Wayland vs. X – Overview | Hacker News Reader

Wayland vs. X – Overview

wayland.freedesktop.org

84 pointshannofcart181 comments

I don't know what I'm doing wrong with Wayland. I have a cheap Linux laptop, with built in graphics. And Wayland works perfectly.

I can run multiple monitors with one of them rotated. When I tried that with X I got lots of juddery tearing.

I can take screenshots and share my screens via video calls. But everyone says it doesn't work due to security.

I have fractional scaling and it doesn't seem to burn out my CPU or battery. Yet that's frequently listed as a disadvantage.

What do I need to do in order to make Wayland as bad as everyone says it is?

On the fractional scaling side, precisely Wayland's advantage is that it works much better there than in Xorg.

Regarding the rest, I run an Nvidia laptop under Wayland since early 2022 and it's been working flawlessly. It's true that I'm using one of the cleanest, most forward thinking distros out there: Fedora. On Ubuntu it had way more issues than on Fedora, though.

I guess that’s a good way to think of Federora, forward looking. I always liked it for other reasons, but they do have just the right amount of forward focus. Ubuntu has a very different community to try and satisfy, so has to move slower.

Yes, I agree. I understand why RH splits Fedora and CentOS Stream.

Ubuntu and Nvidia are difficult. We have a Linux work station and attempt to get an Nvidia card working (drivers anyway) failed. Its was confusing and even those with more skill/experience couldn't make it work. PopOS (which is a fork of Ubuntu) with Nvidia ended up working for us. Though I'm not sure if its X or Wayland.

Pop is X, they'll move to Wayland soon.

I am not sure what happened in the Ubuntu case, but maybe you guys should try Alma, RHEL or CentOS?

If Pop works well enough, power to you! I just believe it's not a standard in the industry.

Because its Ubuntu based, we've had no issues installing/running Ubuntu software on it.

My past experiences with SuSE, Fedora, and Red Hat, RPM distributions, eventually experienced a corrupt repository that in each case took hours to fix. That's when I settled on Ubuntu in 2006 and haven't looked back.

I heard bad things about RPM before, but that was long ago. To be honest, I think by 2006 most issues were already over, and YUM was mostly on par with APT. Don't know what might happen in your specific case.

try running VLC

what happens with vlc ?

Yup, plays everything just fine - on both laptop and external screen.

you might be playing tricks with us...vlc is known to be broken with wayland...if your being honest consider yourself lucky

Source? Regardless, even if VLC or a version of VLC is broken in some configuration, it's not universally broken on wayland. I have been using it on Wayland for multiple years (some of that might be through XWayland, I don't think all of it, but I'm not sure).

I literally cannot get Wayland working. Everything is broken. It's slow, the fractional scaling doesn't work, full screening apps like vlc or games turn off my monitors, the distro installer crashes, playing a youtube video makes my laptop heat up like crazy, one time a display change made my laptop's screen flicker so hard that it persisted after I restored the settings, another time it turned my monitor's bright red and white respectively.

This is on fresh installs of Ubuntu 22.04 and 23.10.

X11 with XFCE and i3 with picom works perfectly. It's blazing fast, has no tearing, never crashes, uses next to no resources, has no bugs and runs everything. I even use ddccontrol to change my external monitor's brightness.

Maybe try a more modern distro like Fedora. I haven't had any issue with it (intel igpu+nvidia dgpu) in a while.

Op mentioned ubuntu 23.10... which was released two months ago.

I noticed all sorts of horrible breakage in Ubuntu (including LTS updates) over the last 3-5 years (I gave up on it in the 20.* days for anything except VMs / docker containers) Examples included DNS taking 5 seconds to resolve each host, the syslog fiasco, systemd flat out not working, etc, etc.

Maybe that's what they're referring to?

(At this point, I'm looking for anything that's stable and still uses a normal init + x11, FWIW. I wouldn't consider Fedora, since it's owned by IBM, and Red Hat's new business model under them is "systematically violate the GPL and see if we can get away from it".)

That's not really what I meant by modern

So, modern by your own definition of "modern". What is it exactly besides being Fedora?

