13 ms·

Firefox 121 defaults to Wayland on Linux

193 points by politelemon 3y ago

neogodless 3y ago
Related discussion from 1 month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38281264 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38281264 Firefox Is Going to Try and Ship with Wayland Enabled by Default (phoronix.com) 151 comments Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38488850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38488850 17 days ago, 6 comments (mozilla.org)
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rthkljlkrj 3y ago
Sorry for the OT but this is driving me crazy. How does "dark mode" work in desktop linux? I'm using i3wm and I haven't been able to find a way to "press a button and every app turns into dark mode". To be clear, all my apps are already configured to take the theme from "system theme", I just haven't been able to find how to change this system theme. On android this is pretty well integrated, what's the deal with desktop?
- Aardwolf 3y ago
  Not sure about dark mode, but theming in general in Linux is so broken for me compared to the past. Many applications now use themes set by desktop configuration (but with some choosing gtk-related settings, others choosing qt-related settings, which can differ). But no matter what theme I choose, there will always SOMETHING be broken. In one theme some part of an application will have black text on a black background. Another theme fixes that, but them makes in the alt+tab application switcher the part that highlights which application you're selecting invisible. Other themes have almost invisible scrollbars. Various applications have missing icons because they no longer have their own built-in ones. I wish every application just had its own actually working built-in theme, rather than trying to shoehorn a global desktop theme inside of everything. It used to be like that in the past and it looked perfect compared to the mess now. Desktop theme settings should just be about the outer window borders and stuff. Also, does there even exist ONE theme still today that actually visually distinguishes the selected and non-selected windows well? They're all super subtle about this now. Give me a bright blue selected window, gray non-selected window titlebar please so I can tell at a side-eye glance what's focused.
  - tristan957 3y ago
    Sounds like you want GNOME + libadwaita or KDE + Breeze. Never had theming issues with that combination.
    - Aardwolf 3y ago
      Thanks, I'm using cinnamon. I loved KDE 3.5, but ever since KDE 4 and plasma, I've tried multiple times and never liked it. I also don't like Gnome, doesn't fit my workflows well, it doesn't support moving windows between multiple desktops well, no window list enabled by default, ...
    - WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
      If one user wants theming, he certainly doesn't "want" Gnome, themes break every versions https://medium.com/@fulalas/gnome-42-the-nonsense-continues-7d96c3287f7 https://medium.com/@fulalas/gnome-42-the-nonsense-continues-...
      - tristan957 3y ago
        They said each application should have its own theme that it supports, which is exactly what libadwaita is. A theme that apps can bundle and force.
        WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
        Can't you see the contradiction? What's a theme and customization if the DE/app forces 'themes' on the user? Getting downvoted over this further prove my whole point https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38696961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38696961
        Aardwolf 3y ago
        What I'm looking for is: -Allow to choose theme for the window decorations (titlebar etc...) and the desktop itself in its settings and have this applied consistently in the desktop (all applications use same window decorations on the outer part of their windows, ...). -Let application have their own icons inside of the window (I have nothing against applications reusing icons, but let the developer choose them, not desktop-dependent since that's clearly not working out). Like say the "save file" icon in a text editor: I'd rather have a well-chosen one by the developer of this text editor, than one that either doesn't work or look completely out of place but was enforced by some desktop standard. What I don't like is: -applications changing / removing the outer window borders. They have no business changing that, only the inside content of their windows. E.g. a browser removing the title bar of its window can make some menus the desktop provides there inaccessible, make it invisible which window is focused, etc... -application using external theme (e.g. based on some desktop standard) icons for its internal contents and then not working properly because the creator of the application could not know what the external theme would look like. This does not work out for various reasons: having 1 desktop setting makes it impossible to fix individual programs since changing theme to fix 1 may break another, e.g. say you have themes "adwaita" and "greybird" in your desktop setting, theme adwaita breaks program A (e.g. it shows black text on black background; just arbitrary example, not saying adwaita actually does this but I know at least one epub reader that showed black text on black background for some desktop settings in real life) but works in program B, and theme greybord works in program A but breaks program B (e.g. its icons will be invisible or whatever): If program A and program B just had their own inner contents, this problem would not exist. Also, different applications having to be consistent across each other for their inner contents is something I couldn't care less about, so it's not worth all the problems it causes.
- jcastro 3y ago
  > On android this is pretty well integrated, what's the deal with desktop? I have a button in gnome that toggles dark mode on/off that switches the desktop over that works for just about everything (not discord though).
- tristan957 3y ago
  On GNOME and KDE, this is simple. Window managers, of course, are going to come with their own solutions. The setting is exposed through the XDG Desktop Portal.
  - rthkljlkrj 3y ago
    > The setting is exposed through the XDG Desktop Portal. Is this something I can use if I'm using i3wm?
    - yoyohello13 3y ago
      A desktop environment like Gnome or KDE does a lot of this for you. You can try using a stand alone program like lxappearance (from LXDE) to tweak your settings. Or you can configure it yourself https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GTK#Dark_theme_variant https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GTK#Dark_theme_variant
  - yoyohello13 3y ago
    You're being downvoted but you're right. If you're using a Window Manager (like i3) they are unlikely to come with utilities like this. You need to download another app (lxapperance for Xorg) or write a script to flip the appropriate settings.
- squigz 3y ago
  I use `lxappearance` to modify theme and other such UI settings from within i3wm.
- deleted 3y ago
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- codenaught 3y ago
  I wrote a little toggle script for the Gnome apps: #!/bin/bash color_scheme=$(gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface color-scheme) case $color_scheme in *default* ) new_color_scheme="'prefer-dark'";; * ) new_color_scheme="'default'";; esac gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface color-scheme "$new_color_scheme"
- sevagh 3y ago
  i3wm and Android are polar opposites in terms of how much power users have to customize the experience (almost a necessity for using i3wm, and almost impossible on a unrooted Android). Strange situation you're in if you want a locked down, polished end-user experience on i3.
DCKing 3y ago
