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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?

#201

Post by Pxtl »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #130
ewoodrich wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! Per-monitor fractional scaling on Fedora/Wayland finally allowed me to switch my default OS on my laptop from Windows 11 to Linux. I had to give up on my previous attempt a couple years ago with Linux Mint/X11 because it was an exercise in futility trying to make my various apps look acceptable on my mixed DPI monitor setup. Linux Mint with Wayland clearly was not getting a lot of attention at the time, and the…

What a pox that such an old slow moving distro as Mint somehow is people's first port of call. I don't know how this happened, how Mint rooted itself so well (in 2006 it was fresh!), but this perception that you should use the slowest moving oldest possible dustiest Linux is the best possible thing Microsoft and Apple could spread to convince the world to believe. If you are going to jump into Linux, dont sell yourse…

In my experience Mint still has the smoothest process for Nvidia drivers, making it the first suggestion for gamers.

And Snap causes some embarrassing bugs in Firefox in the Ubuntu family, so people thinking "I want an Ubuntu-like OS but without Canonical's mistakes" still gravitate to Mint.

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

#202

Post by Blikkentrekker »

martinald wrote: post #7

FWIW I recently switched full time to Linux and have had absolutely 0 problems with GNOME, Wayland and Fedora, though I am using an AMD GPU. wl-copy works fine, askpass works, copy and paste works, screen sharing with Google Meet works, drag and drop works. Using an iphone as a webcam works as does recording my screen. Most importantly using multiple monitors with fractional scaling works perfectly. AFIAK this is not…

It's really simple, then I have to use GNOME or KDE or any other thing that is on Wayland which I don't use. AwesomeWM, Xmonad, Fluxbox, OpenBox and many other interfaces just aren't on Wayland and have no intention to be because it just doesn't really do well what they want to and they don't feel like maintaining two versions.

The real issue with Wayland and “setting back” isn't what the article says, but just that like 15 years was taken just to get Wayland on semi-decent feature-parity with X11 during which time development on X11 came to a standstill. That time could've been used to improve X11 and it's still not real feature parity.

And part of it was just the devs refusing to believe that people needed those features. I talked with them around 2010-ish and about some of the things they cut out claiming that no one ever used them. These were things related to mouse acceleration that is pretty essential to video games and image editing, certain forms of screen capture, various things with fonts and color management that are essential to many professionals and they actually believed that no one used those things. Eventually they came around and added many of those things back in, in doing so basically making many of the initial security promises complete void again but so much time has been put in what isn't much of an improvement to justify the time spent on it.

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

#203

Post by jmkr »

arikrahman wrote: post #101
BowBun wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Pretty much every vst, clap, etc plugin on Linux requires X calls because of how windows get created and then managed by the host.

I've moved to running Bitwig in an Ubuntu distrobox container. Hope you're enjoying 6, it seems they fixed a lot with the piano roll.

I had to set mouse warping off in my tiling manager for yabridge/wine plugins.

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

#204

Post by eviks »

> Entitlement and bullying of open-source maintainers is not appropriate, and it's understandable that the developers lash out after feeling beaten down by entitled users.

Is it not understandable that the users lash out after being beaten down by arrogant developers calling them assholes? At least their lashing out seems to be appropriately targeted at the source?

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

#205

Post by Blikkentrekker »

Cyph0n wrote: post #174
andrewstuart2 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience lately has been similar. Most things work well now. But, I think the article has some valid points about how long it's taken to get even this far. And it just kinda sucks that some things are still broken or don't have alternatives (the #1 thing I miss right now is Barrier (Synergy) for using my macbook from my linux desktop). HDR gaming on linux is possible thanks to Valve but it's still nowhere near a…

If the Python 2 to 3 migration took a decade, isn’t it reasonable for a display server migration to take even more time to stabilize? Especially given: (1) The (relatively) fragmented reality of Linux distros and desktop managers. I am sure that such a migration could have been executed faster had the Linux desktop world been more centralized like Windows or macOS. (2) The age and maturity of X11

The python 2 to 3 situation was a similar colossal mistake of honestly incompetent developers who really enjoy programming in their free time who don't understand that time is money for most people.

