5 ms·

I still don't know why I would want to use it. The benefits don't seem to outweigh the costs yet, and xorg is tried and true. So many Linux articles and forum p

I still don't know why I would want to use it. The benefits don't seem to outweigh the costs yet, and xorg is tried and true. So many Linux articles and forum posts about fixing problems with your desktop graphics start with "If you're using Wayland, go back to xorg, it'll probably fix the problem you're seeing." You don't always have to replace something that works with something that doesn't but is "modern." My guess is that we'll only start seeing Wayland adoption when distributions start forcing it or making it a strong default, like what happened with systemd.

pshirshov 10mo ago
Working fractional scaling
- przmk 10mo ago
  I would venture to say that there is little overlap between X11 users and people with high-DPI screens.
  - secure 10mo ago
    I’ve been using X11 with high-DPI screens since 2013, but with integer scaling (200% or 300%), never fractional scaling.
  - RealStickman_ 10mo ago
    Nobody's going to buy monitors where they need fractional scaling or multiple monitors with mixed DPI if they know it's broken.
    - physicles 10mo ago
      Everyone’s so excited about the wave if windows users coming to Linux. Those people already have monitors. I switched in 2018 and was surprised I couldn’t use fractional scaling on one monitor like I’d been doing for years on windows.
      - jsheard 10mo ago
        Not to mention that fractional scaling is practically required in order to use the majority of higher DPI monitors on the market today. Manufacturers have settled on 4K at 27" or 32" as the new standard, which lends itself to running at around 150% scale, so to avoid fractional scaling you either need to give up on high DPI or pay at least twice as much for a niche 5K monitor which only does 60hz.
        toast0 10mo ago
        Why not give up on high DPI? Save money on the monitor, save money on the gpu (because it's pushing fewer pixels, you don't need as much oomph), save frustration with software.
        jsheard 10mo ago
        4K monitors aren't a significant expense at this point, and text rendering is a lot nicer at 150% scale. The GPU load can be a concern if you're gaming but most newer games have upscalers which decouple the render resolution from the display resolution anyway.
        michaelmrose 10mo ago
        The overwhelming majority of the low-DPI external displays at this point are 24-27 1080p Most high-DPI displays are simply the same thing with exactly twice the density. We settled on putting exactly twice as many pixels in the same panels because it facilitates integer scaling
        jsheard 10mo ago
        That doesn't gel with my experience, 1080p was the de-facto resolution for 24" monitors but 27" monitors were nearly always 1440p, and switching from 27" 1440p to 27" 4K requires a fractional 150% scale to maintain the same effective area. To maintain a clean 200% scale you need a 27" 5K panel instead, which do exist but are vastly more expensive than 4K ones and perform worse in aspects other than pixel density, so they're not very popular.
    - vladvasiliu 10mo ago
      I used to be like this. I actually ran a 14" FHD laptop with a 24" 4k monitor, both at 100%. Using i3 and not caring about most interface chrome was great, it was enough for me to zoom the text on the 4k one. But then we got 27" 5k screens at work, and that had me move to wayland since 100% on that was ridiculously small.
      - michaelmrose 10mo ago
        Why not 200% and increase font size slightly in all 3 cases?
        pshirshov 10mo ago
        Why to have a home if you can sleep in a cardboard box?
        vladvasiliu 10mo ago
        Because although I don't care much about the chrome, I sometimes have to use it. For example, the address bar in firefox is ridiculously small. Also, some apps, like firefox (again) have a weird adaptation of the scroll to the zoom. So if you zoom at 300%, it will scroll by a lot at a time, whereas 200% is still usable. Also, 200% on an FHD 14" laptop means 960x540 px equivalent. That's too big to the point of rendering the laptop unusable. Also, X11 doesn't support switching DPI on the fly AFAIK, and I don't want to restart my session whenever I plug or unplug the external monitor, which happens multiple times a day when I'm at the office.
        michaelmrose 10mo ago