Worth noting that Firefox has run on Wayland by default on Fedora for many, many years at this point because the Fedora team patched it to do that. Firefox also uses Wayland on the default RHEL9 desktop and its derivatives, and it's been quite easy for power users to enable it in other environments. So it's quite well battle tested. I am sensing a large momentum for Wayland in the Linux community though. Finally there is maturity for Wayland in KDE, there is very strong commitment from various projects to default to Wayland (this being one of them). Traditionally more conservative projects like Cinnamon and Wine are finally adopting Wayland too. It seems critical mass has been achieved to get things really moving in the community, and it's about time.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  > Traditionally more conservative projects like Cinnamon and Wine are finally adopting Wayland too. I was under the impression WINE was less conservative and more that they really needed features that Wayland only recently added (relative positioning?)
  - coldpie 3y ago
    I would describe it as both. Adding support for a new OS API adds a significant development, maintenance, and testing burden. When I was working on Wine, for changes in the higher-level audio APIs I would have to run tests across all of [macos coreaudio, linux alsa, linux alsa-pulse, linux pulseaudio, linux ossv4, and BSD ossv4]. Any change to those OS-level implementations had to be duplicated across all of them. It's a serious consideration to add support for new API, so we strongly preferred to offload that work to a shim layer (xwayland, alsa-pulse) as much as possible to avoid increasing the amount of code we had to write & maintain. Desktop is even more complicated. Think about the infinite fractal of Linux windowing systems and DEs and drivers and end-user configurations, and having to maintain consistent win32 windowing behavior across _all_ of them... you realize adding in Wayland support is a massive development effort and support and maintenance commitment, even if it did have all the needed features. Then also consider that new technologies have many bugs and change frequently; many Wine users do not use the latest version of Wine; and how important being able to build & run older Wine versions is for regression testing... it adds up to adding new OS API support being a very expensive thing to do. So yeah, it makes sense to be conservative about it. The Linux community's love for throwing away stable libraries and replacing them with a fresh new thing is a serious hindrance to writing quality software on a long timescale. (Oh look, it's PipeWire coming down the road... oh joy...)
_ea1k 3y ago
I'm happy to see that this transition is finally nearing its end. TBH, I think most of us expected certain drivers to take a long time, but I've been shocked at how long it took for some other basic things to happen. Synergy support just kept getting kicked down the road, possibly into its own irrelevancy? :)
bluedays 3y ago
[flagged]
- coldpie 3y ago
  Seems you have little to gain by that. I'm also a Wayland laggard, I still haven't switched any of my machines over, but I recognize it's the future. I think they've chipped away at all the big complaints at this point, so it's just a process of bringing all the applications I care about online, and I think that work is largely done, too. Whenever XFCE announces official support[1], I'll switch over and give it a try. [1] Sounds like some upcoming major version https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap
SCdF 3y ago
Unfortunately the accessibility software[1] I use will likely never support Wayland due to Wayland's design requiring accessibility to be reimplemented by every DE, which means for you are no longer say supporting Windows, Mac and Linux; but Windows, Mac, X11, Gnome, KDE, Mate, Cina... It's very weird to say, but I feel like I'll eventually be dropping Linux and moving to Windows, and it won't be for videogames. [1] https://talonvoice.com/ https://talonvoice.com/
- smoldesu 3y ago
  > which means for you are no longer say supporting Windows, Mac and Linux; but Windows, Mac, X11, Gnome, KDE, Mate, Cina... At a toolkit level, you don't really have to worry about that. When developing GTK or Qt apps, most of the DE integration and Wayland/x11-specific features are handled for you automatically. Basic trackpad gestures, copy/paste and windowing heuristics are handled by the toolkit, and so is accessibility software if your toolkit supports it. If an app doesn't work well on a desktop's Wayland implimentation, it is less often a Wayland problem and more a desktop/toolkit problem. We had the same issue with non-conformist x11 software, unfortunately.
  - superkuh 3y ago
    >most of the DE integration and Wayland/x11-specific features are handled for you automatically... Just no ability to launch windows at absolute positions or do non-standard input stuff (like special mice, keyboards, or keyboard/mouse sharing) unless your particular wayland flavor has libei. And some waylands like sway are actively hostile to libei. Which is kind of microcosm of the waylands as whole.
    - smoldesu 3y ago
      It's a microcosm of Linux. x11 had wildly non-conformant desktops since forever, having a larger spec doesn't inherently fix things or force desktops to abide by the rules. Projects like GNOME would have dropped AppIndicator and server-side decorations whether it was included in Wayland or not. Drilling-down on a minimal set of secure features was the only path forward if Wayland wanted developers to take the protocol seriously.
WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
[flagged]
- worthless-trash 3y ago
  People are sick of the rhetoric of the people bashing on it.
- master-lincoln 3y ago
  I think the downvoting is often because there are no arguments, just negativity without explaining what exactly is problematic, like in your comment which is also getting downvoted...
  - kristjank 3y ago
    I do not like how ready the big spenders in the Linux sphere are to push wayland into every crack, considering: 1. It consistently breaks closed-cource software that I need to use in education like Mathematica and MATLAB 2. It requires tweaking to work with Flameshot and related screenshotting software 3. It breaks emulation layers like Wine and Proton (or significantly decreases performance). This was a dealbreaker since I managed to move almost completely to Linux for gaming. 4. It does weird things with scaling. I used to use three monitors (two 1080p above one another and a 1060p to the side) and it always did weird things if I tried to span windows across it. 5. It still is not working properly on Nvidia. There is a problem with these technologies where the leaders are reinventing wheels and making them square in the process, acting like past paradigms are completely useless and that you're ridiculous for even questioning the departure from status quo. And because big entities like Microsoft, Red Hat, Fedora, Canonical etc. spend money on them, the main users have little say in the features developed. Desktop finally got to a reliable and comfortable point with software compatibility and usability, but now we have a ton of people funded by the EmbraceExtendExtinguish crowd pushing a new desktop protocol stack that obviously breaks things.
    - tapoxi 3y ago
      1) I haven't used these, but I assume newer releases will be native to Wayland. 2) This is because you need to make an API call to the compositor to capture the screen. This is a one-time change unless you're using a very old application that hasn't had Wayland support added in the last decade. 3) It doesn't significantly impact Wine/Proton performance. In fact the Steam Deck runs a Wayland compositor (Gamescope) with the games under XWayland. Valve is porting Wine/Proton to support Wayland natively. 4) This isn't up to Wayland but up to the compositor. 5) This is Nvidia's fault for trying to force everyone else's hand by using their driver API model of choice for years until only recently capitulating.
