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Comment by palata | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotally, my experience with Wayland has been a lot better than with X11. I have been on Wayland for years, I can't remember the last time I had an issue (running Sway).

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Exactly. Ubuntu LTS 24 and Intel integrated GPU + Wayland is zero problems even when running 4k120 and 150% scaled resolution. Chrome / vscode / zed / Rstudio / Youtube 4k60, it just works.

Edit this is running a 32" 2160p120 (4k) monitor alongside a 24" 1080p144 monitor.

Same here, there are some pain points with swaywm (notably screen sharing is only per display, DisplayLink support and screen mirroring is a pain). Most of these points however are IME a worthwhile tradeoff. Sway has also been astoundingly stable (compared to gnome or KDE)

> I can't remember the last time I had an issue

Depending on your workflows the comment just described three issues

Kde has been stable too So much more than x11 kde

With the next release of sway (1.12) you should be able to share individual windows.

https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr/issues/10...

https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/8170#issuecomment-3962...

Thank you for pointing that out, I'm looking forward to this release a lot then

Same here. Wayland has been fine. (Hyprland)

Me too. I just swapped waybar etc for the dank shell etc and love the setup. It feels polished now

I suspect part of that is the Xorg maintainers (who are also behind Wayland efforts) are actively trying to kill it and make it as unbearable as possible

It's all open-source. If you think the maintainers are trying to sabotage the codebase, you have the freedom to fork it.

I don’t get all of what’s going on but from the outside it seems like the xLibre guys got a lot of negative attention for doing that.

If you don't know what's going on, why comment?

A guy decided that after getting all his patches rejected because they cause tests to fail, doesn't compile, etc. that the problem is everyone else and decided to fork XOrg.

He then announced that the problem wasn't his code that didn't compile but DEI so based the entire forking around being a political conservative.

Everything I've seen written by him shows him to be insufferable, thats where the negative attention comes from.

There are a lot of distros that have xlibre packages for something that ostensibly doesn't compile.

I wouldn't trust the reason given by the people who have said that they're trying to kill Xorg for why they're rejecting patches from someone trying to improve Xorg

> There are a lot of distros that have xlibre packages for something that ostensibly doesn't compile.

No one says xlibre doesn't compile, but good attempt at a distraction. Have you considered invading a country as an alternative way to distract from terrible views?

> No one says xlibre doesn't compile

>> A guy decided that after getting all his patches rejected because they cause tests to fail, doesn't compile, etc. that the problem is everyone else and decided to fork XOrg.

Emphasis mine, words yours.

Yeah, some submitted patches failed to compile. Others compiled and failed tests.

Not the same as XLibre doesn't compile.

Wow here it shows who's politically motivated and like it or not Xlibre probably felt the same way. Some people cannot sleep or chill if it is not theirs world view.

"... generic human experiment ... creates a new humanoid race ... toxic spike protein ..." - Enrico Weigelt on LKML

"... insane and technically incorrect ... idiotic lies ... you don't know what you are talking about ... SHUT THE HELL UP ..." - Linus Torvalds

https://lkml.org/lkml/2021/6/10/957

It's not just his code.

The COVID conspiracy theories Enrico Weigelt pushes are riddled with bugs, logical errors, and security holes, and don't compile or pass tests either.

Linus already reviewed both the code and the reasoning, and rejected them for failing basic correctness.

This is indeed not at all about his code. I don't care what he thinks of vaccines and COVID - I just as much don't care what Linus Torvalds thinks about these things. They are damn programmers. Their business is to ship reliable, usable, secure software.

"If you don't like the direction of a multi-decade-long, hundreds of manyears, deeply esoteric project, you have the freedom to go in, fork it, and maintain it"

is the most technically true, practically meaningless argument in FOSS

But it happens successfully.

The code base is Xorg rather than Xfree86 because of one such fork.

Gcc went through the egcs fork.

OpenOffice became LibreOffice in a fork.

When leadership of a project fails to keep the volunteers behind them such forks happen.

