23 ms·

PCSX2 Disables Wayland Support

131 points by MaximilianEmel 3y ago

iamcreasy 3y ago
> KDE isn't too buggy, GNOME is a complete disaster. What did the author mean by this? Don't know much about Wayland other than it is window system, replacing x11. KDE Plasma wiki[1] says, "KDE Plasma 5 is the fifth and current generation of the graphical workspaces environment created by KDE....KDE Plasma 5 uses the X Window System and Wayland." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE_Plasma_5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE_Plasma_5
- lights0123 3y ago
  There is no de-facto Wayland software like there is the X.org server. Wayland is just a protocol—KDE and GNOME (through Mutter) both implement it. The author is saying that KDE did so better than GNOME.
- djbusby 3y ago
  Briefly: it's a big lift for all the different desktop environments (DE) to move from X11 to Wayland. Lots of moving parts; re-implementing and re-factoring is needed.
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    The vast majority of users today run a hybrid of Wayland and XWayland... Getting the worst of both worlds, and extra bugs to go on top...
    - nolist_policy 3y ago
      That is not true though, XWayland is better maintained than native Xorg. It is here to stay for backwards compatibility. Disclaimer: I run ChromeOS and Wayland just works.
      - djbusby 3y ago
        Oh, I've got a Chromebook; didn't know it was all Wayland. I'm thinking that it "just works" there because G has more resources to patch all the needed features. More resources than KDE or Gnome or others have available.
        NekkoDroid 3y ago
        I assume its mostly because how you said they can do it and the impact is really only limited to their system AND chromebooks are to my knowledge way more focused of a UX than what Wayland needs to be able to support so they can be even more opinionated about what they support and how
- CuriousCosmic 3y ago
  KDE and GNOME roll their own wayland libs for their compositor. These have varying levels of quality with their own unique quirks and bugs. The "gold standard" for wayland at the moment is wlroots which is what basically every other wayland compositor uses. PCSX2 apparently works perfectly fine on wlroots based compositors but has some quirks with KDE wayland and is nigh unusable with GNOME's super janky wayland implementation.
  - abrouwers 3y ago
    Funny, I've used a wlroots environment recently (hyprland), and noticed tearing in animations that I don't have in gnome. So, I guess I'll take "janky" :-)
    - gkbrk 3y ago
      I thought tearing was not a thing on Wayland, and every frame was perfect.
      - abrouwers 3y ago
        Sorry, "tearing" isn't the correct word. I use the swipe gesture to "peak" at another workspace - if I have a video playing in that workspace, for example, it'll have artifacts in the playback while I'm mid-swipe. On gnome, the picture is perfect - I can swipe half-way, and the video is playing frame-perfect, as if the workspace was in focus.
- DistractionRect 3y ago
  Basically Wayland only supports a subset of what X11 could do. It's more scoped and does a good job with what it's supposed to do. That said, the rest of the functionality is now an exercise for desktop environments, and they can (and do) things differently.
  - LtWorf 3y ago
    > does a good job with what it's supposed to do. And anything that people used to do on X11, they are told by zealots that they are wrong and aren't supposed to do that. For example: Not losing all the work every time your windows manager crashes remapping keys Use xinput to change parameters of their input devices (libinput dropped most configuration options present with evdev) Global shortcuts tunnelling over ssh
    - Arnavion 3y ago
      >Not losing all the work every time your windows manager crashes https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509703 >remapping keys >Use xinput to change parameters of their input devices (libinput dropped most configuration options present with evdev) Up to the compositor. >Global shortcuts Also up to the compositor. Was added to xdp in https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/blob/main/data/org.freedesktop.portal.GlobalShortcuts.xml https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/blob/main/data... so it's up to the compositor's xdp impl to provide it. It was created by a KDE dev so I assume KDE implements it at least. >tunnelling over ssh https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe
      - LtWorf 3y ago
        > Up to the compositor. > Also up to the compositor. Exactly my point! Right there. Thanks.
        erinnh 3y ago
        What’s your point? You didn’t make it. Before you said that your point was that people tell you you aren’t supposed to do those things. But you are able to remap your keys. Remapping keys has been possible in Wayland for quite a while in any compositor I used. (KDE, Gnome, Sway)
- OmarAssadi 3y ago
  As noted by other commenters, there are several compositors available for Wayland (essentially the bit that actually implements Wayland). Some are developed independently of any particular desktop environment--like wlroots, labwc, hikari, etc--but some are part of a larger project, such as mutter and kwin (GNOME and KDE, respectively). Most of the time you install some sort of GNOME/KDE + Wayland distro, you'll usually also end up with their compositors, and thus potential quirks specific to their implementations. GNOME's implementation in particular has historically caused a lot of drama relative to some of the others -- be it due to purely accidental, broken support for something, or sometimes intentional opposition to a particular concept that many applications rely/used to rely on, like server-side window decorations [1]. The accidental issues that come with fragmentation of the ecosystem and the intentional decisions by different compositors to not support particular extensions/whatever, like the aforementioned, can cause a fair bit of pain for developers of end-user programs. Users who may be totally unaware of the inherent differences between Wayland and X, who may not know that different compositors exist, who may not even know they are running Wayland, etc, inevitably run into strange issues, and then, understandably, file bug reports. This can get old quickly under normal circumstances. But I imagine it sucks even more when you're maintaining software that is relatively understaffed given its importance. Outside of PCSX2, mpv would be a good example: - It's incredibly popular software on its own, being probably the most popular open-source, cross-platform mediaplayer after VLC. - It's also embedded and used as a base for other applications on a wide variety of systems, ranging from other open-source players that try to integrate more tightly with a given platform--e.g., IINA (macOS), mpv.net (Windows), etc--to proprietary, commercial software, such as a variety of Android players and, importantly, Plex, which uses mpv as the default backend on at least tvOS/iOS/iPadOS. - It's software that needs to deal with pretty low-level graphics and audio stuff, so it's inherently a bit complex, and the available pool of potential contributors shrinks. - It tries to be as lightweight as possible and allow for easy embedding into other applications and porting to different systems, so it has several things working against it: -- It's mostly written in C, making it very easy to build and embed anywhere, but not only is C not the sexiest language in 2023 to many, it's also a hard language for someone without a good grasp to write safe, quality code, particularly for something like mpv. -- It doesn't try to enforce a particular rendering backend--e.g., OpenGL, DirectX, Vulkan, Metal, software, etc--nor a particular UI toolkit. Again, great for someone building on top of it. But it makes things like the change from server-side decorations to client-side significantly more annoying / potentially fundamentally incompatiblew ith the project goals. mpv sits in that perfect anti-goldilocks zone: It's important enough to be a problem if it were to disappear, yet unlike the Linux kernel, not quite important enough to have the funding and hoardes of patches despite the project complexity. It's also low-level enough to need to worry about every display server and platform on the planet, yet not low-level/general enough to have a say in the design decisions (e.g., Wayland membership, I believe, is pretty much limited to compositors and UI toolkits - like QT/GTK). All of that, and probably more, adds up to maintaining a surprisingly important, difficult project with relatively few developers but likely many millions of users, many of whom may not even know you exist; it's thankless yet important work. As a result, unsurprisingly, in addition to the infamous locale rant [2] (unrelated to Wayland), mpv used to have a pretty spicy wiki section entirely dedicated to GNOME's Wayland implementation: - https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/wiki/FAQ/ddcbe1b88a99d25681ce10cb6fa4c6759aaec063#user-content-I_use_GNOME_Wayland_and_I_have_xyz_problem https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/wiki/FAQ/ddcbe1b88a99d2568... (2020) This section still kind of exists, but it has been toned down a fair bit now that certian issues have been addressed [3]; it now mainly focuses on a couple of specific GNOME issues directly and more broadly addresses NVidia's poor Wayland support relative to some other vendors. ----- [1]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217 [2]: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/commit/1e70e82baa9193f6f027338b0fab0f5078971fbe https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/commit/1e70e82baa9193f6f02... [3]: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/wiki/FAQ/a70c96040ad4fa374d017f47024174072731a29d#why-dont-i-have-any-window-decorations https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/wiki/FAQ/a70c96040ad4fa374...
