5 ms·

I've never used a system with Wayland (been on i3 for ~15 years) but every time a project like this comes up, I have to wonder why Wayland is even a thing. So m

I've never used a system with Wayland (been on i3 for ~15 years) but every time a project like this comes up, I have to wonder why Wayland is even a thing. So many hoops to jump through for things that should be simple. Sure, X11 has warts but I can make it do basically anything I want. Wayland seems like it will always have too much friction to ever consider switching.

badgersnake 7mo ago
Sway is basically i3 on Wayland. You pretty much keep your config file (with a few modifications), there really isn’t much friction. That’s not a reason to do it of course, for me the driver was support for multiple monitors with different scaling requirements.
- bandrami 7mo ago
  Sort of. If your software wants to do something like "know where the pointer is" it won't work on sway.
  - Gigachad 7mo ago
    Why would I want software to know where my pointer is other than when the pointer is over the software's window?
    - bandrami 7mo ago
      Well, in my case, because the VCF on my synth sets its cutoff frequency based on the pointer's Y position and its resonance based on the pointer's X position
      - badgersnake 7mo ago
        Sure, but that is pretty niche. My point was it’s pretty low friction for most people and certainly to try it. But obviously be pragmatic, if it doesn’t work for you because you have a particular requirement, or even if it doesn’t offer any improvement over what you have then don’t use it.
      - mega-tux 7mo ago
        I do not know exactly what all that means but does it needs to be desktop wide or just inside a specific app window?
        bandrami 7mo ago
        Neither way works in Wayland. A program can know where it was clicked but not where the pointer was immediately before that. For that matter Wayland doesn't have a concept of "the" pointer; there may be multiple pointers.
        user142 7mo ago
        Surely programs can know where the pointer is as long as it is over a window that belongs to the program. Otherwise hover wouldn't work.
        bandrami 7mo ago
        Hover is done by the client telling the compositor it would like the cursor to change its shape if it is over a certain area the client is drawing. But the client does not know where the cursor is or where on the screen the client is (or even if the client is visible at all).
        blue_pants 7mo ago
        I don't think this is true. As per wayland protocol docs (https://wayland-book.com/seat/pointer.html https://wayland-book.com/seat/pointer.html): > Using the wl_seat.get_pointer request, clients may obtain a wl_pointer object. The server will send events to it whenever the user moves their pointer, presses mouse buttons, uses the scroll wheel, etc — whenever the pointer is over one of your surfaces. [...] The server sends this event when the pointer moves over one of our surfaces, and specifies both the surface that was "entered", as well as the surface-local coordinates (from the top-left corner) that the pointer is positioned over. So the program should know the pointer's local coordinates.
john01dav 7mo ago
> I can make it do basically anything I want X11 can't do high refresh rates every time that I've tried to do so.
- hulitu 7mo ago
  Huh ? It did in 2000.
- Telaneo 7mo ago
  It runs just fine at 165 hz for me. Given that xrandr and CRTs have been around for a while, and both have supported high refresh rates for a long while, something seems fishy here. Something is probably at fault, but it's not X11.
  - hparadiz 7mo ago
    X11 can't do different hz on different screens. If you have a dual screen setup where one screen is 165 hz and the other is 60 you're SOL.
    - charcircuit 7mo ago
      Works fine for me with 144/120 with the second as 60.
      - imiric 7mo ago
        X11 can't fix climate change.
        hedora 7mo ago
        You joke, but the wayland protocol leaves this up to the compositor. Nothing in the protocol prevents your desktop environment from doing this.
        user142 7mo ago
the__alchemist 7mo ago
The hoop I recently jumped through: There's a type of input called "DeviceEvent" which is a bit lower level than "Window event". It also occurs even if the window isn't "active". Windows and X11 support this, but Wayland doesn't except for mouse movement. I noticed my program stopped working on Linux after I updated it. Ended up switching to Window Events, but still kind of irritating.
- fc417fc802 7mo ago
  Isn't being able to read input while unfocused a huge security issue? Meanwhile if you have root you're still free to do so directly.
  - 1718627440 7mo ago
    A Display server is not a security boundary. If you want that start your processes as different users.
    - ChocolateGod 7mo ago
      > If you want that start your processes as different users. How does this make any difference if they're going to connect to the same IPC that handles input/display? The display server must absolutely enforce some kind of security boundary between clients. Clients that are running untrusted code (e.g. a web browser) must not be able to hijacked into controlling a potentially privileged client (e.g. a root terminal).
  - the__alchemist 7mo ago
    I don't think so, and it's something every Windows and X11 Linux application can do. Perhaps this perspective is a divide between people writing/using applications, and those using/writing web servers? But maybe the Wayland team disagrees, and this is one of the reasons for this restriction? I'm speculating.
hurricanepootis 7mo ago
I've been on wayland since KDE had it available (like the KDE 5 days) because it offered fractional HiDPI scaling that wasn't buns. As a laptop user, it has been one of the best features of Wayland. Furthermore, getting stuff like VRR on Wayland working is way easier than X.org. And, Wayland also supports HDR.
