Both of us experienced issues with games being inconsistent in frame times, black rectangles over electron apps like spotify/discord, for him his multi monitor setup was somehow broken on wayland but fine with X.
Chromium apps in general appear to have varying levels of issues, some applications don't support wayland at all, most can run with the xwayland which IMO mostly defeats the purpose especially when it's still not seamless.
We've both switched to X and no longer have any of the above issues. That's not to say the desktop experience on X is seamless of course, but the above issues were all solved.
I'm really under the impression that people who use wayland either don't use a wide range of applications (which is perfectly fine!) and/or are used to putting up with "typical linux issues" and accept the quirks.
I remember when wayland came out and was supposed to solved the "fragmented/bloated mess of xorg" but it literally just appears to have been a half-baked solution for ~15 years.
IMO the issue with the "linux desktop" has always been consistency. You don't have to worry about adding launch arguments, compositor support, graphics drivers, AMD/Nvidia, wine, broken audio/networking when you do an update, etc. MacOS/Windows "just work" - at least with far more consistency.
And yes, I run X, Wayland is too restrictive currently. I should give it another try some day though.
Funny, it's always been the other way around for me.
My Ubuntu 22.04 at work keeps randomly switching the default audio output to the headphone jack of the machine and off my Bluetooth headphones leaving me without sound in my headphones until I go to the settings and switch it back to Bluetooth. Never had such issues with Windows, it's always been rock solid in this regard.
Would you mind sharing the exact audio issues you had with Windows?
HP Spectre x360 laptop (2020), factory-installed Win10: audio just dies sometimes. The Realtek's control panel (also factory-installed) periodically crashes. Funnily, booting a Linux live from a flash drive gave audio that worked without said problems. The laptop was later replaced with an updated one, when its graphics hardware visibly failed. The replacement did not have the audio problem (IDK if it was a different audio chip revision, firmware, or driver), but the Realtek control panel was still unstable.
(Visually Win10 has at least three UI toolkits that can barely agree on colors, and cannot agree on fonts or the shape of controls. Under X, I have all GTK2, GTK3, Qt5, Qt6 programs use the same fonts and a common theme, with controls, if not exactly uniform, at least having common colors, shapes, and sizes.)
Well there's your problem, or more precise HP's problem, not Windows's problem. Don't use vendor crapware on your machine.
Always install a fresh copy of windows of a USB drive, not the recovery partition which holds the vendor crapware.
The built in windows audio switcher and audio drivers works just fine no need to use third party apps.
Wouldn't it be installed windows update anyway? I'm pretty sure windows installs whatever software is in it's repo the moment a device is discovered by default?
On a fresh install Windows update only install the corect drivers, no vendor apps.
The Realtek app is put there by the vendor (HP/Dell/Lenovo) from the factory in their spin of Windows. If you install a fresh vanilla copy of Windows from Microsft's website you won't have any of that nonsense.
Nvidia will include it's control panels and stuff, same with intel graphics AFAIK?
A little old but https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/razer-bug-let...
I'm like 95% sure intel graphics does this with integrated graphics
It's possible to achieve what you wrote, but the complexity of doing that is borderline impossible. Need to set up group policies, or use custom software, to block installation of specific hardware devices, and specific Windows updates.
Example: https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Software-and-How-To-Q...
I can’t even count the number of times windows reinstalling the sound driver or whatever it does at runtime, requiring a reboot.
I think people are very likely to blame the software layer even when they use subpar hardware — no software will run fine on shitty hardware, and the very inconsistent reports from basically any OS is more than likely the result of some underlying, failing hardware components. This also mostly explains why OSX is considered more stable by some — it is much easier supporting 10 different configs, than all the others.
I think Linux has undergone a huge improvement in this regard and actually has the best, general support for any hardware nowadays — it may happen that a given driver is better/only works for windows, but the mainline has shifted to Linux now.
I might try wayland again, I'm just really frustrated with it. It's always been advertised to be better then X, and 15 years in it's still a rocky mess (as of ~6 months ago).
This isn't 100% waylands fault - but nvidia cards seem to add extra issues. I need CUDA support so AMD is not an option.
Well, there you go. NVIDIA for the longest time didn’t support linux, period. They add proprietary binary blobs to patch xserver to work. It’s no surprise that some normal userspace program can’t do something the kernel can’t do either.
As you later point out more explicitly, there is no way around that.
