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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

#301

Post by paulie_a »

eitland wrote: post #49
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…

Sometimes things don't need to be feature packed and is a negative

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

#302

Post by iforgotpassword »

bluGill wrote: post #276
shock wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't expect a stable application to receive many patches. How many patches do you think Xorg should receive nowadays and in what areas?

There are a ton of long standing security issues. Which is why they are working on wayland: X11 isn't possible to secure as bad security is part of how it works.

My desktop is not a smartphone where I download random shady apps from an app store. I don't need any of the "security" wayland offers. If I don't trust some software I simply won't apt install it.

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

#303

Post by adrusi »

noobermin wrote: post #296
adrusi wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why doesn't it gain more momentum? It has plenty of momentum. The two main desktop environments have wayland ports. Several distros ship wayland by default. without providing a compatibility layer Wayland does provide a compatibility layer, XWayland, which runs an X server that does all the internal processing that Xorg does, and then send the final frame to wayland to put on the screen. It works very well, just with…

xdotool isnt the only issue. FFS read the attached article.

Screen capture is a recently solved problem on wayland. Yes, existing screen capture software that doesn't implement a new backend is broken, because the X model of screen capture was fundamentally broken, and one of main goals of Wayland to fix. But Firefox and OBS can do screen capture on wayland just fine, regardless of compositor.

The gnome global menu thing is a problem with gnome's implementation of wayland. The functionality could surely work if Gnome decided to support the same standard as wlroots does for allowing custom panels like waybar. Perhaps the complaint is that wayland give the gnome despots too much power, but if you don't like gnome, then complain about gnome, not wayland.

I don't know enough about KDE or AppImage to comment on those complaints.

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

#304

Post by haspok »

paulie_a wrote: post #294
brmgb wrote: 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…

In 25 years I've never noticed any screen tearing on a variety of hardware. I'm sure it's happened but it's never been a noticeable issue Is this really a problem for people?

Yes. Even scrolling a long page (like this HN thread) in a web browser can easily produce it. Can be very, very annoying.

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

#305

Post by vidarh »

casept wrote: post #90
elric wrote: 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…

Well, if the protocol is fundamentally broken there's no way to go but an incompatible rewrite.

The protocol is extensible. Nothing would have stopped an approach of having new clients signal they support new behaviour and aggressively deprecate old functionality to iterate the protocol.

The problem was not the protocol, but that the Wayland devs explicitly wanted to throw out a whole lot of functionality people actually depend on without having put thought into replacements.

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

#306

Post by josefx »

adrusi wrote: post #228
nerdponx wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here on all points, including Youtube. I always envisioned some kind of critical graphics failure from the way people talk about it. Maybe my standards are too low.

Maybe it's overhyped, but tearing does make me feel like I'm using an amateur OS, especially when I'm using X for some weeks and then hop over to wayland or Mac or Windows, and the picture looks stable.

Tearing can be a gigantic issue when you have full screen videos or render games. However as far as I could find these are caused by the KDE/Gnome/etc. compositor not running in sync with the screen refresh rate. Find a way to bypass the compositor(KDE options to disable it, GNOME with full screen windows, or tell the X window to override the compositor) and it goes away. Its easy to lob all problems on X but whats next? Did it also cause 9/11?

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

#307

Post by zbuf »

swiley wrote: post #290
zbuf wrote: post #202

Nobody has said it, but it seems we are reaching a fork in the desktop? For users, not 'right' and 'wrong' here, just two groups whose goals differ. Those supporting X.org are using X very much in the spirit of it; custom window managers, network transparency, and possibly bitmapped fonts, BSDs. And those in support of Wayland have arrived there via Linux with eg. GNOME and dominated by GTK and QT desktop apps; looki…

One more nice thing about X that people sometimes miss is that you can turn off compositing (this is the default really.) Lots of people say Wayland feels "sluggish" and this is likely a major contributor to that. Especially if you don't have hardware acceleration (and there are a huge number of reasons why that might not be working.) Wayland solves a lot of problems by deciding to just not handle things but we have…

Yes, I am also not using compositing, which I always assumed means apps render direct to the framebuffer.

Does this mean that moving to Wayland (or its implemenation) is going to add 1 or more frames of delay to my output? This could be a part of why I have always found other modern systems to be less snappy than my own X desktop.

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

#308

Post by [deleted] »

michaelmrose wrote: post #180
majewsky wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly how I'm assembling my Sway session. My Sway config ends with `exec systemctl --user start sway-session.target`, and that target links to all the services I want running in my session (redshift, notification daemon, etc.). If you don't like systemd, you can `exec my-session-startup-script.sh` in the exactly same way. The Sway devs maintain a list of common helper applications that work with Sway: https:…

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. I have nvidia hardware so sway makes no sense for me to use. Also it's developer is extremely abrasive. Furthermore a lot on that list isn't an even trade. ydotool is a poor unmaintained replacement, making yo…

[deleted]

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

#309

Post by zajio1am »

ric2b wrote: post #156
arp242 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How can people accept to use a display manager with constant screen tearing is beside me. I never even noticed it, and I never quite understood what people are on about with this. I had to go to YouTube to watch a demo video to see what it really looks like. And if I try it, then yes, I suppose I see some tearing if I move a window and pay close attention to it. But I never even noticed on my own, and am not bother…

It's especially noticeable with fast-moving videos or games.

Yes, tearing is visible in fast-moving videos or games (when run in windowed mode), but video players or games usually run full-screen, where tearing does not happen (as applications can do vsynced doublebuffering), so usually it is not an issue.

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

#310

Post by arepublicadoceu »

badjeans wrote: post #45
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.

You can honestly say it has less features than you would like, but saying that it's buggy, slow and a mess is simply dishonest.

For instance, Wayland handle my multi dpi displays like a champ. Whereas xorg is a no end nightmare with no acceptable outcome;

In wayland, I have tearfree scrolling by default. Whereas on xorg I have to access some old magic knowledge hidden in the archwiki.

So, in a sense, wayland have more features (For me) than xorg, whereas xorg is the featureless mess (For me).

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