4 ms·

> Wayland may well replace X in the future, but at the time of writing X is still the de-facto standard for a window system Is it? The article was written end

by jraph 2y ago

> Wayland may well replace X in the future, but at the time of writing X is still the de-facto standard for a window system Is it? The article was written end of last year. I believe the most widespread DEs on the most widespread distros now use Wayland by default, don't they? There's now stuff that just works better on Wayland today. I've kept X11 for a very long time, probably until 2023, because of little annoying details, but now it just works. I think the only remaming thing that annoys me is some apps like Kate not coming to the to the foreground when invoked. Things are slowly going to stop working on X11. Perhaps not today, but we are talking about setting up a new Linux install. Especially something like Arch that has all the recent versions.

3abiton 2y ago
I recently got a good laptop with great hardware, so I opted for Wayland (with hyprland). It is still finniky. One main issue is Xwayland dependency that feels a bit warped. Another one is gaming support (Wine still heavily depends on X11). Then you got nvidia. It's a lot of small things. Overall, big improvement since I gave it a try 2 years ago, it's evolving fast, and I would argue nearly "there". But not yet.
- jraph 2y ago
  > One main issue is Xwayland dependency that feels a bit warped. I believe XWayland is there to stay for retro compatibility. That seems fine to me, retro-compatibility seems like a good thing. That would not be unlike XQuartz on Mac, which doesn't make us question Mac's own display server. > I would argue nearly "there". But not yet. I fully believe there are use case that are not fully covered indeed. Gaming would be one (I don't know whether gaming on Linux, outside the Steam Deck, is actually niche). But doesn't Wine work well with XWayland? (until they fully move to Wayland, which I think I've read they are in the process of doing) I would guess NVidia would concern mainly gamers and people working with ML (maybe those people don't actually need NVidia to display stuff though, and are actually fully covered by the iGPU - I don't know). It seems to me running an actual X11 session is now needed for niche things, but I might be wrong.
  - 3abiton 2y ago
    > I believe XWayland is there to stay for retro compatibility. That seems fine to me, retro-compatibility seems like a good thing. That would not be unlike XQuartz on Mac, which doesn't make us question Mac's own display server. Yes but if more than 50% of the GUI softwares you run fallback to XWayland (including terminals), it makes no sense. > But doesn't Wine work well with XWayland? (until they fully move to Wayland, which I think I've read they are in the process of doing). Wine is already a compatibility layer, so adding XWayland on top of it introduces overheads and additional lags and visual artifacts in some games. There is an experimental version of wine 9.22+ that should theoretically run natively on Wayland, but it still crashes 100% of the time for me. Nvidia drivers were also notorious with Wayland, but they are getting better progressively. I think the meme is nearly here: this might be the year of the Linux gaming desktop.
    - jraph 2y ago
      > Yes but if more than 50% of the GUI softwares you run fallback to XWayland (including terminals), it makes no sense. That just seems wrong. Default terminal apps like gnome-terminal and konsole are probably the first apps that have worked (well) on Wayland (as soon as select paste started working, which it has for years). If you are using a terminal that doesn't support Wayland, that's a choice you are making. Nothing uses XWayland on my setup except IntelliJ (and they are working on a native Wayland support, it might actually be working well right now but I also happen to run it in a local container though ssh and I haven't yet looked into the Wayland alternative of ssh -X). And that was not even a criterion to choose my apps. That's just not 50% for most people I think. And even if it were, running the DE in Wayland and all the apps in XWayland already brings benefits in comparison to running a full X11 session, at least for setups with multi screens with different DPIs. So yes, it would still make sense. > Wine is already a compatibility layer .. That doesn't introduce any lag because it's not an emulator, it's a reimplementation of Windows APIs, with native speeds, so it doesn't matter at all that it's a compatibility layer in this discussion. Okay, there is dxvk, wined3d and things like this, but apparently they can be better than the original under certain conditions [2]. > adding XWayland on top of it introduces overheads It's not supposed to, your game renders directly anyway [1]: > What about the overhead of running X on wayland? > Most modern desktops already use an external compositing manager: when the X server decides it needs to update content, it informs this external process (usually your window manager), and allows it to control the rendering entirely. Using Xwayland is just the same as this, but more efficient because the compositing manager doesn't have to go back through the X server to display the content it rendered. I'm eager to believe that nvidia has bugs with Wayland (they've been given the middle finger for a reason), and that there are Wayland-specific bugs in some apps, especially games. > I think the meme is nearly here: this might be the year of the Linux gaming desktop. Aren't we already there actually? Isn't it like 90%+ of games that just work now? Isn't the Steam Deck a success? I have friends that were stuck on Windows because of games until recently but finally switched to Linux last year or the year before. [1] https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/nyuqou/what_makes_dxvk_performs_better_than_directx_in/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/nyuqou/what_m...
