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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

#401

Post by adrusi »

account42 wrote: post #343
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…

> It has plenty of momentum. The two main desktop environments have wayland ports. Several distros ship wayland by default. Do they have a common screen capture and automation API yet?

Screen capture yes https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26000812

Automation no https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26000740

Though I would say that standardization of screen capture is far more important than standardization of automation, since screen capture software needs to work for all compositors, but my automation scripts only need to work on the compositor I actually use.

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

#402

Post by 72deluxe »

hodgesrm wrote: post #380
72deluxe wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if everyone is fine with Apple making so many changes. I think it's because they have no choice, being stuck with whatever Apple decides. eg. for years you couldn't resize a window from the left edge and everybody was "fine" with it. When they actually bothered to implement it, it was astounding to think you couldn't do it before! As for me, I await each Apple release with trepidation and fear. Will my a…

I abandoned Mac OSX for Win 10 (manager half of brain) and Linux (dev half of brain) years ago. It got really tiresome rebuilding my dev environments in particular with every new release. Butterfly keyboard, touch bar, and other hardware choices were additional hindrances. Infuriating design choices like doing away with 'Save As' were the last straw. I don't really care about UI improvements, to be honest. OSX Leopar…

I forgot the "Save As" removal! I type this on a Macbook with an irritating noisy butterfly keyboard where the left shift key works 40% of the time and I get duplicate "i" inputs periodically, with a touchbar that has a fault so the F12 region is constantly flashing in my face...

I remember Snow Leopard being a deep joy to use.

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

#403

Post by fabioborellini »

posix_me_less wrote: post #329
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.

I mean display scaling settings that are especially useful for laptops with high-DPI screens.

The desktop environments do have settings for scaling all the elements (not only fonts) but when running on Xorg, the alternatives in the DE are 1x, 2x and 4x, while many present-day configurations would require fractional scaling (like 1.5x) to be usable.

I have a 27-inch 3840x2160 display which I cannot use without scaling, since the UI elements get too small for my eyesight, and scaling everything 2x (effectively 1920x1080) kind of voids the purpose of buying a 27-inch display since the usable screen estate is downgraded to something typical for 23-inch screens. Our laptop has 13-inch screen with 1920x1080 resolution - again not usable without scaling and a disaster with 2x scaling (960x540). Windows is offering very convenient 150% and 125% scaling options on these pieces of hardware, so I had to migrate my professional work to WSL unitl updating to Radeon and Wayland.

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

#404

Post by steerablesafe »

Too wrote: post #399
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…

The biggest roadblock and catch22 is nvidia support. Developers using nvidia can't use wayland and hence can't contribute to better compositors as there is no incentive for themselves. Statistics say nvidia has around 20% global marketshare and for gamers it's up to 80%. My guesstimate is developers are somewhere in the middle there so you are looking at 50% of all developers that can't use wayland themselves. How is…

What's nvidia's market share among desktop Linux users? I picked AMD particularly because of the driver situation, and I don't even use Wayland.

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

#405

Post by vetinari »

simion314 wrote: post #392
vetinari wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are still people who uninstall pulseaudio, because "bloat" and then harass authors of audio applications to support their snowflake system. The forced PA brought some pain. but it forced swift improvement in audio drivers. Without it, we would still have half-buggy drivers that do not really work. Regarding Nvidia: all distributions that switched to Wayland default switched that only for supported hardware, so…

I still think is terrible for the users but probably great for some developers. So you would force the casual user that has no issue with X to suffer so the Wayland and GNOME/KDE developers would hear better the pain and fix the bugs and add the missing features. This is the job of bleeding edge distros to offer you the latest bugs and features. I understand that when you work on your free time you want to work on sh…

There is no split "terrible for users, great for some developers". Casual users do have issue with X; see this thread recently on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25970690. Would you consider that normal for users to handle?

Of course not. Casual users having no issue with X is a lie.

The fact is, that some subsytems on Linux are pile of hacks piled upon something built on assumptions that are no longer true. X11 is one of such subsystems. It is a dead end. When you are stuck in the dead end, you can either back up and once you are out, continue in your ride, or keep being stuck in the dead end.

Wayland is backing out of the dead end; yes, it is short-term, high intensity pain, when you are not going forward, and even have to go back for a while. Piling new hacks on top of X11 is trying how to continue going forward without backing out of that dead-end. You will be stuck in that place for a long time, and ultimately you will move nowhere. That is long-term, low-intensity pain. Some people do not take the long term view (or do want to avoid high-intensity pain), being stuck in a place works for them (and chronic low-intensity pain is fine to them).

These two approaches still clash, it is this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTdUmlGxVo0, all over again, 10 years later.

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

#407

Post by stragies »

mrob wrote: post #325
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…

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 a…

In an ideal world that would be an option to toggle. I can see use-cases/occasions for both "fast&nearly_perfect" and "slow&pixel-perfect"

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

#408

Post by simion314 »

vetinari wrote: post #405
simion314 wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still think is terrible for the users but probably great for some developers. So you would force the casual user that has no issue with X to suffer so the Wayland and GNOME/KDE developers would hear better the pain and fix the bugs and add the missing features. This is the job of bleeding edge distros to offer you the latest bugs and features. I understand that when you work on your free time you want to work on sh…

There is no split "terrible for users, great for some developers". Casual users do have issue with X; see this thread recently on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25970690 . Would you consider that normal for users to handle? Of course not. Casual users having no issue with X is a lie. The fact is, that some subsytems on Linux are pile of hacks piled upon something built on assumptions that are no longer true…

I agree that Xorg has issues, I disagree that Wayland was the best solution. Creating a protocol that specifies a subset of the features and then taking mroe then 10 years to get decent implementations for the subsets and then still having no unique answer on how to do global keyboard shortcuts and that pathetic delay until we got some kind of screenshot and screen recording solution...

If RH were actually competent would have had a roadmap and Xorg would be replaced with some Wayland implementation only when all X featues are ready. Until then RH can label it as Beta.

I don't like how you propose this unfinished stuff is pushed on users so maybe someone would get frustrated enough and make RH job, like WTF RH has tons of money, they could fins competent people to implement the missing stuff 10 years ago, and while at it they could have fucking fixed GTK or maybe buy Qt and the dev team .

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

#409

Post by Liskni_si »

PurpleFoxy wrote: post #383
Aardwolf wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by high DPI monitor? I have a 32" 4K monitor, is that high DPI? It works perfectly in X for me. I don't see any screen tearing when moving a window fast across the entire screen either, if that was the concern. I also could set up large enough font sizes in cinnamon and browsers.

The laptop part is important. Your laptop likely has a 1080p screen which needs to be at 100% scale while 4K monitors usually need to be at 200% scale. X does not allow this.

X does allow this, but it needs cooperation from clients, which in practice means that Gtk and Qt need to implement it, and they decided to only implement this for Wayland (which also needs clients to implement this!) because for them, X is dead and not worth supporting. It's not a problem of X per se. It's a deliberate decision to not implement a feature for X.

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

#410

Post by Liskni_si »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #323
krzyk wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This only works for people who don't care about precise font rendering, either because they just don't care, or because their visual acuity is bad and they simply don't see the difference. (People who arguably don't really need HiDPI displays in the first place.)
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