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Comment by jmclnx | Hacker News Reader

The main complaints against Wayland is:

* It forces me to use a desktop environment, I know about sway, but I like fvwm. From what I have read, creating window managers on wayland is very difficult.

* X-forwarding. Yes I know about waypipes, but does not work when you want to execute an X application on AIX and display it on Linux. AIX is still in use in many large companies. And yes, no performance issues for me doing that.

* Many Linxisms that need to be ported to the BSDs, and in my opinion these corrupt the design of a sane architecture.

* Will probably obsolete many old computers due to resource usage. Similar to what Microsoft is doing with TPM2. Luckily NetBSD is around for old systems. One selling point of Linux was it kept old systems "live".

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>From what I have read, creating window managers on wayland is very difficult.

Only because the wayland community insist on bundling everything into the same binary. Someone could make a compositor that had a swappable window manager component.

>when you want to execute an X application on AIX and display it on Linux.

Don't forget XWayland exists. So it should just work. waypipe is for if the server is using Wayland.

>Many Linxisms that need to be ported to the BSDs

Wayland supports FreeBSD so it must not be that bad.

>Will probably obsolete many old computers due to resource usage.

Why would Wayland use more resources? What work is it doing extra compared to xorg?

> Why would Wayland use more resources

Memory usage, I do not know what sway uses, but I expect it to be much more than the corresponding WM under X

https://itvision.altervista.org/linux-desktop-environments-s...

Based on your source Wayland vs Xorg memory usage looks to be within the error margin and I don't know which computer you're running where an additional 100MB claimed make the system unusable.

iceWM will not run under wayland. Using a DE on an old computer will not work.

Sure, but purely based on the comparisons between KDE and Gnome under Xorg and Wayland, I don't see any indication that Wayland would inherently use more memory.

It's simply a matter of using one of the lighter Wayland compositors, none of which have been tested in the comparison you linked.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Wayland#Compositors

I think you are missing something. In a old system, which probably has at most 1 gig of memory (maybe 2 if you are lucky), I can run Wayland KDE or GNOME ? Seems to me 1487 is > 1000 :)

So, Wayland will kill off using GUIs under Linux on old systems. Even with 2G memory, if running Wayland, you will hit swap a lot unless you are just staring at an empty screen.

Now I do not know what sway uses, but my guess is it must be at best a bit less than 1G.

Under Linux, the only option is X on old systems. But as I mentioned, NetBSD along with OpenBSD will work quite well on these old systems.

So it is my belief, Wayland will push retro computing people off of Linux to one of the BSDs.

My point is simply that I can't see any evidence of Wayland using more memory than Xorf in the scenarios we can compare.

You're free to find or create benchmarks of lighter Wayland compositors and prove me wrong, of course.

  ~  cat /proc/2276/cmdline 
  sway%                                                                                                            
  
  ~  sudo grep -E '^[RP]ss:' /proc/2276/smaps_rollup
  Rss:              523864 kB
  Pss:              267873 kB

> Wayland supports FreeBSD so it must not be that bad.

FreeBSD has adopted evdev/libinput and, if I recall correctly, mostly comparable KMS/DRM APIs to Linux, which makes it the only BSD currently reasonably capable of running real Wayland stacks that are actually useful to day-to-day users.

Outside of FreeBSD, the story deteriorates rapidly: see this article about what it's taking to get even the absolute basics, like Weston (which ~nobody actually uses as a daily driver), running on OpenBSD: https://xenocara.org/Wayland_on_OpenBSD.html

You might want to investigate what others are doing to ensure a way forward for legacy X WMs on Wayland. Here's one I have bookmarked, mentioned in another HN thread recently:

https://github.com/puppylinux-woof-CE/woof-CE/pull/2265

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