        14 fhd is 157 ppi 24 4k is 184 ppi This really isn't this far off. If we imagined the screens overlayed semi-transparently an 16 pixel letter would be over a 14 pixel one. If one imagines an ideal font size for a given user's preference for physical height of letterform one one could imagine a idealized size of 12 on another and 14 on the other and setting it to 13 and being extremely close to ideal. >So if you zoom at 300%, it will scroll by a lot at a time, whereas 200% is still usable. This is because it's scrolling a fixed number of lines which occupy more space at 300% zoom notably this applies pretty much only to people running high DPI screens at 100% because if one zoomed to 300% otherwise the letter T would be the size of the last joint on your thumb and legally blind folks could read it. It doesn't apply to setting the scale factor to 200% nor the setting for Firefox's internal scale factor which is independent from the desktop supports fractional scaling in 0.05 steps and can be configured in about:config layout.css.devPixelsPerPx
    - wink 10mo ago
      That's a really odd thing to say. I don't really care about this but here's an example: I have 2 27" screens, usually connected to a windows box, but while working they're connected to a MBP. Before the MBP they were connected to several ThinkPads where I don't remember what screen size or scaling, I don't even remember if I used X11 or Wayland. But the next ThinkPad that will be connected will probably be HiDPI and with Wayland. What will happen without buying a monitor? No one knows.
  - ruszki 10mo ago
    We are under an article which tells you that you can have problems with Wayland and hiDPI screens. And for example I’m one of those people, who uses X11, because Wayland failed on many levels, like buggy video playing, crashing while changing monitors, or simply waking up my laptop with an external monitor, and I didn’t give more than a few days to fix these (cheers to the author to try this long), so I went back to X11. Which is still buggy, but on a “you can live with it level” buggy. Btw, everybody who I know, and I too, changes the font size, and leaving the DPI scaling on 100%, or maybe 200% on X11.
    - Zardoz84 10mo ago
      I have a setup with a high DPI monitor mixed with a normal DPI monitor and KDE over Wayland just works fine. The only issue that I found are with Libre Office doing weird over scaling and Chrome/Chromium window resizing his window to the oblivion.
    - pshirshov 10mo ago
      > Btw, everybody who I know, and I too, changes the font size, and leaving the DPI scaling on 100%, or maybe 200% on X11. Doesn't work if your screens are too different (e.g. 4k laptop screen and 32" desktop monitor).
      - AshamedCaptain 10mo ago
        It does work for Qt and KDE at least.
      - michaelmrose 10mo ago
        You can scale down from a higher resolution to make the UI perceptively the same size. You can do this with xrandr --scale OR for example the GUI in Cinnamon on Mint after you check "fractional scaling" under X mind you.
  - michaelmrose 10mo ago
    There is no particular reason for this theory to be true. X supports high DPI screens well and has for ages.
    - pshirshov 10mo ago
      Maybe it supports it sure, the problem is that it doesn't work at all.
      - michaelmrose 10mo ago
        It does work and has worked for over a decade. You can configure scaling under settings in Cinnamon or plasma for instance or via environmental variables in a simple environment like i3wm. The post is from the Dev of i3wm an x11 window manager complaining among other things about how well his 8k monitor works under x11 and how poorly it works under Wayland. You can also consult the arch wiki article on high DPI which is broadly applicable beyond arch
        pshirshov 10mo ago
        Yes, I know all that. Except it doesn't work. At all. Ten years ago there were cursor clipping issues, cursor coordinates issues and crashes and I've been home-baking patches for that. Also it was impossible for one X session to span across two GPUs. Dunno if that was improved. Now it's bit better, but for sure your amdgpu will entertain you with little nice crashes when you run something heavy on a scaled display. I'm not even talking about VRR, HDR and all that stuff.
        michaelmrose 10mo ago
        In that time I've had Hidpi work perfectly on first on Nvidia then recently on AMD GPUs on several different distros and desktops all running on X on several distros. They all worked out of the box and were able to scale correctly once configured. The totality of my education on the topic was reading the arch wiki on hidpi once. AFAIK one cannot span one x session across multiple GPUs although AMD had something that it once referred to as "eyefinity" for achieving this. It is rarely needed discreet GPU often support 3 or even 4 outputs One may wonder if you tried this a very long time ago back when AMD sucked and Nvidia worked well in 2005-2015
tormeh 10mo ago
I've had to dive into xorg.conf more than once. Switched to Wayland as soon as it became an (experimental) option in Ubuntu and never looked back. Probably helps that I've always had AMD cards when running Linux, but it has been smooth sailing nonetheless. I can vaguely remember something not working under Wayland in the early days.. Maybe something with Wine or Steam? Anyway, that has to be 10 years ago now.
- jauntywundrkind 10mo ago
