Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet • Hacker News Board

Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#41

Post by edent » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 10:27 AM UTC

ekianjo wrote: post #20

edent wrote: post #3

This is completely the opposite of my experience. I've been running Wayland on Pop OS since last year and it has been great. X11 had horrible tearing on external rotated screens - Wayland fixed that. Colour temperature changing works. Screensharing works just fine on Chrome and Firefox. I use it every day. Screen recording works with Gnome's built in recorder. I'm sure there are a few esoteric bits which don't work -…

> Firefox Firefox is quite buggy on Wayland, you need to set up some environment flags before launching it, and there's a trove of bugs still open for it. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=635134 > I'm sure there are a few esoteric bits which don't work Like cut and paste between different kind of applications, which is an horrible user experience tbh.

Sorry, that's not my experience. I installed FF and launched it. No fiddling required. Everything works.

Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#42

Post by roblabla » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 10:27 AM UTC

jcelerier wrote: post #25

edent wrote: post #3

This is completely the opposite of my experience. I've been running Wayland on Pop OS since last year and it has been great. X11 had horrible tearing on external rotated screens - Wayland fixed that. Colour temperature changing works. Screensharing works just fine on Chrome and Firefox. I use it every day. Screen recording works with Gnome's built in recorder. I'm sure there are a few esoteric bits which don't work -…

> Screen recording works with Gnome's built in recorder. okay, but what if I don't like gnome ? e.g. I had to record a screencap of a bug of a software (that, uh, occurs only under wayland) so I went under weston and, well apparently there is also a screen capture tool but it is incompatible. On X11 I use simplescreenrecorder no matter the desktop (I mostly use i3wm or KDE Plasma depending on the circumstances). Also…

> okay, but what if I don't like gnome ?

Under X11, the screen capture and recording doesn't work when one of my screen is scaled and rotated. The capture will turn entirely black, even when capturing on my other screens. If I want to capture something, I need to unplug that monitor (or change my xrandr settings to put it back to horizontal).

Works just fine under Wayland with Sway.

Improvements in X11 break software all the time too. It's not a wayland thing.

Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#43

Post by elric » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 10:27 AM UTC

jchw wrote: post #19

> Wayland solves no issues I have This is a common sentiment, but it is kind of funny. Because software engineers working for companies will know the struggle of trying to justify reducing technical debt, improving security practices, etc. but fail to see why these things are useful to them personally when the tables turn. Wayland indeed “breaks a lot of shit” but it’s not an accident or done due to incompetence. Als…

> [...] reducing technical debt, improving security practices, etc

Reducing technical debt by rewriting everything from scratch (almost?) never works. It's the baby and the bathwater. It's the sort of thing that seems attractive to junior developers, but more seasoned folks know that the legacy system contains years of embedded knowledge and workarounds for "real world" issues. The new, conceptually beautiful system always fails to capture that embedded knowledge, and ends up breaking many things in many ways for many people.

Perhaps we did need a new display server, perhaps Wayland is conceptually better than Xorg, but it'll be many years before it reaches feature parity, if it ever does.

Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#44

Post by edent » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 10:28 AM UTC

axlee wrote: post #5

edent wrote: post #3

This is completely the opposite of my experience. I've been running Wayland on Pop OS since last year and it has been great. X11 had horrible tearing on external rotated screens - Wayland fixed that. Colour temperature changing works. Screensharing works just fine on Chrome and Firefox. I use it every day. Screen recording works with Gnome's built in recorder. I'm sure there are a few esoteric bits which don't work -…

Did you manage to get screensharing working with Slack on Wayland? Did you manage to setup more than 1 monitor to run on various (an sometimes very different) dpi settings?

I don't use Slack for that, but it works on Zoom, Teams, and Meet. So I suspect it works.

I have set up fractional scaling of different fractions on all three of my screens. No issues on Wayland.

Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#45

Post by badjeans » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 10:29 AM UTC

tjoff wrote: post #13

Not much constructive here... I'm of the opposite opinion. Think twice before doing anything with X as the experience and knowledge you gain will soon be useless. Instead invest in wayland, it works great and will only get better and X will only get worse at this point. The pain points are few but yes, if you must have screen sharing with a particular app that doesn't work with wayland that might be a dealbreaker. If…

> soon

That's been the sentiment for the past 12 years and X11 still works great and wayland implementations are a buggy, slow, featureless mess.

Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#46

Post by LeonM » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 10:30 AM UTC

izacus wrote: post #8

edent wrote: post #3

This is completely the opposite of my experience. I've been running Wayland on Pop OS since last year and it has been great. X11 had horrible tearing on external rotated screens - Wayland fixed that. Colour temperature changing works. Screensharing works just fine on Chrome and Firefox. I use it every day. Screen recording works with Gnome's built in recorder. I'm sure there are a few esoteric bits which don't work -…

Not to mention that mixed DPI screens work! I'm using Ubuntu 20.04 on an XPS13 and can finally have different scaling factors between the internal HiDPI screen and external normal DPI screen without awful issues.

Holy sh... I've been battling this for YEARS now on X11. I'll try Wayland and see if it's better

Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#47

Post by fabioborellini » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 10:30 AM UTC

I can no longer use Linux on desktop due to Xorg's lousy DPI scaling support and tearing. Let's face the fact that most laptops are currently HiDPI, modern external displays are too, and neither 1x nor 2x scaling is tolerable with most of them. Unfortunately my video card does not really work with Wayland.

I have never had this serious hardware issues with Linux since 2002. Xorg got outdated but the replacements are not here yet.

Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#48

Post by baybal2 » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 10:30 AM UTC

edent wrote: post #3

This is completely the opposite of my experience. I've been running Wayland on Pop OS since last year and it has been great. X11 had horrible tearing on external rotated screens - Wayland fixed that. Colour temperature changing works. Screensharing works just fine on Chrome and Firefox. I use it every day. Screen recording works with Gnome's built in recorder. I'm sure there are a few esoteric bits which don't work -…

> Colour temperature changing works.

And so it on X11.

Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#49

Post by eitland » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 10:32 AM UTC

jchw wrote: post #19

> Wayland solves no issues I have This is a common sentiment, but it is kind of funny. Because software engineers working for companies will know the struggle of trying to justify reducing technical debt, improving security practices, etc. but fail to see why these things are useful to them personally when the tables turn. Wayland indeed “breaks a lot of shit” but it’s not an accident or done due to incompetence. Als…

> Because software engineers working for companies will know the struggle of trying to justify reducing technical debt, improving security practices, etc. but fail to see why these things are useful to them personally when the tables turn.

Problem is, ever so often what should reduce technical debt ends up also reducing "technical assets" even more.

Firefox is a perfect example of this, they reduced technical debt by selling of so many features that it was sometimes hard to see a single unique selling point except not being owned by what I think is the worlds largest data miner (and quitter)!

For someone who used to use and advocate Firefox this hurts.

What is left is certainly better than Chrome on a number of points (except being bug compatible with Chrome) but the differences are now so small on every point except "not being owned by Google" that they are hardly visible to non tech folks.

Edits: a bunch above, mostly to soften and clarify. Also:

IMO the current management at Mozilla inherited a fortune of goodwill, a best in class web browser and significant tech debt.

They supposedly traded goodwill and features for reduction in tech debt but a few years later I suspect they squandered most of it on coolness because if there was less tech debt now, some of the old features should now be trivial to add back.

Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#50

Post by jchw » Tue, Feb 02, 2021, 10:33 AM UTC

edflsafoiewq wrote: post #38

jchw wrote: post #19

> Wayland solves no issues I have This is a common sentiment, but it is kind of funny. Because software engineers working for companies will know the struggle of trying to justify reducing technical debt, improving security practices, etc. but fail to see why these things are useful to them personally when the tables turn. Wayland indeed “breaks a lot of shit” but it’s not an accident or done due to incompetence. Als…

> But more to the point, that the problem is that moving away from Xorg as a display server really needs to happen eventually Yeah, to a "better Xorg". The problem is people don't believe Wayland is a "better Xorg".

I don’t agree that what we need is better Xorg. Xorg was a client-server based display server design from back when bitmapped displays and their respective UIs were in their infancy. And although it was certainly good for a time, I really think the idea of client-server UI has aged about as well as Polio. Even at the time it was computationally expensive (especially compared to say, Windows basically just jamming the UI into the kernel) but now it’s just crufty, inefficient, and weird. I don’t think there are many design decisions from X11 that you really want to keep anymore. Seriously, dig into the X11 protocol, what would you want to keep? If you want it to be feature compatible, a lot of cruft is going to need to come along for the ride.

There are some aspects of X11 that aren’t so bad, especially more recent bits. Personally, I think XI2 is relatively nicely designed. But on the whole, I just don’t think what we want is better Xorg.