Mastodawn

The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

https://lemmy.ndlug.org/post/143136

The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant - NDLUG

In response to Wayland Breaks Your Bad Software [https://orowith2os.gitlab.io/posts/wayland-breaks-your-bad-software/] > I say that the technical merits are irrelevant because I don’t believe that they’re a major factor any more in most people moving or not moving to Wayland. > With only a slight amount of generalization, none of these people will be moved by Wayland’s technical merits. The energetic people who could be persuaded by technical merits to go through switching desktop environments or in some cases replacing hardware (or accepting limited features) have mostly moved to Wayland already. The people who remain on X are there either because they don’t want to rebuild their desktop environment, they don’t want to do without features and performance they currently have, or their Linux distribution doesn’t think their desktop should switch to Wayland yet.

Greyscale Sep 1, 2023

I’ve not even heard of what the technical merits are. It seems to just break shit like systemd.

Eventually I’ll be dragged across by the distro, but until then I do not care.

GenderNeutralBro Sep 1, 2023

Same. I’m sure its great, but I’m not motivated to spend my time and energy on it. I remember when PulseAudio first came out, it had growing pains too. I jumped on board early because it solved problems I needed to solve. I was a younger nerd back then, and I don’t have the patience for the cutting edge anymore.

I hear it does indeed work with Nvidia now, so I guess I’ll give it another shot next time I distro-hop.

russjr08 Sep 1, 2023

As someone who constantly checks in on the Nvidia + Wayland combination every time there is a Nvidia driver update, it “works” but only by the loosest definition unfortunately.

pelotron Sep 1, 2023

Yea, I have a 2080 and try to run a Wayland KDE session every now and then, but so far every time the desktop has ended up frozen after a couple minutes. Reboot back into X it is…

GenderNeutralBro Sep 1, 2023

Oh. Womp womp.

I need to refamiliarize myself with the state of AI libraries without CUDA. Last I checked it was still a problem. I’d love to never buy Nvidia again.

russjr08 Sep 1, 2023

I’m not too well versed in the AI/ML industry, but from what I hear CUDA is still the far prevalent / preferred backend - I don’t believe its impossible so to speak, but it definitely involves having to dig a bit deeper for more alternatives.

I hear its also somewhat common to use an AMD GPU for your actual desktop, but then also have an Nvidia GPU strictly for usage of CUDA but of course that’s a bit more expensive and also still involves keeping up with Nvidia’s hardware.

Pasta Dental Sep 1, 2023

Yeah it does technically work as in it functions, but it’s riddled with bugs and missing features. The biggest one preventing me to switch my desktop over to Wayland is the lack of GAMMA_LUT (which enables night light). The issue for this has been open for over a year and there is still no apparent progress, Nvidia really is a pain on Linux.

Meanwhile my AMD laptop works wonders on Wayland and it’s the best experience I’ve had using a computer by far, the touchpad gestures on GNOME +Wayland make me want to get a trackpad for my desktop when I can switch to Wayland.

russjr08 Sep 1, 2023

Yep, the lack of GAMMA_LUT has been a thorn for me as well. I’ve tried getting around it every now and then by putting on some glasses that I picked up a while ago that just have the blue light tinting built in, but eh.

Another massive problem is some applications, electron based especially, basically “rewind” frames every so often. I’m not even sure how to explain it, but for example you can be typing and a few letters will revert, then come back in… it’s very strange. Other applications also just have their UI stop rendering completely until restarted (KDE’s taskbar being an annoying occurrence when it happens).

I have an older MacBook that I occasionally use with Fedora + KDE and Wayland works much better there, it’s only integrated graphics AFAIK so I keep my expectations tempered, but it’s definitely still smoother than Nvidia + Wayland which is just… sad.

