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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

#21
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?

Rather bad luck, I have much better experience with Wayland than X. Generally, moving to Wayland and PipeWire improved my experience with Linux desktop so much it's comparable with Mac/Win.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#23

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?

Yes and yes.

By which I mean many applications seem to have got things solved now through their dependencies, so it’s possible to see this as unlucky. But there are still some rough edges.

Too many applications still need app-specific fixes and workarounds, and those are often complicated by e.g. needing to override the environment inside a Snap or AppImage or whatever.

My frustration, heading back to desktop linux after a long break, is the energy spent trying to learn these things feels a bit wasted at my age.

I have a couple of needs I want to use Linux for, and I may end up setting up entirely separate machines for each, so that I don’t need to constantly switch environments.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#24
IMHO for applications it should be completely irrelevant whether they talk to Xlib, XCB, Wayland, or any other future window-system-glue API which sits below widget frameworks like GTK or Qt (just don't require me to use GTK or Qt in an application which just needs a GL or Vulkan canvas instead of a full-blown UI framework).

All those choices should just be differently flavoured client-side APIs to do the same thing (opening a window for 3D rendering, and getting input events).

Frankly, I don't care what's going on under the hood, just give me an easy ui-framework-agnostic way to open a window to draw into (and most importantly where I don't need to draw the frigging title bar myself).

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#25
post #18

Zorin makes it very easy for you to switch between X and Wayland on login. I must have fat-fingered something one day and switched to Wayland, and didn't notice. It's run that way ever since (over 2 years now) and I've only had to switch back to X once or twice to make certain games work on Steam, or just to stop myself from pulling my hair out with OBS. Other than that, it's mostly unnoticeable. Pretty impressive fr…

One thing that is a huge material difference is better handling of multi-DPI support between monitors, and display switching generally.

When I flip back over to X (because of Steam, like you say), I notice right away problems. Plug the laptop into the USB-C dock and everything comes up wrong, fonts all wacked, window sizes distorted. Have to log out and log back in to get things to a working state.

I just don't think X was really designed well for this world of transient displays.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#27

> Suggesting that these people change to a Linux environment with Wayland support is a non-starter; they are presumably using their current environment for good reasons That’s a hell of an assumption

>> Suggesting that these people change to a Linux environment with Wayland support is a non-starter; they are presumably using their current environment for good reasons

>That’s a hell of an assumption

How.. I don't get how you find this a contentious idea. The context of your quote:

"People on Unix environments that don't have Wayland support. They have to use X or not have a graphical experience."

You're stating that assuming that people "presumably" are using "BSD, and not Linux" for "good reasons" is a wrong thing to assume? Or some other Unix?

I don't see how it could be any other way? Would someone use any Unix, be unaware of Linux, and decide NOT to use Linux without a good reason? Any reason that causes them to prefer their Unix of choice, is a good reason!

Did you mean something else?

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#28
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?

I had ever-worsening input lag issues on my daily-driver ubuntu-based laptop for a couple of years. I tried a bunch of finnicky things, with very little benefit.

Then I switched to xanmod kernel. It was like I had an entirely new machine. It's remarkable. I kind of wish most newbie-friendly desktop environments recommended installing it on setup (it's easy to do via package manager.)

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#30
post #16

I’m in one of the “other smaller groups not included here”: people who rely on accessibility tooling that isn’t supported by Wayland. My options are: - keep using X and stay healthy - switch to Wayland and get strong nerve pain again - switch to Windows or Mac If Wayland were my only option, I would have to leave Linux for my health. So the technical merits of Wayland truly don’t matter. Accessibility is an oft forgo…

I can see how this would be utterly limiting.

But even trackpad support is kind of messy at the moment; gestures work but pointer speed just seems weirdly different no matter what.

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