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Comment by seba_dos1 | Hacker News Reader

There's no such thing as "Wayland input latency". It's just a word salad, akin to "HTTP animation smoothness". The post is measuring Xorg vs. KWin (and also XWayland), other implementations of either X11 or Wayland will have different characteristics.

I wonder where the XWayland's added latency comes from though, it seems suspiciously high to just be easily hand-waved as overhead.

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Another post suspects Nvidia drivers: https://davidjusto.com/articles/m2p-latency/#results

Oh yes, that makes a lot of sense.

This is an annoying style of argument from Wayland fans.

Wayland fan: You need to switch to Wayland. X is deprecated and has been for years! Wayland is the future.

User: Okay, I tried, and it's broken/worse.

Wayland fan: No, you don't understand, Wayland is just a protocol. It's your implementation of Wayland that is at fault, not Wayland itself! Wayland is still great!

User: But X was working fine...

Is this some kind of Pavlov's dog reaction? That's not what my comment was about, and even if it was it wouldn't make any sense anyway as KWin had good results in these measurements.

It's exactly what your comment was about: the same boring motte and bailey fallacy of “you don't understand, wayland is a protocol”

If your protocol you pushed to replace a working implementation invites a dozen poor implementations which people routinely confuse, that's a problem with the protocol and the push to get people to use it.

Looks like this pavlovian reaction is quite widespread. It's baffling how can you so confidently miss the point.

It is a weird argument because X11 is also just a protocol. Sure at this point there is only really one server left in the wild(xorg). But historically there have been more.

And on that topic a question I have, seeing as wayland is "just a protocol" why can't the client application talk to the compositor server over a network socket instead of a unix domain socket? Update: reading the spec I found my answer, Wayland buffers are shared memory surfaces... So really wayland is not "just a protocol"

There is only one relevant X11 server left because the design leaves policy and even compositing decisions extensible by window managers. This separation does not exist in the design of Wayland which leaves people who ant different behavior to also re-implement all the other parts, often badly.

Hi, OP here. I agree with you, "Wayland input latency" is inaccurate and I added a note to the article explaining this.

Yep, OP should certainly retest under gnome. Im not in the weeds myself but I get the vibe that gnome's wayland compositor is somewhat faster and more carefully designed than kwin (at least, Emacs in pgtk mode does substantially better under gnome, whereas on Kwin it uses substantial cpu when scrolling and even lags a bit at high resolutions)

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