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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 criter

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.
  - mcv 3y ago
    That's a lot worse than I expected. I thought Wayland was supposed to be able to handle this without performance loss, but that's clearly not the case here. It doesn't make me eager to try out Wayland, but maybe I should try it for myself.
Qwertious 3y ago
>Desktop OS'es have simple criteria and user expectations: they should work no worse than Windows or OS X, and that's it. Fuck that. I want to merge my window manager with my todo-list, and I want my work activity sectioned off from my personal projects. I want to pause my work applications when the clock hits 5PM, because otherwise they might knock a few frames off Counterstrike. If you want a Windows-ish experience then that's fine, but don't project your lack of imagination onto the rest of us.
hulitu 3y ago
> they should work no worse than Windows or OS X, They shall work, much, much better than windows. Working in MS Windows is a PITA.
- alkonaut 3y ago
  Elaborate? There are many annoyances with windows but I the graphics stack I find very good. Things like processes not being able to hang the desktop and even the driver crashing doesn’t cause much disruption.

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.
- mcv 3y ago
  That's a lot worse than I expected. I thought Wayland was supposed to be able to handle this without performance loss, but that's clearly not the case here. It doesn't make me eager to try out Wayland, but maybe I should try it for myself.

Qwertious 3y ago

>Desktop OS'es have simple criteria and user expectations: they should work no worse than Windows or OS X, and that's it. Fuck that. I want to merge my window manager with my todo-list, and I want my work activity sectioned off from my personal projects. I want to pause my work applications when the clock hits 5PM, because otherwise they might knock a few frames off Counterstrike. If you want a Windows-ish experience then that's fine, but don't project your lack of imagination onto the rest of us.

hulitu 3y ago

> they should work no worse than Windows or OS X, They shall work, much, much better than windows. Working in MS Windows is a PITA.

alkonaut 3y ago
Elaborate? There are many annoyances with windows but I the graphics stack I find very good. Things like processes not being able to hang the desktop and even the driver crashing doesn’t cause much disruption.