A response to the "Boycott Wayland" article

Link to article: gist.github.com/…/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d1f227…

This OUTDATED article gets posted all the time. The full story is the guy is a massive FreeBSD fan so he is trying to convince more people to keep on using Xorg because he wants to make sure it isn’t abandoned. Reason for that being that Wayland is built with Linux in mind and would not work under FreeBSD without a lot of effort bwing put in as it uses some Linux-specific components or libraries.

Let’s go through the article point by point:

Wayland is broken by design:
  • 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.
  • You cannot do a lot of things: What, like allowing Windows to see your keystrokes, which makes developing a keylogger absolutely trivial?
  • There is not /usr/bin/wayland: Yes, because Wayland is a set of protocols, which a bunch of projects can implement as few or as many of, as they see fit, thus avoiding the issue of “unmaintainable mess” that has plagued Xorg for years.
  • It offloads work to the window manager: Again, yes, that’s a part of its structure: do the protocols, then let the compositor implement them. That way, you have multiple implementations running simultaneously that are well integrated with their window managers and thus more efficient and performant. It also means that when a compositor suffers from too much cruft, we can just make a new one, while application developers wouldn’t really have anything to change because if their application works on Wayland, then it works on different compositors (unless it is made specifically for GNOME, or specifically for wlroots, like wlr-randr)

…so what works on DE 1, doesn’t necessarily work on DE 2: True, because oftentimes, it doesn’t need to. Not implementing features can lead to a more lean and streamlined software solution. However, sometimes features are necessary and only implemented in some compositors. This usually happens because the universal solution is not ready. KDE are often known to do this with Plasma and KWin.

  • Wayland breaks screen recording applications: Correction: The following screen recording applications were not built to support Wayland (because Wayland is new to them or they just decided not to, or they were either too busy or too irresponsible enough to realise Wayland is coming, and has been for over 10 years. In defence of the devs, they probably wanted to make sure Wayland will become stable enough, but it has been the default even on Debian for many years now, so…

In terms of the applications, I’m not aware of many of them, and for this sort of application, I’m sire alot of work is required to change the graphical backend, so I understood that some smaller projects gave up, but OBS has been working on Wayland for quite a while. Is it perfect? I don’t think so, but back when Brodie Robertson was using Hyprland, he was recording his videos using OBS. This article is quite outdated.

  • Wayland breaks screen sharing applications:

As the update shows, Jitsi now does work on Wayland.

Zoom only seemed to work on gnome, BUT if you open up the Link to the zoom issue and read through the comments, there is clearly a person that clearly states that they changed /etc/os-release from PureOS to debian and it worked for them, all because of some pointless limitations enforced by the Zoom developers. As the person posting the issue states “Currently, the zoom application has put an arbirtrary restriction on screensharing so it ONLY works on GNOME, when the api being used works on all wayland desktops.” Read that again. It’s a pointless restriction put there by the Zoom team because they couldn’t be bothered to test anything non-GNOME.

And the last issue is a problem with the article writer’s own appimage. I don’t know about that one.

  • Wayland breaks automation software

As stated IN YOUR FACE, it is an application that works on X11 only. Yes, Wayland is not made to use such applications, but it doesn’t mean they can’t exist. Every heard of ydotool (remember that name)? Now you have.

Next up, we have 3 issues about GNOME and KDE global menus (1 for GNOME, 2 for KDE). From the little I know about global menus and using these projects, as well as considering that they are both incredibly stable on Wayland and Fedora KDE will be dropping Xorg completely, I think it’s safe to assume these issues have probably been fixed. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

