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Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?

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Re: Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?

#101

Post by arikrahman »

BowBun wrote: post #46
palata wrote: post #17

Disclaimer: I don't have any skin in this game, I was fine with X11 and I am fine with Wayland, and I actually think it's nice to have both (and more, like Xlibre I think?). I understand complaints about systemd, I don't understand the complaints about Wayland. This whole article sounds like a big rant and doesn't seem to bring much information. > I also don't care for the "security" argument when parts of the core r…

> Who is forced to use it? Just use X11, as you said (many times) you do already. This is my understanding of his actual concern - Linux corps are pushing Wayland as a replacement for X11 when it is full of issues. Anecdotally my experience was the same. I'm a dev so I'm fine in a terminal, but trying to switch to KDE actually sent me BACK to Windows. Basic windowing stuff just does not work, and like the OP says, to…

I've had an interesting experience with creating a wayland compatability layer with Bitwig. Especially as I used Niri as the tiling window manager, it is even harder to use as a base as it less supportive of X11 compared to other WMs like hyprland.

This may be Niche, but DAWs are very rare to support linux, especially this stack. I would say it might be a stretch to say the company behind Bitwig is punishing Wayland users, I am sure they don't have the personnel for it, but it is a legitimate issue that companies will most likely be 10 years late to the new modernization into Wayland.

Anyways, I was able to configure it with a specific flake configuration. I had issues with third party windows, which was more of an issue with the floating nature of Niri, since Gnome with Wayland displayed external VSTs fine.

You can find my repository here if interested. It consists of a few files, and I made it easier to use with justfiles. https://github.com/ArikRahman/Nixwig

Re: Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?

#102

Post by nvllsvm »

I've been pretty happy with Wayland for the past ~2 years of using it.

- No annoying "X11 stutter"

- FreeSync works reliably; no more fucking around with different compositors.

- applications aren't allowed permanently alter the display settings. That was particularly problematic with older Windows games and wine. Depending on the game, exiting a game could leave the display server in a very low resolution on exit. Even worse, a few games would result in the X11 gamma settings being altered outside of the game (Deus Ex was one, but there were a few others).

- display-specific scaling factors

- I could use Waydroid on my 2-in-1 finally.

- HDR support. As an added bonus beyond HDR content, SDR content looks better on my PG42UQ monitor due to the monitor suffering from severe black crush in SDR mode.

That said, there are annoyances. I recently started work on a rewrite of the Jellyfin Desktop client (https://github.com/jellyfin-labs/jellyfin-desktop-cef) and of course targeted Wayland first:

Pros:

- HDR via an Wayland subsurface works great!

Cons:

- Running CEF (Chromium) in Wayland mode does NOT respect the system scale factor. The workaround is to run it X11 mode. Not too big of a deal since I'm using CEF in offscreen-rendering mode with a Wayland SDL surface, but annoying.

- Picture-in-Picture isn't widely supported yet. It is one of those things that Wayland is building _towards_ rather than X11 just working.

- Minor, but not being able to position the window centered on startup is kinda annoying.

So yeah - tradeoffs, but currently good enough for me and it continues to get better. I'm optimistic.

Re: Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?

#103

Post by dehrmann »

palata wrote: post #17

Disclaimer: I don't have any skin in this game, I was fine with X11 and I am fine with Wayland, and I actually think it's nice to have both (and more, like Xlibre I think?). I understand complaints about systemd, I don't understand the complaints about Wayland. This whole article sounds like a big rant and doesn't seem to bring much information. > I also don't care for the "security" argument when parts of the core r…

> I actually think it's nice to have both

Options that are equivalent enough for most end users just cause confusion. There are also too many distros, and the Gnome vs. KDE competition set desktop Linux back another 10 years. That's three dimensions of big, important choices with not much downside if you pick the happy path and a whole lot of downside if you don't.

Re: Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?

#104

Post by Cyph0n »

geophile wrote: post #90
Cyph0n wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because you’re concluding from your experience and a single article that Wayland in general is bad. I am saying that perhaps your experience has nothing to do with Wayland directly, so maybe you should still give Wayland a chance. You can see many others in this thread contradicting the article’s complaints.

I stated no conclusions. I have not tried COSMIC, and I said that it’s COSMIC and Wayland seem to be problematic for people who have tried Pop_OS 24.04. (The one fact I do know is that Synergy, which I rely on, is still working on Wayland support.) My only “conclusion” is that Pop_OS 24.04 seems to be incompatible with having a desktop that just works.

