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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

#111

Post by hotnfresh »

The good news is we’re only 4 years away from Wayland’s replacement being born, if it follows Xfree86/Xorg’s timeline (yeah, that is how far into its existence it is, shocking given the state of it). Not if it follows the X Window protocol’s timeline, but I don’t think it’s on the same level as that, longevity-wise, even if “wayland’s just a protocol” (eyeroll)

I’m holding out for that before I do much with the Linux desktop again. This split-desktop-system fiasco has dragged on for years and still sucks every time I pop back in to take a look. Maybe whatever red hat decides we’re all using next will finally get this right.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#112

Post by moody__ »

slooonz wrote: post #79
moody__ wrote: post #60

Wayland is the poster child for a rewrite that tries to be 'simple' and in doing so over-complicates things by under specification. Other commenters have mentioned that usability extension issues but I wanted to discuss my experience as someone who maintains their own wayland client (for drawterm: https://github.com/9front/drawterm ). There are plenty of technical differences between how KDE, Gnome, and Wlroots that…

> There is no way to specify how a client would like this upscaling to be done Isn’t it one of the points of content type hint ? ( https://wayland.app/protocols/content-type-v1 )

It would certainly appear so, I would need to give it a try to know for sure. Based on the compositor support table on that page, this would be even more compositor specific logic as it seems exclusive to KWin. Thank you for the link though, this is the first I had seen someone mention this.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#113

Post by jesboat »

dale_glass wrote: post #53
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 Excuse me, but BS. At least for anything of actual relevance. X11 networking works okay for stuff that looks like a classic X11 app. That's things like xcalc. Any modern text editor, web browser, or anything else is going to be dog slow. X11 has a bad networking protocol that's way too latency sensitive, and as a result is nigh unusuable…

In the 2010-2013 era, i did most of my computing over X over ssh on a fast LAN. At the time, YouTube and other video stuff worked fine, and my environment felt as responsive as local computing.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#114

Post by okamiueru »

kouteiheika wrote: post #40

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 stabl…

Is screen tear something that can be avoided in X11? That's mostly the only reason why I bother with Wayland

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#115

Post by jchw »

JohnFen wrote: post #108
jchw wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on this one? You can of course have multiple Wayland displays at once, and/or multiple VNC servers. But, presumably, you're talking about something entirely different here.

X lets me log into a machine multiple times simultaneously, with each login having its own, independently operating desktop. Wayland doesn't support this (or didn't the last time I checked). VNC does something entirely different from this -- it just shares an existing desktop remotely rather than providing a unique independent desktop (complete with different resolutions and such, if you like). So the effect is a bit…

> VNC does something entirely different from this -- it just shares an existing desktop remotely rather than providing a unique independent desktop.

Actually, not necessarily; you can use Xvnc to achieve this with X+VNC. It's an X server that serves over VNC.

Can Wayland do this? Yes! But, the problem is that there is no singular Wayland "display server". This is both a big strength and big weakness of Wayland. In this case, it means that I can't point to a single correct way you can do this. However, with the compositor I currently use, SwayWM, it's very trivial: I can start Sway inside of an existing compositor or X server to get a nested desktop. You could use this with Waypipe or X11 forwarding for example. It can also be started with wayvnc inside, to expose a VNC server from Sway, though this is not really any different from starting an Xvfb and running a VNC server inside of it.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#116

Post by yorick »

csdreamer7 wrote: post #101
ntietz wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Various nerve stuff in my arms, limiting my use of keyboards. With an ergonomic keyboard I can get through most days, but I’m having more flare ups lately so I’m doing more voice coding. I use Talon. It simply doesn’t support Wayland, and I believe its maintainer who says that there are issues with Wayland which make support infeasible. Using it on X makes my nerve pain much less.

> and I believe its maintainer who says that there are issues with Wayland which make support infeasible. * Where did they say that? * What are the issues? I am trying to narrow down exactly what the issues are. Too much of the conversation is 'something' is broken in Wayland because of 'something'.

https://artemis.sh/2022/09/18/wayland-from-an-x-apologist.ht...

talks about it at length.

It seems the main things missing for Talon are:

- input emulation, doable via uinput but not great - standard way to query the list of windows and active focus - for dwell-click support, you need to be able to know if the user is moving their mouse or clicking so you can cancel your autoclick

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#117

Post by JohnFen »

jchw wrote: post #115
JohnFen wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

X lets me log into a machine multiple times simultaneously, with each login having its own, independently operating desktop. Wayland doesn't support this (or didn't the last time I checked). VNC does something entirely different from this -- it just shares an existing desktop remotely rather than providing a unique independent desktop (complete with different resolutions and such, if you like). So the effect is a bit…

> VNC does something entirely different from this -- it just shares an existing desktop remotely rather than providing a unique independent desktop. Actually, not necessarily; you can use Xvnc to achieve this with X+VNC. It's an X server that serves over VNC. Can Wayland do this? Yes! But, the problem is that there is no singular Wayland "display server". This is both a big strength and big weakness of Wayland. In th…

> Can Wayland do this? Yes!

Interesting. I remember asking some Wayland devs a few years back about this and they said this use case would never be supported. I'm glad that's changed! It means that if the day comes that I have to use Wayland, I won't necessarily lose functionality.

(Just for clarity, I'm not opposed to Wayland if it can do what I want. But I'm not excited by it, either, because the benefits it does provide are ones that don't really matter to me)

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#118

Post by yorick »

gbin wrote: post #11

I have Arch Linux + Nvidia (3090 not even something super recent) + KDE. I am very motivated to continue with Wayland but: 1. It disables GPU acceleration on Chromium/Chrome 2. A major regression introduced glitches on all the electron apps (slack, signal etc..) I spent hours trying to troubleshoot those and dozens of flags combinations, nothing works. KDE + Nvidia + Electron/chromium apps is probably a very common s…

Same issue on sway + nvidia, it can be worked around by disabling wayland support for electron apps. Not ideal.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#119

Post by Maken »

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?

PulseAudio is still not there after 19 years.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#120

Post by Maken »

viraptor wrote: post #38
kmac_ wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To be a complete success, PipeWire merely needed to work at all.
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