4 ms·

Wayland breaks your bad software

37 points by goranmoomin 3y ago

Semaphor 3y ago
9 comments on it when it was posted August 31 last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37340361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37340361
aftbit 3y ago
Can I run awesome-wm on Wayland yet? That's what keeps me on X.
- bitwize 3y ago
  https://way-cooler.org/ https://way-cooler.org/
  - opan 3y ago
    Wasn't this deemed a failure and shut down? The source repos are archived. I think Drew DeVault had a blog post about it since he was friends with the author.
- seszett 3y ago
  X window managers cannot run on Wayland and that's not something that can change in the future. There are many awesome-like Wayland compositors though, I've used sway, hyprland and river.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  You... might be able to, kind of, depending on your goal... So the thing is, if all you need is a single screen (or at least, I've not run this multi-monitor) and you're just working around drivers that don't support Xorg, you can just run cage ( https://github.com/cage-kiosk/cage https://github.com/cage-kiosk/cage ), run xwayland on that, and run your real GUI on that. Of course, then you're skipping all the advantages of wayland except hardware/driver compatibility. For "real" wayland, sibling comments are correct that you'd need a wayland compositor that reimplemented awesome.
- dietr1ch 3y ago
  I've been wanting to try http://hyprland.org/ http://hyprland.org/, but since plasma gets me far enough and provides a working taskbar (wifi, sound, bluetooth, mount, clipboard) and virtual desktops on which I end up opening just firefox and emacs I haven't really given it a chance.
YarickR2 3y ago
Bunch of bu... rather unsubstantial claims. Just installed fresh KDE 5 + Plasma , running Wayland session, with two displays having different DPIs (96 and 185), and Plasma menus on HiDPI display are blurry until I'm moving a mouse over them, then they magically are getting refreshed with proper resolution. Tell me about how Wayland is great and works out of the box, sure
- majoe 3y ago
  Plasma 6 was released recently with man fixes and improvements for the Wayland session, which is now the default. So it may be worth to try it again.
bitwize 3y ago
This should be the final word on the issue. Please don't comment about how your X desktop is fine, or how Wayland doesn't work for your obscure, niche little use case. If X isn't broken already for you, it will soon be broken, not least by some "here's a quarter, go buy yourself a real window system" patch that lands in critical user space or even kernel components or libraries. Ex.: the Asahi Linux video driver simply dies if it detects that it's being called from X, because neither marcan nor Alyssa (who in her early twenties has forgotten more than you know about graphics) can be bothered to support X. So kindly shut the fuck up, use Wayland, and let the adults in the room chart the future for graphics on your Linux system.
- Iridescent_ 3y ago
  Such a positive, wholesome attitude, really makes me eager to switch. Oh no, actually I cannot be bothered because for now my X desktop is fine.
- Filligree 3y ago
  You really think “Steam on nvidia” is a obscure, niche use case?
- saurik 3y ago
  Ok. I guess I will switch when it actually breaks, by which time Wayland will be even better than it is today! Or wait, you want me to switch right now? Because... I guess it hurts your feelings somehow that it hasn't broken for me yet? And you are upset that my desktop works fine, and feel a need to scream at me to use the software you are a fan of? Huh.
  - bitwize 3y ago
    Because as long there's a significant "X is fine, why switch?" user base, it will hold back the apps, toolkits, and libraries, many of whose maintainers desperately want to remove the X11 code paths and get on with something modern. We need everybody going all-in on Wayland in order for there to be progress on the modern desktop. Having that crufty old support for an effectively unmaintained display server kicking around is wasting developer effort.
bee_rider 3y ago
It is really shocking that X has been on life support for like a decade, but it is still necessary to write essays to try and convince people to switch away from it. Maybe it is just a really good design. I like i3, so I can switch to Sway easily, there’s just no reason to.
- orthecreedence 3y ago
  The ONLY reason I switched from i3 -> Sway is because I'm using monitors with different resolutions and dealing with dual monitor setups in X approaches impossible. Sway is mostly OK but i3 and all the supporting X stuff I had was incredibly solid and all just worked together. Enter Sway/Wayland, and some things are in XWayland some things are native so they can't talk to each other, there are constant display bugs, Waybar is glitchy, screen sharing is a nightmare, fullscreen mode doesn't work for floating windows, fullscreen windows aren't transparent and show black instead of my background photo (because "security"). I just kind of hate it. I recently updated Sway and my dropdown terminal no longer focused when I opened it...I'd have to click to focus. I ended up reverting. It's probably some perfect storm of lagging support from apps, bugs in Sway, bad AMD drivers, and a protocol that's, sure, more "correct" but kind of gimps the overall experience. If you're happy on X, stay on X. It all worked fine before my laptop died and I got a new one with a different resolution than my monitor. I will say though...multi-monitor support in Sway/Wayland, with scaling and all that, is excellent.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Not really, it is a design for 1990's UNIX hardware, it is only kept alive thanks to the endless extensions developed for GNU/Linux and BSDs, mostly on x86 graphics hardware.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    GNU/Linux and the BSDs are also designed for 1990s hardware except for all the extensions; how far do you want to take that argument?
    - 3y ago
hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
I've been very, very happy with Sway WM, which is a near-replica of i3 WM ans uses Wayland under the hood. It's close to the peak of personal computing for me. Thank you, Wayland.
hyperman1 3y ago
I've installed the latest ubuntu LTS on my work laptop, with wayland KDE. Every 2 weeks, the wayland proces crashes and I loose all my applications and need to reboot. Only a black screen is left. X11 hasn't done that since 2000 or so. At home, wine doesn't do full screen on wayland so I switched back to X Not ready for prime time. Alpha quality. Sorry. Maybe later.
- linmob 3y ago