  That's always what's missing from these threads. Wayland is boring actually. It just works. KDE, Sway, Niri, whatever, are all good. I don't know what to do. The outpouring of negative energies are so severe. But I think it's so incredibly un-representative, is so misleading. The silent majority problem is so real. Come to the better place.
  - adastra22 10mo ago
    How do I run a GUI application over ssh? This is what’s keeping me from switching.
    - ElectricalUnion 10mo ago
      waypipe
      - adastra22 10mo ago
        Thank you.
haukesomm 10mo ago
That leads to technical debt in the long term. Yes, it might be working well for now but the more outdated it becomes, the harder it will be to maintain later.
jchw 10mo ago
There's no obvious reason for an end used to switch to Wayland if there isn't any particular problems with their current setup, the main improvements come down to things X11 never supported particularly well and are unlikely to be used in many existing X11 setups. My big use case that Wayland enabled was being able to dock my laptop and seamlessly switching apps between displays with different scale factors. And as an added bonus my experience has been that apps, even proprietary ones like Zoom, tend to handle switching scale factors completely seamlessly. It's not that high of importance, but I do like polish like this. (Admittedly, this article outlines that foot on Sway apparently doesn't handle this as gracefully. The protocols enable seamless switching, but of course, they can't really guarantee apps will always render perfect frames.) OTOH though, there are a lot of reasons for projects like GNOME and KDE to want to switch to Wayland, and especially why they want to drop X11 support versus maintaining it indefinitely forever, so it is beneficial if we at least can get a hold on what issues are still holding things up, which is why efforts like the ones outlined in this blog post are so important: it's hard to fix bugs that are never reported, and I especially doubt NVIDIA has been particularly going out of their way to find such bugs, so I can only imagine the reports are pretty crucial for them. So basically, this year the "only downsides" users need to at least move into "no downsides". The impetus for Wayland itself is mainly hinged on features that simply can be done better in a compositor-centric world, but the impetus for the great switchover is trying to reduce the maintenance burden of having to maintain both X11 and Wayland support forever everywhere. (Support for X11 apps via XWayland, though, should basically exist forever, of course.)
- ryandrake 10mo ago
  > having to maintain both X11 and Wayland support forever everywhere I don't get why X11 shouldn't work forever. It works today. As you said, there's no obvious reason for an end user to switch to Wayland if there isn't any particular problems with their current setup. "Because it's modern" and "Because it's outdated" just aren't compelling reasons for anyone besides software developers. And "because we're going to drop support so you have to switch eventually" is an attitude I'd expect out of Apple, not Linux distributions.
  - 10mo ago
t_mahmood 10mo ago
I prefer Wayland, as I feel Wayland's performance is much smoother than Xorg. Though, I have no use for VRR, and I hate the slight lag that is introduced due to font scaling, so I do not use it either. But, I am stuck on Xorg only because of one app that I have to use to work. > My guess is that we'll only start seeing Wayland adoption when distributions start forcing it or making it a strong default, like what happened with systemd. This is already happening. in my knowledge, Archlinux, Ubuntu already switched to Gnome 49, which do not support X without recompilation. So most likely, any distro using Gnome 49 upwards will not provide Xorg by default. KDE also going to do it soon. Xorg is going away pretty soon I believe its step to the right direction, only issue is some annoying app holding us back
- cogman10 10mo ago
  This is the real reason to make the wayland switch. It doesn't really matter if you like or dislike wayland, the major DE have decided they don't like X11 and they are making the switch to wayland. X11 code is actively being removed from these desktop environments. If you want to use X11, you can either stay on an old unmaintained DE or switch to a smaller one that supports X11. But you should realize that with wayland being the thing major DEs are targeting, your experience with X11 will likely degrade with time.
  - t_mahmood 10mo ago
    Yes, and besides, developers not having to support two servers, can focus on improving the DE where it actually matters. And with that, fixing issues, adding features becomes much faster. I see it as a win for both developers and users in the long run.
  - hakfoo 10mo ago
