I think you don't mean that the Wayland protocol forces slowness but that the compositor you used was slow. The one I use is fast.
> And if you don't like the window decorations (say, they take up too much screen space) your choices are suck it up, or if you're lucky and willing to spend a bunch of time reconfigure every different toolkit your apps use.
No, there are protocols to negotiate whether an app has server side decoration or not and the compositor has the last say.
> basic stuff that worked fine on X11 doesn't work on wayland in the name of "security"
On only the core Wayland protocols you're absolutely correct, you can't even implement desktop shells with those. This means there must be extensions and there are 3 different classes: KDE, GNOME, wlroots, with tools for and incompatibility between each. The wlroots extensions are designed to be accepted into the standard and for wider Wayland acceptance they probably should be.
Screen sharing is still a particular issue that we are starting to see solved with the advent of Pipewire.
Wayland desktops are definitely usable. I've been happy with a wlroots based one (Wayfire) for a few months and KDE before that (from what I see GNOME has been perfect for a while).
One of the last standing real issues I'm facing is kerfuffle with Nvidia drivers, especially the ones paired with Intel GPUs, but I think (surprisingly) Nvidia are actually working on fixing that.
The compositor can implement that protocol and just respond with "this compositor doesn't support SSDs". GNOME does this, so all toolkits must use CSDs if they wanna work on the most popular Wayland compositor.
Incidentally, that's hell for all the simple libraries out there which just exist to get a GL window on the screen. GLFW, GLEW, SDL, etc. all have to implement CSDs now if they wanna work with Wayland. It also means that it's no longer feasible to just make a Linux application which uses the windowing system directly; everything must use a huge toolkit now.
EDIT: To clarify, I don't think this is an issue with Wayland, but with GNOME. There's no reason it couldn't have supported SSDs like every other Wayland compositor. But as it stands, it hurts the Wayland ecosystem.
The way GNOME is built it's not really possible architecturally for them to support SSDs in Wayland. Maybe that will change if they ever get around to redesigning mutter and gnome-shell, but I wouldn't wait for it.
Gnome could stop being unreasonably obstructionist, but that indeed seems unlikely.
That's just one example, but GNOME has a reputation for not respecting Linux desktop diversity for a reason.
But in any case I don't understand what is contentious about that. Some pieces are shared between GNOME and XFCE, but a lot of pieces are different and applications have always needed to choose. If they weren't trying to be different they wouldn't have made a separate desktop environment with their own separate libxfce libraries and components. (To GNOME's credit, they have gotten rid of most of the "libgnome" things since then, but now an application that wants to speak to certain GNOME-specific pieces is usually expected to use their private dbus protocols, things that XFCE would never implement anyway)
Incorrect. I am using a single example to illustrate a trend. A single example to illustrate what "unreasonably obstructionist" looks like. That particular incident made everybody roll their eyes but it hardly surprised anybody because GNOME has earned this reputation. Even back then nobody was particularly surprised by the GNOME arrogance, and I've not seen this change.
(Also, maybe I'm getting old but 10 years ago really isn't that long ago.)
If you're trying to illustrate the trend that GNOME and XFCE (and KDE, and LXQT, and MATE, and Budgie, and Mint...) all have different goals and ideas for how applications should behave then yes, I would say that much is obvious by now, and it has only gotten more obvious over the last few years. If you have a technical solution to this then I'd love to hear it, but aside from that I don't care to bicker about whose fault it is that your applications broke, because honestly no answer is going to pleasing for you to hear. Unless I'm mistaken then we aren't paying customers, this is all just random no-warranty open source and there's no support hotline that's going to care about what's broken.
I'm not trying to dispel any perceptions either, if you have a deep seated belief that GNOME (or XFCE, or anything really) are "not playing nice" because they removed features from upstream, there's nothing I can really say to you to change that view. If you want to challenge your own perceptions, I'd suggest you start developing a new open source desktop and application platform yourself over a period of many years just to see how much work it is, and how it's practically impossible to support everything that every app developer asks for when none of them are paying you a cent.
And please don't exaggerate, non-GTK applications do work in GNOME. Qt5 has native CSDs that will show up in GNOME. If the application is a game or something that doesn't support CSD then the experience is somewhat degraded but they still work. You can resize and move any window by holding Super and Left/Middle clicking. I won't pretend the situation is ideal but I also don't believe it's totally unusable or on a bad trajectory at the moment—like I said the other libraries are working on getting CSD support too.
I honestly don't understand what you're talking about here? If you want to get a window on the screen with OpenGL or Vulkan you don't implement anything special for Wayland.
In fact with Vulkan+Wayland, it's fairly easy to do it without any third-party dependencies, with OpenGL you'll probably need EGL which is a Khronos dependency. Here's some slightly outdated example code [1].