  So, that's 22.04 with Plasma 5.24? Yes, I also had bad experiences when I using Plasma 5.24 and earlier with kwin's Wayland session (so much so that I used kwinft for a bit, as this was not a Wayland, but a kwin problem - wlroots and Mutter/GNOME allowed for good experiences earlier than the 22.04 timeframe). Fortunately, with Plasma 6, it's night and day from that, and even with 5.27 which Kubuntu 24.04 will ship, things are a lot more solid already.
  - orbital-decay 3y ago
    That's mostly because unlike Wayland and some distro devs, KDE cares for their users. They substitute missing/unfinished Wayland features with quick and dirty custom implementations they intend to replace after they are finalized. So Plasma is not Wayland. That said, even the bleeding edge Plasma 6 (which has the most complete Wayland support and then some) doesn't work well in Wayland mode yet, it has plenty of issues with drag-n-drop, cursors, portals, much-hyped fractional scaling, and many other things (I still can't calibrate my drawing tablet display, for example). The overall experience beyond very basic features is flaky and unfinished. I'm not even starting on implicit/explicit sync debate, that's a complete shitshow that can only be blamed on Wayland devs (regardless of Nvidia).
  - hyperman1 3y ago
    Happy to see the future looks brighter. Work laptop needs to be supported by some software packages, so Ubuntu LTS of at least 1 year old is the minimal requirement. See you in 2025, wayland. I've gone back and forth on wayland a few times now. It has both good and bad sides. Major functionality holes are finally getting plugged. But the quality and stability of the compositors just isn't there yet compared to X11, and when leaving QT and GTK widget sets, almost nothing is fully baked. Presumably, things will get better in a few years.
praptak 3y ago
Well "Wayland no worky" for me, it breaks keyboard input in Firefox on Ubuntu, so I'd say a pretty basic use case. Not the time to switch for me, sorry.
- linmob 3y ago
  Which release? Ubuntu has had a bad habit of not setting the proper environment variables for Firefox in the past - for X (not setting MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1) and wayland (MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1), massively degrading the user experience in Firefox, e.g., for touchscreen users. With Firefox 121 and forward, the latter variable does not need to be set anymore. To sum it up: Your subpar experience wasn't the fault of Wayland or Mozilla, your distribution is to blame for this (as making the combination of software shipped work well together for the user is the job a good distribution does). That said, even without setting the environment up correctly, I never had a keyboard input issue - so it could be snap... Canonical to blame, again - maybe. (Need I say I no longer use Ubuntu and will move my parents to a different distribution once I find the time?)
- linmob 3y ago
  Which release? Ubuntu has had a bad habit of not setting the proper environment variables for Firefox in the past - for X (not setting MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1) and wayland (MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1), massively degrading the user experience in Firefox, e.g., for touchscreen users. With Firefox 121 and forward, the latter variable does not need to be set anymore. To sum it up: Your subpar experience wasn't the fault of Wayland or Mozilla, your distribution is to blame for this (as making the combination of software shipped work well together for the user is the job a good distribution does). That said, even without setting the environment up correctly, I never had a keyboard input issue - so it could be snap... Canonical to blame, again - maybe. (Need I say I no longer use Ubuntu, despite it being my main distro since 4.10. My parents are still on the LTS train, I will move them to a different distribution once I find the time.)
NobleExpress 3y ago
Honestly, I was never convinced that concentrating all developer effort onto Wayland was the best idea. Wayland seemed like a massive over-correction from X11, where the protocol and core were "simple" in comparison to X11 which did everything. Being simple, by itself, is not a virtue -- Wayland basically forced all the essential complexity of the problem to the compositors (a la Waterbed theory of Complexity [1]). Given there are so many compositor implementations, they essentially end up reinventing the wheels all the time. This is a bit better now with wlroots, but unfortunately, the ecosystem is already fragmented. I'm not saying X11 is superior to Wayland or vice-versa, but frankly I would be surprised if we couldn't improve X11 if it got 0.1% of the amount of effort collectively gone into Wayland. I would highly recommend reading through some of these blog posts who expound upon the problems of Wayland more eloquently than I can [2,3,4]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterbed_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterbed_theory [2]: 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... [3]: https://pointieststick.com/2023/09/17/so-lets-talk-about-this-wayland-thing/ https://pointieststick.com/2023/09/17/so-lets-talk-about-thi... [4]: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/WaylandTechnicalMeritsIrrelevant https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/WaylandTechnic...
- roenxi 3y ago
  That captures it neatly. It remains the future, even though the dawn of the new day has been extremely slow. There was an amazing decade watching the Wayland community struggling with screenshots as a major engineering challenge. They tried to half-bake critical parts of the problem space and it led to a dead-on-arrival protocol that took a decade to be Frankensteined to life. I get that Xorg is terrible, but Wayland has been around for 15 years at this point (the article's "Unless your workflow (and hardware) comes from 20+ years ago" jab falls a bit flat). It is closer to the X.org server's release than to the modern era. There were good people with big ambitions involved, but the Wayland protocol is an example of a mis-design that had to be made to work despite itself.
- sebtron 3y ago
  > [...] I would be surprised if we couldn't improve X11 if it got 0.1% of the amount of effort collectively gone into Wayland. The problem here is that open source volunteers would rather work on the shiny new thing rather fix the old messy code, and I can't really balme them for that.
grzeshru 3y ago
It’s like Linux audio drivers, but for graphics compositors.
veeti 3y ago
All the technical arguments are entirely valid. But they are irrelevant to the end user, who has been using this so-called "bad software" perfectly fine for the past 40 years. What sort of reaction do you expect when you come in and break their workflow and then belittle users by pretty much saying "you're holding it wrong"? It happens most people are more concerned with getting their personal computing done than the ideological purity, technical merits or 80s baggage of their display server. The most popular desktop operating system, Microsoft Windows, takes an entirely different approach to backwards compatibility. Do I have to ask why it has the market share and not Linux?
