KDE's Nate Graham On X11 Being A Bad Platform & The Wayland Future

Well known KDE developer Nate Graham is out with a blog post today outlining his latest Wayland thoughts, how X11 is a bad platform, and the recent topic of “Wayland breaking everything” isn’t really accurate.

“In this context, “breaking everything” is another perhaps less accurate way of saying “not everything is fully ported yet”. This porting is necessary because Wayland is designed to target a future that doesn’t include 100% drop-in compatibility with everything we did in the past, because it turns out that a lot of those things don’t make sense anymore. For the ones that do, a compatibility layer (XWayland) is already provided, and anything needing deeper system integration generally has a path forward (Portals and Wayland protocols and PipeWire) or is being actively worked on. It’s all happening!”

Nate’s Original Blog Post

FiskFisk33,

Soo support for something like synergy would be great!

loutr,
@loutr@sh.itjust.works avatar

Input Leap (fork of a fork of synergy) supports Wayland under gnome, although it seems there are a few bugs remaining.

corsicanguppy,

Input Leap

Thank you for this information.

FiskFisk33,

I’ll watch that project with great interest!

mnglw, (edited )

fucking what synergy doesn’t work on Wayland? welp. I use that daily and no, that’s not optional, its rather critical for my setup

loopgru,

Anecdote, I know, but for my use cases, Wayland just isn’t there yet- I wind up with far more random bugs and less battery life. I don’t pretend to know why, I’m a pleb non-developer, but until that’s resolved I’m still stuck on X. I’d love to use the new shiny thing of The Future™, but not at the cost of stability and usability.

vox,
@vox@sopuli.xyz avatar

Wayland nearly doubled my battery life lol

dRLY,
@dRLY@lemmy.ml avatar

I think that given how frequently this argument is brought up (and it is of course true about it not being completely there yet) so this is just my opinion on the situation (and I am not a dev so I am fine with being wrong and corrected). It is kind of needed for more projects/distros to start actively using it. As a lot of the stuff kind of needs the band-aid ripped off to start forcing it to get there faster at this point. Otherwise it just keeps being held back as people on the coding end of things will keep focusing on X11 issues instead of getting things ready for Wayland.

Kind of like the conundrum of mobile OSes that aren’t Android or iOS. It is hard to get people/companies to even try the new OS because the lack of apps (specifically the most common ones used by the most people). But app devs don’t want to spend time re-building or starting new apps for an OS that isn’t being used (or on devices people are buying). So at a certain point it needs both sides to interact and make progress. The OS needs the apps more at this point, and getting feedback and data from those devs makes it known where things are and aren’t working. But it is also true the devs for the apps might end up finding out the OS is actually easier to work with compared to what they have been doing/dealing with on Android/iOS.

Getting a replacement for X11 has been needed for a long time as the OSes and features keep needing something new to better work for how computers have advanced. And it isn’t something that many devs would want to take on given how easy it is to just use what is already known. Since Wayland has finally gotten to the point it is now, it is time for more devs to start learning/moving to the new thing to get attention to the stuff that they need. The hardest part is this in between period for users as it can and will cause random issues (like the ones you have seen). Stability is important, but Linux is great because there will always be distros and projects that keeping the old thing running well is the main objective. So we are in some great times for the new to be pushed hard so it can become the stable future needed.

nix,

Been trying to think of a term for this issue. It’s not quite chicken or egg. But both sides need the other side to incentivize them. If one gets going the other will follow, but they’re waiting for each other. Like some sort of collaborative standoff.

leopold,

Oh boy, 102 comments. Knowing Phoronix, I bet those are a treat to read.

IverCoder, (edited )

Fourteen pages of comments within a day of posting in Phoronix? Grab your popcorn guys 🍿

sherlockholmez, (edited )

Wayland doesn’t support Nvidia GPUs yet

I’m sorry, my bad, I was unaware.

Nvidia GPUs don’t support Wayland yet. As Linux Torvalds would say, “NVidia, Fuck You”

SquigglyEmpire,

“Wayland” doesn’t support any GPU’s, it’s the job of each GPU driver to support Wayland (and Nvidia’s now does).

iopq,

I’ve switched to Wayland on my Nvidia GPU and I’m taking the FPS hit. OBS crashes when I run a wine game on x11

sherlockholmez, (edited )

Yup, but my external monitor stuttered insufferably, so I still stuck with X11. Didn’t try OBS but Wine worked like a charm.

