DPI scaling and full screen playback without screen tearing are pretty huge upgrades.
You might argue that it’s not worth overhauling everything for that, but it’s undeniably a huge quality difference and was one of the major reasons I moved to wayland. Having a 1080p screen and a 4K screen “just work” has been my reality for a few years now - to the point where I get surprised when people talk about it as if it’s an issue.
I do have screen sharing issues though. With basically everything.
Tearing in full screen (video) playback was not an issue for decades, since X video extension and later OpenGL-based playback. Fullscreen video and 3D is easy, because it is one program that controls buffer flipping. It is windowed video/3D that always has tearing.
Either you're being hyperbolic about the length of time or this is simply untrue.
I have been using Wayland full time for 3 years, and 3 years ago the main driver of me switching was screen tearing.
I was heavily invested in the X11 ecosystem with highly customised fontconfig's, so this was quite painful for me at the time and I definitely tried to solve the screen tearing issue. Part of it was that Linux did not have hardware acceleration in browsers, which is where I spent most of my time (especially for video playback, such as YouTube).
So those extensions didn't help, and when you get used to the buttery smooth scrolling experience of MacOS and iOS it feels quite janky going back to linux- especially when you've invested so much into making it a more beautiful experience for yourself.
I am not hyperbolic, X11 has this Xv API, video players generally use it since early 2000s (as that was only reasonable way to even scale video to fullscreen with contemporary computers). Browsers - well, that is a different issue. I do not think Firefox uses it and have no idea about Chromium.
> Part of it was that Linux did not have hardware acceleration in browsers, which is where I spent most of my time (especially for video playback, such as YouTube).
Linux also have hardware decoding acceleration API (even multiple ones - historic XvMC, NVidia-specific VDPAU and current mainstream VA-API), their support in software is more spotty than basic Xv API (AFAIK MPlayer implemented VDPAU but not VA-API, MPV required for some time explicit option to use VA-API and i have no idea about VLC). Firefox got support just recently: https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2021/08/enable-hardware...
I would generally suggest to view web video such as YouTube in MPV video player using its youtube-dl integration. It is much better experience than playing video in Firefox.
I’m talking about more than video though. I’m talking about scrolling text. You can see visible lines when you have a large display and scroll a page.
Anyway. It doesn’t matter. You want to run X11 then that’s fine, but I’m quite happy with wayland and I’m happy to leave the weird configuration and cacophony of hacks behind.
I really like what the Wayland people are trying to achieve, I just don't agree with their methodology, and their results have spoken for themselves.
Edit: I never had screen tearing on video.
Hot keys are handled by the compositor. Global ones especially. (Apps stealing keystrokes? Sounds like an anti feature)
Point stands. But I’d rather we work on improving things than just living with X11- it’s like continually adapting token ring networks instead of embracing star topology. It’s fundamentally difficult or impossible to fix.
The wayland authors (who are former X11 devs) talked about this extensively.
I use a widget that I can scroll my mouse to change the color, does it have it? It doesn't look like it does.
>Hot keys are handled by the compositor.
Yes I know, I don't like it, I have hotkeys setup in a way that I like, and I don't want to redo it all, I even tried.
>Global ones especially. (Apps stealing keystrokes? Sounds like an anti feature)
Framing app hotkeys as theft of my input is like saying that my window I am tying in is stealing my keystrokes. If you consider breaking userspace as an benefit, I am confused. It is an optional feature I turned on myself, and you call it keystroke theft, when it was ME that enabled it. Linus Torvald's one rule is that userspace should never be broken. This breaks userspace.
> It’s fundamentally difficult or impossible to fix.
Or its not broken.
>The wayland authors (who are former X11 devs) talked about this extensively.
They are still improving it like btrfs, but I would rather stick to something that just works, and so far it has more problems, anti features, needs configuration to be functional, and for what benefit? No battery benefits, no extra functionality in fact less features, breaks workflow, and smoother animations. I also forgot to mention it breaks some of my terminal emulators, every time I try it I have a horrible experience, it breaks things that matter to me, and still does for most people.
