Which is one of the biggest problems with Wayland - there isn't just one Wayland but Gnome Wayland and KDE Wayland and wlroots-based Wayland and Gamescope Wayland. What functionality is available and working and using which API varies between all of these. This includes really basic things like window decorations.

This is different from X where the core functionality is common because everyone usees X.org. If all the Wayland compositors agreed on how thing should work then multiple implementations would be much less of a problem. But they don't or at lest take ages until all but one of the NIH protocol extensions get abandoned. Some of this protocol extension zoo is hidden by applications and toolkits implementing multiple variants but even if you no longer see it as an end user this is still a cost because time spent on dealing with Gnome or KDE bs is time not spent on more useful things.

I just did this switch and found it incredibly frustrating. Simple things like, "I would like to be able to log out and return to my greeter" don't just work like they do in x.org, and it is dependent on which compositor you use.

Anecdata but I've had a LOT of issues with kde & wayland, mainly due to SDDM.

That is not what I said, please don't misquote me. I said:

> [things] don't _just_ work like they do in x.org

Maybe it wasn't clear in my post above so let me clarify. A lot of thing "just work" in x.org and don't in wayland compositors. That is the complaint. That things which were easy are now hard.

No I don't. X11 works perfectly well for me. Wayland doesn't. Until I can migrate without issue, I'll be sticking with what works. If it gets to a point where Linux becomes unusable for me, I'll just move to an OS that works. Linux isn't the only game in town. Boo hoo.

No idea. I'm using Pop OS. So whatever that uses. Gnome is the DE, I think?

So you're being upvoted to the top by praising how flawless Wayland works on an OS that runs by default on X11? :))

Aww man, I hope there's a miscommunication somewhere, like you switched PopOS from X11 to Wayland, because otherwise this is HN comedy gold.

I wrote it up at https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/05/fix-screen-tearing-on-rotat...

Warning - you'll need to be at least a Level 17 Linux expert to understand the complexity involved.

> When I tried that with X I got lots of juddery tearing.

They said it pretty explicitly

And from my experience, there's distros that work better with X11 which is why they ship with it out of the box instead of Wayland(like Mint, EndeavourOS and Kubuntu), and ones that work better on Wayland out of the box, like Ubuntu and Fedora.

The entire reason there's time spent on dealing with Gnome vs KDE vs other bs is that everyone wants to build and customize their own desktop. But hey, it's OSS, freedom of choice and you're free to do it but I doubt window decorations will add very much to the overhead of all those different desktops.

[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...

[2] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...

[3] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...

Regarding the rest, I run an Nvidia laptop under Wayland since early 2022 and it's been working flawlessly. It's true that I'm using one of the cleanest, most forward thinking distros out there: Fedora. On Ubuntu it had way more issues than on Fedora, though.

I am not sure what happened in the Ubuntu case, but maybe you guys should try Alma, RHEL or CentOS?

If Pop works well enough, power to you! I just believe it's not a standard in the industry.

Wayland is probably much better than when I tried it in 2019 but all I remember is the 2019 experience. I think a lot of people are in the same boat.

There plenty of chances to make good non-first impressions though.

I used to check periodically whether Wayland works better than X for me, until it does one day, and I switched.

Not everybody hold on to the shadow of a bad first impression. It’s unfair when subject to another human being, and irrational when subject to a product.

Now X.org works fine for the majority of users, so for them (/raises hand) it is very hard to see the value proposition of switching to Wayland, especially if prior attempts were less than successful.

The fact that X11 development has stalled might be a plus for those that just want a stable system, are used to the limitations and don't need new features.

We will migrate eventually, likely at next distro upgrade, but there is no hurry.

Also doesn't help some people have been rather aggressively banging the Wayland drum for a long time now in a way that quite a few people find rather unpleasant. About half a year ago someone told me I "need" to switch to Wayland because programs will drop X11 support "any time now", all with a sense of glee. A quick search on https://hn.algolia.com with "Wayland by:username" showed they have been telling people that for about 7 or 8 years. Clearly that hasn't happened, so... And when they started banging this Wayland drum so aggressively there really WERE actual problems. Textbook "toxic fanboy" stuff. At some point people start filtering this sort of stuff out.

