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Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

michael.stapelberg.ch

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Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#141

Post by charcircuit »

mariusor wrote: post #133
charcircuit wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>leaving aside the fact that "proprietary" has a very well defined meaning in this context Yes, it does and it is different the the well defined meaning when talking in regards to the software itself. OpenGL is an open API, but the source code for an implementation isn't necessarily open. >Nvidia was not willing to implement an API for their drivers They couldn't because this API is a part of Mesa itself. As I mentio…

> For obvious reasons this was never going to happen. Well, I guess this is the crux of the problem, and for open-source enthusiasts like me this is not obvious at all. What we can surmise is that Nvidia refused to collaborate, therefore they were the party to blame for the status of their video cards not being supported as well as others' vendors on linux.

>What we can surmise is that Nvidia refused to collaborate

I saw more effort on Nvidia's side trying to collaborate than on the Wayland side. I think it's unfair to not call out the people who had a hardline stance of only caring about open source drivers and didn't want to do the work to onboard Nvidia.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#142

Post by altern8 »

exceptione wrote: post #138
altern8 wrote: post #69

Might be a stupid question, but what's wrong with Xorg? I know that it wasn't originally conceived to do what it does today, but I've never had any problem using it, and when I tried Wayland I didn't notice any difference whatsoever. Is it just that it's a pain to write apps for it..?

Good question. It makes sand-boxing security impossible. The moment a process has access to the Xorg socket, it has access to everything. It is weird that this oftentimes misses from the discussion though.

Can't this aspect be improved, vs. switching to something else?

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#143

Post by altern8 »

the_why_of_y wrote: post #100
altern8 wrote: post #69

Might be a stupid question, but what's wrong with Xorg? I know that it wasn't originally conceived to do what it does today, but I've never had any problem using it, and when I tried Wayland I didn't notice any difference whatsoever. Is it just that it's a pain to write apps for it..?

The real story behind Wayland and X, Linux.conf.au 2013 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ https://people.freedesktop.org/~daniels/lca2013-wayland-x11....

Oh, nice--thank you!

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#144

Post by NekkoDroid »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #65
officialchicken wrote: post #32

2026 is starting with half-baked NVidia drivers and missing functionality on linux? I am so surprised... did you try 17 different previous versions to get it running in true NV-Linux fashion? This stuff has been flawless on AMD systems for a while a couple of years now, with the exception of the occasional archaic app that only runs on X11 (thus shoved in a container).

Does AMD support CUDA yet? Because otherwise you can't use it for video editing.

Ask NV to open up CUDA and then maybe AMD can start even thinking about supporting it :)

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#145

Post by michaelmrose »

mindcrash wrote: post #63
WhyNotHugo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that we need the entire xdg-desktop-portal stack for screen sharing on browsers is a major annoyance. We now have a standardised extension for screencasting and screencopy (formerly it was not standard, but had been around for years), but browsers only support the Flatpak stack, which has a lot of moving parts and IPC. Doing out-of-band IPC for this is kind of pointless when the client and the server already…

> but browsers only support the Flatpak stack Well, I think you should blame Google and Mozilla for that. KDE (through Discover, https://apps.kde.org/discover/ ) and GNOME (through Software, https://apps.gnome.org/Software/ ) both have innate support for Flatpak. So, given that the majority of normie Linux users will use Flatpak to install a browser, they will just use and support that in the browser (because the und…

Most distros come with Firefox which most normies will simply use as is.

Also, software stores show both native and flatpak or on Ubuntu snap. One can easily install the system package of chrome if one doesn't want to deal with flatpak.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#146

Post by michaelmrose »

imtringued wrote: post #85
gsliepen wrote: post #2

A rather big problem is that Wayland is just a protocol, not an implementation. There are many competing implementations, like Gnome, KDE and wlroots. The problems you have with one of them might not appear in another. The reference compositor, Weston, is not really usable as a daily driver. So while with Xorg you have a solid base, and desktops are implemented on top of that, with Wayland the each desktop is reinven…

The real problem with post X compositors is that the Wayland developers assumed that the compositor developers will develop additional working groups (an input protocol, a window management protocol, etc) on top of the working group that exclusively focuses on display aka Wayland. Wayland was supposed to be one protocol out of many, with the idea being that if Wayland ever turns out to be a problem it is small in sco…

If they thought this then they misunderstood the people and problem space basically everything of importance.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#148

Post by mananaysiempre »

immibis wrote: post #132
mananaysiempre wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seem to remember reading in an old paper (1990s?) that the asynchronous nature of the connection between the X server and the window manager results in essentially unfixable protocol-level races.

Wayland has a philosophy of "every frame is perfect", which means fixing every race condition. However, X11 doesn't have this philosophy. If the window manager is slow and doesn't respond to a notification that a window has been resized, drawing the new window content over the old borders is the correct thing to do . What sense does it make to freeze the whole display just for a window border? Similarly, tearing gets…

The races I recall being described were substantially worse, but that’s largely beside my point.

My point is that, now that bare fillrate and framebuffer memory haven’t been a limiting factor for 15 to 20 years, it is a reasonable choice to build a desktop graphics system with the invariant of every frame being perfect—not even because of the user experience, but because that allows the developer to unequivocally classify every imperfect frame as a bug. Invariants are nice like that. And once that decision has been made, you cannot have asynchronous out-of-process window management. (I’m not convinced that out-of-process but synchronous is useful.) A reasonable choice is not necessarily the right choice, but neither is it moronic, and I’ve yet to see a discussion of that choice that doesn’t start with calling (formerly-X11) Wayland designers morons for not doing the thing that X11 did (if in not so many words).

To be clear, I’m still low-key pissed that a crash in my desktop shell, which was deliberately designed as a dynamic-language extensibility free-for-all in the vein of Emacs or TeX, crashes my entire graphical session, also as a result of deliberate design. The combination of those two reasonable decisions is, in fact, moronic. But it didn’t need to be done that way even on Wayland.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#149

Post by michaelmrose »

przmk wrote: post #21
pshirshov wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working fractional scaling

I would venture to say that there is little overlap between X11 users and people with high-DPI screens.

There is no particular reason for this theory to be true. X supports high DPI screens well and has for ages.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#150

Post by mrighele »

imtringued wrote: post #85
gsliepen wrote: post #2

A rather big problem is that Wayland is just a protocol, not an implementation. There are many competing implementations, like Gnome, KDE and wlroots. The problems you have with one of them might not appear in another. The reference compositor, Weston, is not really usable as a daily driver. So while with Xorg you have a solid base, and desktops are implemented on top of that, with Wayland the each desktop is reinven…

The real problem with post X compositors is that the Wayland developers assumed that the compositor developers will develop additional working groups (an input protocol, a window management protocol, etc) on top of the working group that exclusively focuses on display aka Wayland. Wayland was supposed to be one protocol out of many, with the idea being that if Wayland ever turns out to be a problem it is small in sco…

> People who are thinking of a Wayland replacement at this stage, mostly because they don't like it, will waste their time reinventing the mature parts instead of thinking about how to solve the remaining problems.

Now, if only people deciding to replace X11 with Wayland heeded your suggestion...

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