denton-scratch 3y ago
> it’s clear that Wayland is the future for modern, secure, performant display server needs on Linux. Cool. I guess I can delay switching to Wayland until the future!
- cevn 3y ago
  Wayland sucks. At least for Nvidia users. RN dealing with - 1- when it comes back from suspend, the whole screen is filled with Rainbows. Pretty, but useless. 2- display scaling setting is either ignored or completely broken, no in between. Display settings in general seem wonky. If I pretend these two things don't exist, the smoothness during gaming is far superior though..
  - snowram 3y ago
    More like "Nvidia sucks. That includes Wayland users."
    - cevn 3y ago
      I can't deny that, but the fact is, X still works fine.. and a lot of people use NVIDIA cards and don't want to throw them away. I guess they are the real culprit though, to be sure. But if were a random new user who booted into Wayland-only new fedora only to find my installation is already borked... what are we supposed to tell them? Oh yea, Linux is only for AMD users.. sorry!
    - deleted 3y ago
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  - bityard 3y ago
    I am not bullish on Wayland but it's not Wayland's fault that nVidia is abnormally uncooperative with the open source community. I lurk on several Linux enthusiast forums and subreddits and whenever a new person wanders in asking why they get a blank screen on boot, or their laptop can't resume properly, or their desktop crashes randomly, I have observed that there is a roughly 0.95 chance they have an nVidia card in their system. (With or without the proprietary drivers.)
brucethemoose2 3y ago
Meanwhile, Chromium Wayland is still broken for me on two PCs, as it has been for over a year in spite of my best efforts to troubleshoot, due to some bad interaction with the Nvidia driver. GPU acceleration doesn't work, and there are some other possibly related issues like copy paste locking up the browser and crashing the browser. Firefox is kind of flakey on Nvidia wayland too. Sometimes it just refuses to launch, but it mostly does work with GPU acceleration if it manages to launch. I should mention that every bug, and dozens more, immediately disappears if I disable the Nvidia driver completely and just run off my AMD IGP.
- zamalek 3y ago
  The Sway flag to allow running on an NVIDIA GPU used to be `--i-wont-buy-an-nvidia-gpu-again` or something like that. I took it to heart and couldn't be happier with my AMD dGPU. What boggles the mind is the sheer number of laptops that claim to be Linux laptops, while shipping with NVIDIA dGPUs.
  - Arnavion 3y ago
    Yes, it used to be `--my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia`. Nowadays it's the much tamer `--unsupported-gpu`
codedokode 3y ago
I wonder, does Wayland requires to allocate gigantic buffers for every window or it is possible to make a Wayland implementation that doesn't require tens of megabytes of RAM? For example, is it possible to render window by tiles (of course only changed tiles) using a small 200×200 buffer? Is it possible to use a single buffer for all applications (which they use in turn)?
- phkahler 3y ago
  All modern composited desktops have buffers per app, even on X11.
  - codedokode 3y ago
    But isn't this super expensive, especially when there are many windows and 4K resolution displays? I don't like that you need 10 buffers for 10 full-screen windows when you see only the topmost one.
    - acdha 3y ago
      Say you have a dozen of full screen windows. That’s 3840 × 2160 × 3 bytes per window or 24MB, so our dozen windows take just shy of 300MB uncompressed. That’s not nothing, but it’s also a small fraction of the RAM on even a phone for one of the primary functions of the device, and the upside is that you avoid all kinds of nasty challenges coordinating updates and access between applications and the window server because there’s no shared state between applications and the window manager can do things like transparency, scaling, or all-windows switching views without any app involvement. Another way of looking at this, Apple did the same move over a decade ago with far more limited hardware and pretty much everyone loved it because the speed and stability boost was quite noticeable.
      - deleted 3y ago
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mattl 3y ago
Wayland needs to support screensavers before I'll consider using it.
xcdzvyn 3y ago
Am I right in thinking this title is non-sensical? From my understanding of the article, "Firefox 121 ships with native Wayland support" would work better. Firefox can't "default" to anything because it has to run atop whatever display server I'm running. I guess you could say it "defaults to Wayland" instead of XWayland, but I can't see that being the common interpretation.
- saghm 3y ago
  It already shipped with native wayland support; the only "change" is that you no longer have to set an env var (MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1) to get native Wayland instead of XWayland. Maybe "defaults to native Wayland" is the "most" correct way of saying it, but that's a bit more editorial with respect to the article's actual title.
- kevincox 3y ago
  I think the title is pretty reasonable. When given the choice between Wayland and X (because both are available, typically this is a Wayland + XWayland config) Firefox will now pick Wayland instead of X by default. Of course if only X is available (or only Wayland) it will continue to use what is available. I think "Firefox now prefers Wayland over X" may have been a bit more accurate, but that also has other possible interpretations.
greentea23 3y ago
I want to move to the "future", but I use several firefox profiles via xpra in combination with xdotool based hotkeys. The fluidity with which I can control my different profile windows without a mouse and with which I can switch between computers with no lag with this setup is a big reason why I have stuck with a Linux desktop, so I am sad to see those super powers go away for no perceived benefit. I have tried Wayland several times now and don't notice any performance differences, just more bugs in Wayland. `xdotool search` seems like it has been deemed a security issue for reasons I can't understand (if someone has hacked in to the point that they can even run such query commands, surely I'm already pwn'd). Maybe I'm oversimplifying it, but to me it's like being upset that someone who broke into your house can see the color of your curtains. The powerful feature set of X far outweighs these minor security concerns. And it looks like xpra is facing huge issues switching over https://github.com/Xpra-org/xpra/issues/387 https://github.com/Xpra-org/xpra/issues/387 :(, I have yet to be as satisfied with any other free remote desktop software (paid nomachine is close but less scriptable). I hope these aren't fundamental limitations of wayland, but the challenges seem steep.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  >if someone has hacked in to the point that they can even run such query commands, surely I'm already pwn'd Achieving RCE in a single program meaning your entire system is pwned is behind the times compared other operating systems. In order to make freedesktop's security competitive again security restrictions need to be added.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  > if someone has hacked in to the point that they can even run such query commands, surely I'm already pwn'd I believe the idea is that by adding security measures in the graphical server, you can limit it better. So yes, if there's no other protections then the graphical server is the least of your problems, but if you run a program in a container then the graphical server becomes the weakest link so we'd like to protect it. (I don't know why other protections - https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firejail#Firejail_with_Xorg https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firejail#Firejail_with_Xorg or XACE - weren't good enough, but there is an argument for something there)