  • Wayland breaks AppImages that don’t ship a special QT plugin: Great! Just ship the plugins then! Problem solved! Also, quote from the article: “However, there is a workaround: “AppImages which ship just the XCB plugin will automatically fallback to running in xwayland mode” (see below).”
  • Wayland breaks Redshift: Once again, a program built for Xorg doesn’t always work on Wayland. Especially if it works with the compositor, like a colour temperature control application, or a wallpaper setter. The article quotes that “Redshift does not support Wayland since it offers no way to adjust the color temperature” which is not true, as proven by Redshift alternatives like Gammastep.
  • Wayland breaks global hotkeys: I present to you: Hyprland (where you can get global hotkeys). Now, it is normally not allowed by design, as a security measure, but Hyprland has not allowed that to stop them from implementing a solution where you can choose keys that will be passed on to the application. Boom, problem solved. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be implemented anywhere else, as far as I know.
  • Wayland does not work for XFCE: Come back to me in late 2024 after XFCE 4.20, which will introduce Wayland support, has been released. Also, wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap
  • Wayland does not work properly on Nvidia Hardware: It keeps on getting closer but is not there yet, or so I’ve heard. Apparently, the issue is with the proprietary drivers, as noveau works well. But I use AMD, so I’m only working off rumours and opinions here.
  • 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.

Edit: As multiple Intel users have pointed out in the comments, there seem to be no issues on Wayland with Intel hardware.

  • Wayland prevents GUI applications from running as root: This one has been crossed out as the article writer admits there is a solution
  • Wayland is biased towards Linux and breaks BSD: Arguments seem valid, and I’m guessing, are correct. This one is likely true and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

Edit: And yet, it seems that there are Wayland compositors for FreeBSD, so the above might only be true for OpenBSD and others.

  • Wayland complicates server side decorations: From what I’ve heard, this is true, mainly something to do with some GNOME agenda, as the article states. I think that one is true.
  • Wayland breaks windows raising/activating themselves: The linked issue is closed and seems to be resolved. There is a mention of a WIP protocol at the time (2019) that woukd fix this. I had difficulty following the discussion, but I think this has been fixed.
  • Wayland breaks RescueTime: Because RescueTime depends on X11-only tools like xprop.
  • Wayland breaks window manager: What you’re describing is Wayland breaking X11-only tools for doing various tasks in a window manager. They are X11 tools, so of course they don’t work on Wayland. I’m not sure if there are alternatives, but I’d guess there probably are. I know for a fact that Xrandr has alternatives like wlr-randr and kanshi for wlroots.
  • Wayland requires {instert WM here} to implement Xorg-like functionality:Yes, it does.

Quote from article: "As it currently stands minor WMs and DEs do not even intend to support Wayland given the sheer complexity of writing all the code required to support the above features. "

DEs: GNOME, KDE, MATE, XFCE, Cinnamon, Budgie, Enlightenment, and recently even Pantheon have either announced to start work on, have started work on, or already support Wayland.

Window managers: Qtile is doing it. Xmonad wants to hire a dev to do it. Dwm has a spiritual successor called dwl. i3 has a drop-in replacement called sway. Openbox has 2 spiritual successors called labwc and waybox. Now you might notice one of the biggest WMs is missing on here: AwesomeWM, which is such a shame. The Awesome devs have said they would be okay with someone taking on that challenge (which has already been attempted, as evidenced by the existence of way-cooler), but it seems that they wouldn’t do it themselves.

As for the projects mentioned in the article, (JWM, TWM, XDM, IceWM) they are too small and obscure, and will likely fade away with Xorg.

  • Wayland breaks _NET_WM_STATE_SKIP_TASKBAR protocol I don’t know about that one, ao I’ll assume it is still the case. Edit: Ignoring the fact that the link is broken, it basically just links to a docs change where skipTaskbar is marked as unsupported on Linux. Link: github.com/electron/electron/pull/33226
  • Wayland breaks NoMachine NX The link points to a page that has this marked as “SOLVED, Released in version 8” so I’m guessing it has been solved.
  • 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?

Edit: As pointed out by some people in the comments, there are also alternatives to xclip like wl-clipboard.

