12 ms·

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

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.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        ThatPlayer 2y ago
        Why is Red Hat the one who has to pay for development? Why not any other Linux contributor? Ubuntu, Google, AMD. They don't want to hire anybody to work on X11 either. Why not you? That's why it's "everybody doesn't want to pay for development", which is shortened to "nobody wants to".
        Vilian 2y ago
        actually ubuntu also paid people, but x11 is so fucked that was never enough, that's why google never used it, and why they adopted wayland in the chromeOS
    - The_Colonel 2y ago
      I think it means RedHat takes opinions of their technical staff into consideration and thinks their money is better invested into Wayland.
- wwalexander 2y ago
  The people actually working on X11 decided it was worth starting from scratch.
  - okasaki 2y ago
    So fire them and hire people that want to work on X11.
    - benterix 2y ago
      Have you ever worked on a project when after several years it became clear that the initial assumptions were wrong and the current design is untenable? Like, users asking for simple features that you know could be implemented in just a few lines of code had the design been done differently but now require many weeks of months of clunky hacks? Because I did and in some cases the initial decisions were mine - I had to admit I was wrong and do what is logical to make it easier for both developers and users.
      - okasaki 2y ago
        Are we talking about Wayland or X11 here? Because like the article mentioned, Wayland is now 15 years old and still sucks. Sure sounds like the Wayland design is untenable.
        orangeboats 2y ago
        > 15 years old and still sucks People dragged their feet on Wayland support for at least 10 years.
        okasaki 2y ago
        Yes, because it sucks.
        orangeboats 2y ago
- vkazanov 2y ago
  But that's the point. It's a sunk cost fallacy. The assumptions that X11 uses are incompatible with what personal computing turned into. Drivers, security, the networking part... All of it is just not how things work these days. It is a major project, it is hard to push through but it's there already, with most of the work complete by now. And as a programer I must say that underlying Wayland libraries are vastly better than X11 ever was.
  - firebaze 2y ago
    Maybe we should consider starting over again in that case. Wayland increasingly appears to be supported by a sunk cost fallacy itself - the A11Y issues are not fixable in the base architecture, which means that every Wayland DM implementation needs to implement them again, which in turn means lots of different APIs, incompatibilities and so on.
    - Vilian 2y ago
      go ahead them, show was how to make a good screen protocol that is as secure as wayland, and flexible, and one that support every type of screen, from cellphones, to VR, to desktop, go ahead, i'm waiting, show how these wayland normies(x11 too, they are the same people) how to make a protocol
- biorach 2y ago
  Nobody wants to keep working on X11, its design is fundamentally mismatched with the needs of a modern graphics stack and it contains a ton of legacy code and layers that make development difficult. Check the lwn.net archives for some articles that explain this in detail.
  - sprash 2y ago
    The X11 DRI3 buffer swap mechanism is identical to the one used in Wayland. The fact that Wayland has still worse performance across the board (especially latency metrics) might be an indicator that Wayland is fundamentally mismatched with the needs of a modern graphics stack.
    - orangeboats 2y ago
      You are basing your conclusions on a single blogpost. Measurements from other people show that X11 wins in some cases, Wayland wins in other cases, there isn't a clear winner. https://zamundaaa.github.io/wayland/2021/12/14/about-gaming-on-wayland.html https://zamundaaa.github.io/wayland/2021/12/14/about-gaming-...
      - sprash 2y ago
        > X11 wins in some cases, Wayland wins in other cases Even according to your blog post uncomposited X11 wins in all cases (or is tied within the error of one millisecond). It especially sweeps the floor with immediate rendering.
        orangeboats 2y ago
        Uncomposited anything is madness in 2024. You have the VRAM, use it and save your battery life / power which is arguably far more important. It being tear-free is a very nice bonus on top of the power savings too. (And no, composition is not just for 3D cube effects or anything like that. Although it certainly enables them.) MacOS have moved on, Windows have moved on, Linux should do the same.
- coffeeblack 2y ago
  We can do both at the same time. Are you working on X11 though?
- orangeboats 2y ago
  The thing is, many things in X11 are "hardcoded" to the protocol. For example, there is only one coordinate space in the X11 world. This meant that 1 pixel is always N "real" pixels (typically N=1). But nowadays we have this thing called HiDPI, where 1 pixel can mean 1.5 real pixels on one screen (150% scaling), 2 real pixels on the second (200% scaling), and 1 real pixel on the third (100% scaling). We need mixed DPI and hence multiple coordinate systems, but you will break existing X11 programs if you tried to add that to the protocol, and at this point if you force your way through the problem it'll just be Wayland. Existing X11-compatible systems "fix" this by: 1. assuming N=scale factor, thus upscaling all programs. Everything becomes a blurry mess (see XWayland). 2. assuming N=1, and let the programs upscale themselves. The problem is older apps (e.g. GTK2) don't understand HiDPI and you get a GUI for ants.
  - pedrocr 2y ago