I really would love to test it with an AMD card some day, but I have way too many other things to worry about than picking up a new GPU for the time being.

zwekihoyy Sep 1, 2023

just check out a compatible desktop environment/window manager. you don’t need to do a full distro change.

if the base is the same (ie. debian, arch, etc) there is no point in changing distros anyways.

dnzm Sep 2, 2023

Or, maybe, not go out of my way to fit my way of working to someone else's notice of how I should be doing things? If A works and B doesn't, unless I put in a lot of effort... Why exactly would I?

BlinkerFluid Sep 1, 2023

The utilities that replace the utilities you’re used to on X11 work great.

So do the utilities that already work on X11.

That’s um… not the best motivation.

Sh1nyM3t4l4ss Sep 1, 2023

I agree. I switched to Wayland over two years ago and these days I don’t look back at all. I don’t care if Wayland has full feature parity with X11 as long the features I actually use are supported which they are.

Clipboard sharing in VirtualBox doesn’t work right now (though I’m relatively sure it could be implemented by VirtualBox right now with Wayland as it is) and neither does AutoTyping in KeePassXC (not sure if there’s a mechanism for that on Wayland), though Autofill in the Browser works so it’s no big deal to me.

In return I get 1:1 touch gestures, better multi monitor support and an overall smoother desktop on Plasma Wayland so I’ll take it.

People often still make complaints about Wayland that have been fixed months or years ago and it’s a bit tiring.

FrostyCaveman Sep 1, 2023

Better multi monitor support and a smoother desktop? Very interesting…

Pasta Dental Sep 1, 2023

Yeah? Things like having a 60hz monitor and a 120hz monitor is basically non existent on X11, plus Wayland has this “perfect frame every time” + vsync philosophy which means no tearing and it feels much smoother to use than X11

marty_relaxes Sep 1, 2023

On the topic of auto-typing, the mechanisms for variations of it exist in Wayland since I am using it in my password scripts to automatically fill login boxes. (Using tools like ydotool or wtype.)

So I would guess that KeePass hasn’t integrated the necessary protocols/api for Wayland?

GitHub - ReimuNotMoe/ydotool: Generic command-line automation tool

Generic command-line automation tool. Contribute to ReimuNotMoe/ydotool development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub

demesisx Sep 1, 2023

I’m not leaving xmonad. It’s such a bummer that Waymonad didn’t really take off.

theshatterstone54 Sep 1, 2023

And I’m over here crying over Way-Cooler that was supposed to give us AwesomeWM on Wayland.

Hairyblue Sep 1, 2023

I want to use Wayland, but it currently doesn't work with my Ubuntu 23.04/Nvidia/Steam. It was working under old steam big picture mode but the new big picture mode broke it.

Hope they fix it because I do believe Wayland is the future.

Coelacanthus Sep 1, 2023

It may be related to Nvidia. Most bugs I met in Wayland is related to it. Such as no dmabuf export support, and vulkan init will fail because a bug in nvidia prime implementation…
As Linus said, so Nvidia, fuck you…

nyan Sep 1, 2023

Wayland’s major “technical merits”, as far as I can tell, are a lack of screen tearing, slightly faster rendering under some circumstances and better handling of touchscreens. That’s it. If you don’t have a touchscreen and aren’t a gamer (few non-gamers care all that much about tearing or about framerates above 60Hz), Wayland has no real advantages to the user that I’m aware of.

X is network-transparent, more widely compatible, and arguably more extensible. Most users don’t care about those things either.

Wayland has an advantage in attracting developers because it has less accumulated technical debt and general code cruft. That doesn’t make it better for users, though. Most Wayland evangelists I run into seem to be devs who are more interested in the design of the graphics stack than whether it makes a difference in the real world.

So, as with so many things, “merit” is in the eye of the beholder. People should use what works for them.

Gebruikersnaam Sep 1, 2023

Also better isolation of applications and better support for multiple screens.

nyan Sep 1, 2023

I’ll give you the multiple screens (not a use case I have myself, so I don’t pay attention to support quality). Isolation of applications is another thing that most users don’t really care that much about, I would say.

tal Sep 1, 2023

It's legitimately important if you want to be able to pull random software from places and not have your system compromised, a la smartphone OSes.