By comparison, Rust with its edition system understands this.

But this is the major issue. They don't understand that even if Wayland had feature-parity with X11. The simple fact that it works differently means that if I am to migrate I would have to rewrite a tonne of scripts that hook into X11 that just organically grew over time that I've now become dependent on for my workflow. It has to be substantially better and have killer features for me to switch and yes, fractional scaling per-monitor is that killer feature for many, but not for me, and the simple fact that XMonad runs on X11 and not on Wayland is a killer feature for others.

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

#206

Post by kennethrc »

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…

> Even something as simple as alt-tabbing lagged for seconds on an overpowered machine.

This may not be KDE's fault; I tracked these kinds of issues down to some bad tunable defaults.

I came up with this:

    ----
    cat /etc/sysctl.d/50-usb-responsiveness.conf
    #
    # Attempt to keep large USB transfers from locking the system (kswapd0)
    #
    vm.swappiness = 1
    vm.dirty_background_ratio = 5
    vm.dirty_ratio = 5
    vm.extfrag_threshold = 1000
    vm.compaction_proactiveness = 0
    vm.vfs_cache_pressure = 200
    # FIXME? 64K too big?
    vm.page-cluster = 16
    ----
I have fast everything, NVMe SSD onboard and others in Thunderbolt 4 enclosures and 32GB of RAM on my 12th-Gen i7 with 20 (6+14) cores; there should have been no reason for any stuttering and/or Alt-Tab slowness while doing large file copies and finally got fed up, did some research and experimentation and use the above and it's not happened since.

YMMV, but it's worth a try.

(Oh, and on-topic, I've had to try Wayland (vs. X11) on my KDE desktop 'cause it seems to handle switching monitors when I go from home to work better; jury's still out if I'm keeping it)

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

#207

Post by rasz »

dralley wrote: post #173
Teknoman117 wrote: post #109

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 d…

Same thing with Pulse Audio People cursed the name for years, because it exposed all of the terrible, glitchy audio hardware drivers and refused on general principle to work around the issues to the degree that previous audio solutions had. And the result was that while the experience was inconsistent and buggy for years, it did eventually drag the Linux audio stack into a better place.

PulseAudio dragged linux to replacing that stinkin pile of garbage with PipeWire.

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

#208

Post by matheusmoreira »

globalnode wrote: post #122
BowBun wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

as much as i dislike m$, at least windows works and it works for games and graphics. when i need text or computation without a ui, i use linux. similar to the argument in the article about use what works, i use what works.

> at least windows works and it works for games and graphics

It doesn't, actually. I vividly remember trying and failing to play some old games on Windows. GTA San Andreas, I think. Didn't even launch due to missing DirectX libraries or whatever. I hunted down and installed all the redistributables and DLLs. Still didn't run.

So much for the fabled backwards compatibility of Windows. Microsoft clearly does not give a shit anymore. Wouldn't be surprised if Linux with Proton becomes better at running games than Windows one day.

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

#209

Post by [deleted] »

Cyph0n wrote: post #174
andrewstuart2 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience lately has been similar. Most things work well now. But, I think the article has some valid points about how long it's taken to get even this far. And it just kinda sucks that some things are still broken or don't have alternatives (the #1 thing I miss right now is Barrier (Synergy) for using my macbook from my linux desktop). HDR gaming on linux is possible thanks to Valve but it's still nowhere near a…

If the Python 2 to 3 migration took a decade, isn’t it reasonable for a display server migration to take even more time to stabilize? Especially given: (1) The (relatively) fragmented reality of Linux distros and desktop managers. I am sure that such a migration could have been executed faster had the Linux desktop world been more centralized like Windows or macOS. (2) The age and maturity of X11

[deleted]

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

#210

Post by cwnyth »

kingaillas wrote: post #178
cwnyth wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just guessing, are we? https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1445kc7/citie...

That post is 3 years old, so basically around 1 year into the Steam Deck's release.

And yet, Cities Skylines still (last tried: about 2 months ago) crashes for me when I try to load it in Wayland on Fedora, which has removed Xorg from its updates.

Wayland has broken dozens of my Steam games.

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