Even if its "good enough" it will take a long time for more application support, unless I hate myself and resign myself to no configuration GNOME.
Sounds like that right until the user tries to press Alt Tab on a full-screen VNC or VM client.
It is jarring to need to remember different keystrokes by the compositor if you use more than one computer, especially if they're not all linux. Why do you think its worth all this pain?
Every "feature" of wayland sounds like a regression. I hope someone makes x.org in rust
Which I could agree with you- I dislike change too, I fight systemd because I don’t see it benefiting me.
But this is a bit silly, you keep coming up with rotating surface level complaints but the main reason X11 was replaced was because it was architecturally broken not because they wanted to solve specific issues.
That there is no great community around wayland is because of naysayers like yourself. Things are easier to solve than they used to be but people are doing everything they can to avoid using wayland.
Things like nvidia forcing people to use X11 have caused distro maintainers to do double the work to maintain backwards compatibility; which means it hasn’t had as much love as X11 over the years either.
Normally I would take the stance of “what ever works” but you sound like you’ll do anything to justify not switching. Arguing about creature comforts or that your compositor has more control over your UX than some random program is an absolutely surface level argument when we’re talking about fundamental and required architecture changes for us to go forward with desktop Linux.
That you don’t understand how dire the situation was becoming is quite telling. It’s not worse, it just doesn’t have the community stuff behind it yet, and the reason is the mentality you have.
I would gladly hop in a better car, if the newer car has less features and is worst, I will not.
>That there is no great community around wayland is because of naysayers like yourself. Things are easier to solve than they used to be but people are doing everything they can to avoid using wayland.
Rust has plenty of naysayers, as does pipewire. People hate Apple stuff with a passion, but they are all good. Wayland works on GNOME, which is a fact. I even said if its "good enough" it will take a long time for more application support, unless I hate myself and resign myself to no configuration GNOME. The reason it has no community is because it sucks.
>Normally I would take the stance of “what ever works” but you sound like you’ll do anything to justify not switching. Arguing about creature comforts or that your compositor has more control over your UX than some random program is an absolutely surface level argument when we’re talking about fundamental and required architecture changes for us to go forward with desktop Linux.
You don't get to decide what the direction of desktop linux is, or what people want to do with their open source software. I could say that the dolphin is the stupidest animal in the world, and nobody would take me seriously. Wayland sucks, if tomorrow x.org didn't exist, I would not continue to use linux. There is no benefit for most users in this thread. I even said I used it on a touch device to get rotation working on my touch tablet, but you ignored that because I have a different preference than you. Every "feature" of wayland sounds like a regression if doublespeaking as regression in features is going forward.
>That you don’t understand how dire the situation was becoming is quite telling. It’s not worse, it just doesn’t have the community stuff behind it yet, and the reason is the mentality you have.
There is a new maintainer, I will continue to use the best tools for myself, which will not be wayland for any non touch computer. Wayland design is... good It's taken over a decade to add a fraction of x.org features, random plugins needed to make it imitate x11, and with less features it still crashes? If it such a required architeture change, why is it making everything worst? What does forward even mean, less features with more crashes? No thanks. If it was so great why does it still suck compared to the so called dire x.org?
>It’s not worse, it just doesn’t have the community stuff behind it yet, and the reason is the mentality you have.
Do you love broken userspace? That's great, choose a compositor that breaks your userspace? My mentality of having robust software is the opposite. Suprise! Nobody wants to use crappier software with less features despite the dire "problems" of x.org, they made a rational choice, which bothers you so much. Why does it matter what I run? You look down on everyone's problem as invalid, calls our mentality wrong, and can't even define what forward is, or why anyone cares, because nothing you say is a benefit matters. Don't be suprised if wayland never gets used or doesn't ever gain traction, other half baked projects like btrfs that are inferior to even older software are not going to be used over better alternatives.
You are dishonest about screen tearing being an issue, and calling my custom hotkeys "stealing keystrokes", saying its fundamentally broken when wayland breaks more things, and instead of the project acknowledging user needs, they ignore it and somehow wonder why nobody want to use it.