[1] https://gist.github.com/Miouyouyou/ca15af1c7f2696f66b0e01305...
Possibly this is a subtle distinction, but I do think it matters.
[1] https://github.com/wayland-project/wayland-protocols/blob/ma...
Go ahead and make a basic Wayland window in GNOME. Compare the user experience to KDE or Sway.
I was objecting to the fact that you said that windows did not have this capability without the server-side extensions, whereas I think they can be through configure. I did not dispute whether sway had server-side decorations or not.
wlroots performed very poorly on my i5-3427U with 4000 series iGPU. Very poorly. I ended up using neither X nor Wayland and instead having mpv render straight to the frame buffer (--vo=gpu --gpu-context=drm)
X.org, Firefox, and Xterm all work very well on it though. As do other apps like gschem and openscad.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Chrome-8...
Native applications these days have the option to use pipewire and xdg-desktop-portal for screen-sharing, and it doesn't matter whether they use that from a Wayland window or an Xwayland window. Both Firefox (under Wayland) and Chromium (under Xwayland) use this method today.
Unfortunately Teams does not use that method and instead calls an X function directly, which crashes, as I wrote in the sibling comment.
To be able to maximize vncviewer you do need a compositor running under Xephyr too. I picked i3 to be the most minimal. Again, i3 can be told to run in the Xephyr window by setting `DISPLAY`.
One caveat is that I still use Teams under Wayland to join calls for the audio, so this setup means I need two Teams instances to join the same call. This works for meetings but not for individual calls. Of course if you want to use the Xephyr'd Teams to do audio too there shouldn't be any problem; I just prefer having easy access to the Teams window to mute myself, etc instead of having to reach into the Xephyr window and unmaximize the vncviewer window.
People on the #sway IRC channel on Freenode suggested an alternative might be to use v4l2loopback to create a "camera" device that is sourced from the screen and then have Teams use it as a webcam, but I couldn't get v4l2 to work on my distro (it kept insisting my distro's ffmpeg couldn't encode video even though it could) so I didn't investigate further.
Anyway, a less convoluted setup might be to use the browser version of Teams in a browser where it allows you to screen-share, ie Chromium and not Firefox. IIRC when I tried it a few months ago people on the call said they could only see me broadcasting a black screen, but I know the browser is fine so it had to have been a Teams issue. Maybe it's fixed now.
Hopefully these applications will catch up soon. As another example, Zoom's native Electron application uses a GNOME-specific method of screen-sharing which doesn't work in non-GNOME DEs, but I've heard the browser version works fine.
- An unofficial Teams app (https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux) which works great - screen sharing works without problems, no crashing, and native notifications!.
- Use teams in qutebrowser: the dev (The-Compiler) added support for screensharing and it works great. Just like the unofficial app above, it also has native notifications, not the weird popup notifications of the official app.
as a counterpoint: my sway (Wayland) system is the first one I've ever had where I can watch youtube, or vlc/mpv at 60fps without flickering, dropping frames or tearing
I've used nvidia and radeon cards, plus intel onboard in this machine with X and none of them allowed all of the above
the display server also remains responsive even if one client starts going nuts
generally sway is considerably more responsive on the same system than the Xorg it replaced
I am very happy with it
Have you tried Picom?
If there’s a security problem and people are hacking around it, that’s an indication that the either those people have bad needs, or that the security model is flawed — but it’s not an indication that it’s wrong to attempt to secure that resource in the first place.
If a janitor needs the nuclear-missile launch codes to clean the missile silo, you’ve probably fucked something up — but that “something” isn’t the fact that the missile silo doors are code-locked. (Instead, it’s probably 1. the fact that you’re using the same credentials for physical missile access as you are for missile launch, and 2. the fact that your regular janitor is expected to clean the missile silo.)
In this case, the security model of Wayland is the same kind that Windows and Android already have: preventing “low-integrity” apps from screen-scraping “high-integrity” apps. In other words, preventing a random webpage running in Chrome from stealing your credit card details sitting visibly in a sibling text-editor window.
(Or, of course, preventing you from Twitch-streaming your playback of DRMed Netflix video. That’s a use-case that “needs supporting” too, given that the alternative is that type of video not playing back on the platform at all.)
I mean, if you're worried about security of apps from other apps, don't make it something in the apps' domain. Only allow Wayland to take the screenshots, but support that, make it easy, and you won't need to worry about either the security model or users complaining.
I mean, this is the way other OSes do it...to the best of my knowledge (which is certainly not comprehensive) neither Windows nor macOS allow arbitrary apps to screenshot arbitrary portions of the screen; that's handled by the OS itself.
