tbf to this thread, wayland wasn't really viable until 2023.
I made an existing comment on this that people didn't like because I pointed out that most of Wayland's "modern upgrades" like VRR, HDR, etc were unimplemented or unfinished for years. Even HDR is still "beta" on KDE iirc.
People also like to pretend the triple buffer wasn't a can of worms for many users for a very long time (and still is on low power devices).
That's a weird comparison because HDR is never going to happen on X.org (nor probably in the X11 protocol or clients). Wayland is being actively developed and the developers took it from something that can be made to work with some effort and some concessions to something that will reliably work in most cases. The year isn't 1987 -- software isn't being written by nerds for nerds who can tinker and fix issues or add new features as a patchwork of unmaintainable code.
X did a great job for decades but it's old, it never was designed for modern day requirements, let it retire gracefully instead of dumping on it's replacement, maybe?
I understand there are some apps that still require X, those at some point will be / should be / have to be updated, but I don't see that as a reason not to want to move forward to something better
Oh I'm sure there was valid critique, but at the time it was completely hidden under a pile of made-up conspiracy bullshit about red hat being the devil or so, or plain wrong assertions like “it's monolithic” or “it forces you to use binary logging”.
If the debate would have been about technical merits, maybe one of the other init systems would have won by being slightly better, but systemd’s detractors prevented that really well by making the public “debate” a compete farce.
Wayland has to overcome more real problems than systemd (because X11 was a giant monolith of compatibility hacks that everybody used, as opposed to a hundred piles of messy shell scripts that was SYSV init). But it has no alternatives that could possibly have more technical merit; I can't even remember the thing Ubuntu announced for a hot minute.
it was completely hidden under a pile of made-up conspiracy bullshit
This is basically bullshit. I mean for ANY given thing you can imagine existing there is 5 weirdos on facebook somewhere but the substance and prevailing bitch fest as expressed by 99% of people bitching was perfectly comprehensible normal shit that you are completely retconning.
Not in my experience. Granted that was mostly Reddit, but I often read entire threads about this, with almost nobody coming up with reasonable criticism.
I guess that was different on moderated bug trackers and so on?
Wayland is 18 years old. From 2015 on people whose entire computer use was a browser and a terminal on their single screen laptop with intel integrated GPU were telling everyone else they needed to change over because X was already practically dead and wayland was ready for prime time.
Meanwhile even on the latest and greatest everything wayland still has at that point many problems, many limitations, and is from the perspective of many users not better in any way whatsoever and in many ways worse. Continue this for 11 years. By the time everything is ready for prime time you've already primed people to reject and dislike you.
The issue with wayland is that both the process and the base mechanisms had significqnt flaws, that made it take a long time to get things working. In all fairness, the core team uad a valiant effort for a dwcade, hampered by unresponsive complainers, and late-to-the-party suggestions.
Fyi: I am an early WL adopter, but not on any of the major DEs.
The comainers were nvidia, when they didn't participate in the early anni g, and then cam in late trying to push a rewrite to the memory sharing model.
Was that just my fantasy, or did other people have the same drean? I did mention that I was an early adotper. Maybe I should have clarified that I never went back.
Listen, no matter your opinion on wayland, you can admit that some technical decisions made were not optimal.
Large Wayland projects like KDE and Gnome that are considered member projects of Wayland had the ability to NACK new wayland protocols and proposals. This has historically been abused by a lot of a different projects, in many instamces Gnome because they didn't want to implement things. A lot of wayland proposals were unnecessarily delayed because of this. The bylaws of how wayland projects are allowed to NACK things has since changed to make it so a single project cannot needlessly block protocols but this was only implemented in the past few years iirc so for a long time this happened. Thats a massive contributor to why wayland development takes so long.
Wayland is overall just better. I know there are plenty of apps that keep people on X11 just because they don't properly support/work on Wayland yet, but other than that I'm not sure why you would want to stay on X11.