- ta988 2y ago
  Wine just released in the last days a new version with excellent Wayland support.
nextos 2y ago
The good thing about Wayland is that security is much better. In X, a compromised application can easily steal information. Sandboxing is hard. The bad thing about Wayland is that changes to the architecture are incompatible with window managers, which require a rewrite. Things like XMonad or StumpWM are relatively popular among Arch users so that is why X is still featured prominently in the Wiki. I use those two, but on NixOS, and I find it annoying there is no simple migration route. Waymonad never took off. StumpWM/Mahogany seems to be getting there, but AFAIK there is no release in the horizon yet.
Fnoord 2y ago
A couple of years ago (2-3), I had a fully functioning Linux desktop with Wayland and SwayWM. Even automation worked, key rebinds worked, touchpad (approx like it works on macOS). Lots of software with great performance, too. Like Alacritty, for example. I could even run apps remotely over Waypipe (I ran Android emulator remotely). I did have to run a Windows application in XWayland IIRC. Was on Arch, too. This was after I had been running dual-boot on my PC at home, running Ubuntu with GNOME with Wayland as default. But what I do not use, is Nvidia GPUs!
aboardRat4 2y ago
Does CJK input work for you in each and every program?
- jraph 2y ago
  I don't do CJK. Of course if something you need doesn't work under Wayland, you will need to use X and you can for as long as it still works, and that's actually about the only good reason I see to pick X. But make sure issues are reported! (Now, I'm curious, what breaks CJK under Wayland?)
  - aboardRat4 2y ago
    I don't know, I'm not a guru in that domain. As far as I understand, wayland doesn't have any common provisions for input methods whatsoever. (There is something recent and experimental, but I'm not sure.) So far, every toolkit would implement it's own way of inputting CJK, independently. So input would work in kde and gtk programs, but not in foot or alacritty.
yashasolutions 2y ago
Wayland users seems very happy with it and it is great. I don't understand the animosity toward X. Why do wish X to die so hard? I am using X for twenty years. It works great. It is stable and well documented. Is wayland a better option? Could be. But since when cannot there be 2 good options? Why does it bother there is an alternative to wayland?
- jraph 2y ago
  I'm not specifically happy with Wayland, I don't care much actually. And I don't have any animosity against X neither. X is an iconic project, and inspiring too. I also spent almost 20 years using it. But it is dying. Its design doesn't correspond to the way things work anymore. It is a nightmare to maintain because its (old) code is incredibly complex, because it is full of features, and these features need to be kept for backward compatibility but aren't used much anymore. Modern toolkits actually bypass its features when they can: instead of drawing using X directives, they stream huge pictures they draw themselves. X wasn't designed like this, but it was getting in the way so this was shoehorned into it. It's now common to have two screens with different dpis, which X doesn't handle. With X, drivers are provided with X, but it is now normal to have the drivers in the kernel instead. The X developers went away to design and develop Wayland to start from a clean slate, with all the insight gathered all these years. Drivers and apps are now developed against Wayland and are less and less tested on X. Things are going to startup breaking, I suspect librairies will startup removing X support at dôme point, etc. X is not an alternative to Wayland. It is its past. I don't wish X to die at all. I have no feelings here. But that's what's happening. I don't mind someone using X knowing all this. But we are commenting on a guide directed towards newcomers. Because all these reasons, making them use X is bad advice. If you have a working install using X, there's no urge to switch. Don't fix it if it ain't broken. It might even be clever to follow the upgrade path of your distro if you didn't customize anything. Apart from that, I don't see any reason today to use X instead of Wayland unless specifically something doesn't work. And if it is the case, I hope you reported the issue, because one day you might be forced to switch and if the bug is still there, you will have to live with it. We are not in a situation where we have two competing alternatives between which you can freely chose. Both involve the same developers, and one of them is considered obsolete and isn't developed anymore. It's not that we are Wayland fans (at least I'm not). It's just that Wayland is all we have going forward.
epoxia 2y ago
I haven't touched Wayland because of a lack of window control tools, but don't know if the landscape has changed. Specifically to replace autokey, xdotool, wmctrl. I know kdotool exists for kde only which would cover most of xdotool, but I don't know about text expansion (autokey). Isn't most of Wayland's keybindings just remapping and not macros? I've written my own code to read dev files with elevated permissions so I think I'm fine with macros, but that might be too much work for other people. Would appreciate some Wayland users experience.
- MrDrMcCoy 2y ago
  For text expansion, I'm using Espanso on KDE Wayland. The text expansion works fine, but its ability to paste image files only works in certain apps for reasons I haven't gotten to the bottom of yet.
vagab0nd 2y ago
I thought the same until I tried to migrate. The hardest part is figuring out how to achieve the same thing in Wayland (idle control, window automation, clipboard, etc.). The one thing I haven't figured out, which prevents me from switching over is getting "urgency" to work in Sway.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