    > But nowadays we have this thing called HiDPI, where 1 pixel can mean 1.5 real pixels on one screen (150% scaling), 2 real pixels on the second (200% scaling), and 1 real pixel on the third (100% scaling). This is the wrong way to do scaling and even Wayland got it wrong and has been very slowly fixing things. What you actually want to do is just use real pixels everywhere and just tell the client "here's your NxM window size and it will be displayed in a X scale" and let the client do the intelligent thing. If it's a browser, a 3D game, or a PDF reader it will render directly at target resolution and scale with no fuzziness and those are most use cases people care about. GUI toolkits were stuck at integer scaling for a long time and thus the strange solutions to render at higher resolution and then scale down happened. All of this can work in X11, just always use native resolution for everything but Wayland is much better anyway and works great these days.
    - sevagh 2y ago
      Wouldn't that mean every application has to re-invent (or include) some form of scaling? Isn't it better than the display manager handles that for you?
      - cuu508 2y ago
- Hendrikto 2y ago
  Go ahead. The people who actually work on it decided that was not the way forward, and chose another approach. If you are qualified to work on it yourself, and you disagree, you can step up to maintain and improve X11.
  - sprash 2y ago
    No they decided working on X11 would not rake in enough consulting money. So they engineered a completely non-working solution called Wayland that is broken by design and takes years and many consulting hours to fix.
    - orangeboats 2y ago
      Calling it "broken by design" is an extraordinary claim and requires extraordinary evidences to back it up. Now, X11 being un-sandboxable is truly something broken by design.
      - Vilian 2y ago
        "broken by design" proceeds to work perfectly, lol, i don't can that broken by design
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - sprash 2y ago
        > "broken by design" is an extraordinary claim and requires extraordinary evidences There are many technical aspects that make Wayland broken by design (like default forced vsync, forced double buffering, a fucked up event-loop for single threaded applications or severely lacking functionality for things like window positioning or screen sharing). But the biggest problem is the design-philosophy: Wayland makes life extremely easy for gate keeping "Protocol Designers" and extremely hard for application developers. > un-sandboxable Not true. The quick and dirty way would be using Xephyr. Besides that many access control hooks like XACE are present and standardized in the X11 protocol for many years. Application developers just choose not to use them. So if X11 is not secure enough for you, blame GNOME and KDE, not X11.
goosedragons 2y ago
X HAS those things. Ubuntu's version of Gnome for example has supported fractional DPI scaling and per monitor scaling on X11 since I think 20.04. Upstream Gnome wasn't interested because that's what Wayland is supposed to do. Xrandr has made this possible for years with some setup. Wayland is frustrating at basic crap. Just this past month I had issues sharing my screen, getting programs to use my PATH correctly and setting options. It's insanely stupid that SO much has moved over DE that how you do things between Gnome, KDE, etc. are now all radically different. It's actually worse than X11 in so many ways.
- Hendrikto 2y ago
  > X HAS those things. Ubuntu's version of Gnome for example has supported fractional DPI scaling and per monitor scaling on X11 since I think 20.04. […] Xrandr has made this possible for years with some setup. Via some ugly hacks that degrade performance and make things look blurry. It‘s not the same.
  - znpy 2y ago
    I mentioned network transparency in another comment, and wayland will never have that unless they implement that "degrade performances and make things look blurry". So meh, you give and you take, life is a compromise.
    - Vilian 2y ago
      https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe here, found the wayland network transparency, fix your comment
      - znpy 2y ago
        Not officially supported, irrelevant
        orangeboats 2y ago
LorenDB 2y ago
X also has awful touchscreen support. When you use a touchscreen, you are just dragging the cursor around with your finger. In Wayland, touch support is what you'd normally expect (e.g. dragging scrolls pages instead of selecting text).
- Vilian 2y ago
  exactly, you can go back and forth in firefox using your touchpad and i thing that very practical
- alwyn 2y ago
  This is configurable[1]. I am writing this from a laptop with a touchscreen using X. I can use the touch screen fine and _browse_ Firefox with it and don't select text. [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox/Tweaks#Enable_touchscreen_gestures https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox/Tweaks#Enable_touch...
- jeroenhd 2y ago
  X has decent touchscreen support, but it sucks at dealing with multitouch gestures, especially on touchpads rather than touch screens.
- itvision 2y ago
  That's configurable in X and I've never had this issue.
znpy 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. I think it's fair, considering we also leave out stuff that X11 can do that wayland can't do (and will likely never be able to do). Example: network transparency. I still occasionally have to save the day by doing `ssh -X` and run some stuff on a remote host (but having a window be displayed on a local X11 server). And I already foresee some idiot coming here and commenting that "you're not supposed to do that" to which i pre-reply: not all companies are FAANGS that can rework and rebuild everything that's sub-optimal. Many (most?) of us have to do the best with what we've got.
- orangeboats 2y ago
  Wayland does have network transparency, it's called waypipe. But caveats apply: applications which use the GPU are network translucent. You'd need VNC or other forms of streaming for that.
  - Vilian 2y ago
    i didn't find that mentioned on waypipe, could you link a issue that mention that?
    - orangeboats 2y ago
      It's an inherent limitation of any network transparent windowing protocols.

