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Comment by notemaker | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to use Wayland, but it's not stable enough. I've lost count of the number of times I've lost work due to a segfault and then being logged out. And lots of applications still don't support it for screensharing (looking at you slack).

My bug in particular seems to be related with thunderbolt or USB c connected monitors. A disconnect will prompt a segfault.

I'd like to contribute with a proper bug report and I probably would if I hadn't had everything working with gnome+X. But now I just can't motivate spending time on it over other things in my life. Hope they have telemetry for segfaults at least.

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I was tinkering with building a wayland hello world a few weeks ago (on manjaro+gnome), and I could reliably hang the desktop by starting to create a window but not finishing the handshake. Many reboots later, even after finishing the handshake, running my app would break mouse input across the system until reboot. I never did figure that one out.

The experience left me feeling that any misbehaving app/driver can break the desktop. And since you can't restart the window manager without losing your session, you'll lose a bunch of time every time something goes wrong.

btw I should say I was seriously impressed by the UI in general and how smooth everything felt, but stability is ultimately more important for me.

I haven't got a single Wayland seg fault since I moved back to Linux in October 2021. Not one.

I imagine this is very dependent on your hardware. In my case, I'm using a Lenovo P1 (gen 3).

To be honest, I could have survived the segfault thing if I could predict when they would occur. But coupled with the fact that my laptop draws >100W at peak and that my monitors only supply ~70W or so over thunderbolt, my laptop disconnects the peripherals attached over thunderbolt on power peaks. When this happens, Gnome segfaults and I lose whatever I was doing outside of tmux :)

X stays out of my way and allows me to get work done.

So perhaps you should use your power supply instead of the monitor power because it's clearly not getting enough power at peak?

Yep, that's one solution. Another is using X :)

I get them every 5 minutes on some of my systems. Much like... everything else in Linux, its really hardware-dependant

> Much like... everything else in Linux, its really hardware-dependant

Much like... everything in any OS, its really hardware-dependant

Fixed that for you.

Listen, I'm a Linux advocate to the core. I despise Windows and MacOS from the bottom of my heart, and I genuinely find them insufferable to work on. However, their issues don't stem from a lack of support. When you run either of those OSes on supported hardware, it will work. These bugs get ironed out before they ship. From the lowest-end $200 Asus laptops to the highest-end Macbook Pros, you won't encounter issues like your compositor crashing. Critical bugs like that slip through the cracks on Linux; their stability isn't even remotely comparable. For me, it's not the end of the world. For a casual user? This is a show-stopper. If Wayland continues to reduce the scope of hardware/software combos it works well on, it will critically hinder it's adoption in the already-minuscule demographic of desktop Linux users.

I don't understand what you are talking about. My Linux-first laptop (Librem 15) has been working flawlessly for many years with no issues whatsoever. Suspend, WiFi, GUI work as expected 100% of the time.

That's great to hear. Now, compare that to the sample size of people running Linux on custom-built desktops, Chromebooks, cheap-o laptops and Macbooks, all of which are "supported" by the Linux kernel. Starting to get the picture?

Furthermore, even some commercial "designed for Linux" laptops like the Dell XPS Developer Edition have critical features missing like suspend/sleep, both of which work better on unofficially supported machines like Thinkpads. You're welcome to support whichever hardware vendors you choose, but you absolutely can't pretend like all hardware works "fine" on Linux to the same degree it would on MacOS or Windows.

Did you try to run Windows on a Macbook? Do you expect that it should work flawlessly? Will you blame Microsoft or Apple for its problems? Same with Linux.

Linux tries to support "all" hardware, but you should not expect that it's possible to actually do it perfectly.

> commercial "designed for Linux" laptops like the Dell XPS Developer Edition have critical features missing like suspend/sleep

So you should stop trusting Dell with their hardware. Why do you blame the Linux community for not supporting proprietary hardware without documentation flawlessly?

> pretend like all hardware works "fine" on Linux

I never said that all hardware worked fine on Linux. There is no OS with which all hardware works fine, and can't be. I'm just suggesting to rely on actually supported hardware, which is rare but pretty much possible to find. See also: System76.

> And lots of applications still don't support it for screensharing (looking at you slack).

Good point. This is the only issue keeping me from using Wayland, because OBS just won't work with it yet.

Native wayland support through pipewire landed in OBS last September: https://obsproject.com/blog/obs-studio-27-released

What exactly is the issue? OBS (currently version 27.2.3) works perfectly fine on my machine using Gnome Wayland.

The issue is that capturing the screen puts OBS on ~40% CPU utilization. I wouldn't call that "perfectly fine" nor is that even an option to be considered for me.

It absolutely works with Wayland... I just recorded a screencast yesterday with OBS on Wayland. The only thing that changes is you have to explicitly grant OBS rights to your display/window when it starts.

I've been using Gnome/Wayland via Ubuntu LTS releases for the past 4 years now on my Dell XPS 13 and not once have I experienced a segfault.

I think I've had maybe two instances where I had to do a hard reboot in those years and those both involved me doing something a tad aggressive with multiple containers on my system, which is an ultrabook and really isn't speced to handle a lot of them.

I’ve been using a 5k thunderbolt monitor with Fedora since 33 and haven’t once had an issue. My guess is it’s a kernel version or driver issue. I use Intel and Nvidea, and Intel is definitely smoother sailing. I’ll say this, though. Fedora has gotten much better support for Nvidia lately.

Wayland is just a protocol. The desktop environment or application is likely your actual problem.

Yes a protocol that has no standardized way to share screen content. And as such it is completely usless for todays workflow which is dominated by video call meetings.

Then how come I use both teams and zoom just fine under wayland?

Pipewire support is there for a long time now.

> long time

Considering the age of Wayland it's not that long. Besides that, Pipewire is not part of the Wayland protocol. This means external protocols now have to jump in fixing the deficiencies of Wayland.

No, it means that a problem best solved elsewhere is solved.. elsewhere. Screen sharing is streaming, where audio is also relevant and the two have to be synced. It would be plain incorrect to solve the two thing separately.

The composited image of the desktop is only available to the compositor. Hence it needs to be solved at the compositor. Since Wayland is essentially nothing more than a multiprocess negotiation protocol for video memory access it is exactly the right place where it should be solved.

But at the end pipewire does get the output from the compositor, doesn’t it? Not specifying a general API can be a good and a bad thing — see eg. the linux kernel’s stance on driver interfaces.

Yes, I was a bit imprecise. It is Gnome's Wayland support that is too unstable. Given the thread topic, I didn't think to be explicit :)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Wayland, the protocol, doesn't support restarting and reconnecting to running apps. That means any little bug and you lose your entire session. X11 does support this, even Windows supports it (win+ctrl+shift+b). I wish wayland had a way to make things robust in the face of bugs, because bugs are inevitable.

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