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Comment by suby | Hacker News Reader

I'm on the latest Nvidia drivers (550), I have a 3080 video card, and I get something like 20 FPS in Plasma's Wayland session. They are crazy if they drop support for x11.

Fedora was similarly crazy for making it the default when they did. I remember trying out Fedora around that time, not being aware that Wayland was even a thing. I installed it on my machine, I attempted to login, the screen goes black and then after a second I'm back at the login screen. I ended up installing another distro, not realizing what the problem was.

Wayland is wonderful if your hardware supports it well, but even then it is not without problems and regressions.

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Wayland and the way some people and distros handle the move puts me off because they violate a core tenet of user facing software design: support most if not all of your users. Not just a happy path. Not a few either. It's _all about_ understanding that the job is about 1001 'edge' cases, not a few happy paths.

A mindset that says a piece of software should be the only option because it works for all your fellow developers on their standard Intel Dell laptops is not one I put much stock in.

X is dead, long live X.

It’s open source software, feel free to support/maintain your own edge case.

It makes zero sense to spread a team that thin on handling some edge case no one uses. There are only finite resources, and it makes sense to focus on a smooth experience for the vast majority of people.

> vast majority

How have you measured that?

What's important about X is the clients. Thus, Xwayland.

what's important about X is that it works.

I guess the other side of the coin is, right now, what is the killer client app for Wayland? If I have an X11 desktop that works for me, why should I bother launching a new compositor plus XWayland, or looking for native replacements for my software?

The sales pitches seem to revolve around the architecture being more secure because random window A can't read random window B (and BTW that means your media player's global hotkeys stopped working). It's hard to not see that as a "the killer is already inside your house, so locking yourself in the linen closet is really effective" perspective.

I can recall looking at galleries in the late 1990s thinking "I really want to get Linux on my 486 clone because I want those awesome window managers". I don't look at what Wayland has to offer the same way.

There are a few compositors lean into the eye-candy mindset (Wayfire comes to mind), but they don't shout out with the boldness of an old Enlightenment release, or even the classic dignity of WindowMaker or FVWM, just some worn-out "let's add transparency and make the windows wobble when you drag them" tropes that were nifty for 10 minutes when we first saw them under X11+Compiz.

There won't be a killer app for Wayland specifically. It's infrastructure. It's also not the place where all the showy (but ultimately annoying) user interface fluff will be found. It's infrastructure.

The question is what can it do that X can't, and there are plenty of examples mentioned in this thread (including no tearing, high refresh rates, multiple monitors with different DPI, etc).

But the issue is those things are nice to have, whereas X is baked into existing workflows that either do not work on wayland, or only work on a subset of compositors (due to philosophical disagreements), and many of these workflows have been around for a while, and there is no desire (or funding, or time) to change them.

> I get something like 20 FPS in Plasma's Wayland session

I'm guessing that's on KDE 5. They have made a lot of progress on Wayland in KDE 6 and in fact made it the default there as well.

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