Wayland does not support screen savers
jwz.org
jwz.org
Progress over many years worth of time. This is why whenever people ask me what display I run it's always X. X is a piece of work for sure but it's the only display server that actually works for almost every conceivable use case. Despite all the time and effort Wayland devs have spent to try and wrest control over the Linux graphical rendering server they are still a long ways from replacing X for good.
One selects the area, the other captures it. The joy of a tiling wm, make your own fun (and success)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37350221
(And did JWZ get rid of the special picture for people with Hacker News in the referrer?)
Anyone knows if he has grown out of his hatred for HN, or is this just a misconfigured server?
(Just bummer that a lot of legitimate sites won't be able to figure out who's sending them traffic. But I guess http referer (sic) isn't very reliable these days anyway)
as do screen recordings, if you have the right tools that support it. the problem is that apps need to be written specifically for wayland to make that work, and so many apps are broken and can't make screenshots or screen recordings. just this week i tried a few for a quick recording, and none worked. either they got sound or video but not both.
what did work was obs with the pipewire plugin. so it can be done, it's just that there are a lot of old apps that haven't been updated yet.
That's the problem when you replace a desktop system with something which has been designed for the embedded use case, Wayland's proponent always boasted that there had much less line of codes, but of course they had much less features too..
And the NVIDIA proprietary Linux module for NVIDIA GPUs hardware video decode doesn't work on Wayland; along with a number of other things: "NVIDIA Accelerated Linux Graphics Driver README and Installation Guide > Appendix L. Wayland Known Issues" https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/535.54.03/R...
However, they do use protocol extensions, so you can still make the argument that this is bolted on after the fact.
Things like XDND, XKB, XRender, Xft, Xinerama, RandR aren't "base X".
Every second year the font system is redesigned.
The window manager can crash, but under X it can be restarted (or is restarted automatically). You don't loose all your windows and open applications. On Wayland this is not possible. In GNOME if you type F2 and r you restart the graphical session under X, useful if some extension created some trouble. Under Wayland no way, log out and log back in and loose all your work. Is this good 21st century design? To me, not.
A program should handle a single task and should do it well. X did one thing, the window manager another, the compositor another, XScreensaver another, etc. If I want to substituite a component I could.
Also X is a client/server program, Wayland is not. Why does it matter? Under X I can run applications on a remote server and they are rendered locally. I use it time to time, because it uses far less bandwidth than using (let's say) VNC, since the rendering happens locally and only X drawing commands are passed trough the SSH connection (instead of a video stream). Wayland decided that this is not needed.
To me Wayland is not that good design. It's not reliable after nearly a decade of being "nearly done", while X still works and it's still solid as a rock. If only they spended some time to improve X instead of rewriting everything from scratch... whatever.
And if we want to talk about performance... to me it seemed that 10 years ago Compiz under X with a crappy GPU was more reactive than the modern Wayland window managers.
Finally... X did have the possibility to change DPI of the fonts in the ~/.Xresources file! Yes, natively. Thus a window manager that only used X primitives (such as i3) did work flawlessly on HiDPI screens from decades. They seems to be still figuring it out in GNOME under Wayland for fracional values...
Wayland is way simpler, has a more secure design, and handles modern GPUs much more efficiently. It's missing a lot of features X11 had, but the fact that you can use one program to run a screensaver, another program to lock the screen, and another program to do window management (oh, and also another program which is the actual X11 server) is something that 1% of users care about. The other 99% of users are OK with using Gnome or KDE or XFCE or whatever other desktop environment just does all this stuff.
The client/server argument held weight 5 or 10 years ago, but waypipe exists now and works great (I would know, I use it regularly myself). Actually it works much better than X11 forwarding ever did thanks to the modern compression codecs it has built in. And the fact that the waypipe code is just a regular unprivileged application rather than something built into the compositor means that I don't need to worry about what security holes.
Your comment just reads as a bunch of half thought out anecdotes (not all of which are factually accurate). There's a reason why basically EVERYONE who is actually knowledgeable about how X11 works decided that it was completely broken and welcomed Wayland when it came along.
i thought it was the other way around. in X11 everything including display manager and compositor are part of X itself, only the window manager is a client, whereas wayland separates the protocol and the compositor and display manager. the latter includes the window manager because a window manager always had a privileged position, and that i think interfered with the security architecture. by not having the need to allow a privileged window manager, wayland apps are more secure against interference by other apps.
It is easily conceivable to have a system, where regular applications cannot do these things, but privileged programs can do that (without being integrated into one big compositor).
Personally, I'm a fan of Wayland - but I'm not deluded either. Sway offers one of the better experiences, but you have to craft an awful lot of it.
I'm also fortunate that everything I need/use either supports Wayland or is a game that benefits from gamescope. Some requires more tweaking/encouragement than others.
Mixed environments are awful - ie: copying/pasting between Wayland/XWayland tends to freeze/hang in a specific direction. Making xlsclients return nothing should be the goal before getting too frustrated.
Screen sharing is fine thanks to Pipewire... and screenshots with grim/slurp - but again, some curating was involved and limitations apply (ie: no sharing 10-bit color displays)
Any wlroots compositor supports it