TLDR of linked gist: wayland is not X therefore it is bad. end of.
Wayland breaks Xclip: As you said it yourself, Xclip is an X11 application, so it doesn’t work on Wayland. Of course it wouldn’t work on Wayland. With Wayland, we’re trying to prevent what happened with Xorg from happening again, or am I wrong?
also, github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard. perhaps all OP (of gist) needs is a simple shim that can convert calls to xclip to wl-copy/paste? that doesn’t seem too hard to make compared to keeping X.org alive I’d say (perhaps they should try making it if it’s that much of a problem)
Wayland breaks screensavers: Yeah, that seems to be the case.
[…] Adding screen savers to Wayland is not simply a matter of “port the XScreenSaver daemon”, because under the Wayland model, screen blanking and locking should not be a third-party user-space app; much of the logic must be embedded into the display manager itself. This is a good thing! It is a better model than what we have under X11. […]
[…] Under X11, you run XScreenSaver, which is a user-space program that tries really hard to keep the screen locked and never crash. It is very good at this, but that it needs to try so hard in the first place is a fundamental design flaw of X11. […]
other people can comment on the parts they know about, these are two i know of off the top of my head
In the modern era, the main purpose of a screen saver is to lock the screen, and has been for most users for a long time. Many of us would also like to have pretty pictures on our locked screens.
It no longer has anything to do with preventing burn-in, so you’re right from a certain point of view.
On X11 systems, XScreenSaver is two things: it is both a large collection of screen savers; and it is also the framework for blanking and locking the screen.
What a stupid article. It’s like saying “stop using electric vehicles because you can’t use gas stations”. I don’t understand why he’s so adamant about this? It’s not like Wayland had about 20 years of extra time to develop like X11. People keep working on it, and it takes time to polish things.
The article is 3 years old and some things are only presently being fixed NOW and due to filter down to stable distros in 2024. Furthermore wayland proponents have been claiming its totally ready for prime time and not broken at all since 2015 while promoting AMD GPUs that at that point in time still sucked hairy balls.
I don’t think a good response to " breaks " is to say "yes, because was designed to work with and hasn’t been updated to use ". Part of the task of replacing something old - onerous though it be - is to provide a smooth route to support old programs and functionality.
Wayland deliberately broke everything, but then was rolled out prematurely at least on some distros, before giving the vast X ecosystem enough time (which was guaranteed to be a long time, due to how large and entrenched it was) to update. Besides which, the “OUTDATED” post has an awful lot of things you acknowledge are still issues!
I would argue that promoting Wayland as production ready is still premature considering the number of excuses Wayland proponents have to make who is at fault for Wayland’s shortcomings (Nvidia seems to be a big one but people who have needs the short-sighted protocol design didn’t account for are a close second).
The problem, as I see it, is that the author of the original Gist does not really want wayland replacements for what he has, but rather what he has to also work on wayland.
Wayland didn’t break everything. It broke what relied on X11 specific stuff, which turned out to be a lot of things. The vast majority of issues still present with Wayland are edge-cases that will only see the light of day when the people with those edge-cases start using wayland. And as long as distros default to X11, that won’t happen. So that distros, like Fedora, started defaulting to Wayland “early” on (yes I put early in quotes, because it’s only perceived as early) is actually a good thing. Makes the compositor developers aware of edge-cases they can’t catch themselves.
I’vge been using Wayland exclusively for over a year and apart from a couple of small bugs, not even missing functions, I haven’t experienced any issues relating to Wayland directly. But that’s for my use case. YMMV as always.
The problem, as I see it, is that the author of the original Gist does not really want wayland replacements for what he has, but rather what he has to also work on wayland.
It's like the Windows users expecting to use all the same software on Linux when they move over problem, but in microcosm.
The main issue here is not that some of the issues that are mentioned there are not genuine. They indeed are genuine and have mostly already been notified to the devs working on the protocols and the compositors. The issue here is how those are presented. By creating this almost cultish “battle between the 2 display servers” thing is not productive and demoralizes developers. Making criticism is one thing and productive but “boycotting” is not. And certainly not in the bad faith way the author of that article has done. I myself have both X and WL setups and I alternate between them frequently. I am not sitting here “boycotting” one display server in a prejudiced manner. This is Linux, not Windows or MacOS. Users are free to continue using Xorg and develop it according to them if they do not like something else. And similarly, they are free to use Wayland.
idk i feel the window manager space its losing a lot with wayland and i didnt have a great experience with any wayland versions of existing WM. without even talking about the nvidia shitshow, does sway still call you a bitch for even trying to run it on nvidia?? imma stick to dwm as long as it works
I believe they try to force it asap to make pressure on applications developers to really speed things up.
When I dumped windows for the first time (maybe about 5-6 years ago) I immediately stumbled upon articles about bad wayland needing decades to mature. And here I am couple years later running linux on wayland quite happily.
