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Comment by miguelmota | Hacker News Reader

As a regular linux user should I switch to wayland from xorg? will I notice performance improvements?

Depends on the window manager you are using.

If you are coming from i3 the move to sway is a no-brainer and works great (sway is wayland only). Firefox, thunderbird, Libreoffice all work great and look great, i.e. sharp when you need scaling for example. Sway is to thank for base work they did for other distros like a wayland clipboard protocol all the others are using.

Second comes Gnome. No issues. Gnome laid the gruntwork of porting gtk3 to wayland which works great.

Third maybe KDE. Still two years to come. KDE plasma is suffering from arguably better design decisions like client side decorations vs. Gnome serverside decorations but as many users use GTK based apps those GTK apps do not yet play nicely with the KDE design decisions. As such the brave KDE folks have to implement things themselves while those relying on GTK are done. QT is fine with wayland but not everything is QT.

That's all only true if you are not using NVidia hardware.

FYI GTK apps look native now under plasma 5.18

> If you are coming from i3 the move to sway is a no-brainer and works great

It may work great, but it's not as well packaged by/for upstream as i3.

I recently started running wayland+gnome (rather than i3) on my Ubuntu 18.04 at work - because less bad support for fractional scaling looks a bit better on my two 24" with different dpi.

But there didn't appear to be a "no effort" way to install sway (yet). Especially not with automatic (security) patches.

I'm hopeful it'll be in 20.04?

Compiling sway is literally three commands (not counting cloning the repository).

Sure, the instructions are clear. But since there isn't a build ready for 18.04 - that kind of makes me wonder about the versions/state of dependencies too - that is - the packaged dependencies in 18.04.

They'll generally be frozen at the point 18.04 was frozen - so api and versions from 2017 or so. With 20.04 around the corner, I'd rather wait than faff around.

Sway is in 19.10 already, but 20.04 also adds some nice extras like wofi, wdisplays and mako.

> If you are coming from i3 the move to sway is a no-brainer

I was thinking of waiting another year to jump as I'm having no issues with i3, what are the advantages?

Sway has nicer configuration for multihead display setups than you ever get with xrandr, which is very nice on laptops if you often connect to different external monitors. There's also some clunky support for moving windows around with the mouse, which I've found to be occasionally useful.

Then there are the wayland advantages: very little screen tearing if any, no blanking the screen when connecting to a new display, better security properties.

There's disadvantages as well. There's no xdotool support, and if you want to use any sophisticated keybindings or remapping keys, you'll be forced to rely on Sway's configuration language to do that for you. On i3 I was able to bind ctrl_r to right click, but that is — as far as I know — not possible on sway without rewriting the libinput event stream, which is very painful.

Can you use `bindsym ctrl+r seat - cursor press button2, seat - cursor release button2`?

Sorry, I was unclear. By ctrl_r I meant the right ctrl key, pressed on its own with nothing else. Binding Ctrl+r might be possible. It's also been about a year since I last tried, so there may be a solution now.

  There's no xdotool support

Have you looked at ydotool?

https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool

Also, do you know about the "i3 Migration guide"?

https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/i3-Migration-Guide

Given the need to access /dev/uinput as a, user doesn't this require negating the supposed security gains of wayland?

Also not exactly maintained

>Since Jun, 2019, I have little time to maintain this project because I'm striving to start an undertaking (instead of working 996).

You can implement a xdotool's equivalent by using virtual-keyboard and virtual-pointer Wayland protocols.

Sorry, but you seemed to have missed answering the OPs question... Why they should switch to Wayland? If there were any benefits to using Wayland, like performance improvements, etc.

Personally, the one real gain I've read about previously is no tearing when watching videos or scrolling fast and security improvements. Also now these Firefox performance improvements. But that's about it.

Are there any other benefits that a normal user would see?

>Personally, the one real gain I've read about previously is no tearing when watching videos or scrolling fast and security improvements.

Finally, my Ubuntu box has screen tearing all the time. I'm on good hardware with pretty standard 1080p monitors so I've been absolutely baffled that screen tearing is so frequent in standard desktop use.

I think Wayland is supposed to have better support for various DPI settings and mixed DPI settings.

