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Comment by jhugo | Hacker News Reader

Disabling Xwayland, if you can, makes wayland a much better experience. Not possible for everyone, as you may have software that doesn't work on Wayland, but I ran my daily driver Arch laptop with sway and no X at all for years, everything worked really well.

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I have run my daily driver Fedora machine with Gnome and no X at all since May 2021, everything has worked really well for me, too.

I haven't disabled Xwayland, but I have configured the apps that by default do not do it (in my case, Emacs and Chrome) to avoid Xwayland and instead to talk directly to Wayland.

(Gnome's interface design decisions are not very good IMO, but that's clearly not Wayland's fault).

At least some of comments on supposed defects in the architecture of Wayland seem to me to be written by long-time X users who simply do not like change. (I used MacOS for 11 years before I switched to Fedora and barely remember X.)

The problem for those that want to continue to use X -- well, Xserver to be specific -- is that nobody wants to maintain it.

> Disabling Xwayland, if you can, makes wayland a much better experience. Not possible for everyone, as you may have software that doesn't work on Wayland, but I ran my daily driver Arch laptop with sway and no X at all for years, everything worked really well.

If I can't run suckless terminal then what's the point of having a computer on my desktop? At that point I might as well kill the GUI altogether!

Does screen share work in firefox or chromium if you disable Xwayland and enable wayland rendering for those apps?

Yes, it works well in Firefox if you have the needed packages installed [0]. I don't use Chromium but apparently that works too.

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#WebRTC_screen_shar...

Cool. I'm using sway and might need screen sharing in a few weeks. Will check this out.

Xwayland is probably going to be deprecated and removed anyway. It's only included for backward compatibility with "legacy applications". It's like DOS compatibility on Windows.

I guess we should deprecate and remove DOSBox too, right?

DOSBox exists because DOS legacy applications still exist, and will continue to exist for a very long time. The same is true of X legacy applications.

DOSBox is something different. I was referring to the largely incomplete legacy DOS compatibility on Windows NT based systems.

Soon it will get to the point where the UI toolkits that matter will have ported entirely to Wayland and remove their X11 compatibility code. When that happens, all modern apps will be Wayland-native only. That leaves legacy apps and toolkits that haven't gotten with the program. For those, a VM running an old OS with Xorg will suffice. That is the "DOSBox equivalent" here.

Sincerely hope not, I’ll be forced to go back to X11 for jetbrains tools and everything electron based.

(as the version that ships almost never has wayland support enabled in the sandbox browser- and even force enabling it where it isn’t compiled out crashes it randomly)

EDIT: why did I get downvoted for that? It’s extremely true and I’ve tried to run without Xwayland a lot.

Have you had the chance to report those random crashes as bugs (against Electron or your compositor?) I figure that would be helpful for all.

I’ve been using Electron apps natively on Wayland for quite a while with those force-enable flags you mentioned. Few issues so far.

At one point, the apps indeed started crashing. Turns out this was due to the compositor (wl-roots) evolving while the Chromium team didn’t get the memo. They quickly fixed it in Chromium though but not before people started filing bugs. Didn’t take long for their patch to bubble up to the next Electron patch release.

The sooner people report those crashes, the better for everyone involved.

It won’t be deprecated, the very reason it exists is that there will always be plenty of software that won’t get ported to Wayland.

With Chromium having decent Wayland support since a while now, I expect Electron apps will catch up eventually. A major DE deprecating Xwayland would give packagers of Electron apps a reason to get around to it.

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