Wayland also opens the door to many performance improvements which are not possible on Xorg, and which take advantage of newer GPU features, especially on embedded systems but moreso every year on desktop and laptop GPUs as well.
If you want this to stop, make GNOME's performance better in the ways you envision, because it is the experience most Linux users get. (Quite a lot of work has been going into GNOME Wayland performance lately.) Arguments about Wayland protocol feature politics don't necessarily make the out-of-the-box experience worse; for many people it's a good "Just Works" experience. Stop telling people they need to switch desktop environments to get a better experience; some fraction of people will go "if I have to switch, I'll switch back to Windows/macOS/etc". A vanishingly small fraction of people will go "oh, sure, I should switch to a different window manager and environment that isn't what I'm used to and doesn't necessarily have the integration I'm used to, and switch my apps to match too; this makes me happy", and those people know who they are already.
This isn't the appropriate comparison. What they said is "x86-64 is incredibly slow", and then when you teased them for details, what they meant was "this Linux feature is incredibly slow on x86-64". To which the answer isn't "it's fast on RISC-V", but rather, "that's a problem with Linux, not x86-64".
If you have a beef with GNOME, then bring it to GNOME. Don't pin it on a tangentally related technology which bears none of the fault, and which has had hundreds of thousands of hours of work invested in it by volunteers all to make something nice for you to use.
It's not an end user's job to tease apart what specific thing is the root cause. If something changes, and their system feels slower, they're going to reasonably assume the thing that changed is at fault. That's doubly true if there's an easy switch to turn that thing on and off (which there often is, by picking a Wayland or non-Wayland session at login), and they can easily evaluate the difference in isolation. It might be cathartic to spend time yelling at people about who is actually at fault, but fixing the root cause would make there not be a fault to seek blame for.
People aren't going to stop running GNOME en-masse. Distributions are not going to abruptly abandon GNOME. If (and I do mean "if") there's some issue with GNOME's Wayland implementation, that's going to be many people's primary exposure to Wayland as a technology.
People will continue working on optimizations, to many places in the stack. It doesn't matter where the fault lies or where the fixes need to happen, the net result is people saying things like "I switched to Wayland and things got slower / less smooth / etc", and they're going to continue saying things like that. It'd be nice if people phrased it more that way (slowness associated with switching to Wayland, rather than Wayland being slow), and provided more details about their environment, rather than implying that "Wayland" is a single piece of software which should incur their ire. It'd be even nicer if there were less ire to go around because more things Just Work.
It's also entirely possible that some of the people in these various threads have issues with some other piece of software in the stack.
> If you have a beef with GNOME, then bring it to GNOME.
I'm not the one with a beef with GNOME; you seem to be. If you have a problem with GNOME, take it to GNOME. GNOME works great for me, and I don't care which Wayland protocols it does or doesn't choose to implement. You haven't even specified what precise change you think ought to happen there, just some general complaints about protocol extensions.
Not everyone has the time for curating a desktop environment with individual utilities, and not everyone likes tiling WMs. i3 gave me an RSI.
To be clear the "adventure" I'm talking about is for replacing desktop environment niceties like the ones provided by gsettingsd and the tight integration provided between devices and the system management tools offered in full desktop blown environments like Gnome and KDE. I used i3 for six or seven years and it was never as nicely integrated as Gnome and I spent a LOT of time yak shaving to get it nice and keep it that way. Eventually I gave up. Gnome is really nice these days.
But maybe I missed the point of your original comment.
Gnome will catch up some day.
There are other environments that have worked well for a decade and will work well for the next decade.
Use a binary blob that only works with a 3 year old vendor kernel, and works most of the time (but you can't fix it when it doesn't work, and if you are compositing most of the time isn't good enough)
Use a mainline Linux kernel that is so buggy that fixing the bugs in it is a full time job
Use fbdev
Otherwise, this is starting the benchmark wars with meaningless comparisons at the outset. :(
Is GNOME on Wayland worse than GNOME on X11? Perhaps. Is Wayland worse than X11, based on that answer? No.
Wayland was created because of horrible X11 performance [1]. It is not Waylands prime time yet but X.Org still works and maintained. Phoronix.com should have checked contributions [2].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ
[2] https://github.com/freedesktop/xorg-xserver/graphs/commit-ac...
Think risc v cisc. It isn't that there are not points to be gained from the alternatives. It is that leaving the past behind is not necessarily the best way to get progress. And even when enough time passes that the alternative gains ground, it often looks more like what it was replacing than less.
Or if you truly believe there is nothing wrong with X.Org you would become maintainer.
> My (often incorrect) views and opinions are my own and not those of anyone I currently or have ever worked for. Please help me make them more informed (and hopefully more correct) whenever you can!
Sadly, for the most part I have been discouraged from Linux desktop usage in recent years. Shame, as I have been on Linux for a couple of decades now. That said, I confess this is opening my interest. Would love to get myself and my children contributing, and I will start looking for ways to make that possible.
there would be no controversy with
"I only really care about GNOME performance and GNOME Wayland hasn’t been very convincing [0] with no discernible improvement over GNOME X11"
GNOME matters for you, it does not matter for me (xmonad, xterm, browsers). If all user see is GNOME he can decide it is Linux that is broken as well.
"The real story behind Wayland and X" by Daniel Stone (link above) specifically shows X11 performance problems, it is view from developer what is wrong with X. The story which we, as users, do not know. We can't blame developers for trying to implement something sane.
I have no contributions to core projects but I don't blame them either.
Continuing in that vein. I stand by pointing that the choice of benchmark matters. I've been burned by my own choices and choices from peers too often to agree that hypothetical benchmarks will see improvements for everyone.
I also find it dubious that there are many use cases that are better served today than in the past. I want to believe you, but the evidence is coming in weak with a ton of argument from authority. You don't get a pass just for being a developer to tell users they are wrong.
Sorry, I can't continue until you've watched presentation [1]
> gedit startup:
> 130 blocking InternAtom calls
> 34 blocking GetProperty calls
> 116 property change requests
> blocking because Xlib is terrible
> usually spends 25ms waiting for requests
> sometimes spends 1428ms
Can you recommend me a good representative of Wayland I could try?
I've been running KDE Neon for the past few years, but as you noted elsewhere it seems KDE on Wayland needs more work still.