Having a compositor for X11 will help with the tearing some, but not completely. This will be a nice step up once Wayland is ready in other ways (mainly more window managers and a few other tools that don't quite have equivalents to their X counterparts yet).

Any program using X can see the keystrokes entered into any other program using X. This has been bothering people for many years, especially those who have to use untrusted proprietary applications for work reasons. Wayland doesn't have this issue.

If you have an app that is literally attacking you then you are probably compromised. Even with wayland technology to contain hostile apps is grossly insufficient for the use case.

I would be surprised if this weren't as true in 2030 as it is in 2020.

The OS with the best isolation primitives is probably Solaris. It would be hilarious if 2020 Solaris was still better than 2020 Linux.

Defense in depth.

>If you have an app that is literally attacking you then you are probably compromised

Sure, if your adversary is some literal hacker. But you also have to worry about legit companies that use aggressive "analytics". VSCode most likely logs keystrokes. It would suck if it also logs keystrokes that you type into other applications.

VSCodium is great. It has all the MS junk removed.

https://vscodium.com/

Your point still stands, though.

Here are the real, user-visible benefits that I am aware of, at the moment:

  * Fractional scaling of monitor outputs
  * Multi-touch gestures for e.g. switching desktops
  * Security sand-boxing of apps
  * Tear-free video

As the original link shows, though, the architecture has much better abstractions for software engineers to work with so developer quality-of-life is improved, too.

I forgot the most important one: per-output scaling (integer or fractional). This allows you to have your HiDPI laptop display and an external 1080p monitor set to different scale factors.

>> Sorry, but you seemed to have missed answering the OPs question... Why they should switch to Wayland?

Because X is deprecated. The question isn't Why switch to Wayland, but When. You have mentioned some benefits too.

Plasma has too many knobs to tweak and their settings menus are too modular, so it’s hard to turn those knobs (there are like 4 keyboard shortcut panels for example). IMHO, I find it easier to be keyboard driven in gnome than plasma (at least, as of a year ago)

How is this related with Wayland? I prefer having checkboxes then a regedit or gnome gconfig.

About shorcuts, I also like having the GUI there to configure the keyboard layout (like set capslook as Escape) rather then edit xorg configs. Also it makes sense to have a section for Global shortcuts and a section for regular shortcuts. If you do not know what Global shortcuts are maybe you don't need them.

Probably GHOME users complain about Firefox's "about:config" because it has too many options and their brain can't fit that many options. The point is the distro gives you some defaults and if you are competent(you know to read and use google) you can change the distro defaults. if you are not competent you find the distro that looks cool and use it as the developers intended and adapt to it not it to you.

Anything that's shown in main settings has to be QA'd and officially supported, often at a commercial level.

Anything hidden in Tweaks or about:config like settings can be classed as "here be dragons".

That's one reason GNOME has less settings (not the main one). Less Settings = less to test, less to support.

But why are some GNOME fans get irritated and irrationally in this case complain about the fact that some developers are more capable of supporting more settings. Why you as a user are bothered that application X has options for people more capable then you of using them.

I am a developer and I understand the part of more coptions and more code paths means more things to test, but with robust code it is not a big deal. Imagine the wallpaper would be hard coded because the developers are lazzy and won't test with a different wallpaper. As a person with dsabilities I contributed a few patches and it would suck to have them rejected because I would need to bring a proof that there is a majority of users that need those things addressed.

Anyway i was not complaining about GNOME removing options or hidding them but complaining that some insecure person for some reason had to complain about KDE into a topic about Wayland support.

Also worth mentioning: Wayland has no support for color management at the moment. Work has been ongoing on this for about a year now, but I think it hasn't really solidified yet into something you can use.

This is the biggest show-stopper for me. Color management is a minimum for usability.

I'm using i3 right now instead of sway, but even in that case all you've said is that I won't lose too much by the transition. You haven't mentioned anything (except scaling, which I don't need) that I have to gain. I'm open to new info, but what's the benefit of wayland for me?

I am not an X/wayland dev, but:

I don’t think it’s supposed to be an upgrade from the users perspective, just a new display driver. Maybe a few new native things like rotatable windows etc which if exist in X11 are probably emulated.