I'll end by saying wayland is fundamentally broken, it has less features, no gains to non graphics or productivity, no benefits and more drawbacks to most users, the wonderful future of the "forward thinking" design that strips useful features and ignores what people like about x.org is beneficial to everyone. No, it is inferior in every way except for gyroscope screen rotation and slightly smoother movements, something that is compartively worthless to the suite of useful x.org features.
The ecosystem around bicycles is much better than the ecosystem around trucks.
You are tasked with getting to and from work every day, in the beginning it's just you who travels, but over time you have more and more things to carry with you- shovels and such.
You buy a trailer.
You find that with your trailer it's more difficult to see what is coming up behind you, so you buy side mirrors.
You find that in the cold it's difficult to keep your hands warm, so you buy hand warmers, and lights on a dynamo.
Eventually your bike is quite heavy, you carry much and requires much more effort to operate.
But it has a lot of "features".
This is the sunk cost fallacy in action.
> Do you love broken userspace? That's great, choose a compositor that breaks your userspace? My mentality of having robust software is the opposite. Suprise!
My userspace is absolutely not broken. Arguably it's less broken than yours but you've patched around the issues or are blind to them.
Sway crashes for me less often than Xorg did; but I understand that Xorg and Wayland are not the same, and that took some getting used to, and indeed it was uncomfortable in the beginning.
You are passionately arguing from a place of absolute ignorance, I have used both. I have used both professionally. I have used both for years.
Yes, I replaced a lot of my normal programs.
Yes, Wayland has issues, many of which could have been addressed if people weren't conservative. Not that I begrudge them for it, I believe choice is good.
But, it's absolutely ignorant to claim that X11 has features. X11 does not have features, it has people willing to hack on it and an architecture that allows disgusting and ugly hacks to work.
You might like that, I absolutely despise it- because malicious software exists (and I use it), things like Zoom which if given the opportunity would love to run as root and capture all my keystrokes.
Things like Teams which on Android devices managed to block 911 calls.
Things like Chrome which is attempting to be my userland.
Ultimately, I trust my windowing system more than I trust random programs I may run to bind my hotkeys.
> I'll end by saying wayland is fundamentally broken.
Wayland is not "fundamentally broken" it's been working for me professionally for years. The "features" you cite so often are non-features "my cursor can change color!" which are not inherent in x.org at all.
Wayland "breaks" things that are designed to work exclusively with X11. Much like how graphics cards "break things" that are designed to work on a serial console.
I must conclude that you're a troll. Honestly.
Them the developers should do something about it, instead of calling a comparatively crippled compositor complete. If choice is good, respect everyone who says x.org is better, instead of trying to scare drums or use vague words like “progress”. Progress towards what? Lower Linux satisfaction?
If you think I’m a troll because I refuse to lie about how the useless wayland is actually good and don’t engage in an encho chamber of praise, you need to listen to complaints and respect opinions of others. Your analogy is of it being a truck instead of a bike, it’s hard to take you seriously unless you’re trolling, that is unless it’s a plastic toy truck. You bring up nonexistent threats like Android not calling 911, and demonstrate it’s being a no threat, and an irrelevant threat.
Don’t joyfully call everyone to switch from fine software and enjoy their new crippled and child proof space progress and applause the broken userspace for the sake of scaling, slightly smoother movements and colored cursors. Respect other people who don’t like the same thing you do instead of calling them wrong. You wouldn’t do this to a sexual preference, not Thor compositor.
That you can't steal keystrokes from other programs?
Screensharing? (which is an adoption issue for clients, not a "problem" with Wayland)
Your X11 programs (not hacks) already work as if they were X11 with Xwayland, but it has the same drawbacks as running it natively with X11. (with a small bonus that it's rootless... unlike X11 which is assuredly not rootless by default).
Do you honestly believe that wayland developers should reimplement all software that has leveraged and abused the X11 system? Seems asinine, what are your _real needs_ that Wayland isn't providing support for?
Yes. Linus Torvalds says never break userspace.
