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The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

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Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#3
I recently upgraded to the latest Debian stable, which gave me wayland-based KDE. I thought to give it a try, but running old dosbox or wine based games in full screen doesn't seem to work: They appear in the top left corner, but don't change the resolution. I reverted to X for now. I might give it another try later. Am I just unlucky, or are the wayland edges still this rough?

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#6
Wayland should make developers' lives easier, and as such would be adopted and software converted to it without users even noticing.

For better of for worse Linux is still in the phase where software which would only interest developers ends up interesting also the end users, just like we have people who don't develop or administer anything and yet have strong opinions on systemd or GCC.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#7
Very true. Wayland is now stable enough to be used in a lot of "production" environments and I've been using Sway as my desktop for years, and yet still, there is work left to be done:

- Hardware support. NVIDIA support is spotty still. Easily the biggest issue IMO, though it's better than it was.

- Network operation. X will always be better here because it was designed to be (at least with toolkits that can still take advantage of XRender.) That said, Waypipe can work well too, but I find myself needing to tweak it for best performance. Having a better out of box experience would be nice.

- Apps. Electron and Chromium still default to XWayland and still have a laundry list of (mostly small) issues. VS Code currently is unstable in native Wayland mode. Qt QDockWidget works poorly in native Wayland: it was unusable in Qt 5. OBS crashes more often in Wayland, on top of being impacted by the dock widget problem.

(There are other issues, e.g. no obvious/general answers for automation, but these ones in particular make me weary of generally recommending people switch to Wayland.)

Until then, there's no point in pushing harder. These problems are showstoppers for many.

P.S.: Not all UNIX environments have good Wayland support but since its a common misconception, Wayland is not inherently limited to Linux and some compositors will run on BSD and there is even one for macOS, albeit more in the vein of XQuartz.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#8
post #4

I tried sway and foot (as replacement for i3 and xterm) and found the input latency to be really bad. Is this a Wayland problem or was i having bad luck with foot?

The input latency should be good normally. I play steam games on Wayland and they're smooth and responsive. Could be some weird thing for your specific config / hardware, but it's not broken overall.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#9
post #4

I tried sway and foot (as replacement for i3 and xterm) and found the input latency to be really bad. Is this a Wayland problem or was i having bad luck with foot?

foot uses software rendering only. How good is your CPU? It may have been Vsync... I think there has been progress on allowing the user to disable it.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#10
I'm from the group of people that do switch based on technical merits. I remember a few years back I gave it a try and there were a few usability issues with it. Small things here and there not working, annoyances too small to remember. I've since then always discarded the idea of switching based on that. I have to give it another spin, maybe things have improved in the last few years.
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