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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

#31

Post by b112 »

pipo234 wrote: post #19
robinduckett wrote: post #5

> 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

Though so too, when I read it. But I think it's meant to be read in the larger context where the early adopters have already moved, the remaining desktop users are mostly in apathy on this subject (it works, whatever), and it would help if Wayland were to offer some clear merits to break the inertia.

The point was made in the context of "Other Unixes". It has nothing to do with Linux users, on Linux distros, not having Wayland support. It has to do with Unix users, not having Wayland support.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#32

Post by qwerty456127 »

This corresponds my point of view exactly. I'm 99% satisfied with X and see no practical reason in switching to Wayland as long as it breaks anything. I feel sympathetic conceptually but don't want to deal with any additional headaches (which can be expected to occur as many common apps still are not perfectly Wayland-ready) in exchange for purely theoretical (for me) improvements which don't offer any practical value to me. I also use X over SSH (even on Windows!) occasionally and don't really like the idea of loosing this feature.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#33

Post by causi »

As a Linux outsider, the X/Wayland thing is bizarre to me. The story I hear over and over is "X is dead, the last stable release was thirteen years ago, Wayland is the future and I love it except for these two hundred things I need that are broken on it." Like what the hell.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#34

Post by lynx23 »

ntietz wrote: 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…

Wayland kind of reminds me of the CORBA->DBus rewrite. GNOME 2 was awesomely accessible. Then came the "qwe need to switch to DBus" people, and basically destroyed the hard work of many years. For me, GNOME Accessibility never recovered from that blow. And then came Wayland, which made things even worse.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#36

Post by roenxi »

jchw wrote: post #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 t…

> 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 is by no means clear cut - X is competing against specialist applications like VNC and there is a real question mark over whether a critical application uses OpenGL. X can easily win on toy benchmarks that play to its strengths, but it is rare in the extreme for that to matter.

Why do we need a remote server to provide a GUI that doesn't involve OpenGL? It happens, but not often enough to be an advantage. SSH + VNC is a more reliable and general combination, the X protocol is a maintenance and security liability. Personally if I'm logging in to strange servers I'd rather be learning cross-platform skills that carry between Windows, Mac and Linux.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#37

Post by b112 »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #32

This corresponds my point of view exactly. I'm 99% satisfied with X and see no practical reason in switching to Wayland as long as it breaks anything. I feel sympathetic conceptually but don't want to deal with any additional headaches (which can be expected to occur as many common apps still are not perfectly Wayland-ready) in exchange for purely theoretical (for me) improvements which don't offer any practical valu…

And I think, even if Wayland was feature complete, I'd still only be 99% satisfied with it.. because, I cannot think of anything I am 100% satisfied with!

Every piece of software has something you have to work around, every piece of software has small issues, bugs, and there's always some issue. Thus, 99% is pretty much "perfect", because you'll never get 100%. And therefore, for me, X11 is literally perfect. I have zero, absolutely zero motivation to change.

Frankly, compared to 20 years ago, X is a dream to use. Autoconfig, incredibly rich support for multiple monitors, compared to decades ago. It's wonderful. I love it.

I sort of feel like Wayland is in ipv6 turf. Always gaining support, but always blocked in a lot of places for some reason. I fully expect ipv8 to come out, with some sort of additionals for inter-solar routing or some such, before ipv6 gets fully adopted.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#38

Post by viraptor »

kmac_ wrote: post #21
blueflow wrote: 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.

Pipewire got comparable to Mac/win months ago and now it's years ahead in terms of capabilities. BT codec switching on request, fully configurable graph of connections, multi input/output, sub-20ms BT delay, jack compatibility, etc. It's the biggest software success I've seen in a really long time and I don't expect other systems to catch up to the current state for many many years.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#39

Post by cmrdporcupine »

mpsprd wrote: post #13

The last time I played with Wayland: * It broke screen sharing things * It removed X forwarding * It made my copy-paste life more complicated * It made steam ui ever slower Were these points fixed? what is the current usability of Wayland on these fronts?

Steam is doing something wrong on Linux. I can't put my finger on what it is, but on my AMD based machine running a recent-ish Ubuntu it's just..a mess in both X and Wayland.

Sometimes it's their annoying chrome-fork, steam-web-runner or whatever in a constant crash-loop in the background, eating all CPU.

Other times it seems like if a game or the UI gets launched accidentally or automatically somehow on the integrated graphics, I have to go hunting zombie processes with kill -9 to get things to shut down enough so that I can start them using discrete graphics.

Sometimes launches games and they're in odd geometry.

Running it on X instead of Wayland sometimes fixes problems. But then other times not. Unpredictable.

They're using a chromium based shell, but I don't have these problems with other things like that (Slack, Chrome itself, etc.) And Wayland support in the chromium stack is ... ok? So what gives?

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#40

Post by kouteiheika »

This might be a hot take, but you'll have to take X from my cold, dead hands.

Or at least until things start breaking, or maybe until Wayland has e.g. stellar HDR support and I'll get a nice OLED monitor. Otherwise, no dice.

I know that X is a crusty old spawn of Cthulhu; but honestly, I don't really care? It just works! I set up my system 10 years ago with how the UI works (including my window manager), and it stably works since then without me having to ever fiddle with it. The fact that X's development is dead is also a feature, because there's no churn!

And when I see other people complaining what still doesn't work on Wayland (where everything works perfectly for me on X) I'm like, eh, I don't have the time for fiddling around; maybe I'll try it out some other day.

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