X11 by modern standards is a shitshow of dirty hacks, I spent the weekend researching ‘how can I not have notifications pop over my lock screen using openbox and any composite manager’ and it ended up in the top hard basket. Also repeat this story for screen tearing, DPI, acceleration, weird bugs, etc etc.

Wayland is maturing which is nice, but you really won’t notice many changes, but youll be much cleaner / less buggy in the long run.

The way I see it, Wayland itself is better in some ways but not great. For one thing, it's so secure that things like menus can't show outside window borders - hence, case-by-case handling of exceptions to the security model. Read: dirty hacks built in from the start. I think clipboard handling also falls under this category.

Edit: to me, it seems like wayland isn't fundamentally better. It's just a "new and improved" version of the same system architecture paradigm X is built with. I'd be more interested in something that follows the 'everything is a file' paradigm that made Unix so great to begin with.

> For one thing, it's so secure that things like menus can't show outside window borders

This isn't true.

Although Sway is great, they may miss out on certain features they'd need like screen sharing, especially for applications like Zoom which is used by many enterprises.

When I left Linux for Mac a few years ago, the Wayland situation was about as you describe it. Cannot say I'm surprised.

Upsides: more secure (in X.org every client can read every other client's keystrokes, pointer position, and do screen grabs), generally smoother rendering, better support for mixed-DPI setups.

Current downsides: worse support for screen recording/sharing (e.g. not supported in Skype), a bug in the compositor (e.g. GNOME Mutter) can bring your whole session down, not-as-good NVIDIA support (also depending on the compositor).

I have been using Wayland for two years or so an wouldn't want to go back. I do miss wide screen sharing support, because I am working remotely and Skype is the primary means of communication.

Isn’t modern Skype using WebRTC that would be supported at least in beta with xdg-desktop-portal?

Did you try to use WebRTC PipeWire for screen sharing?

Yes, it works with some applications, like Jitsi. No luck with Skype so far.

Haven't switched yet. Under Wayland, can users which are not owning the session display an app on the Wayland session/server? (e.g. under X I can do something like "xhost +" and then have any user display an app on the X server). I'm not asking about the security implications of doing that under X (as you already mentioned, X is less secure and an app can read another app's screen content etc.): just if it's doable or not under Wayland?

Whoever has access to your wayland socket can display applications. Root already has access to all the things so for running apps as root (e.g. wireshark) you just need to configure sudo/doas/whatever-you-use to keep XDG_RUNTIME_DIR and WAYLAND_DISPLAY. e.g. in my doas.conf:

permit setenv { HOME LC_ALL TERM XDG_RUNTIME_DIR WAYLAND_DISPLAY } greg as root

and I can just run 'doas wireshark'.

Very interesting, thanks a lot. I'll definitely give Wayland a try soon!

What about running a GUI from a local or remote ssh session?

Eg previously I would execute DISPLAY=:0 mplayer foo.avi to play remotely or ssh -X root@foo xcalc to display xcalc on my local monitor but execute on rhost

To some extent you're looking for Waypipe, which aims to bring the X-style network transparency model to Wayland apps: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe

X forwarding works just fine with Xwayland.

> Upsides: more secure (in X.org every client can read every other client's keystrokes, pointer position, and do screen grabs)

What if i want this as a feature? Does wayland allow this per app?

The screen-grabbing app would have to interface with the compositor instead of the display server. For example, krfb is adding Wayland screen sharing support with KDE.

Is this better from a security standpoint? Does the compositor verify clients in a more secure fashion? Presumably screenshotting is still a thing on Wayland so this has to be a solved problem.

The point is apps can’t grab other apps input/output. If you run the app in an otherwise secure manner (eg execute in a perfect security chroot/container).

A malicious application on your host can still do anything at the executing privilege level (read .ssh, inject malware into .bashrc) but can’t sniff your gksudo password

Why would you assume it's a solved problem? Basically every compositor has to implement this feature.

The idea is that the compositor can then pop up a dialog saying "App X wants to record your screen. Allow?"

It could also limit recording to certain windows, or heck even redraw the whole screen any way it wants, like pretending sensitive windows aren't there.

Does this lead to a more fragmented application space? If each compostor required its own screen grabbing tool, and each DE has its own compostor?

Whilst backend implementations are going to be different per-compositor, they're exposed as freedesktop apis so tools shouldn't need to be adjusted for each one.