> Seems asinine,
You are disrespectful of anyone’s valid issues, you are hard to take seriously as more of a caricature.
>what are your _real needs_ that Wayland isn't providing support for?
I told you before several times, I’m not going to repeat myself again.
> Do you honestly believe that wayland developers should reimplement all software that has leveraged and abused the X11 system?
Most definitely not, but what they should do is just to _allow_ the continued existence of all the software which has leveraged X11 in their garden, if the garden is to have any kind of success. And not as 2nd grade citizens.
It might look like extensibility but it’s somewhat akin to your ISP having the ability to insert random HTML on a plaintext http stream.
Of course, this is “extensible”, but it’s potentially dangerous.
Your argument is that _your router_ is doing the same thing, adding HTML and JS elements to every web page to, idk, give you dark mode.
It doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
Now, I can agree that it feels jarring to lose these things- but we should be looking to solve them the right ways.
And the problem with "it's potentially dangerous" is that you can use it as justification for removing any feature, so much that it doesn't really have any meaning left.
X11 definitely wasn’t designed for this. It’s a byproduct of its (poor) design and the fact you can directly interfere with the renderer.
It’s the same as the c64 not protecting memory addresses so you can poke memory to fuck with the video output, which people did, but the c64 is not a good computing platform in the modern age almost because of this.
You might be better served by actually looking how X11 works, with quirks and what it was originally designed for, I promise you that your hair will stand on end.
I should note: “potentially dangerous” is seriously downplaying a genuine problem linux had with keyloggers- it just wasn’t overly common because Linux is not a big enough platform for trojans to target, but it was known to be easy. Hugely easy.
You are confusing things. Where can you "interfere" with the renderer? What you can do is _replace_ the renderer. This is one extension point Wayland _forces_ on you, so what is your complain exactly?
Manipulating things around using the ways provided for things to be manipulated is not a quirk. The server allows other processes to render to windows they don't own because this is how you implement decorations and the like. The server allows you to read the contents of windows you don't own because this is how you implement screen grabbers and color pickers. The server allows any two processes connected to it to communicate in any way because that is how clipboards and things like that are implemented. This is all by design.
And that is the problem. If all of this was still possible with Wayland (WITHOUT having to patch the compositor), I'm certain there won't be as many complains.
But no; they tried to fix "security" (for some definition of security) at the same time and thus had to spend a decade to see any hint of adoption. And face a lot of resistance.
At least fetch the UNIX haters handbook if you want to see a minimally valid criticism to X...
> but it was known to be easy. Hugely easy.
Still is. Wayland or not. Therefore: Yes, I will downplay this issue.
You would need an even more radical design to make it not trivial on Linux (e.g. passing individual input device descriptors to the process owning the focused window or the like, and then make each process a different user or god knows). Basically: something like Qubes (which used to do it with X11). And then face all the "it's not working!" complains because you break even more things.
The downside is that once a command is bound it cannot be reused: so if I wanted to have OBS and simplescreenrecorder that both use “meta+S” to start recording then that’s not possible.
The biggest issue I have with wayland is that OBS and screen recording simply do not work, I’m not sure if there are effective workarounds but a consequence of one program not being allowed to spy on another program is that you can’t record the screen.
That is not true (at least in sway). You need the xdg-desktop-portal-wlr installed and running for it. Gnome and Plasma have similar desktop portal utilities, but I'm not sure they fully support the screen sharing wayland extension.
This was also a showstopper for me. Now, however, in Debian Sid `redshift -m wayland` works fine (although Gnome also has its own
> my global hotkeys,
They can be configured in your compositor. For those used to using i3, Sway makes this easy by being mostly compatible.
Pretty annoying to do this, too bad there's no easy import. A lot of effort for a lot of loss of functionality for smoother animations. Nice to know that redshift is updated thought!
Has the font rendering improved at all? My eyes can't handle some of the ugliness and my skill with code ends where the browser closes, so I've never tried to fix it.
If you have Intel or AMD graphics I think you will be happy with Wayland and Linux.
Nvidia had a politics problem for a long time that is being resolved but the resolution is still on the cutting edge so I would wait a while. XWindows is generally fine.