The normal, non-edge-case use of the relevant screen-capturing API is for screen-sharing ala Zoom, or for remote desktop using RDP et al. These are use-cases where one app wants to see what's going on in other apps — exactly the thing you wouldn't want a malicious app to be able to do, but also exactly the thing that you do want these apps to be able to do.
I have to wonder if this is distribution dependent? On Manjaro my experience with Wayland has been fantastic. I cannot perceive any speed differences vs X.org; Wayland just flies.
It would be interesting to poll users and see just what factors are contributing to speed issues. GPU? CPU? Distribution? Wlroots vs Gnome? etc. Learning more about what users experience could be helpful in making Wayland better. Has anyone done this?
* Both Ubuntu and Arch based distro 40%
* Manjaro helped a lot 15%
* Both AMD and Intel 50%
* AMD GPU 40% and rising
* Open source GPU driver 43% (almost all of it AMD)
* 10% own VR Headset
[1] https://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?module=statistics&vi...
Presumably your compositor is using llvmpipe software rendering if it's so slow.
Unaccelerated Xorg using something like the vesa driver is slow too.
Xorg is absolutely usable on such machines with compositing disabled, wayland is not.
For this comparison to make any sense at all you need to state which Wayland compositor, Wayland is a protocol.
This is crazy when you think about it. I remember running an X server, Hummingbird I think it was called, on 386 and 486 machines connecting to Suns and it was fine, this was a perfectly acceptable way to work. Couple of xterms, an Emacs, xbiff for email, maybe some xeyes just for fun. Developing with Tcl/Tk and running those applications. Now we have several orders of magnitude more CPU, memory, network and Wayland doesn't even perform as well as that! My mind is truly boggled.
Let's be real here - if you're needing something to "just work" you're going to install X. Sorry Wayland, you're just not there yet.
I didn't downvote but it's because parents comment are anecdotal and not providing further data one might be able to engage/confirm/refute ... and therefore I learned nothing from reading it.
I'm also running a dual setup of i3/sway and the only reason why I still keep i3 around is screen-sharing in jitsi and similar. and my experience is that wayland has a lower use of CPU/memory than when running X (i3) but it's not why I prefer sway. (I'm using sway with "xwayland disable" so maybe this is where a lot of resources are saved). But the whole discussion is pointless without verifiable benchmarks.
Another example I like is the Nokia N900, which ran X on a phone no less, phone hardware from 2009, and it was pretty good there.
Part of the problem is surely software bloat over time on higher parts of the stack, rather than X itself. You couldn't get the 486 in the comment above to run recent gnome or a recent browser. But you could run software of the era well.
It works flawlessly if you have a reasonable amount of bandwidth and reasonable latency.
Sure, it doesn’t work over dial-up.
That's the point, X's claimed advantages here long since stopped existing, and nobody noticed because the "inferior" approach is perfectly fine with modern internet connectivity.
It's also rather complicated to set-up on the server side (xauth, magic cookie, etc).
waypipe, on the other hand, was a breeze to use, even though it's very young. I tried with Firefox and 500Mbps of upload capacity, it worked fine as long as the window wasn't too large.
you mean "ssh -Y user@host..."?
- X forwarding over SSH: this only requires changing X11Forwarding in OpenSSH sshd's config
- Plain X over network, which is secured with `xhost`, insecure, and needs transfering the magic cookie or other authentication information
So, not nearly as complex to setup as I recalled, though it's much simpler to run a nested wayland compositor (which waypipe does) than a X11 server (which xpra does). The difference between X11 and Wayland remote access thins when xpra is involved.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37157097/how-does-x11-au...
That should have been 500 kbps
That is entirely subjective no? Personally I think Motif is one of the pinnacles of GUI design.
Alas. That isn't the way the world has went, and it's extremely expensive to be weird.
And? Last time I checked, tunneling Wayland over a non-local SSH connection was slow as glass. Which is to say it didn't work at all.
Modern UIs could do with being a bit more like 1995. Most of my work is performance sensitive so the first thing that goes are all the desktop effects that try to barf pointless rainbows and glitter in my direction.
The old core protocol approach extensively used optimized graphic operations on the server side, with clients sending things like "draw me a rectangle/fill a rectangle/draw a bunch of lines" etc. - today you're going to get pretty big bitmap (especially with high dpi).
It's the same problem that mobile devices faced, and is related to a lot of issues on how android devices were "janky" (and related to the various hacks that Apple did to make sure your application wasn't capable of overstressing the early iPhones - cause just displaying basic UI was close to doing that.)
Engineering-wise it's really hard.
Microsoft reworked GPU driver model introducing WDDM. They invented a new user-facing API for that, introducing Direct3D 10. They did that in close collaboration with all 3 GPU vendors. They made user-mode components like desktop compositor itself, dwm.exe, and higher-level libraries to benefit from all that stuff. Initially they were optional things like WPF, Direct2D, DirectWrite, then with Win8 they introduced WinRT later rebranded to UWP. That one is no longer optional and is the only practical way to render "hello world, GUI edition" in modern Windows (possible to do with DirectWrite or legacy GDI but neither of them is practical).