I have one machine with ubuntu 22.04, and I've never seen any of the described issues. I doubt that 23.10 regressed.

Outside of using Wayland, do you do much 3D rendering?

The symptoms you describe almost sound like a dying 3D graphics card (or 3D graphics card with misconfigured drivers). I wonder if Wayland is requiring the 3D layer to do its compositing and other window engines don't?

Wayland compositors will happily use gpu 3d engine, if it is available. Otherwise, they will do their job with Mesa's software rendering.

They also accept dma-buf handles from clients, so if other software on the system does use gpu, the compositor has somehow to do its composition, and zero-copy if possible.

My laptop isn't dying, dude. It works perfectly in Windows 11 and X11, including running the latest games.

Fair enough. I only suggested it because it turned out to be the root cause the last time my video flaked that badly. Heat sink had failed.

You only get one chance to make a good first impression.

Wayland is probably much better than when I tried it in 2019 but all I remember is the 2019 experience. I think a lot of people are in the same boat.

Really? I can’t help but notice that nobody is describing X as if it hasn’t improved since XFree86 in the 90s so perhaps it is possible for technical professionals to update their understanding?

You seem to be seeing a confrontational message where I didn't mean one. Yes I'm sure you could find some old posts complaining about X that would illustrate the same phenomenon. My point is pretty much exactly that. Fast forward the next 5-10 years and we might all be on Wayland but they blew their first impression and that's delaying adoption.

It sounded like a but of a misdirected excuse: if someone is still complaining about Wayland now based on an initial experience half a decade ago, wouldn’t the first step be getting up to speed with the current state? When I read that I was reminded of how many Linux users had issues with things like mode lines back in the day, and that was a non-issue only a few years later.

The problem is 20 years ago you had to use XFree86 if you wanted graphical output in Linux, there was no other choice, so you had to put up with it no matter the craziness.

Now X.org works fine for the majority of users, so for them (/raises hand) it is very hard to see the value proposition of switching to Wayland, especially if prior attempts were less than successful.

The fact that X11 development has stalled might be a plus for those that just want a stable system, are used to the limitations and don't need new features.

We will migrate eventually, likely at next distro upgrade, but there is no hurry.

You also didn't have much choice; XFree86 is what everyone used and it more or less the only realistic option.

Also doesn't help some people have been rather aggressively banging the Wayland drum for a long time now in a way that quite a few people find rather unpleasant. About half a year ago someone told me I "need" to switch to Wayland because programs will drop X11 support "any time now", all with a sense of glee. A quick search on https://hn.algolia.com with "Wayland by:username" showed they have been telling people that for about 7 or 8 years. Clearly that hasn't happened, so... And when they started banging this Wayland drum so aggressively there really WERE actual problems. Textbook "toxic fanboy" stuff. At some point people start filtering this sort of stuff out.

The first time I really looked in to Wayland was when "I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit" article took off, which starts by comparing "anti-Wayland activism" (something which doesn't really exist as an organised force) with "anti-vaxxers, flat earthers, 9/11 truthers", dismisses anything that disagrees as "lies", and is generally just a stupid rant with a number of fairly obvious factual inaccuracies. To say this rather put me off from Wayland would be an understatement.

I'm not holding you responsible for any of that of course, nor am I saying this is representative of people interested in Wayland as a whole, but at the same time ... I do think Wayland has burned a lot of goodwill with stuff like that, and that people voted that stupid insulting conspiratorial rant to the frontpage did no one any favours – it's not just a single person who wrote that article, it's the hundreds of people who voted on it, and some of whom defended it.

> XFree86 is what everyone used and it more or less the only realistic option.

Not really; in the 90s, there were many X servers, each implementing a different set of extensions. Not just for other Unices, even for Linux, you could purchase a proprietary ones.

For XFree86, it was a monolith, that you had to compile for a specific chipset. Distributions shipped with many binaries, each intended for a specific graphic card and the installer symlinked the right one for you. It was only later, that XFree86 became modular and everyone converged on it.