seeknotfind 3y ago
What a refreshingly honest commit message. The corporate over-professional dribble on work commit messages is so bland by comparison. That being said, I'm still left wondering if Wayland support on one of my projects is a problem.
jdlyga 3y ago
Are we subjecting ourselves to the sunk cost fallacy with Wayland? It's been "almost ready" for 6 or 7 years at this point.
- OsrsNeedsf2P 3y ago
  Ignoring the exponential pace Wayland has improved for end users in the last 36 months (see for example Plasma/Wayland Showstoppers[0]), would staying on X11 not be more of a sunk cost fallacy? There aren't even any Wayland alternatives with meaningful momentum [0] https://community.kde.org/index.php?title=Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers&action=history https://community.kde.org/index.php?title=Plasma/Wayland_Sho...
  - barkingcat 3y ago
    It's entirely possible that both suffer from sunk cost fallacy, and from that analysis there isn't a "better" or "more" sunk cost. It's already sunk, anything you sink further into it is a waste.
    - gryn 3y ago
      So what's your suggestion start a 3rd initiative ? It will suffer the same same problems that Wayland has. the problem is that X is flawed at the design and level and whatever you propose that fix those design issues will face the same type of push-back from the communities that don't like it because it's not the way their grandpa taught them to do things. keep in mind the wayland devs are the xorg devs that gave up on that project because how hopeless it was to fix things around.
      - starkparker 3y ago
        > the wayland devs are the xorg devs Are we sure _this_ isn't the problem?
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
haunter 3y ago
Further down: >... it is disabled on our release builds, because it's nothing but headaches for us, because of its broken by design nature causing issues for users. I listed a bunch of them in the OP as well. >We're sick of getting blamed for bugs in wayland compositors, while the various committees sit around arguing with each other, finally decide on standard ways of doing things after half a decade, then GNOME ruins it all by refusing to implement it.
- MuffinFlavored 3y ago
  Linux in general... Think of the efforts wasted in duplicate/overlapping functionality between maintenance + development of distributions, package managers, shells, compilers, C libraries, desktop environments, etc.
  - idle_zealot 3y ago
    Unfortunately that's not avoidable. The duplication exists because of disagreement regarding how things should be done. The alternative is not "my preferred project gets all the resources" but "my preferred project doesn't exist and all the resources go to some fundamentally flawed project that I don't want to use". See Windows or macOS for how that turns out.
    - MuffinFlavored 3y ago
      > The duplication exists because of disagreement regarding how things should be done. Is there too high a level of this disagreement in open-source software? Should it be called out from the perspective of "please try to use your time more effectively instead of contributing to fragmentation because it's harmful to the ecosystem from a macro perspective"?
      - lupusreal 3y ago
        [dead]
    - jxdxbx 3y ago
oynqr 3y ago
Wayland lacks a crutch to work around broken multi-monitor handling in composit
- oynqr 3y ago
  Side note: The Glider HN client makes it real easy to fat finger comments since the rewrite. No editing or deleting either. Sigh.
hashworks 3y ago
Actions like this will just hurt Wayland in the long run. It needs more users, and for that more applications that support it by default. No one will bring X11 to the level of Wayland, but someone might fix the existing Wayland problems.
- Gigachad 3y ago
  Not sure it will do anything to hurt Wayland. The app will just run in XWayland which is mostly impossible to tell between a native Wayland app for users.
  - rowanG077 3y ago
    Xwayland is instantly recognizable as shitty due to fractional scaling. Which almost everyone with a modern laptop uses.
    - Gigachad 3y ago
      I might not be up to date on this, but does fractional scaling work at all on Linux under any setup? Last I checked GTK just flat out didn't support it or something.
      - rowanG077 3y ago
        Yes wayland supports fractional scaling without issues. At least I have had no issues.
      - bryanlarsen 3y ago
        Works on KDE.
      - MindSpunk 3y ago
        KDE supports fractional scaling. GTK doesn't and as a result neither does GNOME. There's hacks in gnome to work around this by faking it with downscaled integer scaling (render at 2x, squash into 1.5x) but it never provided a good experience for me.
dinckelman 3y ago
As long as the option to keep it turned on exists, I have no issues with this. It's one thing to move forward with a new stack, but it's a different thing to have it as default when it doesn't fully work
BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
I'm not sure if it's funnier to see popular projects shunning wayland because it sucks or Linus looking to move kernel development away from an email based workflow because "it really isn't working anymore". There is such an insane amount of coping about both of those topics online.
Laaas 3y ago
FWIW all the reasons seem like an aversion to complying with how Wayland works. Yes, you can't position windows absolutely, but that's because you're not supposed to do that. In any case I don't see how being able to position windows is relevant at all to PCXS2's functioning on Wayland? Just don't position windows if you can't? It's an incredibly dumb reason not to support the protocol. Xorg is mostly unmaintained AFAIK. See https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/247 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m... for the discussion on this
- fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago
  One person’s unmaintained is another’s stable
- asveikau 3y ago
  > Yes, you can't position windows absolutely, but that's because you're not supposed to do that. I think about 40 years of GUI APIs disagree with this.
  - charcircuit 3y ago
    40 years ago people did not care about malicous applications, nor did they care about jank, nor did they have the hindsights that we do know. Those API only still exist because of backwards compatibility.
    - Ferret7446 3y ago
      If you're running malicious applications, you're already fucked, and your compositor pretending to protect you is the last thing you need.
    - Lammy 3y ago
      I also don't care about malicious applications. I don't need to be protected from myself and didn't ask anyone to try.
bryanlarsen 3y ago
Another option might be to disable only on Gnome or Nvidia since those seem to be the source of most of the problems.
apatheticonion 3y ago
As a naive user who largely hasn't had any issue with it. Is Wayland that bad?
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  In my experience Wayland is pretty bad on Nvidia binary driver, has some annoyances on Gnome and works fabulous on AMD hardware with KDE or a wlroots based compositor.
  - yencabulator 3y ago
    I think you meant to say NVidia drivers are bad... Not Wayland's fault, or the fault of any single compositor, or the kernel DRM's fault.
  - soniczentropy 3y ago
    Never tried it on AMD hardware, but I can confirm Nvidia drivers cause it to go haywire on all 4 of my machines. I try yearly or so, see everything's still a dumpster fire, and head back to X11
- LtWorf 3y ago
  The internet is full of people that will inform you that all the stuff that stops working when switching to wayland is your own fault and you're a liar anyway. I'm quite convinced these people just use windows and occasionally open linux in a vm for 10 minutes.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  I have no problems with recent Ubuntu & Gnome & Wayland, unless I launch a game in Steam, and then it's a mixed bag (tho getting better). And in fact multimonitor support esp with multiple DPIs & resolutions works much better with Wayland than with X. For that, X is just a terrible experience. But I'm on AMD. Thinkpad Z16 AMD Gen1.
TillE 3y ago
Aside from bugs and driver issues, Wayland has some unfortunate design limitations. For example, Dear ImGui multi-viewports don't work because "Wayland doesn't let application read or write windows positions." https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/wiki/Multi-Viewports https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/wiki/Multi-Viewports This is a feature available on Windows, macOS, and of course X11. Making choices like this means desktop Linux becomes even more of a weird island that nobody wants to support.
- wtallis 3y ago
