3 ms·
The author is not wrong in the sense that many things X11 did for a long time and people were used to are not possible in wayland. My personal anecdotal experi
by fcpk 1y ago
The author is not wrong in the sense that many things X11 did for a long time and people were used to are not possible in wayland.
My personal anecdotal experience is that wayland is a lot better than X11 performance wise. It feels snappier, and it has been rockstable.
Please note I'm using a KDE based distro(neon) and on both nvidia and intel gpu it has been great.
If you are looking for raw performance based on simple frameworks, I do believe X11 will probably better, but for most people wayland will bring improvements. Yes I could get insane terms performance in an urxvt with FB under X11. Do I need it? Not really when my the system still behaves.
As a devil's advocate argument, it is true that wayland has come from being a lot worse O(years) ago.
some complaints from OP:
* "A crash in the window manager takes down all running applications" - this was true, but it has started to change, see https://www.phoronix.com/news/Qt-Wayland-Compositor-Restart#:~:text=In%20the%20event%20of%20a,to%20where%20we%20left%20off. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Qt-Wayland-Compositor-Restart#...
* "You cannot do a lot of things that you can do in Xorg by design" - I do not see this as an issue, other than having emotional attachement to Xorg.
* "It offloads a lot of work to each and every window manager. As a result, the same basic features get implemented differently in different window managers, with different behaviors and bugs - so what works on desktop environment A does not necessarily work in desktop environment B (e.g., often you hear that something "works in Wayland", even though it only really works on Gnome and KDE, not in all Wayland implementations)." - this is true, but again, it means that instead of complaining to a monolithic project you complain to a specific implementation. And I disagree this would be wasteful as there are clear design decisions done differently by different wayland implementation.
* "Wayland breaks screen recording applications" - Google Meet, Zoom, OBS Studio all work fine here. I guess if you mean X11 recording, then yeah it's broken.
* "Wayland breaks automation software" - yeah, again, changed of display protocol will break existing automation. That's called change, and is not inherent to wayland
* "Wayland is biased toward Linux and breaks BSD" - that one's valid.
* "Wayland requires JWM, TWM, XDM, IceWM,... to reimplement Xorg-like functionality" - Well duh, it's not X11, it does require a lot of new implementation. X11 was made as a kitchensync that can do everything. That's not necessarily a good thing in the modern world.
I think there is a pattern there, the OP is mostly complaining that things are changing and some new things don't yet work. But he forgets that wayland appeared out of very good reason:
- inefficient indirect rendering
- security flaws(too easy to actually do a keylogger)
- kitchensync approach(where it did everything) making it large and monolithic.