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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

#211
post #30

I really miss the network transparency in Wayland. Just being able to start a program on another machine through an SSH session is so useful. You can use something like vnc but a "whole desktop in a window" is slower and not as handy. I'm on freebsd mostly anyway which isn't big on the Wayland train so I'm fine for now. But it would be great if X11 development would be continued.

> You can use something like vnc but a "whole desktop in a window" is slower Really? I’ve found x-forwarding much slower and annoying unless the host is on a LAN.

I think you've probably answered the question there; there are a lot of hosts on my LAN. X works great.

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

#212
post #186
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Firefox is quite buggy on Wayland Is it? I moved to Sway (a Wayland WM) a few months ago, and run FF exclusively. Hell, I even run Firefox ESR (as provided by Debian), and I've noticed precisely one bug, and it's tiny: the main FF hamburger menu has a vertical scrollbar even if it's got plenty of vertical space left on the screen. Whatever, I use that menu once in a blue moon. Everything else is perfect ! What are…

> The only copy/paste behavioral difference I've noticed on Wayland is that I lose the copied data if I close the source program.

This is because sway by default does not provide a "clipboard manager" component. It has been the case for a long time that the clipboard is only actually populated when you paste, copying merely stores a reference. This is so you can copy/paste multi gigabyte files without running out of memory. A clipboard manager component solves this issue by intelligently saving your clipboard as applications come and go.

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

#213
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that doesn't why not get all high dpi hardware

My external monitor is 3440x1440. Equivalent HiDPI monitors didn't exist. Perhaps maybe they do now, but the pricing would be prohibitive.

My 3840x2160 external monitor has a pixel density of approx. 275 ppi. IIRC it cost approx. $300, not exactly prohibitive.

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

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [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, s…

> Problem solved! Not so fast! Are you going to patch it to decade old binaries? How are you going to handle that Wordperfect from 1998? It certainly won't respect you new protocol. How the compositors are supposed to handle that? If you are not going to handle it, and just let it behave as it behaves today, you are still not achieving your goal of scaling all clients properly, and kind of throwing away that 30 years…

> Are you going to patch it to decade old binaries? How are you going to handle that Wordperfect from 1998?

The same way Apple handles a PowerPC-compiled application from 1998.

By incrementing to a new major version number, and stating in the changelog that users are free to keep running the older version if their software won't be patched.

Does Wayland provide a better solution than that? No, and in addition it also breaks a lot of newer applications. We don't need to do a lot of math to figure out more people would miss Xorg than Wordperfect.

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

#215
post #195
post #123

I wasn't even sure which of them I'm running even though I've been remote teaching for almost a year, i.e. frequently sharing my screen: > [user@laptop:~]$ echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE > wayland Apparently it's not as bad as it seems! However, now that I think of it, I haven't been able to share the entire screen and must add one application at a time to OBS. Maybe I've gotten used to this. At least I won't accidentally sh…

If you're using a wlroots compositor, then a workaround for sharing the whole screen is to use wf-recorder [1], which supports capturing the whole screen, and feeding its output to a virtual V4L2 device using v4l2loopback [2]. Software that is able to capture from a V4L2-compatible webcam (i.e. most) can them capture from the virtual device without knowing anything about Wayland. It's not exactly the most CPU-efficie…

Thanks for the hint, I'll check it out. I'm using v4l2loopback already for feeding OBS output to Teams/Zoom so I'm familiar with the process.

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

#216
This is so incredibly bad faith based. I have used wayland on my main computer for the last 3 years and the amount of GNOME-centricness is entirely choice based, there are lots of other options. There are items on those lists that have been long fixed, it's just that X tools don't work on wayland. One has to employ wayland tools. This is like saying "I can't use x86 assembler for arm processors therefore arm is useless". A new technology requires new tools (a different assembler in this example). Some tools are already present in wayland world (like redshift replacement) and some still have to be developed. Instead of whining the author could perhaps contribute to that effort and make wayland a better place.