I've only ever really had issues with X11 to be fair. Since DEs started fully supporting Wayland I was able to finally switch over to Linux full time and it feel better than Windows in every regard
The overwhelming majority of systems consist of one monitor. For the minority on two monitors the overwhelming majority have 2 low DPI monitors or 2 high DPI monitors.
For those with mixed DPI screens only recently has any system supported scaling xwayland apps appropriately on such setups meaning some apps look like garbage and they still do on gnome. xrandr --scale to scale per screen has worked since 2003 and per screen fractional scaling works on Cinanamon under X right now.
To revise
90% of everyone
Single screen: Wayland == X
Multiple similar DPI Wayland == X
5%
Mixed DPI with a mix of Wayland on X apps on every desktop but KDE X > Wayland
5%
Mixed DPI with a mix of wayland and X apps on KDE Wayland > X
Mixed DPI with only wayland apps Wayland > X
I wonder why something that is only better for 5% and worse for 5% and requires 100% to deal with bugs missing features and growing pains has negative feelings attached!
Looks like a hotkey daemon. That helps, but the crux of my issue is that on X11, xdotool can read the window names, size, position, and move them between workspaces and monitors.
you cannot use it via bash you configure it and it applies actions to windows as they are created you cannot use it at all where plasma isn't your desktop and as of wayland you cannot use a different window maanager with KDE plasma as wayland doesn't have the idea of window managers.
I don't think you are ever again going to have an agnostic way to do this
I use bash extensively. I poll video files with ffprobe to get the audio level and video resolution to set a universal standard volume and custom window positions per file depending on what other applications are open.
I understand that all this is a security risk / too obscure of a feature from Wayland's perspective. I'll probably stick to X11 for as long as possible.
Until recently they didn't have support for alternate keyboard layouts, but that seems to have been fixed in 6.6. Tried it again, and there's a few missing theming features such as window decorations being adwaita-ey and my cursor theme not working.
So I recently updated pop from 22.04 to 24.04. The only real headache I've had is running games through proton. Games now start in windows, which might not even show up at all until I super + F11 to full screen it. The mouse gets stuck in either a corner or the middle, sometimes the cursor works in the menus but stops working on the game itself. Gamescope can fix some of these issues, but alt-tabbing is always an adventure if it breaks the game or not.
An annoying thing is it is very hard to figure out where an issue lies. Is it wayland, is it Cosmic, is it gamescope, or proton? Any tips or tricks people might have would be appreciated.
It's a shame, because I want to like Wayland. i don't know what magic system 76 worked in x11 but the only issue I had before was some tearing when moving windows around. 2 monitors of different resolution and framerate with nvidia.
i ran arch with 2 monitors with different refresh rates on a rtx2060, idk why everyone's complaining. my screenshare issues were my fault or i didn't update vesktop which i can't fault due to it being like a "pirate" client for discord.
KDE on Wayland has only very recently started to become workable for me, before that it was utter crap as I switch between home and office with my laptop, with varying display setups. In that case you got stuff like screen positions not being remembered and applications consistently starting off screen, requiring gymnastics to coax them onto a display.
And regularly it would crap out and not show output to one of the displays, if you opened up display manager you'd see the displays not touching and a big red error telling you that gaps betweens displays aren't supported. Well here's a brilliant idea, how about not automatically putting a gap between them in that case?
As I said, last few months it works better (although I still encounter some issues from time to time that I never had on X11). But the whole Wayland protocol had such a rough start, with issues encountered often being downplayed by parts of the community because "it's better and we don't want to hear otherwise", that I simply cannot feel any love for it anymore. There was too much basic stuff that took too long to support, while people were shouting "but HDR!", "better code!". I don't fucking care, I just want to be able to work and for too long that required X11.
On my old nvidia laptop with Endeavouros i have some minor lag from time to time, nothing too crazy. But there are a couple of things i can't make work. For start i can't lower the gamma with xrandr, wlr-randr should work but my nvidia give me the middle finger. Secondly i can't, for the love of me, find a decent onscreen keyboard app to use. I can technically enable the touchscreen keyboard in my desktop adding KWIN_IM_SHOW_ALWAYS=1 but is just too bothersome to have it pop-out everywhere. Also, while most of the app-images works, last time i've tried running this one https://github.com/ryzendew/Linux-Affinity-Installer it crashed 9 times out of 10. All of this works just fine on x11.