  Why can't ImGui applications do multiple windows while leaving the positioning up to somebody else (the user or their window manager)?
  - kevingadd 3y ago
    How is the window manager going to handle the positioning in a scenario like multi-viewport? The user already conveyed their intent by dragging a window out of the application's viewport to create a new viewport, and Wayland is prohibiting the application from obeying the user.
    - wtallis 3y ago
      I'm just trying to understand why ImGui needs to read and write window positions, because it's not immediately obvious from that paltry description. It sounds like you're describing a use case where it needs to be able to set the position of a new window relative to an existing window. So APIs to read the position of the current window and write the position of the new window are probably what they're looking for—though I can readily imagine narrower APIs to handle that use case. Does that sound to you like an accurate explanation of their complaint? (None of the above explains why ImGui cannot in the interim accept a janky experience where newly created child windows pop up wherever the window manager puts them, as commonly happens for transient dialog boxes. This seems like a nice to have feature, but not a complete showstopper.)
      - 3y ago
reisse 3y ago
Quoting @stenzek > But Wayland is just broken, and everyone would rather sit around arguing with each other instead of actually addressing the design flaws. > It's not the first time such a proposal has been put forward. Something that developers need for their applications to work properly on WL (particularly multi-window applications), and it gets vetoed. Every other OS manages this fine. But apparently we're in the wrong for not conforming to some warped view of how applications should be, despite our applications working fine on every other platform. This is so damn true. Wayland lacks a Linus-style BDFL saying that the kern... the compositor is for applications, and not the other way around. We won't have nice things until Wayland maintainers stop thinking about what their end users must or must not do, and start closing feature gaps with X and compositors/window managers on other OSes. Right now they're reinventing the wheel while making it square.
- caslon 3y ago
  Wayland already works, and is great for a lot of use cases; it's the default on distributions like Fedora, and has been for a while. It has nice things. For 90% of users, it's better than X in most ways that matter. Similar, but much less catastrophic, to how Android isn't great for blind users, or people who want to do low-latency audio production, Wayland is actually great for most users, despite not appealing to extremely niche use cases. It's objectively better for most real-time use cases. I exclusively use X11 because of an extremely niche use case, and I can admit that Wayland is perfectly fine for 99% of things anyone wants to do with a computer. It's not a square wheel at all.
  - hulitu 3y ago
    > Wayland already works, and is great for a lot of use cases; it's the default on distributions like Fedora, and has been for a while. It has nice things. For 90% of users, it's better than X in most ways that matter. > I exclusively use X11 because of an extremely niche use case, and I can admit that Wayland is perfectly fine for 99% I am also married with a nice girl, but the girl next door, looks much better. /s
  - LordShredda 3y ago
NekkoDroid 3y ago
My opinion on a few of the points they have: > Stupid obsession with CSD in Gnome I get why GNOME devs don't wanna implement it (most of the times looks out of place for the app, or the app looks out of place to the system if it doesn't use the system toolkit, so it's just better for them to roll something that looks good for the app) and the XWayland implementation for SSDs are still a holdover that would need to be ported that they don't want to do. But then again to my knowledge QT has a way to make a header bar (I think even one in GTK style) and there is libdecor that handles headerbars. > Inability to position windows xdg-session-management is being worked to handle restoring of window positions. There are some contensious extensions being discussed about other window placements but they are still very much in flux. I personally am impartital for the actual use of the features and if they are really that necessary. > Hacks in render-to-main because WL craps itself otherwise This sounds more like a problem with the project itself than wayland considering the meriad of other things able to work, but then again its an emulator that might be doing some very weird stuff so I can't say much about it. > Despite said hacks, game list still glitches after stopping emulation, happens more often in gnome Probably a cascading problem from the previous > NVIDIA just crashes in swap chain creation under Wayland Not exactly too surprised, although my laptop with Intel/NV hybrid has been working mostly fine for my mostly basic usage. > Broken global menus Those are a thing anywhere other than OSX? How do they handle this on Windows?
- anaisbetts 3y ago
  Windows doesn't have global menus, it defines an API to get the workspace coordinates, which allows apps to know the area available to the window (i.e. not covered by the Start Menu)
anaisbetts 3y ago
GNOME as a platform (and by extension, all of their associated projects which unfortunately includes the Wayland protocol) has such a bizarre worldview - it's like they think they can treat the Desktop OS, with all of its user expectations and existing working software, and remake it as a bigger iPadOS, to no one's actual benefit. What do I get in return for having to give up all of these things that used to work? It's not faster, it doesn't do extra things I couldn't do before - it's _strictly_ downsides all the way down
- uneekname 3y ago
  It's cool if GNOME doesn't work well for you, but for me it's near-perfect. For sure it's rough around the edges, but what isn't? GNOME helps me get work done, stays out of my way until I need it, etc. I see so much general hate towards GNOME on HN, and it's really annoying. If it doesn't work for you, great, I'd like to hear why. But saying it's "strictly downsides" simply isn't true, nor productive.
  - pshirshov 3y ago
    1) It doesn't properly support fractional scaling, crashes frequnently on multi-head setups with fractional scaling. 2) They completely removed the keyboard shortcuts css mechanism, so I can't have emacs-like text navigation everywhere 3) They even removed local shortcut customization capabilities and replaced corresponding dialogs with useless shortcut reference window 4) There is no working systray implementation 5) their community is extremely hostile, seemingly they sadistically enjoy telling users to "fuck off, we kno better" I was a happy gnome user since 2005 until ~2017 but this shitshow is not bearable anymore.
  - initplus 3y ago
    Issues with GNOME come down to three inter-related issues. * Configurability - GNOME goes out of it's way to remove any configurability from their DE. First they move settings to obscure places, next they remove them entirely. * Compatibility - GNOME devs don't provide solutions for common use cases like window positioning or screen capture (yes I know that screen capture is now supported, but it's a compositor specific implementation rather than actually standardized by Wayland), at the expense of end users with those requirements. * Consistency - GNOME seems to go out of it's way to do things differently from other mainstream desktop platforms. Windows does typeahead search, macos does typeahead search, KDE does typeahead search, GNOME does their own weird recursive search instead. On their own each of these isn't a dealbreaker (I can deal with weird defaults if I can change them, I don't need as many settings if the defaults are less weird and don't break my software). But all three together is too much - GNOME looks like they are sitting in an ivory tower trying to dictate their opinions on desktop design to the world while having sub 1% market share. People won't drop window positioning or screen capture just because GNOME devs say so - they'll just not support Wayland. I know at least one real world person who swore off desktop Linux as a whole after Wayland screen capture broke at a critical time.
shmerl 3y ago
> NVIDIA just crashes in swap chain creation under Wayland I'd say ignore Nvidia, their Wayland support is junk (until nouveau+nvk catches up). It's not a Wayland problem, it's Nvidia problem. For dealing with CSD mess, there is libdecoration that SDL started using. In general - just use SDL for for DE integration, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. Wayland is not broken. But if you are trying to reinvent the wheel of supporting it from scratch, you'll be hitting a lot of things that need to be implemented. So as above, don't do it. Others already did it for you.
- keep_reading 3y ago
  He can't ignore NVIDIA, it's his job to make sure NVIDIA users can run his software by any means necessary.
  - Arnavion 3y ago
    "Ignore NVIDIA" in this context means "run it under X11 for NVIDIA", not "fail to run at all".
    - shmerl 3y ago
      Right, ignore it on Wayland because their drivers on Wayland are supported so poorly that's it's not worth wasting your time. It started getting a bit better lately, but it's still far from good. I'd expect nouveau+nvk for it to catch up sooner than blob will become decent on Wayland.