  • Wayland breaks SUDO_ASKPASS: That link seems to point to the way this issue has been resolved so I don’t see your point.
  • Wayland breaks X11 atoms: I lack knowledge on the topic so will assume this to be a valid argument
  • Wayland break games: I’m 99% sure you can disable Vsync??? But I’m not a gamer. Also, WINE on Wayland is getting better and better. Soon enough, I hope the subpar performance will become better performance (when compared to Xorg)
  • Wayland breaks xdotool: Well, yes. There is ydotool, but you’re looking for a 1-to-1 replacement and I’m not sure if ydotool fits the bill for that.
  • Wayland breaks xkill: Well, yes. Again. It is an X application, so of course it does. Though for some reason I remember it working once on wayland. Must have been an xwayland app, or maybe I’m just misremembering this.
  • Wayland breaks screensavers: Yeah, that seems to be the case.
  • Wayland breaks setting the window position: That is a WIP for Plasma, not sure about any other projects, so assume true for anything else.
  • Wayland breaks color management: Not anymore. That is being actively worked on.
  • Wayland breaks DRM leasing: While not rhat familiar with the issue, my understanding of the topic is the article is correct: not all compositors support it.
  • Wayland breaks in-home streaming: Not familiar with this, so will assume true.
  • Wayland breaks NetWM/EWMH: Yeah, that seems to be the case.
  • Wayland breaks window icons: Yeah, that seems to be the case, as said in the article, when no .desktop files are used.

And that concludes my response to this article based on my fairly limited knowledge on the topic. If I got anything wrong, please, please let me know. As you can see my knowledge is quite limited, and as such, any corrections (preferably backed up with evidence) would be appreciated

yum13241,

Add screensavers or take X11 out of my cold, dead hands. I don’t use a CRT but still like screensaver since it prevents me from having to wait 5 years for my screen to turn on.

dukatos,

Found AOC user :)

yum13241,

Wdym AOC

dukatos,

AOC monitor. It takes ages to wake up.

yum13241,

Nah. I’m using the built in monitor on my craptop.

slembcke,

Wayland is great! Except for all list of not-a-bugs that I’d like to see fixed. Still, I’m not going back to X, so take that how you will.

What are the not-a-bugs? Things like covering up a Wayland window will block it’s rendering thread indefinitely with no way to detect it happens to handle it. This can lock up some games, or cause you to time out in a networked application. Some Wayland core folks don’t want applications to know if their window is visible or not because it’s mild information about a user’s attention that should be private. Every game dev on the other hand is asking “WTF!?” as it causes their games to break randomly.

Another mild example is that windows cannot be raised except by the user or by launching them. This is supposed to be a mild security precaution so a program can’t pop up a legitimate looking dialog over another application and trick the user. Realistically it means that applications can’t open and focus URL in your web or file browser. Instead they have to give you a notification telling you “Firefox is Ready” and make you do it manually.

A lot of this is slowly (painfully?) changing, and the adversarial nature is a bit frustrating. Wayland fixes so many little things that I find it well worth it though, and I say that as a game developer frustrated by many of the core design decisions.

domi, (edited )
@domi@lemmy.secnd.me avatar

Another mild example is that windows cannot be raised except by the user or by launching them. This is supposed to be a mild security precaution so a program can’t pop up a legitimate looking dialog over another application and trick the user. Realistically it means that applications can’t open and focus URL in your web or file browser. Instead they have to give you a notification telling you “Firefox is Ready” and make you do it manually.

I would like them to keep that behaviour. At least make it an option or allow whitelisting certain applications. Nothing I hate more in an OS than windows stealing focus without asking.

turbowafflz,

Focus stealing is one of the worst things in the world, I am so glad I haven’t had to deal with it since I switched to wayland. (Except for stupid firefox tabs stealing focus from other tabs, that still happens obviously and happened to me during a test for my university and almost invalidated my score)

GnuLinuxDude,
@GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml avatar

Some Wayland core folks don’t want applications to know if their window is visible or not because it’s mild information about a user’s attention that should be private.

I do like that. I have encountered a number of bullshit things like HR mindless training videos (ok, the fourth time I’ve seen this guy contemplate accepting a bribe… I get it. Don’t accept bribes! Leave that shit to Clarence Thomas) or ad playbacks that refuse to proceed unless they are focused. It’s annoying as hell. The problem you point out also sounds really annoying.

Zamundaaa,

What are the not-a-bugs? Things like covering up a Wayland window will block it’s rendering thread indefinitely with no way to detect it happens to handle it. This can lock up some games, or cause you to time out in a networked application. Some Wayland core folks don’t want applications to know if their window is visible or not because it’s mild information about a user’s attention that should be private. Every game dev on the other hand is asking “WTF!?” as it causes their games to break randomly

Please don’t make up what “Wayland core folks” think. You don’t know it, and your claims are waay off.