I respect what your saying, but I’ve seen that model tried and failed multiple times

Furthermore I kind of wonder if anybody bringing up this point has ever in their life seen or heard of a malicious X11 client ...

I know this is not how security works (a theoretical hole is often as bad as a practical one) but it's a bit like saying you should have antivirus software, to which I might say: where are the viruses?

If containerisation takes off and ends up being perfect security it’ll make sense. An example would be running Android on X, apps would be able to read / modify windows of other apps via The X socket.

Why would anyone suppose that containers on Linux which are designed to keep applications isolated enough not to interfere with each other ends up being perfectly secure when it's not really designed to be secure at all?

I’m not suggesting it’s sane particularly if your threat model is nation state level actors, but people use containers (chroot, docker, vms) as a security boundary all the time.

Neither chroot or docker is a worthwhile security boundary. People that act as if it is risk appearing incompetent when they get compromised.

I’d argue that anything but bare metal is not a good compromise, but I’m not balancing the books of a large company.

People care about docker escapes so they’re getting more difficult, at least.

Edit: Plus, I’d rather $app_i_dont_fully_trust be sitting in a container rather than on my host. And no, not running apps i don’t fully trust is not something which is at all viable for me.

> a bug in the compositor (e.g. GNOME Mutter) can bring your whole session down,

True for Gnome, no issue for KDE. Their arguably better design decisions led them to proceed slower though.

I've found wayland still has strange input, if there's a lot of CPU usage going on (something compiling or whatever) then the mouse and keyboard input will 'lag' and get stuck, plus it feels worse in games to me but the benefits seem really good, I hope wayland can keep improving so I can switch without it feeling worse for me

I use Wayland on a single-monitor desktop with a modern AMD card and Freesync, and I have had zero problems. I run all kinds of software and games (under Wine or otherwise) and everything just works out of the box.

I hear other configurations have more issues.

Performance was worse than X11 for a long time[1] and is finally catching up for some singular compositors. However most compositors still have worse performance and every single compositor has different quirks. Latency still seems to be worse across the board. In my test not one Wayland compositor could beat xterm input/output latency on X11 because of enforced global vsync.

1.:https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=gnome-32...

Yeah, mutter/gnome-shell was pretty awful. Weston and wlroots (Sway/Wayfire/etc) never had the issues Gnome had.

In fact Weston since 2015 has had a clever delay algorithm that allows clients to hit the very next frame if they sync to presentation-time feedback:

https://ppaalanen.blogspot.com/2015/02/weston-repaint-schedu...

(And Sway has a configurable delay; since Sway is so simple to render, the recommended max_frame_time value is 1ms — i.e. the compositor has the very last millisecond before vblank to composite, and everything before that is for the apps.)

Not really fair to compare with non-vsync systems — tearing is completely unacceptable ;)

Why is X11 able to be tear free (if drivers a configured properly) and still allows single applications to disable vsync?

I still don't understand why I need Wayland.

You probably don't need it, but you can use it if you really want. If you're using a fullscreen compositing WM in X11 then single applications can't disable vsync, it's the same situation as with Wayland.

Wayland compositors can have something called direct-scan out, which passes the buffer for the full screen application to KMS, which should be superior to Xorg unredirection (Wayland doesn't "redirect" windows in the first place though).

Well, of all the monitors I have, I think one of them supports >60Hz refresh. Overwhelmingly (including on windows7) I've disabled compositing because it makes the machine seems laggy. A bit of tearing when I'm scrolling fast, or moving a window doesn't bother me. About the only time its annoying is low frame-rate video.

So, if you think about what the tearing is it makes sense, your getting a partially drawn frame because the application didn't provide the full frame in time for the vsync, waiting to display the update for and additional one or two frames simply to assure a complete frame can only slow things down.

There is no screen tearing. That is quite noticeable.

X doesn't have screen tearing. Broken video drivers do.

Are all (Intel, AMD and Nouveau) drivers broken, then? I experience tearing on X with all of them.

X definitely has screen tearing, otherwise we wouldn't have the Present extension.

Core Xlib is entirely ignorant of vsync or anything relating to completed frames. It's an immediate mode rendering model in that everything you draw just gets thrown on-screen by the display server whenever.

