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I enabled wayland recently and there’s been a lot of annoyances to the point that I wonder why I bother considering X11 works without these issues. For example:

I enabled wayland recently and there’s been a lot of annoyances to the point that I wonder why I bother considering X11 works without these issues. For example: * Chrome needs a bunch of extra flags to launch in Wayland mode * Firefox needs extra flags to launch in Wayland mode * Xwayland is just broken on Nvidia with both sides refusing to compromise (implicit vs explicit synchronization - Nvidia refuses to add implicit and Xwayland refuses to take Nvidia’s patch to do explicit). What this means is that you get tearing, flickering and all sorts of terrible graphical artifacts * Chrome only just fixed HW acceleration for Nvidia (latest m120 beta) * enabling vulkan causes Chrome to fail to render (although this may just me needing to try reinstalling Nvidia drivers) * I thought it was an acceleration thing, but even with HW acceleration fixed Chrome has a bug where the mouse pointer leaves behind white speckling when mousing over on a dark background. VSCode doesn’t have this issue. None of these issues appear in X and this is from someone who thought Wayland is the right way to go (eg you didn’t see this kind of story on Mac when they switched to HW accelerated compositing).

npteljes 3y ago
Another regression is that KeePassX/C AutoType doesn't work with Wayland, so now instead of a simple CTRL+V in KeePassXC, I have to separately copy and paste the user and the pass. I'm another X holdout because of random issues like this. X just works for me, and I don't have the time and energy to care. https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/2281 https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/2281
jwells89 3y ago
Maybe Firefox needing flags is a per-distro thing? I’ll have to check and make sure but I think Firefox works with Waylad sessions out of the box on my Fedora laptop. That’s using an Intel iGPU instead of an Nvidia GPU though so maybe that’s also a factor.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  I think that's right. To make it work on Nvidia you need to go through extra hoops in a bunch of ways (turning on config flags, installing alternative HW decoding libraries etc). Part of this story is definitely Nvidia & Wayland teams being at ends with each other for some reason so anyone on Intel & AMD GPUs probably don't see a lot of this which is kind of surprising because 10 years ago Nvidia was the only one with well behaving drivers on Linux.
- cycomanic 3y ago
  I'm using sway on an Nvidia card and apart from having to use sway-nvidia (which does set some environment variables for wayland with nvidia) I don't have to set any flags for Firefox. On my laptop with Intel graphics I didn't have to use any special flags for Firefox on wayland for several years. One thing is that the correct environment variables should be set, but all the wayland compositors have been setting these for ages AFAIK
tormeh 3y ago
Using Wayland on NixOS with AMD GPU. I have done exactly nothing to make Wayland work and it has none of this bugs.
- beebeepka 3y ago
  But you don't have rtx, peasant! Seriously though, it's been a while since I've had serious issues with AMD cards on Linux. I was very annoyed with the state of my rx5700 when it first launched back in 2019. We've come a long way
  - tormeh 3y ago
    > But you don't have rtx, peasant! [j/k] On Linux it's basically the opposite now. Nvidia should basically be seen as unsupported, which to be clear is 100% Nvidia's fault.
    - michaelmrose 3y ago
      Its been well supported and functional for over 23 years through 17 years during which ati/amd gpus were closed source and bad then just bad. X11 + Nvidia is still one the most common and functional configurations for people who want to use their computer instead of beta testing.
  - Modified3019 3y ago
    Yeah the typical AMD experience on linux is about as good as should be expected. It’s a shame that there’s such a complex mix of potential problems when it comes to using AMD cards for GPU passthrough after needing to reset/reassign them.
sidkshatriya 3y ago
It's possible some of these things are really distro+hw related, but for the sake of argument: > * Chrome needs a bunch of extra flags to launch in Wayland mode I'd rather have to worry about adding a few extra flags than worry about X11. X11 is overcomplicated, over-engineered, barely maintained, is apparently broken from a security angle, ancient... Till today I have found X11 configuration one of the toughest things in Linux. I'd rather google for some wayland specific flags than worry about X11. > * Firefox needs extra flags to launch in Wayland mode See argument above for Chrome. > * Xwayland is just broken on Nvidia with both sides refusing to compromise (implicit vs explicit synchronization - Nvidia refuses to add implicit and Xwayland refuses to take Nvidia’s patch to do explicit). What this means is that you get tearing, flickering and all sorts of terrible graphical artifacts Xwayland is a transitional thing anyways too. When X is dead we won't need to worry about Xwayland either. > * Chrome only just fixed HW acceleration for Nvidia (latest m120 beta) One more reason got added to use Wayland from now onwards. > * enabling vulkan causes Chrome to fail to render (although this may just me needing to try reinstalling Nvidia drivers) Vulkan unlike OpenGL is also quite new. Give it a couple of years for every combination to get ironed out. X11 is hardly the answer here. If you're going to gripe about Wayland, X11 is never the answer.
