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Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

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Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#311

Post by DyslexicAtheist »

majewsky wrote: post #119
elric wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...] reducing technical debt, improving security practices, etc Reducing technical debt by rewriting everything from scratch (almost?) never works. It's the baby and the bathwater. It's the sort of thing that seems attractive to junior developers, but more seasoned folks know that the legacy system contains years of embedded knowledge and workarounds for "real world" issues. The new, conceptually beautiful system…

> It's the sort of thing that seems attractive to junior developers You make it sound like Wayland has been pushed by some script kiddies, when in fact the lead developers on Wayland are the actual Xorg maintainers. To me, the migration from X11 to Wayland looks similar to the switch from DOS-based Windows to Windows NT. At the time, lots of programs were broken by the move because they assumed you could meddle in ot…

> when in fact the lead developers on Wayland are the actual Xorg maintainers.

Daniel Stone[0] incredibly funny and educational talk[1] from 2013 could help many critics who missed the 3 decade long ongoing discussion of why X is bad. We've talked about this already in the mid 90ies (when there were no alternatives) and now 8 years after this popular linux.conf.au talk, people still having troubles understanding why X has always been a terrible tradeoff for both security and performance (well for literally everything).

[0] https://www.fooishbar.org/about/

[1] The Real Story Behind Wayland and X https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44

edit: BUT X IS THE UNIX WAY! << so what is the 1 thing X does, and what is it doing well?

Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#312

Post by mehdix »

TL;DR Just played Cyberpunk 2077 with no glich on Sway and Wayland on Arch Linux last night for almost two hours.

I am embracing Wayland and wlroot-based desktops. It is simpler, faster, and fits easier in my head.

Forgot to mention that I also just got my screensharing working under Wayland with Sway and Chromium for MS Teams (Have not tried with Firefox yet). Works like charm, albat with Pipewire. I have no gdm/GNOME installed.

Edit I: Mention the OS.

Edit II: Mention screen sharing.

Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#313

Post by adrusi »

josefx wrote: post #306
adrusi wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's overhyped, but tearing does make me feel like I'm using an amateur OS, especially when I'm using X for some weeks and then hop over to wayland or Mac or Windows, and the picture looks stable.

Tearing can be a gigantic issue when you have full screen videos or render games. However as far as I could find these are caused by the KDE/Gnome/etc. compositor not running in sync with the screen refresh rate. Find a way to bypass the compositor(KDE options to disable it, GNOME with full screen windows, or tell the X window to override the compositor) and it goes away. Its easy to lob all problems on X but whats n…

I'm not familiar with the internals enough to know if you're right about tearing being the compositor's fault, though I'd be quite surprised if disabling the compositor resulted in less tearing. But I do know that I experienced tearing using compton with i3 (though much less than i3 with no compositor).

If Gnome, KDE and compton all manage to get compositing wrong on X, and yet every wayland compositor manages to get it right, then maybe it is a problem with X, even if there is some arcane way to fix the issue.

Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#314

Post by _abox »

zbuf wrote: post #221
_abox wrote: post #30

I really miss the network transparency in Wayland. Just being able to start a program on another machine through an SSH session is so useful. You can use something like vnc but a "whole desktop in a window" is slower and not as handy. I'm on freebsd mostly anyway which isn't big on the Wayland train so I'm fine for now. But it would be great if X11 development would be continued.

> I'm on freebsd mostly anyway which isn't big on the Wayland train so I'm fine for now. But it would be great if X11 development would be continued. It would be. If a group wishes to take up Xorg development then I would be supportive of that. I suspect it may come from the BSDs, too.

Yeah I hope so. It's not in a good place with RedHat right now because they want to get rid of it anyway. This way it becomes obsolete even quicker, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I really hope some group will take it on board that really wants it. I think there's still a good usecase for it.

FreeBSD does support Wayland in a way but it's pretty primitive.

Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#315

Post by Avamander »

tjoff wrote: post #84
badjeans wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> soon That's been the sentiment for the past 12 years and X11 still works great and wayland implementations are a buggy, slow, featureless mess.

They aren't though. And X is pretty deprecated by now.

> They aren't though.

Remote desktop, game screen recording, screenshots, how do those work?

Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#316

Post by _abox »

zbuf wrote: post #211
Redoubts wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can use something like vnc but a "whole desktop in a window" is slower Really? I’ve found x-forwarding much slower and annoying unless the host is on a LAN.

I think you've probably answered the question there; there are a lot of hosts on my LAN. X works great.

Yeah even on my cloud boxes it works great. They are physically close though.

Ideally if X was still maintained they could incorporate some of the old freeNX / X2go logic that makes it more robust against latency.

But I think this usecase is becoming more important again. In the early days of X it was great because we were all using terminals on single powerful machines. Then we moved to desktop and transparency was less of a thing. But now we're moving more and more towards cloud computing again which is not all that different from the old client/server model. At least not in the sense of having a separation between compute and I/O.

Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#317

Post by noobermin »

viraptor wrote: post #94
sam_lowry_ wrote: post #24

My biggest issue with Wayland is how it makes window managers a thing of the past. i3, xmonad, elightenment, ctwm, WindowMaker and dozens of others appeared only because X made it easy. Wayland makes developing window managers difficult again.

Give it some time. With the way sway and wlroots are developed, someone will create a proper high level framework-to-write-a-WM one day and we'll get all those experiments on wayland too.

One day. While today it's easy to write one in X and you don't have all the compatibility issues talked about in the article and up and down this thread.

Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#318

Post by _abox »

ragnese wrote: post #285
elric wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...] reducing technical debt, improving security practices, etc Reducing technical debt by rewriting everything from scratch (almost?) never works. It's the baby and the bathwater. It's the sort of thing that seems attractive to junior developers, but more seasoned folks know that the legacy system contains years of embedded knowledge and workarounds for "real world" issues. The new, conceptually beautiful system…

Everything you said is correct. But, there are surely cases where even though rewriting everything from scratch almost never works, the status quo doesn't work either . I'm afraid that's where the Linux desktop is today. Linux as a platform actually sucks for running "untrusted" software. And "untrusted" doesn't just mean proprietary games. It also just means "can I please run the alpha version of this cool open sour…

Android does a thing where it has its own display stack and very strict sandboxing so X11 isn't really a thing :)

And for the sandboxing it uses SELinux which is available on desktop as well. It's just a royal PITA to configure. This is why many people don't bother with it. But in a highly restricted environment like a smartphone it's a lot easier.

I wouldn't call that a 'hacky' thing, it's just using it in a very different environment.

Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#319

Post by iforgotpassword »

krzyk wrote: post #281
jchw wrote: post #19

> Wayland solves no issues I have This is a common sentiment, but it is kind of funny. Because software engineers working for companies will know the struggle of trying to justify reducing technical debt, improving security practices, etc. but fail to see why these things are useful to them personally when the tables turn. Wayland indeed “breaks a lot of shit” but it’s not an accident or done due to incompetence. Als…

Exactly this: Wayland solves no issues I have (It is very similar to systemd, and the motto on page https://nosystemd.org/ that is what I think about systemd also: If this is the solution, I want my problem back.) If one doesn't use multi-GPU setups or high DPI they don't need Wayland, yet (later they will either have no options (like with systemd) or will buy better screens). For me e.g. I don't know if I have a pro…

I feel the same. Xorg just works. My dev machine has intel onboard gfx with two screens attached and an old gefore 8 (I think) to drive a third screen, using nouveau. Zero config required, X just combines them as if it were one card with three outputs. Wayland? No chance. Screen sharing in Jitsi in Firefox? X doing just fine, Wayland not a chance (using Sway). So X just works fine out of the box no matter what, while Wayland is a broken mess that reminds you of X 15 years ago. Oh but Wayland solves screen tearing, which I guess would boost my productivity while coding by 500% so maybe it's worth the hassle.

Re: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet

#320

Post by mtzet »

Filligree wrote: post #248
canofbars wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Wayland has existed since more than 10 years and it has still not been able to release a usable system. Fedora has has it on by default for about 4 years now and its perfectly usable. I use it every day. The problem is much more serious than you are explaining. While using X, on my main monitor, UI and text becomes so small I can not even read it or click the icons. I'm not talking about the window size, but the UI…

My display scalings aren't 100% and 200%, however. They're 125% and 160%. Can Wayland handle this? If not, what's it really solving?

> Can Wayland handle this?

Yes.

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