Dual-GPU laptops with an integrated as well as a discrete GPU seem to still be buggy. Best bet is probably to not use the discrete GPU or plan for the occasional driver update kerfluffle. AMD again is better here.
Yes and no. The Linux default are bad because people lack some common taste in font rendering. The default fonts on most distros are pretty awful. Here's my recipe for the best font rendering setup on Linux, which in my eyes is as close as macOS (tested on Fedora 35):
* Have a high DPI screen at 2x scaling
* With a custom fontconfig, force the default sans, serif and mono to the Google Noto fonts. DejaVu and Bitstream are ugly. Don't use them.
* Copy and install the ttf files from your closest C:\Windows\Fonts directory. Everyone on the internet uses Windows fonts. HN and Old Reddit use Verdana.
* And the best for last: disable font hinting. Modern distros default to slight hinting, which is still too much hinting and distorts the font. MacOS doesn't apply any hinting.
Font rendering is fine by my eyes, but apparently it has gotten significantly worse on GNOME 40/GTK4[0]. On KDE it's quite nice these days though, so I guess you should just give it another whirl and see for yourself.
This is not true. It's caused by drawing out sync with the vblank cycle. It has nothing do with specific hardware. Older versions of X11 didn't even allow drawing to be synced to vblank (the start of the raster retrace).
Some distributions look like Ubuntu look pretty good out of the box others look like garbage out of the box. Fedora used to be notoriously ugly out of the box in part because it was wary of implementing patent encumbered techniques. It's probably improved since. Notably firefox when rendering websites with some common on windows fonts in systems without many fonts installed may make some interesting and crappy choices insofar as substitution. If you install common MS fonts or tell firefox that websites aren't allowed to do their own thing you can avoid firefox raining on your font rendering parade.
If you want good looking fonts and don't like how it looks out of the box you mostly want to google good looking fonts in "foo" where foo is your distribution even though most advice is universal between distributions then consider installing some decent fonts.
For example in void linux following this gets good results.
https://blog.brunomiguel.net/geekices/how-to-get-good-font-r...
No wizardry involved just rote direction following.
For void the google-fronts-ttf provides an absolute ton of fonts in ubuntu ttf-mscorefonts-installer provides some common ms oriented fonts. Nerd fonts provides a lot of interesting fonts. https://www.nerdfonts.com/ which you can install manually or via a distro package if there is one for you. They provide many fonts patched with lots of additional symbols.
I also happen to think San Francisco from Apple looks nice. If you use the font patcher from nerd fonts you can have Apple font's on your Linux Desktop.
ET-Book is interesting
https://github.com/edwardtufte/et-book
This Emacser made a font out of her handwriting with instructions on how it was done so you too can type like you write for good or ill.
https://github.com/sachac/sachac-hand/
Personally I prefer the font rendering on Linux to Windows and have for many years.
If you use GNOME and wayland I never once felt I had an issue, but GNOME is more limiting for configuration than OSX.
> You can also recolor any part of a widget however you like
And they show an example of a gradient background and stuff like that.
And I mean, for most people, a theme is just coloring things how they like and setting the font and visual things. While full-blown stylesheets are very cool, and I think still “allowed,” you can’t really officially support that in a compatible way. You have to set an API so that everything can be consistent.
For example, it can currently be a huge pain to change the accent color on PopOS away from orange because you can’t just set a variable somewhere. It seems like the new system will improve that.
Either way, leaps and bounds ahead of macOS
As for font scaling, I just choose a big enough font or default zoom level in the browsers, VTE's and text editors I use, looks perfect.
And display scaling != font scaling. You don't fix scaling by making your fonts bigger, everything, including UI has to scale.
it's a monument on how things should be done, without breaking anyone's workflow.
edit: I really want to use Wayland, it is so much better for so many things, it looks better, font rendering is better, scaling is better, but it introduces new bugs that really are a no-go in my day to day usage, for example sometimes copy&paste shortcuts don't work.
I'm sure it's the fact that I use KDE and support is not top notch, but I have no such problems on X.org.
