Intel modesetting driver with tearfree support in a xorg release!
I'm all for people switching to wayland but there should be choice and xorg should not be neglected for ideological reasons.
You are free to spend your own time and resources doing the work, but you don't get to dictate how other people spend theirs.
Wayland is the complete opposite of modular; that's why the compositor has to handle everything. The claimed problem with X11 was it was too modular, easy for different clients to control various aspects of the environment, but perhaps too easy, lacking a security policy framework to limit client access. (Or at least a framework that was fully baked. Wayland put an end to such initiatives.)
The lack of modularity in Wayland has been widening the rift between the desktop environments. It's as-if KDE and GNOME each forked X11 and went their own ways.
Not true. Wayland simply cuts out the middleman. Making the compositor the display server is one of the best things Wayland did. This brings so many advantages, such as true tear-free graphics and lower input latency.
And that's the point. X11 provided a framework for all of this. Not perfect, but deliberately extensible. The Wayland alternatives are so much more complicated and brittle, and have to work around the limitations of Wayland. The effort expended by groups like freedesktop.org to architect and standardize new features would have been (and was) so much more productive in the X11 world.
There's also talk of D-Bus eventually being replaced with Varlink [0], showing that this whole ecosystem is still very much a moving target. What feels like endless breakage and friction right now is really just the noise of a massive architectural migration in progress. Eventually, the dust will settle, the APIs will stabilize, and the whole stack will become boring, reliable, and really good. That is how I prefer to look at it.
If you want to see things move in a specific direction or address any particular problem, the best path forward is to get involved and participate in the projects that interest you.
Curiously, people always seem to list the same advantages, and it's a very short list. Fewer (but still non-zero) torn frames are the top of the list pretty much every time, since that was the very first thing its creator listed in his original goals... but that's a pretty small benefit in exchange for breaking entire categories of functionality. Like, it looks smoother when I scroll, but features I rely on heavily every day are forbidden.
As for input latency... that doesn't seem like it was ever a problem. Using X11, I'm able to get 500 to 1000 inputs per second even on a potato PC. That's faster than the frame rate of pretty much any screen, and fast enough even for audio / midi purposes. Reducing input latency from ~1.5ms to ~1.0ms doesn't really matter when the timeslice scheduling has ~6ms of jitter on an average system, a common screen only draws a frame every ~16ms, and many input devices have 50+ ms of their own additional latency.
> if you want to take a screenshot in a generic way, you have to go through the XDG portal API
This is a symptom of what's wrong with Wayland. Wayland doesn't do screenshots. Like many things users need, they decided it was someone else's problem, and threw it over the fence for the fragmented ecosystem of downstream projects to solve. So each downstream project came up with their own workarounds for essential features not existing. The solutions had to be built entirely outside of Wayland, and even after years of development, the solutions are still incomplete, unreliable, complex, and full of caveats. It required (and still requires) everyone except Wayland's core devs to write a lot more code for less functionality than they used to get with a couple of simple API calls. They had to architect entire complex infrastructure layers in order to work around a missing feature in the core protocol, since the core devs stubbornly refused to allow it.
Similar situation for input automation and remote control. It's a common thing people need. I use it every day and can't use the notebook at my desk without it... but the Wayland folks refused to solve it, so it had to be done outside of Wayland. For example, one workaround is to give the user direct access to the kernel so they can create fake input devices at a kernel level, and generate the inputs they need, which Wayland then sees as a local physical keyboard or mouse. So... problem solved, from Wayland's point of view. The user gets what they need, sort of, and it's implemented outside of Wayland, so Wayland doesn't have any security issues. But... and this is a big "but"... the solution involves giving users device-level kernel access. Which seems significantly worse than the issue it was originally trying to solve.
> I understand where you're coming from, but there is no turning back at this point.
A position of "sure it has major problems, but it's too late now" is not a position of progress. Much like the situation with pulseaudio being deployed everywhere then replaced with pipewire, it's almost never too late to fix bad software architecture. As you said, this whole ecosystem is still very much a moving target.