And? I'm tired of thoughtless drive-by comments pointing out problems with a given solution without proposing any alternatives, which tends to be a tacit admission that there is no better solution. If you think you have a better solution, let's hear it:

>I'm tired of thoughtless drive-by comments pointing out problems with a given solution

And? Fortunately, free speech and criticism doesn't stop when someone is tired of hearing it.

The alternative doesn't need to be some new solution. A course reversal or change on the existing ones is enough. In which case the criticism already highlights the solution. Besides, the first step of fixing a problem is identifying it.

> If you think the maintainers are trying to sabotage the codebase, you have the freedom to fork it.

But do you have the skill to actually maintain that fork? Do you have the time to keep it going?

We all need to decide where to spend our efforts. If you decide that maintaining a fork isn't worth your time, then that's a revelation of your own preferences.

Sucks for you, but you can't then turn around and expect someone else to invest these for you when they don't want to.

I'm still using Xorg after all these years, on a laptop with 150% scaling, which I occasionally plug into an external monitor with 100% scaling. Somewhat surprisingly, it works great. (Cinnamon desktop, Ryzen 7840u integrated graphics. And also a desktop machine with Radeon RX 6800XT, but it's not surprising that still works great.)

I second this. I had issues years ago, but those have mostly been fixed.

Additionally, the Steam Deck ships with Wayland by default. Hundreds of thousands of gamers are stress-testing it without any complaint that I'm aware of.

As someone who uses my steam deck as a workstation too, I really really wish this were fully true. The desktop is still X based, and that suuuccckkksss.

The desktop sure, but the primary handheld mode uses Gamescope which is a Wayland-based session.

It's true that Gamescope is a Wayland compositor, but it does not support Wayland clients ("native Wayland programs" if you're unfamiliar with *nix terminology). In handheld mode, everything you see on your screen is an X11 client running under Xwayland. I have no interest in arguing over whether X11 or Wayland is better (I've used both and both work fine for me) but I would not use the Steam Deck to argue that Wayland is being stress tested by hundreds of thousands of gamers when none of their games are using Wayland.

Using Xwayland is using Wayland. It's entirely a moot point anyways, since Wine/Proton supports a native Wayland background these days anyhow.

There’s a gradient. For example, if I ran rootful Xwayland, ran an X11 DE inside that, and then solely used X11 software, it would technically be using Wayland but it would not be what most people are referring to when they are discussing the Wayland transition on the Linux desktop. Similarly, arguing that Wayland is being battle-tested by hundreds of thousands of gamers by citing a single-tasking gaming focused Wayland compositor that only supports X11 clients is not what most people are referring to discussing the Wayland transition either.

Wine/Proton may support a native Wayland backend but it’s not currently being used on the Steam Deck.

I've had bazzite on mine for a year and wayland by default

The next SteamOS release will use Wayland by default for desktop mode, too:

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1675200/announcements/detai...

Just guessing, are we?

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1445kc7/citie...

That post is 3 years old, so basically around 1 year into the Steam Deck's release.

And yet, Cities Skylines still (last tried: about 2 months ago) crashes for me when I try to load it in Wayland on Fedora, which has removed Xorg from its updates.

Wayland has broken dozens of my Steam games.

I just played Skylines last night via Proton-GE. AMD GPU. Fedora 43. Gnome.

CS1, right? If so, can you please detail what you might have done differently?Load options? Some package or another I might be missing? All I know is that with Xorg it worked perfectly, I upgraded Fedora, and now that I only have Wayland, whatever I was doing before no longer works. I'd be grateful for the help.

I am using a system-installed Steam, but sometimes a Steam Flatpak can help with troubleshooting, because it bundles components inside of the flatpak. Running games this way may give you a 5% performance penalty, but it's a good way to see if you have a packaging issue (other things needing installed, or misconfigured).

Also are you running th Linux native one or the proton version?

I run everything through Steam with the proton compatibility layer forced. It's a steam client option somewhere.

I think they're an app called ProtonQT or something like that. It will enable you to easily download the latest proton-ge version. Once downloaded and installed you will need to restart the steam client, then restart the steam client again after selecting the new proton-ge version as the default.

