5 ms·

Wayland is a protocol. The problems people complain about are generally implementation details specific to GNOME or KDE or (in general) one particular implemen

Wayland is a protocol. The problems people complain about are generally implementation details specific to GNOME or KDE or (in general) one particular implementation. There's rarely any such thing as "universal superiority", usually you're making a tradeoff. In the case of X vs Wayland it's usually latency vs. tearing. Personally I'm happy with Wayland because there was a time when watching certain videos with certain media players on Linux was incredibly painful because of how blatant and obtrusive the tearing was. Watching the same video under Wayland worked fine. Early automobiles didn't have "universal superiority" to horses, but that wasn't an inhibitor to adoption.

bpfrh 2y ago
I mean most of the things are the fault of a badly designed or non existent protocols: -Problems with non western input systems -Accessibility -Remote control(took around 2 years to be stable I think?) -Bad color management Then there's the things that did work in x11 but not in wayland: -Bad support for keymapping(the input library says keymapping should be implemented by the compositor, gnome says not in scope, so we have a regression) -bad nvidia support for the first two years? three years? While these things are compositor/hw vendor faults, the rush to use wayland and nearly every distro making it as default, forced major regressions and wayland kinda promised to improve the x11 based experience.
- AtlasBarfed 2y ago
  Yes, and to the parents point it was a CHANGE in protocol. I get there was cruft in x. But the moment selected was a barrier to Linux desktop adoption precisely when the greatest opportunity in decades was present. And the desktop was reimplemented. Now in this period kde and gnome both decided to do rewrites, Ubuntu did their own desktop, got it up to snuff, and abandoned it. The lunacy wasn't just Wayland. If we are complaining the gnome compositor sucks... I mean , should that be the goddamn reference implementation? What percent of desktops are gnome, 80% at least? If the gnome composting ready for primetime, then Wayland isn't ready for primetime.
  - vincent-manis 2y ago
    >If the gnome composting ready for primetime, then Wayland isn't ready for primetime. I use Sway, which uses a different compos[i]tor than Gnome. I would like to see similar results for wlroots, Sway's compositor, though I'm not actually interested enough to do the experiment (I guess that would be comparing Sway with i3). Cursor lag in Sway is not enough to bother me. I have on occasion used Gnome on the same machine(s), and never been bothered by lag. As others have pointed out, Wayland is a protocol, not a compositor.
    - tankenmate 2y ago
      "As others have pointed out, Wayland is a protocol, not a compositor." But the Wayland protocol requires a compositor, so here we are.
      - vincent-manis 2y ago
        I have no idea of the difference(s) in performance between wlroots and Gnome's compositor. Protocols do not have performance, implementations do. If someone can prove that the Wayland protocol, on a certain set of tasks, and in a certain environment, has a better or worse performance than the X11 protocol, then it might be possible to make abstract comparisons on protocol. Given that Gnome runs on both X and Wayland, it might be interesting to hear from the Gnome authors on the performance differences.
- tuna74 2y ago
  I have run Wayland since it was available for testing on Fedora Workstation and I have had zero problems inputting Japanese and Chinese. With regards to accessibility, what problems have you had exactly?
  - ChocolateGod 2y ago
    > With regards to accessibility, what problems have you had exactly? Fedora shipped a broken screen reader for 8 years.
    - tuna74 2y ago
      Is there a bug report for this anywhere? Does everything work now?
      - ChocolateGod 2y ago
        I vaguely remember someone made a blog post about it and got piled-on. I think it's now fixed or being fixed. Edit: Found it https://ar.al/2024/06/23/fedora-has-been-shipping-with-a-broken-screen-reader-for-nine-years-but-the-real-problem-is-me/ https://ar.al/2024/06/23/fedora-has-been-shipping-with-a-bro...
  - thayne 2y ago
    I think that gnome has had built-in IME, but at least for a long time, it wasn't possible to use a third party system with gnome, or use gnome's with other compositors. And I'm pretty sure the situation was the same for sreen readers and on-screen keyboards. The wlroots project created their own protocols to support external applications to provide such features, since that is out of scope for a compositor like sway, but there are still missing pieces.
  - LtWorf 2y ago
    2 finger scroll doesn't work on my thinkpad model. Not a bug, apparently. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/issues/1059 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/issues/10...
- prmoustache 2y ago
  > the rush to use wayland and nearly every distro making it as default, Which rush? It has been done by only a small fraction of distros like Fedora, after years of development of the first wayland compositors. Fedora main purpose has always been to implement bleeding edge tech stuff early so that bugs get found and fixed before people using more stable distros have to suffer from it. Nobody has been forced in any regression and x11 has continued to be available until now and there is no sign that the most conservative distros will drop x11 support anytime soon.
