very technical person that cares deeply about the details most of the time. I also spend most of my time in a terminal. But when I’m not in a terminal I mostly want things to just work, because I don’t “do” graphics. I have never cared about whether Wayland or X11 is better, I only ever cared that Wayland consistently broke my browser’s interactions with the rest of the system. I still don’t care what is underneath, I just care that my browser works as expected and I can tile a few terminals stacked on a screen with my browser full length on the side so I can view docs while I work. I consider my workflow to be /very/ simple with low requirements and it still breaks with Wayland (or at least did the last time I bothered to try it). These days I feel well served by a Macbook, but am giving Linux another go as soon as my Framework 13 AMD shows up. So I guess I will give Wayland another shot soon enough.

flerchin 3y ago

My last major issue is screen sharing in Wayland on Slack and Teams.

ubuntunooo 3y ago

[flagged]

eternityforest 3y ago

Wayland is pretty much the only shiny new Linux tech I don't want. I have no desire to use sysvinit or non PipeWire sound or anything but NetworkManager.... but Wayland is a step backwards in features, because they delegate things to individual implementations. What about screen sharing? What about global shortcuts? What about -X style network transparency? I am not a fan of fake standards that aren't actually standards and leave important stuff undefined, inviting everyone to just leave out those things.

bitwize 3y ago

From a social standpoint, all of the development and maintenance is going to Wayland. No one wants to fucking support or maintain Xorg anymore. So go ahead, keep clinging to Xorg... and watch things break as other GUI projects either drop support for X or actively stop working in an X environment. (There are GPU drivers in the mainline kernel right now which will refuse to work if they detect they're being opened from X.)

hulitu 3y ago

> There are still some people who would get enough benefit from what Wayland improves over X I'm still waiting to see a list of "what Wayland improves over X". The only things that i heard of is fractional scalling and suppport for bigger colour depths.

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

The exultation of consumeristic convenience & consumption above all else that surrounds this topic is such a powerful lesson in desire & influence & what gets voiced. Externally, seeing chaos & churn is easy, takes no effort. Yes, a lot of screenshots & device emulation protocols were left undefined. But that doesn't seem like a weakness to me. The bazaar finds interesting good approaches, slowly, over time, by way of it's many voices. X extensions also evolved out of some organic growth as well, but gee it sure seems like everyone remotely involved says there's basically no more juice to squeeze, that the limitations of the architecture have come & are hard & fast (and that getting many modern necessities has been hell after hell). Wayland's minimalism is such a great guard against running into deadends. It invents less, uses the OS more (rather than inventing it's own controllers), relies on protocols more. X had to be a perfect cathedral, and it got really far & severed many well, but issues like hidpi, multiple refresh rates, screen tearing a video seemed basically unsolvable. No one had purchase on the monolith to keep things moving forward, and something had to be done. There really wasn't any choice. And it's almost certain a new monolith that tried to be X, that tried to do everything, would have fizzled. Letting the compositors figure stuff out slowly made success possible. Success, progress, has to mature. And that's hard and takes patience. And maybe people don't appreciate the wins, and this being unfrozen; but we were stuck where we were, we couldn't really budge at all, and we found a really smart way to start. Wayland is much less and that's huge. The bazaar iterating forwards is glorious & great, an exchange where we prevent crufting ourselves in like we had in the past. Whatever the technical decisions are here (and I for one see huge wins), theres so many other concerns. Compositors can be remarkably complete for being absolutely tiny, because we actually use the OS now; that's a stunning win that doesn't affect users of a particular env, but actually means so much. Keeping the door open to new futures matters, and Wayland bestows that possibility, something of great importance. The political decision/merit to let protocols work things out over time, to find agreement & allow divergence is as important and even greater a win, a way to insure adaptability forwards, a colossal jump over X monocultures & monolith fiddling. Wayland's merit is that it makes sense in the world. That it is a basis for creation. It's easy as an end user to underrate that, to feel upset over a proprietary hardware vendors lagged adoption and your videoconferencing software's lazy negligence. A viable open ended future isn't much comfort to present suffering. It's still stunning to me the vehemence of such avid consumerdom, such strong consumeristic expectation, such unbroked unwillingness to face difficulty, and such staunch tying oneself to the past. I'm so excited for this future - difficulties and discovery and all - and I want to much to see some respect & appreciation for the technical & political merits of Wayland, of the bazaar, of figuring stuff out, of improving. It matters.