It’s not about security. It was intended to allow the compositor to throttle apps to improve efficiency… Which of course in practice doesn’t work like this at all, because OpenGL swap buffers and Vulkan FIFO presentation modes were never intended to be used this way.

As for why that hasn’t been fixed yet, it’s not as big of a problem anymore:

  • Mesa (at least for Vulkan) and Xwayland gurantee one frame per second as a minimum refresh rate
  • toolkits and libraries use mailbox presentation internally and check frame callbacks themselves for when to render
  • xdg shell now contains a flag for apps to know to inhibit rendering because they’re hidden. That doesn’t guarantee that presentation won’t otherwise block though
  • a (set of) protocol(s) is being worked on to replace frame callbacks with a mechanism actually suited for OpenGL and Vulkan

Another mild example is that windows cannot be raised except by the user or by launching them. This is supposed to be a mild security precaution so a program can’t pop up a legitimate looking dialog over another application and trick the user. Realistically it means that applications can’t open and focus URL in your web or file browser. Instead they have to give you a notification telling you “Firefox is Ready” and make you do it manually.

That’s not even close to how activation works on Wayland, and no, it’s not just a security thing, it’s a usability thing. Apps can only raise themselves if the currently focused app gives them focus, so that random apps can’t cover up what you’re working on just cause they need to show you an ad or an “important” pop up question or whatever. If it doesn’t work for a specific app, make a bug report about it to the app.

slembcke,

A bit of a zombie thread, but I’m not making anything up here. The blocking issue gets discussed a lot in gamedev circles, and there are issue threads that have been locked by folks with the power to do so because they just said “no”. One of them (Maybe Sebastian Wick? I don’t remember… doesn’t really matter) gave verbatim that use case where a video service they use would stop playing videos when the browser was in the background, and that is why they won’t report . Maybe they weren’t a “core” developer, but they had the ability to say “no” and end the discussion thread.

As for it being not a problem anymore, it still occurs even on Fedora 39. The 1 second present timeout still only works for XWayland, and that’s… not a great solution. Also, realistically unless SDL2, GLFW or whatever engine a gamedev is using handles it for them they just don’t have the time to worry about what GTK, Qt, or XDG shell does. We are already supporting multiple rendering APIs, and combining that with multiple UI libraries just to get a window to draw a triangle into is a combinatorial explosion. Last I remember reading from the SDL folks, they were waiting for the functionality to appear in Wayland before they could implement it, and they weren’t expecting anything to change soon either. Speaking personally, my current game project is single player so I can just pave over the timing issues when they come up:

Long frame detected: 6463.731931 ms. Skipping ahead!

The most frustrating part to me is much more meta. You get discussions with other game devs that have heard about this stuff and they continue to think that supporting Linux is just way too much work. Sometimes they are right, but rarely for the right reasons it seems. I believe in the glorious Wayland future… I just wish it would get here a bit faster. ;) On the other hand, if we rushed it and botched it then it would never arrive at all I suppose. (sigh)

As for how window activation works, you got me there. I just heard other people discussing that one, but it did explain why on Wayland I would just get “Firefox is ready” notifications when opening links instead of just showing me the page like X did. Though I’m quite happy that it’s gone now in Fedora 39. Progress is good!

Zamundaaa,

The 1 second present timeout still only works for XWayland

Oof, I thought the corresponding MR for Wayland was merged… But it was from Sebastian and after he got into a heated discussion again and started cursing, the MR got closed by someone else :|

realistically unless SDL2, GLFW or whatever engine a gamedev is using handles it for them they just don’t have the time to worry about what GTK, Qt, or XDG shell does

SDL does handle it, but only for OpenGL; it can’t do anything about Vulkan. GLFW doesn’t do anything about it either, so that is pretty annoying.

I believe in the glorious Wayland future… I just wish it would get here a bit faster

Don’t we all. Let’s hope the current upstream approach to fix this issue gets somewhere sooner than later…

bitwolf, (edited )

Nvidia works on Wayland now. And in 6.6 the noveou will support reclocking on 2xxx+

Games also work fine under Wayland. Either with gamescope or kwin.

