Are We Wayland Yet?

https://www.swalladge.net/archives/2019/10/14/are-we-wayland-yet/

by fourthark • 7 years ago

288 367 7 years ago

edgyquant• 7 years ago

Gnome/Wayland on Fedora works pretty well last time I used it. I eventually had to switch back for a few reasons (mouse over the network had no replacement) but that was almost a year ago I'd bet it was even smoother now.

baroffoos5• 7 years ago

My work laptop has been on wayland for years now. My desktop was on x11 due to nvidia drivers but now I have an amd card in it so I am back to wayland.

imode• 7 years ago

I don't agree with the assumption that we need to ditch X11 entirely. Implementations are different from the spec, and a common complaint I have is that certain implementations are gathering code smells like nobody's business.

You can fix both an implementation and a spec by continued review and revision, while making choices to either remain backwards compatible or breaking that compatibility with newer revisions. I don't think Wayland is a good solution to this kind of problem, despite it being touted as one in many circles I've witnessed.

The competition is nice, though! I have yet to give Wayland a try, but it's on my to-do list some time on a fresh machine.

cyphar• 7 years ago

One of the arguments made by the Wayland spec folks (many of whom were involved in Xorg development for many years) is that the Xorg spec is also a major cause of problems with modern Linux graphics[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQoQE_HDG8g

paulie_a• 7 years ago

X has long been a crufty dusty codebase. Due to a small amount of people that obsess about networking it has stayed alive. Hopefully Wayland hits critical mass and x can finally be old yellered as it should have been twenty years ago

Due to the down votes let me clarify. X sucks

michaelmrose11• 7 years ago

I want things that only work under x that aren't spacebar heating.

erik_seaberg4• 7 years ago

How many Linux users have only one computer? The MBP work put on my desk is a toy compared to the thousands of Linux boxes they give me access to.

zzo38computer11• 7 years ago

I agree with you. X isn't so bad and implementations are different from the spec (see my message about my proposed X12, which makes this more explicit).

bsder• 7 years ago

Screen recording or sharing apps just don't work. Zoom with XWayland appeared to work, but in reality only shared a blank screen. This was kind of a deal breaker, because sooner or later I will need to use screen sharing in Zoom for work.

Isn't this one of they key points FOR Wayland, though? I thought Wayland specifically stops applications from having access to other chunks of the screen without special permissions?

fake-name• 7 years ago

"Doesn't give access by default" is very different from "cannot be made to work".

I'd assume the complaint is about the latter, which is a issue. I can't imagine anyone complaining about the first.

swalladge9• 7 years ago

Agreed. The extra security given by the latter is a huge win for Wayland, but it needs to be possible to give access when required.

rotten• 7 years ago

Lack of support for screensharing is why I stopped using Wayland.

frio5• 7 years ago

I've been using Wayland full-time (via Sway) since Sway went 1.0. It's been a pretty straightforward experience. The transition took some elbow grease at first (things like getting redshift working, as the author notes), but the last time I fucked around with my graphical config was months ago. I use a display manager, so the "crashes lead to an exposed terminal" thing doesn't matter so much (I've had a total of two crashes, once when I was putsing with XWayland, video games and multi-head -- and the other when building a since-abandoned alternative to kanshi).

There are some quirks I need to spend a little more time investigating whether they're caused by Sway/Wayland or just my configuration: drag-and-dropping between windows seems to be busted, and right-click context menus that overflow their host window's boundaries aren't clickable outside those boundaries. But I mainly use the keyboard/terminal/TUIs, so I don't frequently drag and drop, and it's easy enough to right click somewhere else when the second issue occurs.

Other than that, for how I use a computer, it's been smooth sailing. I wouldn't say we're Wayland yet for general usage either, but for the group of users who are into tiling window managers, we're maybe Wayland enough for now.

sjy2• 7 years ago

For what it's worth, I've also noticed that right-click problem and some glitchiness with dragging and dropping.

frio5• 7 years ago

Thanks, that's useful to know :).

colordrops• 7 years ago

Do you share your config files publicly?

frio5• 7 years ago

Not at this stage, but I've got them all in a git repo in Keybase. The problem is that I've had pretty sloppy discipline re: storing secrets in them (... because Keybase makes that less bad), so I'll need to put some effort in to share them.

ColanR3• 7 years ago

I use i3 (with X11), and the last time I messed around with my graphical config was when I installed the system 18 months ago. Haven't had any issues even close to what you're describing, much less the screen tearing that I have never seen in my last 10 years of linux.

frio5• 7 years ago

Like I said, getting started took some elbow grease, but as a daily driver on my personal and professional machines, Sway's never once crashed or behaved poorly. I no longer need to tinker with it or worry about it; hence, I believe that for the collection of people willing to hammer at something a bit when they first pick it up, Wayland's in an OK space.

michaelmrose11• 7 years ago

You actually mentioned several deal breakers would you recommend stuff to friends that would convince them Linux is weird and broken?

frio5• 7 years ago

I run NixOS on all my machines and either use Proton or VFIO to boot Windows when I want to game now. No, I wouldn't recommend the way I use computers to friends and family ;). For the Hacker News crowd who are likely willing to tilt at technical windmills once in a while, however, Sway no longer has a high bar to entry, and I use it all day professionally and personally without worrying about it.

young_unixer• 7 years ago

From what I've read, it seems like Wayland's "controversial design choices" don't stem from developers being inconsiderate of different workflows, but rather from the intention of making a general purpose protocol.

Being general purpose means that things like screenshotting capabilities are not the protocol's concern and should be implemented in the upper layer(s) instead.

In that case, this general purpose approach seems to me like the right way to tackle the problem, since we won't need a different protocol for use cases that fall outside the traditional desktop paradigm. You can just use Wayland and implement your own business code on top. There'll be a de-facto standard way to do graphics on Linux, no matter your use case.

Correct me if I'm wrong about this. I'm not a Wayland expert (I have many articles and books in my to-read list).

I'm excited about Wayland for the simple reason that I hate screen tearing.

roenxi3• 7 years ago

That means the screenshot application is, to some degree, compositor specific. It leaves the door completely open to the outcome that if you want to stream using a Gnome streaming application you will have to be using the Gnome project's window manager. Or the KDE streaming application will require the KDE window manager. Or the 'best' screenshot application will be tied to the XMonad successor on Wayland.

Wayland is a good experiment, and the community may well go with it because X11 is atrocious and Wayland is a viable alternative. But call a spade a spade, they dropped the ball with that design decision. It isn't a big deal.

The practical outcome is that there is going to be a screenshot protocol and everything that implements Wayland is going to have to implement that protocol as well. The required negotiation for that to happen is taking/going to take years and delay Wayland adoption. If they'd designed that at the same time as an optional part of the Wayland protocol it would have saved time and confusion.

Hello712• 7 years ago

there are already a number of screenshot protocols (as TFA explains, slurp and grim can be used for screenshots on sway). the trouble is getting everybody to agree on a single one, or implementing a library to interface with all the protocols, which is the current strategy. https://www.google.com/search?q=wayland+screenshot+protocol

but, IMO, this is a good thing, and the only way it could have worked. if every single conceivable protocol was added to the initial specification, then wayland would never have been released. even if it was, people would complain even more about it being "bloated" and "non modular" and "not following the unix philosophy", whatever that means.

ChrisSD• 7 years ago

freedesktop have had success in standardising the Linux desktop. I fail to see why gnome, KDE, etc wouldn't eventually standardise around a common screenshot protocol.

danShumway• 7 years ago

The practical outcome is that there is going to be a screenshot protocol and everything that implements Wayland is going to have to implement that protocol as well. The required negotiation for that to happen is taking/going to take years and delay Wayland adoption.

