I’ve been on Wayland for the past two years exclusively (Nvidia).
I thought it was okay for the most part but then I had to switch to an X session recently. The experience felt about the same. Out of curiosity, I played a couple of games and realized they worked much better. Steam doesn’t go nuts either.
Made me think maybe people aren’t actually adopting it that aggressively despite the constant coverage in the community. And that maybe I should just go back.
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I’ll adopt it when it’s ready.
For NVIDIA users, that’s the right answer. For AMD users, it’s already ready. No problems here (6700xt)
It’s not just about hardware compatibility. It has to be compatible with existing workflows, and it’s currently very limiting.
Which workflows? Asking because I’d like to experiment with some edge case stuff.
I’m running KDE with wayland on multiple different vintage machines with AMD and intel graphics and it would take alot for me to go back to the depressing old mess that was X.
The biggest improvement in recent times was absolutely pulling out all my Nvidia cards and putting in second hand Radeon cards, but switching to wayland fixed all the dumb interactions between VRR ( and HDR ) capable monitors of mixed refresh rates.
Even the little NUC that drives the three 4k TV’s for the security cameras at work is a little happier with wayland, running for weeks now with hardware decoding, rather than X crashing pretty well every few days.
For me it’s a million little details that just don’t work. Stuff like positioning windows, removing decorations from a window, remapping buttons on a trackball, setting a graphics output to tvrgb, disabling a display via ssh and enabling it again, etc.
The first and the best answer
Yes. I’ve used X11 for far too long to have any rose tinted glasses for the piece of fucking broken shit it always was. a LOT of people don’t realize how many hacks, workarounds and sheer tears and duct tape goes into making the piece of shit render the smallest line on the screen.
That’s also why Phoronix comment section neckbeards are so infuriating for me. They talk like X.Org works like at all.
Full wayland all the time for probably 2 years now
Started my Linux journey with Wayland 1.5 years ago and haven’t used X11 at all.
Oh, you’ve been missing out on a lot of “fun” 😄
When XFCE supports it.
Still won’t be able to stick i3 in xfce because of how Wayland is designed
I’ve got three hard problems preventing me from using Wayland (sway/wlroots) right now:
- No global shortcuts for applications, especially legacy applications; I need teamspeak3 to be able to read my PTT keys in any application. Yes I know that could be used to keylog (the default should be off) but let me make that decision.
- Button to pixel latency is significantly worse. I don’t need V-Sync in the terminal or Emacs. Let me use immediate presentation in those applications.
- VRR is weird. I’d love if desktop apps were V-sync’d via VRR but the way it currently works is that apps make the display go down to 48Hz (because they don’t refresh) but the refresh rate never goes up when typing; further exacerbating button to pixel delay.
There’s a portal for Global Shortcuts: https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/docs/doc-org.freedesktop.portal.GlobalShortcuts.html
KDE and Hyprland already implement it, and COSMIC seems likely to
On the app side, if we can get the major toolkits to adopt it, then hopefully that covers most actively-maintained apps (but it’s unlikely to cover legacy apps): https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/38288
If I can get the portal to just forward every keypress (or a configurable subset) to an xwayland window, that’d work for me. (I am aware of the security implications.)
I’m not an expert, but my understanding of the Global Shortcuts portal is that it’s very much designed for the push-to-talk use case where an app is not focused but still receives button events for exactly the keys its interested in and no other keys: I think this would cause problems if an app requested every key (e.g. if the request was approved then no keys would work in every other app)
It’ll be interesting to see how the remaining compatibility/accessibility issues are tackled, either in portals or in wayland protocols
Yeah and that’s great but my point is that I don’t see an obvious way to use it for that in its current implementation. I’m sure you could build it but it’s simply not built yet.
As far as I know xwayland in plasma/kde already does that. However as it’s KDE, it is most likely configurable and might not be enabled by default :P
Why I’m not using it:
- worse performance (Nvidia)
- couldn’t get screen sharing and recording to work
- unfinished or abandoned alternatives to xorg tools (swhkd for example)
Made me think maybe people aren’t actually adopting it that aggressively despite the constant coverage in the community.
Take the community with a grain of salt; It’s made up of the same type of people that say Arch is a stable distro that never has any issues.
Some distros are pushing it aggressively (Fedora for example), so use them as a more accurate gauge. If Fedora doesn’t accept the proposal to start phasing out xorg, you can know for sure it doesn’t have the conversion rates they’re hoping for.
I think the Xorg vs Wayland situation is not too dissimilar to that of Windows vs Linux. Lots of people are waiting for all of their games/software work (just as well or better) on Linux before switching. I believe that in most cases, switching to Linux requires that a person goes out of their way to either find alternatives to the software they use or altogether change the way they use their computer. It’s a hard sell for people who only use their computer to get their work done, and that’s why it is almost exclusively developers, tech-curious, idealists, government workers, and grandparents who switch to Linux (thanks to a family member who falls into any subset of the former categories). It may require another generation (of people) for X11 to be fully deprecated, because even amongst Linux users there are those who are not interested in changing their established workflow.
