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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

#181

Post by helmchenlord »

nanna wrote: post #56
Galanwe wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What were you using on X that made you healthy? Well my WM for a start. It did not migrate to Wayland. And I also need to share screen from time to time (teams, Google chat, etc), which results in a dark screen for viewers in Wayland.

I despise Teams but when I was forced to use it for work and screensharing didn't work, I had to flee back to X. Any updates from Microsoft on this issue?

The "update" is that the Teams Desktop Application for Linux was discontinued last year, and the only supported way to use Teams on Linux is now to open https://teams.microsoft.com in Google Chrome or Chromium (audio/video calls don't work on Firefox).

Since Chrome/Chromium supports screen sharing with Wayland, it simply just works for me nowy while it never worked with the Elecrton-based desktop application.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#182

Post by henearkr »

bitwize wrote: post #174
henearkr wrote: post #35

I don't understand people saying "X development has stopped". This is false. Bugs continue to be fixed. Yes, features are already there, so they are not developed anymore. Is this bad?

The only version of X still being maintained is -- wait for it -- Xwayland.

This is false, just plain logically false.

Have a look at Xorg's git repo. Please.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#183

Post by jchw »

Gud wrote: post #150
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…

Regarding your post scriptum, It is clear to me as a FreeBSD user that Wayland is primarily developed first hand for Linux. To me, Wayland looks like a threat rather than something I should embrace. I remember when it was a given that free software was developed to support a wide eco system. What happened? “There is even one for macos” XD

I disagree, though. Wayland itself is definitely not meant to be a threat to BSD.

There are some anti-patterns in the Wayland ecosystem that lead to arguably unnecessary dependency on things like DBus, but Wayland itself doesn't actually need much and you should find that SwayWM works fine on FreeBSD. However, the graphics stack and drivers for BSDs are a little bit behind, which is arguably a bigger threat.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#184

Post by nanna »

helmchenlord wrote: post #181
nanna wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I despise Teams but when I was forced to use it for work and screensharing didn't work, I had to flee back to X. Any updates from Microsoft on this issue?

The "update" is that the Teams Desktop Application for Linux was discontinued last year, and the only supported way to use Teams on Linux is now to open https://teams.microsoft.com in Google Chrome or Chromium (audio/video calls don't work on Firefox). Since Chrome/Chromium supports screen sharing with Wayland, it simply just works for me nowy while it never worked with the Elecrton-based desktop application.

Oh, this I never knew. Thank you.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#185

Post by Brian_K_White »

LinAGKar wrote: post #180
ndriscoll wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think every monitor I've seen in the last 20 years has had a 60 Hz refresh rate. Most people probably don't even know scaling options exist, so using different ones on different monitors is going to be niche, yeah. I just got a new laptop for work last month. HDR 4k display. It's still 60 Hz. More only matters for people who are really into gaming, and then you wouldn't be using a laptop.

A lot of the ones I see available are 75 Hz Also, is that 60 or 59.94 Hz? Both exist

One of my external monitors always tries to run at 170 hz by default, which doesn't work and the screen is black, and I have to go into the display setter app in xfce to change it to 60. The monitor can probably do it, just not when it's one of two 4k monitors on a docking station.

Most of the time on a normal boot, the xfce display app will apply my saved config and the monitor works, but several apps like kicad somehow glitch out something at random times and I lose both external monitors as though the dock were unplugged and then replugged.

What that happens, it's an extra level of ridiculous. I have to use TWO different apps to recover.

First I have to use ArandR to reset the layout with left, right, and center screens. The normal xfce display app does not work for this even though it does at other times. Trying to click on the little scteens doesn't do anything. But ArandR works.

But ArandR has no way to set the 170hz one back to 60. For that, I have to go back to the xfce app, which is now working after ArandR fixed whatever it fixed.

Then I can resume work. Sometimes for only a minute before it happens again.

It's completely ridiculous and has spanned a few different monitors and docking stations and tb3 and tb4 cables. The one constant is the Framework laptop after upgrading to the i7 1280p motherboard.

Anyway, monitors with all kinds of framerates are now the norm. I'm not even a gamer. I didn't seek out a high framerate monitor specially. I just wanted a good monitor in general with a type of stand that would not waste all my desk space. I think the other monitor can do 120 too for that matter, but somehow is better behaved and doesn't try to when it won't work. It's the norm.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#186

Post by noobermin »

didntcheck wrote: post #121
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…

And what's frustrating is this isn't just down to poor execution, it's fundamental to the design, and it was repeatedly pointed out from the start. I'm glad there's finally been some acknowledgement of issues predicted around a decade ago, but only because the issues have indeed manifested, making it a rather pyrrhic victory A "simple" solution to a necessary complex problem is just kicking the can down the road, and…

What is the solution here, if you don't mind me asking. I feel partial here to X, because it just "works", but as the article this cites, there are real issues to X and this afflicts the upstream developers, whom we need to develop our windowing system in the first place.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#187

Post by adrian_b »

reisse wrote: post #157
Nullabillity wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Virtually every modern laptop with a dGPU runs Nvidia, so Wayland is still a no-go there too. (And no, if Nouveau is an option for you then you probably wouldn't have a dGPU in the first place.)

Linux on the laptops with Nvidia dGPU is miserable enough without X/Wayland discussions. I beleive people who are buying laptops to install Linux mostly use ones without dGPUs.

I have been using Linux on laptops with NVIDIA dGPUs (from Dell and Lenovo) during the last decade without any problem whatsoever.

Not only nothing was miserable, but the NVIDIA dGPUs have allowed applications that are still impossible with GPUs from other vendors, e.g. professional applications using OpenGL that expose bugs in the drivers from other vendors or that have a too low performance on other hardware, or computational CUDA applications that benefit from the many useful libraries provided freely by NVIDIA.

For simpler applications AMD and Intel are fine, but unfortunately there are still many cases when there is no alternative for NVIDIA.

NVIDIA may be criticized for the greediness of their pricing policy or for the slow progress towards providing an open-source kernel driver, but claiming that they offer a miserable Linux experience is completely false.

Very few companies provide a similar level of Linux support, despite the fact that there are some kernel developers who continue to try to sabotage the work needed for maintaining the NVIDIA Linux kernel driver.

NVIDIA provides much more free Linux tools for their GPUs than any other GPU vendor.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#188

Post by Galanwe »

csdreamer7 wrote: post #104
Galanwe wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What were you using on X that made you healthy? Well my WM for a start. It did not migrate to Wayland. And I also need to share screen from time to time (teams, Google chat, etc), which results in a dark screen for viewers in Wayland.

* What is your WM? * Have they posted what is blocking them? Besides a lack of hands on keyboards? 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'.

My WM is i3. I know sway exists, but last time I tried it was sufficiently different from i3 to be annoying.

I think overall the problem with Wayland is that there is no user facing improvement over X that I know of.

I have no doubt it's more modern, better engineered, or whatelse. But in the end, the days of fiddling endlessly with your xorg.conf are over, and X _just works_ out of the box on any distro / device.

All Wayland bring me is a switch of WM, and some bugs when screensharing, for no visible benefit.

The only hope of value add I can see with Wayland would be per-monitor DPI. But last I checked, it was hackish at best.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#189

Post by alkonaut »

hulitu wrote: post #86
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.

> they should work no worse than Windows or OS X, They shall work, much, much better than windows. Working in MS Windows is a PITA.

Elaborate? There are many annoyances with windows but I the graphics stack I find very good. Things like processes not being able to hang the desktop and even the driver crashing doesn’t cause much disruption.
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