That's what I mean with "more or less", and they were all more or less compatible and was mostly a "Vim vs. Emacs" type situation, not a "plz rewrite your entire stack"-type situation. That's really the key difference here.

I wonder if you asked people their feelings about 1) Wayland, and 2) systemd, whether or not sentiment would be highly correlated. My first impression of both was when I had a problem.

Add BTRFS to that list; I hear it's gotten better, but I lost 2 root filesystems to the thing and the impression rather stuck.

> You only get one chance to make a good first impression

There plenty of chances to make good non-first impressions though.

I used to check periodically whether Wayland works better than X for me, until it does one day, and I switched.

Not everybody hold on to the shadow of a bad first impression. It’s unfair when subject to another human being, and irrational when subject to a product.

Which DE are you using?

Pop OS's Gnome.

I've been using Wayland for 5 years now. Never had any serious issues with it either. I have always used AMD GPUs though.

> What do I need to do

I think you just need to be less lucky tbh.

Out of curiosity, what distro do you run. I'm running Wayland pretty seamlessly right now on Ubuntu: it's not a distro I would normally choose but I cycled through 3 others before "giving in" & going to Canonical. Hardware aside, there's also a lot to be said for sticking to the mainstream software-wise; though it's certainly an oddity for me to be so limited with software-choice in the Linux world.

Pop OS. Very happy with it.

I just setup wayland a couple months ago, so everything should be pretty recent, and couldn't ever get screen sharing to work. It's discord electron, which I think is having some weird interaction with xwayland, but I only researched it for a bit before deciding it wasn't worth it.

Games though can be a nightmare, a recent nvidia driver seems to have created stuttering across all games using X to varying degrees. (downgrading the driver fixes the issue)

> Games though can be a nightmare, a recent nvidia driver seems to have created stuttering across all games using X to varying degrees. (downgrading the driver fixes the issue)

On ubuntu (Kubuntu really), and as a gamer, I've seen no issues with nVidia on X, both native Linux and Steam Proton games rock on.

The games use X, but I'm using Wayland. Wayland native is fine, X games are not.

I think the place you get into trouble is when you try and DIY the config. I'm using Fedora and everything works perfectly out of the box. But when I was using arch and was trying out Sway (i3 + wayland) I was constantly running into issues.

Odd, I use Arch (well, EndeavourOS) with Sway and have experienced no problems. Quite on the contrary, my setup with a high-DPI laptop + external monitors is far nicer with Wayland than with X.

Tbh I think a big part of my woes came from my Nvidia card.

How is it nicer with Wayland? I have a high-DPI laptop and it works great with X11. What would I gain with Wayland?

Screen tearing is the big pain of X11 in my experience. Most things work fine, but watching videos or playing games is a terrible experience when dealing with constant screen tears.

I tried a bunch of different configs and was able to minimize them significantly, but they were still there.

What you gain is that programs render at the native resolution of both displays. In terms of appearance, it looks noticeably clearer, since no downsampling or upsampling necessary. But the nicest thing is that it just works — I don’t need to configure any settings to prevent windows from being displayed unreadably small or gigantically large.

You probably need an Nvidia graphics card. That was the source of all my problems when I first tried it. I dumped that shit and been using Intel graphics and Wayland (sway) happily since 2019.

Any ATI/AMD graphics card too old to use amdgpu has the same problem. I have two machines using the "radeon" driver and Wayland had so many issues on them as well.

Someone on HN pointed me at setting LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=true which makes it stable on my "radeon" driver GPUs at the cost of some performance (e.g. moving a window that is playing video causes the entire screen to freeze only while the window is moving). That should make it pretty stable with any KMS driver (though the nouveau module still crashes on me every 10 days of uptime or so; I've never been able to figure that one out).

I always point out that all of the issues I run into with Wayland on ATI/AMD GPUs also happen with hardware-compositing on X, but I can turn compositing on X off since it's optional, but, as the figures in TFA suggest, it's a core part of Wayland. I think one minor thing that has put so many people (or at least me) off of Wayland is how many issues are dismissed as "your GPU driver is broken." Well I can't write a GPU driver, and Xorg works better with a broken GPU driver than Wayland does.