gorgoiler 3y ago
I’m still not sure I understand Wayland. With X11, the server manages input, windows, and desktops and provides hooks so a window manager process can decorate those objects. Other processes can make a window and logically draw to it, and the X server does the physical rendering to a screen. But with Wayland, who does the physical rendering? This responsibility is all now dumped on the window manager? Edit: ahah, modern systems punt the actual drawing off to the kernel, using Kernel Mode Setting. What I would’ve called the framebuffer when I were a lad.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  >But with Wayland, who does the physical rendering? The application renders to a texture. The compositor takes all of the textures from windows and composites them into a single texture that will then get displayed. > This responsibility is all now dumped on the window manager? No, the window manager manages the windows and giwen the compositor information on how it should composite.
- kevincox 3y ago
  For the full picture I think https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44 is still a pretty good overview of why X11's design doesn't really apply well to modern usage. Particularly the second half of the "core X11" chapter. The TL;DR is that the vast majority of apps are now rendered on the client and most window managers are compositing. This means that the flows look like this: 1. X server reads input. 2. X server sends input to the window manager. 3. The window manager maps the input to a window and sends it back to X. 4. The X server sends it to the clients. 5. The client re-renders and sends it's buffer to the X sever. (Unsyncronized) 6. The X sever sends the new buffers to the window manager. 7. The window manager composites the desktop and sends the result back to the X server. 8. The X server displays the buffer. The TL;DR is that the X server just does inefficient IPC and some top level I/O. Basically all of the rendering is done in the clients or window manager. So Wayland attempts to improve on this model, highlights are: 1. Well designed IPC interface and async/hotplug baked in. 2. Remove the X server intermediary. 3. Actually add frame metadata to allow avoiding tearing. 4. Switch to a more declarative approach for most APIs. For example actually having the concepts of full-screen, modals, popups and screensavers. This fixes issues like using volume keys while a context menu is open and many others. 5. Provide the ability to have capability-based security for things like reading other application's outputs and inputs. The top level I/O management have been moved into libraries as much as possible. Output is mostly managed by the regular graphics APIs and kernel DRM and input is managed by libinput. Of course you don't have to use these libraries, but they are pretty commonly used. People get upset that there are now N compositors, but in X most window managers were compositors anyways, it hasn't really changed this equation. There were also lots of optional extensions so window-manger compatibility was never perfect.
127361 3y ago
Mozilla will likely be one of the first to drop X11 support, forcing everyone to move to Wayland or use some emulation layer. They did the same with removal of ALSA audio support.
denton-scratch 3y ago
[flagged]
- jl6 3y ago
  It’s OK, the G stands for GNU.
- pavon 3y ago
  I too find the Object Management Group to be blasphemous.
hawk01 3y ago
To everyone who is sceptical about Wayland, give it a try now I've been daily driving it for the past 2.5 years. If you've used it more than 6 months ago give it a try it's changing and it's changing fast
- coldpie 3y ago
  FWIW, that is not an endorsement from my perspective. I don't want my windowing stuff to change significantly in 6 months. Let me know when it settles down.
- sprash 3y ago
  I gave it a try. It's shit! Worse latency and performance (on intel and AMD), xdotools don't work, window managers don't work. Doesn't work without dbus (the first thing I usually uninstall) and additional seat/login daemons which indicates its bad design.
- mydogcanpurr 3y ago
  I’ve also been using it for, I think, 2 years now. While it has fewer issues in my experience, they’ve also destroyed features for nebulous security benefits. I’ve wasted quite a lot of time trying to get things to work on Wayland that just worked on X11.
- bufio 3y ago
  You could wait a century and compositing would still suck.
addicted 3y ago
> New option to force-underline links in websites Game changer.
lopkeny12ko 3y ago
I have never been successful enabling Wayland in Ubuntu. I have tried multiple times over the last 3 years, most recently on 22.04. Every time I try to enable it, either: everything still uses X11 on reboot, or the system boots to a black screen and I need to use recovery to revert.
LanzVonL 3y ago
I don't care for Wayland because I don't care for the FreeDesktop people, Red Hat or IBM. It's also horribly bloated, x.org runs comfortably on very very little hardware, Wayland is an incredible resource hog by comparison. I hope soon, the FreeDesktop people will formally stop "supporting" X.org so some other, more interested party can finally take control. FreeDesktop's charter promises that they will extend X.org, not abandon it OR replace it, so if you've given donations to them (as my organization has) you should feel a little ripped off.
- hq1 3y ago
  > x.org runs comfortably on very very little hardware, Wayland is an incredible resource hog by comparison. Citation needed.
  - LanzVonL 3y ago
    Nope, no citation needed. It's just the truth.
    - orangeboats 3y ago
      I got 1~2 hours of additional battery life on Wayland. Unless we have a very different definition of "truth" or "an incredible resource hog", then indeed citation is needed. Since you are the first in this comment chain to assert that Wayland is bloated, perhaps you should also be the first to provide evidences to support your assertion too.
      - LanzVonL 3y ago
        >I got 1~2 hours of additional battery life on Wayland. Proof needed.
tamimio 3y ago
I use kde and I usually put this line in /etc/environment to enable wayland “MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1”, and you can check that you are using it and not the adapter by going to about:support and search for wayland, it should be “wayland” and not “xwayland”. It improves the performance especially for video playback and such, but also enables the toch pad gestures in some laptops and zoom in/out.
rldjbpin 3y ago
funny how they introduced wayland support in their nightly build over 5 years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18465506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18465506), and people continue to complain about wayland support till date. i am in support of pushing for newer standards this way, whether that is the intention or just a side-effect. no progress happens when people in the most impactful position refuse to adapt it. the needle moves only when casual users are made to test it. almost 10 years ago, nvidia drivers sucked massively for laptops with hybrid graphics on x11 (sometimes not giving video out at all). they now suck at wayland. if we put up with all that in the past with the older standard, so be it today in the name of progress.