- zepolen 3y ago
  To take your example and flip it on its head: Apple takes a support nothing old approach, rewrite all the things, including the cpu. Windows desktop market share vs Apple has been dropping, and Linux is slowly creeping up as well.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    > Windows desktop market share vs Apple has been dropping, ...to a mere 73%? That's not the most compelling argument. https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-share-of-windows-7/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha...
    - zepolen 3y ago
      That link doesn't work for me, asks for a subscription. Besides, the trend is what matters.
      - pjmlp 3y ago
        Tread is meaningless when it spawns multiple generations, and there are markets where it is irrelevant. Below a certain threshold no one is buying Apple, as they can't afford to, and after 20 years GNU/Linux managed 2%, maybe will reach 5% in the next 20 years at current velocity. Android, ChromeOS and WebOS don't count, as it is irrelevant for users and respective app developers, that they are powered by the Linux kernel.
sebtron 3y ago
The article does not explain how Wayland breaks bad software? > X11 is, to put it simply, not at all fit for any modern system. Full stop. Everything to make it work on modern systems are just hacks. Don’t even try to get away with “well, it just works for me” or “but Wayland no worky”. Unless your workflow (and hardware) comes from 20+ years ago, you have almost no reason to stick with Xorg, especially as it continues to get worse and worse when the user experience relies on newer and newer features. This is not a great way to start an article. You are not going to convince any "it works for me" person to try out Wayland with this attitude. I'll say it: X works for me, what's wrong with my 20 year old workflow? > Xorg, from the very beginning, only ever had to deal with one display. It did originate from around the 1980s, after all. Having more than one display wasn’t even a thought in their mind, let alone ones with different resolutions and scales. The official docs even consider a “Display” to be the entire Xorg server, with all of its screens combined. This paragraph seems to imply that X does not work with multiple displays, but I have never had issues with those. I have nothing against Wayland and I think there are good arguments in favor of it in this article, but they are presented in a bad way. The author seems mad at users for... Not wanting to change a working setup? Do they not realize that most people only care about windows being shown, and not about how messy the internals are? Sorry, not sorry. It works for me.
- orthecreedence 3y ago
  > This paragraph seems to imply that X does not work with multiple displays, but I have never had issues with those. I had issues with it, and it's honestly the main reason I switched to Wayland. And while I don't regret that decision, I live in constant annoyance of all the little things that used to work but just don't now. Wayland and/or its implementations are just not feature complete, and in many cases are a step backwards in UX. I think it's great people stay on X. I wish I could have.
  - saurik 3y ago
    Maybe it is merely a documentation issue? I keep hearing stories on the one hand of people (such as yourself) who say they failed to get X working with multiple displays... and yet, a ton of software seems to exist predicated on the notion of working with multiple displays (even i3) and a number of actual users claim to have multiple displays working. https://ptgamr.notion.site/xrand-4k-mixed-monitors-7a026e5345994267aebfa01a32044a2f https://ptgamr.notion.site/xrand-4k-mixed-monitors-7a026e534... ^ maybe this would be useful? This seems like a pretty simple single run of xrandr that configures multiple (three, even) monitors on X all at different resolutions and ending up at different display scaling (including one fractional scaling). Like, looking at this, I feel as if I should be able to get this working myself, were I to have multiple monitors (I don't on my Linux laptop). FWIW, I love the idea of helping someone not be sad about having to switch to Wayland by getting them back on X with all of their happy software working, and so if you want to try to debug whatever your issue was together, I'm game. To me, what makes Linux fun is all of the random combinations and hacking we can do together, and it just seems like people are both losing that ethos and even saying we are wrong for enjoying it, and that makes me a bit demoralized :(.
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
Oh look, another emotional "I hate X11 and screw you for pointing out that Wayland still hasn't reached feature parity" rant. If y'all spent as much time coding as gaslighting people it might actually work already. > It’s perfectly valid if you’re staying on Xorg because some features don’t quite work just yet, especially when it comes to accessibility. But that ship can only keep floating for so long. It has been fifteen years. Eventually the conversion largely moved from "well just don't use that feature" to "someday we should provide that" with occasional breakthroughs to "okay, it works in these 3 compositors so that counts, right?" There was a time when I joked abut Wayland reaching feature parity around the same age X was when Wayland started, but it's not a joke anymore. > Try out Wayland every once in a while if it doesn’t work for you, and keep an eye on the relevant discussions. I did, once. Eventually it got old and I stopped paying addition. I think I’ll end this off with: Wayland: it’s all TODOs, and not all of them work.
lionkor 3y ago
How difficult would it be for a few hundred of us to just fork X11 and refactor it a good bit, make some breaking changes, and just call that job done? It cant be that bad? Everyone who mentions its bad fails to mention what is bad about it. You're writing an article saying its bad, and you didn't read the code or do whatever is needed to tell me what exactly is wrong with X11? Chestertons fence says hello, I guess?
- roenxi 3y ago
  Likely impossible in practice. None of the design decisions in X core make sense any more (it is designed for a world where 2D acceleration was important and didn't design for this world we live in where the kernel controls all the hardware). The parts that matter are extensions and hacks on top of that. All the developers (we're verging on literally all of them) who had to work with X fled it like rats on a sinking ship. Signs suggest it is genuinely unmaintainable. The only problem is the replacement was secured against common user tasks being possible and un-securing it has been a long, slow and painful process of community negotiation. Although we're probably most of the way there by now.