Ah, perhaps I misread your conclusion then. I hope COSMIC irons out the issues.

Re: Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?

#105

Post by wildredkraut »

renewiltord wrote: post #61
iknowstuff wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow what a showstopper!

Decades of using Linux desktops and nothing has ever changed hahaha. Users still complain things don’t work. Fans still say “oh what a first world problem”. Like a little 2004 era time loop. People still installing Dapper Drake. Haha. In the time that people have been talking about the Wayland future to today where they’re still talking about it I have lived in 3 continents, met my wife and had a child, and experienc…

Fully agree, same here. It's just sad to keep watching this, because now just after approx. 15 years i started to evaluate the Linux Desktop again and it failed again. Many professional software like Maya, Houdini, Unreal, etc. that used to run great on Linux/X11, now sucks on wayland. Some are hyping Linux for the subpar gaming compatibility, while for GameDev Windows is still required. In 15 years I'll try again, but then I'm probably to old for this.

Re: Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?

#106

Post by nickelpro »

tapoxi wrote: post #96
xbar wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It reads like a user that tried Wayland again last week, found the same issues and wrote a piece that tried to summarize why they remain sad after 17 years of waiting for Wayland to address its issues.

There is no "Wayland" to address these issues. It's like asking "web" to address its issues. Wayland is a protocol with multiple different implementations.

But this is sort of the nature of the problem?

In X11, the problem was Xserver. Now, X11's design philosophy was hopelessly broken and needed to be replaced, but it wasn't replaced. As you correctly point out, there is no "Wayland", Wayland is a methodology, a description, of how one might implement the technologies necessary to replace X11.

This has led to hopeless fracturing and replication of effort. Every WM is forced to become an entire compositor and partial desktop environment, which they inevitably fail at. In turn application developers cannot rely on protocol extensions which represent necessary desktop program behavior being available or working consistently.

This manifests in users feeling the ecosystem is forever broken, because for them, on their machine, some part of it is.

There is no longer one central broken component to be fixed. There are hundreds of scattered, slightly broken components.

Re: Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?

#107

Post by JSR_FDED »

LLMs didn’t exist when Wayland was started.

Now that we have them, would it be feasible to use LLMs to go after the historical crud that X11 accumulated due to age?

I don’t like vibe coding, but using LLMs to dig into a huge legacy code base like X11 could be very useful.

Re: Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?

#108

Post by corndoge »

sourcegrift wrote: post #93
corndoge wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still have X11. Why are you crying? People worked - for free - on what they wanted to work on, and that is wayland. Who are you upset at?

I'm upset not at wayland contributors but at people like you who can't be civil and people in the thread who don't understand the problem

You are the one not being civil replying to people expressing their legitimate opinion with the text "Fuck you I got mine". I see you've since deleted your reply.

Re: Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?

#109

Post by Teknoman117 »

I strongly disagree with the premise.

Regardless of how you feel about Wayland, its creation set off _massive_ improvements across the entire Linux graphics stack.

For those of us who were using Linux on the desktop in decades past, remember when you couldn't use a GPU without X running? Remember the days when you needed an X session running in order to use CUDA or OpenCL? Remember the days when the entire graphics driver lived inside of X? When display server issues caused kernel panics? Remember the days when you couldn't share a hardware graphics surface between processes? When it was impossible to get hardware acceleration to work offscreen?

Wayland's aggressive stance on "it doesn't work on platforms that don't fix all of that" is one of the only things that pushed the stability and flexibility of the graphics stack on Linux forward.

I don't really think anything less than saying "We the X developers are going to stop X development and X is going away" would have been enough to push graphics card vendors to actually rework the drivers.

Re: Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?

#110

Post by hakfoo »

000ooo000 wrote: post #54
PunchyHamster wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is fine. X11 needed fresh start. But they also failed to learn any lessons from X, just assuming "if X11 did it it must've been a bad idea, let's do it differently". X11 did chalk many lines of abstractions in absolutely the right places, it's just the implementation was crufty in places, and just not designed for modern hardware in some other places, while wayland just tried to kick as much as possible to the W…

>now every WM have to repeat that work wlroots?

wlroots is self-described as "about 60,000 lines of code you were going to write anyway." It's also a moving target and you'll probably have to retool when wlroots updates.

That seems like a huge burden to carry around, considering that a minimal X11 window manager can be a few thousand lines of code and probably still compiles after 15 years.

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