Fedora is switching because Fedora is always trying to be first at everything. And because things are very close tp perfect, it means that when Fedora makes the switch, a bunch of users will use Wayland more, helping iron out the last few bugs and issues.
i just tried again, its literally impossibile to compile dwl on ubuntu 22 since libwlroots-dev is too old so youd have to compile that manually… stuff like this is what keeps me away from wayland for now
Then why is this piece of shit called x11’s successor or even x12? Why do you want to force adoption of this 2 decade long unfinished beta software when it can’t even run most applications?
Also, the red hat moderators have banned my previous account as expected. They are literally moderating many forums like reddit’s linux subreddit and this place, and enforce censorship. They banned my account for posting the github gist posted in the OP. I didn’t even break any rules, they indiscriminately banned me just because i posted one post portraying wayland in a negative light.
Because it is the replacement for Xorg and X11 as a whole. This is like expecting all Unix applications to work on Linux. No, some things need to be ported or rewritten. I don’t want to force adoption of Wayland. Heck, I’m on Xorg because Qtile’s Wayland session is missing a thing or two I need (they’re in development but not there yet). I’m just tired of people pretending this article is accurate and up to date so I wanted to set some things clear. Granted, I didn’t do it that well, but I tried.
Also, whoever calls Wayland X12 is lying to themselves and everyone else. The only way in which such naming would make sense is if you consider the fact that the X11 maintainers (pretty much all of them RedHat employees) were sick and tired of maintaining it, so they started Wayland to replace X11 (NOT as a drop in replacement, mind you). So the only way such naming wpuld make sense is if you consoder the fact that Wayland developers and maintainers were the same people that were maintaining Xorg until they just gave up.
Some people including myself call Wayland X12 because Wayland is a subset of the X12 protocol made by the X11 maintainers, and as such is as close to an X11 successor as you can get.
Because the people who developed X11 (that is Xorg) haven declared that. Maybe they should have named it X12, but they didn't for whatever reason. However the people doing the work have already given up on working on X11 they gave up on X11 beyond the bare minimum almost 10 years ago because some real issues with X11 as a protocol are not fixable.
There were other attempts to a successor to X11, but they never got the support of people doing the work on X11 (in part because they didn't understand the problem with X11 and so kept many bad things while 'fixing' things that were not broken)
Which is to say: you have two choices: get involved with continuing X11 development, or jump to Wayland. Throw a couple million $$$ per year at X11 (either pay developers, or convince a dozen developers to maintain X11) and I'll retract my statement, until then X11 is dead. If you cannot do that then Wayland is your only option.
A crash in the window manager takes down all running applications: Yes, because the compositor IS the server, window manager AND compositor at the same time.
FreeBSD’s Wayland support is through a Linux compatibility library. The major Wayland implementations are Linux only and there’s no way around it other than implementing Linux libraries like FreeBSD did.
That something entirely different than the protocol being biased towards Linux. It's like complaining that TCP/IP is biased towards Linux because the Linux kernel's networking module can't be used in BSD kernels.
Amazing text! I was just commenting how ridiculous the article is this morning and now you have written a more lenghty criticism.
As for the Zoom bit. I will add my 2 years experience of using it on Wayland on Artix as well as Void Linux - I never used Gnome and it worked fine on Sway and River on my iGPU. In between a few updates I did face a few crashes of zoom when rendering on my nvidia gpu but it was still fine. I have not used zoom in over an year so I can’t comment on how it is now.
As for “wayland does not work properly on nvidia.” Solely nvidia is blame. They have been pushing out patches to bring out more support but it’s just nvidia who can fix that in the end. While I would not want to assume what hardware the author uses. Wayland works like butter on my Intel hardware.
Great alternatives for xclip and many other X-tools are already in the market.
The VSync issue on wayland is genuine. Disabling it in-game does not affect anything because it is enforced by the compositor. VSync is an integral part of Wayland Compositioning (acc. to the wlroots dev) but a solution to automatically disable it in full screen applications, etc is down the pipeline and work is ongoing. I have not been following it but I think some fixes were already released, I could be wrong.
As for X11 Atoms: stackoverflow.com/…/x-to-wayland-what-about-atomsJust boils down to the application dev’s willingness to port the app to Wayland. The author of the ‘boycott wayland’ article seems to just want wayland to implement Xorg 1:1 for it to not fail their stupid standard of what-should-be-boycotted. And at that point Wayland is not Wayland but Xorg.
Most of the arguments presented in the ‘Boycott Wayland’ article are either generic issues being worked upon by the devs or things that don’t have much relevance but put down in a manner as if to almost fear-monger that Wayland is the spawn of the devil and must not be used at all.
As for “wayland does not work properly on nvidia.” Solely nvidia is blame.
Nobody but Wayland apologists cares who is to blame. If it doesn’t work on their hardware that clearly is an issue with the idea that Wayland should completely replace X11/xorg because out of Wayland and Nvidia if one of those two goes away it will be Wayland, not Nvidia.
You clearly do not know what you are talking about so I have no interest in giving more value to your already worthless comment. It is amusing that you must introduce the term “Wayland Apologist” as if that has any meaning in this sector.