evanjrowley 3y ago
Due to the headline, it has dawned on me just now that the Steam Deck uses X11. Been using PCSX2 successfully on it for several months now. I never thought about whether it was using Wayland or X11 until reading this.
- dinosaurdynasty 3y ago
  Steam Deck uses Wayland. It uses Xwayland to run X11 applications.
  - saghm 3y ago
    To be fair, that includes a huge portion of the games available on a Steam Deck right now, given that Wine (and by extension Proton) currently only support running via XWayland. On the other hand, that's argument in favor of Wayland from my perspective; if something I want to run doesn't support Wayland, it doesn't actually stop me from using it.
  - BearOso 3y ago
    Ironically, the Wayland compositor used by the steam deck, gamescope, doesn't support native Wayland applications. Even weirder, it runs inside an X11 session.
    - Ferret7446 3y ago
      Wait, so why are they even using Wayland?
      - BearOso 3y ago
        The readme pretty much explains it: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope
v1ne 3y ago
This discussion about monitor-aware positioning of windows relative to another is a real treasure trove: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/247 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m... One post summarizes it pretty well. Jehan says: > As GIMP maintainer, do you want me to open a separate report so that we explain our use case on multiple windows, as well as future planned use cases? I find it fascinating. There is this supposed successor to X11, but it breaks a lot of existing applications, telling them that they are wrong. Because layout shall be done by the compositor, not by the application. True, traditional desktop systems make a lot of invalid assumptions like Windows with a global physical pixel grid that makes it pretty tough to display windows which span multiple monitors with different DPIs correctly. Yet still, they get one thing right: Positioning is a job shared between the application and window system. Because only the application knows the semantics in detail. Completely ignoring that and insisting on the application to only express these semantics via a previously-agreed upon protocol sounds pretty arrogant to me. This means that details will be lost. It's not up to the protocol designers to decide which semantic details are important. That's up to the application designer.
- jahewson 3y ago
  I don’t know, deciding not to support multi-window mode seems ok to me. It’s a relic of the past and dragging around all that baggage often isn’t worth it.
  - danaris 3y ago
    ...Now, I haven't used Linux regularly in a long time, so I may be misunderstanding, but unless "multi-window mode" means something very different than what it sounds like, it seems ludicrously arrogant to be declaring it a "relic of the past". Do you think every application should use no more than a single window, and fit its content inside that? Rather than being able to have a window for the main content, a tool palette, an information window, etc? Just because that's the only kind of application you can imagine wanting to use or make doesn't mean that should be the only thing allowed.
  - westyvw 3y ago
greyw 3y ago
Weston developers recently NACKd the window placement protocol (https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/247 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m...). I believe this one of the features pcsx2 wants to see merged. Hopefully, this doesn't mean weston developers can block essential protocols.
- Arnavion 3y ago
  >Hopefully, this doesn't mean weston developers can block essential protocols. Of course it means that. Weston developers are core developers of the Wayland protocol, as are developers of other compositors. Also, not only weston but wlroots also NACK'd it (for the same reason). If compositors refuse to implement a protocol then there's no point to merging such a protocol. Also to be clear, it was blocked from being added to xdg- namespace, and was thus moved to ext- namespace where it can still be worked on. Edit: See details in https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/blob/main/GOVERNANCE.md#22-protocol-inclusion-requirements https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/b...
esjeon 3y ago
Wayland is good until you hit the corner cases that the dev decided to abandon without leaving any alternatives. We can always have extra protocol that can be optionally enabled, but good luck with standardizing that. It feels as if Wayland people are abusing their committee to keep Wayland as-is, instead of extending it. The protocol dashboard[1] doesn't look exactly good. [1]: https://wayland.app/protocols/ https://wayland.app/protocols/
pkkm 3y ago
Wayland and systemd are two topics that I credit with showing me that I shouldn't give too much weight to the consensus on Hacker News and Reddit. Things turned out opposite to the prevailing sentiment at the time. systemd faced an enormous torrent of criticism for replacing the simple sysvinit with something more complex. Yet, sysvinit was only simple if you focus on the init program only instead of taking a systemic view. Under sysvinit, if you wanted to turn a regular command-line program into a daemon, you had to code a whole dance of closing file descriptors, sanitizing environment variables, forking, calling setsid, forking again, resetting the umask, and so on [0]. You had to make sure that all code writing to the standard output and error streams was changed to use the syslog. You also had to manage a pidfile in a way that was free of race conditions. People would write the same logic over, and over, and over again in different projects and programming languages. On the admin side, a server system with a sophisticated configuration that involved starting daemons when a connection arrives, automatic restarting, e-mailing on error, and so on, could easily turn into a complicated maze of interacting programs and shell scripts. To get the full picture of how a daemon is actually managed, you would need to check many config files with completely different syntaxes. systemd has greatly reduced this pointless duplication of effort by centralizing the complexity into a single, well reviewed set of implementations. Now, you can take a small program that runs in the terminal and prints log messages to stdout and, with a single INI-like file of a dozen lines, turn it into a daemon whose process supervision is better than anything you could implement yourself. The ease of configuration encourages you to add features such as automatic restarts, resource limits, or dynamic users, which you probably wouldn't have done on sysvinit because it was a pain in the ass. Wayland, until recently, almost universally praised, but it does the opposite. In order to keep the protocol pristine, it just pushes complexity onto everyone else and ends up making the situation terrible from a systemic perspective. Wayland can push video from a regular program (client) to a privileged one (compositor), but when asked about pushing video the other way to record the screen, they went "not my problem" so pipewire has to handle it. There is no longer even a set of standard command-line utilities you can expect everywhere. On X11, you can type a setxkbmap command to tweak your keyboard layout at runtime regardless of the desktop environment. You can get information about the connected monitors with an xrandr command. In Wayland, every compositor has its own way of handling these, and sometimes you can't even change a keyboard setting without restarting the compositor. What a regression and a blow to the community of tinkerers who like to share small utility scripts with one another. These are just two examples, but I don't think that Wayland's approach of targeting specific use cases, instead of providing a set of general tools, can ever work well when combined with its bureaucratic approval process. It took years of asking before Wayland devs decided that maybe the user should be able to disable VSync after all. It also took years to backtrack from the bizarre choice of making the UI scale integer only instead of just exposing the real fraction set by the user. [0] For details, see https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/daemon.html#SysV%20Daemons https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/daem...
hollerith 3y ago
Public service announcement: you might have switched from X to Wayland (as display server) without your having realized simply by upgrading your distro. To find out: printenv XDG_SESSION_TYPE BTW, Linux/Wayland has been my daily driver for 3 years, and I'm happy with it though I don't have Nvidia graphics and don't need to record or share my screen.
psyclobe 3y ago
Why the fuck should I, the end user, give two shits about whether I'm running Wayland or X. Linux will never conquer the desktop with this shit.
- anton96 3y ago
  In the same thought. https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/posts/2022-06-10-wayland-xorg/wayland-xorg.html https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/posts/2022-06-10-wayland-x...
- ok123456 3y ago
  It's almost as if someone is intentionally sabotaging the Linux desktop.
heywoodlh 3y ago
One tiny irritation for me on Wayland+GNOME is the lack of an Unclutter alternative. Is there any Unclutter alternative that works on Wayland+GNOME?

