7 ms·

> 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

> 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.)
  - jovial_cavalier 3y ago
    Why does it work perfectly on X11, then?
    - jsiepkes 3y ago
      That reasoning is flawed. I could easily counter it with similar flawed reasoning: My AMD cards works (without proprietary kernel modules) flawlessly wit Wayland. I can play Cyberpunk out of the box.
    - tapoxi 3y ago
      Because Nvidia, until recently, refused to use the driver model (GBM) that everyone else adopted because they wanted to force everyone to use EGLStreams, which was their choice of API.
      - charcircuit 3y ago
        At the time EGLStream was an open standard where GBM was a proprietary API tightly coupled to Mesa. Extra work had to be done in Mesa in order to let Nvidia write a backend for it. Nvidia released such a backend over 2 years ago.
    - phkahler 3y ago
      Because nVidia supports X11 and other old APIs but not newer ones. Wayland does not define AFAICT new APIs that a driver needs to support, but it does use the newer ones that nVidia never bothered to support.
    - addicted 3y ago
      Nothing works perfectly on X11. WTF is this revisionism. There’s a reason nearly everyone in the Linux community has been trying to create an X11 alternative. Because X11 is really terrible at doing many things. Sure Wayland doesn’t do everything X11 does. Yet. It’s also decades younger and doesn’t have decades worth of patches and workarounds making things work. Finally Wayland does things that X11 simply cannot do, and unlike Wayland where some of the things it “cannot” (more often chooses not to by design) do can be offloaded to other parts of the system, the same is not true of X11.
- doix 3y ago
  > If I pretend these two things don't exist, the smoothness during gaming is far superior though.. Really? I find Wayland way worse for gaming. Like there's a few extra frames of delay or something. It _really_ messes with me and I can't stand it. It's why I'm still on X11 for now.
  - SSLy 3y ago
    It has really low latency on Steam Deck OLED, so it seems not to be fault of protocol, but either your HW or compositor.
    - doix 3y ago
      Steam deck is AMD, not Nvidia. I was surprised that the parent had good performance in games with Nvidia+Wayland. Edit: I did a quick Google search, and your comment is dishonest. Many people are complaining about input lag on the steam deck. They've even measured it [0] [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/11yuulz/input_latency_issue_begging_for_acknowledgment/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/11yuulz/input_la...
      - SSLy 3y ago
        I specifically said OLED, yes the LED model is not so great. The improvement across board is described eg. here https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2023-steam-deck-oled-doesnt-just-look-better-than-lcd-it-plays-better-too https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2023-steam-deck-ole...
        doix 3y ago
        Yeah, look at the input lag in your link. If you enable the frame limit it goes to shit. It's unclear to me if this is Wayland's fault or Valves fault or a mixture of both. The new version doesn't fix the issue, it just reduces latency somewhere else so all the latencies go down.
  - cevn 3y ago
    That's really weird... I play Rocket League on 144 frames and X is far more janky.. while Wayland keeps a very smooth 144 99% of the time, and input delay feels non existent but on X it feels like 2-3 frames behind.
- specter_1 3y ago
  Even worse for me, I have a hybrid laptop with integrated amd-gpu and a dedicated nvidia, and there is no way to specify primary gpu on Wayland. Everything goes through integrated and nvidia card just sits at 0%.
ryandrake 3y ago
Yea, more and more with computing, when I hear I should switch to something because it is "the future" or "modern," I am instantly suspicious. Maybe I'm just getting elderly and cranky, but "newness" itself is not a compelling sales pitch. I am more interested in things that have been already working in more than the happy-path case for 20 years, and have all their edge cases battle tested, and from the other replies to this article, it looks like there is still tons of work to do to cover every case. I think I'll be waiting another 10 years at least, and I hope distributions at least keep X.org as an option for at least that long.
- ho_schi 3y ago
