Are We Wayland Yet? | Hacker News Reader

Are We Wayland Yet?

arewewaylandyet.com

43 pointsskibz57 comments

>are we wayland yet?

No, No I am not, because things I care about are broken, and all of the supposed improvements wayland offers simply don't bother me. I've tried it, yes it feels a little snappier sometimes, but that's not a huge priority for me, personally.

X11 is fine.

My situation is similar, except it's not Wayland bugs, it's functionality that X provides but Wayland doesn't.

I’m fairly certain that the plan is to jettison X before next RHEL release. So if your cases are not resolved, and we’re looking at decades by now, then it’s going to get “interesting” at that point.

So they make Gnome X-less, then debian will incorporate that, then other DEs will get less attention, etc… It will go downhill fast from there on.

I don't use RHEL or Gnome, so I can ignore them for now.

I've begun the process of moving all of my machines away from Linux and to BSD anyway. While I have so many that the effort will probably take a couple of years to complete, perhaps I can complete it before I really get bit by this issue.

Or, worst case, I'll just stop updating and keep everything frozen on a version that meets my needs

> So they make Gnome X-less, then debian will incorporate that, then other DEs will get less attention, etc… It will go downhill fast from there on.

I'm not seeing the progression there; of course I can easily imagine GNOME dropping X support, and sure Debian isn't going to patch it in (probably), but... so what? Nothing about that affects other DEs/WMs.

Some point soon the major distros are going to make Wayland the default and the Linux desktop will be "mostly working if you stick to certain apps" for a little bit.

There is no faster way to fix software problems then pushing it prod.

I don't really care about Wayland either, tbh I don't even know/care if I run it or X11 at the moment. But while X11 is still OK to use today, it will likely fall behind with it getting less maintenance and less testing by DEs.

Wayland feels like a different operating system to Linux. Linuw?

I can't do this in linuw: https://twitter.com/xundecidability/status/17632190171608678...

X11 was neither developed for or is a part of linux. Like I get the folks who consider the GNU userland tools to be a part of the "linux"-and-stuff-we-expect-to-be-bundled, but X11 is pretty separate.

Either way screen recording is working in all major wayland WMs, so you can do that in "linuw" (or whatever you choose to call it)

Yeah, X11 really isn't a Linux thing at all; I think the association is just that Linux distros are the current hacker/poweruser OS of choice, for a lot of reasons including tools that let people do cool/powerful things with the system, and X11 is one of those tools (or the backing framework for them, at least).

I don't know what screen recording has to do with anything? Like, yes Wayland also makes the computer vision half of that example harder (you can do it in all major compositors, but details vary and GNOME is outright hostile to automating it) but Wayland doesn't have an answer to xdotool which is arguably the bigger component. (I am aware of tools like ydotool and such, but AFAIK they're all significantly weaker; they can blindly inject emulated key/mouse events, but not, say, target specific windows)

Ah, I misunderstood which part was a problem on wayland. I haven't used either xdotool or ydotool much, and for automating stuff that is in a browser I have used the browser APIs instead.

X11 was not initially developed for linux, but every major X11 platform -- Linux, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and FreeBSD -- uses Linux's graphics stack to display X11 at this point. It's been that way since the KMS/DRM introduction. I would say that X11 is not separate at all, today, regardless of its origins.

On the flip side, though, it does seem that Wayland has been developed with a sort of "Linux first" attitude. Not that it's impossible to run on other OSes, but there are bits and bobs here and there that show the Linux bias.

I switch to wayland to play steam games because there is less screen tearing than with X11. Otherwise, I'm still on xorg because I find little annoyances in the alternatives to my X11 window manager of choice (dwm) and other little things that don't work well, like the Zoom desktop app being kind of wonky in sway.

If you want to avoid having switch back and forth, you might try running things inside a wayland compositor under X11; for example, when I want to run waydroid I just run it in cage[0] in a window in my usual environment.

[0] https://github.com/cage-kiosk/cage

I don't think that will solve the problem; if the X server is tearing, apps running inside a Wayland compositor that's running in the X server will also tear.

Can I use a no-bloat minimal window manager with Nvidia+AMD hybrid graphics yet? No? I'll stick to X¹¹ then.

As a user of stripped-down XFCE and being a Wayland virgin, interested to know what problems there are with 'no-bloat' WMs on Wayland?