> KDE isn't too buggy, GNOME is a complete disaster. What did the author mean by this? Don't know much about Wayland other than it is window system, replacing x11. KDE Plasma wiki[1] says, "KDE Plasma 5 is the fifth and current generation of the graphical workspaces environment created by KDE....KDE Plasma 5 uses the X Window System and Wayland." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE_Plasma_5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE_Plasma_5

lights0123 3y ago
There is no de-facto Wayland software like there is the X.org server. Wayland is just a protocol—KDE and GNOME (through Mutter) both implement it. The author is saying that KDE did so better than GNOME.
djbusby 3y ago
Briefly: it's a big lift for all the different desktop environments (DE) to move from X11 to Wayland. Lots of moving parts; re-implementing and re-factoring is needed.
- londons_explore 3y ago
  The vast majority of users today run a hybrid of Wayland and XWayland... Getting the worst of both worlds, and extra bugs to go on top...
  - nolist_policy 3y ago
    That is not true though, XWayland is better maintained than native Xorg. It is here to stay for backwards compatibility. Disclaimer: I run ChromeOS and Wayland just works.
    - djbusby 3y ago
      Oh, I've got a Chromebook; didn't know it was all Wayland. I'm thinking that it "just works" there because G has more resources to patch all the needed features. More resources than KDE or Gnome or others have available.
      - NekkoDroid 3y ago
        I assume its mostly because how you said they can do it and the impact is really only limited to their system AND chromebooks are to my knowledge way more focused of a UX than what Wayland needs to be able to support so they can be even more opinionated about what they support and how
CuriousCosmic 3y ago
KDE and GNOME roll their own wayland libs for their compositor. These have varying levels of quality with their own unique quirks and bugs. The "gold standard" for wayland at the moment is wlroots which is what basically every other wayland compositor uses. PCSX2 apparently works perfectly fine on wlroots based compositors but has some quirks with KDE wayland and is nigh unusable with GNOME's super janky wayland implementation.
- abrouwers 3y ago
  Funny, I've used a wlroots environment recently (hyprland), and noticed tearing in animations that I don't have in gnome. So, I guess I'll take "janky" :-)
  - gkbrk 3y ago
    I thought tearing was not a thing on Wayland, and every frame was perfect.
    - abrouwers 3y ago
      Sorry, "tearing" isn't the correct word. I use the swipe gesture to "peak" at another workspace - if I have a video playing in that workspace, for example, it'll have artifacts in the playback while I'm mid-swipe. On gnome, the picture is perfect - I can swipe half-way, and the video is playing frame-perfect, as if the workspace was in focus.
DistractionRect 3y ago
Basically Wayland only supports a subset of what X11 could do. It's more scoped and does a good job with what it's supposed to do. That said, the rest of the functionality is now an exercise for desktop environments, and they can (and do) things differently.
- LtWorf 3y ago
  > does a good job with what it's supposed to do. And anything that people used to do on X11, they are told by zealots that they are wrong and aren't supposed to do that. For example: Not losing all the work every time your windows manager crashes remapping keys Use xinput to change parameters of their input devices (libinput dropped most configuration options present with evdev) Global shortcuts tunnelling over ssh
  - Arnavion 3y ago
    >Not losing all the work every time your windows manager crashes https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37509703 >remapping keys >Use xinput to change parameters of their input devices (libinput dropped most configuration options present with evdev) Up to the compositor. >Global shortcuts Also up to the compositor. Was added to xdp in https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/blob/main/data/org.freedesktop.portal.GlobalShortcuts.xml https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/blob/main/data... so it's up to the compositor's xdp impl to provide it. It was created by a KDE dev so I assume KDE implements it at least. >tunnelling over ssh https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe
    - LtWorf 3y ago
      > Up to the compositor. > Also up to the compositor. Exactly my point! Right there. Thanks.
      - erinnh 3y ago
        What’s your point? You didn’t make it. Before you said that your point was that people tell you you aren’t supposed to do those things. But you are able to remap your keys. Remapping keys has been possible in Wayland for quite a while in any compositor I used. (KDE, Gnome, Sway)
OmarAssadi 3y ago
As noted by other commenters, there are several compositors available for Wayland (essentially the bit that actually implements Wayland). Some are developed independently of any particular desktop environment--like wlroots, labwc, hikari, etc--but some are part of a larger project, such as mutter and kwin (GNOME and KDE, respectively). Most of the time you install some sort of GNOME/KDE + Wayland distro, you'll usually also end up with their compositors, and thus potential quirks specific to their implementations. GNOME's implementation in particular has historically caused a lot of drama relative to some of the others -- be it due to purely accidental, broken support for something, or sometimes intentional opposition to a particular concept that many applications rely/used to rely on, like server-side window decorations [1]. The accidental issues that come with fragmentation of the ecosystem and the intentional decisions by different compositors to not support particular extensions/whatever, like the aforementioned, can cause a fair bit of pain for developers of end-user programs. Users who may be totally unaware of the inherent differences between Wayland and X, who may not know that different compositors exist, who may not even know they are running Wayland, etc, inevitably run into strange issues, and then, understandably, file bug reports. This can get old quickly under normal circumstances. But I imagine it sucks even more when you're maintaining software that is relatively understaffed given its importance. Outside of PCSX2, mpv would be a good example: - It's incredibly popular software on its own, being probably the most popular open-source, cross-platform mediaplayer after VLC. - It's also embedded and used as a base for other applications on a wide variety of systems, ranging from other open-source players that try to integrate more tightly with a given platform--e.g., IINA (macOS), mpv.net (Windows), etc--to proprietary, commercial software, such as a variety of Android players and, importantly, Plex, which uses mpv as the default backend on at least tvOS/iOS/iPadOS. - It's software that needs to deal with pretty low-level graphics and audio stuff, so it's inherently a bit complex, and the available pool of potential contributors shrinks. - It tries to be as lightweight as possible and allow for easy embedding into other applications and porting to different systems, so it has several things working against it: -- It's mostly written in C, making it very easy to build and embed anywhere, but not only is C not the sexiest language in 2023 to many, it's also a hard language for someone without a good grasp to write safe, quality code, particularly for something like mpv. -- It doesn't try to enforce a particular rendering backend--e.g., OpenGL, DirectX, Vulkan, Metal, software, etc--nor a particular UI toolkit. Again, great for someone building on top of it. But it makes things like the change from server-side decorations to client-side significantly more annoying / potentially fundamentally incompatiblew ith the project goals. mpv sits in that perfect anti-goldilocks zone: It's important enough to be a problem if it were to disappear, yet unlike the Linux kernel, not quite important enough to have the funding and hoardes of patches despite the project complexity. It's also low-level enough to need to worry about every display server and platform on the planet, yet not low-level/general enough to have a say in the design decisions (e.g., Wayland membership, I believe, is pretty much limited to compositors and UI toolkits - like QT/GTK). All of that, and probably more, adds up to maintaining a surprisingly important, difficult project with relatively few developers but likely many millions of users, many of whom may not even know you exist; it's thankless yet important work. As a result, unsurprisingly, in addition to the infamous locale rant [2] (unrelated to Wayland), mpv used to have a pretty spicy wiki section entirely dedicated to GNOME's Wayland implementation: - https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/wiki/FAQ/ddcbe1b88a99d25681ce10cb6fa4c6759aaec063#user-content-I_use_GNOME_Wayland_and_I_have_xyz_problem https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/wiki/FAQ/ddcbe1b88a99d2568... (2020) This section still kind of exists, but it has been toned down a fair bit now that certian issues have been addressed [3]; it now mainly focuses on a couple of specific GNOME issues directly and more broadly addresses NVidia's poor Wayland support relative to some other vendors. ----- [1]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217 [2]: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/commit/1e70e82baa9193f6f027338b0fab0f5078971fbe https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/commit/1e70e82baa9193f6f02... [3]: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/wiki/FAQ/a70c96040ad4fa374d017f47024174072731a29d#why-dont-i-have-any-window-decorations https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/wiki/FAQ/a70c96040ad4fa374...

seeknotfind 3y ago

What a refreshingly honest commit message. The corporate over-professional dribble on work commit messages is so bland by comparison. That being said, I'm still left wondering if Wayland support on one of my projects is a problem.

jdlyga 3y ago

Are we subjecting ourselves to the sunk cost fallacy with Wayland? It's been "almost ready" for 6 or 7 years at this point.

