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Comment by dralley | Hacker News Reader

Wayland is a protocol. The problems people complain about are generally implementation details specific to GNOME or KDE or (in general) one particular implementation.

There's rarely any such thing as "universal superiority", usually you're making a tradeoff. In the case of X vs Wayland it's usually latency vs. tearing. Personally I'm happy with Wayland because there was a time when watching certain videos with certain media players on Linux was incredibly painful because of how blatant and obtrusive the tearing was. Watching the same video under Wayland worked fine.

Early automobiles didn't have "universal superiority" to horses, but that wasn't an inhibitor to adoption.

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"Wayland is a protocol" is exactly the problem. Protocols suck; they just mean multiplying the possibility of bugs. A standard implementation is far more valuable any day.

With X11, it was simple: everybody used Xfree86 (or eventually the Xorg fork, but forks are not reimplementations) and libX11 (later libxcb was shimmed underneath with careful planning). The WM was bespoke, but it was small, nonintrusive, and out of the critical path, so bugs in it were neither numerous nor disastrous.

But today, with Wayland, there is no plan. And there is no limit to the bugs, which must get patched time and time again every time they are implemented.

X had garbage handling of multiple monitors and especially multiple monitors with different DPIs, and there was "no plan" to deal with that either. Nobody wanted to work on the X codebase anymore. The architecture bore no resemblance to the way any other part of the desktop stack (or hardware) works.

Most of the garbage aspect is because toolkits refuse to support multiple monitors on DPI with X11 with the argument that "Wayland is just around the corner", for decades now.

For example Qt does per-monitor DPI just fine on X11; it's just that the way to specify/override the DPI values just sucks (an environment variable).

This stupid decision is going to chase us until the end of times since Xwayland will have no standardized way to tell its clients about per-display DPI.

It's not useful if you have to specify a scaling factor before the application has started, when the application can move monitors.

This is something feasible on Wayland, X draws one large wide screen display.

Yes. It just proves that all you needed is a better way to specify the per-monitor DPI, one that can be updated afterwards, or even set by the WM on windows.

X11 used to provide separate displays, but at some point due to hardware changes (and quite probably due to prominence of intel hardware, actually) it was changed to merged framebuffer with virtual cut out displays.

In a way, Wayland in this case developed a solution for issue its creators brought into this world first

It can still provide seperate displays. The problem is you couldn't do something like drag a window from display 1 to 2°. IIRC it's also annoying to launch two instances of a program on both displays. The hacky merged framebuffer thing is a workaround to these problems. But you can have independent DPIs on each display.

° For most programs.

Yeah there were certainly tradeoffs. It's much harder to use separate displays now, though - last time I tried, I could address the two displays individually (":0.0" and ":0.1") if I launched X on its own, but something (maybe the display manager?) was merging them into a single virtual display (":0") as soon as I tried to use an actual desktop environment. (This was was Mint 20, MATE edition, a few years ago - I gave up and reverted to a single-monitor setup at that point.)

X could do seveal different screens I did have this working once. However then moving an application to a different display was impossible (an app could do it but it was a lot of work so nobody bothered). I few cad programs supported two streens but they were seperate and the two didn't meet.

Most people want to drag windown between screens and sometimes even split down the middle. One large display supports that much easier so that is what everyone switched to in the late 1990

I was using it that way until about 2020. (Mint 13 MATE supported, but it seems that capability was lost somewhere along the line. Shame, because I have a dual monitor setup where the second monitor is often displaying the picture from a different device, so in that situation I absolutely cannot have applications deciding to open on the busy-elsewhere screen. I miss being able to set a movie running on one monitor and have it not disappear if I flipped virtual desktops on the other!)

Yes, separate screens would be a much better model for me as well. Much better than KDE randomly deciding to show KRunner on the turned off TV for some reason unless I manually disable the output.

X11 does a lot of things that are outdated now, and multiple independent screens is one of them. Ideally, you'd be able to select either independent screens or one big virtual screen, and still have a window manager be able to move windows between independent screens. I don't know how that would be achieved though.

X's "mechanism, not policy" has proven to be a failure. Without a consistent policy you end up with a pile of things that don't work together. "One big virtual screen" is a policy and it's one that works well enough.

Deciding what needs to be in the protocol and what should be in the application is never easy. It's important to be able to iterate quickly and avoid locking in bad practices. I think that's what Wayland tried to do by making everything a fine-grained extension, but it doesn't really work like that as the extensions become mandatory in practice.

> It's not useful if you have to specify a scaling factor before the application has started, when the application can move monitors.

Windows does this. Try to use in Windows 2 monitors with 2 different scalling factors. It is hit or miss. 100 and 150 works. 100 and 125 doesn't.

For the record: you can specify a different DPI _for each monitor_ for Qt X11. You just cannot change it after the program has started, which is exactly the limitation I was referring to.

But you can definitely move windows to another monitor and Qt will use the right DPI for it. It is the same behavior as Wayland. "One large wide screen display" is exactly how Wayland works...

This is not "just fine" in my book: https://lobste.rs/s/oxtwre/hard_numbers_wayland_vs_x11_input...

