5 ms·

Dedoimedo reviews Wayland in 2024 and comes to sad conclusions

49 points by itvision 2y ago

postepowanieadm 2y ago
Methodology description would be nice.
- zamalek 2y ago
  Especially for "display clarity." I smell confirmation bias here. Higher latency across two machines is hard to swallow but, sure, maybe they do have hardware where Wayland is broken.
- jonesyharry 2y ago
  Yes, the performance part there is not description what was tested, only he did use for "6-7 hours". This article it is written with a heavy bias in mind
  - onlytime 2y ago
    It's Dedoimedo. The entire point of Dedoimedo is whining loudly about whatever gets reviewed. If he stopped complaining about things his audience paid him to complain about, they would stop paying him enough money for overpriced vehicles that he then could complain about in an overly-braggadocios manner.
happens 2y ago
What's annoying to me is that when we talk about Wayland, the things it's capable of that X11 can't do are always left out. X has no fractional dpi scaling, and no per-monitor scaling, so it's a non-starter for both my desktop and my laptop setup. X will never have those things, while Wayland is consistently improving. Yes it has rough edges, yes the security model might be over-engineered, but it's perfectly serviceable nowadays from my point of view.
- RedShift1 2y ago
  But what if we just kept working on X11 instead starting from scratch?
  - paranoidxprod 2y ago
    I think the problem is nobody actually wants to work on x11.
    - okasaki 2y ago
      What does that meme even mean? Are you saying if Red Hat wanted to hire people to work on X11 they would get 0 people applying?? I really doubt that.
      - benterix 2y ago
        I see your approach is quite radical. But I think the real issue here is that we expect the developers currently working on Wayland working faster. I managed to be a bystander in this debate as I've been using X exclusively but I do hope that one day Wayland gets all the functionality and performance of X, and people stop getting frustrated by it.
      - ThatPlayer 2y ago
        Yes, if Red Hat wanted to, there wouldn't be nobody. Like you say, if Red Hat wanted to, they could hire those people to work on X11. Conversely if "Red Hat doesn't want to work on X11", then they wouldn't hire those developers, and now nobody wants to work on X11.
        okasaki 2y ago
        Right, so the problem isn't "nobody wants to work on X11", it's that "Red Hat management doesn't want to hire anybody to work on X11", and phrasing it as the former is extremely dishonest.
ITwork2019 2y ago
KDE plasma being the basis of Linux is BS. Why not test on gnome as well. KDE has always been bigger, more complex and slower
- jonesyharry 2y ago
  KDE for some time now it is faster than gnome. I think the test in KDE it is because Wayland it is the default in Plasma 6
- xcdzvyn 2y ago
  Testing multiple DEs would be great but I think there's merit to calling Plasma more Linux-y (or hacker-y?) than GNOME.
  - sevagh 2y ago
    >Testing multiple DEs would be great but I think there's merit to calling Plasma more Linux-y (or hacker-y?) than GNOME. Give some reasons? Or is it just a "hunch", like also people who dislike systemd are hacker-y, or people who dislike sudo are hacker-y,?
    - ahartmetz 2y ago
      I think it's because KDE has more of a "have it your way" attitude rather than "we know best".
- ahartmetz 2y ago
  Disclaimer: I'm a KDE user and mostly-inactive developer. KDE has always been about the same size as Gnome in LOC and performance has been +/- the same as well, KDE just has more exposed settings which confuses people to think it's "bigger". At the time of Gnome shell in JS, KDE had much less performance trouble than Gnome, now they are about the same again. There is a thing that Gnome has going for it regarding Wayland, which is that Wayland has been the default on Gnome for much longer, so yes, for the time being it has fewer problems there. KDE is improving rather quickly, but it has not caught up yet. So Gnome is the showcase for Wayland right now and it should be used to evaluate what Wayland can and cannot do. As a KDE user, I am personally holding out on X11 for a little longer because I don't need great fractional scaling and multi-monitor support, so Wayland buys me little.
juujian 2y ago
This discussion feels like it's going in circles. Some important points to add -- Wayland already has some features that will never come to X11: * Support for different screen resolution across screens. I would venture a guess that most of us plug a screen into our laptop these days, I use this feature almost every day. * Similarly, different screen refresh rates across screens. I personally don't care. * Scaling of the home bar or whatever it's called. Couldn't be scaled in X11 in many cases, remained too small. Much better handled in Wayland. Essential feature for me.
- ahartmetz 2y ago
  Disclaimer: I think that Wayland is a much cleaner technology than X11 and I am planning to switch to it in, say, roughly a year - I currently don't need any Wayland features, so I'd be getting mostly downsides. You can tell that I'm not a raging fan. But some of your points are wrong or misstated. * Different screen resolutions are obviously supported on X11, you probably meant scale factors? * Scaling of the, I guess taskbar, on X11? has nothing to do with the window system. It has worked for 15+ years on KDE Plasma and I'm currently using it.
  - juujian 2y ago
    Haven't looked at the details in a while since I have been using only Wayland for close to 5 years not. You might be right that there was a scaling factor issue I filed as "does not work (for me)." The task bar, was that switching on the fly and scaling. Might have been having issues switching back and forth between laptop screen and external and again filing that like the issue above.
- jeroenhd 2y ago