So I guess you don’t have anything but insults then to refute that blame is at best a secondary issue and most likely a complete non-issue for people on whose systems Wayland won’t work. Unless all you care about is playing blame games but not about the actual practical issues blame is irrelevant.
I mean, you started your comment by saying “Wayland apologists” - I’m not sure why you thought it would go over just fine.
Which is unfortunate that you did, the Linux community already has quite a bit of hate for Nvidia (for good reason) but comments like these tend to just make people who use Nvidia hardware look bad. I say this as someone who made the exact same position on the argument (so to speak) in a similar thread a few days ago.
Wayland does not work properly on Intel hardware: Again, I’m using AMD, so I can’t confirm or deny this, but considering the Intel drivers are open source, and I’ve heard about many, many improvements made on the Intel side of things, I think it would be reasonable to assume it has been fixed.
Posting this from Plasma Wayland on Intel right now. If something is broken, it's something not apparent to me.
Dual monitor? Wayland on my intel works fine for single screen, but as soon as I plug in a 4k monitor, it gets black cube shadow like artifacts in KDE Plasma 5. A couple of kernel command line options for the module has not helped, either.
I'm fairly sure I have run this system dual-monitor though I don't do it routinely. I'll check sometime this weekend and let you know, if you are interested for comparison's sake.
Worked with no drama, for me at least. Hooked it to my TV because that was most convenient. USB-C to HDMI adapter, I just had to tell it where they were in relation to each other and set scaling on the TV. Fonts look a little screwy on that dialogue box, but only in the screenshot - and when composing this post I realized even there they look OK if I don't view that part of the screenshot on the 4K display.
Edit: No, untrue. I think I had the wrong glasses on. The fonts on the 1080p display are fine in reality, but the screenshot is distorting everything on that panel a bit. Again, screenshot only though. All good otherwise. I can't see any other problem after using it a bit like this though.
What they are talking about is that some of the Wayland compositors rely on things like libinput and libdrm which are Linux specific.
This is not “Wayland” really but, from the point of view of a regular user, it may as well be. As the OP points out, there is no /usr/bin/Wayland
It is not really a great criticism although it must be frustrating for the BSD folks and others. Of course, the answer like always is to contribute. Nothing stopping anybody from taking wlroots ( or whatever ) and adding abstractions that make it more portable.
Non-Linux operating systems have already added Wayland support ( like Haiku ). If I had the time, I would add it to SerenityOS myself.
Actually, if I had the time, I might write a WaylandServer for X. First, it would be funny. Second, the people that do not want to move could stay on X forever even when everything stops supporting it. I would have to make sure that my WaylandServer could run XWayland of course.
Yeah, I was going to ask if the Wayland protocol included some Linux-kernel-specific data structures or something that would make it somehow more awkward to implement on non-Linux kernels or something.
Like if I created a protocol that included sending data encoded using the Python serialization framework called “pickle”, one could say that was a Python-specific protocol in that while it would be possible to use that protocol from other languages, it would be very weird and awkward to do so at best.
Not really knowing much about the specifics of Wayland, I wouldn’t truly know if there could possibly be anything Linux-specific in Wayland. But as far as I know, it’s entirely possible theshatterstone54 knows something I don’t.
I often switch between Wayland and X. My only concern is java does not yet support Wayland and old native libraries (e.g. 3D stuff for no longer maintained Java games) will probably break, once Java actually switches. Java and some Java games work with the xwayland compatibility layer, for now, but there are glitches sometimes. There are multiple projects porting Java stuff (e.g. Swing) to Wayland. All unofficial and incomplete.
I think that’s only true for the programs, not for the JVM/JRE code. The JVM/JRE doesn’t support Wayland without the xwayland compatibility layer. Also, some games use “native” libs that do optimized 3D stuff. Those are special Java classes, not part of the JVM/JRE that interface with C libs, kernels, system calls and hardware directly. Some will stop working without an X window to connect to. Some are long forgotten and won’t be ported.
Yeah, I don’t know about Java. I often switch between X and Wayland myself, but I’m mostly on X because I use a tiling window manager (Qtile) which has a Wayland version but is still ironing out some issues before I can switch full time.
There are some hacky methods to make some Java software use Wayland. Iirc, github.com/openjdk/wakefield is the jvm version I used to test it on Minecraft and Mindustry. I did not really get that far, but it has been quite some time since I tested it so I do not remember exactly what the results were. Otherwise it is possible the subjected software itself needs extra editing to make it work on Wayland.
Wayland xdg-shell Protocol is tailored only for GNOME needs.
What why is this a problem at all? For what’s worth GNOME is the only actually half designed and half usable thing out there. Yes they could add desktop icons and drop the “go into activities after boot” bullshit but how well, they’ve 1M€ in funding to reinvent the DE in all the unnecessary ways possible.
(And this comment is how you offend both the GNOME fans and haters at the same time. Probably also anyone else who cares about having alternatives.)
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