  It is not being elderly. It is experience. We’ve seen more stuff becoming older. And we see similarities. That being said. Wayland is good and it shall have replaced X11 years ago! It is made by the same people which maintain X11. Same applies to Systemd, implemented in C, unified interface and simple configs. Nothing is perfect and things need to mature. As usual :) And? Tactile keyboards, switches and knobs are much better than touch screens. Mechanical keyboards are the counter reaction to bad input devices. I love TUIs because they are more efficient than GUIs and easier than CLIs. GUI won? Notcurses (C++) and Rust bring many new TUIs. But also? I’ve seen Electron and from the first moment I wondered why it resembles Flash. With a built-in huge web browser. Eating resources and fitting nowhere. Same for touch screens in cars. And VR-Headsets…bruh…are that 3D-Shutter Glasses?! Vice versa - I hope for lightweight AR-Glasses. But only with a standard VESA-Protocol or a BLE-Profile.
  - sprash 3y ago
    What is good about Wayland? I only see a really idiotic, badly designed API and a very over-complicated ecosystem that requires lots of bloat, parallel infrastructure and duplicated effort to do even the simplest tasks due to lack of standardization of essential functionality. Personally I can't wait until everybody comes to their senses and drops this pile of garbage API and goes back to X11.
- 127361 3y ago
  Many years ago I used to look forward to every new software release. That was when software got better with each version. Nowadays things just get worse with each release, when it comes to user-interfaces and desktop apps. Time to move on to something else.
wing-_-nuts 3y ago
What drives me up the wall is the number of apps they broke in the name of 'security' when the threat is not something most users will ever face. Even if they wanted to do that, they should have had a popup display asking the user for permission, and not simply breaking it. Also, say what you will about Xorg, but it's very much 'batteries included', the idea of wayland foisting so much of what used to be X's responsibilities off to the wm just reeks of 'ivory tower'ness.
- coppsilgold 3y ago
  The problem is that with a shared X11, sandboxing is pointless. Any application with access to the X11 socket has easy privilege escalation available to it. By for example, injecting into a sudo enabled terminal or keylogging the user. Admittedly, with Wayland the security situation wasn't ideal until recently with the adoption of security contexts that can finally allow you to deny screen capture access among other Wayland protocols to sandboxed applications[1]. [1] <https://git.sr.ht/~whynothugo/way-secure https://git.sr.ht/~whynothugo/way-secure>
  - nolist_policy 3y ago
    AFAIK Wayland does not provide screen capture though. It is provided outside of it via xdg-desktop-portal[1]. [1] https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/docs/portal-interfaces.html https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/docs/portal-int...
    - coppsilgold 3y ago
      wlroots-based compositors had screen capture for a long time. I'm not sure about Gnome. <https://wayland.app/protocols/wlr-screencopy-unstable-v1 https://wayland.app/protocols/wlr-screencopy-unstable-v1> <https://sr.ht/~emersion/grim/ https://sr.ht/~emersion/grim/> <https://github.com/ammen99/wf-recorder https://github.com/ammen99/wf-recorder>
  - denton-scratch 3y ago
    So like nearly every other X11 user, my X11 server is not exposed to the network at all. Not the internet, and not my LAN. It's the default; you have to do work to make it insecure. I don't hot-desk, and I use SSH to talk to the machines on my network that don't need a GUI. Wayland solves a problem that I've never had. I don't believe I'm an outlier. I believe most Linux users are like me: they are conscious of security issues, and they don't need a nanny to look after them. I don't think that the majority of Linux users are hot-desking corporate users, with multiple user sessions on the same machine, or trying to run a GUI over a network connection. Those are eccentric use-cases. Red Hat/Gnome are trying to make a version of Linux that can be used by a child. I think that's a fine objective; but it's not even on the horizon. An operating system that just gets out of your way would be lovely, but for now it's a dream (and Windows isn't that system, of course; I think managing a Linux system is miles easier than trying to manage Windows). As far as Gnome is concerned, it's experienced at least two violent changes of direction in its history. One of the things you need from a child-friendly OS is no violent changes of direction. If a GUI in particular changes dramatically from one version to the next, that's a big fail.
gosub100 3y ago
You can delay it forever until nobody maintains X11 anymore, or the ones who join/remain start breaking things there too. X11R6 is about 30 years old now. I think that's enough time for them to demand a rewrite.