  > Support for different screen resolution across screens I think you mean scaling; screen resolutions aren't a problem on X11. It even does an inferior version of fractional scaling if you use the right software. It's much worse than Wayland's implementation, though. > Scaling of the home bar or whatever it's called. Couldn't be scaled in X11 in many cases, remained too small. Much better handled in Wayland. Essential feature for me. That's DE specific. HiDPI scaling is kind of a mess in Linux if you use screens of different sizes. Even on Wayland you're far from guaranteed a decent experience.
jonesyharry 2y ago
A lot of other tests, with methodology properly described, shows Wayland in Plasma 6 with a better performance than X11. This Dedoimedo article does not have any methodology only "feelings". And don't talk about features which for some people it is essential for a good desktop usage, like, fractional dpi scaling per monitor, HDR implementation
- goosedragons 2y ago
  Is it noticeable performance? Because I can't tell the difference between KDE 6 on Wayland VS. X11. X11 seems more buggy but I think that has to with priorities. Neither feels as fast as Trinity Desktop on X11.
gigatexal 2y ago
I agree. I find x11 far better and easier than Wayland for my workflow. I3 works nicer for me than sway.
severino 2y ago
I don't get how Wayland's performance and responsiveness is worse than X11's (at least according to this guy). Because X11 followed a client-server model with tons of layers added on top to make modern things work, and Wayland was going to get rid of that with a cleaner design, etc., yet it's slower?
- The_Colonel 2y ago
  It is believable. It often comes down to driver/app devs testing mainly on X11 while Wayland has been mostly an afterthought until recently.
- sprash 2y ago
  Wayland is also a "client-server" model. If you use DRI3, X11 and Wayland even do the exact same thing "under the hood". Only the sub msec negotiation phase is slightly more complicated on X11. We are talking about very cold code paths here. Wayland not only has forced vertical sync it also requires every application to be double buffered. This can be detrimental for some performance metrics. That is why Wayland has worse performance despite being "simpler".
- rstuart4133 2y ago
  > I don't get how Wayland's performance and responsiveness is worse than X11's I don't get it either. But not because "software structure X11 is better than Y" reasons. X11 and Wayland are far too complex for that reasoning to work well. For example, X11 round trip latencies are a PITA over a high latency WAN, but nonetheless NoMachine worked around that structural problem without changing X11. I don't get it because when I ran Wayland instead of X11, one thing that immediately stood out was how much faster Wayland was. As in it was less than 1/2 the time go from login screen to full set up desktop on Debian 11 using Gnome / GDM3. I showed it to friends and they switched to Wayland based on that one speed difference demo. It really was that dramatic. When an article deviates that much from my personal experience I start questioning all it's claims. It doesn't help that the article is a long list of assertions without any data. Nor does he explain how to reproduce what he's asserting. It sounds harsh, but it reads like an opinion piece to me. I don't know how else you could interpret: "Panel icon drag & drop:: Wayland - Quirky, X11 - Normal" as anything but a statement on personal preference.
dmvdoug 2y ago
> Three, Wayland has a fundamental design flaw; indeed, its mission is to make its own development easier (quoted from the original website), and that means it's not intended for the end user, and therefore, it cannot do what it needs to do. End users need functionality, how a product is developed is totally beside the point. I suspect this will get overlooked or set aside by the developer-centric crowd here, but as a non-developer Who observes that world with outside interest and curiosity, it’s a direct hit. Sank the battleship.
ceronman 2y ago
I'm a happy Wayland user for years already. But on a different topic, it's a bit hard for me to read such harsh critical posts on open source software. Wayland is free software, I don't have to pay a penny for it. It's truly free! not like Google/Facebook free when you pay by allowing the companies to spy on you and get all your data. It's also open source. And many people working on these things are volunteers. Nowadays, most software is written iteratively. You start with minimal features, and start fixing, improving things. Not only Wayland, most products are like this. You could argue that this in the only way to have a successful software product. Waiting years until everything is perfect is simply not feasible. All this time, while devs have been iterating on Wayland, X11 has always been available. And this is open source, X11 will always be available. Use it if you want. It's also open source, so you can even improve it if you want or dare to do it. So why being so harsh with those trying to make things better?
- mrkeen 2y ago
  > So why being so harsh with those trying to make things better? Distro maintainers won't know what to include (or what to default to) unless people speak up.
Vilian 2y ago
it's always wayland vs xorg, like xorg and wayland was the same thing, wayland has implementations, xorg is the only implementations, also he didn't even tested GNOME and kde had a huge f*ck ass transition to qt6 a few weeks ago, give them break lol, the responsiveness had an improvement for plasma 6.0.4 i guess, idk what version of plasma the op is
klazutin 2y ago
I want to switch to Wayland after all the good things I hear about it and for better scaling on external screens. But I just don't understand how people are able to use it when fractional scaling is so blurry. I feel like in 2024 fractional scaling is everywhere, so that's quite important. I was really excited for Plasma 6 in that regard, and most of QT6 apps look good. But all webpages in Firefox, Chrome - they all look so bad. Am I missing something?
florencegaby13 2y ago
[dead]