OsrsNeedsf2P 3y ago
Ignoring the exponential pace Wayland has improved for end users in the last 36 months (see for example Plasma/Wayland Showstoppers[0]), would staying on X11 not be more of a sunk cost fallacy? There aren't even any Wayland alternatives with meaningful momentum [0] https://community.kde.org/index.php?title=Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers&action=history https://community.kde.org/index.php?title=Plasma/Wayland_Sho...
- barkingcat 3y ago
  It's entirely possible that both suffer from sunk cost fallacy, and from that analysis there isn't a "better" or "more" sunk cost. It's already sunk, anything you sink further into it is a waste.
  - gryn 3y ago
    So what's your suggestion start a 3rd initiative ? It will suffer the same same problems that Wayland has. the problem is that X is flawed at the design and level and whatever you propose that fix those design issues will face the same type of push-back from the communities that don't like it because it's not the way their grandpa taught them to do things. keep in mind the wayland devs are the xorg devs that gave up on that project because how hopeless it was to fix things around.
    - starkparker 3y ago
      > the wayland devs are the xorg devs Are we sure _this_ isn't the problem?
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]

haunter 3y ago

Further down: >... it is disabled on our release builds, because it's nothing but headaches for us, because of its broken by design nature causing issues for users. I listed a bunch of them in the OP as well. >We're sick of getting blamed for bugs in wayland compositors, while the various committees sit around arguing with each other, finally decide on standard ways of doing things after half a decade, then GNOME ruins it all by refusing to implement it.

MuffinFlavored 3y ago
Linux in general... Think of the efforts wasted in duplicate/overlapping functionality between maintenance + development of distributions, package managers, shells, compilers, C libraries, desktop environments, etc.
- idle_zealot 3y ago
  Unfortunately that's not avoidable. The duplication exists because of disagreement regarding how things should be done. The alternative is not "my preferred project gets all the resources" but "my preferred project doesn't exist and all the resources go to some fundamentally flawed project that I don't want to use". See Windows or macOS for how that turns out.
  - MuffinFlavored 3y ago
    > The duplication exists because of disagreement regarding how things should be done. Is there too high a level of this disagreement in open-source software? Should it be called out from the perspective of "please try to use your time more effectively instead of contributing to fragmentation because it's harmful to the ecosystem from a macro perspective"?
    - lupusreal 3y ago
      [dead]
  - jxdxbx 3y ago

oynqr 3y ago

Wayland lacks a crutch to work around broken multi-monitor handling in composit

oynqr 3y ago
Side note: The Glider HN client makes it real easy to fat finger comments since the rewrite. No editing or deleting either. Sigh.

hashworks 3y ago

Actions like this will just hurt Wayland in the long run. It needs more users, and for that more applications that support it by default. No one will bring X11 to the level of Wayland, but someone might fix the existing Wayland problems.

Gigachad 3y ago
Not sure it will do anything to hurt Wayland. The app will just run in XWayland which is mostly impossible to tell between a native Wayland app for users.
- rowanG077 3y ago
  Xwayland is instantly recognizable as shitty due to fractional scaling. Which almost everyone with a modern laptop uses.
  - Gigachad 3y ago
    I might not be up to date on this, but does fractional scaling work at all on Linux under any setup? Last I checked GTK just flat out didn't support it or something.
    - rowanG077 3y ago
      Yes wayland supports fractional scaling without issues. At least I have had no issues.
    - bryanlarsen 3y ago
      Works on KDE.
    - MindSpunk 3y ago
      KDE supports fractional scaling. GTK doesn't and as a result neither does GNOME. There's hacks in gnome to work around this by faking it with downscaled integer scaling (render at 2x, squash into 1.5x) but it never provided a good experience for me.

dinckelman 3y ago

As long as the option to keep it turned on exists, I have no issues with this. It's one thing to move forward with a new stack, but it's a different thing to have it as default when it doesn't fully work

BaculumMeumEst 3y ago

I'm not sure if it's funnier to see popular projects shunning wayland because it sucks or Linus looking to move kernel development away from an email based workflow because "it really isn't working anymore". There is such an insane amount of coping about both of those topics online.

Laaas 3y ago

FWIW all the reasons seem like an aversion to complying with how Wayland works. Yes, you can't position windows absolutely, but that's because you're not supposed to do that. In any case I don't see how being able to position windows is relevant at all to PCXS2's functioning on Wayland? Just don't position windows if you can't? It's an incredibly dumb reason not to support the protocol. Xorg is mostly unmaintained AFAIK. See https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/247 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m... for the discussion on this

fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago
One person’s unmaintained is another’s stable
asveikau 3y ago
> Yes, you can't position windows absolutely, but that's because you're not supposed to do that. I think about 40 years of GUI APIs disagree with this.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  40 years ago people did not care about malicous applications, nor did they care about jank, nor did they have the hindsights that we do know. Those API only still exist because of backwards compatibility.
  - Ferret7446 3y ago
    If you're running malicious applications, you're already fucked, and your compositor pretending to protect you is the last thing you need.
  - Lammy 3y ago
    I also don't care about malicious applications. I don't need to be protected from myself and didn't ask anyone to try.

bryanlarsen 3y ago

Another option might be to disable only on Gnome or Nvidia since those seem to be the source of most of the problems.

apatheticonion 3y ago

As a naive user who largely hasn't had any issue with it. Is Wayland that bad?

bryanlarsen 3y ago
In my experience Wayland is pretty bad on Nvidia binary driver, has some annoyances on Gnome and works fabulous on AMD hardware with KDE or a wlroots based compositor.
- yencabulator 3y ago
  I think you meant to say NVidia drivers are bad... Not Wayland's fault, or the fault of any single compositor, or the kernel DRM's fault.
- soniczentropy 3y ago
  Never tried it on AMD hardware, but I can confirm Nvidia drivers cause it to go haywire on all 4 of my machines. I try yearly or so, see everything's still a dumpster fire, and head back to X11
LtWorf 3y ago
The internet is full of people that will inform you that all the stuff that stops working when switching to wayland is your own fault and you're a liar anyway. I'm quite convinced these people just use windows and occasionally open linux in a vm for 10 minutes.
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
I have no problems with recent Ubuntu & Gnome & Wayland, unless I launch a game in Steam, and then it's a mixed bag (tho getting better). And in fact multimonitor support esp with multiple DPIs & resolutions works much better with Wayland than with X. For that, X is just a terrible experience. But I'm on AMD. Thinkpad Z16 AMD Gen1.