  - erik_seaberg 3y ago
    Server-side rendering still makes sense, because the server (the user's laptop or phone) has its own dedicated GPU, and the client (racked in a shared datacenter) likely doesn't. So I think we'll keep seeing browser frontends for everything.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      Yeah, but that kind of workload isn't really X, OpenGL and Vulkan are designed in a way that X isn't necessarily part of the story, and CUDA, SYSCL even less.
- tene 3y ago
  The way it sounds from reading the article is X11's design fundamentally is that bad for modern hardware, which is why almost all of the active graphics development is focused on reimplementing a designed-for-modern-hardware replacement. The claim from the article is that X11 is basically unsupported abandonware, and is calling for developers to please help with the rest of the work in finishing the migration of use-cases to Wayland in order to help the whole ecosystem be able to abandon the sinking ship and move to a more-modern better-maintained future.
LucidLynx 3y ago
Let’s be honest: if you want people to switch to Wayland then make it works for all softwares. Do not expect people to switch habits because of a piece of software most of the people never heard of. I don’t agree either with this notion of « bad software »: to me « bad software » is for something that just does not execute (well), so is the « bad software » for an executable that executes successfully on X11 or Wayland which does not execute it…?
pjmlp 3y ago
UNIX was born as headless server hardware, and as things go, the future of Desktop Linux comes packaged in either a VM, or the Linux kernel alongside a non-UNIX userspace. X is stuck in the past, and Wayland might already be too late, in the age of WebUIs, no mater at all.
trismegisti 3y ago
I don't agree with everything in this article, but it is even more tiresome reading some of the comments here. Keep in mind that a lot of people are working really hard to get wayland to where it should be. This is HN and it would be cool to show support to the technical improvements and the security benefits of the whole wayland stack. Its fine if it is "no worky" for you. The goal is get it to work for everyone and actual reports on what does not work is much more helpful than philosophical arguments about wayland that have been ongoing for years. Also you are not being forced to use it. Stick with i3, its fine. I think there are already quite a few user benefits that come with wayland and for me wayland and XWayland works very well for all applications I use with the exception of some java guis. (that is also being worked on) All of that beeing said, developing protocols and implementing them on multiple sides is just a slow process and we are not 100% there yet.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  A way to get a more positive conversation would be to post something nice about Wayland, rather than something relentlessly negative about X.
agildehaus 3y ago
As much as I agree with this article, it's not ready for everyone yet. If you're using nVidia, everything that uses xwayland is still a flickery mess. Explicit sync patches are looking good, but those patches are not in a release of xwayland and the driver side is not yet available (but in my experience, just the xwayland support helps 99% of the problem). KDE Plasma 5.x has a ton of bugs on Wayland that were fixed with 6.x. But 6.x hasn't filtered down to everyone yet. Plasma 6.x still has minor Wayland-specific bugs I've noticed that they're slowly cleaning up in the point releases. Wayland only recently gained a real drag-and-drop protocol. Dragging windows, say, from a Chrome or Firefox session, doesn't work well. I've noticed Chrome beta implements the new protocol and it works great, but still unavailable. It's almost there though. Wayland's massive performance improvement over Xorg, and its robustness (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4HnwqidYFo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4HnwqidYFo) has convinced me to stay. And it's the clear future. Most Xorg development has moved to Wayland.
sspiff 3y ago
There's many reasons why X11 is not great today, like it's security model and it's hardware abstraction model. But it's been working for almost 4 decades, and its user experience has been improved for most of that time. I mostly use Wayland nowadays, but there are still times I need to switch to X11 to get things to work. Telling me this is because the software I use is bad is not at all helpful. I'm trying to get something done, and sometimes I can't choose different software and almost never do I have the ability or time to fix it if it doesn't work on Wayland.
jgb1984 3y ago
I'll stay on Xorg, which has worked perfectly fine for me for decades, for as long as I can. I use openbox, and fluxbox before that. A bit of pekwm and bspwm in between. I love the diversity of Xorg window managers, and I prefer its architecture which allows one to write a new wm in a few hundred lines of code, instead of pushing all complexity away and creating massive fragmentation and (mediocre) reinvention of wheels. Wayland tries to solve problems I don't have, while creating actual problems for many people like myself. It's a serious downgrade for me, so I'm staying with Xorg. Same thing with neovim actually: a solution in search of a problem. I don't care for treesitter (it's slow, buggy and makes my code look like a Christmas tree on steroids), I don't like Lua and I have no use for an LSP. I'm staying with vim, on openbox, on Xorg, on Debian.
TrianguloY 3y ago
As a kde neon user, the plasma 6 update broke all my global automaton shortcuts (like for example press win+u to automatically write a random uuid where the text cursor is). The script uses xdotool for this, and "it just works" every time. On Wayland three is no xdotool, but there is ydotool (and a couple others). However for some reason they are not reliable (with and without xdotoold) and most of the times the pasted uuid is missing letters. I managed to get around this by using the clipboard to copy the text, and then I can manually paste it, but it's a extra step. Plus I have other scripts that deal with emojis and other Unicode characters, and it's either been a pain to work around or "It just doesn't work". I switched back to X11, and I'll probably stick with it a few years more. But I'm still confusing, linux is the best platform for customization, and allowing you to automate things. However wayland seems like a block. I understand that it's a more modern project, probably more optimized and everything, but unless I'm missing a key toggle or tool to allow me to automate things, I'll try to avoid it.