My several years old laptop with an Intel P530 runs Wayland with zero issues, to the point where I can't tell you when I switched because it was zero drama. Maybe about a year ago? There was one feature in plasma that I needed to wait on before switching, but I don't even remember which one it was.

You haven't even mentioned which wayland compositor you are using.

Which is one of the biggest problems with Wayland - there isn't just one Wayland but Gnome Wayland and KDE Wayland and wlroots-based Wayland and Gamescope Wayland. What functionality is available and working and using which API varies between all of these. This includes really basic things like window decorations.

This is different from X where the core functionality is common because everyone usees X.org. If all the Wayland compositors agreed on how thing should work then multiple implementations would be much less of a problem. But they don't or at lest take ages until all but one of the NIH protocol extensions get abandoned. Some of this protocol extension zoo is hidden by applications and toolkits implementing multiple variants but even if you no longer see it as an end user this is still a cost because time spent on dealing with Gnome or KDE bs is time not spent on more useful things.

Yes this. If you use gnome or kde you probably will have no issue with the transition to Wayland. If you use any other window manager then the transition will be painful because there's a bunch of things that don't simply map over from x WMs to Wayland compositors.

I just did this switch and found it incredibly frustrating. Simple things like, "I would like to be able to log out and return to my greeter" don't just work like they do in x.org, and it is dependent on which compositor you use.

> If you use gnome or kde you probably will have no issue with the transition to Wayland

Anecdata but I've had a LOT of issues with kde & wayland, mainly due to SDDM.

> You haven't even mentioned which wayland compositor you are using.

No idea. I'm using Pop OS. So whatever that uses. Gnome is the DE, I think?

>No idea. I'm using Pop OS.

So you're being upvoted to the top by praising how flawless Wayland works on an OS that runs by default on X11? :))

Aww man, I hope there's a miscommunication somewhere, like you switched PopOS from X11 to Wayland, because otherwise this is HN comedy gold.

> like you switched PopOS from X11 to Wayland

> When I tried that with X I got lots of juddery tearing.

They said it pretty explicitly

No, they didn't explicitly say they tried X11 "on the same OS". You can assume that, but it's not explicitly stated in the context. It might as well be experiences on different OSs/instances. OP needs to clarify.

And from my experience, there's distros that work better with X11 which is why they ship with it out of the box instead of Wayland(like Mint, EndeavourOS and Kubuntu), and ones that work better on Wayland out of the box, like Ubuntu and Fedora.

I had to do some pretty hardcore hacking to get Wayland working on Pop.

I wrote it up at https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/05/fix-screen-tearing-on-rotat...

Warning - you'll need to be at least a Level 17 Linux expert to understand the complexity involved.

Sorry. Thanks for the laugh :)

And in addition there are vast parts of the API that is deprecated and no longer used, with basically no documentation of what should not be used.

It's the same issue with the "W3C is just a standard." Rather than making the lives of web developers and users easier by just basing every web browser on Chromium we have to deal with caniuse, polyfills, nonstandard extensions. Basic features like tab sharing are implemented by Google's NIH cast protocol. There's no such thing as a website anymore there's Chrome apps, Firefox apps, and Safari apps. More time is spent wrangling webpack then doing actual web development.

> because time spent on dealing with Gnome or KDE bs is time not spent on more useful things.

The entire reason there's time spent on dealing with Gnome vs KDE vs other bs is that everyone wants to build and customize their own desktop. But hey, it's OSS, freedom of choice and you're free to do it but I doubt window decorations will add very much to the overhead of all those different desktops.

The tearing situation has also recently improved [1,2,3] in X.org, including your cited use case of multiple, rotated monitors, and even if you are not using a compositor, although these improvements are only present in the latest master branch and aren't in any release and thus not shipped by most Linux distributions. I'm sure that the argument could be made about how Wayland still solves the tearing problem more optimally, and I think you should stick with Wayland if you are happy with it, but the tearing situation has improved dramatically on the X side of things since Wayland as well.