WhyNotHugo 7mo ago
My reason for switching from i3 to sway (about 8 years ago) is DPI support. High DPI is a pain in Xorg, and essentially impossible with heterogeneous monitors. The migration was a one way thing. Lots of things are smoother and simpler, and not having to ever again touch Xorg.conf has improved my quality of life. To this day, I still have different monitors with different scale factors.
- imiric 7mo ago
  > not having to ever again touch Xorg.conf has improved my quality of life I haven't touched xorg.conf in decades. I suppose you might have to do it to configure some unique setup, but for me this hasn't been an issue in a long time. Now with Wayland, instead of having to touch a single config file, we have to learn how each compositor/WM is configured, and do it there instead. It hardly seems like an improvement in that regard, IMO.
  - WhyNotHugo 7mo ago
    > Now with Wayland, instead of having to touch a single config file, we have to learn how each compositor/WM is configured, and do it there instead. Not really. I only need to know how to configure the compositor which I use. I don't need to know how to configure all the other compositors, in the same way I didn't know how to configure all the existing Xorg window managers.
- somat 7mo ago
  The funny thing is that X11 can actually do heterogeneous dpi and Wayland can't. Unfortunately you will never find yourself in a situation to actually use a mixed dpi X11 setup (you lose your homogeneous desktop) and Wayland is better at spoofing it (for whatever reason fractional scaling works better in Wayland). http://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/mixed-dpi-x11/ http://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/mixed-dpi-x11/ My favorite quote from that writeup. "If you think this idea is a bit stupid, shed a tear for the future of the display servers: this same mechanism is essentially how Wayland compositors —Wayland being the purported future replacement for X— cope with mixed-DPI setups."
imiric 7mo ago
I'm with you. I haven't had major issues with X11 for a good couple of decades. Ever since I didn't have to manually edit xorg.conf, I forget when that happened. Granted, my requirements were simple, a laptop and occasionally one external monitor, though the issues I did run into were related to graphics drivers and NVIDIA shenanigans, but not to X11. Now that I'm on Wayland, I do feel that visuals are slightly more responsive and crisper, but honestly, it wasn't worth replacing a bunch of my programs, significantly altering my workflow, and dealing with numerous new issues I didn't have to deal with before. Unfortunately, the momentum is now fully with Wayland, and it's only a matter of time until X11 stops being supported altogether. The XLibre project is a noble idea, but a few contributors can't maintain an entire ecosystem on their own.
shevy-java 7mo ago
Many theories. A simple one is that corporations wanted more control. See systemd's rise - not related to wayland as such, but to corporate-driven influence. I am not saying all of the design is corporate-controlled. But a ton of propaganda is associated with how wayland was advertised, until some folks had enough with it and decided to stop buying the "xorg is dead" routine these corporations push on: https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver It will be interesting to see what will happen though. The GTK devs said they will help kill off xorg with GTK5. KDE also wants to kill xserver. It would be kind of cool if that would not happen - imagine if a non-corporate controlled ecosystem would emerge. Not likely to happen, but it would be a lot of fun. As well as more real competition with wayland. Wayland broke its biggest promise: that it is a viable alternative to the xorg-server. I don't want to lose any feature, so it is a drawback for me.
- LeFantome 7mo ago
  Xorg is not dead. It is maintained by one of those corporations you are talking about. And since 2/3 of the Xorg code is in Xwayland, they will be maintaining it for a very long time to come. It is not going anywhere. But already a majority of Linux desktop users have stopped using it. And it will be 90% in the next 2-3 years. GNOME, KDE, Budgie, and COSMIC are effectively Wayland only now and XFCE and Cinnamon will be Wayland native before then. The GTK5 devs do not have to “kill off” X11. But it is not really worth their time either. Keep using Xorg, or Xlibre, or Phoenix. It should keep working. But don’t mind if the rest of us keep building on Wayland. By the way, I use Niri, a very cool and absolutely non-corporate Wayland compositor. Not sure how that fits into your narrative.
deterministic 7mo ago
I completely agree. This feels like the typical “open-source developers rewriting something that already works well, then forcing it on people who never asked for it” kind of project. It will take years to reach the feature set of X11. And for what? From my perspective as both a developer and a user, I see no tangible benefits. On top of that, it breaks software I rely on professionally. Code that worked perfectly fine under X11. Meanwhile, I can still build and run Windows programs I wrote 30 years ago on Windows 11.
Gigachad 7mo ago
From a user perspective it just works, the online issues are all hypotheticals or very specific scenarios. On wayland my computer just works, my displays can have different dpi scales, my video doesn't tear, and programs don't have full access to record the screen and keylog without asking permission.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]

badgersnake 7mo ago

Sway is basically i3 on Wayland. You pretty much keep your config file (with a few modifications), there really isn’t much friction. That’s not a reason to do it of course, for me the driver was support for multiple monitors with different scaling requirements.

