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Comment by SaintSeiya | Hacker News Reader

Why this does not surprise me? every attempt to rewrite a working solution to make it more "modern, easy to maintain and future proof" rarely do so. It always end up slower, with more latency and lifted by faster hardware, not by faster software. Every 20 years a new generation comes weaker, pampered with the abtsractions of the previous generations who did the grunt work for them. After 3 generations of software developers all we have is library/framework callers and nobody really knows about performance and optimization.

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This is not my experience. When I upgraded several of my computers to KDE 6 switching to Wayland, overall responsiveness and snappiness of the system increased very visibly. There are still features that Wayland lacks compared to X11, but I am willing to compromise in favor of its other benefits.

On the other hand, I just did a fresh install of Artix Linux. Installed KDE just to have something functional while I get my tiling setup working. Boot into Plasma(Wayland) and it utterly shits itself, turning my main monitor on and off repeatedly until it finally crashes. So I pick Plasma(X11) instead and that just works.

In fact, in almost 2 decades of using Linux every day, I can't remember X doing anything similar. It's always just worked.

> In fact, in almost 2 decades of using Linux every day, I can't remember X doing anything similar. It's always just worked.

Well, we have very different memories then. Sure, X worked reliably once configured. But configuring it was a marathon in hell, as per by my memory, and all the litany of forum posts crying out for help all across the internet. Like, I have at one point had to rescue an install by changing back the config file without a screen at all!

I remember this too, but it was a really long time ago.

That was like over 10 years ago… It has been a long time since Xorg required configuring.

Yes. Grandparent talked about 20 years ago. 15 years ago Ubuntu required no configuration at all if you had a graphics card that worked (most newer ones did, Nvidia was a nightmare).

I mean, I've certainly had issues with X before, back when you had to configure it. But they were usually initial issues while figuring out the right configuration. And if you had a GPU where the choice was between shitty proprietary blob drivers and woefully incomplete open ones, you might have a bad experience regardless of what you put in the config. But that's not really Xorg's fault. It can't magically make shitty drivers good. With decent drivers, once configured, it was rock solid, and has been for as long as I've been using Linux. And for a long time the configuration has been addressed; it now figures that stuff out on its own the vast majority of the time, unless you have really specific needs, in which case I bet Wayland compositors don't fare any better.

I also fundamentally disagree with the idea that X "does too much", which is often cited in favour of Wayland. The fact that X encompasses everything about how I interact with my computer is one of the things I love about it. I might switch WMs and DEs, but my xmodmap, xresources etc remain the same.

I used X11 in the early 90s (HP-UX) and since 2009 (Ubuntu until 22.04 made me switch to Debian.) I never had to configure anything. Maybe some xmodmap in the 90s. I did everything with dialog windows in this century, like I would do it in Windows.

X was hard to configure ... back when Wayland didn't even exist.

It hasn't needed any manual configuration for a normal setup in ages.

Same here, switching from i3 to sway resulted in a noticeably more responsive experience on my aging hardware. Of course, this is just an anecdote, and I could probably get the same results on X with some fiddling, but I do think the value of simpler and more modern systems is demonstrated here.

I’d be interested in seeing similar benchmarks done on x11+i3 vs sway.

There’s nothing Wayland-specific that would introduce this latency, so I wonder if wlroots/sway have any additions lag.

????

After upgrading to plasma6 from 5, all the desktop animations have started stuttering. Probably your hardware is too new.

One of my PCs is old and was really slow on X11. Wayland gave it a second life.

Old computers had less latency, but otoh on many OSes a single app crashing meant the whole OS was irresponsive and you had to reboot the whole system.

Less latency matters little if it's just to wait behind some other operation like disk IO or network.

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