193 points by politelemon 3y ago

Related discussion from 1 month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38281264 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38281264 Firefox Is Going to Try and Ship with Wayland Enabled by Default (phoronix.com) 151 comments Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38488850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38488850 17 days ago, 6 comments (mozilla.org)

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rthkljlkrj 3y ago

Sorry for the OT but this is driving me crazy. How does "dark mode" work in desktop linux? I'm using i3wm and I haven't been able to find a way to "press a button and every app turns into dark mode". To be clear, all my apps are already configured to take the theme from "system theme", I just haven't been able to find how to change this system theme. On android this is pretty well integrated, what's the deal with desktop?

Aardwolf 3y ago
Not sure about dark mode, but theming in general in Linux is so broken for me compared to the past. Many applications now use themes set by desktop configuration (but with some choosing gtk-related settings, others choosing qt-related settings, which can differ). But no matter what theme I choose, there will always SOMETHING be broken. In one theme some part of an application will have black text on a black background. Another theme fixes that, but them makes in the alt+tab application switcher the part that highlights which application you're selecting invisible. Other themes have almost invisible scrollbars. Various applications have missing icons because they no longer have their own built-in ones. I wish every application just had its own actually working built-in theme, rather than trying to shoehorn a global desktop theme inside of everything. It used to be like that in the past and it looked perfect compared to the mess now. Desktop theme settings should just be about the outer window borders and stuff. Also, does there even exist ONE theme still today that actually visually distinguishes the selected and non-selected windows well? They're all super subtle about this now. Give me a bright blue selected window, gray non-selected window titlebar please so I can tell at a side-eye glance what's focused.
- tristan957 3y ago
  Sounds like you want GNOME + libadwaita or KDE + Breeze. Never had theming issues with that combination.
  - Aardwolf 3y ago
    Thanks, I'm using cinnamon. I loved KDE 3.5, but ever since KDE 4 and plasma, I've tried multiple times and never liked it. I also don't like Gnome, doesn't fit my workflows well, it doesn't support moving windows between multiple desktops well, no window list enabled by default, ...
  - WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
    If one user wants theming, he certainly doesn't "want" Gnome, themes break every versions https://medium.com/@fulalas/gnome-42-the-nonsense-continues-7d96c3287f7 https://medium.com/@fulalas/gnome-42-the-nonsense-continues-...
    - tristan957 3y ago
      They said each application should have its own theme that it supports, which is exactly what libadwaita is. A theme that apps can bundle and force.
      - WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
        Can't you see the contradiction? What's a theme and customization if the DE/app forces 'themes' on the user? Getting downvoted over this further prove my whole point https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38696961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38696961
        Aardwolf 3y ago
        What I'm looking for is: -Allow to choose theme for the window decorations (titlebar etc...) and the desktop itself in its settings and have this applied consistently in the desktop (all applications use same window decorations on the outer part of their windows, ...). -Let application have their own icons inside of the window (I have nothing against applications reusing icons, but let the developer choose them, not desktop-dependent since that's clearly not working out). Like say the "save file" icon in a text editor: I'd rather have a well-chosen one by the developer of this text editor, than one that either doesn't work or look completely out of place but was enforced by some desktop standard. What I don't like is: -applications changing / removing the outer window borders. They have no business changing that, only the inside content of their windows. E.g. a browser removing the title bar of its window can make some menus the desktop provides there inaccessible, make it invisible which window is focused, etc... -application using external theme (e.g. based on some desktop standard) icons for its internal contents and then not working properly because the creator of the application could not know what the external theme would look like. This does not work out for various reasons: having 1 desktop setting makes it impossible to fix individual programs since changing theme to fix 1 may break another, e.g. say you have themes "adwaita" and "greybird" in your desktop setting, theme adwaita breaks program A (e.g. it shows black text on black background; just arbitrary example, not saying adwaita actually does this but I know at least one epub reader that showed black text on black background for some desktop settings in real life) but works in program B, and theme greybord works in program A but breaks program B (e.g. its icons will be invisible or whatever): If program A and program B just had their own inner contents, this problem would not exist. Also, different applications having to be consistent across each other for their inner contents is something I couldn't care less about, so it's not worth all the problems it causes.
jcastro 3y ago
> On android this is pretty well integrated, what's the deal with desktop? I have a button in gnome that toggles dark mode on/off that switches the desktop over that works for just about everything (not discord though).
tristan957 3y ago
On GNOME and KDE, this is simple. Window managers, of course, are going to come with their own solutions. The setting is exposed through the XDG Desktop Portal.
- rthkljlkrj 3y ago
  > The setting is exposed through the XDG Desktop Portal. Is this something I can use if I'm using i3wm?
  - yoyohello13 3y ago
    A desktop environment like Gnome or KDE does a lot of this for you. You can try using a stand alone program like lxappearance (from LXDE) to tweak your settings. Or you can configure it yourself https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GTK#Dark_theme_variant https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GTK#Dark_theme_variant
- yoyohello13 3y ago
  You're being downvoted but you're right. If you're using a Window Manager (like i3) they are unlikely to come with utilities like this. You need to download another app (lxapperance for Xorg) or write a script to flip the appropriate settings.
squigz 3y ago
I use `lxappearance` to modify theme and other such UI settings from within i3wm.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
codenaught 3y ago
I wrote a little toggle script for the Gnome apps: #!/bin/bash color_scheme=$(gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface color-scheme) case $color_scheme in *default* ) new_color_scheme="'prefer-dark'";; * ) new_color_scheme="'default'";; esac gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface color-scheme "$new_color_scheme"
sevagh 3y ago
i3wm and Android are polar opposites in terms of how much power users have to customize the experience (almost a necessity for using i3wm, and almost impossible on a unrooted Android). Strange situation you're in if you want a locked down, polished end-user experience on i3.