- jokethrowaway 2y ago
  Nvidia support is still poor (at least on latest cards), I'm forced to use X or I get tons of glitches. I need the proprietary drivers for machine learning. Not that I mind particularly, X is fine and everything works as expected. I can even have the integrated (amd gpu) take care of the desktop while the Nvidia gpu does machine learning (I need all the vram I can get, the desktop alone would be 100-150mb of vram) - then I start a game on steam and the nvidia gpu gets used. Funnily enough I had wayland enabled by default when I installed the system and I didn't understand why I was getting random freeze and artifacts for weeks. Then I realized I was not using X11
  - BlueTemplar 2y ago
    Isn't this an issue with Nvidia not releasing open source drivers ?
  - PcChip 2y ago
    nvidia has been great on wayland since 550; Everyone running CachyOS is on 570 now
- gmokki 2y ago
  I've used Wayland on Fedora for 16 years. Had to disable Nvidia GPU on laptop And use Intel GPU for first 11 years. Now have been using AMD GPU smoothly for 5 years. But I hear Nvidia is slowly getting back on the game. Let's hope they get stable support less than 20 years of wayland being in use on major desktop Linux distros.
bawolff 2y ago
> Wayland is a protocol. The problems people complain about are generally implementation details specific to GNOME or KDE or (in general) one particular implementation. I feel like at some point this is a cop-out. Wayland is a protocol but its also a "system" involving many components. If the product as a whole doesn't work well then its still a failure regardless of which component's fault it is. Its a little like responding to someone saying we haven't reached the year of linux on the desktop by saying: well actually linux is just the kernel and its been ready for the desktop for ages. Technically true but also missing the point.
- washadjeffmad 2y ago
  Wayland. Solving yesterday's problems, tomorrow.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    unlike x which couldn't solve yesterdays problems.
    - Qwertious 2y ago
      X is fine, most of the problems people bring up are niche and minor. Meanwhile, Wayland induces problems of its own, like breaking all sorts of accessibility systems and multi-window X applications with no solution in sight.
      - throwaway2037 2y ago
        > multi-window X applications I believe you. Can you share an example? To be clear, I'm pretty sure this can be done with Gtk and Qt, but maybe you are talking about older apps written directly in Xlib or Xt?
        aragilar 2y ago
        It's not the toolkit (as they work on X11 and other OSes with the existing toolkits), it's Wayland that's the issue (there are a series of Wayland protocols to implement this, but they are being blocked).
o11c 2y ago
"Wayland is a protocol" is exactly the problem. Protocols suck; they just mean multiplying the possibility of bugs. A standard implementation is far more valuable any day. With X11, it was simple: everybody used Xfree86 (or eventually the Xorg fork, but forks are not reimplementations) and libX11 (later libxcb was shimmed underneath with careful planning). The WM was bespoke, but it was small, nonintrusive, and out of the critical path, so bugs in it were neither numerous nor disastrous. But today, with Wayland, there is no plan. And there is no limit to the bugs, which must get patched time and time again every time they are implemented.
- dralley 2y ago
  X had garbage handling of multiple monitors and especially multiple monitors with different DPIs, and there was "no plan" to deal with that either. Nobody wanted to work on the X codebase anymore. The architecture bore no resemblance to the way any other part of the desktop stack (or hardware) works.
  - AshamedCaptain 2y ago
    Most of the garbage aspect is because toolkits refuse to support multiple monitors on DPI with X11 with the argument that "Wayland is just around the corner", for decades now. For example Qt does per-monitor DPI just fine on X11; it's just that the way to specify/override the DPI values just sucks (an environment variable). This stupid decision is going to chase us until the end of times since Xwayland will have no standardized way to tell its clients about per-display DPI.
    - ChocolateGod 2y ago
      It's not useful if you have to specify a scaling factor before the application has started, when the application can move monitors. This is something feasible on Wayland, X draws one large wide screen display.
      - AshamedCaptain 2y ago
hulitu 2y ago
> there was a time when watching certain videos with certain media players on Linux was incredibly painful because of how blatant and obtrusive the tearing was It was because of the crap LCD monitors (5 to 20 ms GtG) and how they are driven. The problem persists today. The (Wayland) solution was to render and display a complete frame at a time without taking into account the timings involved in hardware (you always have a good static image, but you have to wait). I tried Tails (comes with some Wayland compositor) on a laptop. The GUI performance was terrible with only a Tor browser open and one tab. If you do not care about hardware, you will, sooner or later, run into problems. Not everybody has your shiny 240 Hz monitor.
account42 2y ago
Tearing hasn't been a thing under X.Org for me since the introduction of Option "TearFree".