Linux fragmentation is a real thing, but if the community is going to take multiple years to reach a consensus on the right way to approach screenshots, that does at least somewhat suggest to me that leaving it out of the base protocol may be a good decision. My understanding is that the point of Wayland is to be a semi-permanent solution to the problem of X11. Any mistakes we make in the protocol will haunt us for decades, not just years.

That concern makes me more likely to err on the side of reaching consensus before core logic is implemented, even though I admit that the fractured nature of the Linux community is likely to make process take a lot longer. I'm not saying that nothing should be standardized, just that if it looks like there's disagreement over implementation, it might be a good idea in this specific case to bias towards delaying a final decision.

josefx3• 7 years ago

The practical outcome is that there is going to be a screenshot protocol and everything that implements Wayland is going to have to implement that protocol as well.

So we are going to reinvent X extensions from scratch? By the time that is finished we will have enough legacy bloat that people will call for the next replacement.

arghwhat7• 7 years ago

That means the screenshot application is, to some degree, compositor specific

This is not the intention under Wayland. Wayland protocol development is geared towards compositors implementing protocols for experimentation, and then basically "upstreaming" the result. Even before upstreaming, compositors share work (e.g. wlroots implemented at least one kde-specific protocol, that has now been superceeded by the resulting upstream work).

Also, all Wayland protocols are advertised in the registry, so applications don't do "I'm on KDE, so...", and instead just use the protocols available. It is therefore not a problem if KDE implements a GNOME protocol, for example. It'll just work.

Screenshot and recording will be a shared protocol, but due to wanting a proper protocol with goodies like damage tracking for performance, it's a little bit more work than you would think. We certainly don't want X's "dumb" approach—we want something faster and safer (that is, functionality guaranteed without tearing or fun stuff like that).

vertex-four5• 7 years ago

Screenshots, remote desktop stuff, etc, is being built under the Portal system that’s used for flatpak. GNOME and KDE already support this, and it doesn’t depend on flatpak at all.

baroffoos5• 7 years ago

Its funny how people shit all over systemd for doing everything and then people shit all over wayland for just doing enough for the task it was made for.

I think the complaining is 10% real concerns and 90% people upset that it is different than it used to be.

sprash9• 7 years ago

Wayland is indeed similar to systemd. It requires a monolithic implementation of all features traditionally done by separate programs (e.g. window managers, hotkey deamons, screen recorders, streamers, ...) because it lacks the appropriate protocols. X11 on the other hand provides a platform (thanks the "process not policy" design mantra) for all those separate programs by implementing those appropriate protocols.

Also, people love change if you have actual improvement. I was very happy to switch from sysvinit to runit.

lukeschlather• 7 years ago

Systemd and Wayland are very different pieces of software. It's easy to imagine (in fact I think it's very common) that end-users of Systemd just use it to launch a service which replaces all the logical features of Systemd. (E.g. for an extreme example, a kubernetes cluster.) If systemd doesn't support some feature, it's really fine. Maybe even preferable. You can get it working by some other means.

Wayland on the other hand, it really does need to do everything well. If Zoom won't run in Wayland, needing to launch X11 to run Zoom means Wayland is broken.

arghwhat7• 7 years ago

This is, just like the article's take, somewhat a misunderstanding of what "wayland" is.

A wayland environment basically has 3 "levels":

- Wayland core ("wayland")

- Wayland shared protocols ("wayland-protocols")

- Other protocols

Core only concerns itself with nitty-gritty necessities, like how wayland communication actually works. You cannot create a window with wayland alone.

wayland-protocols is where you'd find "xdg-shell", the protocol needed to manage windows on a normal desktop. Protocols here are optional, but are still a collaborative effort.

However, protocol development starts locally, in which case it starts being compositor specific under its own namespace (e.g. "kde"). If it gains traction, other compositors may implement the protocol as is. At some point, a shared protocol draft will be made under one of the "higher" namespaces, like "xdg" or "wp". KDE's idle protocol was widely implemented before a common one was developed from it, for example.

Screen recording is an example of something not yet shared. Wlroots-based compositors like sway fully support it, but details to improve the situation is still under development. An example of such development is to ensure that damage bubbles up to the screen recorder, allowing it to only process screen areas that are reported to have changed.

So, screenshotting is not something implemented in the "upper layers", but something that is currently specific protocols, that will at some point become an (optional) shared protocol.

It is also important to note that Wayland works through a protocol registry, with clients always knowing all protocols available, and using whatever they need if it is supported. GTK and Qt does all this for you, but there is no "If on KDE, do this", rather "I have a protocol that gives me this functionality".

It has always been—and still is—my impression that those considering wayland design "controversial" have simply misunderstood it, such as by thinking that it disallows screenshots and recording. Rather, it is designed to provide control over these things, and to do them right.

I have been using Wayland through sway for the past year. I can confidently say that anything I did under X, Wayland does way better. Multi-DPI, plug-n-play screen support without any hassle, tear-free low-latency rendition, etc. Knowing what is not done yet, I could provoke problems if I wanted to, but nothing interferes with my day-to-day operations.

Boulth2• 7 years ago

Excellent post. Thanks for your in depth insights!

Are there any Wayland resources for even more technical information you'd recommend?

For the record I use sway for months and can also report that the experience has been great (including hotplugging multiple monitors over Thunderbolt etc.)

nwah1• 7 years ago

But the author of this post mentioned a lack of support in apps like Zoom being a dealbreaker. I've also run into incompatibility with TeamViewer. And that is just going to happen whenever these companies get around to it. And if your work requires using such apps, that is just what you need to use.

I would prefer some kind of WebRTC-based screensharing solution, but I don't know of any that are preferred and many people just think of WebRTC as a security nightmare, and I haven't seen much momentum with it.

msla2• 7 years ago

My big problem with Wayland is that it doesn't look like it's going to support Window Maker as well as X does, if at all. Well, maybe I should rephrase: Wayland isn't going to be my problem until it supports Window Maker as well as X does, because I won't switch to it until that happens. I'm sure there are more than enough people like me to support a distro, like how there are non-systemd distros, the major appeal of which is that they don't use systemd.

daurnimator• 7 years ago

The fact is, Wayland is the only viable X11 successor

There's at least one other option in the running, Arcan: https://arcan-fe.com/

fiddlerwoaroof• 7 years ago

Cool, Arcan looks a lot more viable for me than wayland

cnasc• 7 years ago

I'm a big fan of Arcan (moreso than I am of Wayland), but it's nowhere near as far along as Wayland and I think at this point is still the product of just one person. I think it's fair to call Wayland viable, but I don't think I would say that of Arcan until it's:

a) generally usable as a daily driver; and

b) maintained by enough people that there isn't a single point of failure.

Right now I'm still on X.

Hello712• 7 years ago

hooray, finally a wayland criticism article that actually put in some effort instead of "muh unix philosophy". most of these issues are real issues for wayland today, and the author might be right to switch back to X for now. however, I'll try to explain some of the issues:

I had consistent font rendering issues. There was this painful issue in sway relating to display scaling that caused fonts (among other things) to be missing, fuzzy, or just terrible in general.

yup, still a problem. hidpi doesn't work great on X in the first place, and adding Xwayland definitely makes it worse for X applications. but, once the majority of applications are ported to wayland, hidpi should become much, much better.

NetworkManager GUI tools were strangely buggy with wayland. It wouldn't always crash, but sometimes the only way I could get it to connect to a wifi network was to quit sway, launch i3, connect with nm-applet in i3, then switch back to sway. Bizarre.

personally, I recommend using either raw wpa_supplicant or iwd with a separate network management daemon (dhcpcd or systemd-networkd). the wpa_supplicant GUI is very ugly and uses weird terminology (what's a "PSK" -- yes, I know what it is, but if you didn't, you'd have to google it), but if you can get over that hump as well as the initial configuration, it's been 100% reliable for me, unlike NM, which usually works but then sometimes silently fails somewhere. I recently switched to iwd, which has been mostly fine, but, like wayland, still lacking features important for some people.

