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

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

#161
post #20
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.

Yes I've been using wayland for over a year and there are lots of little bugs.

The main thing that annoys me with firefox is drop-down menus don't respond to clicks properly so I'm forced to use the arrow keys.

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

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The author obviously hasn’t tried plugging a high dpi monitor in to a laptop if they don’t understand what’s wrong with X This is the only actual, honest, problem that I've ever seen about X. Still, it does not seem a really fundamental problem, it must surely be solvable from within X? Do we really need a full-rewrite of X, unstable, with new bugs and less functionalities? (many of us don't use "desktop" applicati…

> Still, it does not seem a really fundamental problem, it must surely be solvable from within X? X gives you two options: set DPI per displays. The thing is, you cannot drag windows between displays, the app has destroy it, connect to another one and recreate it here. There's even no mechanism to detect multiple displays other that user setting up the DISPLAY env variable. Or you can do, as the Xorg does: use multip…

> [Xorg] limitation is, that all screens have to have same DPI.

The limitation is not true. Yes, the core protocol gives you a single, global DPI value. However, who cares about the core protocol? You have XRandR, which gives you a per-screen DPI. Alternative, you could have a freedesktop standard/convention where the DPI is stored as a global property of the root window, in a array of values, one for each display, so that you can override them.

Problem solved! I am actually running Gtk+ slightly patched to support that... trouble is, most of the toolkit is hardcoded to assume a fixed display or even process-wide global DPI, or at least it was when I last looked at it. Dunno what they did for wayland.

I really don't understand why we need to throw away an entire 30 years of software development just because the current property for storing the DPI only has space for 1 value instead of 1 array of values, one per monitor. Just use a new property.

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

#163
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Xorg is 16 years old Xorg is a fork of Xfree86 which started in 1991 but feature parity minus the cruft has been reached years ago. Some people disagree about what is cruft however. For example, I view 90% of the list in the posted articles to be minor softwares relying on undesirable behaviour and unwilling to adapt (the remaining 10% being misrepresentation of actually solved issues listed in bad faith). The orig…

> How can people accept to use a display manager with constant screen tearing is beside me. I'm not saying this isn't true, but I always find it interesting when I see people complain about screen tearing. How often does it actually happen to you, and under which circumstances? Personally I've been using computers since 1995, (Windows and Linux) and I practically never encounter screen tearing. And this is on a wide…

>> I'm not saying this isn't true, but I always find it interesting when I see people complain about screen tearing.

>> How often does it actually happen to you, and under which circumstances?

It happens every time I Watch a video on X, which is really annoying. It also happens when dragging large windows on my 4k. Wayland is fantastic in this regard.

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

#164
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Xorg is 16 years old Xorg is a fork of Xfree86 which started in 1991 but feature parity minus the cruft has been reached years ago. Some people disagree about what is cruft however. For example, I view 90% of the list in the posted articles to be minor softwares relying on undesirable behaviour and unwilling to adapt (the remaining 10% being misrepresentation of actually solved issues listed in bad faith). The orig…

> How can people accept to use a display manager with constant screen tearing is beside me. I'm not saying this isn't true, but I always find it interesting when I see people complain about screen tearing. How often does it actually happen to you, and under which circumstances? Personally I've been using computers since 1995, (Windows and Linux) and I practically never encounter screen tearing. And this is on a wide…

> How often does it actually happen to you, and under which circumstances?

Scrolling, moving windows, resizing windows, approximately constantly.

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

#165

This is a bit blunt, but I'm with the commented who says: > What a surprise. Desktop components requiring X do not work on Wayland. It's as if they're different display server protocol Yes, it's a breaking change. Yes, old software will have problems. But X11/XOrg has run its useful life

It's not meat in the fridge it doesn't go bad at a certain date.