[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...

[2] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...

[3] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...

The key point your missing is that you're not using wayland. You're using a wayland. Each wayland is very different from the others in terms of features because they aren't implemented internally as a wayland standard, each wayland picks and choses between various external libs to try to reach normal desktop feature parity for things like keyboard/mouse/input device support (ie, the libei wars: some waylands use it, some hate it and never will).

There's no such thing as "wayland". There are only various different waylands. A person can have an experience with X11, there's standard reference features all X have. But your experience with a single wayland doesn't really give you knowledge of how waylands work (or don't work).

I don't know either, I use it for the more than a year and it just works. Used GNOME at first, now on Sway.

But every time Wayland is mentioned on HN, it's always orange display protocol bad.

This could use a (2012) tag.

(And the better link to use is this one: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/docs/html/index.html)

I feel like the debate between Wayland and X always bring more a general discussion about technology refactoring and modularity.

To me be, the big question is not why freedesktop.org or redhat is doing all of this, they're a company and they have their needs. It is why distro maintainers have chosen to adopt those technologies(systemd,Wayland, others?), not that those options are especially bad but to me,but they really look like a clear bifurcation from the modularity and customization we used to see on the distro world.

I remember the mid 2000 and early 2010, when computing was still cultivating this cool image from the animations of Mac os Leopard and the aero style of Vista and the leader above all in the form compiz crowning Linux from far.

In the talks around Wayland vs X, the maneer Wayland proponent(not only its developer and also any linux user) dismisses critics of missing feature because 15 years later they're still not standardized or lack of composabilty between windowing and compositing is a stark contrast with the way we used to talk about free and open source software at the turn of the millennium.

We used to defend customizability and a certain form of freedom. Sure X11 lack security and should be replaced by something that works better. The Wayland shortcoming are defended in the name of security is some kind PR speak I wouldn't think I'd see in the linux world years ago. It comes as particularly bitter as other closed platform from wich we used to hear a lot corporate speak still allow apps to do more things with their own windows that Wayland does.

The fact that the same organization hosts flatpack but has not vision of how to use the capability model for Wayland really poses questions on the vision.

All in all, I wonder if things would have went more smoothly and in greater general agreement if those 15 years+ were spend make Linux work like plan 9.

Edit: typoes/syntax

Wayland is still customizable, and x11 isn't going away. If you want to trade in security and maintenance for features and capabilities, nobody will try to stop you. In that sense, distributions still don't hold much power over the user besides what they present as default.

> The fact that the same organization hosts flatpack but has not vision of how to use the capability model for Wayland really poses questions on the vision.

I disagree, and I'm a staunch GNOME skeptic myself. Flatpak and Wayland were both built as extensible systems from the start, and GNOME's implementation of both technologies is just one interpretation of the protocol. KDE is a good mirror example; their Wayland implementation exposes many features completely unavailable on x11, and their Flatpak permissions are integrated right in the Settings app.

Personally I don't like GNOME's approach to the desktop anymore, and I refuse to defend most of their more opinionated decisions. Those choices have a minimal impact on desktop Linux outside of GNOME though, and it more feels like Red Hat is displacing the amount of work put into keeping legacy systems alive.

Yes, technically nothing prevents someone to make a customizable Wayland compositor. You’re taking about KDE and I agree that it is certainly one of the most customizable Wayland desktops we have.

What I deplore is that those customization have not made their way into at least an extension of Wayland.

And as you say, hopefully I can still use X11 when needed but I wish the more modern option would carry everything I need.

Have you seen the Debian Init Case by GreatEmerald? You can find it here: <https://aaonline.fr/search.php?search&criteria[title-contain...>. It shows the debate over systemd vs upstart in an entertaining way.

Also funny that you say it's about customizability, having a bunch of implementations of the wayland standard seems more customizable than having the one X server.

Wayland feels more customizable and modular to me, in that it is a set of protocols and optional extensions with multiple implementations instead of one server (Xorg) to rule them all. This feels much more in the Linuxy/FOSSy mindset to me. In fact, many, many people complain about the multitude of wayland implementations as fracturing and a division of work.