Sometimes, on my desktop, everything would lock up for 10 seconds or so, the screen would blank, and then come back on and everything would be fine. It appeared to be some issue with the graphics drivers - I don't have that issue on i3, so something deep in Wayland is interacting strangely with it.

I would assume you are using intel drivers and are experiencing a GPU reset. check dmesg, but it's quite possible that a poorly behaved application is causing the trouble.

Screen recording or sharing apps just don't work. Zoom with XWayland appeared to work, but in reality only shared a blank screen. This was kind of a deal breaker, because sooner or later I will need to use screen sharing in Zoom for work.

yeah, this is definitely a problem. as other commenters have said, ordinary applications aren't allowed to just record the screen, they have to ask the compositor. unfortunately, this has not yet been standardized between different wayland implementations. iirc, gnome has a screen recording api, kde has one, and wlroots has another, and they're all incompatible. my current solution for sway is to use wf-recorder + v4l2loopback, which works fairly well but is a little bit hard to set up. install wf-recorder-git and v4l2loopback-dkms-git, then modprobe v4l2loopback exclusive_caps=1 video_nr=7 && wf-recorder -m v4l2 -f /dev/video7 -c rawvideo --pixel-format=yuv420p. then you'll have a fake camera device which you can select in your streaming application. that works for me on Firefox 70 and Chromium 78, so it should work for Zoom too. the workflow is not as smooth as built-in screen sharing (for one, you can't display two "cameras" at once), but it works well enough for most purposes.

Sometimes, Sway would crash while the screen was locked, leaving my previously secured computer at a logged-in tty. Not great for security!

this is actually very easy to solve.

solution 1: instead of running sway, run exec sway.

solution 2: instead of running swaylock, run physlock. if security is a high priority for you, this is probably better anyways.

swalladge9• 7 years ago

Thanks for these comments!

I definitely need to migrate away from NetworkManager; I think you just gave me the motivation to do so. :)

maxhille• 7 years ago

FWIW I am using nmcli and it work good enough for me.

marcthe12• 7 years ago

Iwd is much better for WiFi.

iam-TJ• 7 years ago

You might find 'nmtui' (Network Manager Text User Interface) more helpful if you prefer an ncurses based interface similar to the GUI nm-applet (but it doesn't work for GUI-only configuration extensions for some VPNs, etc.)

'nmcli' is good for basics, eg:

nmcli == connection summary inc. addresses, routes, DNS

nmcli dev wifi == wifi networks found (inc. specs)

nmcli dev wifi rescan

nmcli con == list configured connections

nmcli con up Connection-Name

nmcli con down Connection-Name

most of the above support intelligent tab-completion including of (space containing) connection names.

sprash9• 7 years ago

The biggest hurdle for Wayland adoption is the absolutely brain dead "security model". Commonly used features like hotkey daemons, push to talk, screen recording/streaming/sharing, window management, clipboard history manager or even Wallpapers need to managed by the particular implementation (of there are many) of the Wayland server itself and have mostly no common protocols, at least not official. And when all those protocols after a long process are finally finished I have serious doubts that Wayland will be either less bloated and "messy" or more secure than current X11.

The non-existent X11 security model is not really ideal but at least you could mitigate the problem there with access control hooks and as long as you use trusted software (which is 99.9% the case on a typical Linux system) you can use all the above mentioned features today without having too much headaches.

snagglegaggle• 7 years ago

The non-existent X11 security model is irrelevant considering on most systems anything under a uid can debug something else under a uid. Wayland's security is entirely pointless.

I suspect Wayland will just become a container for an X11 session.

paulddraper2• 7 years ago

considering on most systems anything under a uid can debug something else under a uid

Right? Couldn't only security hardened distros like SELinux take advantage of this?

Or I suppose Docker GUI apps?

_fbpt• 7 years ago

This is not true on Ubuntu 18.04. I had to use sudo or change /proc or something to use gdb on other processes running on my user.

shrubble• 7 years ago

Sun shipped a Trusted Solaris with trusted X11 Windows... over TWENTY YEARS AGO.

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E18752_01/html/819-0869/windowapi...

microcolonel3• 7 years ago

The thing about scaling is a bit difficult. Sway chooses to render XWayland windows in the lower resolution and scales up, rather than the other way around; I think this should be configurable.

pzone2• 7 years ago

I don't see what would make such a configuration option particularly difficult. Maybe file a bug report requesting it? The scaling difficulties are fundamentally a problem with XWayland so you're left with two problematic options.

microcolonel3• 7 years ago

The scaling difficulties are fundamentally a problem with XWayland

Well, sort of. There are fundamental issues with having per-display scaling in X. If you plug in a HiDPI display after starting an application, it's my understanding that there is no standard way to signal that to a window.

The toolkits, or GTK+3 at least, do handle changing the scale at runtime internally, so it's more of a social problem than a hard engineering one.

jchw2• 7 years ago

Important to note that Sway WM is not Wayland as a whole; I am a happy Sway user, but unfortunately it is not 100% at parity with the experience you will get with GNOME. However, you can always contribute if you have time; it’s fun and the codebase is very nice to work with. You don’t even have to switch to Sway to work on it. (If you are skilled at debugging and use graphics tablets we could use some help trying to figure out some crashing bugs with tablets...)

Regarding screen capture: wl_roots actually supports this, but WebRTC doesn’t support the wl_roots protocol for it. I’ve been told Pipewire should solve this problem eventually.

Edit: accidentally wrote Waypipe instead of Pipewire. (Waypipe is cool too, though.)

seminatl• 7 years ago

A good way to think about Wayland is the screen manager brought to you by the people who thought xrandr, Mesa, Cairo, the Linux FireWire stack, and freetype were good things. If you come in with appropriate expectations you’ll be amazed that any of it works at all.

Is you think it over for a bit you’ll realize that the real Linux graphics protocol is Android SurfaceFlinger. Wayland is like five orders of magnitude less popular.

epx2• 7 years ago

I have had this unpopular opinion since the beginning of the decade: Linux should just adopt AOSP UI, be able to run apps, and that’s it.

michaelmrose11• 7 years ago

The android interface would be hot garbage on desktops/laptops.

Not everyone uses a 12in netbook with only a browser window open.

The fact that Android is successful does not actually make it good and most of the apps are worthless on a large screen whereas there are lots of actual apps for Linux of note.

imtringued3• 7 years ago

So what stops you from doing just that? (There is ChromeOS, anbox and co)

umanwizard5• 7 years ago

Who is "Linux" ? Who exactly do you think should adopt AOSP UI?

nhumrich• 7 years ago

My biggest problem Wayland, is no screensharing. (i.e. casting on Chromecast, sharing screen on zoom). Apparently this because of security. Is this possible to overcome? Is this something can fixed by simply having chromecast/zoom devs implement something? Or will it never be possible?

throwaway89412• 7 years ago

Take a look into pipewire.

jchw2• 7 years ago

Good news actually, it's already being worked on. As mentioned, Pipewire is the current leading solution. Upstream WebRTC has experimental support for Pipewire; in Chromium it can be enabled with a flag and in Firefox it can be enabled with a patch or configuration flag (I believe it is supposedly merged, but not sure if stable versions will compile and work with it.)

GitHub is down atm but there's also an xdg-desktop-portal implementation for wlroots which should allow for Pipewire clients to run under Sway (I have not tried this personally, so I have no idea if it actually all works in practice yet.) https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr

jasondclinton• 7 years ago

Correct. All of this is working out of the box in Fedora 31 which ships Wayland by default.

Boulth2• 7 years ago

It doesn't sound like it's ready (as of June): https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr/issues/4#...

baroffoos5• 7 years ago

Screensharing is possible but it is not part of wayland. The compositor/DE must implement screen sharing and manage how programs are given permission to this.

michaelmrose11• 7 years ago

Will this require both parties to be running the same compositor?

boudin2• 7 years ago

It is already there. I use zoom screensharing on wayland for work and it works like a charm. Better than on X11 where i always had artefacts actually.