    I guess I don't quite understand what the selling point of a "desktop environment" is. I use a grab-bag of random software but generally don't bother with the KDE and GNOME-specific stuff. It reminds me of things like the pack-in software you get with Windows. It's convenient because it all comes in one place and more or less works together, but not much of it is particularly best-of-breed. I guess they've sucked a lot of air out of some niches though-- I suspect a lot of utilities for things like system configuration and file management have turned into parts of the desktop environment rather than standalone tools.
thanatos519 10mo ago
I have essential workflows using x2x, xev, and xdotool. Apparently this kind of stuff is contrary to Wayland's security model, so I'm stuck on Xorg, and I'm ok with that.
- Phelinofist 10mo ago
  Out of curiosity, what are these workflows?
  - Solarsail 10mo ago
    Not the GP, but I recall the KeePass password manager using xdotool for its autotype feature. I struggled to get xdotool to work correctly back in 2014 on a Debian 7 personal computer. Not familiar with 'x2x' or 'xev'
  - com 10mo ago
    I don’t use x2x but use xev and xdotool for automated regression testing of GUI tools. I can’t find a low-effort, high-portability, low-menory way to do it with Wayland. Local and also in CI pipelines.
    - charmicat 10mo ago
      wev+ydotool?
      - com 10mo ago
        I might be in the wrong Wayland desktop environment; I couldn’t get it to work reliably. Headless Wayland was really complicated when I last tried it, and quite memory heavy. I’ll try again this month!
zouhair 10mo ago
For me mainly better HDR implementation.
- shadowpho 10mo ago
  Does X even support hdr yet? When I looked last time the answer was none
BoredPositron 10mo ago
Different refresh rates on different displays is just a killer feature for me.
- 2001zhaozhao 10mo ago
  Wayland just has the best multi display support hands down. (I am using Cosmic DE but KDE is similar) Windows: - Per-display scaling can be set to multiple of 25% (you can set more precise scaling ONLY if you apply it to all displays) - Windows across monitors with different scaling look weird - Mouse cursor movement across monitors based on screen pixels rather than scaled, which is inaccurate to physical distances when using monitors with different DPI - Under the hood handles all monitors with one rectangular logical monitor, which renders a lot of unnecessary pixels in any multi monitor setups where the monitors don't form a perfect rectangle - All monitors use the underlying refresh rate of the primary monitor for everything other than the mouse cursor (for example, if you have a secondary 60Hz monitor, timings on it will not be smooth unless your primary monitor refresh rate is a multiple of 60) Wayland: - Per-display scaling can be set to multiple of 5% - Windows do not span across monitors. This can be a downside in case you want to span a window across multiple monitors with the same scaling, but is mostly an upside - Mouse movements across screen boundaries based on actual scaled distance, so you can tune it perfectly to the physical screen distances - Each monitor can have its own refresh rate, and windows in each monitor actually update at the refresh rate of that monitor - Each monitor is logically separate, no unnecessary pixels rendered MacOS: - Similar to Wayland but per-display scaling is much more restrictive for external displays, sometimes there isn't any way to set a scale between 100% and 200% without blurring the screen - Apple Silicon hardware also limits number of total monitors supported, so it is impossible to use big multi-monitor setups on all but the most expensive hardware
amelius 10mo ago
The main reason I could imagine is security. Right now with X11, IIRC, if one application has access to your display they can read what is going on in other applications running on the same display. If browser tabs were able to do that, all hell would break loose. So why do we accept it from applications? Anyway, despite this, I still use X11 instead of Wayland because of all the shortcomings.
- MarsIronPI 10mo ago
  > If browser tabs were able to do that, all hell would break loose. So why do we accept it from applications? Because I don't run random untrusted apps all the time. Whereas I do visit random untrusted websites all the time.
  - amelius 10mo ago
    But Snap and Flatpak have an advanced permission system, designed so you _can_ run random applications that you don't trust.
redeeman 10mo ago
it already is default in many places, and is used by a large percentage
gf000 10mo ago
> "If you're using Wayland, go back to xorg, it'll probably fix the problem you're seeing." Well, I will be honest, I have had enough "edit this xorg.conf files to boot to a black screen" for a lifetime, so that's not the rebuttal you think it is. If anything, the (gnu/)linux desktop has certainly matured over the years and on well-selected hardware it more often than not "just works" nowadays, which was certainly not something you could tell before.

