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Wayland vs. X – Overview

wayland.freedesktop.org

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Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview

#71

Post by vetinari »

shadowgovt wrote: post #33
okasaki wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

Outside of using Wayland, do you do much 3D rendering? The symptoms you describe almost sound like a dying 3D graphics card (or 3D graphics card with misconfigured drivers). I wonder if Wayland is requiring the 3D layer to do its compositing and other window engines don't?

Wayland compositors will happily use gpu 3d engine, if it is available. Otherwise, they will do their job with Mesa's software rendering.

They also accept dma-buf handles from clients, so if other software on the system does use gpu, the compositor has somehow to do its composition, and zero-copy if possible.

Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview

#72

Post by bzzzt »

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…

> because time spent on dealing with Gnome or KDE bs is time not spent on more useful things.

The entire reason there's time spent on dealing with Gnome vs KDE vs other bs is that everyone wants to build and customize their own desktop. But hey, it's OSS, freedom of choice and you're free to do it but I doubt window decorations will add very much to the overhead of all those different desktops.

Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview

#73

Post by superkuh »

It should probably be "Waylands vs. X" since each of the Waylands supports different features and libraries to try to achieve the same ends. For example, some of the waylands use an external library, libei, to be able to support features like being able to share mouse/keyboard between computers. But some waylands, like sway, are actively hostile to libei and have made a point of never supporting it. So some waylands can share mouse/keyboard and some can't.

There is no wayland. Just waylands.

Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview

#75

Post by superkuh »

icarito wrote: post #8

I suffer from the limitations of both X11 and Wayland. Some things work in one and not the other, it's a trade off. In Wayland I can use different scaling for each monitor (in exchange for a LOT of RAM). But in X11 I can use Barrier to share my mouse / keyboard with my other computer. So I use one when I have a second monitor and have to restart my session when I use a second computer :'( Please fix this!

It will be fixed on some Waylands with libei, but it will never be fixed on other waylands that find libei distasteful (like sway). And that's the waylands in a nutshell: many different things, never "wayland" always "waylands".

Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview

#76

Post by simiones »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #36
simiones wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The thing is a 'day 1' feature everyone hacks back in is clipboard sharing and screen share, each of which remove a decent chunk of these protections. Each essentially grants access to another apps data. Plus the attack angle is someone having permission to execute apps on your machine, there's plenty of other nasty things they could do.

> The thing is a 'day 1' feature everyone hacks back in is clipboard sharing and screen share, each of which remove a decent chunk of these protections. Each essentially grants access to another apps data.

Oh, yes, it's very likely that Wayland will end up with the exact same vulnerabilities. It's very hard in fact to design a windowing system that allows rich interaction between apps, but still maintains per user access control (never mind actually implementing it).

Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview

#77

Post by nolist_policy »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #36
simiones wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The thing is a 'day 1' feature everyone hacks back in is clipboard sharing and screen share, each of which remove a decent chunk of these protections. Each essentially grants access to another apps data. Plus the attack angle is someone having permission to execute apps on your machine, there's plenty of other nasty things they could do.

> Plus the attack angle is someone having permission to execute apps on your machine, there's plenty of other nasty things they could do.

No, the attack angle is either a untrusted app running in a sandbox (fatpak, snap or crosvm or qemu with wayland passtrough[1]) with only a connection to the compositor or a trusted app running in a sandbox getting exploited, any apps handling foreign data is suspect here (Web browser, mail client, pdf, office suite, etc.).

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/qemu-devel/20231005024330.836-1-gurc...

Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview

#78

Post by vetinari »

arp242 wrote: post #65
acdha wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> XFree86 is what everyone used and it more or less the only realistic option.

Not really; in the 90s, there were many X servers, each implementing a different set of extensions. Not just for other Unices, even for Linux, you could purchase a proprietary ones.

For XFree86, it was a monolith, that you had to compile for a specific chipset. Distributions shipped with many binaries, each intended for a specific graphic card and the installer symlinked the right one for you. It was only later, that XFree86 became modular and everyone converged on it.

Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview

#79

Post by superkuh »

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.

Ah yes, sway, the one of the waylands that refuses to add support for complex mouse/keyboard and alternate input devices. https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/issues/2378 . You've been running a wayland, not wayland, because there is no "wayland": only many different waylands.

Re: Wayland vs. X – Overview

#80

Post by dinkleberg »

bradrn wrote: post #40
dinkleberg wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the place you get into trouble is when you try and DIY the config. I'm using Fedora and everything works perfectly out of the box. But when I was using arch and was trying out Sway (i3 + wayland) I was constantly running into issues.

Odd, I use Arch (well, EndeavourOS) with Sway and have experienced no problems. Quite on the contrary, my setup with a high-DPI laptop + external monitors is far nicer with Wayland than with X.

Tbh I think a big part of my woes came from my Nvidia card.
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