I've been using gnome on wayland for a while now, all apps running natively but the electron based ones and it's working perfectly. I have none of the issues mentionned by the author of this post.

sjy2• 7 years ago

Summary: yes, unless you use video conferencing and screen sharing software, which is likely to be totally broken (but see Hello71's comment). The author needs to use Zoom, so he reverted to X11.

zamadatix• 7 years ago

That's not at all an accurate summary. I'd cover why but really the article is apt and to the point on doing so without summarization IMO.

zzo38computer11• 7 years ago

I don't really like Wayland and I think X is better in many ways. There are a few problem which is why I had some ideas about X version 12. One is to ensure the implementation and protocol are separate. Another is proxies to implement security features. Another is support for SCM_RIGHTS and SCM_CREDENTIALS (only for local connections; these are obviously not supported for remote connections, which are still possible, if implemented by the server and enabled by the user). And then, also 64-bit numbers in many places. But a lot of it is like the version 11 protool (without all of the extensions they have added), but with a few differences. (I don't really like much of the freedesktop stuff either; I work without a desktop environment, and programs should not assume the existence of one.) Maybe there is even a possibility to implement these different systems over each other when needed.

For example, with text rendering. Font path setting is not part of the core protocol (although there may be a XSET extension which can do this on some implementations), nor does the protocol specify font formats (PCF is recommended, but the protocol doesn't actually care so you can implement different formats if wanted). Characters are still sixteen bits, although to allow optional support for some more modern features, there are two flags you can specify when loading fonts: EnableLigatures and EnableAntialiasing. Servers that don't understand these flags can ignore them, and fonts that don't support them would also ignore them. EnableLigatures waives the requirement that a sequence of characters is the same as each of those characters put next to each other, and EnableAntialiasing waives the requirement that text is painted in the specified background and foreground colour only. (EnableLigatures is required to correctly render Unicode text with the X core text rendering system (if the server implements support for Unicode fonts, which is of course optional). Of course you are not required to use the core text rendering (previewer programs should not use it, for example), but if you do, and your program uses Unicode, then this will be needed. In effect, a surrogate pair is treated like a ligature at the protocol level (how it works in the actual implementation may differ, and is independent of the protocol).)

braindeath2• 7 years ago

But a lot of it is like the version 11 protool (without all of the extensions they have added),

It’s hard to tease out, but it sounds like you’re advocating for the state of the art drawing model of 1980 in 2019. I don’t think this is going to fly except for a very niche audience.

ColanR3• 7 years ago

I've seen this sort of comment frequently: "it's 2019, why are we still doing n?", as if somehow it should be assumed we have grown out of it.

It's a completely unsubstantiative argument; its effect is to sweep under the rug any justification for the 'old way' of doing things.

zzo38computer11• 7 years ago

[This paragraph used to mention Vulkan, but now I think that is not a good idea and DRI is better. See the replies to this message for details.]

Also, on server implementations that support SCM_RIGHTS (the core protocol would have some way to check), it would be possible to pass a file descriptor opened with shm_open() to the client and share memory that way, if the client and server are on the same computer. In this way, direct rendering is more efficient than it is with the X11 core protocol.

I said a lot like the version 11 core protocol, not exactly like it; in what I am thinking there would still be many differences, although many things are similar (because I think much of it is good).

zzo38computer11• 7 years ago

Some people mention how Wayland does not allow access to other windows from other clients, and is sometimes good and bad. In my X12 idea, this is independent of the protocol, and the protocol doesn't care. Restricted access may be implemented either by the X server itself or by some proxy, and either way the protocol doesn't care and the client doesn't care. What the restrictions are may also be implementation-dependent and is preferably configurable by the user. The client would send a SCM_CREDENTIALS message to the server; if the server doesn't understand it then it will just ignore it and allow (or deny) access anyways. (It isn't necessarily only other windows that you may restrict access to; you might also sandbox selections in a proxy too, if you want to.) (Note that an implementation which cannot be configured for unrestricted access technically is not compliant with the specification; although merely allowing it to be configured with restrictions does not violate the specification.)

erik_seaberg4• 7 years ago

Any news on remoting Wayland? This article kinda ignores it, but I don't see how it's not a complete showstopper.

pabs3• 7 years ago

The Waypipe Summer of Code project implemented that recently:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2019-Au...

erik_seaberg4• 7 years ago

Outstanding. Are they software rendering at the client and shoving raw images? Remote GPU from scratch strikes me as an even bigger job.

Jeaye• 7 years ago

Before I touch on Wayland and X, a brief detour.

Let's assume Mozilla finishes servo (their browser in Rust). Let's also assume:

- It's faster than Firefox.

- It's safer than every other browser out there.

How do they get people to use it? Those two are not enough. To the user:

- It's different.

- Firefox feels plenty safe.

This is a real problem and Mozilla faces it now. As a result, they're focusing on what they can do with servo which no browser has done before, like superb VR support. In short, they need features to gain users and they recognize that. Marginal gains are not enough to encourage an entire product switch.

Back to Wayland. Aside from the lack of screen tearing, what can we all agree are big wins for the user? I haven't tried it yet (for this reason), but everything I've read suggests that it could be safer, it could be faster, it could bring some more new features, but mostly it's the same shit.

The masses, and this definitely includes the GNU/Linux using masses, need more than the same shit to change because change is tough. They are going to need something killer from Wayland, or another competitor, before they give up on X.

war1025• 7 years ago

I believe Mozilla's strategy is to develop new features in Rust on Servo, and then swap them out into Firefox as they go. That way users don't need to change, since they realized that users never would.

jdc• 7 years ago

For instance, they wrote WebRender for Servo and ported it to Firefox

m45t3r3• 7 years ago

This is kind the objective I think. Wayland in most cases (Gnome and KDE) is simply an implementation detail, and Gnome and KDE runs in both X11 and Wayland.

The end result is, hopefully, less bugs, more security and more performance, however most people wouldn't care anyway (and I think most people doesn't care, for example Fedora uses Wayland by default).

For us using window managers like i3wm the history is different. However in i3wm I am very close to the X11 so there is almost no abstraction, this is why the transition is more painful.

zdragnar• 7 years ago

Have you tried sway? It's about as close to a drop-in replacement to i3 as we'll get, I think, and my experience with it has been pretty positive.

https://swaywm.org/

it wasn't exactly a drop-in replacement for me, but with a bit of modification I was overall pretty pleased with it, and subjectively it did feel faster.

colatkinson• 7 years ago

Unsure if you've seen it before, but I've been using sway [0] as a Wayland-based replacement for i3. Switching the configs took about 15 minutes (and could probably be replaced by a few sed commands). It's been very nice to use all around--snappy, no major issues even with multiple monitors, etc.

[0] https://github.com/swaywm/sway

juped3• 7 years ago

I realize no one reads TFA, but TFA is very relevant since it's all about i3 and sway...

asveikau4• 7 years ago

Nobody replying to you seems to catch on that i3 is not the only environment other than KDE and Gnome.

i3 users have sway. Good for them. Now what about every other window manager?

thayne2• 7 years ago

It isn't just window managers, there are also applications that are close to X11, and many of these don't even work in XWayland, because they break wayland's security model. For example screen shot and screen sharing apps. And even if the developers took the large amount of work to refactor to work with wayland, there isn't any kind of standard for privileged access in wayland, so they would need to use different protocols to implement the functionality for each compositor.

saghm• 7 years ago

Let's assume Mozilla finishes servo (their browser in Rust). Let's also assume:
- It's faster than Firefox.
- It's safer than every other browser out there.
How do they get people to use it Those two are not enough. To the user

If Mozilla wanted to take the route of switching people from Firefox to a new browser, they would presumably do it by gradually stopping development of Firefox. This is basically the strategy that Microsoft is taking with Edge, with the obvious difference being that it's a browser that comes pre-installed on a common OS, although I'm not convinced that the strategy would need to be fundamentally different.