It's not the whole story -- things still aren't entirely sandboxed aside from that -- but without it, the GUI is a big security hole.

SkyeStarfall Sep 1, 2023

You never care about security until you get hacked

zwekihoyy Sep 1, 2023

users shouldn’t have to care about security. it should be the baseline.

MazonnaCara89 Sep 1, 2023

And don’t forget 1:1 gesture and the Crash-Resilient Wayland Compositing that keep the application alive even tho the “compositor” crash, so it does restart without any data loss.

Fedora Sep 2, 2023

Let’s not forget HiDPI. Everything with a HiDPI display is borderline unusable on Linux. This also applies to applications that run through XWayland, unfortunately.

theshatterstone54 Sep 1, 2023

People on Unix environments that don’t have Wayland support.

That’s a big one. All the *BSD folk will keep on using X at least until it gets proper support over there (which might never happen) and even then it will still be boycotted by some BSD users for other reasons.

People using mainstream desktop environments that already support Wayland … [but their distro hasn’t made the switch]

I agree about that. Many people don’t care and will just use whatever their distro tells them to use. As you said, there’s usually good reason for it.

People using desktop environments or custom X setups that don’t (currently) support Wayland.

This is another one, and is actually one I kinda fall under. I use a tiling window manager. The tiling Wayland compositors are often times not as polished, and a big annoyance for me personally is the fact that most of them (River, Hyprland, DWL) don’t come with a bar. Of my X Window Managers, AwesomeWM, DWM and Qtile already have their own bars. BSPWM is basically supposed to be used with Polybar, the same way XMonad and xmobar are basically made for each other. On Wayland, Somebar is made for DWL, but waybar and yambar work really well with it. Sway has swaybar, but waybar works perfectly with it. Both Waybar and yambar work great with River. And there’s Waybar, and gBar, and other bars for Hyprland. And that’s without mentioning EWW, which can be used to make a bar.

Another issue I have is that my touchpad doesn’t get detected if I’m holding down a key. So if I’m playing Minecraft and I’m trying to turn around and run away from a zombie using my touchpad because my mouse’s battery ran out, I have to do these actions one by one and hope I survive, or just let myself die. That’s just an example, but I have noticed it in other games as well. No such issues on X. And I’ve also had Powerwash Simulator, ran through wine, just crash on me in some (Qtile or Hyprland), but not other compositors. In DWL, I couldn’t turn all the way around and forbsome reason my movement was restricted to 270°, and in River I had 0 issues.

When you have a monopoly

You’re saying this as if X didn’t have a monopoly over Unix graphics.

Zamundaaa Sep 1, 2023

Another issue I have is that my touchpad doesn’t get detected if I’m holding down a key

That’s a libinput feature, meant to prevent you from accidentally using the touchpad when you’re typing. You can disable it if you want.

theshatterstone54 Sep 2, 2023

How? Would that be in the compositor input rules or somewhere else?

Zamundaaa Sep 2, 2023

I don’t know how to configure libinput under ${YOUR_FAVORITE_COMPOSITOR}, you’ll have to figure that out yourself. In Plasma it’s simply in the touchpad settings

theshatterstone54 Sep 2, 2023

Okay, my point was it is in input settings, not some strange configuration.

HakFoo Sep 1, 2023

What has kept me away from Wayland is the tendency to be dependent on the compositor for so much.

I use my preferred X11 window manager for largely aesthetic reasons, but by and large, I can swap it out and the rest of the software doesn’t give a damn. At most, you might have to tweak a RC file to fix missing custom assumptions (i. e. disabling decorations on full-screenified Proton games)

It seems like on Wayland, there’s a lot more of a “if you aren’t using GNOME or KDE, the odds something meaningful breaks are much higher.” Aside from the perceived bulk of these environments, they’re highly opinionated-- I suspect it would be a major production number to hammer them into a shape that looked like FVWM or WindowMaker, even if you only wanted to match a single theme’s aesthetics (as opposed to, say, FVWM’s dynamic configurability).