The first time I really looked in to Wayland was when "I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit" article took off, which starts by comparing "anti-Wayland activism" (something which doesn't really exist as an organised force) with "anti-vaxxers, flat earthers, 9/11 truthers", dismisses anything that disagrees as "lies", and is generally just a stupid rant with a number of fairly obvious factual inaccuracies. To say this rather put me off from Wayland would be an understatement.

I'm not holding you responsible for any of that of course, nor am I saying this is representative of people interested in Wayland as a whole, but at the same time ... I do think Wayland has burned a lot of goodwill with stuff like that, and that people voted that stupid insulting conspiratorial rant to the frontpage did no one any favours – it's not just a single person who wrote that article, it's the hundreds of people who voted on it, and some of whom defended it.

Not really; in the 90s, there were many X servers, each implementing a different set of extensions. Not just for other Unices, even for Linux, you could purchase a proprietary ones.

For XFree86, it was a monolith, that you had to compile for a specific chipset. Distributions shipped with many binaries, each intended for a specific graphic card and the installer symlinked the right one for you. It was only later, that XFree86 became modular and everyone converged on it.

Games though can be a nightmare, a recent nvidia driver seems to have created stuttering across all games using X to varying degrees. (downgrading the driver fixes the issue)

On ubuntu (Kubuntu really), and as a gamer, I've seen no issues with nVidia on X, both native Linux and Steam Proton games rock on.

I tried a bunch of different configs and was able to minimize them significantly, but they were still there.

I think you just need to be less lucky tbh.

Out of curiosity, what distro do you run. I'm running Wayland pretty seamlessly right now on Ubuntu: it's not a distro I would normally choose but I cycled through 3 others before "giving in" & going to Canonical. Hardware aside, there's also a lot to be said for sticking to the mainstream software-wise; though it's certainly an oddity for me to be so limited with software-choice in the Linux world.

This is on fresh installs of Ubuntu 22.04 and 23.10.

X11 with XFCE and i3 with picom works perfectly. It's blazing fast, has no tearing, never crashes, uses next to no resources, has no bugs and runs everything. I even use ddccontrol to change my external monitor's brightness.

Maybe that's what they're referring to?

(At this point, I'm looking for anything that's stable and still uses a normal init + x11, FWIW. I wouldn't consider Fedora, since it's owned by IBM, and Red Hat's new business model under them is "systematically violate the GPL and see if we can get away from it".)

The symptoms you describe almost sound like a dying 3D graphics card (or 3D graphics card with misconfigured drivers). I wonder if Wayland is requiring the 3D layer to do its compositing and other window engines don't?

They also accept dma-buf handles from clients, so if other software on the system does use gpu, the compositor has somehow to do its composition, and zero-copy if possible.

There's no such thing as "wayland". There are only various different waylands. A person can have an experience with X11, there's standard reference features all X have. But your experience with a single wayland doesn't really give you knowledge of how waylands work (or don't work).

Someone on HN pointed me at setting LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=true which makes it stable on my "radeon" driver GPUs at the cost of some performance (e.g. moving a window that is playing video causes the entire screen to freeze only while the window is moving). That should make it pretty stable with any KMS driver (though the nouveau module still crashes on me every 10 days of uptime or so; I've never been able to figure that one out).

I always point out that all of the issues I run into with Wayland on ATI/AMD GPUs also happen with hardware-compositing on X, but I can turn compositing on X off since it's optional, but, as the figures in TFA suggest, it's a core part of Wayland. I think one minor thing that has put so many people (or at least me) off of Wayland is how many issues are dismissed as "your GPU driver is broken." Well I can't write a GPU driver, and Xorg works better with a broken GPU driver than Wayland does.

My several years old laptop with an Intel P530 runs Wayland with zero issues, to the point where I can't tell you when I switched because it was zero drama. Maybe about a year ago? There was one feature in plasma that I needed to wait on before switching, but I don't even remember which one it was.

But every time Wayland is mentioned on HN, it's always orange display protocol bad.