37 points by goranmoomin 3y ago

9 comments on it when it was posted August 31 last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37340361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37340361

aftbit 3y ago

Can I run awesome-wm on Wayland yet? That's what keeps me on X.

bitwize 3y ago
https://way-cooler.org/ https://way-cooler.org/
- opan 3y ago
  Wasn't this deemed a failure and shut down? The source repos are archived. I think Drew DeVault had a blog post about it since he was friends with the author.
seszett 3y ago
X window managers cannot run on Wayland and that's not something that can change in the future. There are many awesome-like Wayland compositors though, I've used sway, hyprland and river.
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
You... might be able to, kind of, depending on your goal... So the thing is, if all you need is a single screen (or at least, I've not run this multi-monitor) and you're just working around drivers that don't support Xorg, you can just run cage ( https://github.com/cage-kiosk/cage https://github.com/cage-kiosk/cage ), run xwayland on that, and run your real GUI on that. Of course, then you're skipping all the advantages of wayland except hardware/driver compatibility. For "real" wayland, sibling comments are correct that you'd need a wayland compositor that reimplemented awesome.
dietr1ch 3y ago
I've been wanting to try http://hyprland.org/ http://hyprland.org/, but since plasma gets me far enough and provides a working taskbar (wifi, sound, bluetooth, mount, clipboard) and virtual desktops on which I end up opening just firefox and emacs I haven't really given it a chance.

YarickR2 3y ago

Bunch of bu... rather unsubstantial claims. Just installed fresh KDE 5 + Plasma , running Wayland session, with two displays having different DPIs (96 and 185), and Plasma menus on HiDPI display are blurry until I'm moving a mouse over them, then they magically are getting refreshed with proper resolution. Tell me about how Wayland is great and works out of the box, sure

majoe 3y ago
Plasma 6 was released recently with man fixes and improvements for the Wayland session, which is now the default. So it may be worth to try it again.

bitwize 3y ago

This should be the final word on the issue. Please don't comment about how your X desktop is fine, or how Wayland doesn't work for your obscure, niche little use case. If X isn't broken already for you, it will soon be broken, not least by some "here's a quarter, go buy yourself a real window system" patch that lands in critical user space or even kernel components or libraries. Ex.: the Asahi Linux video driver simply dies if it detects that it's being called from X, because neither marcan nor Alyssa (who in her early twenties has forgotten more than you know about graphics) can be bothered to support X. So kindly shut the fuck up, use Wayland, and let the adults in the room chart the future for graphics on your Linux system.

Iridescent_ 3y ago
Such a positive, wholesome attitude, really makes me eager to switch. Oh no, actually I cannot be bothered because for now my X desktop is fine.
Filligree 3y ago
You really think “Steam on nvidia” is a obscure, niche use case?
saurik 3y ago
Ok. I guess I will switch when it actually breaks, by which time Wayland will be even better than it is today! Or wait, you want me to switch right now? Because... I guess it hurts your feelings somehow that it hasn't broken for me yet? And you are upset that my desktop works fine, and feel a need to scream at me to use the software you are a fan of? Huh.
- bitwize 3y ago
  Because as long there's a significant "X is fine, why switch?" user base, it will hold back the apps, toolkits, and libraries, many of whose maintainers desperately want to remove the X11 code paths and get on with something modern. We need everybody going all-in on Wayland in order for there to be progress on the modern desktop. Having that crufty old support for an effectively unmaintained display server kicking around is wasting developer effort.

bee_rider 3y ago

It is really shocking that X has been on life support for like a decade, but it is still necessary to write essays to try and convince people to switch away from it. Maybe it is just a really good design. I like i3, so I can switch to Sway easily, there’s just no reason to.

orthecreedence 3y ago
The ONLY reason I switched from i3 -> Sway is because I'm using monitors with different resolutions and dealing with dual monitor setups in X approaches impossible. Sway is mostly OK but i3 and all the supporting X stuff I had was incredibly solid and all just worked together. Enter Sway/Wayland, and some things are in XWayland some things are native so they can't talk to each other, there are constant display bugs, Waybar is glitchy, screen sharing is a nightmare, fullscreen mode doesn't work for floating windows, fullscreen windows aren't transparent and show black instead of my background photo (because "security"). I just kind of hate it. I recently updated Sway and my dropdown terminal no longer focused when I opened it...I'd have to click to focus. I ended up reverting. It's probably some perfect storm of lagging support from apps, bugs in Sway, bad AMD drivers, and a protocol that's, sure, more "correct" but kind of gimps the overall experience. If you're happy on X, stay on X. It all worked fine before my laptop died and I got a new one with a different resolution than my monitor. I will say though...multi-monitor support in Sway/Wayland, with scaling and all that, is excellent.
pjmlp 3y ago
Not really, it is a design for 1990's UNIX hardware, it is only kept alive thanks to the endless extensions developed for GNU/Linux and BSDs, mostly on x86 graphics hardware.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  GNU/Linux and the BSDs are also designed for 1990s hardware except for all the extensions; how far do you want to take that argument?
  - 3y ago

hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago

I've been very, very happy with Sway WM, which is a near-replica of i3 WM ans uses Wayland under the hood. It's close to the peak of personal computing for me. Thank you, Wayland.

hyperman1 3y ago

I've installed the latest ubuntu LTS on my work laptop, with wayland KDE. Every 2 weeks, the wayland proces crashes and I loose all my applications and need to reboot. Only a black screen is left. X11 hasn't done that since 2000 or so. At home, wine doesn't do full screen on wayland so I switched back to X Not ready for prime time. Alpha quality. Sorry. Maybe later.

