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Comment by xrd | Hacker News Reader

I'm getting increasingly frustrated with Wayland. I cannot share my screen with Zoom. I cannot use applications like gcolor2. It is often that I find an application just does not work with Wayland and I have no idea how to troubleshoot.

I know a lot of people complain about Linux being much more complicated to use, but my experience for the last ten years is that Linux almost always works better than Windows and OSX for the basic 90% of things. But, Wayland has changed that for me entirely, now it feels like 50% does not work.

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For me the most frustrating thing about Wayland is that with Wayland a crash anywhere in the stack means I lose all my work. I really like the fact that under X I can simply restart my DE after a crash to get a working desktop back and the open apps are unaffected, this saved me so many times. I tried Wayland for a while, but after losing all my work twice to crashes I came back running to X.

I love X, etc and use it all the time, but let's be honest, X isn't exactly rock solid either. I had X crash due to video mode switches (mainly via games) so many times that nowadays unless i know a game behaves nicely, i tend to first run it under gamescope[0] which shields against these issues. I do find it kinda amusing that my only use for Wayland so far has been to avoid driver issues by running a compositor inside an X window :-P

[0] https://github.com/Plagman/gamescope - it is a fork of Valve's wayland compositor which actually works under X11 inside a window and effectively creates a nested XWayland environment but also attempts to minimize latency... it doesn't eliminate it completely but outside of twitchy shooters it is ok

The thing is, with X there were a lot of separate parts - the display server, the window manager, and the compositor were separate packages and if either of the latter crashed and you were set up for it you could keep going. With Wayland, the display server is the window manager and compositor - and is directly responsible for handling all audio, video, input devices, color management, clipboard, and probably other things I'm forgetting - so there's only one thing to crash and it's game over. This also is a pain in terms of features, because you can't tack on, say, a clipboard manager, it has to be directly supported, hence things like GNOME, KDE, and basically everything else (via wlroots) having different, incompatible ways to do things like screen shots.

I have never had that ever happen, I am guessing nvidia? Are you aware of VFIO? Its probably a better solution, 100% gaming on linux with a Windows VM that uses GPU passthrough.

No, AMD, i have a Radeon RX 5700 XT with the open source drivers. One of the sure-fire ways to crash the entire server seems to be trying to run Wizardry 6 from GOG via Wine, which essentially runs DOSBox for Windows. Somewhere when it tries to change video mode it crashes. Note that this doesn't happen if i use Gamescope under X (which essentially runs Wine under XWayland under its own Wayland compositor that runs in an X window).

Of course since this is a DOS game i can simply run it with native DOSBox, but this is just a way to replicate the issue.

Since i've found workarounds for these issues i didn't bother much, but i might try and see why it crashes at some point.

Also FWIW i do not really consider "gaming on Linux" when i have to use a Windows VM. Besides Wine (well, Wine staging) nowadays works perfectly fine. And if i wanted to use Windows, i'd just be using Windows :-P.

I would rather not reboot and run windows as a captive OS. Would you call using the Win11 android emulator gaming on Windows?

I'd rather not bother with Windows at all.

Thing is, with Proton and X I have a rock steady and capable env to do all of my gaming, and I have been doing so for years now. I've no need or desire to bring windows back into the mix.

Wayland messes that up, on top of frequent crashiness. Wayland does not solve any problem I have, but it does break most of the things that were working well.

I don't like windows either, just the best method to run 100% games.

>Wayland messes that up, on top of frequent crashiness. Wayland does not solve any problem I have, but it does break most of the things that were working well.

That's all I get from the thread, it works well as long as you don't do anything other than use the browser.

To add to this, thunderbird has started to crash and hang in Ubuntu 21+ because of Wayland[0]. It's feeling the old days when I had to separately install wireless drivers to make WiFi to work.

[0] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/thunderbird/+bug/1...

who forced you to use Wayland? just switch back to x11 as most conservative users, it's like with winxp users, that survived vista years

just don't forget to check if Wayland is up to your standard every year or so

Most new linux users don't know this and will give up., Ubuntu really shot in their foot when they made Wayland default in 21.04 and beyond. It's going to lose a lot of new users.

Never had that issue myself, but it can crash and lose all my work? Wayland sounds like 100% regression on functionality for some lame graphic benefits.

If the X.org crashes then you lose all of your work. Same as your compositor. The difference is that your WM is just a client to the X server and so can crash and restart without affecting other clients.

A great solution until software declares X11 "deprecated" and refuses to support it. For instance, the only way to run Waydroid under X11... is to nest a Wayland session inside X11.

FWIW as someone who uses Xorg exclusively i do not see an issue with using a nested Wayland server to run Wayland applications. The only issue is that current Wayland servers only support running inside their own windows instead of creating "rootless" windows that can be integrated with the rest of the X desktop, but that is something that can be fixed at some point if needed as neither X nor Wayland limit this functionality.

Not sure if you want to change programs, but I use telegram to screen share, not sure if wayland supports it. Can you screen capture with a video card? I don't know if you plan to stay on it.

I feel like Zoom support is the absolute last thing I would ever care about with a display manager.

What would it take for Zoom and gcolor2 to be amended to work with Wayland?

Well, given that `gcolor2` is open source, it does already work with Wayland if you have XDG Portal setup correctly.

And Zoom could, too, if they cared. (And by the way, I use Zoom in browser with Wayland when required by <obligation>, and it works fine.)

Once again, people miffed at Linux because closed source app developers are lazy and don't give two shits. (Which would be and often is a pain for plenty of other reasons than Wayland.)

I don't know what xdg-portal is or how to set it up. When I searched in Google, the very first link has a bad SSL certificate (which I accepted anyway, but seems very complex at first glance), the next from Reddit didn't work and said the tutorials were all out of date.

I totally agree Zoom should fix it, but they haven't yet.

I tried to install xdg-desktop-portal with ` nix-env --install xdg-desktop-portal` but running xdg-desktop-portal does not find the binary. I'm just confused what this command does anyway.

There is a lot of conversation about Zoom here: https://github.com/flathub/us.zoom.Zoom/issues/22

Apparently, there has been some recent activity via support channels. But I’d bet it’s probably not that difficult, just a matter of the team’s priorities to get to it. Then again, zoom isn’t very active or transparent in the OSS world, so it’s hard to say.

Their developers to implement some dbus protocol probably?

More accurately, the developers need to a) fix the buggy implementation of the Gnome-specific protocol they currently use, and b) switch to the standard screensharing protocol.

https://github.com/flathub/us.zoom.Zoom/pull/182#issuecommen...

Zoom happily supports screen sharing on Wayland/gnome, even using the flatpak version.

Not if you use screen scaling.

For what it's worth, I do use screen scaling (in fact: different scales on different screens) and haven't had trouble with screen sharing on Zoom on Ubuntu in over a year.

Don't use it then. At this stage Wayland looks more like an unfortunate experiment than a serious thing. Of course it is secure when it does nothing.

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