Linux is the epitome of bazaar style development - it has endless positives, but a huge drawback is not having a consistent direction, nor any real force behind any of the directions.
Apple can just say that they will now support a new compositor, if you wanna stay in business, change. And it will happen. But that’s not a technical thing at all, wayland’s first 10 years is very different from the next 5 one — since it has become mainstream now, its support and hands working on it will result in exponentially more improvements. A new direction needs critical mass, and wayland has only recently acquired that, imo.
But the article is specifically about incompatibility of input methods among different DEs: Gnome, KDE, wlroots-based environments such as Sway and Hyprland.
After many years, ibus still doesn’t work with wlroots, because ibus supports input method protocol v1 and wlroots supports v2: https://github.com/ibus/ibus/issues/2182
The list of recommended IMEs on Sway are all WIP: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/Useful-add-ons-for-sway#...
There is even v3. Kitty refused to implement v3 because v3 appeared even more unstable: https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/2814#issuecomment...
The wayland input method protocol is stuck at v1, and DEs/applications disagree about which versions to support. That’s why it’s problematic.
Just recently moved to Hyprland and similar experience. Barely had any hiccups and switching to a non-english layout such as Arabic works like a charm.
Perhaps maybe our systems are just ideal? For the record I'm using a thinkpad which generally has good support but even on my Lenovo G505 it worked perfectly.
You can right-click-drag, and you can middle click. macOS doesn't support either one of these, and Windows only supports assigning a bottom-right quadrant of the trackpad to right-clicking.
It's fine in Sway or KDE, as they have scroll sensitivity settings.
Oh, I got bitten by that actually. I ended up just configuring Firefox since that was the main app I used, but most apps aren't Firefox and don't have settings for things that they would expect to be handled by your WM/DE/DM.
GTK may have other scroll issues as well (I recall seeing some stuff about that, though I don't remember the details), but there is definitely stuff the compositor can do.
GTK works through a bunch of heuristics and in-built multipliers, but the fundamental problem is that scroll effect depends on the “weight” of the content itself — kinematic scrolling is unfortunately quite missing from linux desktop, AFAIK. But do correct me if you know better, I’m not too well versed in that.
Screen tearing is something that simply shouldn't exist by default. A person should be able to count on its absence, like a person should be able to count on a basic USB keyboard working without any headaches.
Now I'll brace myself for the "I've never noticed screen tearing" from people whose brains run on a different refresh rate than mine does.
It was such a relief the first time I used Mac OS X. Finally a unix that renders to the screen without artifacts.
It didn’t help that the drivers for everything were closed course, but even with perfect drivers X11’s design can’t deliver perfect frames.
That was one of the reasons I used macOS too. Not for artifact-free rendering but for the fact that it's a real production-ready desktop OS with first-party app support from most companies, while being a true Unix with all the powerful Unix capabilities, like being able to run Valgrind and etc. without nesting virtual machines.
Similarly, nothing says you need to request a redraw when moving a window instead of redrawing it from backing store - but at some point backing store became useless in X.Org even if you explicitly try to program its use.
I'm actually pretty sure this is a thing. I have a dissociative disorder and sometimes the "refresh rate" of my senses seems to go down. I have no idea why or how, but it's really weird to literally experience reality feeling like a slideshow.
But other times I can detect any flickering lighting, so I dunno.
Here's another thing, which proves that directly addressing tearing is false dharma: it gets better with higher refresh rates. Having higher Hz is awesome, and it's improving the issue to boot! It's like antialiasing. You're rendering stuff multiple times, taking enormous performance hits, sometimes now even using semi-sentient AI to smooth the jaggies out... when it turns out that the jaggies get better when you increase your resolution. False dharma: trying to live the lie of no jaggies on 768p @ 43 FPS; TRUE DHARMA: accepting and advancing your computerized existence on 4K @ 53 FPS. Same with tearing and refresh rate.
Also??? These days, adaptive sync (on the monitor hardware level, NOT software driver level) completely eliminates tearing. Another dharmically truer solution.
Also, while you're so hung up on tearing that you'd leave X11 for Wayland, you've clearly never experienced the awesomeness of xdotool, which isn't available on Wayland. You're not truly living. You're trapped in a gilded cage, satisfying merely the basest petty natures of man.
Where do you live?
Oh Lord no. Clickpads are still basically unusable with libinput. There's a reason it hasn't actually displaced synaptics.
Eh, what? That's not at all common