The ideal solution would be the creation of a new system which supports the features, protocols, and APIs of the older system(s), in a way which "just works". But that requires a very different mindset from the people behind it. Instead of "not my problem, someone else can deal with it" like the Wayland policy, a proper solution needs people to adopt a "the buck stops here" approach, and take responsibility for making the entire system work. Things like accessibility, network transparency, automation, and legacy support... need to be built in from the ground up, not rejected or treated as an afterthought for someone else to handle.
The things I listed are just the tip of the iceberg. Having studied earlier versions of X like X10, X11, and now Wayland, I could go on and on. What I'm trying to emphasize here is not to look at Wayland through an Xorg lens. I know it's easy to look at Wayland and immediately think it's a rigid protocol that breaks everything, but the reality is that it's a lot more flexible than people realize. Once you understand it, I think the closest thing that comes to mind is "There is no spoon." And just like there is no spoon, there are also no windows, only surfaces, but again, that's only the tip of the iceberg.
If you want an example of what I'm talking about, take a look at projects like p9wl. [0] This is using wlroots to create a proxy between Linux and Plan 9 in order to display windows remotely. Such flexibility is only possible when the protocols are small and composable, which Wayland is.
> As for input latency... that doesn't seem like it was ever a problem.
I never said it's impossible to get acceptable input latency on Xorg. I'm just saying that when your input and graphics go directly through your compositor, the experience is on a completely different level. This is even more true with features like direct scanout, where the compositor steps aside to send graphics directly to the GPU and input directly to the game as it goes fullscreen. It simply makes using your computer so much more pleasant. These input latency issues were exactly what Kristian Høgsberg tried to fix in Xorg, and addressing them was one of the primary motivations behind creating Wayland. [1]
> This is a symptom of what's wrong with Wayland. Wayland doesn't do screenshots.
You're thinking through your Xorg lens again. That's understandable, since you're probably used to it. However, to really understand Wayland, you have to look at it through a different lens. Wayland isn't defective, and it's not trying to be Xorg 2. It's a protocol. It doesn't do your laundry, nor does it take screenshots. It's just there to provide the mechanism for sending buffers to your compositor.
You can think of Wayland as thin building blocks to build compositors, just as you can build window managers on X, except this time, the core protocol does one thing and the libraries already exist. Wayland exists because all the infrastructure is already there in the kernel and in libraries.
The screenshot feature is the job of the compositor. Most compositors already have this feature built in. As I mentioned before, XDG portals exist, and interoperability will only keep getting better.
> Similar situation for input automation and remote control.
I agree input automation and remote desktop are still problematic. GNOME and KDE have their own remote desktop solutions, as do most of the others, but I haven't had a need to use them myself. All in all, Wayland really isn't trying to prevent you from doing things, it's just a protocol.
I'm pretty sure all this will be solved eventually, and I understand the frustration of those who need these features. However, I also understand Wayland and compositor developers taking a careful approach here, and it shows.
> A position of "sure it has major problems, but it's too late now" is not a position of progress.
That's not what I intended to say. The intended message was: the core Wayland protocol is set in stone and won't change, but we can build these things that aren't working and make them work. That is already happening every day. Progress has been steady, it's a lot better than it used to be, and it will only keep getting better. Going from Wayland into a whole different windowing system, I don't see that happening, at least not in the next 60+ years, but I definitely see the whole Wayland ecosystem improving.
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRx75piIlxo
[1] - https://archive.fosdem.org/2012/interview/kristian-hogsberg....
So I keep hearing. But hardly anyone ever talks about what's underneath the tip... and when they do, it turns out to be a big mess under there, not a mountain of advantages.
> just like there is no spoon, there are also no windows, only surfaces
Yes, I understand. That's why programs can't position their own windows, or get or set the mouse position. It doesn't even assume the coordinates are 2-dimensional. It's all very futuristic and makes a lot of interesting things possible, like using Minecraft as a compositor, or a Facebook style Metaverse compositor. But you're not hearing what I'm saying:
Wayland is solving the wrong problems. What it can do is pretty neat, but what it does is not what people need. It's good at party tricks, but bad at solving the real needs of daily life. It largely solves problems that nobody had, and to do this, it breaks major features people need. Much like how Facebook's Metaverse failed, nobody really wants to do their spreadsheets in Minecraft.