I would really love to see Wayland succeed, but how long is it gonna take?
And then the small improvements started trickling in, such as absolute volume support in headsets. The stupid PA limitation of only being able to configure the 1st ALSA mixer element. And so on and so forth.
For me it was mainly this!
My Bluetooth headphones kept disconnecting randomly and the microphone never worked properly, no matter how many conf tweaks I tried.
I installed pipewire in anger, expecting nothing and it magically solved every issue.
Yes, my headphones are not expensive devices, but looks like that wasn't the problem, pulseaudio was!
I sent them some money out of happiness and now I am lobbying for it at work.
Your complaint is the opposite. You're complaining that Wayland is trying to do one thing & do it well instead of trying to be a kitchen sink.
X11 is the antithesis of Unix philosophy. It tries to do a hundred unrelated things (compositing, clipboard, drawing, input, etc...)
> Admittedly, there's not an elegant solution to any of this. However, in this specific example, I think the best course of action would have been to just outright plagiarize Apple's Quartz.
Or Windows' DWM. Or Android's SurfaceFlinger.
Android being Apache 2 would have been the more obvious one to take code/design from in this case, but desktop Linux seems to have a general disdain for anything coming from Android.
Well, curiously, X11 has no compositor, no definition of clipboard, and a drawing API that no one uses. It seems to me that precisely it is not trying to do any of these things, but rather providing the mechanism by which some other process (or processes) can do these things.
E.g. if tomorrow I want to implement a toolkit that wants to have 3 clipboards, I can; even without changing the server or the compositor process.
And it works. Do you avoid desktop environments since they do everything, emacs which might as well be an OS, or music players that can also rename music too? Is a messenger app something you will never use if you can call or send music or pictures on it? My file manager can rename files, show pictures, rename them, and even open compressed files. Why is the Unix philosophy relevant when most linux systems use systemd?
Do you even follow "Unix philosophy"? Installing a bunch of plugins to make wayland do 100 unrelated things is the same result.
That's what really turned me off Gnome 3, they basically threw away an entire ecosystem of third party apps.
MATE was able to pick of some of that, but especially when it comes to third party support, that level was never reached.
Not really, aside from input (which is also optional) all of what you mentioned are provided by separate applications, not X itself - these just work on top of X.
But in general the Unix philosophy isn't some sort of dogma and it never really was. It is more of a guideline and it can be ignored whenever that makes sense - e.g. the Linux kernel itself.
Also if there is any philosophy that X11 has is its "mechanism over policy" one, which is also why it has lasted for so long: it gives you the mechanism to do things but doesn't enforce any specific way to use these things and instead leaves things up to the clients. This is also why you can use a TON of different environments and UI approaches on the same X server, including stuff that the original X designers wouldn't even imagine.
Wayland is also missing that one cool feature that makes people say: yes, I want that; I need that. And I KNOW I don't want Gnome 3.
Its new! That's good enough for a lot of adopters. Gamers (on linux lol) might care about graphics. Wayland is however feature rich in having more people see it as a less functional software and when I tried it, I appreciated x.org more and more.
Edit: Gnome and wayland give slow mouse movements and can crash if you move mouse too fast.
It has one killer and necessary feature. It's smooth. Have you tried resizing a window under X11 and doing it under Wayland? I have hated those half drawn rectangles caused by X and the app not being synchronized for DECADES. In 2021 I can have a GUI that's almost as smooth as Windows 7 was.
I feel the rift in the Linux world grows bigger between the conservatives (fuck systemd! X11 was alright!) and the progressives (can I have HDR, fractional scaling, and hardware video acceleration on YouTube, please?). I want my computer to be modern and slick and fluid, I'm vain like that.
Yes, Wayland is still a beta, but it's here to stay, like systemd, like flatpak, like pipewire. There was no status quo before, X11 was a beta and crappy in other ways. Not suited for modern hardware. Deal with it. The xorg repo is there for anybody that thinks they can do better than Wayland. The reason why xorg had to be abandoned is a Google search away.