bandrami 7mo ago
Sort of. If your software wants to do something like "know where the pointer is" it won't work on sway.
- Gigachad 7mo ago
  Why would I want software to know where my pointer is other than when the pointer is over the software's window?
  - bandrami 7mo ago
    Well, in my case, because the VCF on my synth sets its cutoff frequency based on the pointer's Y position and its resonance based on the pointer's X position
    - badgersnake 7mo ago
      Sure, but that is pretty niche. My point was it’s pretty low friction for most people and certainly to try it. But obviously be pragmatic, if it doesn’t work for you because you have a particular requirement, or even if it doesn’t offer any improvement over what you have then don’t use it.
    - mega-tux 7mo ago
      I do not know exactly what all that means but does it needs to be desktop wide or just inside a specific app window?
      - bandrami 7mo ago
        Neither way works in Wayland. A program can know where it was clicked but not where the pointer was immediately before that. For that matter Wayland doesn't have a concept of "the" pointer; there may be multiple pointers.
        user142 7mo ago
        Surely programs can know where the pointer is as long as it is over a window that belongs to the program. Otherwise hover wouldn't work.
        bandrami 7mo ago
        Hover is done by the client telling the compositor it would like the cursor to change its shape if it is over a certain area the client is drawing. But the client does not know where the cursor is or where on the screen the client is (or even if the client is visible at all).
        blue_pants 7mo ago
        I don't think this is true. As per wayland protocol docs (https://wayland-book.com/seat/pointer.html https://wayland-book.com/seat/pointer.html): > Using the wl_seat.get_pointer request, clients may obtain a wl_pointer object. The server will send events to it whenever the user moves their pointer, presses mouse buttons, uses the scroll wheel, etc — whenever the pointer is over one of your surfaces. [...] The server sends this event when the pointer moves over one of our surfaces, and specifies both the surface that was "entered", as well as the surface-local coordinates (from the top-left corner) that the pointer is positioned over. So the program should know the pointer's local coordinates.

john01dav 7mo ago

> I can make it do basically anything I want X11 can't do high refresh rates every time that I've tried to do so.

hulitu 7mo ago
Huh ? It did in 2000.
Telaneo 7mo ago
It runs just fine at 165 hz for me. Given that xrandr and CRTs have been around for a while, and both have supported high refresh rates for a long while, something seems fishy here. Something is probably at fault, but it's not X11.
- hparadiz 7mo ago
  X11 can't do different hz on different screens. If you have a dual screen setup where one screen is 165 hz and the other is 60 you're SOL.
  - charcircuit 7mo ago
    Works fine for me with 144/120 with the second as 60.
    - imiric 7mo ago
      X11 can't fix climate change.
      - hedora 7mo ago
        You joke, but the wayland protocol leaves this up to the compositor. Nothing in the protocol prevents your desktop environment from doing this.
        user142 7mo ago

the__alchemist 7mo ago

The hoop I recently jumped through: There's a type of input called "DeviceEvent" which is a bit lower level than "Window event". It also occurs even if the window isn't "active". Windows and X11 support this, but Wayland doesn't except for mouse movement. I noticed my program stopped working on Linux after I updated it. Ended up switching to Window Events, but still kind of irritating.

fc417fc802 7mo ago
Isn't being able to read input while unfocused a huge security issue? Meanwhile if you have root you're still free to do so directly.
- 1718627440 7mo ago
  A Display server is not a security boundary. If you want that start your processes as different users.
  - ChocolateGod 7mo ago
    > If you want that start your processes as different users. How does this make any difference if they're going to connect to the same IPC that handles input/display? The display server must absolutely enforce some kind of security boundary between clients. Clients that are running untrusted code (e.g. a web browser) must not be able to hijacked into controlling a potentially privileged client (e.g. a root terminal).
- the__alchemist 7mo ago
  I don't think so, and it's something every Windows and X11 Linux application can do. Perhaps this perspective is a divide between people writing/using applications, and those using/writing web servers? But maybe the Wayland team disagrees, and this is one of the reasons for this restriction? I'm speculating.

hurricanepootis 7mo ago

I've been on wayland since KDE had it available (like the KDE 5 days) because it offered fractional HiDPI scaling that wasn't buns. As a laptop user, it has been one of the best features of Wayland. Furthermore, getting stuff like VRR on Wayland working is way easier than X.org. And, Wayland also supports HDR.