linmob 3y ago
So, that's 22.04 with Plasma 5.24? Yes, I also had bad experiences when I using Plasma 5.24 and earlier with kwin's Wayland session (so much so that I used kwinft for a bit, as this was not a Wayland, but a kwin problem - wlroots and Mutter/GNOME allowed for good experiences earlier than the 22.04 timeframe). Fortunately, with Plasma 6, it's night and day from that, and even with 5.27 which Kubuntu 24.04 will ship, things are a lot more solid already.
- orbital-decay 3y ago
  That's mostly because unlike Wayland and some distro devs, KDE cares for their users. They substitute missing/unfinished Wayland features with quick and dirty custom implementations they intend to replace after they are finalized. So Plasma is not Wayland. That said, even the bleeding edge Plasma 6 (which has the most complete Wayland support and then some) doesn't work well in Wayland mode yet, it has plenty of issues with drag-n-drop, cursors, portals, much-hyped fractional scaling, and many other things (I still can't calibrate my drawing tablet display, for example). The overall experience beyond very basic features is flaky and unfinished. I'm not even starting on implicit/explicit sync debate, that's a complete shitshow that can only be blamed on Wayland devs (regardless of Nvidia).
- hyperman1 3y ago
  Happy to see the future looks brighter. Work laptop needs to be supported by some software packages, so Ubuntu LTS of at least 1 year old is the minimal requirement. See you in 2025, wayland. I've gone back and forth on wayland a few times now. It has both good and bad sides. Major functionality holes are finally getting plugged. But the quality and stability of the compositors just isn't there yet compared to X11, and when leaving QT and GTK widget sets, almost nothing is fully baked. Presumably, things will get better in a few years.

praptak 3y ago

Well "Wayland no worky" for me, it breaks keyboard input in Firefox on Ubuntu, so I'd say a pretty basic use case. Not the time to switch for me, sorry.

linmob 3y ago
Which release? Ubuntu has had a bad habit of not setting the proper environment variables for Firefox in the past - for X (not setting MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1) and wayland (MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1), massively degrading the user experience in Firefox, e.g., for touchscreen users. With Firefox 121 and forward, the latter variable does not need to be set anymore. To sum it up: Your subpar experience wasn't the fault of Wayland or Mozilla, your distribution is to blame for this (as making the combination of software shipped work well together for the user is the job a good distribution does). That said, even without setting the environment up correctly, I never had a keyboard input issue - so it could be snap... Canonical to blame, again - maybe. (Need I say I no longer use Ubuntu and will move my parents to a different distribution once I find the time?)
linmob 3y ago
Which release? Ubuntu has had a bad habit of not setting the proper environment variables for Firefox in the past - for X (not setting MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1) and wayland (MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1), massively degrading the user experience in Firefox, e.g., for touchscreen users. With Firefox 121 and forward, the latter variable does not need to be set anymore. To sum it up: Your subpar experience wasn't the fault of Wayland or Mozilla, your distribution is to blame for this (as making the combination of software shipped work well together for the user is the job a good distribution does). That said, even without setting the environment up correctly, I never had a keyboard input issue - so it could be snap... Canonical to blame, again - maybe. (Need I say I no longer use Ubuntu, despite it being my main distro since 4.10. My parents are still on the LTS train, I will move them to a different distribution once I find the time.)

NobleExpress 3y ago

Honestly, I was never convinced that concentrating all developer effort onto Wayland was the best idea. Wayland seemed like a massive over-correction from X11, where the protocol and core were "simple" in comparison to X11 which did everything. Being simple, by itself, is not a virtue -- Wayland basically forced all the essential complexity of the problem to the compositors (a la Waterbed theory of Complexity [1]). Given there are so many compositor implementations, they essentially end up reinventing the wheels all the time. This is a bit better now with wlroots, but unfortunately, the ecosystem is already fragmented. I'm not saying X11 is superior to Wayland or vice-versa, but frankly I would be surprised if we couldn't improve X11 if it got 0.1% of the amount of effort collectively gone into Wayland. I would highly recommend reading through some of these blog posts who expound upon the problems of Wayland more eloquently than I can [2,3,4]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterbed_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterbed_theory [2]: 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... [3]: https://pointieststick.com/2023/09/17/so-lets-talk-about-this-wayland-thing/ https://pointieststick.com/2023/09/17/so-lets-talk-about-thi... [4]: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/WaylandTechnicalMeritsIrrelevant https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/WaylandTechnic...

roenxi 3y ago
That captures it neatly. It remains the future, even though the dawn of the new day has been extremely slow. There was an amazing decade watching the Wayland community struggling with screenshots as a major engineering challenge. They tried to half-bake critical parts of the problem space and it led to a dead-on-arrival protocol that took a decade to be Frankensteined to life. I get that Xorg is terrible, but Wayland has been around for 15 years at this point (the article's "Unless your workflow (and hardware) comes from 20+ years ago" jab falls a bit flat). It is closer to the X.org server's release than to the modern era. There were good people with big ambitions involved, but the Wayland protocol is an example of a mis-design that had to be made to work despite itself.
sebtron 3y ago
> [...] I would be surprised if we couldn't improve X11 if it got 0.1% of the amount of effort collectively gone into Wayland. The problem here is that open source volunteers would rather work on the shiny new thing rather fix the old messy code, and I can't really balme them for that.

grzeshru 3y ago

It’s like Linux audio drivers, but for graphics compositors.