OneCardboardBox Sep 1, 2023

If you find a Wayland compositor that’s based on wl-roots, you basically get that ability for swapping out the window manager.

The wl-roots project aims to be a common library that any project can pull in without having to implement the required Wayland protocols themselves.

HakFoo Sep 2, 2023

But even that’s a relatively high bar. Wl-roots is self-described as “60000 lines of code you don’t have to write yourself”, and any arbitrary compositor may not use it or may not be up-to-date with it. In X11, you don’t need 60,000 lines of code to be functional. Hell, the example Window Manager that was printed as a couple of chapters in the old X11R5 reference books works well enough especially considering its size.

I feel like I missed the historic genesis of this particular quagmire. Knowing that a composer was essential, you’d expect developers would want to make very robust core functionality-- a super-rich libweston or something like wl-roots, so that “real” compositors would just be paper-thin extensions that answered the opinionated parts. Did early Wayland design get bogged down on embedded-style use cases where such features were seen as too expensive (compare: no built-in printf in C), or was it a deliberate territory grab by early compositor developers, trying to turn it into a place they could to gain competitive advantage?

slembcke Sep 1, 2023

I’ve been using it for a few years now, and it fixes a lot of little issues I have with X11, and at this point brings very few of its own. ALTHOUGH, I don’t have any Nvidia GPUs, and people seem to think it works for crap on them. I keep hearing “Ah, this will finally fix it!”, but I don’t know what the actual status is. You have the hardware you have, so unless you are going to buy something different to try Wayland… eh… I guess it never hurts to try. It’s pretty trivial to toggle on and off.

Sh1nyM3t4l4ss Sep 1, 2023

I have a laptop with hybrid Intel+NVIDIA graphics, and I can say that offloading games and such to the dGPU while letting the iGPU handle everything else works with zero issues for me on Wayland.

On desktops where the NVIDIA GPU handles everything I don’t have that much experience on Wayland although when I did try it earlier this year it was surprisingly good, but with occasional dumb bugs like Plasma panels freezing or XWayland apps breaking in funny ways. Although honestly just a few years back running Plasma X11 on NVIDIA wasn’t much better than Wayland now.

slembcke Sep 1, 2023

Interesting. My laptop died a little while ago, and I needed to demo a game I’m working on at a local convention. My wife had a hybrid GPU machine and let me swap in my SSD to run it. The drive had PopOS on it without the NV drivers. It did seem to run wayland fine on the internal display, but the external display was picky. (I wanted to demo on a bigger display) The only way to get the game to run smoothly was to disable the internal display using X11, and run the game using GL instead of Vulkan. >_<

So yeah, kinda mostly worked if I wanted it to be a laptop. I can see how it gets to be a pain if your needs are specific though.

bookmeat Sep 1, 2023

I still don’t know why people are willing to give up remoting so willingly. With X it was always easy to send your accelerated video securely over the network. Didn’t Wayland drop this? How are people remoting securely into Wayland desktops now?

InverseParallax Sep 1, 2023

I mean, I think most people use xwayland to keep this functionality.

Agreed completely though, we need a better replacement for remoting, it’s too useful.

SkyeStarfall Sep 1, 2023

Do a significant amount of people using wayland even want or need to remote exactly like in X?

Cornelius Sep 1, 2023

There is a variety of remote desktop applications that support Wayland, Brodie talked about them in his video regarding Wayland’s lack of network transparency. Wayland does not need network transparency to be able to support remote desktop.

django Sep 1, 2023

You mean something like waypipe? gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/

M. Stoeckl / Waypipe · GitLab

Network transparency with Wayland

GitLab

bookmeat Sep 2, 2023

This seems good. Is there a preferred solution for headless Wayland desktops?