DCKing 3y ago

Worth noting that Firefox has run on Wayland by default on Fedora for many, many years at this point because the Fedora team patched it to do that. Firefox also uses Wayland on the default RHEL9 desktop and its derivatives, and it's been quite easy for power users to enable it in other environments. So it's quite well battle tested. I am sensing a large momentum for Wayland in the Linux community though. Finally there is maturity for Wayland in KDE, there is very strong commitment from various projects to default to Wayland (this being one of them). Traditionally more conservative projects like Cinnamon and Wine are finally adopting Wayland too. It seems critical mass has been achieved to get things really moving in the community, and it's about time.

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
> Traditionally more conservative projects like Cinnamon and Wine are finally adopting Wayland too. I was under the impression WINE was less conservative and more that they really needed features that Wayland only recently added (relative positioning?)
- coldpie 3y ago
  I would describe it as both. Adding support for a new OS API adds a significant development, maintenance, and testing burden. When I was working on Wine, for changes in the higher-level audio APIs I would have to run tests across all of [macos coreaudio, linux alsa, linux alsa-pulse, linux pulseaudio, linux ossv4, and BSD ossv4]. Any change to those OS-level implementations had to be duplicated across all of them. It's a serious consideration to add support for new API, so we strongly preferred to offload that work to a shim layer (xwayland, alsa-pulse) as much as possible to avoid increasing the amount of code we had to write & maintain. Desktop is even more complicated. Think about the infinite fractal of Linux windowing systems and DEs and drivers and end-user configurations, and having to maintain consistent win32 windowing behavior across _all_ of them... you realize adding in Wayland support is a massive development effort and support and maintenance commitment, even if it did have all the needed features. Then also consider that new technologies have many bugs and change frequently; many Wine users do not use the latest version of Wine; and how important being able to build & run older Wine versions is for regression testing... it adds up to adding new OS API support being a very expensive thing to do. So yeah, it makes sense to be conservative about it. The Linux community's love for throwing away stable libraries and replacing them with a fresh new thing is a serious hindrance to writing quality software on a long timescale. (Oh look, it's PipeWire coming down the road... oh joy...)

_ea1k 3y ago

I'm happy to see that this transition is finally nearing its end. TBH, I think most of us expected certain drivers to take a long time, but I've been shocked at how long it took for some other basic things to happen. Synergy support just kept getting kicked down the road, possibly into its own irrelevancy? :)

bluedays 3y ago

[flagged]

coldpie 3y ago
Seems you have little to gain by that. I'm also a Wayland laggard, I still haven't switched any of my machines over, but I recognize it's the future. I think they've chipped away at all the big complaints at this point, so it's just a process of bringing all the applications I care about online, and I think that work is largely done, too. Whenever XFCE announces official support[1], I'll switch over and give it a try. [1] Sounds like some upcoming major version https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap

SCdF 3y ago

Unfortunately the accessibility software[1] I use will likely never support Wayland due to Wayland's design requiring accessibility to be reimplemented by every DE, which means for you are no longer say supporting Windows, Mac and Linux; but Windows, Mac, X11, Gnome, KDE, Mate, Cina... It's very weird to say, but I feel like I'll eventually be dropping Linux and moving to Windows, and it won't be for videogames. [1] https://talonvoice.com/ https://talonvoice.com/

smoldesu 3y ago
> which means for you are no longer say supporting Windows, Mac and Linux; but Windows, Mac, X11, Gnome, KDE, Mate, Cina... At a toolkit level, you don't really have to worry about that. When developing GTK or Qt apps, most of the DE integration and Wayland/x11-specific features are handled for you automatically. Basic trackpad gestures, copy/paste and windowing heuristics are handled by the toolkit, and so is accessibility software if your toolkit supports it. If an app doesn't work well on a desktop's Wayland implimentation, it is less often a Wayland problem and more a desktop/toolkit problem. We had the same issue with non-conformist x11 software, unfortunately.
- superkuh 3y ago
  >most of the DE integration and Wayland/x11-specific features are handled for you automatically... Just no ability to launch windows at absolute positions or do non-standard input stuff (like special mice, keyboards, or keyboard/mouse sharing) unless your particular wayland flavor has libei. And some waylands like sway are actively hostile to libei. Which is kind of microcosm of the waylands as whole.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    It's a microcosm of Linux. x11 had wildly non-conformant desktops since forever, having a larger spec doesn't inherently fix things or force desktops to abide by the rules. Projects like GNOME would have dropped AppIndicator and server-side decorations whether it was included in Wayland or not. Drilling-down on a minimal set of secure features was the only path forward if Wayland wanted developers to take the protocol seriously.

WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago

[flagged]

worthless-trash 3y ago
People are sick of the rhetoric of the people bashing on it.
master-lincoln 3y ago
I think the downvoting is often because there are no arguments, just negativity without explaining what exactly is problematic, like in your comment which is also getting downvoted...
- kristjank 3y ago
  I do not like how ready the big spenders in the Linux sphere are to push wayland into every crack, considering: 1. It consistently breaks closed-cource software that I need to use in education like Mathematica and MATLAB 2. It requires tweaking to work with Flameshot and related screenshotting software 3. It breaks emulation layers like Wine and Proton (or significantly decreases performance). This was a dealbreaker since I managed to move almost completely to Linux for gaming. 4. It does weird things with scaling. I used to use three monitors (two 1080p above one another and a 1060p to the side) and it always did weird things if I tried to span windows across it. 5. It still is not working properly on Nvidia. There is a problem with these technologies where the leaders are reinventing wheels and making them square in the process, acting like past paradigms are completely useless and that you're ridiculous for even questioning the departure from status quo. And because big entities like Microsoft, Red Hat, Fedora, Canonical etc. spend money on them, the main users have little say in the features developed. Desktop finally got to a reliable and comfortable point with software compatibility and usability, but now we have a ton of people funded by the EmbraceExtendExtinguish crowd pushing a new desktop protocol stack that obviously breaks things.
  - tapoxi 3y ago
    1) I haven't used these, but I assume newer releases will be native to Wayland. 2) This is because you need to make an API call to the compositor to capture the screen. This is a one-time change unless you're using a very old application that hasn't had Wayland support added in the last decade. 3) It doesn't significantly impact Wine/Proton performance. In fact the Steam Deck runs a Wayland compositor (Gamescope) with the games under XWayland. Valve is porting Wine/Proton to support Wayland natively. 4) This isn't up to Wayland but up to the compositor. 5) This is Nvidia's fault for trying to force everyone else's hand by using their driver API model of choice for years until only recently capitulating.