>Nobody wanted to work on the X codebase anymore.

That, i think, is the main issue. Nobody wants to work with GTK1, or GTK2, or GTK3 anymore. Nobody wants to work with QT1, or QT2, or QT3 or QT4 anymore. Everybody wants the new shiny toy. Over and over again.

It is CADT all over. Earlier X was developed by an industry consortium. Now Wayland is a monopoly pushed by RedHat.

> Now Wayland is a monopoly pushed by RedHat.

Pushed but still it seems it flails and takes too long to do the basic stuff

RedHat is still mostly a server side company isn't it?

Can we trust them to "care" about desktops?

Oh wait. There is no more RedHat. There is IBM.

They care about applicances and phone-likes. Which is what Wayland is geared towards. Desktop is just there to do the free testing for them.

Exactly, same situation as with audio. Instead of improving the OSS API we got ALSA, PulseAudio, and now PipeWire (and a bunch of less mainstream alternatives) -- all with their own weird issues. And of course it's application (or at least toolkit) developers that bear the cost of this churn, not the developers that get to work on their fancy new NIH tech that they'll then abandon before being 100% stable for yet another reimplementation.

Software has bugs and water is wet. Wait til you hear about HTTP, TCP, UDP, IP torrents, etc... and "simple" is not really a term I would designate to X11. I mean, its fine, but even just the ecosystem surrounding X is convoluted, outdated and absurd. Things like xinit, startx, .Xauthority, xresources, xhost etc... are all a mess.

> Wayland is a protocol. The problems people complain about are generally implementation details specific to GNOME or KDE or (in general) one particular implementation.

I feel like at some point this is a cop-out. Wayland is a protocol but its also a "system" involving many components. If the product as a whole doesn't work well then its still a failure regardless of which component's fault it is.

Its a little like responding to someone saying we haven't reached the year of linux on the desktop by saying: well actually linux is just the kernel and its been ready for the desktop for ages. Technically true but also missing the point.

Wayland. Solving yesterday's problems, tomorrow.

unlike x which couldn't solve yesterdays problems.

X is fine, most of the problems people bring up are niche and minor. Meanwhile, Wayland induces problems of its own, like breaking all sorts of accessibility systems and multi-window X applications with no solution in sight.

    > multi-window X applications

I believe you. Can you share an example? To be clear, I'm pretty sure this can be done with Gtk and Qt, but maybe you are talking about older apps written directly in Xlib or Xt?

It's not the toolkit (as they work on X11 and other OSes with the existing toolkits), it's Wayland that's the issue (there are a series of Wayland protocols to implement this, but they are being blocked).

To be fair this wayland issue is also niche. Author of the linked article wrote that this is reported by really small percentage of users most of the people do not notice it.

What components? Wayland is literally an XML protocol that turns an XML file into a method of communication. libwayland-server and libwayland-client only handle communication and the internal event loop. Its completely up to the developer to write the implementations of these functions and register them in the server.

Then a client is going to query the server and ask request to do stuff via a unix socket. In fact, you don't even need libwayland, you can raw dog it over sockets manually. The idea is that there are standard protocols that can be queried and used,and you can implement this in any environment you want to. You could write the "frontend" in html and JS and run a wayland compositor on the web (which has been done [1]), you could do it with text or anything really, most people use some graphics stack.

[1] https://github.com/udevbe/greenfield

Nit: Wayland isn't an XML protocol. The "calls" and their arguments are described in XML, but the data is transmitted in a fairly simple binary encoding.

The components are:

- the compositor, of which there are multiple implementations (gnome, kde, all the wlroots compositors)

- the client, which often uses one of several toolkits (gtk, qt, several smaller frameworks, or even directly using the protocol)

- the wayland protocol (or rather protocols, because there are several extensions) itself

- other specifications and side channels for communication, in particular dbus.

Many issues (although I don't think the one in OP) are due to the protocol being underspecified, and so the client and compositor disagree about some semantics, or doesn't even have a standard way to accomplish something across all compositors.

The key detail in the “Wayland is a protocol” is that there are several other implementations, some of them extremely mature. The implementation being tested here isn’t exactly know to be a good one.

If there were a single Wayland implementation in existence, I’d agree with your sentiment.

It's the implementation backed by Red Hat, which is probably the largest company in the Linux graphics space and the one employing the most experts.

It's also the implementation most unsuspecting users will end up with.

The author was using Gnome, which is meant to be the most mature Wayland implementation given its developed by Redhat which is also the same company that is the biggest driver of Wayland protocol.

I mean most of the things are the fault of a badly designed or non existent protocols:

-Problems with non western input systems

-Accessibility

-Remote control(took around 2 years to be stable I think?)

-Bad color management

Then there's the things that did work in x11 but not in wayland:

-Bad support for keymapping(the input library says keymapping should be implemented by the compositor, gnome says not in scope, so we have a regression)

-bad nvidia support for the first two years? three years?

While these things are compositor/hw vendor faults, the rush to use wayland and nearly every distro making it as default, forced major regressions and wayland kinda promised to improve the x11 based experience.

