I wouldn’t say it breaks everything. Franky it fixes / handles better issues that are common usecases today that was not the case during the time X11 was still the norm / actively maintained such as:
- Multiple monitor support with varied refresh rates
- Hybrid GPU setup (including being able to use your motherboard’s hdmi socket and your dedicated gpu hdmi at the same time)
- Display scaling
- Better isolation of applications (to the deterrence of existing linux applications)
Of course granted its a new protocol, it doesn’t support all the usecases that X11 was designed for due to variety or reasons (including controversial decisions)
Mind you, Wayland isn’t perfect either. For example, I found out that despite Wayland having better Hybrid GPU setup support out of the box, there are applications that ended up having broken multi-gpu support (where the application in question can choose which gpu it would utilize for its processing) where it works fine X11.
With the state of the hardware we are having, it is understandable why distros have been focused on pushing Wayland as the default, although honestly, it would be wise for these distros to not completely phase out x11 because currently, Wayland isn’t perfect.
I’ve been using Wayland daily for a few years (2020 at least?) on intel and AMD graphics and have had few complaints:
- Some games didn’t work right a few years ago. (Under Proton or otherwise. Haven’t had issues for a while)
- RenderDoc, a vital bit of graphics debugging software, works poorly on Wayland. (Easy fix is to force X11 for QT via QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb)
- Had some issues with mixed integrated/NVidia graphics on a laptop I was using for a demo once.
- Covering or otherwise hiding a Wayland window blocks a program’s graphics thread. This is sometimes problematic.
- VR development had issues a while ago? (This was for work. It just… stopped working at some point. Dunno if it was a Linux, SteamVR, or Unity3D issue. My work machine mostly runs Windows 10 now as a result. Oh well.)
- Screen recording didn’t work well a while ago… (continued)
Overall, it’s just worked great though!
My anti-complaints:
- Mixed refresh rates on monitors “just works” now. (I have a 1080@144 for gaming, and a 4k@60 for work)
- Video frames don’t have half drawn content. (ex: when resizing windows), except on XWayland stuff
- Video tearing has basically disappeared.
- Video timing issues seem to be improved.
- Input handling for keyboard layouts has improved.
- Screen recording in Wayland is way better than it ever was on X11 now. I do this a lot to share gamedev stuff I’m working on.
Which app do you use for screen recording? That’s the only thing keeping me on X11.
OBS Studio mostly. It’s not the most convenient for a quick screencap, but I can record 720p@60 fps video downscaled and resampled from my 1080p@144hz monitor and it just kinda works fine. The other nice feature of OBS is that you can have it recording all the time and then press a button to dump the last few seconds when something interesting happens. Handy when trying to get interesting clips of my game. For quick recording I usually just use Kooha or the built in Gnome one.
ooo, that does sound handy!
Looks like OBS is the goto. Thanks.
I record our D&D sessions with OBS. Works well.
Wayland != X11
Not 100% feature compatible != broken.
My opinion and also a TL;DR: of the article.
“that thing you used to do is now impossible to do consistently across different implementations, if at all. But it’s all ok, because we have decided it’s not our responsibility!”
That is not what users want to hear. From a user’s point of view, it is broken.
I see what you’re getting at. It’s a matter of perspective, I guess.
If you presented someone with a list of features from two similar but different pieces of software, they wouldn’t say software b is broken because it’s featureset is different from software a, right? But I acknowledge it’s not that straightforward. It’s more like telling them software b is going to replace software a that you’re currently using, get ready to say goodbye to some features.
I still don’t consider wayland broken, but I understand argument that it is.
yes, if i combare kicad with blender, neither is broken because they have different features. But also, nobody is telling users that kicad’s days are over and it should be replaced by blender. If they did, and a user wanted to design a circuit board, the user is out of luck. The user is told that it is a replacement. From the user’s point of view it most definitely is not.
The probeem isn’t just that wayland doesn’t do everything x does. But that users are told that it will replace x, deal with it and quit complaining.
We have to keep in mind that the fact that we know what wayland is in the first place puts us squarely into the “technical user” category, not regular users. Regular users are the ones who don’t even know (nor should they have to care) what wayland even is
Quite literally, the only problem or “stuff broken because or Wayland” is some old ass apps or lazy companies that won’t update their electron version. Looking at you discord, screen sharing COULD WORK if you managed your stuff
They make enough money off nitro and shit to not care. Everything becomes worse when they start making money
KDE gui scaling problems too?