I have fractional DPI scaling in x.org, I just don't use it since undocking keeps it on that on my small screen.
I use systemd, pipewire, x.org, and never follow unix philosophy with my desktop environment not because I am some sort of political standard you set arbitrarily, I just use stuff that just works, like most computer users.
> The reason why xorg had to be abandoned is a Google search away.
Its mostly because you can't make it more perfect, but they did!
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/10/xorg-2110-sees-a-relea...
>After three years without a full release, X.Org 21.1.0 has finally landed with new features and a lot of bug fixes. While the next-generation for all Linux systems will eventually be Wayland, plenty still default to X.Org.
I really dislike how you turn linux into politics, announce it isn't suitable for modern hardware with zero reason, saying x11 (actually x.org was crappy as if the whole thread isn't talking about how much crappier wayland is) and deal with it. Leave your feelings at home.
I have tried these as addons, and they basically suck, and its complex to change them, and for what benefit? Some smoother graphics? I am on Linux, that is the least important thing. Basically if it doesn't give me real world benefits, I am unlikely to want to switch, and if it gives me more issues and less features for things that matter and isn't a drop in replacement it might as well be a scooter to my car.
This really sums up this side of the argument for me (though it doesn't address the security features of Wayland). If I want to watch an ultra high definition movie, or play a game, rebooting to windows is a miniscule price. Almost all of my work is done on Linux, and I value it because everything can be made to work, usually with little effort. Wayland adds some severe overhead to that work.
For anyone who wants a functional desktop on any DE, x.org is the best, and cannot be replaced currently by wayland in features or software compatibility.
So you're saying let's not improve the Linux desktop because one can just reboot into Windows to do desktop things? What even is that argument?
I want to have a nice desktop on Linux, thank you very much.
- Cursor rapidly changing state for no discernible reason
- Missed inputs, particularly in xWayland
- Drawing issues, where portions of one window would appear and the rest would fail to draw entirely
- Electron apps were hit-or-miss out of the box, but I got most of them working
- Display flickering and seriously messed-up color correction in xWayland applications, rendering a handful of games and apps just completely unusable
It's been a few months since I've given it a run again, but I'm not exactly excited to spend a day figuring out how my display manager functions when x11 works well enough for my uses. Maybe once the KDE bugs get ironed out properly I'll give it another pass.
Which 4?
Also, it's not fully ready for the pro-audio side at this point.
Now, I can anticipate a number of responses to this. Firstly, a lot of people will (correctly) point out that x11 isn't a very good window server, and doesn't account for things like compositing, security or proper window management. Fair enough, they're all valid complaints. Wayland's solution to the dog bite seems to be pulling the teeth off the dog though, and I don't really agree with a lot of the design philosophy that went into making it. It reminds me of the recent GNOME releases, where their solution to inconsistent user theming and poor extension support was just to remove both features altogether. The trap that a lot of modern Linux developers seem to fall into is fragmenting their userbase under the guise of "finally fixing" some pain point or bug, and cutting off the users who disagree with them instead of Doing One Thing, and Doing It Well. Everyone is big-picture these days, wanting to take giant leaps for the Linux desktop experience without really considering how extensible or feature-complete their program is, and slamming the "f*ck it, ship it" button before it's ready.
Admittedly, there's not an elegant solution to any of this. However, in this specific example, I think the best course of action would have been to just outright plagiarize Apple's Quartz. The development cycle for Wayland has been painful to say the least, and a lot of it came from wildly unnecessary breaking changes, vendor apprehension and arguments about ideology that really shouldn't have wasted our time in the first place. Now that it's "ready", there's a couple hundred asterisks following every feature, and the experience is generally shaky enough to keep me fearful of God and contented with x11, no matter how bad it is.
Edit: Quick shoutout to PipeWire while I'm here, for actually creating a crowd-pleasing solution where nobody had to be thrown under the bus. They were given a herculean task of unifying 4 different audio standards, and they shipped it when it was ready instead of letting it languish in development hell. The result was fantastic, and distro uptake was almost immediate. If more projects were like PW, we wouldn't be here having this conversation right now.