veeti 3y ago

All the technical arguments are entirely valid. But they are irrelevant to the end user, who has been using this so-called "bad software" perfectly fine for the past 40 years. What sort of reaction do you expect when you come in and break their workflow and then belittle users by pretty much saying "you're holding it wrong"? It happens most people are more concerned with getting their personal computing done than the ideological purity, technical merits or 80s baggage of their display server. The most popular desktop operating system, Microsoft Windows, takes an entirely different approach to backwards compatibility. Do I have to ask why it has the market share and not Linux?

zepolen 3y ago
To take your example and flip it on its head: Apple takes a support nothing old approach, rewrite all the things, including the cpu. Windows desktop market share vs Apple has been dropping, and Linux is slowly creeping up as well.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  > Windows desktop market share vs Apple has been dropping, ...to a mere 73%? That's not the most compelling argument. https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-share-of-windows-7/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/218089/global-market-sha...
  - zepolen 3y ago
    That link doesn't work for me, asks for a subscription. Besides, the trend is what matters.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      Tread is meaningless when it spawns multiple generations, and there are markets where it is irrelevant. Below a certain threshold no one is buying Apple, as they can't afford to, and after 20 years GNU/Linux managed 2%, maybe will reach 5% in the next 20 years at current velocity. Android, ChromeOS and WebOS don't count, as it is irrelevant for users and respective app developers, that they are powered by the Linux kernel.

sebtron 3y ago

The article does not explain how Wayland breaks bad software? > X11 is, to put it simply, not at all fit for any modern system. Full stop. Everything to make it work on modern systems are just hacks. Don’t even try to get away with “well, it just works for me” or “but Wayland no worky”. Unless your workflow (and hardware) comes from 20+ years ago, you have almost no reason to stick with Xorg, especially as it continues to get worse and worse when the user experience relies on newer and newer features. This is not a great way to start an article. You are not going to convince any "it works for me" person to try out Wayland with this attitude. I'll say it: X works for me, what's wrong with my 20 year old workflow? > Xorg, from the very beginning, only ever had to deal with one display. It did originate from around the 1980s, after all. Having more than one display wasn’t even a thought in their mind, let alone ones with different resolutions and scales. The official docs even consider a “Display” to be the entire Xorg server, with all of its screens combined. This paragraph seems to imply that X does not work with multiple displays, but I have never had issues with those. I have nothing against Wayland and I think there are good arguments in favor of it in this article, but they are presented in a bad way. The author seems mad at users for... Not wanting to change a working setup? Do they not realize that most people only care about windows being shown, and not about how messy the internals are? Sorry, not sorry. It works for me.

orthecreedence 3y ago
> This paragraph seems to imply that X does not work with multiple displays, but I have never had issues with those. I had issues with it, and it's honestly the main reason I switched to Wayland. And while I don't regret that decision, I live in constant annoyance of all the little things that used to work but just don't now. Wayland and/or its implementations are just not feature complete, and in many cases are a step backwards in UX. I think it's great people stay on X. I wish I could have.
- saurik 3y ago
  Maybe it is merely a documentation issue? I keep hearing stories on the one hand of people (such as yourself) who say they failed to get X working with multiple displays... and yet, a ton of software seems to exist predicated on the notion of working with multiple displays (even i3) and a number of actual users claim to have multiple displays working. https://ptgamr.notion.site/xrand-4k-mixed-monitors-7a026e5345994267aebfa01a32044a2f https://ptgamr.notion.site/xrand-4k-mixed-monitors-7a026e534... ^ maybe this would be useful? This seems like a pretty simple single run of xrandr that configures multiple (three, even) monitors on X all at different resolutions and ending up at different display scaling (including one fractional scaling). Like, looking at this, I feel as if I should be able to get this working myself, were I to have multiple monitors (I don't on my Linux laptop). FWIW, I love the idea of helping someone not be sad about having to switch to Wayland by getting them back on X with all of their happy software working, and so if you want to try to debug whatever your issue was together, I'm game. To me, what makes Linux fun is all of the random combinations and hacking we can do together, and it just seems like people are both losing that ethos and even saying we are wrong for enjoying it, and that makes me a bit demoralized :(.

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago

Oh look, another emotional "I hate X11 and screw you for pointing out that Wayland still hasn't reached feature parity" rant. If y'all spent as much time coding as gaslighting people it might actually work already. > It’s perfectly valid if you’re staying on Xorg because some features don’t quite work just yet, especially when it comes to accessibility. But that ship can only keep floating for so long. It has been fifteen years. Eventually the conversion largely moved from "well just don't use that feature" to "someday we should provide that" with occasional breakthroughs to "okay, it works in these 3 compositors so that counts, right?" There was a time when I joked abut Wayland reaching feature parity around the same age X was when Wayland started, but it's not a joke anymore. > Try out Wayland every once in a while if it doesn’t work for you, and keep an eye on the relevant discussions. I did, once. Eventually it got old and I stopped paying addition. I think I’ll end this off with: Wayland: it’s all TODOs, and not all of them work.

lionkor 3y ago

How difficult would it be for a few hundred of us to just fork X11 and refactor it a good bit, make some breaking changes, and just call that job done? It cant be that bad? Everyone who mentions its bad fails to mention what is bad about it. You're writing an article saying its bad, and you didn't read the code or do whatever is needed to tell me what exactly is wrong with X11? Chestertons fence says hello, I guess?