pshirshov 10mo ago

Working fractional scaling

przmk 10mo ago
I would venture to say that there is little overlap between X11 users and people with high-DPI screens.
- secure 10mo ago
  I’ve been using X11 with high-DPI screens since 2013, but with integer scaling (200% or 300%), never fractional scaling.
- RealStickman_ 10mo ago
  Nobody's going to buy monitors where they need fractional scaling or multiple monitors with mixed DPI if they know it's broken.
  - physicles 10mo ago
    Everyone’s so excited about the wave if windows users coming to Linux. Those people already have monitors. I switched in 2018 and was surprised I couldn’t use fractional scaling on one monitor like I’d been doing for years on windows.
    - jsheard 10mo ago
      Not to mention that fractional scaling is practically required in order to use the majority of higher DPI monitors on the market today. Manufacturers have settled on 4K at 27" or 32" as the new standard, which lends itself to running at around 150% scale, so to avoid fractional scaling you either need to give up on high DPI or pay at least twice as much for a niche 5K monitor which only does 60hz.
      - toast0 10mo ago
        Why not give up on high DPI? Save money on the monitor, save money on the gpu (because it's pushing fewer pixels, you don't need as much oomph), save frustration with software.
        jsheard 10mo ago
        4K monitors aren't a significant expense at this point, and text rendering is a lot nicer at 150% scale. The GPU load can be a concern if you're gaming but most newer games have upscalers which decouple the render resolution from the display resolution anyway.
      - michaelmrose 10mo ago
        The overwhelming majority of the low-DPI external displays at this point are 24-27 1080p Most high-DPI displays are simply the same thing with exactly twice the density. We settled on putting exactly twice as many pixels in the same panels because it facilitates integer scaling
        jsheard 10mo ago
        That doesn't gel with my experience, 1080p was the de-facto resolution for 24" monitors but 27" monitors were nearly always 1440p, and switching from 27" 1440p to 27" 4K requires a fractional 150% scale to maintain the same effective area. To maintain a clean 200% scale you need a 27" 5K panel instead, which do exist but are vastly more expensive than 4K ones and perform worse in aspects other than pixel density, so they're not very popular.
  - vladvasiliu 10mo ago
    I used to be like this. I actually ran a 14" FHD laptop with a 24" 4k monitor, both at 100%. Using i3 and not caring about most interface chrome was great, it was enough for me to zoom the text on the 4k one. But then we got 27" 5k screens at work, and that had me move to wayland since 100% on that was ridiculously small.
    - michaelmrose 10mo ago
      Why not 200% and increase font size slightly in all 3 cases?
      - pshirshov 10mo ago
        Why to have a home if you can sleep in a cardboard box?
      - vladvasiliu 10mo ago
        Because although I don't care much about the chrome, I sometimes have to use it. For example, the address bar in firefox is ridiculously small. Also, some apps, like firefox (again) have a weird adaptation of the scroll to the zoom. So if you zoom at 300%, it will scroll by a lot at a time, whereas 200% is still usable. Also, 200% on an FHD 14" laptop means 960x540 px equivalent. That's too big to the point of rendering the laptop unusable. Also, X11 doesn't support switching DPI on the fly AFAIK, and I don't want to restart my session whenever I plug or unplug the external monitor, which happens multiple times a day when I'm at the office.
        michaelmrose 10mo ago
        14 fhd is 157 ppi 24 4k is 184 ppi This really isn't this far off. If we imagined the screens overlayed semi-transparently an 16 pixel letter would be over a 14 pixel one. If one imagines an ideal font size for a given user's preference for physical height of letterform one one could imagine a idealized size of 12 on another and 14 on the other and setting it to 13 and being extremely close to ideal. >So if you zoom at 300%, it will scroll by a lot at a time, whereas 200% is still usable. This is because it's scrolling a fixed number of lines which occupy more space at 300% zoom notably this applies pretty much only to people running high DPI screens at 100% because if one zoomed to 300% otherwise the letter T would be the size of the last joint on your thumb and legally blind folks could read it. It doesn't apply to setting the scale factor to 200% nor the setting for Firefox's internal scale factor which is independent from the desktop supports fractional scaling in 0.05 steps and can be configured in about:config layout.css.devPixelsPerPx