bpfrh 2y ago

I mean most of the things are the fault of a badly designed or non existent protocols: -Problems with non western input systems -Accessibility -Remote control(took around 2 years to be stable I think?) -Bad color management Then there's the things that did work in x11 but not in wayland: -Bad support for keymapping(the input library says keymapping should be implemented by the compositor, gnome says not in scope, so we have a regression) -bad nvidia support for the first two years? three years? While these things are compositor/hw vendor faults, the rush to use wayland and nearly every distro making it as default, forced major regressions and wayland kinda promised to improve the x11 based experience.

AtlasBarfed 2y ago
Yes, and to the parents point it was a CHANGE in protocol. I get there was cruft in x. But the moment selected was a barrier to Linux desktop adoption precisely when the greatest opportunity in decades was present. And the desktop was reimplemented. Now in this period kde and gnome both decided to do rewrites, Ubuntu did their own desktop, got it up to snuff, and abandoned it. The lunacy wasn't just Wayland. If we are complaining the gnome compositor sucks... I mean , should that be the goddamn reference implementation? What percent of desktops are gnome, 80% at least? If the gnome composting ready for primetime, then Wayland isn't ready for primetime.
- vincent-manis 2y ago
  >If the gnome composting ready for primetime, then Wayland isn't ready for primetime. I use Sway, which uses a different compos[i]tor than Gnome. I would like to see similar results for wlroots, Sway's compositor, though I'm not actually interested enough to do the experiment (I guess that would be comparing Sway with i3). Cursor lag in Sway is not enough to bother me. I have on occasion used Gnome on the same machine(s), and never been bothered by lag. As others have pointed out, Wayland is a protocol, not a compositor.
  - tankenmate 2y ago
    "As others have pointed out, Wayland is a protocol, not a compositor." But the Wayland protocol requires a compositor, so here we are.
    - vincent-manis 2y ago
      I have no idea of the difference(s) in performance between wlroots and Gnome's compositor. Protocols do not have performance, implementations do. If someone can prove that the Wayland protocol, on a certain set of tasks, and in a certain environment, has a better or worse performance than the X11 protocol, then it might be possible to make abstract comparisons on protocol. Given that Gnome runs on both X and Wayland, it might be interesting to hear from the Gnome authors on the performance differences.
tuna74 2y ago
I have run Wayland since it was available for testing on Fedora Workstation and I have had zero problems inputting Japanese and Chinese. With regards to accessibility, what problems have you had exactly?
- ChocolateGod 2y ago
  > With regards to accessibility, what problems have you had exactly? Fedora shipped a broken screen reader for 8 years.
  - tuna74 2y ago
    Is there a bug report for this anywhere? Does everything work now?
    - ChocolateGod 2y ago
      I vaguely remember someone made a blog post about it and got piled-on. I think it's now fixed or being fixed. Edit: Found it https://ar.al/2024/06/23/fedora-has-been-shipping-with-a-broken-screen-reader-for-nine-years-but-the-real-problem-is-me/ https://ar.al/2024/06/23/fedora-has-been-shipping-with-a-bro...
- thayne 2y ago
  I think that gnome has had built-in IME, but at least for a long time, it wasn't possible to use a third party system with gnome, or use gnome's with other compositors. And I'm pretty sure the situation was the same for sreen readers and on-screen keyboards. The wlroots project created their own protocols to support external applications to provide such features, since that is out of scope for a compositor like sway, but there are still missing pieces.
- LtWorf 2y ago
  2 finger scroll doesn't work on my thinkpad model. Not a bug, apparently. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/issues/1059 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/issues/10...
prmoustache 2y ago
> the rush to use wayland and nearly every distro making it as default, Which rush? It has been done by only a small fraction of distros like Fedora, after years of development of the first wayland compositors. Fedora main purpose has always been to implement bleeding edge tech stuff early so that bugs get found and fixed before people using more stable distros have to suffer from it. Nobody has been forced in any regression and x11 has continued to be available until now and there is no sign that the most conservative distros will drop x11 support anytime soon.
jokethrowaway 2y ago
Nvidia support is still poor (at least on latest cards), I'm forced to use X or I get tons of glitches. I need the proprietary drivers for machine learning. Not that I mind particularly, X is fine and everything works as expected. I can even have the integrated (amd gpu) take care of the desktop while the Nvidia gpu does machine learning (I need all the vram I can get, the desktop alone would be 100-150mb of vram) - then I start a game on steam and the nvidia gpu gets used. Funnily enough I had wayland enabled by default when I installed the system and I didn't understand why I was getting random freeze and artifacts for weeks. Then I realized I was not using X11
- BlueTemplar 2y ago
  Isn't this an issue with Nvidia not releasing open source drivers ?
- PcChip 2y ago
  nvidia has been great on wayland since 550; Everyone running CachyOS is on 570 now
gmokki 2y ago
I've used Wayland on Fedora for 16 years. Had to disable Nvidia GPU on laptop And use Intel GPU for first 11 years. Now have been using AMD GPU smoothly for 5 years. But I hear Nvidia is slowly getting back on the game. Let's hope they get stable support less than 20 years of wayland being in use on major desktop Linux distros.