Compositors were then bolted on w/redirect and damage extensions and basically randomly snapshot the client window contents before compositing a desktop frame, within that snapshot you can easily have tearing of half-drawn updates.

Further extensions and hacks have tried to fix this like Present and frame clocks from the gtk/gnome folks, but it's all opt-in by X clients and non-uniformly supported by compositing WMs or not at all in classical non-compositing WMs where the X server just draws things directly on-screen as the protocol requests arrive from clients.

These are all driver issues. Xorg and commercial servers on Windows don't have these problems. Intel and AMD drivers don't either unless misconfigured. It is not X's responsibility to handle low level hardware implementation details.

Everything I just described is implemented in userspace at the X protocol level.

You clearly don't know what you're talking about.

Every presentation or explanation I've ever heard by an X.org/Wayland developer (many of which are the same people) says otherwise.

There is nothing in Xlib (that I'm aware of) that has a notion of complete frames - i.e. no buffer swap, no "frame complete" signal. How would the server know when a frame is complete then?

Isn't this the point of the XDB extension that everybody has?

Never heard of that, I don't think it's commonly used.

The XDBE [0] extension attempted to add this, but I don't think anything actually implements it. (see edit)

I tried using it over a decade ago on XOrg and it didn't seem to do anything useful...

[0] https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.6/doc/libXext/dbelib.html

Edit:

It's definitely there in the Xorg xserver [1]. My memory is fuzzy as it was a long time ago but I distinctly remember wasting a day trying to use this extension and becoming frustrated with its ineffectiveness. Maybe it was just for lack of any vsync mechanism to schedule the swap?

[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/tree/master/db...

For KDE on X11, enabling the display compositor also seems to resolve screen tearing.

Another question: I don't take advantage of X network transparency all the day every day, but it is very handy when it's needed. Will there be an equivalent in the Wayland (or, should I say, post-Xorg) world?

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe

I find lack of remoting to be a showstopper for a lot of apps that belong in datacenters, but a web browser is one of the few where it's reasonable to always run on your desktop (attached to the GPU and display, which Wayland can't live without).

https://github.com/udevbe/greenfield

This is kind of a joke answer but the real answer is: This depends on the compositor you're using. So Wayland may not be network transparent, but it's possible to implement equivalent functionality on another layer of the stack.

Do keep in mind that just because you might be using X11 doesn't mean you get any network transparency at all. The network transparency only "works" if the GUI applications you're running actually use X's 2D rendering system. Which many things don't do because it's old and terrible and slow. QT5's scene graph backend, for example, doesn't have a X renderer anymore. So those GUI apps already lost network transparency (and did anyone even notice?)

On the other hand it turns out streaming video is super easy, entirely agnostic of the actual rendering stack in use, and not really that expensive in terms of bandwidth anymore.

that is not really an answer.

regarding the video streaming: meh, i can do X forwarding out of the box with just ssh, mostly out of the box, no other software required.

As a regular linux user, no, don't worry about whether you're using wayland or xorg, just use whatever comes with your distro. Let the maintainers worry about those things and just be a user.

I run clamshell mode on a regular dpi monitor and the laptop is hi dpi. Everything rescales when switching between clamshell mode and laptop mode on Wayland (Sway). I tried to get it to work as well with xorg i3 and xrandr but I couldn’t. I would always need to close everything and restart my workflow when switching between modes.

I want to, but I use two computers at my desk and run Synergy so I only need one keyboard/mouse. (bought a copy twice) Synergy does not yet support Wayland. I really hope they come around and support it soon.

If you use a distro with up to date kde/gnome you may want to. If you use i3 you may want to try sway.

If you use Nvidia gpus don't bother.

If you use a nvidia GPU just sell it and by an AMD one. You will save yourself a mountain of headaches.

Does each individual application have to convert to wayland, or does wayland allow you to use old xorg apps without modification?

Yes and no.

- Apps which use toolkits like GTK and QT will “just work” since they did the porting grunt work.

- X11 apps can run unmodified using XWayland but this just runs an X.org server and directs the output.

But the literal answer is “no”. Wayland and X11 are incompatible and apps will need to port.

No more screen tearing is a nice one.

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