[flagged]
Has Wayland fixed the fact that compositing sucks by definition?
“Sucks” I mean if you want tear free rendering there’s not a lot of choices other than compositing.
Wayland vs. X – Overview
11–20 of 186 posts
Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview
#12[flagged]
X was so insecure that wayland maintainers must now work tirelessly to roughly emulate these insecurities such as taking screenshots and sharing their desktop in their new protocol.
Don't get me wrong; I don't like X, but if I had it my way we'd all be using Haiku with a Linux or BSD kernel right now.
Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview
#13I don't know what I'm doing wrong with Wayland. I have a cheap Linux laptop, with built in graphics. And Wayland works perfectly. I can run multiple monitors with one of them rotated. When I tried that with X I got lots of juddery tearing. I can take screenshots and share my screens via video calls. But everyone says it doesn't work due to security. I have fractional scaling and it doesn't seem to burn out my CPU or…
On the fractional scaling side, precisely Wayland's advantage is that it works much better there than in Xorg.
Regarding the rest, I run an Nvidia laptop under Wayland since early 2022 and it's been working flawlessly. It's true that I'm using one of the cleanest, most forward thinking distros out there: Fedora. On Ubuntu it had way more issues than on Fedora, though.
Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview
#14[flagged]
Isn't only the transport layer of X insecure? That could be swapped out with another layer. With Wayland you have to use VNC which is fine for local networks, but not for remote ones.
My understanding is that any app which has access to X (so any windowed app) had full access to all other apps which have access. So, any app with a window can read the input from any other app on the same system, e.g. your sudo password. Or, take a screenshot of your bank info in Firefox.
Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't only the transport layer of X insecure? That could be swapped out with another layer. With Wayland you have to use VNC which is fine for local networks, but not for remote ones.
From what I understand, and I’m no expert on this, X pretty much broke application sandboxing. X’s design was inherently insecure in the context of modern OS security practices.
I think you're phrasing that incorrectly. There was no application sandboxing for X to break. And you can't build sandboxing atop X.
You speak as if application sandboxing within the ever existed in the past... Not that people tried to build it and X doesn't play well with it.
Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview
#16I don't know what I'm doing wrong with Wayland. I have a cheap Linux laptop, with built in graphics. And Wayland works perfectly. I can run multiple monitors with one of them rotated. When I tried that with X I got lots of juddery tearing. I can take screenshots and share my screens via video calls. But everyone says it doesn't work due to security. I have fractional scaling and it doesn't seem to burn out my CPU or…
try running VLC
Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't only the transport layer of X insecure? That could be swapped out with another layer. With Wayland you have to use VNC which is fine for local networks, but not for remote ones.
From what I understand, and I’m no expert on this, X pretty much broke application sandboxing. X’s design was inherently insecure in the context of modern OS security practices.
Without claiming that X is secure: I think it’s more accurate to say that X has never cared about application isolation at all, since it wasn’t (like its contemporaries) built with that paradigm in mind.
In other words: while not originally UNIX-y, X matured in an ecosystem that idiomatically treats every userspace program as a perfect proxy for the user agent themselves. Sandboxing is a foreign (but good!) idiom that’s being bolted onto that paradigm.
Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview
#18I don't know what I'm doing wrong with Wayland. I have a cheap Linux laptop, with built in graphics. And Wayland works perfectly. I can run multiple monitors with one of them rotated. When I tried that with X I got lots of juddery tearing. I can take screenshots and share my screens via video calls. But everyone says it doesn't work due to security. I have fractional scaling and it doesn't seem to burn out my CPU or…
I literally cannot get Wayland working. Everything is broken. It's slow, the fractional scaling doesn't work, full screening apps like vlc or games turn off my monitors, the distro installer crashes, playing a youtube video makes my laptop heat up like crazy, one time a display change made my laptop's screen flicker so hard that it persisted after I restored the settings, another time it turned my monitor's bright red and white respectively.
This is on fresh installs of Ubuntu 22.04 and 23.10.
X11 with XFCE and i3 with picom works perfectly. It's blazing fast, has no tearing, never crashes, uses next to no resources, has no bugs and runs everything. I even use ddccontrol to change my external monitor's brightness.
Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview
#19[flagged]
Your prediction is probably right but it highlights what I still find to be a fundamental problem with Wayland. It's something that's very much user-facing, as it affects the behavior of desktop environments and several types of programs. It's also something that developers want because they don't want to write X applications or maintain Xorg itself.
The disconnect is developers want Wayland to replace X ASAP, while users want a smooth experience where nothing breaks due to it being Wayland, which is a high bar.
For me, Wayland remains one of the least favorite technologies I've dealt with. As a developer, I needed to port a custom Linux system to hardware that only has Wayland drivers and it was a giant pain. Wayland offers no advantage at all for that system but it broke a lot of functionality that relied on X in terms of window placement, etc. Took weeks of work to get a more complicated system that does 90% of what the previous one did, while still missing a few convenient features.
As a user, I try Wayland once in a while on one of my computers. It's improving - or more precisely, it's not Wayland itself but rather Wayland support of other software, like KDE. Earlier this year I finally worked under KDE/Wayland for a couple days with no issues, but then I again ran into some weirdness when using Unity so once again back to Xorg. What really makes Wayland hard to daily drive for me is that I have zero issues with Xorg. I don't use the things X can't do at all (fractional scaling is one I think?) so the bar for Wayland as a daily driver is admittedly a very high one, it needs to be completely free of issues because Xorg already does everything for me and Wayland's advantages are for the devs, not for me as a desktop user.
It also feels like it's improving slower than anything else has. Printing on Linux used to be a pain but now it works well. Wifi on Linux was hard to get working at some point but now it just works. Sensationally, gaming on Linux has become as easy as it is on Windows. Wayland protocols hit 1.0 in 2015 and now nine years later, it's approaching usability.
Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview
#20I don't know what I'm doing wrong with Wayland. I have a cheap Linux laptop, with built in graphics. And Wayland works perfectly. I can run multiple monitors with one of them rotated. When I tried that with X I got lots of juddery tearing. I can take screenshots and share my screens via video calls. But everyone says it doesn't work due to security. I have fractional scaling and it doesn't seem to burn out my CPU or…
You only get one chance to make a good first impression.
Wayland is probably much better than when I tried it in 2019 but all I remember is the 2019 experience. I think a lot of people are in the same boat.