roenxi 3y ago
Likely impossible in practice. None of the design decisions in X core make sense any more (it is designed for a world where 2D acceleration was important and didn't design for this world we live in where the kernel controls all the hardware). The parts that matter are extensions and hacks on top of that. All the developers (we're verging on literally all of them) who had to work with X fled it like rats on a sinking ship. Signs suggest it is genuinely unmaintainable. The only problem is the replacement was secured against common user tasks being possible and un-securing it has been a long, slow and painful process of community negotiation. Although we're probably most of the way there by now.
- erik_seaberg 3y ago
  Server-side rendering still makes sense, because the server (the user's laptop or phone) has its own dedicated GPU, and the client (racked in a shared datacenter) likely doesn't. So I think we'll keep seeing browser frontends for everything.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Yeah, but that kind of workload isn't really X, OpenGL and Vulkan are designed in a way that X isn't necessarily part of the story, and CUDA, SYSCL even less.
tene 3y ago
The way it sounds from reading the article is X11's design fundamentally is that bad for modern hardware, which is why almost all of the active graphics development is focused on reimplementing a designed-for-modern-hardware replacement. The claim from the article is that X11 is basically unsupported abandonware, and is calling for developers to please help with the rest of the work in finishing the migration of use-cases to Wayland in order to help the whole ecosystem be able to abandon the sinking ship and move to a more-modern better-maintained future.

LucidLynx 3y ago

Let’s be honest: if you want people to switch to Wayland then make it works for all softwares. Do not expect people to switch habits because of a piece of software most of the people never heard of. I don’t agree either with this notion of « bad software »: to me « bad software » is for something that just does not execute (well), so is the « bad software » for an executable that executes successfully on X11 or Wayland which does not execute it…?

pjmlp 3y ago

UNIX was born as headless server hardware, and as things go, the future of Desktop Linux comes packaged in either a VM, or the Linux kernel alongside a non-UNIX userspace. X is stuck in the past, and Wayland might already be too late, in the age of WebUIs, no mater at all.

trismegisti 3y ago

I don't agree with everything in this article, but it is even more tiresome reading some of the comments here. Keep in mind that a lot of people are working really hard to get wayland to where it should be. This is HN and it would be cool to show support to the technical improvements and the security benefits of the whole wayland stack. Its fine if it is "no worky" for you. The goal is get it to work for everyone and actual reports on what does not work is much more helpful than philosophical arguments about wayland that have been ongoing for years. Also you are not being forced to use it. Stick with i3, its fine. I think there are already quite a few user benefits that come with wayland and for me wayland and XWayland works very well for all applications I use with the exception of some java guis. (that is also being worked on) All of that beeing said, developing protocols and implementing them on multiple sides is just a slow process and we are not 100% there yet.

bee_rider 3y ago
A way to get a more positive conversation would be to post something nice about Wayland, rather than something relentlessly negative about X.

agildehaus 3y ago

As much as I agree with this article, it's not ready for everyone yet. If you're using nVidia, everything that uses xwayland is still a flickery mess. Explicit sync patches are looking good, but those patches are not in a release of xwayland and the driver side is not yet available (but in my experience, just the xwayland support helps 99% of the problem). KDE Plasma 5.x has a ton of bugs on Wayland that were fixed with 6.x. But 6.x hasn't filtered down to everyone yet. Plasma 6.x still has minor Wayland-specific bugs I've noticed that they're slowly cleaning up in the point releases. Wayland only recently gained a real drag-and-drop protocol. Dragging windows, say, from a Chrome or Firefox session, doesn't work well. I've noticed Chrome beta implements the new protocol and it works great, but still unavailable. It's almost there though. Wayland's massive performance improvement over Xorg, and its robustness (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4HnwqidYFo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4HnwqidYFo) has convinced me to stay. And it's the clear future. Most Xorg development has moved to Wayland.

sspiff 3y ago

There's many reasons why X11 is not great today, like it's security model and it's hardware abstraction model. But it's been working for almost 4 decades, and its user experience has been improved for most of that time. I mostly use Wayland nowadays, but there are still times I need to switch to X11 to get things to work. Telling me this is because the software I use is bad is not at all helpful. I'm trying to get something done, and sometimes I can't choose different software and almost never do I have the ability or time to fix it if it doesn't work on Wayland.

jgb1984 3y ago

I'll stay on Xorg, which has worked perfectly fine for me for decades, for as long as I can. I use openbox, and fluxbox before that. A bit of pekwm and bspwm in between. I love the diversity of Xorg window managers, and I prefer its architecture which allows one to write a new wm in a few hundred lines of code, instead of pushing all complexity away and creating massive fragmentation and (mediocre) reinvention of wheels. Wayland tries to solve problems I don't have, while creating actual problems for many people like myself. It's a serious downgrade for me, so I'm staying with Xorg. Same thing with neovim actually: a solution in search of a problem. I don't care for treesitter (it's slow, buggy and makes my code look like a Christmas tree on steroids), I don't like Lua and I have no use for an LSP. I'm staying with vim, on openbox, on Xorg, on Debian.

TrianguloY 3y ago

As a kde neon user, the plasma 6 update broke all my global automaton shortcuts (like for example press win+u to automatically write a random uuid where the text cursor is). The script uses xdotool for this, and "it just works" every time. On Wayland three is no xdotool, but there is ydotool (and a couple others). However for some reason they are not reliable (with and without xdotoold) and most of the times the pasted uuid is missing letters. I managed to get around this by using the clipboard to copy the text, and then I can manually paste it, but it's a extra step. Plus I have other scripts that deal with emojis and other Unicode characters, and it's either been a pain to work around or "It just doesn't work". I switched back to X11, and I'll probably stick with it a few years more. But I'm still confusing, linux is the best platform for customization, and allowing you to automate things. However wayland seems like a block. I understand that it's a more modern project, probably more optimized and everything, but unless I'm missing a key toggle or tool to allow me to automate things, I'll try to avoid it.