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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

#321

Post by noobermin »

grandinj wrote: post #168
hyperman1 wrote: post #62

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.

its amazing anything works in linux given this attitude towards stable code

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

#322

Post by enriquto »

krzyk wrote: post #281
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…

Exactly this: Wayland solves no issues I have (It is very similar to systemd, and the motto on page https://nosystemd.org/ that is what I think about systemd also: If this is the solution, I want my problem back.) If one doesn't use multi-GPU setups or high DPI they don't need Wayland, yet (later they will either have no options (like with systemd) or will buy better screens). For me e.g. I don't know if I have a pro…

Notice that you can use hidpi screens with Xorg and it works perfectly. The only problem occurs when you mix screens with very different pixel sizes on the same display and you want to move windows between these screens.

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

#323

Post by GekkePrutser »

krzyk wrote: post #281
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…

Exactly this: Wayland solves no issues I have (It is very similar to systemd, and the motto on page https://nosystemd.org/ that is what I think about systemd also: If this is the solution, I want my problem back.) If one doesn't use multi-GPU setups or high DPI they don't need Wayland, yet (later they will either have no options (like with systemd) or will buy better screens). For me e.g. I don't know if I have a pro…

Also, mixed-DPI works pretty well here on X. I just scale my low DPI displays at 50% with XRandR. It looks just as good as on Mac.

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

#324

Post by simion314 »

vetinari wrote: post #233
simion314 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And yet, distros like Ubuntu are too conservative, because they are too careful not to break something. Their signalling is then considered as it works, we don't have to fix anything, Ubuntu will keep things broken for us. Due to this attitude, they have slowed down Linux desktop by years, by not switching to Wayland by default in the past LTS release. How can you complain about Ubuntu LTS keeping Xorg as default in…

> How can you complain about Ubuntu LTS keeping Xorg as default in an LTS when RedHat itself had Xorg as default at that time. Isn't this hypocrisy or irony? RHEL8 uses Wayland as default. RHEL8 was released in May 2019. Ubuntu LTS was released in April 2020. What hypocrisy you are talking about? > (same thing of idiots complaining about upstart being shit while RedHat and Goole were still using and supporting it. Re…

So did you check the show stopper bugs that Ubuntu found? or they should ignore the bugs to please RH and it's fanbase ? Maybe the next LTS could profit by the fact that RH recently was forced to fix the bugs in Wayland (though not sure how many paying customers started using it yet and submit tickets for the devs to fix)

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

#325

Post by mrob »

brmgb wrote: post #83
yoz-y wrote: 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…

I consider tearing a feature. Tearing is an unavoidable consequence of writing to the front buffer, and writing to the front buffer is required if you want the minimum latency possible. If you write to the front buffer, then so long as the part of the screen you're updating is below the raster position you'll see it that same display frame. If you write to the back buffer and then wait for vsync to swap buffers and avoid tearing then you won't see it until the next display frame. I value latency more than aesthetics, so I never use a compositor or Xorg's TearFree feature.

The goal of Wayland is "every frame perfect", which means I consider it broken by design. I want imperfect frames right away, not perfect frames later.

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

#326

Post by rektide »

elric wrote: post #255
WhyNotHugo wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Many seasoned Xorg developers work on Wayland. All the decades of lessons form Xorg _were_ carried over to Wayland.

No. That's exactly what I'm saying doesn't happen with a rewrite, ever. You think you take all of the knowledge with you, because after all, you wrote the thing so you know how it works. But it just doesn't work that way. There is too much complexity to carry around in your head. I'm sure many lessons from Xorg were carried over to Wayland, but " all " is an insane exaggeration. And I'm sure many new mistakes were in…

too hardline. progress is possible in this world. software is complex but starting with better sorted fundamentals counts for a bulk ass ton of the marbles.

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

#327

Post by AshamedCaptain »

vetinari wrote: post #279
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is just setting a new property. The discussion here I thought was what is required to distinguish a client that is DPIaware versus one that it is not, for use by the compositor to decide whether to scale it transparently or not.

It's not just setting a new property. Meanwhile, today, you have clients that are dpi aware and are not setting the property. And they all will be out in the wild for an undetermined amount of time (because stuff works for the application developers, why bother?). If you do not handle them anyway, your users will complain that your desktop is broken.

It is just setting a new property. I am not sure we're on the same page here, but if your existing client is DPI-aware, and you just want to let the compositor know it, then it is a one-line change in your client.

As for the "Meanwhile" part, again, how is that better with a new display stack? Unless the point here is that it will be better to just break all those (DPI-aware) clients unconditionally, rather than actually offering them a way forward that does not involve targeting an entirely new display server API.

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

#328

Post by AshamedCaptain »

vetinari wrote: post #282
AshamedCaptain wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hardware encoding for WebRTC is in the works; that's something they would not be able to efficiently do under X11 at all. And this is a not true, as evidenced by the fact even software ported from Windows (OBS) does it.

I specifically qualified it with efficiently . As in, when the surface is in the GPU memory, the software doesn't have to read it over PCIe bus and then put it back into another buffer for the encoder; but that the encoder can do zero-copy encoding in the GPU memory. Here, Firefox uses dma-buf. Unless X11 exposes a special extension for exposing dma-buf, your client won't be able to do that.

You said it yourself. I even believe that extension already exists since it must be going on inside DRI3 for some EGL/VK extensions to work right now. Don't think it worth to create an entirely new display server API for just this.

And in practice, XShm-using OBS actually works better right now than this specific apparently Gnome-only dma-buf API. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kD70ur_xTmE

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

#329

Post by posix_me_less »

fabioborellini wrote: post #47

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…

What does "lousy DPI scaling support" mean? You can configure this in desktop environment, e.g. in Xfce Menu/Settings/Appearance/Fonts/DPI.

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

#330

Post by Deukhoofd »

steerablesafe wrote: post #72

I don't get why everyone gets so defensive for Wayland. It's a fact that a lot of things still do break for users if they switch, without existing alternatives or workarounds. Yes, Xorg is now legacy, outdated, insecure, and does too much. But what wayland did was to replaced one functionality of Xorg, without offering alternatives to other functionalities. Which is good, I guess, it has a clear and focused responsib…

People get defensive for Wayland due to the tone of the article. Sentences like "Let Wayland not destroy everything and then have other people fix the damage it caused" sound extremely hostile, making people who disagree immediately defensive.
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