Rhel 8 supports x11 and will be supported until 2029-2031. If they don't excise support by the next major release which is super likely it will end up supporting x11 until 2034-2036

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

#166
post #64
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...] 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…

I agree that rewriting things needlessly is bad. However I actually think the folks working on this knew exactly what they were doing and actually made a reasonable choice; they’re not rewriting Xorg, they’re making something completely and utterly foreign to what Xorg is. And I think it is justified regardless of whether Wayland ultimately succeeds or fails.

Here is a reasonable overview from 2012: https://lwn.net/Articles/491509/

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

#167
post #83
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I haven't followed the development at all but, Xorg is 16 years old and Wayland is 12. It seems counterintuitive that feature parity could not be attained in this time unless it's for philosophical reasons. Edit: Thanks for pointing out that Xorg is a…

> Xorg is 16 years old Xorg is a fork of Xfree86 which started in 1991 but feature parity minus the cruft has been reached years ago. Some people disagree about what is cruft however. For example, I view 90% of the list in the posted articles to be minor softwares relying on undesirable behaviour and unwilling to adapt (the remaining 10% being misrepresentation of actually solved issues listed in bad faith). The orig…

Screen sharing seems a critical feature to enough people to rise well above mere “minor feature” if the goal is to replace Xorg. That was probably true 12 months ago, but definitely true 8 months ago.

If the goal is to have a different display protocol that a significant fraction of the possible user base can’t reasonably use as their root display because it provides yet another way in which “Linux isn’t ready for this to be the year of the desktop”, that’s a perfectly reasonable aim, but it seems like Wayland is targeting replacing X, in which case supporting screen sharing (and recording) is probably not an ignorable “minor feature degradation”.

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

#168

While I am not the biggest fan of Wayland and understand the author, this link in the comments gives some reasonable responses/rebuttals: https://refi64.com/posts/dont-boycott-wayland.html They seem to point to https://pipewire.org/ for screen recording. I don't know how well that works out in practice and if there are other solutions for automation

Not sure about screen-recording, but for screen-sharing purposes, it breaks frequently (as in, every couple of months).

Which is not surprising, because pipewire, too, decided to start from from scratch instead of working inside gstreamer.

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

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Still, it does not seem a really fundamental problem, it must surely be solvable from within X? X gives you two options: set DPI per displays. The thing is, you cannot drag windows between displays, the app has destroy it, connect to another one and recreate it here. There's even no mechanism to detect multiple displays other that user setting up the DISPLAY env variable. Or you can do, as the Xorg does: use multip…

> It is a good thing that they are broken, because what they do is snooping on windows that do not belong to them. Don't want to derail this discussion anymore, but this argument is nuts. If you are so concerned that programs that you run can spy on other programs that you run, how do you deal that the fact that all of these running programs have full read-write access to all files on your $HOME ? EDIT: I agree that…

> t all of these running programs have full read-write access to all files on your $HOME?

They don't necesarilly do; if you are running flatpak, chances are that they don't.

For example, there is a flatpak for MS Teams. For application like this, you want it to be able to share your screen, but it doesn't have any access to your $HOME (in this specific case, only to ~/Downloads).

More importantly, if you want to tight up your desktop, why do you criticize something that starts attacking it from one angle, that it is not 100% solution? It is not; others are working on the other angles, and then together it will be the 100% solution. In this case, Wayland is only one piece of puzzle, not the entire puzzle.

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

#170
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Xorg is 16 years old Xorg is a fork of Xfree86 which started in 1991 but feature parity minus the cruft has been reached years ago. Some people disagree about what is cruft however. For example, I view 90% of the list in the posted articles to be minor softwares relying on undesirable behaviour and unwilling to adapt (the remaining 10% being misrepresentation of actually solved issues listed in bad faith). The orig…

> How can people accept to use a display manager with constant screen tearing is beside me That's solved by using a compositing window manager such as Compton.

That's also solved by using Wayland with Gnome 3 which comes by default and doesn't require me to tweak anything.
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