That being said, as sibling responses have noted, I think the strategy that Mozilla has been taking has been to just move over components into Firefox itself when they're ready. This has already been done with a few important components, and it seems to be working fairly well.

riquito2• 7 years ago

The masses do not use X directly, they use GTK+ and QT. And those moved to Wayland. Window/desktop managers moved (e.g. Gnome) or have been rewritten (e.g. i3 -> sway). Looks like a success to me (marketing side). Frankly, by your writing it looks like Wayland had been proposed today and needs to make a dent.

michaelmrose11• 7 years ago

Most desktop Linux users aren't using Wayland yet. In fact insofar as sway a good chunk of hardware that is well supported under Linux will never work in sway.

For it to take over it must be shipped by default by all major distros and people need to have time to upgrade after it becomes the default.

This means switching to Debian 10+, any recent Fedora, Ubuntu 20.04+.

Based on this one would expect the majority of users to be using it by 2025

Sway isn't i3 rewritten it's not even the same developers. I3wm is its own active project with their own developers that will continue indefinitely.

ISL3• 7 years ago

From my narrow perspective, Wayland's key feature/bug is that it may break fluxbox, which I have used for >17 yr.

As long as it implements X, I don't mind, but my understanding is that the change is a breaking one.

htns2• 7 years ago

Mine are 1) Xmodmap support/migration 2) breaking imagemagick's import (screenshotting) making my shortcut for OCR'ing text on the screen break.

It seems Wayland isn't going to be the default in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, but if it wasn't for the risk of Wayland I would be on the non-LTS releases. At least Guix exists now so staying on LTS (released every 2 years) isn't that bothersome in terms of easily avoiding out-of-date software.

OrgNet• 7 years ago

How do they get people to use it?

call it Firefox v100 and automatically update

andolanra• 7 years ago

Servo is not a browser, it is a browser engine. To quote the Mozilla Research page about it: "Like WebKit, the Servo project is not a complete browser. It is an experimental project that delivers components that can load, run, and display web sites and applications." Given that, it doesn't make sense to talk about users "…switching from Firefox to Servo."

c.f. https://research.mozilla.org/servo-engines/

shaan7• 7 years ago

Aside from the lack of screen tearing, what can we all agree are big wins for the user?

From what I remember, Wayland makes it easier to mix 4K and HD displays without pain.

ziftface• 7 years ago

I guess it depends on the user, but Wayland is not the same shit for me. The level of jank and screen tearing in X is unacceptable.

I think it’s amusing that that opinion is so common given how bad X is. Mac OS X was developed in the nineties and has a jank-free hardware-accelerated compositor. Windows vista also had one, as well as every windows version after that.

I am certain that I’m not the only end user who notices the difference between smooth animations on those other OSs and what you see on X.

Wayland may be incomplete but it’s obvious that it solves some of these issues.

mixmastamyk3• 7 years ago

Most people don’t care about animation, but getting their work done. Still, I’m rooting for W.

qplex2• 7 years ago

X is very smooth for me. No tearing or other issues.

It's usually a driver configuration issue if you have tearing.

josteink• 7 years ago

Yeah. IMO once you see screen-tearing you cannot unsee it.

Then having a tear-free desktop is going to be something you strive for.

I upgraded every part of my setup which I needed to, just in order to be able to run Wayland (via sway), and I have to say I absolutely think it's worth it.

adrianmonk• 7 years ago

Great question to be asking. I agree users are indifferent, but there are two ways in which this applies:

(1) They aren't going to go out of their way to switch from X11 to Wayland. Many users don't even know (or care) what those two things are. Or they do but they don't see the required effort as justified.

(2) Users also aren't going to out of their way to change the default that their Linux distribution supplies. Not unless there are issues that are bad enough to warrant expending that effort. If it defaults to X11, they'll use X11. If it defaults to Wayland, they'll use Wayland.

The major risk I see to Wayland adoption is if distros play it wrong and default to Wayland before it's ready for prime time. If that happens, then users will get a bad taste in their mouth, and their indifference will get replaced with a preference against Wayland. And it will be hard to erase that preference because even if you fix all the issues, they will still remember that time when they tried it and it caused them problems.

vetinari3• 7 years ago

Depends also on the type of distribution audience.

Fedora has been defaulting to Wayland for several releases now. RHEL 8 also defaults to Wayland.

However, these distributions are probably not used by users, who consider their spacebar heating critical to their workflow.

fulafel2• 7 years ago

I think WebRender (the FF-integrated name of Servo) didn't improve Firefox VR support in any big way. VR was pretty good in Firefox already and WebRender mostly impacts rendering of HTML content like fonts, images, and CSS. The lower level tech that VR depends heavily on is WebGL. The next big jump in that department looks to be WebGPU but that's still in early stages.

shmerl3• 7 years ago

Not quite overall, at least from my perspective.

1. Adaptive sync still needs Wayland protocol support, before compositors can pick it up. It already works on X.

2. Some major features like common frameworks for screen capturing need to be agreed on, in order to avoid reinventing the wheel in tons of incompatible ways. Did everyone agree to use Pipewire, or it's still bikeshedded with everyone trying to do their own thing? I wasn't following this recently.

3. KWin has some major bugs to fix for the Wayland session, like subsurfaces clipping issue.

4. Support for Wacom drawing tablets is still missing in KWin on Wayland.

And so on.

AnIdiotOnTheNet5• 7 years ago

What I'm hearing is, by the time Wayland is actually on par with X, feature-wise, it will by time for a whole new rewrite because something else will be fundamentally different in the way graphics are rendered. Windows went full compositor with Vista in 2006, with all the features and then some of its predecessor (except you can't have windows with no v-sync). 14 years later Wayland almost has a standardized way of taking screenshots.

shmerl3• 7 years ago

Possibly the part of the problem is, that there is no single owner and no one directs it. Everything seems chaotic, many things are low priority for developers, while in practice they are high priority for users and so on.

I suppose that's the natural consequence of Linux desktop stack being developed so collaboratively. And the fact that desktop itself is so fragmented (KDE, Gnome, etc.) doesn't help either. Resources are spread quite thin.

The major problem with Wayland is, that unlike X which is a unified point of collaboration, Wayland compositors need to do all the work on their own (unless they figure out how to share the effort, which doesn't go too well so far). So problems of fragmentation and lack of resources are only amplified in Wayland case, causing a huge delay in overall progress.

And I'm not saying all the above is a bad thing (some argue choices are good and etc.). But the downsides are obvious.

Personally, I'd prefer developers focusing more on KDE, but Gnome users would likely disagree.

MayeulC6• 7 years ago

This is not out of the realm of the possibility. But by the time a new protocol is needed, applications will hopefully be much cleaner if they migrated to Wayland in between (less X-specific hacks, better compartmentalization of features). It would probably be easier to implement interface for backwards compatibility with Wayland than try to emulate the monolithic X (well, Xwayland is X running under Wayland because there's no other choice, so that's a possibility as well).

