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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

#71

Post by jchw »

JohnFen wrote: post #52
roenxi wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Network operation. X will always be better here because it was designed to be (at least with toolkits that can still take advantage of XRender.) That is by no means clear cut - X is competing against specialist applications like VNC and there is a real question mark over whether a critical application uses OpenGL. X can easily win on toy benchmarks that play to its strengths, but it is rare in the extreme for that…

> X is competing against specialist applications like VNC I stay with X because it lets me have multiple independent logins with their own desktops. The last time I checked, Wayland doesn't support this, and this is well outside of what VNC does. This is a very important facility to me.

Can you elaborate on this one? You can of course have multiple Wayland displays at once, and/or multiple VNC servers. But, presumably, you're talking about something entirely different here.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#72

Post by jwells89 »

djha-skin wrote: post #66

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…

Even on single monitor setups Wayland handles HiDPI and fractional scaling better in most circumstances, with the exception being apps that don’t support Wayland and are drawn at upscale 1x (mostly just Electron apps where the dev couldn’t be arsed to update their wrapper for some reason).

HiDPI isn’t that niche of a thing anymore, having become common on upper midrange and up laptops. If only for that reason moving to Wayland makes sense.

Aside from that, with X11 it wasn’t that uncommon to see cases where the layers briefly became distinguishable with things like white flashes other drawing anomalies which made for a less polished sort of hacky feel. That mostly went away when switching off compositing, but most users aren’t going to be doing that.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#73

Post by AltruisticGapHN »

> People who could theoretically switch to Wayland and who might gain benefits from doing so, but who have found good reasons (often related to hardware support) that X works better for them

... like, can't click and drag a picture from Google Chrome into Files (Ubuntu 22.04). Switched back to X and it works.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#74

Post by qwerty456127 »

flohofwoe wrote: post #57
qwerty456127 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this not really this way? Do you mean a person building a GTK or a Qt app actually has to check whether the app is running under Wayland and do something special to support it nowadays?

No that situation is fine. The problems start if you don't want to use GTK or Qt, because in that situation Wayland provides only a subset of features compared to X11 (like not universally supporting window chrome rendering, so a native Wayland application needs to render its own window chrome which won't look consistent with other applications). I actually wonder what happens if you run a Gnome app on KDE, or a KDE…

> application which needs to render its own window chrome

I understand this is absolutely subjective but I just hate this phenomenon so much...

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#75

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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…

I just had to look it up; Wayland has been around for 14 years already. How much software takes 14 years and still isn't stable? How big and / or complicated is this problem and the codebase anyway?

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#76

Post by ekidd »

alphablended wrote: post #69
dale_glass wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)…

Also, X networking was mostly used within local university and company networks, and not over the internet backbone. Well-designed local networks can be very low latency, often noticeably lower latency than disk I/O.

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#77

Post by trey-jones »

nanna wrote: post #56
Galanwe wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What were you using on X that made you healthy? Well my WM for a start. It did not migrate to Wayland. And I also need to share screen from time to time (teams, Google chat, etc), which results in a dark screen for viewers in Wayland.

I despise Teams but when I was forced to use it for work and screensharing didn't work, I had to flee back to X. Any updates from Microsoft on this issue?

Zoom is currently the same - the client finally runs in Wayland, but you can't screenshare. So it's X for now...

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#78

Post by foul »

The blogpost cited by Chris angered me so much! Author at first glance appears as just a user and developer on Linux, in fact they are a full blown Fedora-GNOME-Wayland follower and what I read was a Fedora advertising piece. Since the inception of systemd (but this trend is older than systemd, take for example Ulrich Drepper's work on glibc) I tend to notice a pattern, and they are the same as the Apple fanboy stereotype (an endangered specie nowadays).

However they (oro) made me discover that emulated input arrived on Wayland, so we are nearing the moment where Wayland protocols and overlays ("portals") can reach (through some hacks) real feature parity with Xorg, EFL[1] and Arcan.

[1] Enlightenment, despite all its defects in DX, has a standalone compositor that draws on direct KMS

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#79

Post by slooonz »

moody__ wrote: post #60

Wayland is the poster child for a rewrite that tries to be 'simple' and in doing so over-complicates things by under specification. Other commenters have mentioned that usability extension issues but I wanted to discuss my experience as someone who maintains their own wayland client (for drawterm: https://github.com/9front/drawterm ). There are plenty of technical differences between how KDE, Gnome, and Wlroots that…

> There is no way to specify how a client would like this upscaling to be done

Isn’t it one of the points of content type hint ? (https://wayland.app/protocols/content-type-v1)

Re: The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

#80

Post by Qwertious »

parasti wrote: post #29

The premise of the article linked from this one is "Wayland breaks your bad software", which is a funny way of saying it's incompatible with a bunch of irreplaceable software that people still use.

Minecraft leaks (or used to leak) a prestigious amount of memory and runs poorly on every platform. Some people would say this makes it a bad game, even though it outsold Tetris.

The critical component of most software is the design; performance doesn't matter much because half of X's old software was written when your computer having 500MB of RAM was impressive, and past a certain point being snappy is more of a nice-to-have (and yes, it is very nice) than an actual necessity.

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