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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

The various wayland compositors all have huge problems with keyboards, mice, and other input devices because the wayland spec and reference implementation(s) chose not to support such things. So each wayland compositor picks a different solution. Popular ones are libei and libinput but often there's just no support for "advanced" mouse/keyboard inputs at all (looking at you, weston). And you can never tell if a particular piece of linux software will work on any given wayland. The fragmentation is terrible. On X with the strong X11 reference that actually implements everything you can be sure something that works on one will work on another.

Hell, it's been 12 years and not a single wayland compositor supports screen readers for the visually disabled yet. They are toys.

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I'm told they left out color calibration support, too (as I read it, there's no way for calibration apps to control, or even know, what compensation is applied when they're trying to measure things). Oh, and client side window decorations still around, giving up on the chance to fix an ancient security hole.

So no good for games, no good for professional graphics, no good if you don't see well... basically no good if you're any different from the people who hacked it together.

But, hey, with any luck they cut down on the screen tearing that I've never noticed.

> basically no good if you're any different from the people who hacked it together.

Why would you expect it any different? How can one implement things that they have no need or no hardware for? The entitlement is a bit jarring.

Also I think they merged something last year: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/pull/7681

If you control what goes into a distribution, you can not drop support for stuff that's working and already implements those needs in favor of whatever you pull out of your butt.

You can do whatever you want if you control a distribution. Use something else if you don't like it.

What was the "stuff that's already implemented"? Xorg? Which distribution has dropped Xorg?

If not now, soon. Gtk itself is entirely dropping X support. And it's not their fault of wayland is so incomplete but I do wish people like them, and distro managers, would realize that the waylands are not actually replacements for X yet. And they might not ever be if you're visually impaired.

FWIW, I don’t think they left it out so much as haven’t spent the time to build it. It’s not like they’re pulling implementations off the shelf.

Color management support, though taking a long time, is moving along[1], and compositor implementations have recently started appearing. Device calibration support is a different question, but a much more specialized one.

[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m...

It's unfortunate that colour calibration took a while to be fully implemented (xx-color-management-v4 landed on most compositors half a year ago I think, though LTS distros may need to wait longer to get it).

That being said, thanks to Nvidia I never got colour calibration to work right in X11 either, so I have no horse in this race. Would be cool to finally get HDR working for the first time, but I don't know if that'll ever happen on Linux with Nvidia hardware. Guess I should keep dual booting for HDR content until either Windows 10 dies off or I get new hardware.

I do actually notice the lack of tearing in Wayland, especially under heavy load. Used to annoy me to no end to see my windows tear when just dragging them across a 1080p screen. I don't know if it was an Intel driver bug (I tried all the config settings) or something X11 specific, but Wayland did finally fix the tearing issues I had.

I haven't noticed any problems with colours in either Gnome or Gamescope (except for the lack of HDR, of course, but that's also true on X11) so whatever is causing issues for you seems to be DE specific. Looks like we both have issues other people never encountered, that's what makes graphics stacks so impossible to debug and code for.

Wayland is an extensible protocol. The core is literally just "here a buffer", but it has several extension in various phases that can greatly extend its capabilities. This way, a Wayland compositor can be used as a kiosk screen for a single program, or be a full-blown compositor+window manager, all relying on standard Linux interfaces for the display part.

Color calibration can absolutely be retrofitted into this (versioned) protocol, and there is work ongoing.

This is why I ultimately ended up on Windows after switching from macOS and focusing my free time development work on improving the power user/developer experience on Windows with a tiling window manager ecosystem.[1]

One of the really cool things that has come out of this is seeing how people are adding accessibility workflows on top of the ecosystem. There is one person who controls their entire desktop via the tiling window manager using voice control![2]

[1]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/awesome-komorebi

[2]: https://youtu.be/fiPJLmhnnXM

Windows has added several things with the newer WDDMs to help alleviate compositor problems: flip model, overlays, etc. They've definitely identified the problem areas and are trying to correct them. It's been quite the turnaround since Vista.

> there's just no support for "advanced" mouse/keyboard inputs at all

It feels like you're probably blaming the wrong people here. You should look at the companies that make this peripherals that don't also offer you linux drivers.

You say this, but have you seen the quality of the drivers they produce on platforms they ostensibly support? You do not want vendor mouse/keyboard software on any platform. Instead, improve the USB class drivers so that you don’t need third-party drivers.

I agree with you on general drivers, but what generic devices does Linux still lack? Controller HID support seems pretty universal, as do all manners of touch screens/touch pads, drawing tablets, and just about anything resembling a keyboard.

The only hardware I know for sure is lacking is stuff like Stream Decks, but that kind of hardware is difficult to generalise for.

Plus, most working hardware that doesn't fit a standard HID protocol already has drivers in the Linux kernel written by manufacturers.

> The only hardware I know for sure is lacking is stuff like Stream Decks, but that kind of hardware is difficult to generalise for.

I know that Georges Stavracas has been working on a controller for the Elgato devices for a while (https://flathub.org/apps/com.feaneron.Boatswain) though it needs direct access to the devices instead of through some generic driver (https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/boatswain#udev-rules).

Nope. Because I don't mean special hardware. I mean using normal hardware in advanced ways: like sharing mouse and keyboards between computers. Something that's worked perfectly in X for 20+ years but still doesn't really work with the waylands even if the wayland compositor in question supports libei (which most do not).

There are definitely a lot of missing protocols when it comes to input though - wl_seat has pointer, keyboard and touch input support, but where are gamepads and wheels?

What is lacking when you are using Orca on Gnome with wayland?

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