Apparently, Nvidia drivers? The page says the proprietary driver (which I need for reasonable performance and battery life) only works "with limitations" in Gnome and KDE, which are both too terrible to even consider using.

that look like proprietary nvidia problem

There’s not really any viable options other than Nvidia for GPU compute, despite AMD’s efforts on ROCm. If you want to do compute tasks, you need an Nvidia card with Nvidia drivers, and Wayland won’t support your usage.

I don't care who caused it, I can't use wayland until it gets fixed.

That sounds pretty uncommon.

If I wanted to win popularity contests I'd be using Windows.

Sure, but open source is made of people solving their problems and then sharing… it might be the case that yours is too unique.

I will sit down with XFCE and X11 until the sharp edges have been filed and I will switch when wayland is mature.

I'm really thankful for the people sacrificing their time to test all this stuff and experiencing the bugs. I, as much as I like the GNU/Linux desktop, have already suffered through enough system changes and now I need my computer to get actual work done.

I feel updates used to break thinks more often and now everything works mostly fine. I remember long ago the issues with Polkit/dbus policies, changes in xorg drivers, the introduction of pulseaudio and then pipewire, systemd, GRUB2, problems with removable drives (that are thankfully solved since long), etc.

Is anybody using it?

There's this switch called WaylandEnable in my gdm3 config file, but I have to keep it false to stay out of trouble.

Can confirm that you may run into trouble e.g. when requiring screenshot capabilities (via scrot in our case) hence we had to set the WaylandEnable to false as well.

Yes? All the time? "Stay out of trouble" is definitely not universal among Linux users. Not too long ago, the idea would have been kind of a fairy tale.

Been using it for 4 or 5 years now.

Wayland is called Vyaleniy in Russian IT circles, which means "dried like beef jerky" and generally is disliked. 4chan calls it Gayland. Yeah, I know.

To be fair, 4chan has derogatory names for everything.

Really happy to see that WayPipe has moved from a cute demo to a real tool. It's an absolutely insane implementation and I love it. If X.org hadn't made it a first-class feature there's no way we would have invented it today.

How is nvidia on wayland these days?

Is running an nvidia gpu + gnome/kde + steam viable these days? Do most games work well?

For me its a jittery nightmare. I can't even play a video in vlc and still have firefox scroll smoothly on another monitor. I can turn my desktop experience into a slide show if I set the refresh rate on all three monitors to 144hz. Its silly I'm looking at choosing between having a good linux desktop experience _or_ being able to use CUDA for ML/AI stuff OR having to build a second computer so I can have a gaming computer on AMD _and_ a work node on NVIDIA

I've been daily driving KDE/Wayland/Nvidia for about a year and it's perfectly usable. There are odd bugs every now and then, but nothing that's a show stopper.

KDE/Wayland/Nvidia->random bugs KDE/X11/Nvidia->No random bugs

It is a show stopper when the alternative is more reliable. If I'm playing around, ie, not doing actual work, sure, wayland is cool, and fine. I get the draw. When I'm trying to get something done, I'd much rather use X11 for now.

I said it was perfectly usable and I meant that. It's my full-time primary workstation, which I use for "actual work" every day.

I could waste time elaborating on why that is, listing the odd bugs I mentioned, etc. But I suspect you're part of that crowd that froths at the mouth whenever the name "Wayland" is brought up no matter what. No other explanation explains why you'd leap from "odd bugs" to the inability to "get something done".

Instead, I'll just leave my system build so anyone passing by can give it a go if they want to actually try it out:

* Fedora Kinoite 39

* Nvidia rtx 4090 (driver 545.29.06)

* AMD Ryzen 9 7900

I'm not part of any group, much less one that 'froths' unless you're talking about frothing milk, in which case, yes, I am very much a part of the milk frother's group, that shit's delicious. That toungue in cheek answer is all you deserve, being that HN users like you are a big problem, ie, ones that assume liberally about other users. We'll see if you're in the worst of the worst camp if you fail to recant your assumption.

You're using Fedora, which, they've patched up their flavor of KDE pretty well to work with Wayland/Nividia. I don't use Fedora, and I don't really like Fedora so switching isn't something I'm personally interested in, and the easy KDE installs I have access to through my distros of choice don't support Wayland/Nvidia well, but work fine with x11.

And "x11 is fine" is a part of the discussion that, I don't see come up nearly enough in the "use wayland/don't use wayland" discussions online. What exactly do you get out of using wayland? The answer is "nothing worth more than a bugfree experience". Objectively.