denton-scratch 3y ago

> it’s clear that Wayland is the future for modern, secure, performant display server needs on Linux. Cool. I guess I can delay switching to Wayland until the future!

cevn 3y ago
Wayland sucks. At least for Nvidia users. RN dealing with - 1- when it comes back from suspend, the whole screen is filled with Rainbows. Pretty, but useless. 2- display scaling setting is either ignored or completely broken, no in between. Display settings in general seem wonky. If I pretend these two things don't exist, the smoothness during gaming is far superior though..
- snowram 3y ago
  More like "Nvidia sucks. That includes Wayland users."
  - cevn 3y ago
    I can't deny that, but the fact is, X still works fine.. and a lot of people use NVIDIA cards and don't want to throw them away. I guess they are the real culprit though, to be sure. But if were a random new user who booted into Wayland-only new fedora only to find my installation is already borked... what are we supposed to tell them? Oh yea, Linux is only for AMD users.. sorry!
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- bityard 3y ago
  I am not bullish on Wayland but it's not Wayland's fault that nVidia is abnormally uncooperative with the open source community. I lurk on several Linux enthusiast forums and subreddits and whenever a new person wanders in asking why they get a blank screen on boot, or their laptop can't resume properly, or their desktop crashes randomly, I have observed that there is a roughly 0.95 chance they have an nVidia card in their system. (With or without the proprietary drivers.)

brucethemoose2 3y ago

Meanwhile, Chromium Wayland is still broken for me on two PCs, as it has been for over a year in spite of my best efforts to troubleshoot, due to some bad interaction with the Nvidia driver. GPU acceleration doesn't work, and there are some other possibly related issues like copy paste locking up the browser and crashing the browser. Firefox is kind of flakey on Nvidia wayland too. Sometimes it just refuses to launch, but it mostly does work with GPU acceleration if it manages to launch. I should mention that every bug, and dozens more, immediately disappears if I disable the Nvidia driver completely and just run off my AMD IGP.

zamalek 3y ago
The Sway flag to allow running on an NVIDIA GPU used to be `--i-wont-buy-an-nvidia-gpu-again` or something like that. I took it to heart and couldn't be happier with my AMD dGPU. What boggles the mind is the sheer number of laptops that claim to be Linux laptops, while shipping with NVIDIA dGPUs.
- Arnavion 3y ago
  Yes, it used to be `--my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia`. Nowadays it's the much tamer `--unsupported-gpu`

codedokode 3y ago

I wonder, does Wayland requires to allocate gigantic buffers for every window or it is possible to make a Wayland implementation that doesn't require tens of megabytes of RAM? For example, is it possible to render window by tiles (of course only changed tiles) using a small 200×200 buffer? Is it possible to use a single buffer for all applications (which they use in turn)?

phkahler 3y ago
All modern composited desktops have buffers per app, even on X11.
- codedokode 3y ago
  But isn't this super expensive, especially when there are many windows and 4K resolution displays? I don't like that you need 10 buffers for 10 full-screen windows when you see only the topmost one.
  - acdha 3y ago
    Say you have a dozen of full screen windows. That’s 3840 × 2160 × 3 bytes per window or 24MB, so our dozen windows take just shy of 300MB uncompressed. That’s not nothing, but it’s also a small fraction of the RAM on even a phone for one of the primary functions of the device, and the upside is that you avoid all kinds of nasty challenges coordinating updates and access between applications and the window server because there’s no shared state between applications and the window manager can do things like transparency, scaling, or all-windows switching views without any app involvement. Another way of looking at this, Apple did the same move over a decade ago with far more limited hardware and pretty much everyone loved it because the speed and stability boost was quite noticeable.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]

mattl 3y ago

Wayland needs to support screensavers before I'll consider using it.

xcdzvyn 3y ago

Am I right in thinking this title is non-sensical? From my understanding of the article, "Firefox 121 ships with native Wayland support" would work better. Firefox can't "default" to anything because it has to run atop whatever display server I'm running. I guess you could say it "defaults to Wayland" instead of XWayland, but I can't see that being the common interpretation.

saghm 3y ago
It already shipped with native wayland support; the only "change" is that you no longer have to set an env var (MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1) to get native Wayland instead of XWayland. Maybe "defaults to native Wayland" is the "most" correct way of saying it, but that's a bit more editorial with respect to the article's actual title.
kevincox 3y ago
I think the title is pretty reasonable. When given the choice between Wayland and X (because both are available, typically this is a Wayland + XWayland config) Firefox will now pick Wayland instead of X by default. Of course if only X is available (or only Wayland) it will continue to use what is available. I think "Firefox now prefers Wayland over X" may have been a bit more accurate, but that also has other possible interpretations.

greentea23 3y ago

I want to move to the "future", but I use several firefox profiles via xpra in combination with xdotool based hotkeys. The fluidity with which I can control my different profile windows without a mouse and with which I can switch between computers with no lag with this setup is a big reason why I have stuck with a Linux desktop, so I am sad to see those super powers go away for no perceived benefit. I have tried Wayland several times now and don't notice any performance differences, just more bugs in Wayland. `xdotool search` seems like it has been deemed a security issue for reasons I can't understand (if someone has hacked in to the point that they can even run such query commands, surely I'm already pwn'd). Maybe I'm oversimplifying it, but to me it's like being upset that someone who broke into your house can see the color of your curtains. The powerful feature set of X far outweighs these minor security concerns. And it looks like xpra is facing huge issues switching over https://github.com/Xpra-org/xpra/issues/387 https://github.com/Xpra-org/xpra/issues/387 :(, I have yet to be as satisfied with any other free remote desktop software (paid nomachine is close but less scriptable). I hope these aren't fundamental limitations of wayland, but the challenges seem steep.

