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Wayland vs. X – Overview

wayland.freedesktop.org

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Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview

#61

Post by edent »

account42 wrote: post #46
edent wrote: post #10

I 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…

> You haven't even mentioned which wayland compositor you are using.

No idea. I'm using Pop OS. So whatever that uses. Gnome is the DE, I think?

Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview

#62

Post by horusthegame »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #28
edent wrote: post #10

I 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 just setup wayland a couple months ago, so everything should be pretty recent, and couldn't ever get screen sharing to work. It's discord electron, which I think is having some weird interaction with xwayland, but I only researched it for a bit before deciding it wasn't worth it. Games though can be a nightmare, a recent nvidia driver seems to have created stuttering across all games using X to varying degrees. (do…

> Games though can be a nightmare, a recent nvidia driver seems to have created stuttering across all games using X to varying degrees. (downgrading the driver fixes the issue)

On ubuntu (Kubuntu really), and as a gamer, I've seen no issues with nVidia on X, both native Linux and Steam Proton games rock on.

Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview

#63

Post by yxhuvud »

account42 wrote: post #46
edent wrote: post #10

I 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…

And in addition there are vast parts of the API that is deprecated and no longer used, with basically no documentation of what should not be used.

Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview

#64

Post by edent »

binkHN wrote: post #25
edent wrote: post #10

I 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…

Which DE are you using?

Pop OS's Gnome.

Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview

#65

Post by arp242 »

acdha wrote: post #32
belval wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Really? I can’t help but notice that nobody is describing X as if it hasn’t improved since XFree86 in the 90s so perhaps it is possible for technical professionals to update their understanding?

You also didn't have much choice; XFree86 is what everyone used and it more or less the only realistic option.

Also doesn't help some people have been rather aggressively banging the Wayland drum for a long time now in a way that quite a few people find rather unpleasant. About half a year ago someone told me I "need" to switch to Wayland because programs will drop X11 support "any time now", all with a sense of glee. A quick search on https://hn.algolia.com with "Wayland by:username" showed they have been telling people that for about 7 or 8 years. Clearly that hasn't happened, so... And when they started banging this Wayland drum so aggressively there really WERE actual problems. Textbook "toxic fanboy" stuff. At some point people start filtering this sort of stuff out.

The first time I really looked in to Wayland was when "I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit" article took off, which starts by comparing "anti-Wayland activism" (something which doesn't really exist as an organised force) with "anti-vaxxers, flat earthers, 9/11 truthers", dismisses anything that disagrees as "lies", and is generally just a stupid rant with a number of fairly obvious factual inaccuracies. To say this rather put me off from Wayland would be an understatement.

I'm not holding you responsible for any of that of course, nor am I saying this is representative of people interested in Wayland as a whole, but at the same time ... I do think Wayland has burned a lot of goodwill with stuff like that, and that people voted that stupid insulting conspiratorial rant to the frontpage did no one any favours – it's not just a single person who wrote that article, it's the hundreds of people who voted on it, and some of whom defended it.

Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview

#66

Post by smoldesu »

anton96 wrote: post #49

I feel like the debate between Wayland and X always bring more a general discussion about technology refactoring and modularity. To me be, the big question is not why freedesktop.org or redhat is doing all of this, they're a company and they have their needs. It is why distro maintainers have chosen to adopt those technologies(systemd,Wayland, others?), not that those options are especially bad but to me,but they rea…

Wayland is still customizable, and x11 isn't going away. If you want to trade in security and maintenance for features and capabilities, nobody will try to stop you. In that sense, distributions still don't hold much power over the user besides what they present as default.

> The fact that the same organization hosts flatpack but has not vision of how to use the capability model for Wayland really poses questions on the vision.

I disagree, and I'm a staunch GNOME skeptic myself. Flatpak and Wayland were both built as extensible systems from the start, and GNOME's implementation of both technologies is just one interpretation of the protocol. KDE is a good mirror example; their Wayland implementation exposes many features completely unavailable on x11, and their Flatpak permissions are integrated right in the Settings app.

Personally I don't like GNOME's approach to the desktop anymore, and I refuse to defend most of their more opinionated decisions. Those choices have a minimal impact on desktop Linux outside of GNOME though, and it more feels like Red Hat is displacing the amount of work put into keeping legacy systems alive.

Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview

#67

Post by Spivak »

account42 wrote: post #46
edent wrote: post #10

I 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…

It's the same issue with the "W3C is just a standard." Rather than making the lives of web developers and users easier by just basing every web browser on Chromium we have to deal with caniuse, polyfills, nonstandard extensions. Basic features like tab sharing are implemented by Google's NIH cast protocol. There's no such thing as a website anymore there's Chrome apps, Firefox apps, and Safari apps. More time is spent wrangling webpack then doing actual web development.

Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview

#68

Post by hedora »

asveikau wrote: post #15
addicted wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You certainly can build sandboxing atop X11. If you're reading using a web browser on a Linux desktop (or in a VM on a Linux desktop), then you're literally staring at an existence proof.

Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview

#69

Post by DonHopkins »

craftkiller wrote: post #51
rhabarba wrote: post #21

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.

That totally misses the point. How about running Wayland on systems that a non-negligible number of people use, like Macs? Or even an enormous number of people, like Windows?

Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview

#70

Post by FirmwareBurner »

edent wrote: post #61
account42 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> You haven't even mentioned which wayland compositor you are using. No idea. I'm using Pop OS. So whatever that uses. Gnome is the DE, I think?

>No idea. I'm using Pop OS.

So you're being upvoted to the top by praising how flawless Wayland works on an OS that runs by default on X11? :))

Aww man, I hope there's a miscommunication somewhere, like you switched PopOS from X11 to Wayland, because otherwise this is HN comedy gold.

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