CaptainAniki Sep 2, 2023

I don’t have any need for remote desktop into a linux machine. That’s what CLIs are for.

FluffyPotato Sep 1, 2023

Yea, I’m currently using Wayland because Manjaro comes with it but like 90% of the programs I use launch with xwayland anyway. I’m not a developer but can’t they just give it proper support for all programs? Like run those programs like they do on X11. Seems pointless if nothing works on it.

Not to mention my laptop with Nvidia graphics, that is just so broken on Wayland I ended up switching it to X11 and I’m very lazy.

orangeboats Sep 1, 2023

Most programs you use (provided they are FOSS) probably already support Wayland, they just don’t do it by default. The following list of environment variables can go a long way in making your system largely Wayland-native.

GDK_BACKEND=wayland QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 #SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland # this one is dangerous if you play games

FluffyPotato Sep 2, 2023

My desktop is basically just used for gaming so like nothing there is FOSS. My laptop is used for work which requires a ton of remoting so again Wayland would not work.

woelkchen Sep 2, 2023

My laptop is used for work which requires a ton of remoting so again Wayland would not work.

Funny how a 10 second “wayland remote desktop” web search disproves that claim.

FluffyPotato Sep 2, 2023

Last time I tried that it just launched through xwayland. And currently my laptop is using X11 because Nvidia GPU so I can’t re-test.

woelkchen Sep 2, 2023

And currently my laptop is using X11 because Nvidia GPU

All notebook released in the last several years with an NVidia dGPU also have an AMD or Intel iGPU.

FluffyPotato Sep 2, 2023

Sure and X11 actually works with it’s GPU while Wayland causes more issues than its worth. I’m not gonna use software that locks off my GPU especially if that software has no advantages for me.

woelkchen Sep 2, 2023

Wayland causes more issues than its worth. I’m not gonna use software that locks off my GPU

Sure, shift the blame of NVidia’s shitty Linux and Wayland support to Wayland. How on earth could a multi-billion dollar company ever manage to make proper drivers only 11 years after Wayland 1.0 has been released…? THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE! WAYLAND BAD!

FluffyPotato Sep 2, 2023

Never said that. It’s probably going to be better at some point but for the average user X11 is still a better option.

woelkchen Sep 2, 2023

for the average user X11 is still a better option

The average user has Intel/AMD iGPUs and uses whatever is default which in fact is Wayland in case of Gnome and Steam Deck Game Mode.

FluffyPotato Sep 2, 2023

Nope, steam deck is X11, just checked mine.

Yea, most people use the default, like I use Wayland on my desktop which is almost exclusively used for games so 99.9% of applications launch through xwayland. I’m saying Wayland doesn’t have advantages over X11 for the average user and for anyone with an Nvidia GPU it is an active hindrance.

woelkchen Sep 2, 2023

Nope, steam deck is X11, just checked mine.

Then you checked wrong and don’t understand the difference between Game Mode and Desktop Mode.

for anyone with an Nvidia GPU it is an active hindrance.

You bought an expensive product with incomplete drivers. The hindrance is NVidia.

GitHub - ValveSoftware/gamescope: SteamOS session compositing window manager

SteamOS session compositing window manager. Contribute to ValveSoftware/gamescope development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub

orangeboats Sep 3, 2023

On the other hand… if you are primarily gaming on your PC, then the moment Wine supports Wayland 90% of your programs will be Wayland-native.

FluffyPotato Sep 3, 2023

And that would be great if/when it happens but currently Wayland offers very little over X11 to the average user. Better multi monitor support is like the only thing.

orangeboats Sep 3, 2023

Theoretically an average user should feel nothing. The benefits of Wayland are usually more visible when more modern technologies are involved, for example VRR, high DPI, HDR, etc.