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Wayland. It comes up a lot: “Bug X fixed in the Plasma Wayland session.” “The Plasma Wayland session has now gained support for feature Y.” And it’s in the news quite …

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)
  1. Stagnation isn't always evil, it's just part of tech. Once tech solves the problem it set out to, it should stagnate. Adding more bells and whistles makes things better less often than it makes them bloated and more prone to breaking. On the flipside, software that hasn't changed much other than bugfixes and security patches is the backbone of a loooot of our tech infrastructure. Edit: @[email protected] provides an excellent refutation, with counterexamples showing where lack of new features is hurting X11 here (direct link broke for me on lemmy.ml, hence the redirect)

  2. I fail to see how the architectural difference fundamentally solves the issue of changes breaking compatibility. Now instead of breaking compatibility with the server, you're "only" breaking compatibility with the compositor. But that's okay because at least there are other compositors that fulfill this use case... oops switching to that compositor broke 3 of your other apps, well lets try another! ... and now my pc won't communicate with my GPU... well, we can always... and so on and so on.

Not saying that wayland is bad nor that X is better, but these are the two most common "cases against X/for wayland" that I hear and I just don't buy it. As much as I argued against it, I love trying new and different software and eking every last bit of performance out of my 8 year old PCs, I can't wait to give Wayland a try and see if there's a noticeable difference... I just wish these two arguments would go away already

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The issue is that X was never a mature, feature-complete, stable project. It was always a hideous and bloated hodgepodge of disparate and barely working patches. The entire point of Wayland is to do exactly what you say tech should do: solve the particular problem (graphics server) well and cleanly, and limit itself to a definable set of features so it can actually reach that point of stability.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

As I understand it, Wayland offloads a ton of stuff that was core to X11 (like input device handling) directly to the compositor. The end result is every compositor handling things differently. Compare something like i3 to Sway. Sway has to handle input, displays, keyboard layouts, etc directly in its config. If I switch to Hyprland I then have to learn Hyprland's configuration options for doing the same. Meanwhile, switching from i3 to dwm requires only setting up the WM to behave how I want - no setting up keyboards, mice, etc. It just feels clunky to work with Wayland compositors, frankly.

Also when something breaks in Wayland the fix is almost always hard to find or incredibly obscure because the fix isn't for Wayland- it's for the compositor. If your compositor isn't popular then good luck!

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

Can someone debunk this please? It feels like something is overlooked here

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

They got all of the basic facts right and their general experience mostly mirrors my own, though in my case the majority of problems encountered apply to Wayland in general and are rarely compositor-specific. That is to say that I can usually Google "[APP]" [FEATURE] not working "Wayland" and find people from a variety of different Wayland compositors all experiencing the same thing[^1]. Maybe I just got lucky when I chose my specific compositor?

In fact, despite being on Wayland for about a year now, the only compositor-specific issue I've ever encountered is a broken controller configuration overlay when using Steam's Big Picture Mode. It's actually super frustrating because I have absolutely no idea if it's an issue specific to my compositor, wl-roots, or something unique about my configuration. All I really know is that it works correctly if I launch Steam in a nested gamescope compositor, so it's not a bug in the protocol nor xwayland.

[^1]: Some recent examples: broken Steam Controller cursor, busted SDL in TF2, Invisible Emacs cursor

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

Thanks for sharing your experience. If the majority of issues are Wayland-wide right now instead of compositor-specific, then that is good in my opinion. These issues get fixed once at the protocol level and are then solved for everyone. Compositors should principally just work, given that they implemented the protocol correctly.

[–] uis 1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Not all protocol-level fixes are implemented. Example: protocol-level screen sharing. There is extension for this, but kde and gnome use pipewire instead. Basically it is X11 all over again, but worse.

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[–] uis 2 points 1 year ago

Wayland offloads a ton of stuff that was core to X11 (like input device handling) directly to the compositor.

Not exactly. Imagine if xorg was also desktop environment with own compositor and effects. That's what wayland compositor is.

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

For 1., the big issue is that there constantly are appearing new standards in display technologies. Two semi-recent examples are HDR and VRR, both of which X11 struggles with, and implementing those into X11 has been said to be painful by its developers.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

This is an excellent counterexample to claim 1, and I wish this was the top response to my comment. It not only negates the claim that "maintenance mode" isn't bad, it also provides specific examples of when it is bad.

[–] thalience 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Stagnation here specifically does mean that nobody is making bug fixes or security patches anymore. Xorg is abandoned, kaput, a former software project.