Vogtinator• 7 years ago

3. KWin has some major bugs to fix for the Wayland session, like subsurfaces clipping issue.

You're probably seeing a Qt bug there, not KWin: https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-54888

shmerl3• 7 years ago

That's a different one, and it is a problem with KWin:

* https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=387313

* https://phabricator.kde.org/T10530

pdonis4• 7 years ago

Please, please, please, people, don't impose your personal choice of font and background color on the rest of us. Faded beige background with light colored font makes this hard enough for me to read that I simply gave up. Yes, I have a particular issue since I'm partly red-green colorblind--but a substantial percentage of people have color perception issues of one sort or another. There's a reason why black text on a white background is so common.

swalladge9• 7 years ago

I hear you. Thanks for the feedback. I'm planning on toning down the color scheme a lot now. I'll post further updates on the issue that you or someone else has raised on github: https://github.com/swalladge/swalladge.net/issues/1

The site should work nicely in reader view or through an rss reader which could be a temporary option until I can fix it. Sorry for the inconvenience :/

markwakeford• 7 years ago

Interestingly enough using Chrome on OSX it looked nothing like those screenshots and didn't bother me at all. I am also red green colour blind.

swalladge9• 7 years ago

Resolution: tweaked the font colours to be higher contrast and removed custom absolute font-weights. Please let me know if there are other accessibility issues with the site. :)

mehrdadn• 7 years ago

Is it just me or do both of those look blurry? I want to poke my eyes out...

zzo38computer11• 7 years ago

You are not required to specify colours and fonts when making a web page, and I recommend that in most cases you don't; only specify the language and whether or not it is fixpitch/bold/italic/underline/strikeout. Don't impose your width either; let the user use the width of the window (they can resize if they don't like it).

cyborgx7• 7 years ago

I think websites experimenting with different ways to style themselves is actually very good. The onus should be on the browser to provide you with tools to override those settings for your preference.

pdonis4• 7 years ago

I think websites experimenting with different ways to style themselves is actually very good.

I think websites experimenting with different ways to style themselves is misguided if the purpose of the site is for me to read what the author writes. I don't care what the author's preferred style is; I'm not reading the blog for its style. I'm reading it for its content.

voldacar• 7 years ago

Is wayland viable for gaming yet or does it still add an extra frame or two of latency?

tbenst• 7 years ago

Tried to use Wayland earlier today on Ubuntu 18.04 for fractional scaling support, but sadly there is no support for nvidia drivers. This does not seem well advertised so posting as a PSA to save others from trying to debug the login loop!

swalladge9• 7 years ago

To clarify, it does support nvidia through the open source nouveau drivers. It's only the proprietary drivers that aren't supported.

michaelmrose11• 7 years ago

You mean it does not support the drivers that actually work?

ddtaylor• 7 years ago

For me KDE has offered the best Wayland experience. It's easy to switch between X or Wayland.

epx2• 7 years ago

I lost the faith, guess Joel law of not rewriting things was again upheld.

Svenstaro3• 7 years ago

This would be a good time to mention that sway doesn't support the nvidia proprietary driver [0]. The author recommends nouveau but this leaves out users that 1) have very modern GPUs 2) need vulkan 3) need CUDA 4) do heavy gaming. The author is also quite spiteful about it and I'm not sure I like that. There is even a flag "--my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia" [1]. Whether or not this is nvidia's fault I can't judge but there are usually two stories to every disagreement and so far at least I haven't heard nvidia's.

For me at least, this is a dealbreaker as I don't always get to choose the systems I get to use and I'd like to use the same config/wm everywhere if I can help it and if I sometimes have to alternate between i3 and sway then that won't do for me.

[0] https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki#nvidia-users [1] https://github.com/swaywm/sway/blob/3334d11adc926c0f6d86afc4...

sosodev• 7 years ago

It’s pretty clearly nvidias fault. Their proprietary driver doesn’t play well with wayland and they haven’t seemed to care.

Svenstaro3• 7 years ago

Well, they've developed their EGLStream approach and that probably cost some resources on their end so the question is why they decided to go that way at all. It seems like a waste to me to develop something nobody is going to use and I don't see the business reason for this particular development.

raverbashing• 7 years ago

So, I find this a bit weird

The nvidia driver doesn't play well with some basic apps, but it plays extremely well with games and other professional apps running on Linux (the whole reason for nvidia to put up a driver)?

michaelmrose11• 7 years ago

It leaves out users who do any meaningful gaming beyond tetris or Farmville in the same session.

You could always log in 2 graphical sessions and have one be running x and one sway I presume.

Svenstaro3• 7 years ago

I don't think so. A driver needs to control a device completely so you can't drive sway with nouveau and game on nvidia.

atq21193• 7 years ago

You could just use an AMD GPU on Linux. They've had (more than) competitive open source drivers for a few years now, and they play well with all the modern Linux desktop protocols.

d0ugal• 7 years ago

After trying Sway recently I read a bunch of github issues when debugging. I was disappointed to find many the comments toxic.

I’ll stick with i3 and probably look for something different in the future.

The examples that were easy to find again; https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/1207#issuecomment-2984...

https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/829#issuecomment-32683...

dijit• 7 years ago

idk, those examples seem justified. The second one was someone ressurecting an old issue with a request for config information that was _in the issue_.

RTFM is sometimes a valid response, and if you're having an issue finding the documentation then that's a bug.

dkersten3• 7 years ago

Ugh I also find that really offputting. Worse still is it’s the same guy behind SourceHut. Now I need to think about whether I want to continue to use that since if I need help the last thing I want to hear is RTFM. I always do but that doesn’t mean I don’t miss things and need a pointer :(

qplex2• 7 years ago

It's not just the Wayland/EGL stuff with Nvidia.

They've been called 'the worst company to work with' by the Linux kernel devs and are locking their GPUs down with signed firmware. Nouveau driver development is no longer possible for GM20x and newer GPUs because of this.

cies• 7 years ago

Hence...

--my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia

mortdeus3• 7 years ago

Maybe it's about time for Linus to break the fourth wall and flip them off again in the middle of of a university classroom?

I mean it worked wonders the first time, considering that's how we got the Nvidia proprietary driver to begin with.

throwaway89412• 7 years ago

that's how we got the Nvidia proprietary driver to begin with

Could you elaborate a bit? I don't buy nvidia hardware and don't follow them at all these days, but I very well remember using the proprietary driver back in 2008 or so. At the time, it seemed to me to be the only well supported high-performance graphics driver.

Teknoman117• 7 years ago

Well, this exact problem is why I won’t be buying an nvidia GPU the next time around. I’ll hang on to my 1080 Ti until AMD has something faster.

krageon3• 7 years ago

The author is also quite spiteful about it

Sadly this is more or less the norm and in my eyes the source of the large disconnect between people who believe in things like "linux desktop is for everyone" and actual average users. Nobody wants to read a long principled rant when they're looking to actually use their computer.

benhurmarcel3• 7 years ago

I agree this gives a bad image, but the average user isn't going to use Sway. It doesn't affect most Linux users by far.

canofbars• 7 years ago

No developer wants to deal with bug reports due to a buggy proprietary driver they have no ability to change.

chungus_khan• 7 years ago

The average user would probably appreciate a driver experience most similar to Mac OS, and such an experience is available on Linux for non-nvidia graphics hardware because other vendors cooperate with standards.

kabes• 7 years ago

As someone who has spend a lot of time working on graphics on linux, I can safely say this is nvidia's fault.

Leace3• 7 years ago

This would be a good time to mention that sway doesn't support the nvidia proprietary driver

It's rather nvidia proprietary driver that doesn't support standard Wayland protocols and thus doesn't work with Sway not the other way around.

See this for details: https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html

codedokode• 7 years ago

I have read this and I don't understand why Wayland developers don't want to write an adapter for NVidia's proprietary API. How is it worse than other APIs?

Also, porting proprietary drivers for Linux must be a pain because there is no driver API and you cannot just release a closed-source driver and forget about it, you have to open source it and maintain it forever. No wonder manufacturers don't want to bother with this.

izacus3• 7 years ago

The thing is - nVidia uses shared source for all of their drivers. This is why you always have the newest GPU feature support and performance on their Linux driver - it's the same codebase as it is for Windows and was for macOS.

Linux community on other hand wants nVidia to restructure their driver just to fit Linux model and essentially lose the source parity or publish the source completely. It's not an invalid request, because nVidias APIs don't really fit into Linux kernel design and userspace APIs. It's also not very likely to happen, especially due to poisonous behaviour of kernel maintainers towards nVidia, unwilligness to compromise and nVidias refusal to add more resources to refactor the driver.

