I wouldn’t say it breaks everything. Franky it fixes / handles better issues that are common usecases today that was not the case during the time X11 was still the norm / actively maintained such as:
Multiple monitor support with varied refresh rates
Hybrid GPU setup (including being able to use your motherboard’s hdmi socket and your dedicated gpu hdmi at the same time)
Display scaling
Better isolation of applications (to the deterrence of existing linux applications)
Of course granted its a new protocol, it doesn’t support all the usecases that X11 was designed for due to variety or reasons (including controversial decisions)
Mind you, Wayland isn’t perfect either. For example, I found out that despite Wayland having better Hybrid GPU setup support out of the box, there are applications that ended up having broken multi-gpu support (where the application in question can choose which gpu it would utilize for its processing) where it works fine X11.
With the state of the hardware we are having, it is understandable why distros have been focused on pushing Wayland as the default, although honestly, it would be wise for these distros to not completely phase out x11 because currently, Wayland isn’t perfect.
I have been using wayland on kde the last two years on Debian and MX Linux with zero issues. My general usa includes coding, music production, Libre office and web browsing. So, no much gaming, if that is your concern.
“that thing you used to do is now impossible to do consistently across different implementations, if at all. But it’s all ok, because we have decided it’s not our responsibility!”
That is not what users want to hear. From a user’s point of view, it is broken.
I see what you’re getting at. It’s a matter of perspective, I guess.
If you presented someone with a list of features from two similar but different pieces of software, they wouldn’t say software b is broken because it’s featureset is different from software a, right? But I acknowledge it’s not that straightforward. It’s more like telling them software b is going to replace software a that you’re currently using, get ready to say goodbye to some features.
I still don’t consider wayland broken, but I understand argument that it is.
yes, if i combare kicad with blender, neither is broken because they have different features. But also, nobody is telling users that kicad’s days are over and it should be replaced by blender. If they did, and a user wanted to design a circuit board, the user is out of luck. The user is told that it is a replacement. From the user’s point of view it most definitely is not.
The probeem isn’t just that wayland doesn’t do everything x does. But that users are told that it will replace x, deal with it and quit complaining.
We have to keep in mind that the fact that we know what wayland is in the first place puts us squarely into the “technical user” category, not regular users. Regular users are the ones who don’t even know (nor should they have to care) what wayland even is
I’ve been using Wayland daily for a few years (2020 at least?) on intel and AMD graphics and have had few complaints:
Some games didn’t work right a few years ago. (Under Proton or otherwise. Haven’t had issues for a while)
RenderDoc, a vital bit of graphics debugging software, works poorly on Wayland. (Easy fix is to force X11 for QT via QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb)
Had some issues with mixed integrated/NVidia graphics on a laptop I was using for a demo once.
Covering or otherwise hiding a Wayland window blocks a program’s graphics thread. This is sometimes problematic.
VR development had issues a while ago? (This was for work. It just… stopped working at some point. Dunno if it was a Linux, SteamVR, or Unity3D issue. My work machine mostly runs Windows 10 now as a result. Oh well.)
Screen recording didn’t work well a while ago… (continued)
Overall, it’s just worked great though!
My anti-complaints:
Mixed refresh rates on monitors “just works” now. (I have a 1080@144 for gaming, and a 4k@60 for work)
Video frames don’t have half drawn content. (ex: when resizing windows), except on XWayland stuff
Video tearing has basically disappeared.
Video timing issues seem to be improved.
Input handling for keyboard layouts has improved.
Screen recording in Wayland is way better than it ever was on X11 now. I do this a lot to share gamedev stuff I’m working on.
“There will probably be an awkward period before all of these pieces are in place for all of the people.”
I think these are the two key takeaways – Wayland is still in development and the bandwagoning are the early adopters – most of us will switch when our distros switch (and will probably be none the wiser)
the problems (and the reason we’re suffering through sensationalist stuff like “Wayland breaks everything!”) is the fanboy push to switch before it’s ready – not everybody lives on the bleeding edge (just like not everyone runs Arch) and the “switch now or be left behind” attitude does more harm than good (far more likely to alienate than convert) …
Wayland is still in development and the bandwagoning are the early adopters
Not to bust your chops but I’m not sure what you’re implying. What isn’t still in development? WordStar? X11? Mac System 7? And Wayland’s initial release was 2008. That’s 15 years ago. Who are these “early adopters” of which you speak anymore?
Many of those things you're thinking of were declared Somebody Else's Problem by said developers. That's fine, but Wayland was not ready for use by normal end users until somebody else did finish them.
From what I hear most of them actually are finished by now, but they weren't as of a couple years ago when it started becoming commonplace to see declarations that the time to switch to Wayland was Right Now. I tried it out then, and am as a result much less enthusiastic about doing it again now even though it'd be much more likely to go well.