The problem "render nice high-resolution graphics, fast" affects everything, the entire stack. Modern Linux has decent kernel infrastructure (DRM/KMS), but even so, remaining challenges are hard. Linux has less luck with user-facing GPU APIs (Vulkan is not yet universally available, neither is GLES3+ or OpenGL 4.3+). For some GPUs, quality of drivers is less than ideal. OS maintainers oppose stabilizing kernel ABI for drivers. There's no high level GPU-centric graphics libraries, I tried once with moderate success https://github.com/Const-me/Vrmac but that only supports one specific Debian Linux on one specific computer which happens to support GLES 3.1, and some important features are missing e.g. no gradient brushes or stroked pens.
I don't see any large party interested in making that happen. At least not for desktop Linux. Valve started to do relevant things when they thought Windows 10 is going to kill their Steam business model, then it became apparent Microsoft won't make Win10 into an iOS-style walled garden, and they no longer have much motivation.
It's great for the common desktop case.
It's not as great for some other cases in which Linux is the preferred platform (headless servers, repurposed old hardware, etc).
The problem isn't, of course, that there exists a solution for this on Linux. It's that that solution is being pushed as the only one that should be maintained—and thus, exist—going forward.
Also phones and tablets. Also embedded devices who have a GPU + LCD, I have personally shipped Linux firmware where I used NanoVG on top of DRM/KMS to render touch screen GUI. Also for kiosks, cars, smart watches and many other applications.
It’s great everywhere you have a high-resolution screen. And it’s mission-critical for ARM devices who don’t have CPU power to render that screen on CPU, at least not at 60Hz.
> headless servers
Why would you want a GUI there? Even Microsoft has console-only “core” editions of their Windows Server, since 2008. They made it because competition from Linux, who had that from the very beginning and was thus way more suitable for cloud use cases. It still is due to other reasons, but that’s another story.
> It's that that solution is being pushed as the only one that should be maintained—and thus, exist—going forward.
I get why some people would want the X to be maintained, but the thing is, it’s very expensive, and not fun.
Developing game console emulators is expensive, but fun and people do that in their free time with great results. Moving forward GPU-targeted Linux GUI is expensive, not too fun, but there’re commercial applications with healthy profit margins (automotive, embedded, etc) so people from these areas are working on that tech. Patching x.org for repurposed old hardware, on the other hand…
I work on a serious tool, specifically it’s CAM/CAE stuff. Despite Google, Amazon and MS sales people apply pressure to upper management (they want us to move to their clouds and offering gazillions of free compute credits), our software works on desktops and workstations, and I have reasons to believe it gonna stay this way. With recent progress of HPC-targeted CPUs, and steady downward trend of RAM prices, I believe our customers are happier running our software on their own computers, as opposed to someone else’s computers.
> We wouldn’t be rewriting everything in javascript if only we hadn’t forgotten how cool remote X was.
It was cool in the epoch of OpenGL 2. By the time Metal, Direct3D 12, and finally Vulkan arrived, it stopped being cool. Essentially, these APIs were designed to allow apps to saturate PCIe. You can’t transfer that bandwidth over any reasonable network.
Abstractions piled on top of abstractions. Something that might have been 5 function calls deep on either side with a carefully crafted packet in the middle is now 100s on each side.
We have a culture that prizes programmer happiness above all and this means everyone thinks "this is a mess, I'll put my own layer on top to make it nice, then work above that layer". Repeat 100 times and now you have processors literally 2000 times faster that struggle to even keep up with keypresses. But what noone wants to admit, is that it's messy because the problem domain is messy and sometimes you just have to live with the mess and get some real work done. The programmers of old understood this.
We played videogames on them. Does anybody remember Netrek, Xtanks, and a F16 vs MIG flight simulator which I can't remember the name of?
1) Wayland is really slow. I don't know if it's the compositing or what but it's unusable on lighter hardware that X ran fine on.
2) Widget toolkits handling window decoration is awful. Before the large number of toolkits just meant some controls were a little different but now basic behavior changes based on how programmers decided to build an app. And if you don't like the window decorations (say, they take up too much screen space) your choices are suck it up, or if you're lucky and willing to spend a bunch of time reconfigure every different toolkit your apps use.
3) basic stuff that worked fine on X11 doesn't work on wayland in the name of "security" (screenshots are a big one, there are extensions but isn't that the complaint about X? And if there's a security problem with something isn't hacking around with it because people need it a really strong indication that the idea is broken and probably making the situation worse?)