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.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - ThatPlayer 2y ago
        Why is Red Hat the one who has to pay for development? Why not any other Linux contributor? Ubuntu, Google, AMD. They don't want to hire anybody to work on X11 either. Why not you? That's why it's "everybody doesn't want to pay for development", which is shortened to "nobody wants to".
        Vilian 2y ago
        actually ubuntu also paid people, but x11 is so fucked that was never enough, that's why google never used it, and why they adopted wayland in the chromeOS
  - The_Colonel 2y ago
    I think it means RedHat takes opinions of their technical staff into consideration and thinks their money is better invested into Wayland.
wwalexander 2y ago
The people actually working on X11 decided it was worth starting from scratch.
- okasaki 2y ago
  So fire them and hire people that want to work on X11.
  - benterix 2y ago
    Have you ever worked on a project when after several years it became clear that the initial assumptions were wrong and the current design is untenable? Like, users asking for simple features that you know could be implemented in just a few lines of code had the design been done differently but now require many weeks of months of clunky hacks? Because I did and in some cases the initial decisions were mine - I had to admit I was wrong and do what is logical to make it easier for both developers and users.
    - okasaki 2y ago
      Are we talking about Wayland or X11 here? Because like the article mentioned, Wayland is now 15 years old and still sucks. Sure sounds like the Wayland design is untenable.
      - orangeboats 2y ago
        > 15 years old and still sucks People dragged their feet on Wayland support for at least 10 years.
        okasaki 2y ago
        Yes, because it sucks.
        orangeboats 2y ago
vkazanov 2y ago
But that's the point. It's a sunk cost fallacy. The assumptions that X11 uses are incompatible with what personal computing turned into. Drivers, security, the networking part... All of it is just not how things work these days. It is a major project, it is hard to push through but it's there already, with most of the work complete by now. And as a programer I must say that underlying Wayland libraries are vastly better than X11 ever was.
- firebaze 2y ago
  Maybe we should consider starting over again in that case. Wayland increasingly appears to be supported by a sunk cost fallacy itself - the A11Y issues are not fixable in the base architecture, which means that every Wayland DM implementation needs to implement them again, which in turn means lots of different APIs, incompatibilities and so on.
  - Vilian 2y ago
    go ahead them, show was how to make a good screen protocol that is as secure as wayland, and flexible, and one that support every type of screen, from cellphones, to VR, to desktop, go ahead, i'm waiting, show how these wayland normies(x11 too, they are the same people) how to make a protocol
biorach 2y ago
Nobody wants to keep working on X11, its design is fundamentally mismatched with the needs of a modern graphics stack and it contains a ton of legacy code and layers that make development difficult. Check the lwn.net archives for some articles that explain this in detail.
- sprash 2y ago
  The X11 DRI3 buffer swap mechanism is identical to the one used in Wayland. The fact that Wayland has still worse performance across the board (especially latency metrics) might be an indicator that Wayland is fundamentally mismatched with the needs of a modern graphics stack.
  - orangeboats 2y ago
    You are basing your conclusions on a single blogpost. Measurements from other people show that X11 wins in some cases, Wayland wins in other cases, there isn't a clear winner. https://zamundaaa.github.io/wayland/2021/12/14/about-gaming-on-wayland.html https://zamundaaa.github.io/wayland/2021/12/14/about-gaming-...
    - sprash 2y ago
      > X11 wins in some cases, Wayland wins in other cases Even according to your blog post uncomposited X11 wins in all cases (or is tied within the error of one millisecond). It especially sweeps the floor with immediate rendering.
      - orangeboats 2y ago