BiteCode_dev• 7 years ago

Do you think Windows or MacOS make compromise on the way they code their kernel to accomodate nVidia ?

No, it's just a matter of economics.

eleitl2• 7 years ago

It's easier to switch to Radeon, and ROCm instead of CUDA.

microcolonel3• 7 years ago

The thing is - nVidia uses shared source for all of their drivers. This is why you always have the newest GPU feature support and performance on their Linux driver - it's the same codebase as it is for Windows and was for macOS.

The same is true of AMD, they share most of their display configuration code (in the kernel) and userspace code between a set of drivers on Windows, Linux, and macOS; they just also publish documentation and redistributable firmware, and maintain a second very-high-quality driver in Mesa, and due to the availability of documentation and that Mesa GL driver, there is a second Vulkan driver (RADV) which is also excellent.

aidenn0• 7 years ago

You can have an open source driver without mainlining it. This was what the whole discussion between the Linux devs and AMD was over the AMD HAL. If you want to maintain it yourself, you can do it however you want.

Linux has modules, and had very good support for out of tree modules.

brmgb• 7 years ago

It's also not very likely to happen, especially due to poisonous behaviour of kernel maintainers towards nVidia, unwilligness to compromise

Please, there is nothing to compromise about.

Nvidia doesn't want to work with the kernel community. They don't want to document how their driver works. They don't want people to look at how their driver works. They don't even want people to develop alternative drivers for their cards.

Nvidia earned 100% of the bad blood existing between them and the kernel community. They are even worse to work with than Qualcomm. Should give you an idea of how bad they are.

ac29• 7 years ago

The thing is - nVidia uses shared source for all of their drivers. This is why you always have the newest GPU feature support and performance on their Linux driver - it's the same codebase as it is for Windows and was for macOS.

Sure this is almost true, but not quite - there is obviously Linux specific code to support X11 and VDPAU that isnt in the Windows driver, for example. Of course, NVIDIA can decide to not support open drivers, or not support Wayland in their closed drivers, and as a consumer I can choose not to buy their products.

AnIdiotOnTheNet5• 7 years ago

Drew's stance on supporting EGLStreams is not unreasonable. It's a "standard" that only nVidia cares about and causes a lot of headache for pretty much everyone.

However, yes, the naming of that flag is a red flag. It tells me "this developer thinks that because you use their software they are entitled to tell you how to use your computer", which is an attitude I cannot abide.

ddevault2• 7 years ago

Maintainer of sway and wlroots here. The Nvidia proprietary driver does not support sway, not the other way around.

Their standard, EGLStreams, is only implemented by their proprietary drivers, so in order to test that codepath we'd have to use a famously broken and undebuggable driver, which we're not interested in - and make no mistake, we get our hands dirty in the drivers all the time. Their standard also has serious technical problems - lots of really important features simply are not possible to implement based on the proprietary driver. We can't export buffers to clients, overlay planes don't work, buffer presentation timings are impossible... Supporting this driver would be a massive overhaul and would probably make the good drivers worse.

Sway is a volunteer project, we are under no obligation to put in free work to support a GPU vendor which has no interest in playing nice. It's total bullshit that anyone would think to blame the small group of volunteers who have offered up thousands of hours of our free time to the community, for free, when the real blame lays in the hands of the multi-billion dollar company which refuses to pony up docs and cryptographically signs their firmwares. Everyone else plays ball and works with upstream on open source drivers.

_hudj• 7 years ago

I appreciate what you do truly, but It's also perfectly understandable that we consider it a major reason not to use your software and a perfectly fair criticism of the choices you have made. Your rebutal has not changed the main point of the original poster at all, If you want to ignore 70% or more of Linux users that is perfectly your right to do so, but it's also my obligation as a long time Linux user to recommend that people avoid your solution in favor of i3 on X11 or a superior solution such as gnome or kde which understands the basic problems the overwhelming majority of it's user base faces and is willing to work with them regardless of the hurdle.

alimbada• 7 years ago

All spite towards NVidia is completely deserved for many many reasons.

some1else• 7 years ago

I'm using the latest Ubuntu to run an art installation. So far I've been unable to launch GUI apps or take screenshots from a remote SSH terminal under Wayland. I had to resort to adding the commands to autostart & rebooting.

harry8• 7 years ago

What happened to Mir if Wayland is the only viable x11 alternative?

A cruel friend has suggested everything touched by Ubuntu billionaire founder Shuttleworth turns to manure but I think this isn't so helpful to understand why Mir seemingly died completely? Even GnuHurd hasn't died so dramatically..?

gmueckl• 7 years ago

Due to the huge PR fuckup that was the Mir announcement, they never gained much traction in the greater community. And a display stack needs a lot of community support across the whole ecosystem: kernel support, kernel drivers, user space drivers, widget libraries, applications etc... none of these parties were willing to support Mir in any way.

bitwize4• 7 years ago

Mir is now a Wayland compositor.

proverbialbunny• 7 years ago

One point that I totally forgot about, but is now painfully apparent now that I'm back on X11, is screentearing. On Wayland, screentearing is a thing of the past. Everything was so smooth, flicker-free, and tear-free. Now I need to mess around tweaking compositors to get a nice experience on X11 (i3)… So that's a big plus for Wayland.

This was my big hold up of using Linux as a whole. The screentearing is horrible, and coming from OSX where everything is as smooth as butter, it is an issue. But thankfully, Mint (which I'm on atm) allows the user to turn off vsync, and because I have an nvidia graphics card, I can turn on full-composition, and have my graphics card do vsync, and BAM! smooth as butter. It's an absolutely lovely and wonderful experience.

I don't know what it's like on the AMD or Intel side, but with hardware becoming more powerful and better supported, I don't think the future is Wayland, but instead defaulting to a higher level of gpu acceleration than the default Gnome settings we have today. This removes the latency, the page tearing, and responsiveness issues that X11 has Wayland was created to fix.

swalladge9• 7 years ago

I don't know what it's like on the AMD or Intel side

I recently switched to AMD - that, with a compositor (compton/picom), resulted in a super smooth tear-free experience in X for me.

My experiences with Intel integrated graphics has always poor performance, and bad screen tearing, sometimes screentearing even with compton running.

mmerlin2• 7 years ago

VAAPI support on Wayland is painful.

I've built a kiosk system that requires videos playing in Chrome/ium (cannot use Firefox because also need web-bluetooth support)

Our hardware is Intel NUCs and currently we are rolling these out on Windows OS, but would vastly prefer Linux but hitting so many roadblocks.

Trying to get Intel hardware accelerated GPU video decoding working in Chromium running on Wayland has wasted me days of time with no resolution yet (tried ClearLinux and CentOS 8 and Ubuntu 16).

With Wayland on Intel hardware, only VLC player can make use of VAAPI but Chromium doesn't seem possible, which results in 100% (Celeron) CPU usage trying to view a local video in the browser using video.js player.

I'm going to ditch Wayland (Gnome) and try Xfce on my next attempt.

ubercow13• 7 years ago

Are you sure you’re using a build of Chromium with VAAPI support patched in? Support for hardware video decoding in Firefox on Linux does not exist at all, and Chromium does not support it either except in a set of patches which are not included upstream.

mmerlin2• 7 years ago

yes I am using chromium-vaapi thanks.

[edit] I am about to try Arch Linux (or Manjaro) with Xfce to get Chromium-vaapi working

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Chromium#Hardware_video...