I'm not saying that I don't see the benefits of all building on a single server, but I can't say a bazaar-style development of multiple implementations and protocol extensions feels at all corporate.

What do you think of Arcan as an alternative to Wayland and X?

I suffer from the limitations of both X11 and Wayland. Some things work in one and not the other, it's a trade off. In Wayland I can use different scaling for each monitor (in exchange for a LOT of RAM). But in X11 I can use Barrier to share my mouse / keyboard with my other computer. So I use one when I have a second monitor and have to restart my session when I use a second computer :'(

Please fix this!

It will be fixed on some Waylands with libei, but it will never be fixed on other waylands that find libei distasteful (like sway). And that's the waylands in a nutshell: many different things, never "wayland" always "waylands".

libei looks useful. But IDK why libei is necessary to run Barrier with Wayland?

For client systems, couldn't there just be a virtual /dev/input/XYZ that Barrier forwards events through

And for host systems, it looks like xev only logs input events when the window is focused.

Is xeyes still broken on Wayland, and how to fix it so that it would work with Barrier?

With Barrier, when the mouse cursor reaches a screen boundary, the keyboard and mouse input are then passed to a different X session on another box until the cursor again crosses a screen boundary rule.

Barrier is a fork of Synergy's open core: https://github.com/debauchee/barrier

libei: https://libinput.pages.freedesktop.org/libei/

> For client systems, couldn't there just be a virtual /dev/input/XYZ that Barrier forwards events through

You seem to be asking for kernel thing, not something Wayland. But let's assume you wanted a protocol on top of Wayland to do this:

Why can't arbitrary Wayland clients always see the mouse pointer, snoop on the keyboard, and inject keypresses? Because of security, by design.

Why is it taking a bunch of work to provide that capability in an access-controlled way? Because it's a bunch of work. For example, quoting libei: "However, the events are distinguishable inside the compositor to allow for fine-grained access control on which events may be emulated and when emulation is permitted."

Sounds justified. How is the implementation?

Can't you just set the dpi in each display with X11?

Take a look at input-leap. It has experimental support for Wayland.

Wayland won't work well on non-Linux systems, and this is intentional. So, for the foreseeable feature, it can't replace X because its developers don't care.

I've been running Wayland (sway) on FreeBSD flawlessly for years.

That totally misses the point. How about running Wayland on systems that a non-negligible number of people use, like Macs? Or even an enormous number of people, like Windows?

Why should be Windows or Mac support a concern for Wayland compositors? DWM or Quartz authors don't care about Linux either.

To be fair, X (VcXsrv) works on Windows and (XQuartz) pre-M1 macOS.

They do, yes. Nobody will prevent anyone trying to port Wayland compositors, either. If that's your itch, feel free to go for it.

But the Wayland compositor authors will steer their software to run effectively on Linux. If that means it is difficult to port to Windows or Mac (whether because they miss dma-buf, or demand something that the native platform won't provide to non-system process), so be it.

And Windows apparently has a Wayland compositor for WSL

They use RDP RAIL (RDP-for-a-single-window) on top of Weston, and then the resulting surfaces are managed by the DWM.

Which is actually an interesting approach; linux native compositors should "steal" that idea and implement it too. It could lead to RemoteApp-alike for Linux.

ChromeOS transports Wayland over virtio so windows opened from virtual machines are seamlessly part of the main desktop.

Waypipe proxies Wayland over SSH etc: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/

Why when both systems have great window managers?

Since when did Windows or Macs ever have great window managers?

If you just ran a web browser directly on the hardware (or native window system in full screen mode) instead of bothering with non-great X11 or Wayland or Windows or Mac window systems, then you could write great window managers using open standards that ran identically across Linux, Mac, and Windows, plus mobile and VR devices too.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38710127

Better than what most GNU/Linux folks use, many of whom apparently would be quite happy using twm.

Ah, twm is still better than Gnome.

For the folks which the only use of X Windows is to manage xterm sessions.

I was one of those people, in 1994.