I really don’t like nate’s take here. IMO it’s really not that good, Wayland is still outright lacking features, even when using the craptastic xdg portals junk
I didnt even remotely imply that x11 doesn’t have issues, so im not sure why that was brought up. The goal is to make wayland an acceptable and universal replacement, Everyone knows x11 is dying but wayland isnt ready to replace it yet
Things like window embedding, the wayland way is for each app to have it’s own embedded compositor. Wayland has no support for things like overlays/always on top (Useful for OSKs PR has been made but like all wayland things, we might not get it for another couple years, or perhaps never), currently missing support for reading other window states (PR made for this as well, but again, who knows how long it will take), Still no support for window positioning (again PR made), Emulated input events (libei is not universally supported) And these are just the ones off the top of my head, There were others but I cant think of them ATM
Security at the expense of usability comes at the expense of security. X11 doesn’t have security. Wayland doesn’t have usability or security. Security is about putting walls in front of the bad guys while letting the good guys go through. Wayland just puts walls around everyone.
Been on Wayland since 2016 and to this day my only issues (apart from when I had an Nvidia card for a few months, that is…) was video sharing in Discord/steam in-home streaming, both of which still don’t work right.
Other than that, it’s been great. Multi-monitor works way better, far fewer bugs, my desktop feels a lot more fluid and smooth.
On laptops, Wayland+Gnome gestures are exceptional, putting even Apple’s gestures to shame. I cannot stress enough how good of a job Gnome+Wayland does with trackpad gestures. It makes other gesture systems, especially ones under X11, feel like they were cobbled together by a Fallout 3 modder.
Overall Wayland has been great for me. I just wish Discord would fix their shitty app.
Xorg has no fractonal scaling so I have been uaing wayland since I have switched to linux on nvidia and yes I use it for gaming. Not silky smooth but great so far.
Quite literally, the only problem or “stuff broken because or Wayland” is some old ass apps or lazy companies that won’t update their electron version. Looking at you discord, screen sharing COULD WORK if you managed your stuff
My experience with Nvidia+ Wayland was… Less than desirable. Enough to make me pickup an AMD card.
However, once I did that my experience instantly better. Hell, even X11 worked better - I was never able to get the desktop to stay at a consistent 60FPS (I’m still on a 60Hz panel which I’m just now getting around to upgrading shortly) in X until I moved to my AMD card.
The 545 driver update just made things so much worse. So I’d say Wayland+Nvidia is not great (for others it works fine so maybe it’s down to what card you have?) however on my AMD card (and my old MacBook with Intel integrated graphics) it’s fantastic.
I’ve been using Wayland sessions as default since plasma 5.22 came around, and with other window managers before that too. Everything that has ever been broken for me, was broken because of X11 or XWayland. I’d rather take a considerably better experience with an occasional issue, that an experience that is held together by candy wrappers and hot glue, and is widely considered obsolete
Im in the same boat. Been using wayland since around that version or a little later and it has only been uphill (except for right now since i am on the development build and Qt broke itself causing the system config menu to fail to load 80% of KCMs, but this is my fault for switching to alpha software lol)
Been using Wayland since 3’ish years ago and my desktop experience has been really smooth – no crashes, errors or anything of the sort. Everything “just werks” just as if I were on Xorg instead. Even on a completely obscure/zero linux support single board computer (Orange pi zero 3).
Not as bad as you might think. The nouveau drivers have come a long way for maxwell. You should give it a shot if you haven’t. But, unfortunately, if you are using anything new then nouveau sucks. It’s a fun game where you get to wait until nvidia no longer wants to support your GPU and hope by that point that nouveau has progressed far enough that you won’t be looking at noman’s land.
I meant the GTX900 series. I’m aware the 700s have decent support in nouveau, but the 900s has already been dropped by nvidia so we are on older drivers not capable of the latest vulkan extensions required by modern Proton.
For nouveau it needs GSP firmware that wasnt released as part of that release they did a while ago. I think pascal users are on the same situation, they just havent been dropped by the proprietary drivers yet. I wonder if we are gonna be stuck on xorg forever.
The newer cards got the important bits released by nvidia so the community can at least have a path forward…
I wasn’t fully aware of NVK and where it’s at. It’s actually pretty exciting. I wouldn’t mind dropping my current nvidia binary blob for fully open source drivers.
it didnt work ootb for me on ubuntu so i dropped it, but i hear it can already be made to work well with the desktop and basic stuff. performance in games is still bad but they are running.
I’ve switched away from Xorg a few years ago because of its terrible multi monitor support and bad experiences with picom. Sway and now hyprland are imo a better tiling wm experience then their Xorg equivalent.
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