> 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.)
- jovial_cavalier 3y ago
  Why does it work perfectly on X11, then?
  - jsiepkes 3y ago
    That reasoning is flawed. I could easily counter it with similar flawed reasoning: My AMD cards works (without proprietary kernel modules) flawlessly wit Wayland. I can play Cyberpunk out of the box.
  - tapoxi 3y ago
    Because Nvidia, until recently, refused to use the driver model (GBM) that everyone else adopted because they wanted to force everyone to use EGLStreams, which was their choice of API.
    - charcircuit 3y ago
      At the time EGLStream was an open standard where GBM was a proprietary API tightly coupled to Mesa. Extra work had to be done in Mesa in order to let Nvidia write a backend for it. Nvidia released such a backend over 2 years ago.
  - phkahler 3y ago
    Because nVidia supports X11 and other old APIs but not newer ones. Wayland does not define AFAICT new APIs that a driver needs to support, but it does use the newer ones that nVidia never bothered to support.
  - addicted 3y ago
    Nothing works perfectly on X11. WTF is this revisionism. There’s a reason nearly everyone in the Linux community has been trying to create an X11 alternative. Because X11 is really terrible at doing many things. Sure Wayland doesn’t do everything X11 does. Yet. It’s also decades younger and doesn’t have decades worth of patches and workarounds making things work. Finally Wayland does things that X11 simply cannot do, and unlike Wayland where some of the things it “cannot” (more often chooses not to by design) do can be offloaded to other parts of the system, the same is not true of X11.
doix 3y ago
> If I pretend these two things don't exist, the smoothness during gaming is far superior though.. Really? I find Wayland way worse for gaming. Like there's a few extra frames of delay or something. It _really_ messes with me and I can't stand it. It's why I'm still on X11 for now.
- SSLy 3y ago
  It has really low latency on Steam Deck OLED, so it seems not to be fault of protocol, but either your HW or compositor.
  - doix 3y ago
    Steam deck is AMD, not Nvidia. I was surprised that the parent had good performance in games with Nvidia+Wayland. Edit: I did a quick Google search, and your comment is dishonest. Many people are complaining about input lag on the steam deck. They've even measured it [0] [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/11yuulz/input_latency_issue_begging_for_acknowledgment/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/11yuulz/input_la...
    - SSLy 3y ago
      I specifically said OLED, yes the LED model is not so great. The improvement across board is described eg. here https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2023-steam-deck-oled-doesnt-just-look-better-than-lcd-it-plays-better-too https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2023-steam-deck-ole...
      - doix 3y ago
        Yeah, look at the input lag in your link. If you enable the frame limit it goes to shit. It's unclear to me if this is Wayland's fault or Valves fault or a mixture of both. The new version doesn't fix the issue, it just reduces latency somewhere else so all the latencies go down.
- cevn 3y ago
  That's really weird... I play Rocket League on 144 frames and X is far more janky.. while Wayland keeps a very smooth 144 99% of the time, and input delay feels non existent but on X it feels like 2-3 frames behind.
specter_1 3y ago
Even worse for me, I have a hybrid laptop with integrated amd-gpu and a dedicated nvidia, and there is no way to specify primary gpu on Wayland. Everything goes through integrated and nvidia card just sits at 0%.

ryandrake 3y ago

Yea, more and more with computing, when I hear I should switch to something because it is "the future" or "modern," I am instantly suspicious. Maybe I'm just getting elderly and cranky, but "newness" itself is not a compelling sales pitch. I am more interested in things that have been already working in more than the happy-path case for 20 years, and have all their edge cases battle tested, and from the other replies to this article, it looks like there is still tons of work to do to cover every case. I think I'll be waiting another 10 years at least, and I hope distributions at least keep X.org as an option for at least that long.

