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The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

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Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#61

Post by jgb1984 »

kouteiheika wrote: post #40

This might be a hot take, but you'll have to take X from my cold, dead hands. Or at least until things start breaking, or maybe until Wayland has e.g. stellar HDR support and I'll get a nice OLED monitor. Otherwise, no dice. I know that X is a crusty old spawn of Cthulhu; but honestly, I don't really care? It just works! I set up my system 10 years ago with how the UI works (including my window manager), and it stabl…

Same here! I'll keep using X and openbox for as long as I can. It's the way I've been using Debian the past 20 years. Dwm, pekwm, fluxbox, openbox, so many cool windowmanagers... X works perfectly fine for me since ages, Wayland brings no benefits to me it only removes useful software that I enjoy.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#62

Post by tocariimaa »

goodpoint wrote: post #46

The security benefits are massive. X allows *every* application to take screenshots of the whole screen. 40 comments and nobody pointed out this benefit...

Doesn't Wayland WMs have to break those "security benefits" constantly to just be able to take a screenshot?

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#63

Post by enriquto »

Filligree wrote: post #43
mpsprd wrote: post #13

The last time I played with Wayland: * It broke screen sharing things * It removed X forwarding * It made my copy-paste life more complicated * It made steam ui ever slower Were these points fixed? what is the current usability of Wayland on these fronts?

Now it also breaks Electron apps.

That could be easily construed as a feature.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#64

Post by tao_at_garden »

kouteiheika wrote: post #40

This might be a hot take, but you'll have to take X from my cold, dead hands. Or at least until things start breaking, or maybe until Wayland has e.g. stellar HDR support and I'll get a nice OLED monitor. Otherwise, no dice. I know that X is a crusty old spawn of Cthulhu; but honestly, I don't really care? It just works! I set up my system 10 years ago with how the UI works (including my window manager), and it stabl…

As a user of EXWM, I feel this deeply. That Wayland also requires just so much additional tooling to get things like screensharing working properly means that smaller distros, like Clear Linux, don't ship it.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#65

Post by smashed »

systems_glitch wrote: post #26

X11 then, X11 now, X11 forever! I haven't poked at Wayland in years, but when I did `ssh -X` didn't get the job done for many of the applications built for Wayland, even with XWayland.

Please correct me if I'm wrong but XWayland is about bringing an X11 app to show up its output under a Wayland desktop.

I.e., an app that has not been updated yet to work with Wayland.

You can get an entire wayland desktop to display on an X11 backend. This was used in development when there were no display drivers compatible with Wayland but you still wanted to work on app compatibility, etc.. The flow will look like App => Wayland => X11.

Not sure how practical it is for your use case.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#66

Post by djha-skin »

The thing that really made me get over the pain of switching window managers just so that I could go to Wayland was my multi monitor HiPI setup. I had high DPI monitors at work but two 1080p monitors at home. Switching back and forth between them on x is a huge pain because you have to change the scale factor back to one and then restart the window manager. Wayland allows me to switch the scale factor per monitor on the fly and switch back to low DPI screens. I also noticed that screen tearing went away and everything just looked better on Wayland.

I used to use XFCE most of the time but I switched to KDE recently and I noticed it was a lot faster than it used to be. Plasma used to be laggy which is why I switched to XFCE but it's a lot faster now and well-behaved.

The last holdout for X for me was the inability to share my screen on Zoom or Google Meet. Once PipeWire became stable, that problem went away as well, which was a huge win for my work experience.

The network thing doesn't hold water for me. X11 forwarding has been useful in the past, but nowadays I find little use for it on my day to day.

All that said, I believe X will never really go away, and that's a good thing. Open source means the freedom to keep on doing what works for you.