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

#217
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> User services only really make sense for user stuff that requires more complex set up and tear down than start foo and kill it when I log out. > > Creating a user service per single line exec foo is extra ceremony. Then go with the parent post's other suggestion: a simple startup script that ends with launching Sway. > I have nvidia hardware so sway makes no sense for me to use. I mean the fact that Nvidia refuses…

I asked you to name even one thing sway did better and you tell me about the nature of the legacy code base. No user on earth cares any more than they care about the sharpness of the blades used to grind the sausage they ate for breakfast. I'm not sure why you imagine that nvidia is obligated to support Linux in the fashion you would prefer. I bought the hardware based on the existing drivers working well under Linux…

> I asked you to name even one thing sway did better and you tell me about the nature of the legacy code base.

OK, let me rephrase it: a feature it has over i3 is a higher probability of running on the platform provided by most distros in 5 years' time.

> No user on earth cares any more than they care about the sharpness of the blades used to grind the sausage they ate for breakfast.

Indeed. But if you're choosing a sausage you wanna have for breakfast for the next few years, you might choose better than the one made from the animal that people fear might go extinct.

> I'm not sure why you imagine that nvidia is obligated to support Linux in the fashion you would prefer.

Oh not the fashion I prefer. The fashion the Linux developers prefer. Most other providers of hardware seem to. What makes Nvidia special?

> X11s future departure seems like a thin justification seeing as it's future seems pretty secure for the next decade.

Perhaps. You may well be proven right, but I wouldn't bet that X11 is able to attract sufficient manpower to keep up going forward. Time will tell.

I'm not trying to convert you. I'm trying to give one argument why Sway might offer something that i3 doesn't.

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

#218

My biggest issue with Wayland is how it makes window managers a thing of the past. i3, xmonad, elightenment, ctwm, WindowMaker and dozens of others appeared only because X made it easy. Wayland makes developing window managers difficult again.

That's true, but wlroots (sway's compositor) has tried to fill some of that gap: https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/wiki/Projects-which-use-wl... It has its own libraries for things like screensharing (xdg-desktop-portal-wlr) that should work across these window-manager-esque desktops.

I have tried using wlroots, it's very hard. If you had to build your own compositor Mutter is far easier (it provides a GUI toolkit and all you need graphic wise). QTWayland is very nice too but won't get you far outside embedded uses (no xdg portals, no screen capture, etc.)

WayFire makes wlroots a bit easier but I find it quite messy/not clear (but it's very powerful & flexible).

There's definitively the need for an easy high level API for wlroots (the main wlroots dev started working on a high level scene tree API some times ago but it now seems kinda abandoned)

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

#219
post #212
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Firefox is quite buggy on Wayland Is it? I moved to Sway (a Wayland WM) a few months ago, and run FF exclusively. Hell, I even run Firefox ESR (as provided by Debian), and I've noticed precisely one bug, and it's tiny: the main FF hamburger menu has a vertical scrollbar even if it's got plenty of vertical space left on the screen. Whatever, I use that menu once in a blue moon. Everything else is perfect ! What are…

> The only copy/paste behavioral difference I've noticed on Wayland is that I lose the copied data if I close the source program. This is because sway by default does not provide a "clipboard manager" component. It has been the case for a long time that the clipboard is only actually populated when you paste, copying merely stores a reference. This is so you can copy/paste multi gigabyte files without running out of…

Got it! Thanks for clarifying.

Honest question: Is this something that people are missing in Wayland?

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

#220

Kinda offtopic but do steam, gog games, and wine games work on wayland well? What about things like obs?

It's very on-topic. In my experience no, they don't work as well as on Xorg. There was even a bug in Gnome's compositor too for batching input events at screen refresh intervals, which also makes fast-paced games less playable, even if they are native Wayland (not many of those, I believe).
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