  - wink 10mo ago
    That's a really odd thing to say. I don't really care about this but here's an example: I have 2 27" screens, usually connected to a windows box, but while working they're connected to a MBP. Before the MBP they were connected to several ThinkPads where I don't remember what screen size or scaling, I don't even remember if I used X11 or Wayland. But the next ThinkPad that will be connected will probably be HiDPI and with Wayland. What will happen without buying a monitor? No one knows.
- ruszki 10mo ago
  We are under an article which tells you that you can have problems with Wayland and hiDPI screens. And for example I’m one of those people, who uses X11, because Wayland failed on many levels, like buggy video playing, crashing while changing monitors, or simply waking up my laptop with an external monitor, and I didn’t give more than a few days to fix these (cheers to the author to try this long), so I went back to X11. Which is still buggy, but on a “you can live with it level” buggy. Btw, everybody who I know, and I too, changes the font size, and leaving the DPI scaling on 100%, or maybe 200% on X11.
  - Zardoz84 10mo ago
    I have a setup with a high DPI monitor mixed with a normal DPI monitor and KDE over Wayland just works fine. The only issue that I found are with Libre Office doing weird over scaling and Chrome/Chromium window resizing his window to the oblivion.
  - pshirshov 10mo ago
    > Btw, everybody who I know, and I too, changes the font size, and leaving the DPI scaling on 100%, or maybe 200% on X11. Doesn't work if your screens are too different (e.g. 4k laptop screen and 32" desktop monitor).
    - AshamedCaptain 10mo ago
      It does work for Qt and KDE at least.
    - michaelmrose 10mo ago
      You can scale down from a higher resolution to make the UI perceptively the same size. You can do this with xrandr --scale OR for example the GUI in Cinnamon on Mint after you check "fractional scaling" under X mind you.
- michaelmrose 10mo ago
  There is no particular reason for this theory to be true. X supports high DPI screens well and has for ages.
  - pshirshov 10mo ago
    Maybe it supports it sure, the problem is that it doesn't work at all.
    - michaelmrose 10mo ago
      It does work and has worked for over a decade. You can configure scaling under settings in Cinnamon or plasma for instance or via environmental variables in a simple environment like i3wm. The post is from the Dev of i3wm an x11 window manager complaining among other things about how well his 8k monitor works under x11 and how poorly it works under Wayland. You can also consult the arch wiki article on high DPI which is broadly applicable beyond arch
      - pshirshov 10mo ago
        Yes, I know all that. Except it doesn't work. At all. Ten years ago there were cursor clipping issues, cursor coordinates issues and crashes and I've been home-baking patches for that. Also it was impossible for one X session to span across two GPUs. Dunno if that was improved. Now it's bit better, but for sure your amdgpu will entertain you with little nice crashes when you run something heavy on a scaled display. I'm not even talking about VRR, HDR and all that stuff.
        michaelmrose 10mo ago
        In that time I've had Hidpi work perfectly on first on Nvidia then recently on AMD GPUs on several different distros and desktops all running on X on several distros. They all worked out of the box and were able to scale correctly once configured. The totality of my education on the topic was reading the arch wiki on hidpi once. AFAIK one cannot span one x session across multiple GPUs although AMD had something that it once referred to as "eyefinity" for achieving this. It is rarely needed discreet GPU often support 3 or even 4 outputs One may wonder if you tried this a very long time ago back when AMD sucked and Nvidia worked well in 2005-2015

tormeh 10mo ago

I've had to dive into xorg.conf more than once. Switched to Wayland as soon as it became an (experimental) option in Ubuntu and never looked back. Probably helps that I've always had AMD cards when running Linux, but it has been smooth sailing nonetheless. I can vaguely remember something not working under Wayland in the early days.. Maybe something with Wine or Steam? Anyway, that has to be 10 years ago now.