Mutter works well but they haven’t yet merged vrr support so you have to get that separately.

michaelmrose, (edited )

Nvidia appeared fairly buggy as of nvidia 535 and kernel 6.3 with both sway and Plasma 5.27. Notably of all the possible choices for Wayland support ONLY KDE in relatively recent releases supports proper scaling of apps using xwayland which are apt to be a thing for a while now. This is a huge point in KDE’s favor despite loving the idea of an i3 like experience with sway.

If prior experience bears out plasma 6.0 will be buggy as fuck and 6.2 will be excellent.

Nouveau has NEVER been a particularly good choice and its primary developer just resigned www.phoronix.com/news/Nouveau-Maintainer-Resigns I wouldn’t pin my hopes on it in the future becoming usable. I sure as hell wouldn’t say its a useful choice NOW because you suppose it may become so in the future. I’d rather look at nvidias official open source effort.

If I had a crystal ball to look in I bet it would say a lot of folks with existing Nvidia hardware are best off sticking with X11 in 2023 but looking again at KDE’s wayland session in 2024.

Although do bear in mind people using stable distros like Ubuntu/Mint/Debian will be a lot longer seeing new useful features pushed out.

bitwolf, (edited )

I always interpreted that as a factor of the Plasma team being willing to offer compatibility for things that broke the freedesktop spec.

Whereas Gnome / Mutter for example appear to believe that if they don’t strictly follow spec it’ll perpetuate the fragmentation.

I tend to side with the latter perspective but use KDE + kwin on my desktop for gaming for Wayland + vrr (it’s amazing how smooth and responsive this is). Gnome really shines on the notebook form factor so I use it there.

PseudoSpock,
@PseudoSpock@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

NVidia user here, it most certainly is not working well. My external monitor for my laptop is getting black boxes shadowing the kde menu and most of my windows on that screen, and often block boxes trailing the mouse.

FishFace,

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!

taladar,

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).

Strit,
@Strit@lemmy.linuxuserspace.show avatar

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.

be_excellent_to_each_other,
@be_excellent_to_each_other@kbin.social avatar

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.

RTRedreovic,

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.

dzaima, (edited )

As someone who has written client code targetting X11, it’s indeed quite unfortunate that, to properly target Wayland, it’d need to all be replaced, but… good riddance. Working with X11 was fucking hell. X11 has so much broken/unreasonable garbage in, like, most places. Working with X11 has been, by far, my programming worst experience.

This is not to say that Wayland is automatically better at everything (I haven’t looked into it much, and the server-side decoration problem is indeed a problem) but it’d be damn hard to be worse than X11 or be anywhere close to it.

Raspin,

Just use libdecor. Client is supposed to manage its content.

dzaima, (edited )

Yeah, I’ve seen libdecor as a solution, but it still feels quite off to have pretty much every wayland client have a whole dependency for such a trivial thing.

Yes, the client is supposed to manage the client content, but the obvious question then is whether the window decorations are part of its content. In some cases (stuff merged into the decorations) it can definitely be the case, but, for most things I’d say the decorations are as much a part of the client content as the apps entry in the taskbar (both contain the title of the app, potentially the icon, options to close/maximize/minimize). The only difference is that decorations always appear immediately above a window, but even that isn’t really a fundamental part.

LeFantome,

I have noticed that one of the groups that does not seem to be complaining about Wayland are the toolkit folks. GTK added support back in GTK3. Qt added it. Enlightenment added it. They must have jumped on it for a reason.

When you look at the Wayland readiness docs for things like XFCE, it stands out that all the apps are already ready ( because they are GTK based in this case ).

dzaima, (edited )

Looked into some more things, and… base wayland does seem to continue the trend of “lol no not allowing you to do a basic thing, because surely noone has a good reason to” more - no custom positioning of windows (remembering custom window positions on reopen, window moving segments of Rhythm doctor), cursor wrapping (amazing to use in blender, wish more things did it, it feels so much better to use than the cursor being temporarily frozen in place or moving freely through everything).