Wayland will likely catch up though. A rewrite of this size was always going to be painful, but the tangible benefits for me was worth it.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#67

Post by zamalek »

> they don't want to do without features and performance they currently have

FWIW I do agree about the features problem, especially on Ubuntu - where I can only assume they have altered Wayland/Mutter just enough to break screen sharing. I don't have the problems on my personal NisOS machine, although to be fair I haven't used GNOME on my personal machine in >1y. Then there's also missing functionality, such as input emulation. I can absolutely see why someone wouldn't use Wayland from this perspective, even though I "deal with it" for one major reason:

Performance. Wayland uses significantly fewer resources than X - as demonstrated by laptop battery life (like-for-like, GNOME Wayland vs. X). I lose about 30% to X, which is 2 hours during light usage. There's also the latency - where I suspect that people who claim to "not care" have not experienced using a GPU accelerated terminal on a >=144hz display. People are adverse to change (which is fine), haven't tried it in earnest (which is also fine), and yet have strong opinions about how bad it is.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#68

Post by jstimpfle »

veidr wrote: post #55

This article, like many, ignores the reality that lots of setups -- especially workstations with several high-res monitors -- do not work at all, or work with enormous jank-ass caveats even bigger than the ones that come with using Wayland. (Which I admit are also hellacious in may cases.) Case in point: I have to use Wayland, because otherwise my Linux machine just can't reasonably drive my monitors (one 8K, three 4…

> (one 8K, three 4K, and one high-refresh-rate 1440p portable)

More power to you, pushing the limits. But frankly with this setup, you are in a tiny minority. What is your use case?

What is the technical reason that this works on Wayland but not X?

I've had one 4K screen since 2018, never had a problem. Other than the fact that older applications don't respect high-dpi so need manual tweaking, or need to be replaced.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#69

Post by alphablended »

dale_glass wrote: post #53
jchw wrote: post #7

Very true. Wayland is now stable enough to be used in a lot of "production" environments and I've been using Sway as my desktop for years , and yet still, there is work left to be done: - Hardware support. NVIDIA support is spotty still. Easily the biggest issue IMO, though it's better than it was. - Network operation. X will always be better here because it was designed to be (at least with toolkits that can still t…

> Network operation. X will always be better here because it was designed to be Excuse me, but BS. At least for anything of actual relevance. X11 networking works okay for stuff that looks like a classic X11 app. That's things like xcalc. Any modern text editor, web browser, or anything else is going to be dog slow. X11 has a bad networking protocol that's way too latency sensitive, and as a result is nigh unusuable…

> No, I'd say X11 wasn't designed to be run on the network [...]

That's just wrong. X11 was designed from the ground up to be used on the network. It just happens that nowadays requirements are different from when it was originally designed.

Running X11 on the network was quite a thing in Unis all over the world, where you could have dedicated dozens of X11 graphic terminal servers (tektronix used to make good ones) connected (100Mbits) to a single mainframe, and everyone running an Xemacs session without slowdown.

Wayland design is all about framebuffers, which clearly shows how focus has shifted. X11 was not designed for pixmap heavy, shader heavy scenarios.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#70

Post by jchw »

dale_glass wrote: post #53
jchw wrote: post #7

Very true. Wayland is now stable enough to be used in a lot of "production" environments and I've been using Sway as my desktop for years , and yet still, there is work left to be done: - Hardware support. NVIDIA support is spotty still. Easily the biggest issue IMO, though it's better than it was. - Network operation. X will always be better here because it was designed to be (at least with toolkits that can still t…

> Network operation. X will always be better here because it was designed to be Excuse me, but BS. At least for anything of actual relevance. X11 networking works okay for stuff that looks like a classic X11 app. That's things like xcalc. Any modern text editor, web browser, or anything else is going to be dog slow. X11 has a bad networking protocol that's way too latency sensitive, and as a result is nigh unusuable…

Actually, though, toolkits that still have XRender backends will run relatively efficiently over the network. To be fair, this is becoming a thing of the past slowly, but it's not gone yet: Qt 6 re-added the XRender backend due to complaints of how much slower X11 networking was!

Granted though, it does nothing for apps using Electron. However, try e.g. the Dolphin file browser on a 4K display over the network, and you'll find it is clearly faster than should be possible.

Probably I should've made it clearer, but imo the bigger problem is that tweaking Waypipe to replace old uses of ssh -Y shouldn't be needed; it should be possible for it to determine what possible options can be used and switch things around to deal with CPU or network bottlenecks most effectively. Easier said than done. There's also still some bugs under Waypipe; it's an understandably challenging problem.

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