- flohofwoe 3y ago
  > Vulkan unlike OpenGL is also quite new. Vulkan is 7 years old by now. That's the same time span between Direct3D1 (1995) and Direct3D9 (2002). Wayland is 15 years old now btw. 7 and 15 years should be more than enough time to create stable and robust software libraries.
  - Wowfunhappy 3y ago
    I don't wholly disagree with your conclusion, but it's worth considering some context. Direct3D versions 1 – 9 were indeed released at a rapid pace, more than one per year on average. However, it took a whole five years before D3D9 was superseded by D3D10, and subsequent releases have also been relatively slow. Direct3D 12 is eight years old, even older than Vulkan. However, it still feels to me like a "new" API, I think because even now, many games still use DirectX 11. I'm not sure why this is. Probably some combination of the flattening of the technology curve (hardware used to change more each year than they do today), and the fact that once a technology is more complex, it takes more time to change it, and to adopt those changes. And also, legacy compatibility becomes a concern: in 1995, we didn't have multiple decades of existing code, libraries, tooling, and complete consumer software to migrate and support.
brnt 3y ago
I have three laptops each with Intel graphics, each from a different generation. They all have the same show stopping (as in screen locking gotta reset) bugs after a fresh distro install, no adjustments. But ofcourse, Wayland isn't the problem...
- vetinari 3y ago
  Maybe if you told us, how to replicate this show stopping bug so we could it try ourselves, someone could fix it then. Wayland being the problem or not.
  - brnt 3y ago
    I did, there was no interest.
    - vetinari 3y ago
      I'm curious, because I have machines with Intel GPUs from different vendors and of various generations (from Ivy Bridge, through Kaby Lake up to the Raptor Lake) and I've never seen such a bug.
      - brnt 3y ago
        I was too, but I'm not an expert and at the end of the day I need to get work done. It's up to Wayland devs to care about covering the 1001 edge cases (and thus have a process for user reports) or not.
  - duckmysick 3y ago
    Not the OP, but happens to me too. Steps to replicate: put your laptop to sleep (suspend) and try to wake it up (resume). You end up with a black screen. Often times, you can SSH into your laptop, but the screen remains unresponsive. Only hard reset helps. There are many reports of such bug. It's common on Wayland, but happens on X11 to some folks. The only constant is it happens on devices with Nvidia cards. I tried pretty much everything and I gave up on solving it.
beebeepka 3y ago
Wow, is this what the Nvidia Linux experience is like these days? Is it even worth it anymore?
- mardifoufs 3y ago
  Nvidia, even on Wayland since the latest 545 driver, works just fine if you use the proprietary drivers.
  - kabes 3y ago
    My issues started since driver 545
    - mardifoufs 3y ago
      Are you using Wayland? I'm curious since it seems like most people I've discussed with have confirmed that the 545 drivers improved things for them. I thought they might actually have fixed/improved the experience for most Wayland users but I guess things are never that simple!
      - vlovich123 3y ago
        I have heard these reports too but I haven’t noticed any differences in behavior by driver version. All the bugs I mention are the same ones before and after the latest beta that everyone said improved things. I imagine they fixed some particularly visible problem although I haven’t seen it. Maybe most people are on laptops and their laptop chip got some fix for an issue impacting those users? Not sure but that’s one obvious difference that might separate me. The other is that my CPU is the 13900k without an Intel GPU and I imagine most people opt for iGPU integrated (I didn’t see the point of it when running a desktop and I had enough of bad experience with Intel+Nvidia on the laptop side of things for the past 2 years with that configuration that I decided my sanity was better this way).
      - kabes 3y ago
        Yes, wayland. With driver 545 as soon as my screen goes black (due to inactivity), it never goes out of that state anymore and I have to do a hard reboot.
rendaw 3y ago
I try to test my system setups with qemu, but I cannot for the life of me figure out which combination of whats I need to get wayland to run there. There's apparently two? framebuffer implementations which work with none of the desktops I want to use. All the documentation points to other projects that should be documenting X or Y, but don't.