I doubt that. Most of the WMs available for Linux are way more capable than their standard counterparts. There's a rich diversity of UXs available on the platform. Hopefully their ideas won't die with them if they get left behind by Wayland.

That fragmentation is one of the reasons why in the end you get an Electron app.

Most people don't want to spend hours tweaking Enlightenment themes, or keyboard shortcuts for tiled windows.

> That fragmentation is one of the reasons why in the end you get an Electron app.

How so? I run Electron apps all the time. They behave like any other app.

> Most people don't want to spend hours tweaking Enlightenment themes, or keyboard shortcuts for tiled windows.

Most people don't want to run Linux. And I don't want to waste my free time experimenting with a critical desktop component.

BTW, remember those people who actually make Linux work for the rest of us? Many of them do want to do those things. It's how they got to be Linux contributors in the first place.

Indeed, because packing a browser with the application makes up for the missing pieces across all bazillion of desktop configurations, for everyone that isn't running either GNOME or KDE.

Oh do I remember, Red-Hat, Mandrake, IBM, Intel, Oracle, Google, Linaro,....

Slackware 2.0 was my first distribution.

Maybe your knowledge is out of date? Afaict, most (if not all) of the differences between desktop environments have been fixed by XDG. I don't run Gnome or KDE and everything on my desktop works just fine.

Ah yes, sway, the one of the waylands that refuses to add support for complex mouse/keyboard and alternate input devices. https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/issues/2378 . You've been running a wayland, not wayland, because there is no "wayland": only many different waylands.

> You've been running a wayland, not wayland, because there is no "wayland": only many different waylands.

I am aware, that is why I specified which compositor I am running. The comment I replied to said (emphasis mine) "*Wayland* won't work well on non-Linux systems" which is clearly false. To put it into another context: only a subset of C programs run on windows, but it would be silly to claim C won't work on windows.

As for the bug report you linked, the response seems quite reasonable:

> We already have Wayland protocols for input emulation. I think libei should add support for those.

Since standardized protocols exist, why should every compositor have to integrate this library instead of the library integrating support for the standardized protocols?

>support for the standardized protocols?

What standardized protocol? Each wayland makes a different choice. That's the problem. And yeah, I guess I can't say this is a sway issue, their choice is reasonable enough. But it highlights how reasonable actions in a broken system like the waylands can cause problems. They're not doing anything "wrong" and neither are the waylands using libei (all the mouse/keyboard sharing programs target libei, maybe in the future some can target whatever sway comes up with). But it does lead to things not working across waylands. Whereas in X things do work no matter what X implementation you use.

It should probably be "Waylands vs. X" since each of the Waylands supports different features and libraries to try to achieve the same ends. For example, some of the waylands use an external library, libei, to be able to support features like being able to share mouse/keyboard between computers. But some waylands, like sway, are actively hostile to libei and have made a point of never supporting it. So some waylands can share mouse/keyboard and some can't.

There is no wayland. Just waylands.

By that logic, there is also no TCP, HTTP, HTML, Linux, x86, ...

Should it be possible to run games with Steam on Wayland with Nvidia drivers installed? Or is that some ways off while we wait for NVidia drivers to be updated?

I did give it a brief try but getting very low fps, which tells me it's probably running on CPU if I had to guess.

Wayland works perfectly fine on my T480, no complaints with multiple monitors sometimes.

So, here's one thing I need to know:

X can open a window on another machine over ssh

Can Wayland do the same?

You can do it with waypipe[1]. But Wayland itself doesn't support remote rendering by choice[2] as it is outside its scope.

[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/

[2] https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_8

So remote in Wayland is a bag on the side that requires work and integration.

Hard pass on wayland right there.

At least until it offers RR natively (meaning: I don't have to waste hours of my life to get it working).

Secure remote in X11 is a bag on the side that requires work and integration. SSH has to explicitly transport it for you, carefully setting it up the right way. Even worse, SSH has to meddle with X11 internals to prevent your desktop session being trivially pwned by the remote.

You can pry xorg + openbox + tint2 + polybar from my cold, dead hands!

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