Kinda. The problem was fixed in Qt6 and current KDE is Qt5. It’ll be fixed once Plasma 6 releases in February.
Great news. Thank you for the headsup
Idk I use gnome on 200% scaling on my laptop and on desktop gnome at 100%
I have been using wayland on kde the last two years on Debian and MX Linux with zero issues. My general usa includes coding, music production, Libre office and web browsing. So, no much gaming, if that is your concern.
My experience with Nvidia+ Wayland was… Less than desirable. Enough to make me pickup an AMD card.
However, once I did that my experience instantly better. Hell, even X11 worked better - I was never able to get the desktop to stay at a consistent 60FPS (I’m still on a 60Hz panel which I’m just now getting around to upgrading shortly) in X until I moved to my AMD card.
The 545 driver update just made things so much worse. So I’d say Wayland+Nvidia is not great (for others it works fine so maybe it’s down to what card you have?) however on my AMD card (and my old MacBook with Intel integrated graphics) it’s fantastic.
Nouveau + NVK is the hope 🙏
How do we as the community turn hope into help? Is there a way to contribute directly to the NVK developers?
Check their project page or hit them up on their repo. I’m sure any help will be welcomed.
“not everything is fully ported yet”
“There will probably be an awkward period before all of these pieces are in place for all of the people.”
I think these are the two key takeaways – Wayland is still in development and the bandwagoning are the early adopters – most of us will switch when our distros switch (and will probably be none the wiser)
the problems (and the reason we’re suffering through sensationalist stuff like “Wayland breaks everything!”) is the fanboy push to switch before it’s ready – not everybody lives on the bleeding edge (just like not everyone runs Arch) and the “switch now or be left behind” attitude does more harm than good (far more likely to alienate than convert) …
Wayland is still in development and the bandwagoning are the early adopters
Not to bust your chops but I’m not sure what you’re implying. What isn’t still in development? WordStar? X11? Mac System 7? And Wayland’s initial release was 2008. That’s 15 years ago. Who are these “early adopters” of which you speak anymore?
The things you think aren’t finished because it’s still in development are actually not finished because they’re just the way the developers want.
Many of those things you’re thinking of were declared Somebody Else’s Problem by said developers. That’s fine, but Wayland was not ready for use by normal end users until somebody else did finish them.
From what I hear most of them actually are finished by now, but they weren’t as of a couple years ago when it started becoming commonplace to see declarations that the time to switch to Wayland was Right Now. I tried it out then, and am as a result much less enthusiastic about doing it again now even though it’d be much more likely to go well.
Xorg has no fractonal scaling so I have been uaing wayland since I have switched to linux on nvidia and yes I use it for gaming. Not silky smooth but great so far.
Same topic, original article linked in post description. https://lemmy.ndlug.org/post/523560
I really don’t like nate’s take here. IMO it’s really not that good, Wayland is still outright lacking features, even when using the craptastic xdg portals junk
X11 has it’s own issues (and there are a lot of them, including security)
What features exactly?
I didnt even remotely imply that x11 doesn’t have issues, so im not sure why that was brought up. The goal is to make wayland an acceptable and universal replacement, Everyone knows x11 is dying but wayland isnt ready to replace it yet
Things like window embedding, the wayland way is for each app to have it’s own embedded compositor. Wayland has no support for things like overlays/always on top (Useful for OSKs PR has been made but like all wayland things, we might not get it for another couple years, or perhaps never), currently missing support for reading other window states (PR made for this as well, but again, who knows how long it will take), Still no support for window positioning (again PR made), Emulated input events (libei is not universally supported) And these are just the ones off the top of my head, There were others but I cant think of them ATM
Xorg is the organization behind Wayland, and the Xorg X11 server is also the best Wayland compositor.
On the other hand X11 is missing an important feature: security
Security at the expense of usability comes at the expense of security. X11 doesn’t have security. Wayland doesn’t have usability or security. Security is about putting walls in front of the bad guys while letting the good guys go through. Wayland just puts walls around everyone.
while I do agree that x11 could be better in that regard, having the baseline critical features met matter a lot more then security for me.
I personally really like wayland, I just wish it actually was properly usable in all my use cases
