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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

#91

Post by ekidd »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #39
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 integrat…

Weirdly, a lot of Windows games run fine on Proton. There are a couple that only work on the Steam Deck, which is an Arch Linux system. (There's actually a complete Linux desktop UI if you dig for it!)

But the Steam client is weirdly dodgy, even though it should just be a web UI that makes a few system calls. It's much worse than an Electron app like Visual Studio Code.

There's the next-gen Steam Deck UI which is less buggy but pushes a lot of graphics cards pretty hard.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#92

Post by [deleted] »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #74
flohofwoe wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No that situation is fine. The problems start if you don't want to use GTK or Qt, because in that situation Wayland provides only a subset of features compared to X11 (like not universally supporting window chrome rendering, so a native Wayland application needs to render its own window chrome which won't look consistent with other applications). I actually wonder what happens if you run a Gnome app on KDE, or a KDE…

> application which needs to render its own window chrome I understand this is absolutely subjective but I just hate this phenomenon so much...

[deleted]

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#94

Post by gjvc »

torginus wrote: post #82
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…

X hasn't been good at network in the past 2 decades. From my experience, Windows RDP has always worked way better, and when we were confronted with the need of having to do RDP access on Linux, we always found the more primitive VNC far superior. But even that is the past. Today you can stream your entire desktop over the network with highly efficient modern video codecs, courtesy of the hardware encoders built into…

In 1999 or 2000 I read a paper which compared remote desktop protocols and RDP was the clear winner, even then.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#95

Post by shlip »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #75
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…

I just had to look it up; Wayland has been around for 14 years already. How much software takes 14 years and still isn't stable? How big and / or complicated is this problem and the codebase anyway?

Ever heard of GNU Hurd ?

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#96

Post by zajio1am »

It us unfortunate that there is no hybrid Wayland / X compositor that would offer backwards compatibility for existing WMs, so people could switch to Wayland and keep all existing X-based desktops, while allowing new native Wayland applications.

Something like UI-less Wayland compositor that is also an X server, doing 1:1 mapping between top level X windows and Wayland windows.

(There is XWayland, but it is AFAIK does not work with WMs and does not map Wayland windows back to X model.)

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#97

Post by rascul »

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?

What was the copy/paste issue?

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#98

Post by _lvbh »

Filligree wrote: post #43
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?

Now it also breaks Electron apps.

Since when? I switched from MacOS to Linux with Wayland directly with no experience with X11. I’ve never had any issues with electron

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#100

Post by torginus »

I feel like one of the biggest issues with Wayland is that the 'mob energy' of the people who really thought who could slay the Microsoft Dragon, and make 'Year of the Linux Desktop' happen just isn't there anymore.

These people made things like drawing tablet support on X, as well as had the power of fixing all the little weird use cases you'd need for a truly large user base.

It's really funny that open source is bigger than ever, but Desktop Linux development has ground to a halt, and is in the hands of skeleton crews, and stuffy bureaucrats who enforce edicts like 'you aren't allowed to theme your operating system' and 'you must use the text editor built by our specific denomination' on a platform that's supposed to be characterized by being 'free as in speech'.

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