        Uncomposited anything is madness in 2024. You have the VRAM, use it and save your battery life / power which is arguably far more important. It being tear-free is a very nice bonus on top of the power savings too. (And no, composition is not just for 3D cube effects or anything like that. Although it certainly enables them.) MacOS have moved on, Windows have moved on, Linux should do the same.
coffeeblack 2y ago
We can do both at the same time. Are you working on X11 though?
orangeboats 2y ago
The thing is, many things in X11 are "hardcoded" to the protocol. For example, there is only one coordinate space in the X11 world. This meant that 1 pixel is always N "real" pixels (typically N=1). But nowadays we have this thing called HiDPI, where 1 pixel can mean 1.5 real pixels on one screen (150% scaling), 2 real pixels on the second (200% scaling), and 1 real pixel on the third (100% scaling). We need mixed DPI and hence multiple coordinate systems, but you will break existing X11 programs if you tried to add that to the protocol, and at this point if you force your way through the problem it'll just be Wayland. Existing X11-compatible systems "fix" this by: 1. assuming N=scale factor, thus upscaling all programs. Everything becomes a blurry mess (see XWayland). 2. assuming N=1, and let the programs upscale themselves. The problem is older apps (e.g. GTK2) don't understand HiDPI and you get a GUI for ants.
- pedrocr 2y ago
  > But nowadays we have this thing called HiDPI, where 1 pixel can mean 1.5 real pixels on one screen (150% scaling), 2 real pixels on the second (200% scaling), and 1 real pixel on the third (100% scaling). This is the wrong way to do scaling and even Wayland got it wrong and has been very slowly fixing things. What you actually want to do is just use real pixels everywhere and just tell the client "here's your NxM window size and it will be displayed in a X scale" and let the client do the intelligent thing. If it's a browser, a 3D game, or a PDF reader it will render directly at target resolution and scale with no fuzziness and those are most use cases people care about. GUI toolkits were stuck at integer scaling for a long time and thus the strange solutions to render at higher resolution and then scale down happened. All of this can work in X11, just always use native resolution for everything but Wayland is much better anyway and works great these days.
  - sevagh 2y ago
    Wouldn't that mean every application has to re-invent (or include) some form of scaling? Isn't it better than the display manager handles that for you?
    - cuu508 2y ago
Hendrikto 2y ago
Go ahead. The people who actually work on it decided that was not the way forward, and chose another approach. If you are qualified to work on it yourself, and you disagree, you can step up to maintain and improve X11.
- sprash 2y ago
  No they decided working on X11 would not rake in enough consulting money. So they engineered a completely non-working solution called Wayland that is broken by design and takes years and many consulting hours to fix.
  - orangeboats 2y ago
    Calling it "broken by design" is an extraordinary claim and requires extraordinary evidences to back it up. Now, X11 being un-sandboxable is truly something broken by design.
    - Vilian 2y ago
      "broken by design" proceeds to work perfectly, lol, i don't can that broken by design
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - sprash 2y ago
      > "broken by design" is an extraordinary claim and requires extraordinary evidences There are many technical aspects that make Wayland broken by design (like default forced vsync, forced double buffering, a fucked up event-loop for single threaded applications or severely lacking functionality for things like window positioning or screen sharing). But the biggest problem is the design-philosophy: Wayland makes life extremely easy for gate keeping "Protocol Designers" and extremely hard for application developers. > un-sandboxable Not true. The quick and dirty way would be using Xephyr. Besides that many access control hooks like XACE are present and standardized in the X11 protocol for many years. Application developers just choose not to use them. So if X11 is not secure enough for you, blame GNOME and KDE, not X11.