At least there’s still the chance for extensions (wayland.app/…/pointer-constraints-unstable-v1 plus wayland.app/…/relative-pointer-unstable-v1 I think provide the ability to set the cursor position on wrapping and have that not interrupt the stream of relative position changes) but with things not being in base wayland it means that apps can’t just assume basic features on linux wayland which they can everywhere else (windows, mac, X11) unless they just choose to ignore hypothetical WMs which refuse to implement them.

I believe I also have a situation where ydotool wouldn’t be sufficient too - namely, having scrcpy open in the background and sending it keypresses to play/pause/change volume of the content on my phone from global keypresses (which trigger a shell script that chooses to either forward the presses to scrcpy, or if it’s not open, do some hacks to do what they would have done if not intercepted).

merthyr1831,

Sadly, this is going to be preaching to the choir. Wayland has its faults but if it truly was an inferior approach compared to X then someone would’ve forked X or spawned a totally new project. Turns out it takes time, money, and developer power that simply isn’t coming into X or any competing standard. Wayland is “good enough” to be the next standard and that’s how it’ll be for the foreseeable future.

If a BSD fan really thinks X is pivotal to BSD’s future, then maybe BSD will need to consider forking it and fixing it, but I’m sure the real solution will just be supporting Wayland on BSD too.

michaelmrose,

For most of its 15 year history implementations have been woefully and obviously insufficient. Nobody forked X because nobody needed to. Its feature complete and has been for a long time and there was nothing wrong with using X while Wayland implementations see progressive improvement.

LeFantome, (edited )

Not only is nobody forking X but many people are building Wayland compositors.

Listening to the detractors, you get the impression that Wayland is a failure and / or that X may still be the better choice.

Then you realize the only people still working on X are paid by enterprise distros with long-term support obligations. All the toolkit people have moved to Wayland. The major desktop environments have shifted to Wayland. All the “new” window managers are for Wayland.

Wayland is already supported on BSD ( FreeBSD at least ).

The actual developers have spoken and Wayland has won.

skullgiver, (edited )
@skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    PseudoSpock,
    @PseudoSpock@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

    That is a myth! Please stop spreading it.

    RTRedreovic,

    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.

    taladar,

    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.

    RTRedreovic,

    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.

    taladar,

    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.

    russjr08,
    @russjr08@outpost.zeuslink.net avatar

    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.

    jokeyrhyme,
    @jokeyrhyme@lemmy.ml avatar

    Wayland breaks global hotkeys: I present to you: Hyprland (where you can get global hotkeys). Now, it is normally not allowed by design, as a security measure

    Not disagreeing at all, but I’d like to add some information here to support your correction

    There’s a GlobalShortcuts portal ( flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/docs/-… ), and this is implemented for hyprland in xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland ( github.com/hyprwm/…/hyprland.portal#L3 )

    So, technically, there is nothing in the wayland collection of protocols that supports global keyboard shortcuts, but (along with lots of other supporting functionality), this is addressed via the collection of portal APIs

    As it happens, KDE already supports the GlobalShortcuts portal: invent.kde.org/plasma/…/kde.portal#L3

    Any desktop can provide an implementation of the GlobalShortcuts portal, and any app can adopt it as required (although if it’s implemented within popular toolkits/frameworks, then app developers won’t have to even think about it)

    Here are related tracking issues:

    art,
    @art@lemmy.world avatar

    Boycott Wayland. It breaks everything!

    Other should stop just using it because it doesn’t work for you? Wouldn’t it make more sense that those who do work on it keep improving it so it doesn’t break?

    PlexSheep,

    Good post.

    Despite all the progress in terms of Wayland, I still find my laptop to be unstable with plasma + Wayland on fedora 38. Many visual bugs, when the screensaver is entered and I move my mouse again, the screen just stays black until I close and open the lid.

