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Comment by hulitu | Hacker News Reader

Why it is not a great result ?

What are the benefits of Wayland over X ?

Better security, less screen tearing, less lag. Getting rid of the old X protocol most desktops don't need and are unnecessarily complex is the cherry on top for me, still scarred from having to write an X client using Xlib more than 20 years ago ;) I'd say the benefits are worth it unless you absolutely can't live with the few fps difference, but it's already clear Wayland is moving forward and will get better.

To me, screen tearing is if anything good since it indicates that the pixels on the monitor are seeing the most recent data from the GPU at all times. I think the people behind wayland just don't care about my use case.

If 99,9% of all users perceive screen tearing as 'a bug' or at the least an ugliness you can't blame developers from trying to fix it from occurring by default.

> less lag

When I last tried Wayland it felt considerably more "laggy" to me, and I'm the kind of person who typically doesn't overly care about this sort of thing. That was in June 2020 (I can conveniently date this due to a patch I sent) so it's been a while, but that – together with the effort I need to spend on reconfiguring and rewriting tools – was the main reason I gave up on WayLand. Maybe it's better now, or maybe it's better if you have a fancy video card instead of a slow built-in GPU.

It's gotten a more efficient over the years. Also, built-in GPUs are not that slow anymore. Lag can also be caused by desktop environment animations which you can just speed up or disable.

I used dwl; it has no animations, and hard to get simpler than that.

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