jauntywundrkind 10mo ago
That's always what's missing from these threads. Wayland is boring actually. It just works. KDE, Sway, Niri, whatever, are all good. I don't know what to do. The outpouring of negative energies are so severe. But I think it's so incredibly un-representative, is so misleading. The silent majority problem is so real. Come to the better place.
- adastra22 10mo ago
  How do I run a GUI application over ssh? This is what’s keeping me from switching.
  - ElectricalUnion 10mo ago
    waypipe
    - adastra22 10mo ago
      Thank you.

haukesomm 10mo ago

That leads to technical debt in the long term. Yes, it might be working well for now but the more outdated it becomes, the harder it will be to maintain later.

jchw 10mo ago

There's no obvious reason for an end used to switch to Wayland if there isn't any particular problems with their current setup, the main improvements come down to things X11 never supported particularly well and are unlikely to be used in many existing X11 setups. My big use case that Wayland enabled was being able to dock my laptop and seamlessly switching apps between displays with different scale factors. And as an added bonus my experience has been that apps, even proprietary ones like Zoom, tend to handle switching scale factors completely seamlessly. It's not that high of importance, but I do like polish like this. (Admittedly, this article outlines that foot on Sway apparently doesn't handle this as gracefully. The protocols enable seamless switching, but of course, they can't really guarantee apps will always render perfect frames.) OTOH though, there are a lot of reasons for projects like GNOME and KDE to want to switch to Wayland, and especially why they want to drop X11 support versus maintaining it indefinitely forever, so it is beneficial if we at least can get a hold on what issues are still holding things up, which is why efforts like the ones outlined in this blog post are so important: it's hard to fix bugs that are never reported, and I especially doubt NVIDIA has been particularly going out of their way to find such bugs, so I can only imagine the reports are pretty crucial for them. So basically, this year the "only downsides" users need to at least move into "no downsides". The impetus for Wayland itself is mainly hinged on features that simply can be done better in a compositor-centric world, but the impetus for the great switchover is trying to reduce the maintenance burden of having to maintain both X11 and Wayland support forever everywhere. (Support for X11 apps via XWayland, though, should basically exist forever, of course.)

ryandrake 10mo ago
> having to maintain both X11 and Wayland support forever everywhere I don't get why X11 shouldn't work forever. It works today. As you said, there's no obvious reason for an end user to switch to Wayland if there isn't any particular problems with their current setup. "Because it's modern" and "Because it's outdated" just aren't compelling reasons for anyone besides software developers. And "because we're going to drop support so you have to switch eventually" is an attitude I'd expect out of Apple, not Linux distributions.
- 10mo ago

t_mahmood 10mo ago

I prefer Wayland, as I feel Wayland's performance is much smoother than Xorg. Though, I have no use for VRR, and I hate the slight lag that is introduced due to font scaling, so I do not use it either. But, I am stuck on Xorg only because of one app that I have to use to work. > My guess is that we'll only start seeing Wayland adoption when distributions start forcing it or making it a strong default, like what happened with systemd. This is already happening. in my knowledge, Archlinux, Ubuntu already switched to Gnome 49, which do not support X without recompilation. So most likely, any distro using Gnome 49 upwards will not provide Xorg by default. KDE also going to do it soon. Xorg is going away pretty soon I believe its step to the right direction, only issue is some annoying app holding us back

cogman10 10mo ago
This is the real reason to make the wayland switch. It doesn't really matter if you like or dislike wayland, the major DE have decided they don't like X11 and they are making the switch to wayland. X11 code is actively being removed from these desktop environments. If you want to use X11, you can either stay on an old unmaintained DE or switch to a smaller one that supports X11. But you should realize that with wayland being the thing major DEs are targeting, your experience with X11 will likely degrade with time.
- t_mahmood 10mo ago
  Yes, and besides, developers not having to support two servers, can focus on improving the DE where it actually matters. And with that, fixing issues, adding features becomes much faster. I see it as a win for both developers and users in the long run.
- hakfoo 10mo ago
  I guess I don't quite understand what the selling point of a "desktop environment" is. I use a grab-bag of random software but generally don't bother with the KDE and GNOME-specific stuff. It reminds me of things like the pack-in software you get with Windows. It's convenient because it all comes in one place and more or less works together, but not much of it is particularly best-of-breed. I guess they've sucked a lot of air out of some niches though-- I suspect a lot of utilities for things like system configuration and file management have turned into parts of the desktop environment rather than standalone tools.

thanatos519 10mo ago

I have essential workflows using x2x, xev, and xdotool. Apparently this kind of stuff is contrary to Wayland's security model, so I'm stuck on Xorg, and I'm ok with that.