> It doesn't do your laundry
Yeah, and that's part of the problem. To use your analogy, it's like removing someone's washer and dryer, and replacing them with a box of tools which don't do laundry. It may be a really fancy foundation for building efficient laundry appliances, but that's not what people need. People may have used it to build an entire ecosystem of laundry appliances, but they couldn't agree on basic things so the ecosystem became fragmented, such that P-brand soap doesn't work in Q-brand washers, and clothes washed in Q-brand washers can't be dried in R-brand dryers, and if you use a P-brand washer you need to take fifteen extra steps to prepare it for a drying cycle, and T-brand dryers can only be used for pants, and ... etc etc. It's a big complex mess which, after 18 years of development, still doesn't let me get my socks clean. And most of it doesn't work at all for people who use a wheelchair.
> when your input and graphics go directly through your compositor ... input directly to the game
When they cut out the middleware, the middleware stops working. And when they make it impossible to add middleware, it stops being possible to do all sorts of useful things. Sure, it may be a millisecond faster, but in exchange, all my keys get mapped wrong, or I can't use my notebook without physically touching it (and causing repetitive strain injury), or my autoclicker stops working, or my accessibility tools become impossible to fix, or my automatic time tracker is treated as a security violation, or the solution which works for me suddenly won't work for my friend who uses a different compositor, or ... etc etc etc.
It architecturally eliminates entire categories of useful things... in order to make the simplest case slightly faster. This provides a more pleasant experience for average able-bodied normal people with no uncommon needs or preferences, while making things worse for everyone else. In particular, the complete lack of accessibility in Wayland is very able-ist and makes it unusuable for anyone with disabilities. That sort of thing needs to be built deep into the core, but it was instead rejected outright and left as an afterthought exercise for Someone Else to solve.
> [this] feature is the job of the compositor. Most compositors already have this feature ... GNOME and KDE have their own solutions, as do most of the others
This really gets at the nature of Wayland's biggest problem. A ton of important things are rejected and declared to be Someone Else's Problem. The compositors have attempted to deal with the aftermath of this mistake, but they all do their own thing and refuse to agree on a lot, so instead of one robust solution, we end up with an entire fragmented ecosystem of partial solutions which aren't compatible with each other.
It's even more of a nightmare for application developers. Instead of needing to support Windows, MacOS, and X11, suddenly they need to support Windows, MacOS, X11, GNOME, KDE, Sway, Weston, Hyprland, Enlightenment, Niri, etc. Every time two compositors disagree on something, it means every application must add support for both of the ways of doing it, like how they are now required to optionally draw their own title bar and window frame, depending on which compositor the user has... and good luck getting two programs from two different developers to draw their frames in the same visual style.
> Wayland really isn't trying to prevent you from doing things
It may not be trying, but it sure is succeeding.
I agree with your pain points. But the reality is that GNOME is already Wayland-only, KDE will be dropping the X11 session in 6.8, and GTK has deprecated X11 support, so going back isn't realistic.
> so the ecosystem became fragmented
The current fragmentation is frustrating, but Linux and Unix have gone through this exact phase before. Unix and especially Linux have never been static, they are more like living organisms. Back in the late '80s and early '90s, PC Unix suffered from the same growing pains. Multiple commercial and open-source X servers popped up for different hardware, until things eventually settled around X386 and XFree86. Even X developers in 1987 were saying "old window systems don't die" [0], sounds familiar?
We'll likely see compositors come and go, along with new protocols to address today's pain points. But the core protocol is here to stay, and wider adoption will naturally push the ecosystem toward shared solutions, just like we're seeing with River and wlroots. The fragmentation will fade over time.
In the meantime, anyone who still relies on X11 can simply stay on it until Wayland covers their use cases. Standalone X11 window managers aren't going away anytime soon.
Rather than dwelling on the friction, it's probably best to focus on what you can control: test software, file good bug reports, and help resolve the remaining edge cases.
I sympathize with the headache, but many Wayland developers came straight from X.org and know what they're doing. It's an uncomfortable adjustment period, but we'll get through it.