TheGrandNagus,

*Nvidia didn’t support Wayland

jodanlime,
@jodanlime@midwest.social avatar

This is the big thing that all these Nvidia comments miss. It’s not up to Wayland to support a given GPU. Nvidia is actively hostile to Linux users. If you aren’t making money with cuda there are zero reasons to choose Nvidia on a Linux machine over the competition. I’ve been on Wayland for almost a decade now and there’s no way I’m going back to X at this point.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/linus-torvalds-says-f-k-you-to-nvidia/

gnumdk,
@gnumdk@lemmy.ml avatar

Fuck You NVIDIA

Kristof12,
@Kristof12@lemmy.ml avatar

Nouveau is functional… Probably

tiziodcaio, (edited )

My nVidia GPU works with the propietary driver

cobra89,

Uh reading the article, pretty sure the author would phrase it as “Nvidia GPUs don’t support Wayland yet” and that author would be absolutely right.

walthervonstolzing,
@walthervonstolzing@lemmy.ml avatar

FWIW, I’m typing this on the latest GNOME, on wayland, on nvidia proprietary drivers; and it works just fine — EXCEPT for suspend & resume, which is annoying to be sure; but on 2 screens with different refresh rates & different dpi ratios I at least don’t run into some of the weird behavior I do run into using X11.

I used to be an Xfce purist; but this particular setup is even less taxing on the GPU (GTX 970) compared to Xfce’s standard compositor (around 20W on light usage, vs. 35+W); & and the font rendering is slighly better, which is a huge factor AFAIC.

theshatterstone54,

Hey there, what tool do you use to find power usage? Thanks

walthervonstolzing,
@walthervonstolzing@lemmy.ml avatar

Hi; I rely on nvidia-smi mostly; but the nvidia-settings gui app also shows temperatures & wattage (though that app might be x11-only).

mlg,
@mlg@lemmy.world avatar

Nvidia on Wayland moment

Gaming on wayland moment

Battery/Usage on wayland moment

KDE devs making gestures only available on wayland because memes (there is literally a 3rd party github script to achieve the same thing on X11)

X11 being reliable because Xorg devs aren’t stupid

My real issue with Wayland is that it took like 15 years to become acceptably usable. I’ll switch once XFCE moves over in several years, but until then, there is no incentive for worse performance and non exitestent support.

ExLisper,

Exactly. For 10 years the groupthink was that Wayland doesn’t offer anything interesting and X is just fine. Now suddenly everyone who’s still using X is stupid. Amazing what couple of memes can do.

yukijoou,

it’s that wayland wasn’t ready, and now is ready. it took a long time, because building a new protocol like that takes a while if you want to do it well, and lots of coordination between many people. it still has issues, but they’re being adressed. slowly, because x11 was full of half-assed solutions done quickly, and they don’t want that to happen again

dreugeworst,

X11 being reliable because Xorg devs aren’t stupid

Not gonna disagree with the rest of what you said, but the Xorg devs and Wayland devs are mostly the same people

chitak166,

They’ve been working on the same software for 20+ years?

Woah.

tetris11,
@tetris11@lemmy.ml avatar

It’s not about reliability though, X11 is hard to maintain and the devs themselves feel burned out. Wayland at least offloads some of that burden to the desktops

yukijoou,

X11 being reliable because Xorg devs aren’t stupid

xorg devs are wayland devs. nowadays, most of the people that used to work on xorg now work on wayland. they’re not stupid, they realised that x11 is too dated for modern systems (see asahi linux) and now are working on a replacement

danny801,
@danny801@lemmy.world avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    wreckage,

    input-leap will but it’s still in development

    taanegl,

    Wayland on an Intel iGPU runs flawlessly and has for several years. However, that’s a matter of drivers. AMD is in the forefront regarding having dGPU support, while NVIDIA is playing catch-up.

    In any case, the future is bright.

    Dio9sys,

    It’s super impressive to see Wayland having its big breakthrough moment. I remember reading about Wayland 10 years ago and worrying it was going to end up as a dead project.

    Omega_Jimes,

    I love Wayland until I don’t. I honestly don’t think about it, it gets out of my way and my system is stable, until I go to use something like scrcpy that just doesn’t work at all. Luckily, the amount of things that straight up don’t work is shrinking.

    chitak166,

    Eh, I always discredit people when they say X is bad.

    It’s been around for over 20 years. That kind of longevity should be praised.

    danielfgom,
    @danielfgom@lemmy.world avatar

    Undoubtedly Wayland is the way forward and I think it’s a good thing. However I wouldn’t piss all over X because it served us well for many years. My LMDE 6 still runs X and probably will for the next 2 years at least because both the Mint Team and Debian team don’t rush into things. They are taking it slow, testing Wayland to make sure no-one’s system breaks when they switch to Wayland.

    This is the best approach. Eventually it will all be Wayland but I never understood why this is such an issue. Like any tech it’s progress, no need for heated debates. It’s just a windowing system after all.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • linux@lemmy.ml
  • localhost
  • All magazines
    •
    Loading…
    Loading the web debug toolbar…
    Attempt #