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Comment by christophilus | Hacker News Reader

I haven’t booted into an X11 environment in maybe 4 years. Wayland has been fine (Fedora + Gnome, Fedora / Arch + Niri). I think this is one of those issues where hardcore users overestimate how much anyone else cares or will notice.

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> I think this is one of those issues where hardcore users overestimate how much anyone else cares or will notice.

I don't think users that rely on accessibility featurescount as 'hardcore', and the majority of X->Wayland complaints i've heard center around all of that stuff.

Little of it has been remediated last I checked.

I used X when I started with Linux in my high school. When I finally stopped tolerating macOS almost a decade ago, I started with Wayland only, and never looked back. I even ditched Krita in favour of Gimp, solely because Gimp supports Wayland (from version 3, and on 2.99 before that). To this day, I don’t understand X, like at all. It’s all some super complicated pile to me. While I don’t understand Wayland either, it’s super simple to interact with as a user. That’s all I care about, especially given that Wayland is better with security, multiple displays, has a smaller code base, and whatnot. Each time I see someone says Wayland is unusable to them, I wonder whether that’s some edge case they have, or is it just some habit. I’m happy I don’t need X for anything, so I just wait till most apps would support Wayland.

Remember x11 was initially a client server model, where multiple clients could access a single x11 server. This brought a lot of complexity we don’t use these days

For certain jobs, I've done development for Linux while also having a Windows box for other things. Opening Linux GUI apps remotely on my Windows desktop is nice and allows me to consolidate my displays. This is an edge case, for sure. How well does Wayland support this?

AFAIK it's more or less still being worked on. Since Wayland has no support in the core protocol, it's an add-on which needs the compositor to forward input and output streams and then something to compress the video and forward it (+input events) further over the network. I can't say that I got it to work so far, though screen sharing in MS Teams(!) running in MS Edge for Linux does work and uses much of the same functionality. That is with KDE and kwin-wayland.

Anything not in the core protocol might as well not exist. It is literally, by design, impossible to write a fully featured desktop using the core protocols by themselves.

> Remember x11 was initially a client server model, where multiple clients could access a single x11 server. This brought a lot of complexity we don’t use these days

It's worth noting that the "client" and "server" are flipped from what was typical: your screen on your desk is the server and the client is a program running on some expensive machine on a rack somewhere.

It's still really cool to be able to spin up a GUI app on a remote machine, and use it like it's running locally.

Speak for yourself. I use it every day.

Same. As my main dev environment.

That's the whole point and I sure use it every day.

Starting a GUI app on any machine on the network and have its windows display on my local screen is vital functionality.

Wayland is buggy as hell for me. Im not particularly invested in X11 but at least it works.

Nvidia GPU? Their drivers have been broken on Linux for a long time now. I've had no bugs on my steam deck or on asahi linux with wayland.

Are simple things like screensharing working now, without crashing in the worst possible moments?

I screenshare on Wayland on Microsoft Teams of all things without issues.

Buy supported GPUs.

I was under the impression that PipeWire fixed all issues with both screen sharing and desktop audio when it was introduced years ago.

I have a RTX 5060TI that works smooth as butter on Arch+X11. Mix of office tasks, gaming on 1440p and AI workloads all without issues.

Steamdeck doesn't use Wayland.

Gamescope, the main compositor of Steam Deck (the one that drives Gaming Mode), uses Wayland. It is just the desktop mode that doesn't.

I'm happy for you!

On my end I'm still waiting on several critical-for-me things to be fixed. (first and foremost noticeable mouse pointer lag, but also clipboard over-security, and missing XInput analog)

Mouse warping does not work in XWayland. Thus, I still use X11.

David (UI details) beats Goliath.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/SDL-Lands-Wayland-Pointer-Warp

Wayland and SDL got support this summer.

And Xwayland has had support for past 10 years: https://www.phoronix.com/news/XWayland-Pointer-Confinement

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