goosedragons 2y ago

X HAS those things. Ubuntu's version of Gnome for example has supported fractional DPI scaling and per monitor scaling on X11 since I think 20.04. Upstream Gnome wasn't interested because that's what Wayland is supposed to do. Xrandr has made this possible for years with some setup. Wayland is frustrating at basic crap. Just this past month I had issues sharing my screen, getting programs to use my PATH correctly and setting options. It's insanely stupid that SO much has moved over DE that how you do things between Gnome, KDE, etc. are now all radically different. It's actually worse than X11 in so many ways.

Hendrikto 2y ago
> X HAS those things. Ubuntu's version of Gnome for example has supported fractional DPI scaling and per monitor scaling on X11 since I think 20.04. […] Xrandr has made this possible for years with some setup. Via some ugly hacks that degrade performance and make things look blurry. It‘s not the same.
- znpy 2y ago
  I mentioned network transparency in another comment, and wayland will never have that unless they implement that "degrade performances and make things look blurry". So meh, you give and you take, life is a compromise.
  - Vilian 2y ago
    https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe here, found the wayland network transparency, fix your comment
    - znpy 2y ago
      Not officially supported, irrelevant
      - orangeboats 2y ago

LorenDB 2y ago

X also has awful touchscreen support. When you use a touchscreen, you are just dragging the cursor around with your finger. In Wayland, touch support is what you'd normally expect (e.g. dragging scrolls pages instead of selecting text).

Vilian 2y ago
exactly, you can go back and forth in firefox using your touchpad and i thing that very practical
alwyn 2y ago
This is configurable[1]. I am writing this from a laptop with a touchscreen using X. I can use the touch screen fine and _browse_ Firefox with it and don't select text. [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox/Tweaks#Enable_touchscreen_gestures https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox/Tweaks#Enable_touch...
jeroenhd 2y ago
X has decent touchscreen support, but it sucks at dealing with multitouch gestures, especially on touchpads rather than touch screens.
itvision 2y ago
That's configurable in X and I've never had this issue.

znpy 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. I think it's fair, considering we also leave out stuff that X11 can do that wayland can't do (and will likely never be able to do). Example: network transparency. I still occasionally have to save the day by doing `ssh -X` and run some stuff on a remote host (but having a window be displayed on a local X11 server). And I already foresee some idiot coming here and commenting that "you're not supposed to do that" to which i pre-reply: not all companies are FAANGS that can rework and rebuild everything that's sub-optimal. Many (most?) of us have to do the best with what we've got.

orangeboats 2y ago
Wayland does have network transparency, it's called waypipe. But caveats apply: applications which use the GPU are network translucent. You'd need VNC or other forms of streaming for that.
- Vilian 2y ago
  i didn't find that mentioned on waypipe, could you link a issue that mention that?
  - orangeboats 2y ago
    It's an inherent limitation of any network transparent windowing protocols.