4 ms·

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

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.

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.