TillE 3y ago

Aside from bugs and driver issues, Wayland has some unfortunate design limitations. For example, Dear ImGui multi-viewports don't work because "Wayland doesn't let application read or write windows positions." https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/wiki/Multi-Viewports https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/wiki/Multi-Viewports This is a feature available on Windows, macOS, and of course X11. Making choices like this means desktop Linux becomes even more of a weird island that nobody wants to support.

wtallis 3y ago
Why can't ImGui applications do multiple windows while leaving the positioning up to somebody else (the user or their window manager)?
- kevingadd 3y ago
  How is the window manager going to handle the positioning in a scenario like multi-viewport? The user already conveyed their intent by dragging a window out of the application's viewport to create a new viewport, and Wayland is prohibiting the application from obeying the user.
  - wtallis 3y ago
    I'm just trying to understand why ImGui needs to read and write window positions, because it's not immediately obvious from that paltry description. It sounds like you're describing a use case where it needs to be able to set the position of a new window relative to an existing window. So APIs to read the position of the current window and write the position of the new window are probably what they're looking for—though I can readily imagine narrower APIs to handle that use case. Does that sound to you like an accurate explanation of their complaint? (None of the above explains why ImGui cannot in the interim accept a janky experience where newly created child windows pop up wherever the window manager puts them, as commonly happens for transient dialog boxes. This seems like a nice to have feature, but not a complete showstopper.)
    - 3y ago

reisse 3y ago

Quoting @stenzek > But Wayland is just broken, and everyone would rather sit around arguing with each other instead of actually addressing the design flaws. > It's not the first time such a proposal has been put forward. Something that developers need for their applications to work properly on WL (particularly multi-window applications), and it gets vetoed. Every other OS manages this fine. But apparently we're in the wrong for not conforming to some warped view of how applications should be, despite our applications working fine on every other platform. This is so damn true. Wayland lacks a Linus-style BDFL saying that the kern... the compositor is for applications, and not the other way around. We won't have nice things until Wayland maintainers stop thinking about what their end users must or must not do, and start closing feature gaps with X and compositors/window managers on other OSes. Right now they're reinventing the wheel while making it square.

caslon 3y ago
Wayland already works, and is great for a lot of use cases; it's the default on distributions like Fedora, and has been for a while. It has nice things. For 90% of users, it's better than X in most ways that matter. Similar, but much less catastrophic, to how Android isn't great for blind users, or people who want to do low-latency audio production, Wayland is actually great for most users, despite not appealing to extremely niche use cases. It's objectively better for most real-time use cases. I exclusively use X11 because of an extremely niche use case, and I can admit that Wayland is perfectly fine for 99% of things anyone wants to do with a computer. It's not a square wheel at all.
- hulitu 3y ago
  > Wayland already works, and is great for a lot of use cases; it's the default on distributions like Fedora, and has been for a while. It has nice things. For 90% of users, it's better than X in most ways that matter. > I exclusively use X11 because of an extremely niche use case, and I can admit that Wayland is perfectly fine for 99% I am also married with a nice girl, but the girl next door, looks much better. /s
- LordShredda 3y ago

NekkoDroid 3y ago

My opinion on a few of the points they have: > Stupid obsession with CSD in Gnome I get why GNOME devs don't wanna implement it (most of the times looks out of place for the app, or the app looks out of place to the system if it doesn't use the system toolkit, so it's just better for them to roll something that looks good for the app) and the XWayland implementation for SSDs are still a holdover that would need to be ported that they don't want to do. But then again to my knowledge QT has a way to make a header bar (I think even one in GTK style) and there is libdecor that handles headerbars. > Inability to position windows xdg-session-management is being worked to handle restoring of window positions. There are some contensious extensions being discussed about other window placements but they are still very much in flux. I personally am impartital for the actual use of the features and if they are really that necessary. > Hacks in render-to-main because WL craps itself otherwise This sounds more like a problem with the project itself than wayland considering the meriad of other things able to work, but then again its an emulator that might be doing some very weird stuff so I can't say much about it. > Despite said hacks, game list still glitches after stopping emulation, happens more often in gnome Probably a cascading problem from the previous > NVIDIA just crashes in swap chain creation under Wayland Not exactly too surprised, although my laptop with Intel/NV hybrid has been working mostly fine for my mostly basic usage. > Broken global menus Those are a thing anywhere other than OSX? How do they handle this on Windows?

anaisbetts 3y ago
Windows doesn't have global menus, it defines an API to get the workspace coordinates, which allows apps to know the area available to the window (i.e. not covered by the Start Menu)

anaisbetts 3y ago

GNOME as a platform (and by extension, all of their associated projects which unfortunately includes the Wayland protocol) has such a bizarre worldview - it's like they think they can treat the Desktop OS, with all of its user expectations and existing working software, and remake it as a bigger iPadOS, to no one's actual benefit. What do I get in return for having to give up all of these things that used to work? It's not faster, it doesn't do extra things I couldn't do before - it's _strictly_ downsides all the way down

uneekname 3y ago
It's cool if GNOME doesn't work well for you, but for me it's near-perfect. For sure it's rough around the edges, but what isn't? GNOME helps me get work done, stays out of my way until I need it, etc. I see so much general hate towards GNOME on HN, and it's really annoying. If it doesn't work for you, great, I'd like to hear why. But saying it's "strictly downsides" simply isn't true, nor productive.
- pshirshov 3y ago
  1) It doesn't properly support fractional scaling, crashes frequnently on multi-head setups with fractional scaling. 2) They completely removed the keyboard shortcuts css mechanism, so I can't have emacs-like text navigation everywhere 3) They even removed local shortcut customization capabilities and replaced corresponding dialogs with useless shortcut reference window 4) There is no working systray implementation 5) their community is extremely hostile, seemingly they sadistically enjoy telling users to "fuck off, we kno better" I was a happy gnome user since 2005 until ~2017 but this shitshow is not bearable anymore.
- initplus 3y ago
  Issues with GNOME come down to three inter-related issues. * Configurability - GNOME goes out of it's way to remove any configurability from their DE. First they move settings to obscure places, next they remove them entirely. * Compatibility - GNOME devs don't provide solutions for common use cases like window positioning or screen capture (yes I know that screen capture is now supported, but it's a compositor specific implementation rather than actually standardized by Wayland), at the expense of end users with those requirements. * Consistency - GNOME seems to go out of it's way to do things differently from other mainstream desktop platforms. Windows does typeahead search, macos does typeahead search, KDE does typeahead search, GNOME does their own weird recursive search instead. On their own each of these isn't a dealbreaker (I can deal with weird defaults if I can change them, I don't need as many settings if the defaults are less weird and don't break my software). But all three together is too much - GNOME looks like they are sitting in an ivory tower trying to dictate their opinions on desktop design to the world while having sub 1% market share. People won't drop window positioning or screen capture just because GNOME devs say so - they'll just not support Wayland. I know at least one real world person who swore off desktop Linux as a whole after Wayland screen capture broke at a critical time.

shmerl 3y ago

> NVIDIA just crashes in swap chain creation under Wayland I'd say ignore Nvidia, their Wayland support is junk (until nouveau+nvk catches up). It's not a Wayland problem, it's Nvidia problem. For dealing with CSD mess, there is libdecoration that SDL started using. In general - just use SDL for for DE integration, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. Wayland is not broken. But if you are trying to reinvent the wheel of supporting it from scratch, you'll be hitting a lot of things that need to be implemented. So as above, don't do it. Others already did it for you.

