Wayland won't work well on non-Linux systems, and this is intentional. So, for the foreseeable feature, it can't replace X because its developers don't care.
I've been running Wayland (sway) on FreeBSD flawlessly for years.
Wayland vs. X – Overview
51–60 of 186 posts
Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview
#52Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe try a more modern distro like Fedora. I haven't had any issue with it (intel igpu+nvidia dgpu) in a while.
Op mentioned ubuntu 23.10... which was released two months ago.
I have one machine with ubuntu 22.04, and I've never seen any of the described issues. I doubt that 23.10 regressed.
Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview
#54I 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…
The tearing situation has also recently improved [1,2,3] in X.org, including your cited use case of multiple, rotated monitors, and even if you are not using a compositor, although these improvements are only present in the latest master branch and aren't in any release and thus not shipped by most Linux distributions. I'm sure that the argument could be made about how Wayland still solves the tearing problem more optimally, and I think you should stick with Wayland if you are happy with it, but the tearing situation has improved dramatically on the X side of things since Wayland as well.
[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...
[2] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...
[3] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...
Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview
#55I 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…
> What do I need to do I think you just need to be less lucky tbh. Out of curiosity, what distro do you run. I'm running Wayland pretty seamlessly right now on Ubuntu: it's not a distro I would normally choose but I cycled through 3 others before "giving in" & going to Canonical. Hardware aside, there's also a lot to be said for sticking to the mainstream software-wise; though it's certainly an oddity for me to be so…
Pop OS. Very happy with it.
Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview
#56I 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
Yup, plays everything just fine - on both laptop and external screen.
Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview
#57I 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.
My past experiences with SuSE, Fedora, and Red Hat, RPM distributions, eventually experienced a corrupt repository that in each case took hours to fix. That's when I settled on Ubuntu in 2006 and haven't looked back.
Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview
#58[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.
There's nothing wrong with the transport layer's security, as far as I can tell. (For one thing, it's usually tunneled over SSH). The X11 security model assumes that anything with access to the screen has at least as much privilege as the user account that owns the session.
In practice, that's true (things like flatpack claim to support fake sandboxing, but whatever.)
Hypothetically, in a universe where Wayland was running on top of something other than the Linux desktop ecosystem, you could run untrusted code from bash with su, and have it talk to wayland directly, and it'd be OK. Today, you have to run it in a web browser, or using a VM with display virtualization drivers, or use any of a dozen other sandbox choices.
Those all managed to get the correct security properties under X11 because they're properly modularized. Wayland isn't, so to get this one feature, they're expecting all software to be rewritten.
Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview
#59[flagged]
My main issue with Wayland is how big of a missed opportunity it is. If you're going to introduce a massive breaking change like this to modernize the Linux desktop, the least you can do is make it an actually compelling design. Wayland was originally created to fix the parts of Xorg that made it difficult to use it for embedded devices (digital signage, car infotainment systems, etc), so the base protocol only defines enough functionality to make that use case possible. Anything more complex than that requires using a complicated patchwork of Wayland protocol extensions, some of which are specific to certain compositors and many of which duplicate the X11 protocol extensions they're intended to replace. I'd be surprised if Wayland isn't more complicated to use than X11 in a few years.
Additionally, Wayland is already showing its age. The example that first comes to mind is how events are handled. Device events are received from the kernel and placed in a 4KB buffer that clients are supposed to read from and process. If the buffer fills up without being processed (for example, if high CPU or I/O stress causes a program to get descheduled for a few seconds and the user moves his mouse over the window), the compositor will sever its connection with the program, causing it to crash. This wasn't a problem for Wayland's initial embedded use case, but if you're trying to use it on desktop with devices such as high-polling rate mice it makes it far more unstable than X11 unless you have enough system resources to guarantee that no program will ever have its event handler thread pause for any reason. See here for more information: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/issues/159
I wish that the "X11 is showing its age and should be replaced, but Wayland isn't the right option" viewpoint was more mainstream.
Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview
#60I 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 haven't even mentioned which wayland compositor you are using. Which is one of the biggest problems with Wayland - there isn't just one Wayland but Gnome Wayland and KDE Wayland and wlroots-based Wayland and Gamescope Wayland. What functionality is available and working and using which API varies between all of these. This includes really basic things like window decorations. This is different from X where the co…
Yes this. If you use gnome or kde you probably will have no issue with the transition to Wayland. If you use any other window manager then the transition will be painful because there's a bunch of things that don't simply map over from x WMs to Wayland compositors.
I just did this switch and found it incredibly frustrating. Simple things like, "I would like to be able to log out and return to my greeter" don't just work like they do in x.org, and it is dependent on which compositor you use.