Hacker News Reader

Comment by blinkingled | Hacker News Reader

X11 is mostly stable though. With Wayland on Fedora/GNOME or KDE a crash or two once in a while is still pretty much something you expect. Hopefully it gets better in less than 20 years :)

View on HN

Wayland (wlroots/sway) hasn't crashed on me once in the four years I've been using it.

Second this, sway is very very stable. And super snappy/minimal, I like it.

The chance that I will use another WM any time soon is absolutely low.

It's nice that it works for the two of you. But without actual crash statistics this isn't particularly useful. (To be fair: neither is the top-level post.)

Gnome 3 also didn’t crash on me for years. But as always these flamewary threads that dare mention the few forbidden words (wayland, systemd, etc) are always full of anecdotal evidences and emotions post-rationalized into some “argument”.

Touchpad gestures on X11 suck, though. There are hacky workarounds (background software that send special key combos after recognizing a gesture) but there's nothing like a three or four finger drag in X11.

After trying Wayland on my laptop once, I never wanted to go back to X11. Sadly, I made the mistake of buying Nvidia hardware, but I look forward to using Wayland without bugs.

I find touchpad gestures to be a mess on both X11 and Wayland. This is one of the main reasons I don't use Linux on my laptop. Gestures aren't recognized reliably or frequently they just stop working at all. Plus there isn't consistent support for gestures across applications which although not a X11 or Wayland issue is still irritating. Everytime there is a new round of major distro releases I try them. Everytime I go back to Windows because of the gestures issue and poor battery life. The battery life being the main issue. I'll probably not try anymore because neither seems to get better.

I don't know what DE you're using, but on Gnome multitouch support worked out of the box the moment I logged in with Wayland enabled. Pinch to zoom worked in most apps (in my browser, in the picture viewer, and in the Maps app, which are the only places I ever bothered to look for it) and horizontal/vertical scrolling worked a lot smoother than on X11 across the board.

Your trackpad does need to be supported, though. Trackpads without Linux driver support will report to the kernel as if they're PS/2 mice with weird side effects, and those will never work well. If your trackpad has decent driver support (many Synaptic models, for example, though not all) then every single touch is being forwarded to the OS and gestures should work like they do on Windows.

Funnily enough, Windows battery life is a lot worse on my laptop than Linux battery life. I don't know what intern Lenovo had design the fan curves and power settings for this laptop, but I have the choice between "30fps desktop" and "sounds like a fan taking off" whenever I use Windows. I have my suspicions that Linux doesn't boost the CPU as much as Windows does, but honestly I don't need it to stick to its max boost all that often anyway.

My laptop is also a Thinkpad. My experience is the opposite of yours. A plain install of either Fedora or Ubuntu leaves me with about 40% of the battery life on Windows and a much busier fan. Tweaking gets me up to about 50% of the Windows battery.

The synaptics trackpad in my laptop has driver support. Gnome gestures are enabled at install but the trackpad multi-finger swipe gestures are detected erratically and then often stop working until I logout and back in. I assume this is a software issue since rebooting the device is not required. The linux version of my browser doesn't have any gesture support.

I crash constantly on Wayland and I can't talk about it or get help to fix it, because like all Linux problems, it all comes back to somehow being my fault, as all Linux issues are the fault of the user.

As long as desktop Linux's problems keep getting blamed on the user, it will never achieve wider adoption.

Maybe try at the relevant place, and with the necessary due diligence work.

Surely you can’t expect some paid support level help for free from someone who works on it in his/her free time.

Wayland can't crash, it's a protocol. That's like saying "http" crashed. Chrome or Firefox can crash, but not http. Gnome and KDE are Wayland implementations. I'm using SwayWM which uses wlroots as its Wayland implementation and it's solid as a rock.

*ahem*

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux...

Unless you don't use the GNU userland... some are using busybox/Linux, right?

Yeah, it's only GNU/Linux if it uses the GNU OS API with the Linux kernel, as opposed to GNU/Hurd for instance, which also uses the GNU OS API.

Dude the "OS API", in the Linux world, is the syscall interface. Some programs use the wrappers provided by GNU libc, others use the wrappers provided by musl, others yet (such as Go programs) issue syscalls directly.

Hopefully they will one day use my zero-overhead syscall wrappers with sum type niche-value-optimized error handling https://github.com/Cons-Cat/libCat

I agree. Switching from glibc + coreutils to musl + busybox is much more like "switching operating system" than switching from Linux + systemd + GNOME to HURD + SysVInit + KDE.

Obviously not. GNU hasn't been "the operating system" in at least several decades.

I used to find this funny but having had the misfortune of having to hyper define stuff to Stallman on multiple occasions... the joke starts to feel like remembering a lite trauma

I mean RMS is cool and totally awesome but dang it... there are just some things. This goes for everyone I guess.

You either understood the point and purposely ignored it or just missed it completely. The parent reply clearly means support for wayland, not the protocol.

Being pendantic about the definition doesn't help the discussion at all. It is the type of response you would get on the red website

I agree, but I'm curious what the "red website" is? I thought maybe reddit or lobste.rs, but they seem more blue to me. Unless because their logos/favicons are red? Seriously not trying to be annoying, generally curious.

I don't know if you mean blue as in politics, but I mean the literal color red. And well, red is on its name :p

The orange website and the red website are popular slang that you hear around here from time to time

I meant the literal color, too! I guess the new website does have some reddish elements. The old one was entirely blue [1], and I'm pretty sure "reddit" is just a play on "read it".

Ah, full circle, back to being uselessly pedantic. :) But I was really curious, didn't know "red website" was slang for it (well familiar with "orange website").

[1] https://old.reddit.com

> The orange website and the red website are popular slang that you hear around here from time to time.

A Google search for "the orange website" returns a lot of results about Hacker News, "the red website" doesn't return anything about Reddit.

I read it again and it does not seem obvious that they were talking about apps rather than the WM itself. Please explain to me where that's made clear.

I guess that raises an interesting point. The implementations are so divergent that there are probably a lot of very different crashing bugs in all the various pieces that can make a Wayland desktop. As opposed to Xorg, where bugs can be fixed in a single tree.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com