49 points by itvision 2y ago

postepowanieadm 2y ago

Methodology description would be nice.

zamalek 2y ago
Especially for "display clarity." I smell confirmation bias here. Higher latency across two machines is hard to swallow but, sure, maybe they do have hardware where Wayland is broken.
jonesyharry 2y ago
Yes, the performance part there is not description what was tested, only he did use for "6-7 hours". This article it is written with a heavy bias in mind
- onlytime 2y ago
  It's Dedoimedo. The entire point of Dedoimedo is whining loudly about whatever gets reviewed. If he stopped complaining about things his audience paid him to complain about, they would stop paying him enough money for overpriced vehicles that he then could complain about in an overly-braggadocios manner.

happens 2y ago

What's annoying to me is that when we talk about Wayland, the things it's capable of that X11 can't do are always left out. X has no fractional dpi scaling, and no per-monitor scaling, so it's a non-starter for both my desktop and my laptop setup. X will never have those things, while Wayland is consistently improving. Yes it has rough edges, yes the security model might be over-engineered, but it's perfectly serviceable nowadays from my point of view.

RedShift1 2y ago
But what if we just kept working on X11 instead starting from scratch?
- paranoidxprod 2y ago
  I think the problem is nobody actually wants to work on x11.
  - okasaki 2y ago
    What does that meme even mean? Are you saying if Red Hat wanted to hire people to work on X11 they would get 0 people applying?? I really doubt that.
    - benterix 2y ago
      I see your approach is quite radical. But I think the real issue here is that we expect the developers currently working on Wayland working faster. I managed to be a bystander in this debate as I've been using X exclusively but I do hope that one day Wayland gets all the functionality and performance of X, and people stop getting frustrated by it.
    - ThatPlayer 2y ago
      Yes, if Red Hat wanted to, there wouldn't be nobody. Like you say, if Red Hat wanted to, they could hire those people to work on X11. Conversely if "Red Hat doesn't want to work on X11", then they wouldn't hire those developers, and now nobody wants to work on X11.
      - okasaki 2y ago
        Right, so the problem isn't "nobody wants to work on X11", it's that "Red Hat management doesn't want to hire anybody to work on X11", and phrasing it as the former is extremely dishonest.