npteljes 3y ago

Another regression is that KeePassX/C AutoType doesn't work with Wayland, so now instead of a simple CTRL+V in KeePassXC, I have to separately copy and paste the user and the pass. I'm another X holdout because of random issues like this. X just works for me, and I don't have the time and energy to care. https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/2281 https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/2281

jwells89 3y ago

Maybe Firefox needing flags is a per-distro thing? I’ll have to check and make sure but I think Firefox works with Waylad sessions out of the box on my Fedora laptop. That’s using an Intel iGPU instead of an Nvidia GPU though so maybe that’s also a factor.

vlovich123 3y ago
I think that's right. To make it work on Nvidia you need to go through extra hoops in a bunch of ways (turning on config flags, installing alternative HW decoding libraries etc). Part of this story is definitely Nvidia & Wayland teams being at ends with each other for some reason so anyone on Intel & AMD GPUs probably don't see a lot of this which is kind of surprising because 10 years ago Nvidia was the only one with well behaving drivers on Linux.
cycomanic 3y ago
I'm using sway on an Nvidia card and apart from having to use sway-nvidia (which does set some environment variables for wayland with nvidia) I don't have to set any flags for Firefox. On my laptop with Intel graphics I didn't have to use any special flags for Firefox on wayland for several years. One thing is that the correct environment variables should be set, but all the wayland compositors have been setting these for ages AFAIK

tormeh 3y ago

Using Wayland on NixOS with AMD GPU. I have done exactly nothing to make Wayland work and it has none of this bugs.

beebeepka 3y ago
But you don't have rtx, peasant! Seriously though, it's been a while since I've had serious issues with AMD cards on Linux. I was very annoyed with the state of my rx5700 when it first launched back in 2019. We've come a long way
- tormeh 3y ago
  > But you don't have rtx, peasant! [j/k] On Linux it's basically the opposite now. Nvidia should basically be seen as unsupported, which to be clear is 100% Nvidia's fault.
  - michaelmrose 3y ago
    Its been well supported and functional for over 23 years through 17 years during which ati/amd gpus were closed source and bad then just bad. X11 + Nvidia is still one the most common and functional configurations for people who want to use their computer instead of beta testing.
- Modified3019 3y ago
  Yeah the typical AMD experience on linux is about as good as should be expected. It’s a shame that there’s such a complex mix of potential problems when it comes to using AMD cards for GPU passthrough after needing to reset/reassign them.

sidkshatriya 3y ago

It's possible some of these things are really distro+hw related, but for the sake of argument: > * Chrome needs a bunch of extra flags to launch in Wayland mode I'd rather have to worry about adding a few extra flags than worry about X11. X11 is overcomplicated, over-engineered, barely maintained, is apparently broken from a security angle, ancient... Till today I have found X11 configuration one of the toughest things in Linux. I'd rather google for some wayland specific flags than worry about X11. > * Firefox needs extra flags to launch in Wayland mode See argument above for Chrome. > * Xwayland is just broken on Nvidia with both sides refusing to compromise (implicit vs explicit synchronization - Nvidia refuses to add implicit and Xwayland refuses to take Nvidia’s patch to do explicit). What this means is that you get tearing, flickering and all sorts of terrible graphical artifacts Xwayland is a transitional thing anyways too. When X is dead we won't need to worry about Xwayland either. > * Chrome only just fixed HW acceleration for Nvidia (latest m120 beta) One more reason got added to use Wayland from now onwards. > * enabling vulkan causes Chrome to fail to render (although this may just me needing to try reinstalling Nvidia drivers) Vulkan unlike OpenGL is also quite new. Give it a couple of years for every combination to get ironed out. X11 is hardly the answer here. If you're going to gripe about Wayland, X11 is never the answer.