I honestly don’t know where people are getting these Wayland issues. I’m on EndeavorOS with an RTX 3080ti and multiple monitors and it has worked flawlessly for ~2 years now.
There's probably a lot of people on 'stable' distros who are still running Wayland code from a couple of years ago and hitting bugs that have been fixed already.
Maybe, x still works better for me on all three systems. Idk I don't get it. Everything says wayland should be better but it runs horribly for me. A stuttering mess.
Screen sharing of rustdesk on hyperfland/sway or others similars de are mess, things simply doesn't work, drag and drop between virtual box and host system is mess once it works once it not
I can't believe that these arguments never mention one of the central tenets of engineering: don't fix what ain't broke. And Wayland breaks a bunch of what ain't broke.
I'm complaining it sucks because it breaks "things".
Also, it's a "desktop widget", so this awesome thing that's so much better should be able to handle compatibility for a simple desktop widget and not keel over and die, right?
Don't fix what isn't broken, don't break what is working.
X is broken in many different ways. It has a huge codebase made to support a poor design that was optimized for machines 40 years ago. No one wants to touch the code base since it is so incredibly fragile plus the original developers are much older now.
In all fairness, it did work for way longer than anyone expected. I doubt the original designers of the X protocol anticipated it lasting this long.
possiblylinux127
Skullgrid protocol itself is mostly OK. Yes, it have many limitations, but it covers much more desktop needs than wayland/mir/surfaceflinger/etc.
But implementation is really broken.
For example, the way how some extensions override vtable is terrible: overriding functions usually should restore base function in vtable before calling it and and restore back after. Breaking this would break call chain and override function will never be called again.
I think, this is a reason why devs switched to wayland. Nobody want to reimplement x11 from scratch, but exisiting implementation is borked
Xlibre is backed for the most part by the singular maintainer that was still willing to work on X11 who got kicked out for being too toxic and breaking existing code. For what it's worth, it also explicitly used MAGA language in its README for a while.
Phoenix is intended to allow for support of legacy software/DEs and provide a more modern/maintainable version of X11. It isn't trying to compete with Wayland, it's trying to live alongside it for environments that won't or can't move to Wayland. It also technically won't be a complete X11 implementation, as it's ignoring older portions of the protocol.
Neither option addresses the elephant in the room: The X11 protocol is still fundamentally broken in a lot of aspects. Multi-monitor support, especially when monitors aren't the same resolution, refresh rate, or physical size, is broken at a fundamental level. It will never work even as well as Windows, which is already an incredibly low bar to clear.
Wayland is slow moving, sure, but it is a much more stable base to work with than Xorg ever was. From a security, modularity, and extensibility standpoint, Wayland is a lot better. There is a reason most of the Xorg team developed a completely new protocol instead of just reimplementing X11 themselves.
How much do you k ow about computer graphics and X? The protocol is indeed not ok. It has tons of hacks and is incredibly janky. Doing basic graphics with X is so incredibly awful as you need to jump though tons of hoops.
I feel like a lot of people tried Wayland in 2020, a bunch of things didn't work and they've been permanently traumatised.
I switched my laptop years ago, but my desktop only fairly recently - multi screen, mixed DPI with variable refresh rates for gaming took longer to be ready than my laptop's single screen, normal DPI, fixed refresh rate config.
It works sometimes, but when it doesn't, it wastes way too much time. I just switch back to windows for 50% of the time for anything productive. I love configuring hyprland, but actually using it for anything that needs to do something sucks. Thank god for arch linux wiki. I can run some apps instead of going to windows. Can't run vm either🫠
This is gonna take time but eventually we'll see adequate replacements for smaller WMs like awesome. Especially because awesome is based on dwm, im hoping that as dwl (the wayland version of dwm) matures we'll see projects like awesomewl come about.