ITwork2019 2y ago

KDE plasma being the basis of Linux is BS. Why not test on gnome as well. KDE has always been bigger, more complex and slower

jonesyharry 2y ago
KDE for some time now it is faster than gnome. I think the test in KDE it is because Wayland it is the default in Plasma 6
xcdzvyn 2y ago
Testing multiple DEs would be great but I think there's merit to calling Plasma more Linux-y (or hacker-y?) than GNOME.
- sevagh 2y ago
  >Testing multiple DEs would be great but I think there's merit to calling Plasma more Linux-y (or hacker-y?) than GNOME. Give some reasons? Or is it just a "hunch", like also people who dislike systemd are hacker-y, or people who dislike sudo are hacker-y,?
  - ahartmetz 2y ago
    I think it's because KDE has more of a "have it your way" attitude rather than "we know best".
ahartmetz 2y ago
Disclaimer: I'm a KDE user and mostly-inactive developer. KDE has always been about the same size as Gnome in LOC and performance has been +/- the same as well, KDE just has more exposed settings which confuses people to think it's "bigger". At the time of Gnome shell in JS, KDE had much less performance trouble than Gnome, now they are about the same again. There is a thing that Gnome has going for it regarding Wayland, which is that Wayland has been the default on Gnome for much longer, so yes, for the time being it has fewer problems there. KDE is improving rather quickly, but it has not caught up yet. So Gnome is the showcase for Wayland right now and it should be used to evaluate what Wayland can and cannot do. As a KDE user, I am personally holding out on X11 for a little longer because I don't need great fractional scaling and multi-monitor support, so Wayland buys me little.

juujian 2y ago

This discussion feels like it's going in circles. Some important points to add -- Wayland already has some features that will never come to X11: * Support for different screen resolution across screens. I would venture a guess that most of us plug a screen into our laptop these days, I use this feature almost every day. * Similarly, different screen refresh rates across screens. I personally don't care. * Scaling of the home bar or whatever it's called. Couldn't be scaled in X11 in many cases, remained too small. Much better handled in Wayland. Essential feature for me.

ahartmetz 2y ago
Disclaimer: I think that Wayland is a much cleaner technology than X11 and I am planning to switch to it in, say, roughly a year - I currently don't need any Wayland features, so I'd be getting mostly downsides. You can tell that I'm not a raging fan. But some of your points are wrong or misstated. * Different screen resolutions are obviously supported on X11, you probably meant scale factors? * Scaling of the, I guess taskbar, on X11? has nothing to do with the window system. It has worked for 15+ years on KDE Plasma and I'm currently using it.
- juujian 2y ago
  Haven't looked at the details in a while since I have been using only Wayland for close to 5 years not. You might be right that there was a scaling factor issue I filed as "does not work (for me)." The task bar, was that switching on the fly and scaling. Might have been having issues switching back and forth between laptop screen and external and again filing that like the issue above.
jeroenhd 2y ago
> Support for different screen resolution across screens I think you mean scaling; screen resolutions aren't a problem on X11. It even does an inferior version of fractional scaling if you use the right software. It's much worse than Wayland's implementation, though. > Scaling of the home bar or whatever it's called. Couldn't be scaled in X11 in many cases, remained too small. Much better handled in Wayland. Essential feature for me. That's DE specific. HiDPI scaling is kind of a mess in Linux if you use screens of different sizes. Even on Wayland you're far from guaranteed a decent experience.

jonesyharry 2y ago

A lot of other tests, with methodology properly described, shows Wayland in Plasma 6 with a better performance than X11. This Dedoimedo article does not have any methodology only "feelings". And don't talk about features which for some people it is essential for a good desktop usage, like, fractional dpi scaling per monitor, HDR implementation

goosedragons 2y ago
Is it noticeable performance? Because I can't tell the difference between KDE 6 on Wayland VS. X11. X11 seems more buggy but I think that has to with priorities. Neither feels as fast as Trinity Desktop on X11.

gigatexal 2y ago

I agree. I find x11 far better and easier than Wayland for my workflow. I3 works nicer for me than sway.

severino 2y ago

I don't get how Wayland's performance and responsiveness is worse than X11's (at least according to this guy). Because X11 followed a client-server model with tons of layers added on top to make modern things work, and Wayland was going to get rid of that with a cleaner design, etc., yet it's slower?