ho_schi 3y ago
It is not being elderly. It is experience. We’ve seen more stuff becoming older. And we see similarities. That being said. Wayland is good and it shall have replaced X11 years ago! It is made by the same people which maintain X11. Same applies to Systemd, implemented in C, unified interface and simple configs. Nothing is perfect and things need to mature. As usual :) And? Tactile keyboards, switches and knobs are much better than touch screens. Mechanical keyboards are the counter reaction to bad input devices. I love TUIs because they are more efficient than GUIs and easier than CLIs. GUI won? Notcurses (C++) and Rust bring many new TUIs. But also? I’ve seen Electron and from the first moment I wondered why it resembles Flash. With a built-in huge web browser. Eating resources and fitting nowhere. Same for touch screens in cars. And VR-Headsets…bruh…are that 3D-Shutter Glasses?! Vice versa - I hope for lightweight AR-Glasses. But only with a standard VESA-Protocol or a BLE-Profile.
- sprash 3y ago
  What is good about Wayland? I only see a really idiotic, badly designed API and a very over-complicated ecosystem that requires lots of bloat, parallel infrastructure and duplicated effort to do even the simplest tasks due to lack of standardization of essential functionality. Personally I can't wait until everybody comes to their senses and drops this pile of garbage API and goes back to X11.
127361 3y ago
Many years ago I used to look forward to every new software release. That was when software got better with each version. Nowadays things just get worse with each release, when it comes to user-interfaces and desktop apps. Time to move on to something else.

wing-_-nuts 3y ago

What drives me up the wall is the number of apps they broke in the name of 'security' when the threat is not something most users will ever face. Even if they wanted to do that, they should have had a popup display asking the user for permission, and not simply breaking it. Also, say what you will about Xorg, but it's very much 'batteries included', the idea of wayland foisting so much of what used to be X's responsibilities off to the wm just reeks of 'ivory tower'ness.

coppsilgold 3y ago
The problem is that with a shared X11, sandboxing is pointless. Any application with access to the X11 socket has easy privilege escalation available to it. By for example, injecting into a sudo enabled terminal or keylogging the user. Admittedly, with Wayland the security situation wasn't ideal until recently with the adoption of security contexts that can finally allow you to deny screen capture access among other Wayland protocols to sandboxed applications[1]. [1] <https://git.sr.ht/~whynothugo/way-secure https://git.sr.ht/~whynothugo/way-secure>
- nolist_policy 3y ago
  AFAIK Wayland does not provide screen capture though. It is provided outside of it via xdg-desktop-portal[1]. [1] https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/docs/portal-interfaces.html https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/docs/portal-int...
  - coppsilgold 3y ago
    wlroots-based compositors had screen capture for a long time. I'm not sure about Gnome. <https://wayland.app/protocols/wlr-screencopy-unstable-v1 https://wayland.app/protocols/wlr-screencopy-unstable-v1> <https://sr.ht/~emersion/grim/ https://sr.ht/~emersion/grim/> <https://github.com/ammen99/wf-recorder https://github.com/ammen99/wf-recorder>
- denton-scratch 3y ago
  So like nearly every other X11 user, my X11 server is not exposed to the network at all. Not the internet, and not my LAN. It's the default; you have to do work to make it insecure. I don't hot-desk, and I use SSH to talk to the machines on my network that don't need a GUI. Wayland solves a problem that I've never had. I don't believe I'm an outlier. I believe most Linux users are like me: they are conscious of security issues, and they don't need a nanny to look after them. I don't think that the majority of Linux users are hot-desking corporate users, with multiple user sessions on the same machine, or trying to run a GUI over a network connection. Those are eccentric use-cases. Red Hat/Gnome are trying to make a version of Linux that can be used by a child. I think that's a fine objective; but it's not even on the horizon. An operating system that just gets out of your way would be lovely, but for now it's a dream (and Windows isn't that system, of course; I think managing a Linux system is miles easier than trying to manage Windows). As far as Gnome is concerned, it's experienced at least two violent changes of direction in its history. One of the things you need from a child-friendly OS is no violent changes of direction. If a GUI in particular changes dramatically from one version to the next, that's a big fail.

gosub100 3y ago

You can delay it forever until nobody maintains X11 anymore, or the ones who join/remain start breaking things there too. X11R6 is about 30 years old now. I think that's enough time for them to demand a rewrite.