Xorg is bad and deprecated but works, same with Firefox extensions.
Firefox devs decided to drop old extensions in favor of webextensions, now
firefox is at 3.66% marketshare and dropping every month.
(I am using Palemoon fork)
Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet
411–419 of 419 posts
Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet
#412A few months ago I came back to Arch with Gnome and Wayland after several years with Mac. Sadly, default Gnome installation is way less functional now than it used to be back then. Screen sharing doesn't work in Skype and Slack because of Wayland. Apparently Zoom circumvents this by making a series of screenshots. Systray is missing and most of extensions that promise to restore it don't work. Some parts of UI(e.g. w…
You could try MATE, which is a fork of GNOME 2. For a lightweight desktop, I prefer XFCE. For full-featured, I prefer KDE.
Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet
#413I 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 Yes, Xorg is now legacy, outdated, insecure, and does too much.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…
I have nvidia and use wayland. It works just fine. I think you are referring to a nested caveat of this which is that the subset of applications still coded soleley against the X protocol will run without gpu acceleration under nvidia and Xwayland. The number of these apps has dwindled thanks to gtk and qt moving over to wayland, now chrome and firefox have early wayland support, and like you said nvidia will soon support Xwayland.
Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet
#414Earlier 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…
> It's the sort of thing that seems attractive to junior developers You make it sound like Wayland has been pushed by some script kiddies, when in fact the lead developers on Wayland are the actual Xorg maintainers. To me, the migration from X11 to Wayland looks similar to the switch from DOS-based Windows to Windows NT. At the time, lots of programs were broken by the move because they assumed you could meddle in ot…
Exactly! I laugh at this petition because nobody is maintaining X.org server right now or even wants to touch it. Last major release was iin 2018. It is a nightmarish cludge. Nobody is forcing anyone to upgrade their software but the rest of us want a future without X11.
It's not just the internals of X11 that are the problem, it's that the entire concept was baked in a different time. The major innovation of the X11 server was that, well, it's a server. It can be completely decoupled from the client, even physically if you use it over tcp. That was kinda nice, but then came GPUs, and direct rendering. The name of the game is now violating every single abstraction that stands between a userland app drawing directly to the display with only a GPU and a single graphics api in between. It was definitely not junior developers who rewrote the entire kernel graphics stack to move from frame buffers to direct rendering.
Computer graphics are pretty tough if you think about how many bits/s are being transferred to your 4k display at 60hz and how little latency we will tolerate. It's not like network data where we can afford to encapsulate it five times over and abstract it and forget about the contents.
Any criticism of Wayland should be with regard to what is next. Hell I'm not even convinced we need a display server, let's talk about that. I'm not going to take anyone seriously who says X11 is better, and because of a few insignificant issues like taking a damn screen cap (really? and that works fine now btw).
Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet
#415Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's the sort of thing that seems attractive to junior developers You make it sound like Wayland has been pushed by some script kiddies, when in fact the lead developers on Wayland are the actual Xorg maintainers. To me, the migration from X11 to Wayland looks similar to the switch from DOS-based Windows to Windows NT. At the time, lots of programs were broken by the move because they assumed you could meddle in ot…
Exactly! I laugh at this petition because nobody is maintaining X.org server right now or even wants to touch it. Last major release was iin 2018. It is a nightmarish cludge. Nobody is forcing anyone to upgrade their software but the rest of us want a future without X11. It's not just the internals of X11 that are the problem, it's that the entire concept was baked in a different time. The major innovation of the X11…
And by the way, that whole "never rewerite software from scratch"... that might be what they teach you in your startup accelerator or your CS classes, but in the real world, hardware changes fast, your clients change fast, and you will do well to start from scratch sometimes when fundamental assumptions change and you no longer want to support legacy hardware or legacy features that slow you down and everything can be drastically simplified with your new assumptions in hand.
Take for example, Mac OS 9 -> 10. Complete rewrite. One of the best decisions in computing history. And especially relevant here because the display server was one of the babies they threw out the window or whatever, and the quartz compositor was born.
Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
No, that does not solve the issue. Not using a compositor definitely makes tearing worse, on top of a number of other things, but even with a compositor, you'll get tearing on X, at least using intel graphics.
My notebook is using Intel graphics and there's definitely no screen tearing nowadays on X.org with compositing enabled.
Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet
#417My 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.
Enlightenment has support for Wayland. It is up to the hundreds of X11 window manegers if they want wayland or not. There a lot of distros supporting x11 WM:s very few supporting Wayland, Enlightenment, Sway, Wayfire, Taiwins, Liri shell,Hikari, a few supports Plasma and Gnome. Only Arch supports them all.
Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet
#418> 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…
I agree with probonopd on many things, but I will concede that the benefits of this rewrite for hidpi and likely other features is needed. The dependencies for things may shift more however to the DE layer and that is ok - but it will make things more complicated for many developers as they will have to test against DE's more methodically than what they had been is what I suspect.
I am picking up on this from writing app that cares about the currently focused app and with x11 that is easy to deal with. Wayland explicitly denies it from happening, only the DE can give me that information and I have to work out how to work with all of them individually if I want to retain parity. There are definite cons to that as it limits the DEs that I can support vs having the capability retained in Wayland.
Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've had the opposite experience too. I have an Nvidia linux card and Wayland on Fedora has always worked very well for me. In comparison Xorg on Ubuntu was a nightmare on the same machine
Do you use the proprietary drivers?
yes, I reluctantly do indeed