by jraph 2y ago

3abiton 2y ago

I recently got a good laptop with great hardware, so I opted for Wayland (with hyprland). It is still finniky. One main issue is Xwayland dependency that feels a bit warped. Another one is gaming support (Wine still heavily depends on X11). Then you got nvidia. It's a lot of small things. Overall, big improvement since I gave it a try 2 years ago, it's evolving fast, and I would argue nearly "there". But not yet.

jraph 2y ago
> One main issue is Xwayland dependency that feels a bit warped. I believe XWayland is there to stay for retro compatibility. That seems fine to me, retro-compatibility seems like a good thing. That would not be unlike XQuartz on Mac, which doesn't make us question Mac's own display server. > I would argue nearly "there". But not yet. I fully believe there are use case that are not fully covered indeed. Gaming would be one (I don't know whether gaming on Linux, outside the Steam Deck, is actually niche). But doesn't Wine work well with XWayland? (until they fully move to Wayland, which I think I've read they are in the process of doing) I would guess NVidia would concern mainly gamers and people working with ML (maybe those people don't actually need NVidia to display stuff though, and are actually fully covered by the iGPU - I don't know). It seems to me running an actual X11 session is now needed for niche things, but I might be wrong.
- 3abiton 2y ago
  > I believe XWayland is there to stay for retro compatibility. That seems fine to me, retro-compatibility seems like a good thing. That would not be unlike XQuartz on Mac, which doesn't make us question Mac's own display server. Yes but if more than 50% of the GUI softwares you run fallback to XWayland (including terminals), it makes no sense. > But doesn't Wine work well with XWayland? (until they fully move to Wayland, which I think I've read they are in the process of doing). Wine is already a compatibility layer, so adding XWayland on top of it introduces overheads and additional lags and visual artifacts in some games. There is an experimental version of wine 9.22+ that should theoretically run natively on Wayland, but it still crashes 100% of the time for me. Nvidia drivers were also notorious with Wayland, but they are getting better progressively. I think the meme is nearly here: this might be the year of the Linux gaming desktop.
  - jraph 2y ago
    > Yes but if more than 50% of the GUI softwares you run fallback to XWayland (including terminals), it makes no sense. That just seems wrong. Default terminal apps like gnome-terminal and konsole are probably the first apps that have worked (well) on Wayland (as soon as select paste started working, which it has for years). If you are using a terminal that doesn't support Wayland, that's a choice you are making. Nothing uses XWayland on my setup except IntelliJ (and they are working on a native Wayland support, it might actually be working well right now but I also happen to run it in a local container though ssh and I haven't yet looked into the Wayland alternative of ssh -X). And that was not even a criterion to choose my apps. That's just not 50% for most people I think. And even if it were, running the DE in Wayland and all the apps in XWayland already brings benefits in comparison to running a full X11 session, at least for setups with multi screens with different DPIs. So yes, it would still make sense. > Wine is already a compatibility layer .. That doesn't introduce any lag because it's not an emulator, it's a reimplementation of Windows APIs, with native speeds, so it doesn't matter at all that it's a compatibility layer in this discussion. Okay, there is dxvk, wined3d and things like this, but apparently they can be better than the original under certain conditions [2]. > adding XWayland on top of it introduces overheads It's not supposed to, your game renders directly anyway [1]: > What about the overhead of running X on wayland? > Most modern desktops already use an external compositing manager: when the X server decides it needs to update content, it informs this external process (usually your window manager), and allows it to control the rendering entirely. Using Xwayland is just the same as this, but more efficient because the compositing manager doesn't have to go back through the X server to display the content it rendered. I'm eager to believe that nvidia has bugs with Wayland (they've been given the middle finger for a reason), and that there are Wayland-specific bugs in some apps, especially games. > I think the meme is nearly here: this might be the year of the Linux gaming desktop. Aren't we already there actually? Isn't it like 90%+ of games that just work now? Isn't the Steam Deck a success? I have friends that were stuck on Windows because of games until recently but finally switched to Linux last year or the year before. [1] https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/nyuqou/what_makes_dxvk_performs_better_than_directx_in/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/nyuqou/what_m...
ta988 2y ago
Wine just released in the last days a new version with excellent Wayland support.

nextos 2y ago

The good thing about Wayland is that security is much better. In X, a compromised application can easily steal information. Sandboxing is hard. The bad thing about Wayland is that changes to the architecture are incompatible with window managers, which require a rewrite. Things like XMonad or StumpWM are relatively popular among Arch users so that is why X is still featured prominently in the Wiki. I use those two, but on NixOS, and I find it annoying there is no simple migration route. Waymonad never took off. StumpWM/Mahogany seems to be getting there, but AFAIK there is no release in the horizon yet.