And don't get me wrong, I'm rooting for wayland, I get the benefits full well, and I don't think I'm rooting in vain, it'll get there. I also accept that "getting there" is going to involve pushing it into distros before it's really ready in order to generate bug reports. Debian handles this currently by defaulting to wayland where it can, and allowing for an easy way back to x11 if needed. I think that's reasonable enough. I also think debian should have had it defaulted the other way around for another year or two but, I'm far from 'frothing' about it.

All that to say, wayland's not ready for prod. X11 is fine, and will continue to be fine until wayland is ready for prod, and like many things in the linux space, it is indeed better to wait until then unless you have an actual need that can't be satisfied by x11.

Why use something "perfectly usable" with "odd bugs" when you can use something that "actually works"?

You and everyone else in this thread know why. The list of benefits from Wayland is touted repeatedly, in every single one of these threads, for years. We get it, you don't care about mixed DPI, fractional scaling, HDR, non-tearing performance, VRR, a viable driver model for the 2020s, etc. You know, features that consumers expect.

HN should ban these threads. They're g-d absolutely worse than the worst politics threads.

Consumers mostly expect their computers to actually work, these days. They neither know or care about what "a viable driver model for the 2020s" is, they want screensharing to not break every other month.

You all really just drive home your ignorance when you say stuff like this. Screenshotting has never regressed to my knowledge, once it began working, in any wayland DE.

I use Wayland. Every damn day. I make a lot of money doing software engineering. All day. I screen share all day.

Screenshotting != Screensharing

The last two jobs I worked in was in linux-heavy devops departments. The Wayland users are having far more trouble than any of the X11/Mac/Windows users, and probably more than all of them combined.

Maybe it is possible that all of them are just "holding it wrong", but if Wayland is that easy to break, it's still a no sell for me.

I'll send $500 to a charity of your choice if you can show me booting current Fedora, firing up GNOME or KDE and failing to take a single screenshot. Same offer if you can do Sway and grim. And running an X11-only abandonware screenshot tool doesn't really count whenever they tend to ship with supported tools.

And knowing how all this works, it's exceedingly hard to imagine screensharing working, but not screenshots (it would mean you have managed to get dmabuf+pipewire working while somehow having XDG Portals misconfigured badly enough to somehow only break screenshots. It's contrived to the point of being a condemenation of the distro in question, if it's actually even a real scenario.) I've been taking screenshots in Sway for longer than I can remember, GNOME and KDE have supported the same screenshot interfaces for literally years.

(Unsurprisingly, I also send dozens of screenshots to the work chat or coworkers on a daily basis. I've been using Grim since I went to Europe over 5 years ago. Same program. Same hotkey binding. Same PNGs dumped into a dir.)

Please go back and read again what I wrote. I never talked about screenshots until you brought it up. You're literally tilting at windmills here, I'll just leave this conversation.

> We get it, you don't care about mixed DPI, fractional scaling, HDR, non-tearing performance, VRR, a viable driver model for the 2020s, etc.

FWIW my previous experience a year ago was a stuttery mess making it a complete non-starter.

I do need to give it another go though.

Most users do not care about those things, not when much more basic things still do not work.

LIKE WHAT?

I can't name a single "basic" broken thing that users care about more than their freakin displays being actually decent looking to their human eyeballs.

I swear to God, none of you have bought a laptop in the past 8 years. Acting like your tiling manager being able to list windows is more important that mixed DPI scaling, I just can't take any of it seriously.

> LIKE WHAT?

Well it being a stuttery mess for one. I could care less any of the features you mentioned when games or even the desktop is unusable.

Signal couldn't even render correctly.

I had a myriad of other issues, switching to x11 fixed it.

Below the performance you would like by a long way. Always improving.

gnome & kde have links in the Nvidia section at the bottom with good articles showing current status.

Just as a datapoint I'll say I installed Ubuntu 22.04 18 months ago and it defaulted to Wayland. Since then I've had no problems with it.

$ echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE

wayland

Is there any i3wm alternative that works with Wayland on Nvidia hardware (proprietary drivers)? I tried Sway and Hyprland last month but found neither ready for daily use.

"Last updated: 31 October 2022"

And the PRs are ignored unfortunately.

Hmmm. No Remote Desktop server (I run xrdp on all my Linux boxes)

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