Yes, and to the parents point it was a CHANGE in protocol.

I get there was cruft in x. But the moment selected was a barrier to Linux desktop adoption precisely when the greatest opportunity in decades was present.

And the desktop was reimplemented.

Now in this period kde and gnome both decided to do rewrites, Ubuntu did their own desktop, got it up to snuff, and abandoned it. The lunacy wasn't just Wayland.

If we are complaining the gnome compositor sucks... I mean , should that be the goddamn reference implementation? What percent of desktops are gnome, 80% at least? If the gnome composting ready for primetime, then Wayland isn't ready for primetime.

>If the gnome composting ready for primetime, then Wayland isn't ready for primetime.

I use Sway, which uses a different compos[i]tor than Gnome. I would like to see similar results for wlroots, Sway's compositor, though I'm not actually interested enough to do the experiment (I guess that would be comparing Sway with i3). Cursor lag in Sway is not enough to bother me. I have on occasion used Gnome on the same machine(s), and never been bothered by lag.

As others have pointed out, Wayland is a protocol, not a compositor.

"As others have pointed out, Wayland is a protocol, not a compositor."

But the Wayland protocol requires a compositor, so here we are.

I have no idea of the difference(s) in performance between wlroots and Gnome's compositor. Protocols do not have performance, implementations do. If someone can prove that the Wayland protocol, on a certain set of tasks, and in a certain environment, has a better or worse performance than the X11 protocol, then it might be possible to make abstract comparisons on protocol.

Given that Gnome runs on both X and Wayland, it might be interesting to hear from the Gnome authors on the performance differences.

I have run Wayland since it was available for testing on Fedora Workstation and I have had zero problems inputting Japanese and Chinese.

With regards to accessibility, what problems have you had exactly?

> With regards to accessibility, what problems have you had exactly?

Fedora shipped a broken screen reader for 8 years.

Is there a bug report for this anywhere? Does everything work now?

I vaguely remember someone made a blog post about it and got piled-on. I think it's now fixed or being fixed.

Edit: Found it https://ar.al/2024/06/23/fedora-has-been-shipping-with-a-bro...

I think that gnome has had built-in IME, but at least for a long time, it wasn't possible to use a third party system with gnome, or use gnome's with other compositors. And I'm pretty sure the situation was the same for sreen readers and on-screen keyboards. The wlroots project created their own protocols to support external applications to provide such features, since that is out of scope for a compositor like sway, but there are still missing pieces.

2 finger scroll doesn't work on my thinkpad model.

Not a bug, apparently. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/issues/10...

> I have had zero problems inputting Japanese and Chinese.

That may be fine.

Neo2 does not work. Neo has 3 modifier keys, Gnome/Mutter/Wayland/Whatever does only support two. Neo2 has a compose key, Wayland does not honor it.

https://neo-layout.org/

I use mod4 for navigation (arrow keys, site up) and compose for Slavish (read Polish) input (źżąę)

> the rush to use wayland and nearly every distro making it as default,

Which rush? It has been done by only a small fraction of distros like Fedora, after years of development of the first wayland compositors. Fedora main purpose has always been to implement bleeding edge tech stuff early so that bugs get found and fixed before people using more stable distros have to suffer from it.

Nobody has been forced in any regression and x11 has continued to be available until now and there is no sign that the most conservative distros will drop x11 support anytime soon.

Nvidia support is still poor (at least on latest cards), I'm forced to use X or I get tons of glitches. I need the proprietary drivers for machine learning.

Not that I mind particularly, X is fine and everything works as expected. I can even have the integrated (amd gpu) take care of the desktop while the Nvidia gpu does machine learning (I need all the vram I can get, the desktop alone would be 100-150mb of vram) - then I start a game on steam and the nvidia gpu gets used.

Funnily enough I had wayland enabled by default when I installed the system and I didn't understand why I was getting random freeze and artifacts for weeks. Then I realized I was not using X11

Isn't this an issue with Nvidia not releasing open source drivers ?

nvidia has been great on wayland since 550; Everyone running CachyOS is on 570 now

I've used Wayland on Fedora for 16 years. Had to disable Nvidia GPU on laptop And use Intel GPU for first 11 years. Now have been using AMD GPU smoothly for 5 years. But I hear Nvidia is slowly getting back on the game. Let's hope they get stable support less than 20 years of wayland being in use on major desktop Linux distros.

> there was a time when watching certain videos with certain media players on Linux was incredibly painful because of how blatant and obtrusive the tearing was

It was because of the crap LCD monitors (5 to 20 ms GtG) and how they are driven. The problem persists today. The (Wayland) solution was to render and display a complete frame at a time without taking into account the timings involved in hardware (you always have a good static image, but you have to wait).

I tried Tails (comes with some Wayland compositor) on a laptop. The GUI performance was terrible with only a Tor browser open and one tab.

If you do not care about hardware, you will, sooner or later, run into problems. Not everybody has your shiny 240 Hz monitor.

Tearing hasn't been a thing under X.Org for me since the introduction of Option "TearFree".

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