    Some booting and spontaneous shutdown issues too, but I assume that’s something else. (Framework 12 DIY)

    ReveredOxygen,
    @ReveredOxygen@sh.itjust.works avatar

    Wayland limits me more than I’d like, with no global hotkeys and general low hackability. The only thing keeping me on it is the fact that I can’t figure out how to get fractional scaling on gnome xorg (also on fedora on a framework)

    PlexSheep,

    Scaling is one of the major things that suck. Probably on xorg too through. And especially with multiple screens in different ratios and uncommon ratios (like the frameworks 2:3 one)

    loopgru,

    Yeah, same experience on Wayland + GNOME for me. I want it to work, but stuff just breaks too often for me to accept at this point. How much of that is Wayland and how much of it is other things failing to work properly with it is kind of immaterial. Regardless, I’ll happily jump ship when it’s more baked, but now isn’t that time.

    cybersandwich,

    I would count myself among the people who dont have a huge attachment to x11 and am excited by the modern approach provided by wayland.

    Ultimately, I just want my stuff to work. I am running pop and I tried booting into wayland, since they provide that as an option, but I was getting hardlocks. Something I haven’t had on a PC in over a decade. According to the log files it appeared to be related to wayland, so I switched back to x11 and haven’t had any issues since.

    I am happy to switch to wayland, but I’ll be waiting on the pop devs to make it a focus–presumably after cosmic DE is out.

    sederx,

    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

    theshatterstone54,

    I didn’t have a great experience

    Neither did I. I use Qtile, and I’m waiting for some things on Wayland to improve. It’s close, but not there yet.

    r00ty,
    @r00ty@kbin.life avatar

    I think this is ultimately the answer. I'm not going to judge wayland until I see it as ready and can truly replace X in all use cases.

    I sometimes feel like the distros switching now is premature. But, maybe they know something I don't.

    kurcatovium,

    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.

    theshatterstone54,

    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.

    sederx, (edited )

    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

    theshatterstone54,

    I tried on Debian 12 a few months ago and failed.

    sederx, (edited )

    yeah you need wlroots 16 which is not there, trying now to compile from source but you also need to compile wayland manually…

    edit

    tried anyway and after compiling libdrm wayland-server pixman and other stuff i give up. this is not worth it

    RTRedreovic,

    No, running sway with the --unsupported-gpu flag launches it without any remarks about your hardware. It’s been like this for a good while.

    vildis,

    Wayland does not work properly on Nvidia Hardware: It keeps on getting closer but is not there yet, or so I’ve heard. Apparently, the issue is with the proprietary drivers, as noveau works well. But I use AMD, so I’m only working off rumours and opinions here.

    Posting this from Hyprland on NVIDIA, arch (btw) and the nvidia-open-dkms driver, but yes, NVIDIA isn’t fully there yet.

    Akinzekeel,

    I keep reading this all the time but I have the same setup and I don’t understand what’s supposedly wrong or broken with it. It just seems to work fine. What am I missing here?

    gayhitler420,

    I didn’t read any of that but Wayland doesn’t work with xscreensaver so I’m not gonna switch to it.

    MiddledAgedGuy,

    Just :s/x/w/g on every bit of source code and recompile wscreensaver.

    gayhitler420,

    Lol at how controversial that comment was.

    possiblylinux127,

    Wayland works very well for me. I can’t say the same for X

    dramaticcat,

    deleted_by_author

    •
    TheGrandNagus,

    Been on it since 2016. No issues.

    Cope and seethe.

    malgredecanard,

    Yeah, people are trying to make Wayland work so hard… Thanks to the open source community behind it but let’s be honest: Wayland is badly designed and coded.

    After 10 years I can still not share my screen easily, always need to switch to X11.

    Wayland are for little hobbyist kids who want to have fun with Linux, not people who need to do actual stuff.

    If Wayland was doing half of the work it should be doing then we would adopt it. But it’s just bad software and brining all of Linux down with it.

    Communist,
    @Communist@lemmy.ml avatar

    Wayland is not poorly designed or coded, screensharing works perfectly as long as the apps properly support wayland.

    That’s not a problem with waylands design or code, that’s a problem with apps design or code, the thing you may want to take issue with is the notion that we could change things like this while still being poorly supported generally.

    flying_sheep,
    @flying_sheep@lemmy.ml avatar

    Wayland isn’t coded at all, it’s a protocol, so clearly you know nothing.

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