Fnoord 2y ago

A couple of years ago (2-3), I had a fully functioning Linux desktop with Wayland and SwayWM. Even automation worked, key rebinds worked, touchpad (approx like it works on macOS). Lots of software with great performance, too. Like Alacritty, for example. I could even run apps remotely over Waypipe (I ran Android emulator remotely). I did have to run a Windows application in XWayland IIRC. Was on Arch, too. This was after I had been running dual-boot on my PC at home, running Ubuntu with GNOME with Wayland as default. But what I do not use, is Nvidia GPUs!

aboardRat4 2y ago

Does CJK input work for you in each and every program?

jraph 2y ago
I don't do CJK. Of course if something you need doesn't work under Wayland, you will need to use X and you can for as long as it still works, and that's actually about the only good reason I see to pick X. But make sure issues are reported! (Now, I'm curious, what breaks CJK under Wayland?)
- aboardRat4 2y ago
  I don't know, I'm not a guru in that domain. As far as I understand, wayland doesn't have any common provisions for input methods whatsoever. (There is something recent and experimental, but I'm not sure.) So far, every toolkit would implement it's own way of inputting CJK, independently. So input would work in kde and gtk programs, but not in foot or alacritty.

yashasolutions 2y ago

Wayland users seems very happy with it and it is great. I don't understand the animosity toward X. Why do wish X to die so hard? I am using X for twenty years. It works great. It is stable and well documented. Is wayland a better option? Could be. But since when cannot there be 2 good options? Why does it bother there is an alternative to wayland?

jraph 2y ago
I'm not specifically happy with Wayland, I don't care much actually. And I don't have any animosity against X neither. X is an iconic project, and inspiring too. I also spent almost 20 years using it. But it is dying. Its design doesn't correspond to the way things work anymore. It is a nightmare to maintain because its (old) code is incredibly complex, because it is full of features, and these features need to be kept for backward compatibility but aren't used much anymore. Modern toolkits actually bypass its features when they can: instead of drawing using X directives, they stream huge pictures they draw themselves. X wasn't designed like this, but it was getting in the way so this was shoehorned into it. It's now common to have two screens with different dpis, which X doesn't handle. With X, drivers are provided with X, but it is now normal to have the drivers in the kernel instead. The X developers went away to design and develop Wayland to start from a clean slate, with all the insight gathered all these years. Drivers and apps are now developed against Wayland and are less and less tested on X. Things are going to startup breaking, I suspect librairies will startup removing X support at dôme point, etc. X is not an alternative to Wayland. It is its past. I don't wish X to die at all. I have no feelings here. But that's what's happening. I don't mind someone using X knowing all this. But we are commenting on a guide directed towards newcomers. Because all these reasons, making them use X is bad advice. If you have a working install using X, there's no urge to switch. Don't fix it if it ain't broken. It might even be clever to follow the upgrade path of your distro if you didn't customize anything. Apart from that, I don't see any reason today to use X instead of Wayland unless specifically something doesn't work. And if it is the case, I hope you reported the issue, because one day you might be forced to switch and if the bug is still there, you will have to live with it. We are not in a situation where we have two competing alternatives between which you can freely chose. Both involve the same developers, and one of them is considered obsolete and isn't developed anymore. It's not that we are Wayland fans (at least I'm not). It's just that Wayland is all we have going forward.

epoxia 2y ago

I haven't touched Wayland because of a lack of window control tools, but don't know if the landscape has changed. Specifically to replace autokey, xdotool, wmctrl. I know kdotool exists for kde only which would cover most of xdotool, but I don't know about text expansion (autokey). Isn't most of Wayland's keybindings just remapping and not macros? I've written my own code to read dev files with elevated permissions so I think I'm fine with macros, but that might be too much work for other people. Would appreciate some Wayland users experience.

MrDrMcCoy 2y ago
For text expansion, I'm using Espanso on KDE Wayland. The text expansion works fine, but its ability to paste image files only works in certain apps for reasons I haven't gotten to the bottom of yet.

vagab0nd 2y ago

I thought the same until I tried to migrate. The hardest part is figuring out how to achieve the same thing in Wayland (idle control, window automation, clipboard, etc.). The one thing I haven't figured out, which prevents me from switching over is getting "urgency" to work in Sway.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]