WhyNotHugo 7mo ago

My reason for switching from i3 to sway (about 8 years ago) is DPI support. High DPI is a pain in Xorg, and essentially impossible with heterogeneous monitors. The migration was a one way thing. Lots of things are smoother and simpler, and not having to ever again touch Xorg.conf has improved my quality of life. To this day, I still have different monitors with different scale factors.

imiric 7mo ago
> not having to ever again touch Xorg.conf has improved my quality of life I haven't touched xorg.conf in decades. I suppose you might have to do it to configure some unique setup, but for me this hasn't been an issue in a long time. Now with Wayland, instead of having to touch a single config file, we have to learn how each compositor/WM is configured, and do it there instead. It hardly seems like an improvement in that regard, IMO.
- WhyNotHugo 7mo ago
  > Now with Wayland, instead of having to touch a single config file, we have to learn how each compositor/WM is configured, and do it there instead. Not really. I only need to know how to configure the compositor which I use. I don't need to know how to configure all the other compositors, in the same way I didn't know how to configure all the existing Xorg window managers.
somat 7mo ago
The funny thing is that X11 can actually do heterogeneous dpi and Wayland can't. Unfortunately you will never find yourself in a situation to actually use a mixed dpi X11 setup (you lose your homogeneous desktop) and Wayland is better at spoofing it (for whatever reason fractional scaling works better in Wayland). http://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/mixed-dpi-x11/ http://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/mixed-dpi-x11/ My favorite quote from that writeup. "If you think this idea is a bit stupid, shed a tear for the future of the display servers: this same mechanism is essentially how Wayland compositors —Wayland being the purported future replacement for X— cope with mixed-DPI setups."

imiric 7mo ago

I'm with you. I haven't had major issues with X11 for a good couple of decades. Ever since I didn't have to manually edit xorg.conf, I forget when that happened. Granted, my requirements were simple, a laptop and occasionally one external monitor, though the issues I did run into were related to graphics drivers and NVIDIA shenanigans, but not to X11. Now that I'm on Wayland, I do feel that visuals are slightly more responsive and crisper, but honestly, it wasn't worth replacing a bunch of my programs, significantly altering my workflow, and dealing with numerous new issues I didn't have to deal with before. Unfortunately, the momentum is now fully with Wayland, and it's only a matter of time until X11 stops being supported altogether. The XLibre project is a noble idea, but a few contributors can't maintain an entire ecosystem on their own.

shevy-java 7mo ago

Many theories. A simple one is that corporations wanted more control. See systemd's rise - not related to wayland as such, but to corporate-driven influence. I am not saying all of the design is corporate-controlled. But a ton of propaganda is associated with how wayland was advertised, until some folks had enough with it and decided to stop buying the "xorg is dead" routine these corporations push on: https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver It will be interesting to see what will happen though. The GTK devs said they will help kill off xorg with GTK5. KDE also wants to kill xserver. It would be kind of cool if that would not happen - imagine if a non-corporate controlled ecosystem would emerge. Not likely to happen, but it would be a lot of fun. As well as more real competition with wayland. Wayland broke its biggest promise: that it is a viable alternative to the xorg-server. I don't want to lose any feature, so it is a drawback for me.

LeFantome 7mo ago
Xorg is not dead. It is maintained by one of those corporations you are talking about. And since 2/3 of the Xorg code is in Xwayland, they will be maintaining it for a very long time to come. It is not going anywhere. But already a majority of Linux desktop users have stopped using it. And it will be 90% in the next 2-3 years. GNOME, KDE, Budgie, and COSMIC are effectively Wayland only now and XFCE and Cinnamon will be Wayland native before then. The GTK5 devs do not have to “kill off” X11. But it is not really worth their time either. Keep using Xorg, or Xlibre, or Phoenix. It should keep working. But don’t mind if the rest of us keep building on Wayland. By the way, I use Niri, a very cool and absolutely non-corporate Wayland compositor. Not sure how that fits into your narrative.

deterministic 7mo ago

I completely agree. This feels like the typical “open-source developers rewriting something that already works well, then forcing it on people who never asked for it” kind of project. It will take years to reach the feature set of X11. And for what? From my perspective as both a developer and a user, I see no tangible benefits. On top of that, it breaks software I rely on professionally. Code that worked perfectly fine under X11. Meanwhile, I can still build and run Windows programs I wrote 30 years ago on Windows 11.

Gigachad 7mo ago

From a user perspective it just works, the online issues are all hypotheticals or very specific scenarios. On wayland my computer just works, my displays can have different dpi scales, my video doesn't tear, and programs don't have full access to record the screen and keylog without asking permission.

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]