The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

Post by jrm4 » Fri, Sep 01, 2023, 2:14 PM UTC

torginus wrote: post #100

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 b…

Post by veidr » Fri, Sep 01, 2023, 2:17 PM UTC

jstimpfle wrote: post #68

veidr wrote: post #55

This article, like many, ignores the reality that lots of setups -- especially workstations with several high-res monitors -- do not work at all, or work with enormous jank-ass caveats even bigger than the ones that come with using Wayland. (Which I admit are also hellacious in may cases.) Case in point: I have to use Wayland, because otherwise my Linux machine just can't reasonably drive my monitors (one 8K, three 4…

> (one 8K, three 4K, and one high-refresh-rate 1440p portable) More power to you, pushing the limits. But frankly with this setup, you are in a tiny minority. What is your use case? What is the technical reason that this works on Wayland but not X? I've had one 4K screen since 2018, never had a problem. Other than the fact that older applications don't respect high-dpi so need manual tweaking, or need to be replaced.

Post by mcpackieh » Fri, Sep 01, 2023, 2:21 PM UTC

okamiueru wrote: post #114

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

Post by jchw » Fri, Sep 01, 2023, 2:25 PM UTC

JohnFen wrote: post #117

jchw wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 p…

Post by mcpackieh » Fri, Sep 01, 2023, 2:35 PM UTC

mcv wrote: post #84

alkonaut wrote: post #15

No one really cares deeply about what a compositor or low level windowing system does since it shouldn't be a thing you notice. Desktop OS'es have simple criteria and user expectations: they should work no worse than Windows or OS X, and that's it. Whether you need Wayland or not to reach feature and performance parity with commercial desktop OSes isn't very interesting to people, only that you actually do.

I care. I've only recently learned about them, and I'm not in any way an expert on any of this, but from what I understand, they do an important job, and the way they do that in X11 either hurts gaming performance or makes them unstable. When I'm playing Cyberpunk 2077, occasionally the game crashes (hasn't happened often, but a few times), and when it does, the compositor fails until I kill the CP process. And while…