flohofwoe 3y ago
> Vulkan unlike OpenGL is also quite new. Vulkan is 7 years old by now. That's the same time span between Direct3D1 (1995) and Direct3D9 (2002). Wayland is 15 years old now btw. 7 and 15 years should be more than enough time to create stable and robust software libraries.
- Wowfunhappy 3y ago
  I don't wholly disagree with your conclusion, but it's worth considering some context. Direct3D versions 1 – 9 were indeed released at a rapid pace, more than one per year on average. However, it took a whole five years before D3D9 was superseded by D3D10, and subsequent releases have also been relatively slow. Direct3D 12 is eight years old, even older than Vulkan. However, it still feels to me like a "new" API, I think because even now, many games still use DirectX 11. I'm not sure why this is. Probably some combination of the flattening of the technology curve (hardware used to change more each year than they do today), and the fact that once a technology is more complex, it takes more time to change it, and to adopt those changes. And also, legacy compatibility becomes a concern: in 1995, we didn't have multiple decades of existing code, libraries, tooling, and complete consumer software to migrate and support.

brnt 3y ago

I have three laptops each with Intel graphics, each from a different generation. They all have the same show stopping (as in screen locking gotta reset) bugs after a fresh distro install, no adjustments. But ofcourse, Wayland isn't the problem...

vetinari 3y ago
Maybe if you told us, how to replicate this show stopping bug so we could it try ourselves, someone could fix it then. Wayland being the problem or not.
- brnt 3y ago
  I did, there was no interest.
  - vetinari 3y ago
    I'm curious, because I have machines with Intel GPUs from different vendors and of various generations (from Ivy Bridge, through Kaby Lake up to the Raptor Lake) and I've never seen such a bug.
    - brnt 3y ago
      I was too, but I'm not an expert and at the end of the day I need to get work done. It's up to Wayland devs to care about covering the 1001 edge cases (and thus have a process for user reports) or not.
- duckmysick 3y ago
  Not the OP, but happens to me too. Steps to replicate: put your laptop to sleep (suspend) and try to wake it up (resume). You end up with a black screen. Often times, you can SSH into your laptop, but the screen remains unresponsive. Only hard reset helps. There are many reports of such bug. It's common on Wayland, but happens on X11 to some folks. The only constant is it happens on devices with Nvidia cards. I tried pretty much everything and I gave up on solving it.

beebeepka 3y ago

Wow, is this what the Nvidia Linux experience is like these days? Is it even worth it anymore?

mardifoufs 3y ago
Nvidia, even on Wayland since the latest 545 driver, works just fine if you use the proprietary drivers.
- kabes 3y ago
  My issues started since driver 545
  - mardifoufs 3y ago
    Are you using Wayland? I'm curious since it seems like most people I've discussed with have confirmed that the 545 drivers improved things for them. I thought they might actually have fixed/improved the experience for most Wayland users but I guess things are never that simple!
    - vlovich123 3y ago
      I have heard these reports too but I haven’t noticed any differences in behavior by driver version. All the bugs I mention are the same ones before and after the latest beta that everyone said improved things. I imagine they fixed some particularly visible problem although I haven’t seen it. Maybe most people are on laptops and their laptop chip got some fix for an issue impacting those users? Not sure but that’s one obvious difference that might separate me. The other is that my CPU is the 13900k without an Intel GPU and I imagine most people opt for iGPU integrated (I didn’t see the point of it when running a desktop and I had enough of bad experience with Intel+Nvidia on the laptop side of things for the past 2 years with that configuration that I decided my sanity was better this way).
    - kabes 3y ago
      Yes, wayland. With driver 545 as soon as my screen goes black (due to inactivity), it never goes out of that state anymore and I have to do a hard reboot.

rendaw 3y ago

I try to test my system setups with qemu, but I cannot for the life of me figure out which combination of whats I need to get wayland to run there. There's apparently two? framebuffer implementations which work with none of the desktops I want to use. All the documentation points to other projects that should be documenting X or Y, but don't.