The_Colonel 2y ago
It is believable. It often comes down to driver/app devs testing mainly on X11 while Wayland has been mostly an afterthought until recently.
sprash 2y ago
Wayland is also a "client-server" model. If you use DRI3, X11 and Wayland even do the exact same thing "under the hood". Only the sub msec negotiation phase is slightly more complicated on X11. We are talking about very cold code paths here. Wayland not only has forced vertical sync it also requires every application to be double buffered. This can be detrimental for some performance metrics. That is why Wayland has worse performance despite being "simpler".
rstuart4133 2y ago
> I don't get how Wayland's performance and responsiveness is worse than X11's I don't get it either. But not because "software structure X11 is better than Y" reasons. X11 and Wayland are far too complex for that reasoning to work well. For example, X11 round trip latencies are a PITA over a high latency WAN, but nonetheless NoMachine worked around that structural problem without changing X11. I don't get it because when I ran Wayland instead of X11, one thing that immediately stood out was how much faster Wayland was. As in it was less than 1/2 the time go from login screen to full set up desktop on Debian 11 using Gnome / GDM3. I showed it to friends and they switched to Wayland based on that one speed difference demo. It really was that dramatic. When an article deviates that much from my personal experience I start questioning all it's claims. It doesn't help that the article is a long list of assertions without any data. Nor does he explain how to reproduce what he's asserting. It sounds harsh, but it reads like an opinion piece to me. I don't know how else you could interpret: "Panel icon drag & drop:: Wayland - Quirky, X11 - Normal" as anything but a statement on personal preference.

dmvdoug 2y ago

> Three, Wayland has a fundamental design flaw; indeed, its mission is to make its own development easier (quoted from the original website), and that means it's not intended for the end user, and therefore, it cannot do what it needs to do. End users need functionality, how a product is developed is totally beside the point. I suspect this will get overlooked or set aside by the developer-centric crowd here, but as a non-developer Who observes that world with outside interest and curiosity, it’s a direct hit. Sank the battleship.

ceronman 2y ago

I'm a happy Wayland user for years already. But on a different topic, it's a bit hard for me to read such harsh critical posts on open source software. Wayland is free software, I don't have to pay a penny for it. It's truly free! not like Google/Facebook free when you pay by allowing the companies to spy on you and get all your data. It's also open source. And many people working on these things are volunteers. Nowadays, most software is written iteratively. You start with minimal features, and start fixing, improving things. Not only Wayland, most products are like this. You could argue that this in the only way to have a successful software product. Waiting years until everything is perfect is simply not feasible. All this time, while devs have been iterating on Wayland, X11 has always been available. And this is open source, X11 will always be available. Use it if you want. It's also open source, so you can even improve it if you want or dare to do it. So why being so harsh with those trying to make things better?

mrkeen 2y ago
> So why being so harsh with those trying to make things better? Distro maintainers won't know what to include (or what to default to) unless people speak up.

Vilian 2y ago

it's always wayland vs xorg, like xorg and wayland was the same thing, wayland has implementations, xorg is the only implementations, also he didn't even tested GNOME and kde had a huge f*ck ass transition to qt6 a few weeks ago, give them break lol, the responsiveness had an improvement for plasma 6.0.4 i guess, idk what version of plasma the op is

klazutin 2y ago

I want to switch to Wayland after all the good things I hear about it and for better scaling on external screens. But I just don't understand how people are able to use it when fractional scaling is so blurry. I feel like in 2024 fractional scaling is everywhere, so that's quite important. I was really excited for Plasma 6 in that regard, and most of QT6 apps look good. But all webpages in Firefox, Chrome - they all look so bad. Am I missing something?

florencegaby13 2y ago

[dead]