The new architecture allows developers to fix one thing without accidentally breaking 3 others.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Then the problem is that it's abandoned, not that it has stagnated (which can also be phrased as "stabilized" depending entirely on context and the speaker's/author's personal feelings about the project). Once again, I'm not saying that Xorg is good, but that particular critique needs to stop; it's major flaw is that even the "maintainers" are sick of it and want it to die, not that it has ceased major developments.

Even the article acknowledges this:

Having something as central as the window server being unmaintained is a major issue, as it means no bug fixes, no security patches...

But it also falls into the "Bells and whistles" side of the critique immediately after:

... and no new features

and it even starts of explaining the problems with X by saying it's in "maintenance mode." I couldn't care less about new features, the Pareto principle implies 80% of users don't need new features regardless of how much dopamine they get from seeing the marketing hype. "Maintenance mode" isn't a bad thing, it's a good thing. Abandoned projects that most GUIs still rely on is a disaster waiting to happen.


The new architecture allows developers to fix one thing without accidentally breaking 3 others.

That's an extremely bold claim, and vague, with no actual examples. Do I take it on faith that changing code can break things with X? Yes, but I, having worked with code, just assume that's what happens to all software. Do I believe that Wayland has found a way to do away with that problem of software architecture (and not necessarily protocol architecture)? Not unless they've somehow found a way to compartmentalize every single module such that every aspect is fully isolated and yet has interfaces for every potential use case that could ever be dreamed up. Any devs in the comments want to pipe up and let me know how that endeavor has worked for them in past projects?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

The new architecture allows developers to fix one thing without accidentally breaking 3 others.

That’s an extremely bold claim, and vague, with no actual examples.

The problem is not the code per se, but that we can't add stuff anymore that doesn't somehow break the core protocol. The plain fact is that we've been tacking on things to X11 which it was never designed to do for decades and we reached a breaking point a while ago.

Stuff like multi-DPI setups are impossible to implement in X11's single-framebuffer model; security on X11 is non-existent, but we can't retroactively fit any kind of permissions on the protocol as that breaks X11 applications that (rightfully) assumed they could get a pixmap from the root window. There's so much more, just take look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Great article. I'm currently still on X because Plasma 5 doesn't handle fractional scaling well. As soon as that changes (Plasma 6?) I'll be jumping over to Wayland.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

X handles fractional scaling terrible as well lol. Has caused terrible tearing and framedrops for me on a Framework 13.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

Good read, provided context that I didn't have before as a newbie

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I want to switch to Wayland. I try it every month to see if it is working with my system and so far it is not.

Ubuntu 23.04/Nvidia 3080/Steam. It use to work with the old big picture mode but when steam went to the new one, Wayland broke for me.

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

That's weird. I thought Steam doesn't support Wayland at all and runs using XWayland.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Gamescope makes the experience a lot better with steam at least for me in swaywm. I experimented with running each game in gamescope using launch options but with gamescope's mediocre support of the steam overlay some multiplayer invite stuff doesn't work correctly. Running steam in bigpicture within gamescope pretty much solves all these issues and seems to improve performance too.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

So most complaints you read about Wayland missing this or that (such as fractional scaling, or screen sharing, or global shortcuts) from over a year or two ago are likely to be wrong today.

Is fractional scaling in Wayland really working now? I tried it a while ago and everything was blurry mess.

[–] wheels 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I just tried this and it was blurry until I logged out and back in!

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

Just tried it on my laptop and xwayland apps are still blurry mess, even after restart. However, all apps I use now has Wayland support that can be enabled with some flags or environmental variables, so they are actually usable now with fractional scaling. Finally I can use my laptop with 175% scaling, which is much more comfortable than 200% scaling.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

In display settings check the box to allow x11 apps to scale themselves instead of the compositor. Your cursor will still be blurry but the app content itself will be fine. A few apps like steam won't scale without some kind of launch flag though.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

It's working with Sway from a quick test:

swaymsg output DP-1 scale 1.7

But XWayland is blurry as expected (that's the big blocker, or all useful apps being ported to Wayland).

[–] clemdemort 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'd run Wayland on my main PC but Nvidia drivers don't support Wayland too well, when they do I'll switch over but for now I'll wait

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

I'm gonna give it an honest go once KDE Plasma 6 hits the arch repos.

[–] clemdemort 1 points 1 year ago

I also want to try COSMIC when it comes out apparently it's got Wayland support built in and looks pretty good imo

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

We need another display system. Something more dev friendly and more desktop agnostic.

I seems Wlroots is designed to be server agnostic (despite the name), if it is bound to a new display server many apps should be available.

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