keep_reading 3y ago
He can't ignore NVIDIA, it's his job to make sure NVIDIA users can run his software by any means necessary.
- Arnavion 3y ago
  "Ignore NVIDIA" in this context means "run it under X11 for NVIDIA", not "fail to run at all".
  - shmerl 3y ago
    Right, ignore it on Wayland because their drivers on Wayland are supported so poorly that's it's not worth wasting your time. It started getting a bit better lately, but it's still far from good. I'd expect nouveau+nvk for it to catch up sooner than blob will become decent on Wayland.

evanjrowley 3y ago

Due to the headline, it has dawned on me just now that the Steam Deck uses X11. Been using PCSX2 successfully on it for several months now. I never thought about whether it was using Wayland or X11 until reading this.

dinosaurdynasty 3y ago
Steam Deck uses Wayland. It uses Xwayland to run X11 applications.
- saghm 3y ago
  To be fair, that includes a huge portion of the games available on a Steam Deck right now, given that Wine (and by extension Proton) currently only support running via XWayland. On the other hand, that's argument in favor of Wayland from my perspective; if something I want to run doesn't support Wayland, it doesn't actually stop me from using it.
- BearOso 3y ago
  Ironically, the Wayland compositor used by the steam deck, gamescope, doesn't support native Wayland applications. Even weirder, it runs inside an X11 session.
  - Ferret7446 3y ago
    Wait, so why are they even using Wayland?
    - BearOso 3y ago
      The readme pretty much explains it: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope

v1ne 3y ago

This discussion about monitor-aware positioning of windows relative to another is a real treasure trove: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/247 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m... One post summarizes it pretty well. Jehan says: > As GIMP maintainer, do you want me to open a separate report so that we explain our use case on multiple windows, as well as future planned use cases? I find it fascinating. There is this supposed successor to X11, but it breaks a lot of existing applications, telling them that they are wrong. Because layout shall be done by the compositor, not by the application. True, traditional desktop systems make a lot of invalid assumptions like Windows with a global physical pixel grid that makes it pretty tough to display windows which span multiple monitors with different DPIs correctly. Yet still, they get one thing right: Positioning is a job shared between the application and window system. Because only the application knows the semantics in detail. Completely ignoring that and insisting on the application to only express these semantics via a previously-agreed upon protocol sounds pretty arrogant to me. This means that details will be lost. It's not up to the protocol designers to decide which semantic details are important. That's up to the application designer.

jahewson 3y ago
I don’t know, deciding not to support multi-window mode seems ok to me. It’s a relic of the past and dragging around all that baggage often isn’t worth it.
- danaris 3y ago
  ...Now, I haven't used Linux regularly in a long time, so I may be misunderstanding, but unless "multi-window mode" means something very different than what it sounds like, it seems ludicrously arrogant to be declaring it a "relic of the past". Do you think every application should use no more than a single window, and fit its content inside that? Rather than being able to have a window for the main content, a tool palette, an information window, etc? Just because that's the only kind of application you can imagine wanting to use or make doesn't mean that should be the only thing allowed.
- westyvw 3y ago

greyw 3y ago

Weston developers recently NACKd the window placement protocol (https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/247 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m...). I believe this one of the features pcsx2 wants to see merged. Hopefully, this doesn't mean weston developers can block essential protocols.

Arnavion 3y ago
>Hopefully, this doesn't mean weston developers can block essential protocols. Of course it means that. Weston developers are core developers of the Wayland protocol, as are developers of other compositors. Also, not only weston but wlroots also NACK'd it (for the same reason). If compositors refuse to implement a protocol then there's no point to merging such a protocol. Also to be clear, it was blocked from being added to xdg- namespace, and was thus moved to ext- namespace where it can still be worked on. Edit: See details in https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/blob/main/GOVERNANCE.md#22-protocol-inclusion-requirements https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/b...

esjeon 3y ago

Wayland is good until you hit the corner cases that the dev decided to abandon without leaving any alternatives. We can always have extra protocol that can be optionally enabled, but good luck with standardizing that. It feels as if Wayland people are abusing their committee to keep Wayland as-is, instead of extending it. The protocol dashboard[1] doesn't look exactly good. [1]: https://wayland.app/protocols/ https://wayland.app/protocols/

pkkm 3y ago

Wayland and systemd are two topics that I credit with showing me that I shouldn't give too much weight to the consensus on Hacker News and Reddit. Things turned out opposite to the prevailing sentiment at the time. systemd faced an enormous torrent of criticism for replacing the simple sysvinit with something more complex. Yet, sysvinit was only simple if you focus on the init program only instead of taking a systemic view. Under sysvinit, if you wanted to turn a regular command-line program into a daemon, you had to code a whole dance of closing file descriptors, sanitizing environment variables, forking, calling setsid, forking again, resetting the umask, and so on [0]. You had to make sure that all code writing to the standard output and error streams was changed to use the syslog. You also had to manage a pidfile in a way that was free of race conditions. People would write the same logic over, and over, and over again in different projects and programming languages. On the admin side, a server system with a sophisticated configuration that involved starting daemons when a connection arrives, automatic restarting, e-mailing on error, and so on, could easily turn into a complicated maze of interacting programs and shell scripts. To get the full picture of how a daemon is actually managed, you would need to check many config files with completely different syntaxes. systemd has greatly reduced this pointless duplication of effort by centralizing the complexity into a single, well reviewed set of implementations. Now, you can take a small program that runs in the terminal and prints log messages to stdout and, with a single INI-like file of a dozen lines, turn it into a daemon whose process supervision is better than anything you could implement yourself. The ease of configuration encourages you to add features such as automatic restarts, resource limits, or dynamic users, which you probably wouldn't have done on sysvinit because it was a pain in the ass. Wayland, until recently, almost universally praised, but it does the opposite. In order to keep the protocol pristine, it just pushes complexity onto everyone else and ends up making the situation terrible from a systemic perspective. Wayland can push video from a regular program (client) to a privileged one (compositor), but when asked about pushing video the other way to record the screen, they went "not my problem" so pipewire has to handle it. There is no longer even a set of standard command-line utilities you can expect everywhere. On X11, you can type a setxkbmap command to tweak your keyboard layout at runtime regardless of the desktop environment. You can get information about the connected monitors with an xrandr command. In Wayland, every compositor has its own way of handling these, and sometimes you can't even change a keyboard setting without restarting the compositor. What a regression and a blow to the community of tinkerers who like to share small utility scripts with one another. These are just two examples, but I don't think that Wayland's approach of targeting specific use cases, instead of providing a set of general tools, can ever work well when combined with its bureaucratic approval process. It took years of asking before Wayland devs decided that maybe the user should be able to disable VSync after all. It also took years to backtrack from the bizarre choice of making the UI scale integer only instead of just exposing the real fraction set by the user. [0] For details, see https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/daemon.html#SysV%20Daemons https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/daem...

hollerith 3y ago

Public service announcement: you might have switched from X to Wayland (as display server) without your having realized simply by upgrading your distro. To find out: printenv XDG_SESSION_TYPE BTW, Linux/Wayland has been my daily driver for 3 years, and I'm happy with it though I don't have Nvidia graphics and don't need to record or share my screen.

psyclobe 3y ago

Why the fuck should I, the end user, give two shits about whether I'm running Wayland or X. Linux will never conquer the desktop with this shit.

anton96 3y ago
In the same thought. https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/posts/2022-06-10-wayland-xorg/wayland-xorg.html https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/posts/2022-06-10-wayland-x...
ok123456 3y ago
It's almost as if someone is intentionally sabotaging the Linux desktop.

heywoodlh 3y ago

One tiny irritation for me on Wayland+GNOME is the lack of an Unclutter alternative. Is there any Unclutter alternative that works on Wayland+GNOME?