charcircuit 3y ago
>if someone has hacked in to the point that they can even run such query commands, surely I'm already pwn'd Achieving RCE in a single program meaning your entire system is pwned is behind the times compared other operating systems. In order to make freedesktop's security competitive again security restrictions need to be added.
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
> if someone has hacked in to the point that they can even run such query commands, surely I'm already pwn'd I believe the idea is that by adding security measures in the graphical server, you can limit it better. So yes, if there's no other protections then the graphical server is the least of your problems, but if you run a program in a container then the graphical server becomes the weakest link so we'd like to protect it. (I don't know why other protections - https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firejail#Firejail_with_Xorg https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firejail#Firejail_with_Xorg or XACE - weren't good enough, but there is an argument for something there)

gorgoiler 3y ago

I’m still not sure I understand Wayland. With X11, the server manages input, windows, and desktops and provides hooks so a window manager process can decorate those objects. Other processes can make a window and logically draw to it, and the X server does the physical rendering to a screen. But with Wayland, who does the physical rendering? This responsibility is all now dumped on the window manager? Edit: ahah, modern systems punt the actual drawing off to the kernel, using Kernel Mode Setting. What I would’ve called the framebuffer when I were a lad.

charcircuit 3y ago
>But with Wayland, who does the physical rendering? The application renders to a texture. The compositor takes all of the textures from windows and composites them into a single texture that will then get displayed. > This responsibility is all now dumped on the window manager? No, the window manager manages the windows and giwen the compositor information on how it should composite.
kevincox 3y ago
For the full picture I think https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44 is still a pretty good overview of why X11's design doesn't really apply well to modern usage. Particularly the second half of the "core X11" chapter. The TL;DR is that the vast majority of apps are now rendered on the client and most window managers are compositing. This means that the flows look like this: 1. X server reads input. 2. X server sends input to the window manager. 3. The window manager maps the input to a window and sends it back to X. 4. The X server sends it to the clients. 5. The client re-renders and sends it's buffer to the X sever. (Unsyncronized) 6. The X sever sends the new buffers to the window manager. 7. The window manager composites the desktop and sends the result back to the X server. 8. The X server displays the buffer. The TL;DR is that the X server just does inefficient IPC and some top level I/O. Basically all of the rendering is done in the clients or window manager. So Wayland attempts to improve on this model, highlights are: 1. Well designed IPC interface and async/hotplug baked in. 2. Remove the X server intermediary. 3. Actually add frame metadata to allow avoiding tearing. 4. Switch to a more declarative approach for most APIs. For example actually having the concepts of full-screen, modals, popups and screensavers. This fixes issues like using volume keys while a context menu is open and many others. 5. Provide the ability to have capability-based security for things like reading other application's outputs and inputs. The top level I/O management have been moved into libraries as much as possible. Output is mostly managed by the regular graphics APIs and kernel DRM and input is managed by libinput. Of course you don't have to use these libraries, but they are pretty commonly used. People get upset that there are now N compositors, but in X most window managers were compositors anyways, it hasn't really changed this equation. There were also lots of optional extensions so window-manger compatibility was never perfect.

127361 3y ago

Mozilla will likely be one of the first to drop X11 support, forcing everyone to move to Wayland or use some emulation layer. They did the same with removal of ALSA audio support.

denton-scratch 3y ago

[flagged]

jl6 3y ago
It’s OK, the G stands for GNU.
pavon 3y ago
I too find the Object Management Group to be blasphemous.

hawk01 3y ago

To everyone who is sceptical about Wayland, give it a try now I've been daily driving it for the past 2.5 years. If you've used it more than 6 months ago give it a try it's changing and it's changing fast

coldpie 3y ago
FWIW, that is not an endorsement from my perspective. I don't want my windowing stuff to change significantly in 6 months. Let me know when it settles down.
sprash 3y ago
I gave it a try. It's shit! Worse latency and performance (on intel and AMD), xdotools don't work, window managers don't work. Doesn't work without dbus (the first thing I usually uninstall) and additional seat/login daemons which indicates its bad design.
mydogcanpurr 3y ago
I’ve also been using it for, I think, 2 years now. While it has fewer issues in my experience, they’ve also destroyed features for nebulous security benefits. I’ve wasted quite a lot of time trying to get things to work on Wayland that just worked on X11.
bufio 3y ago
You could wait a century and compositing would still suck.

addicted 3y ago

> New option to force-underline links in websites Game changer.

lopkeny12ko 3y ago

I have never been successful enabling Wayland in Ubuntu. I have tried multiple times over the last 3 years, most recently on 22.04. Every time I try to enable it, either: everything still uses X11 on reboot, or the system boots to a black screen and I need to use recovery to revert.

LanzVonL 3y ago

I don't care for Wayland because I don't care for the FreeDesktop people, Red Hat or IBM. It's also horribly bloated, x.org runs comfortably on very very little hardware, Wayland is an incredible resource hog by comparison. I hope soon, the FreeDesktop people will formally stop "supporting" X.org so some other, more interested party can finally take control. FreeDesktop's charter promises that they will extend X.org, not abandon it OR replace it, so if you've given donations to them (as my organization has) you should feel a little ripped off.

hq1 3y ago
> x.org runs comfortably on very very little hardware, Wayland is an incredible resource hog by comparison. Citation needed.
- LanzVonL 3y ago
  Nope, no citation needed. It's just the truth.
  - orangeboats 3y ago
    I got 1~2 hours of additional battery life on Wayland. Unless we have a very different definition of "truth" or "an incredible resource hog", then indeed citation is needed. Since you are the first in this comment chain to assert that Wayland is bloated, perhaps you should also be the first to provide evidences to support your assertion too.
    - LanzVonL 3y ago
      >I got 1~2 hours of additional battery life on Wayland. Proof needed.

tamimio 3y ago

I use kde and I usually put this line in /etc/environment to enable wayland “MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1”, and you can check that you are using it and not the adapter by going to about:support and search for wayland, it should be “wayland” and not “xwayland”. It improves the performance especially for video playback and such, but also enables the toch pad gestures in some laptops and zoom in/out.

rldjbpin 3y ago

funny how they introduced wayland support in their nightly build over 5 years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18465506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18465506), and people continue to complain about wayland support till date. i am in support of pushing for newer standards this way, whether that is the intention or just a side-effect. no progress happens when people in the most impactful position refuse to adapt it. the needle moves only when casual users are made to test it. almost 10 years ago, nvidia drivers sucked massively for laptops with hybrid graphics on x11 (sometimes not giving video out at all). they now suck at wayland. if we put up with all that in the past with the older standard, so be it today in the name of progress.