this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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In response to 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.

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[–] Sh1nyM3t4l4ss 71 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

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

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (11 children)

The ability to have multiple displays at different scales is a godsend when trying to use a laptop with a 4k display connected to 1080p monitors or vice versa

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (21 children)

X11 is, to put it simply, not at all fit for any modern system. Full stop. Everything to make it work on modern systems are just hacks. Don’t even try to get away with “well, it just works for me” or “but Wayland no worky”.

I really don't know if there could be a more obnoxious opening than this. I guess Wayland fanatics have taken a page from the Rust playbook of trying to shame people into using it when technical merits aren't enough ("But your code is UNSAFE!")

[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

[This comment has been deleted by an automated system]

[–] orangeboats 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

I feel that the biggest mistake of X11's protocol design is the idea of a "root window" that is supposed to cover the whole screen.

Perhaps that worked greatly in the 1990s, but it's just completely incompatible with multi-displays that we commonly see in modern setups. Hacks upon hacks were involved to make multi-displays a possibility on X11. The root window no longer corresponded to a single display. In heterogenous display setups, part of the root window is actually invisible.

Later on we decided to stack compositing on top of the already-hacky mess, and it was so bad that many opted to disable the compositor (no Martha, compositors are more than wobbly windows!).

And then there's the problem of sandboxing programs... Which is completely unmappable to X11 even with hacks.

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[–] woelkchen 10 points 1 year ago (8 children)

This is not an insult to the people behind X11.

The people behind X11 agree and that's why they founded Wayland.

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[–] Static_Rocket 23 points 1 year ago

No, no, they've got a point. The architecture of Wayland is much more sane. Because of the way refresh events are driven its also much more power and memory efficient. I'll miss bspwm and picom but man there is a lot riding on simplifying the graphics stack under Linux. The X hacks, GLX, and all the other weird interactions X decided to take away from applications made things non-portable to begin with and a nightmare for any embedded devices that thought GLES was good enough.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I find that usually when people write "Full stop", it's best to just stop reading there in most cases.

It comes off as "I am correct, how dare you think that for a moment I could be wrong".

I'd love to use Wayland, but until it works properly on Nvidia hardware like X11 is, then it's not a viable option for me. Of course, then someone always goes "Well then use an AMD card" but money doesn't grow on trees. The only reason I'm not still using a 970 is because a friend of mine was nice and gave me his 2080 that he was no longer using, along with some other really nice upgrades to my hardware.

Honestly it's one of the biggest issues I have with the Linux community. I love Linux and FOSS software but the people who go around and yell at anyone who isn't using Linux, and the people who write articles like this who try to shame you for your choices (something that is supposed to be a landmark of using open source software) only make Linux look bad.

There's a difference between someone kindly telling others that X11 is not likely to receive any new major features and bug fixes (which is the right thing to do, in order to inform someone something they may not know) - and then there's whatever the author of this quote is doing.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

It happens all the time in the magical world of closed source, too.

Ever heard about the iOS vs Android fights? How people shame Android users for being green bubbles?

It's just the extension of the my camp vs theirs applied to the tech field, nothing new.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I laughed off reports about this kind of thing, thinking "omg who could possibly give a shit about what color their text bubble is in a group chat?" Later my gen Z office mate told me about how he uses an iPhone and cited this exact reason unironically. I was stunned into silence.

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[–] Sh1nyM3t4l4ss 21 points 1 year ago (4 children)

There are several remarks in that article that bothered me. I agree with their message overall and am a strong proponent of Wayland but...

Unless your workflow (and hardware) comes from 20+ years ago, you have almost no reason to stick with Xorg

There definitely are valid use cases that aren't 20 years old that will keep you on X11 for a little while longer. And hardware too: NVIDIA dropped driver support for Kepler GPUs and older before they added GBM support which is effectively a requirement for Wayland, so you can't use these older cards on Wayland with the proprietary drivers

Of course, NVIDIA likes to do their own thing, as always. Just use Nouveau if you want to do anything with Xwayland, and you don’t have several GPUs.

Uh, no. Nouveau is not a serious option for anyone who likes using their GPU for useful things. And on those older cards it will likely never work well.

The author of that article seems extremely ignorant of other people's needs.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Ok but then how about the developers of X11 who decided it wasn't worth fixing the issues and to start a new project called Wayland where they could start from scratch to fix the issues. Does that change your mind at all?

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Every time I try Wayland, something doesn't work. The time before last, subpixel DPI scaling was badly broken. This last time, there's some glitch where the screen jumps right a couple pixels (and back) every dozen seconds. I don't have any interest in spending my time trying to fix Wayland issues when X just works.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago

Replacing good legacy will always be a struggle. X11 works pretty well and has been stable for decades. Most of the things that suck about it already have workarounds.

The advantages of Wayland are not directly visible for the end user. The security part will be great once it's completely integrated on the distributions to give granular permissions to software. The simpler apis and greater performance will help libraries creators, but most developers don't touch X directly and won't touch Wayland either.

Being stable for a couple of months is not good enough. People will use it once distros trust it enough to make it default, and this will probably only happen once Wayland or its compatibility tools work with most software and major applications work significantly better on it.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

I switched to wayland because of screen tearing and it fixed it. Idk if x is still glitchy on my new laptop but i dont really care. Also hyprland is really cool so im happy with wayland.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

When both NVIDIA and KDE work well with Wayland, most of the anti-Wayland energy will go away. The advocates will calm down too bar cause they will have won.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't think the sentiment is 'anti-wayland'. Most people just don't care. I'm using Awesome WM and it doesn't support Wayland. As OP says, why would I rewrite all my plugins and config just to the sake of switching to Wayland? I would have to invest a lot of time and what will I gain? Absolutely nothing. On my work computer I have different distro and I'm using Cinnamon. I think it uses Wayland but I didn't even bother to check. It works exactly the same as Gnome on X11. Why would I care?

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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).

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

I literally don’t care. I don’t have any issues with X11 on PopOS and I will switch when System76 decides it’s time.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

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...

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (8 children)

Only reason I'm not using it is Nvidia. Missing night light in particular.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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 8 points 1 year ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I won't mind moving to Wayland but really , X11/xorg just works to me with all the feat. (hidpi, multi-monitor etc...) I don't need fractional scaling, my 27" monitor is UHD but with right ppi set, everything looks good BUT I understand the interest.

And I do understand the need to move away from X because of Elon... just kidding. Yes, we need to move to a better architecture but it must 1:1 in term of feat/stability, at least.

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