---

https://www.protondb.com/app/255710

I'll try again. I tried both native Linux and a dozen Proton builds, and none would load, even with no mods or DLC. I'll try again with the latest, and if that doesn't work, I'll try the flatpak instead of via RPM Fusion.

There is a note on protondb about needing the most recent proton-ge release. Use ProtonQT flatpak, should help you install / maintain proton-ge versions. Will get you the latest updates as they release.

The Steamdeck loads games into some kind of nested x11 renderer-in-a-window, I think. If for no other reason than to try to avoid Wayland’s extra input latency? Dunno. Maybe you lost some component it needs to work, if regular Steam also does that.

Regular steam does not do that. At this point on most hardware (minus SOME Nvidia, I think older stuff like 2XXX) you should have less latency in Wayland than x11.

I was under the impression that some of the anti-screen-tearing and other features in Wayland unavoidably set a higher (and, higher-enough to be noticeable in some contexts) floor on latency, though, because of how those features necessarily work. I don't mean drivers.

Variable Refresh Rate in Gnome. No screen tearing, no input latency hit for full screen games. To make this work correctly, I think regardless of OS, you need to cap the refresh rate to something just inside the max for the monitor. A lot of games these days have fps limiters. Let's say your monitor was 144hz. You'd want to cap fps to something like 140hz. That's going to prevent any screen jank or input latency.

It ships with Wayland, but it does almost everything with X(wayland)

Wine 9.22+ has the native Wayland backend by default. Now Xwayland is barely needed.

Games isn't exactly the best stress test for a windowing system. Most (if not all) run in full-screen mode and don't really use it much after the launch. And that's not what desktop computing is about. You want to run multiple programs, you want them to integrate with each other. But games don't need any of this.

There is a "Desktop mode" that I, at least, use more than the handheld mode. Not sure if it's running Wayland though.

Desktop mode on the Steam Deck uses X11. I think that's why the brightness control is fucked up (ever notice how the brightness is always 40% when you switch to desktop mode?). You can manually switch it to Wayland, but Steam input is broken under Wayland (or at least it was last time I checked, which is admittedly half a year ago or something).

> input is broken under Wayland

Drop the ‘Steam’, it's cleaner. Wayland's raison d'etre is to push frame buffers without tearing. Input is an afterthought.

That's odd, I'm using Wayland on my desktop and, for example, Japanese input works 問題ない. Then again, I haven't tried every possible input method/peripheral in existence, so I may just be the one in [some arbitrary large number] who lucked out.

> Input is an afterthought

This. You need more than graphics to have a windowing system. Wayland team threw out X11, did graphics and left the rest for the others to figure out.

> you want them to integrate with each other.

Do you? Not going to lie, I'm perfectly happy just using the apps I want to use and having none of them talk to each other. 90% of my use is covered by Vivaldi (browser stuff which is most stuff these days) and Kitty (Neovim, random TUIs and utilities). The few other apps I have are Steam, Krita and Blender, which are all worlds unto themselves and have no need to integrate with anything.

I don't disagree in principle, my workflow is pretty similar, most of the integration part goes thru kitty for me too. But I also need need screenshot and screencast - which need special permission in Wayland because reasons. Fine for me, but I can imagine some having their workflow around specific tools, that might or might not work with Wayland - and apparently, Wayland team thinks it's not their problem.

And I personally need kicad - it doesn't support Wayland at all because of some mouse-related stuff. Again, Wayland team thinks it's not their problem.

Then I had a lots of issues with a graphics tablet. Yes, it's a cheap chinesium knock-off, but it does work on X11. Wayland - no chance and it's obviously not their problem.

So I dropped Wayland altogether and went to X11/herbstluftwm. Was a few years ago, but I didn't bother to go back since - why should I? These aren't their problem, but now I don't use Wayland anymore, so these aren't my problem either.

What I'm trying to say, "hundreds of thousands of gamers stress-testing" have very little to say about usability. Yes the graphics part is excellent, nobody is denying that. There is more to a WM then graphics.

Running fullscreen games on a single fixed hardware configuration isn't exactly 'stress-testing', it just tells you that a single code path works.

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