bawolff 2y ago

> Wayland is a protocol. The problems people complain about are generally implementation details specific to GNOME or KDE or (in general) one particular implementation. I feel like at some point this is a cop-out. Wayland is a protocol but its also a "system" involving many components. If the product as a whole doesn't work well then its still a failure regardless of which component's fault it is. Its a little like responding to someone saying we haven't reached the year of linux on the desktop by saying: well actually linux is just the kernel and its been ready for the desktop for ages. Technically true but also missing the point.

washadjeffmad 2y ago
Wayland. Solving yesterday's problems, tomorrow.
- bluGill 2y ago
  unlike x which couldn't solve yesterdays problems.
  - Qwertious 2y ago
    X is fine, most of the problems people bring up are niche and minor. Meanwhile, Wayland induces problems of its own, like breaking all sorts of accessibility systems and multi-window X applications with no solution in sight.
    - throwaway2037 2y ago
      > multi-window X applications I believe you. Can you share an example? To be clear, I'm pretty sure this can be done with Gtk and Qt, but maybe you are talking about older apps written directly in Xlib or Xt?
      - aragilar 2y ago
        It's not the toolkit (as they work on X11 and other OSes with the existing toolkits), it's Wayland that's the issue (there are a series of Wayland protocols to implement this, but they are being blocked).

o11c 2y ago

"Wayland is a protocol" is exactly the problem. Protocols suck; they just mean multiplying the possibility of bugs. A standard implementation is far more valuable any day. With X11, it was simple: everybody used Xfree86 (or eventually the Xorg fork, but forks are not reimplementations) and libX11 (later libxcb was shimmed underneath with careful planning). The WM was bespoke, but it was small, nonintrusive, and out of the critical path, so bugs in it were neither numerous nor disastrous. But today, with Wayland, there is no plan. And there is no limit to the bugs, which must get patched time and time again every time they are implemented.

dralley 2y ago
X had garbage handling of multiple monitors and especially multiple monitors with different DPIs, and there was "no plan" to deal with that either. Nobody wanted to work on the X codebase anymore. The architecture bore no resemblance to the way any other part of the desktop stack (or hardware) works.
- AshamedCaptain 2y ago
  Most of the garbage aspect is because toolkits refuse to support multiple monitors on DPI with X11 with the argument that "Wayland is just around the corner", for decades now. For example Qt does per-monitor DPI just fine on X11; it's just that the way to specify/override the DPI values just sucks (an environment variable). This stupid decision is going to chase us until the end of times since Xwayland will have no standardized way to tell its clients about per-display DPI.
  - ChocolateGod 2y ago
    It's not useful if you have to specify a scaling factor before the application has started, when the application can move monitors. This is something feasible on Wayland, X draws one large wide screen display.
    - AshamedCaptain 2y ago

hulitu 2y ago

> there was a time when watching certain videos with certain media players on Linux was incredibly painful because of how blatant and obtrusive the tearing was It was because of the crap LCD monitors (5 to 20 ms GtG) and how they are driven. The problem persists today. The (Wayland) solution was to render and display a complete frame at a time without taking into account the timings involved in hardware (you always have a good static image, but you have to wait). I tried Tails (comes with some Wayland compositor) on a laptop. The GUI performance was terrible with only a Tor browser open and one tab. If you do not care about hardware, you will, sooner or later, run into problems. Not everybody has your shiny 240 Hz monitor.

account42 2y ago

Tearing hasn't been a thing under X.Org for me since the introduction of Option "TearFree".