Whatitat90• 7 years ago

only VLC player can make use of VAAPI

And mpv with "hwdec=vaapi" in ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf

aktau• 7 years ago

I used to develop something like this (5-6 years ago). By far the best (most stable and performant) solution was the following:

  - Linux OS (ease of management, installation, introspectability).
  - Debian (somewhat stripped down), with custom packages.
  - Puppet for node management.
  - runit as a process manager.
  - Chromium to display videos/presentations.
  - (Custom) NPAPI based plugin (shim) that would load mplayer-vaapi (nowadays it would be mpv I guess) to display videos.

It worked because one could get the X window ID of the <video> element via NPAPI, which was then passed to mplayer so it could initialize/render within the sub-window.

One of the main benefits was that this avoided lots of resource leaks. The plugin pre-loaded mplayer processes and would shut them down after the video finished playing. Transitions were near to seamless (though required some HTML hacks to avoid white flashing).

On our Sandy Bridge machines (small form factor, fanless), we could display 16 1080p videos side-by-side for days and the machine would stay cool. I was so excited when I demonstrated this. The previous interation of this software used the regular <video> (software) implementation and could barely manage a single video without overheating.

Of course, NPAPI was deprecated a long time ago and removed from Chromium more than a year ago I think. The "replacement" (at the time) Pepper API AFAIK didn't allow access to the X window which is needed by mplayer. It was also not compatible between browsers. The plugin I made also worked on Firefox.

Nowadays access to the necessary resources is so walled off that you'd really need hardware acceleration to be native to the browser. There'd be hard-to-avoid resource leaks, so I'd schedule browser restarts at night-time. I've been out of the loop for a while so maybe there's better stuff. I remember monitoring the Chromium repository to see if they would implement hardware acceleration. I recall they had a branch where this was "working" on ChromeOS and supposedly you could force-enable this for general Linux. I tried building this once, but my machine at the time could barely handle building it (took many hours). Once the binary was built, it would crash at startup. I decided it was too much effort to replace a solution that was working perfectly.

mistaken• 7 years ago

I've tried wayland around half a year ago, but switched back. Wayland was surprisingly usable, but a couple of features were missing that are essential for me for example color management.

mortdeus3• 7 years ago

Ive been using wayland and sway for about 2 weeks now.

My experience is this.

If it's compiled to run for Wayland. Fan f-in tastic. No hiccups, no random screen tears or visual glitches of any kind. My logs are surprisingly sparse and when there is a configuration issue it's something trivial i overlooked and easily fixed.

Now here is the issue. When it comes to X-Wayland. Well lets just say that my opinion of X-wayland can be boiled down to two major criticisms.

1. It's turning into another X11. I've been trying to get apps that should just work out of the box when running on gtk like Google Chrome. And frankly looking at the bug reports and hack ass solutions to get things like Video Hardware Acceleration to function using X-Wayland... Nightmarish to say the least and glad it's not my job.

2. I think history has shown time and time again with debacles like Apple trying to retain backwards capability for powerpc MacOS or Windows ensuring your archaic MS-DOS application at work doesn't end up need an expensive update.... that any time you try to not throw things away that need to be thrown away, regardless of how sentimental they might be, you always end up a dead hoarder buried somewhere in your house where nobody can find you but they can sure as hell smell you; so they know you are in there somewhere... Where ever the hell that may be.

My attitude when it come's to the critics of Wayland is to say build something better or shut up and just not use it and keep letting X11 make the desktop experience on Linux suck on two fronts.

The first where nobody who is working on it actually knows how the entire thing works except maybe a handful of people. (all of whom are btw wayland core developers).

And the second, where things just don't work like they should out of the box on whichever desktop environment circumstance you may be in. When you have such a complicated API you end up with 50 million different ways 50 million different developers can write bugs into the 50 millionth reimplementation of your system.

There is a reason why Unix was the most ripped off and successful operating system in the world. It's not because it had X11...

naranha2• 7 years ago

Most xorg drivers have an option to run in tearfree mode.

Another dealbreaker for me (i did the i3 sway journey this summer) is the early stage of remote desktop. With x it is super easy to spin up a nice vncserver. I also miss setxkbmap, xrandr, import etc.

Wayland had some nice ideas and some not so useful ones. I'm waiting for something simple to replace xorg and wayland in the future.

trulyrandom2• 7 years ago

Tear free mode has never worked for me on multi-monitor setups. All Xorg drivers have this issue in my experience. Nvidia, AMD, Intel and even the modesetting driver. Wayland seems to magically fix it.

naranha2• 7 years ago

Strange, it seems to work fine for me on 2 FHD monitors at least. Maybe I just don't see it...

chris_wot• 7 years ago

I just cannot get Wayland work on a VirtualBox instance of Ubuntu, with the host being MacOS Catalina on an iMac Retina. The screen just keeps flickering.

I would love it if Wayland would work!

grandinj2• 7 years ago

The problem with Wayland is the extremely long tail of use-cases that it does not cover (yet).

(For example, I use VNC extensively and it has a lot of issues there still)

majewsky3• 7 years ago

After reading through this thread, my impression is more like VNC being the only use-case that is not covered enough yet. What are the other uncovered use-cases?

EDIT: Okay, VNC and xmodmap.

grandinj2• 7 years ago

I believe accessibility integration is still on the to-do list.

mouldysammich• 7 years ago

on the lack of clipboard history: https://github.com/sentriz/cliphist this exists and is pretty good.

coldtea• 7 years ago

The discussion in the post, the description of what a technical user had to do to switch, the problems encountered, the X11 problems mentioned (tearing, etc), and the suggestions and workarounds in the comments, should be mandatory reading before someone calls Linux "ready for the desktop".

For some reason Linux discussions are bimodal: in some everybody chimes how perfect everything works, and what peace they found switching to it. In others, like this one here, it's all about all kind of problems, hacky solutions, tinkering with system settings, and so on, and still having serious issues.

olau• 7 years ago

If you like tinkering, you can certainly do so, but there's a maintenance cost to customizations, and if you're not willing to shoulder them, then you should go with something closer to the stock install where the distribution will generally have sorted out things for you.

Perhaps this is the explanation you're looking for?

Actually, I think, and this is perhaps somewhat surprising, that many software developers don't pay terrible much attention to future maintenance costs.

bengalister• 7 years ago

Here are the issues that I still have (other than that it seems smoother):

- I could not make copy/paste work from a Wayland host to Wayland guest in a Qemu/KVM VM. It seems that the guest utilities like spice vagent only work for Xorg.

- I noticed that chrome/firefox are still relying on X and run in XWayland (at least on my arch setup).

- Fractional scaling make some applications blurry but it seems that they are the ones running in Xwayland.

lasftew• 7 years ago

Last time I tried to migrate to wayland on a hidpi device, scaling wayland 2x would scale all xwayland windows naively by doubling pixels. In particular, this made graphical emacs fonts blurry. Is there a way to fix that, i.e. letting wayland apps scale natively, but scale xwayland apps using the regular X dpi setting (Xft.dpi and the like)?

Emacs may be old and crufty, but unfortunately is my most often used graphical application.

MayeulC6• 7 years ago

NetworkManager GUI tools were strangely buggy with wayland. It wouldn't always crash, but sometimes the only way I could get it to connect to a wifi network was to quit sway, launch i3, connect with nm-applet in i3, then switch back to sway.

I haven't tried using something else than nmtui, TBH

Sometimes, Sway would crash while the screen was locked, leaving my previously secured computer at a logged-in tty

Ah! I've had some issues running SysRq+R, then Ctrl+C. The tty intreprets this as my wanting to quit sway :/

I was actually disappointed to find out that screensharing not working was preventing me from using Steam's in-home streaming (or Steam Remote Play, as it's now called). I hope sway can fix that for Xwayland apps at some point.

appleflaxen• 7 years ago

Wayland has xwayland, which somehow provides mini embedded X server(s) for GUI apps that don't support wayland yet. I kept this disabled when switching, going for the "pure" Wayland experience.

this seems like a really limiting decision in deciding how viable wayland is.

Are We Wayland Yet?

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