Phelinofist 10mo ago
Out of curiosity, what are these workflows?
- Solarsail 10mo ago
  Not the GP, but I recall the KeePass password manager using xdotool for its autotype feature. I struggled to get xdotool to work correctly back in 2014 on a Debian 7 personal computer. Not familiar with 'x2x' or 'xev'
- com 10mo ago
  I don’t use x2x but use xev and xdotool for automated regression testing of GUI tools. I can’t find a low-effort, high-portability, low-menory way to do it with Wayland. Local and also in CI pipelines.
  - charmicat 10mo ago
    wev+ydotool?
    - com 10mo ago
      I might be in the wrong Wayland desktop environment; I couldn’t get it to work reliably. Headless Wayland was really complicated when I last tried it, and quite memory heavy. I’ll try again this month!

zouhair 10mo ago

For me mainly better HDR implementation.

shadowpho 10mo ago
Does X even support hdr yet? When I looked last time the answer was none

BoredPositron 10mo ago

Different refresh rates on different displays is just a killer feature for me.

2001zhaozhao 10mo ago
Wayland just has the best multi display support hands down. (I am using Cosmic DE but KDE is similar) Windows: - Per-display scaling can be set to multiple of 25% (you can set more precise scaling ONLY if you apply it to all displays) - Windows across monitors with different scaling look weird - Mouse cursor movement across monitors based on screen pixels rather than scaled, which is inaccurate to physical distances when using monitors with different DPI - Under the hood handles all monitors with one rectangular logical monitor, which renders a lot of unnecessary pixels in any multi monitor setups where the monitors don't form a perfect rectangle - All monitors use the underlying refresh rate of the primary monitor for everything other than the mouse cursor (for example, if you have a secondary 60Hz monitor, timings on it will not be smooth unless your primary monitor refresh rate is a multiple of 60) Wayland: - Per-display scaling can be set to multiple of 5% - Windows do not span across monitors. This can be a downside in case you want to span a window across multiple monitors with the same scaling, but is mostly an upside - Mouse movements across screen boundaries based on actual scaled distance, so you can tune it perfectly to the physical screen distances - Each monitor can have its own refresh rate, and windows in each monitor actually update at the refresh rate of that monitor - Each monitor is logically separate, no unnecessary pixels rendered MacOS: - Similar to Wayland but per-display scaling is much more restrictive for external displays, sometimes there isn't any way to set a scale between 100% and 200% without blurring the screen - Apple Silicon hardware also limits number of total monitors supported, so it is impossible to use big multi-monitor setups on all but the most expensive hardware

amelius 10mo ago

The main reason I could imagine is security. Right now with X11, IIRC, if one application has access to your display they can read what is going on in other applications running on the same display. If browser tabs were able to do that, all hell would break loose. So why do we accept it from applications? Anyway, despite this, I still use X11 instead of Wayland because of all the shortcomings.

MarsIronPI 10mo ago
> If browser tabs were able to do that, all hell would break loose. So why do we accept it from applications? Because I don't run random untrusted apps all the time. Whereas I do visit random untrusted websites all the time.
- amelius 10mo ago
  But Snap and Flatpak have an advanced permission system, designed so you _can_ run random applications that you don't trust.

redeeman 10mo ago

it already is default in many places, and is used by a large percentage

gf000 10mo ago

> "If you're using Wayland, go back to xorg, it'll probably fix the problem you're seeing." Well, I will be honest, I have had enough "edit this xorg.conf files to boot to a black screen" for a lifetime, so that's not the rebuttal you think it is. If anything, the (gnu/)linux desktop has certainly matured over the years and on well-selected hardware it more often than not "just works" nowadays, which was certainly not something you could tell before.