I do think it’s unreasonable to expect everything to work the same when a major component is being replaced. Some applications that are built with X11 in mind will never be ported/adapted to work on Wayland. It’s likely that for some things, no alternatives are ever going to exist.
Good news is that we humans are complex adaptive systems! Technology is always changing - that’s just the way of it. Sometimes that will lead to perceived loss of functionality, reduction in quality, or impeded workflow in the name of security, resource efficiency, moral/political reasons, or other considerations. Hopefully we can learn to accept such change, because that’ll be a virtue in times to come.
(This isn’t to say that it’s acceptable for userspace to be suddenly broken because contributors thought of a more elegant way to write underlying software. Luckily, X11 isn’t being deprecated anytime soon for just this reason.)
Ok I’m done rambling.
I switched to sway from i3 about 5 years ago. It’s easier to configure (no /etc/X11 nonsense) and it fixed my screen tearing issue. I’m not much of a gamer, so can’t comment on that. Supertuxkart and browser games work fine.
Exact same. Sway’s 1.0 release was March of 2019, and it did everything I needed.
Even playing games on my desktop, Xwayland worked fine for me.
I’ve been daily driving Hyprland for almost a year now I think, my only complaint is that some of my electron apps act out a little bit (Discord won’t open links, etc). I don’t game as heavily as I used to, but I regularly am running Overwatch 2 around 200 FPS with no issues, and Bauldur’s Gate 3 is super smooth as well.
I mainly use Wayland(nvidia) and have been using it for the last couple of years. Only switch to X11 when there is a game that absolutely won’t work with Wayland.
As I see it both display servers are ass.
X11 just being old and crusty, maintainers don’t really wanna deal with it. Vsync in general has problems so you usually just turn it off in hope of your software running fast enough(or you could lock fps lower than display hz) so you won’t get screen tearing.
Wayland being new and has active development is great but now we have a very opinionated dev team. It took until Valve came along for them to actually listen to complaints, I guess if Valve is knocking at your door you would answer.
Some days I’m pretty close to going back to Windows, then I remember how ass windows is and I just deal with it. And for anyone saying “just buy AMD” I had a AMD card before this and I couldn’t even use Linux, it would just constantly crash.
I’m using Wayland on my AMD laptop (with integrated Vega graphics). I had zero problems with this setup.
When I have to. Either when Wayland does something that I can’t do with X11, or X stops being supported.
Probably never. X11 just works better. Wayland has bad design and bad implementations.
Feels good to hear someone else say this. I regularly try switching and always end up finding bugs in the DE or clients. Some issues I’ve found have existed for years with no fix in sight.
I worry we’ll end up in a situation where X11 starts accumulating bugs due to lack of maintenance while Wayland takes ages to mature.
I keep seeing people say this, and nobody ever gives any sensible reasons for why they believe this.
Do you honestly think X11 has a better design than wayland? Do you think every single app should have permissions to screen record without you knowing, to keylog without you knowing? That mixed refresh rates (without hacks) should be impossible, that mixed display scaling should be impossible, etc? X11 just seems fundamentally broken from the ground up, I have no idea what of x11’s design is better in any way.
I’ll grant you there’s some implementation issues right now, but design is absolutely not a place where x11 wins. There is not a single X11 developer who would agree with you that the design of X11 is better than wayland, not even one.
Do you think every single app should have permissions to screen record without you knowing, to keylog without you knowing?
Can you point me to a single notable breach that happened because of this?
Classical security thinking is that if you have a compromised app running, it’s all over anyway, and it’s time to wipe and reinstall. Luckily, this isn’t a problem on Linux because packages are vetted by distributions maintainers… unless…
Unless the new plan is to transition from that to flatpak proprietary stores packaged by unknown developers, giving us trashware app stores like on Android and Windows.
Sure, if you expect to run proprietary malware on Linux then some protection might be useful. But then you’re just running a shitty version of Windows, and not getting the historical cultural benefits of Linux anyway. Might as well run Windows.
That is NOT classical security thinking AT ALL, and anybody who told you that is lying to you. Classic security thinking says minimize the surface area of attack…
…I’m sorry but your core argument seems to be “it’s okay that clients can do literally whatever they want because if you run anything proprietary you should be using windows” and I don’t understand this all-or-nothing stance. Do you expect me to vet every line of code that runs on my PC to make sure it’s safe? Do you think everyone should do that? Do you think the operating system should be designed so that grandmas are required to read code before they install software?
I’m sorry but this is just so obviously terrible design, I don’t know how you think gatekeeping solves anything, and that seems to be all you’re doing. Shitty clients shouldn’t be able to wreck peoples lives/computers, and we should minimize the amount of damage shitty clients can do. You also seem to believe that everyone is cognizant of the fact that they’ve been infected with something, in reality, you will go months or even decades without knowing you’ve been hit in some cases, we should minimize the amount of damage that can cause, not give them full access to everything on the entire pc because you think we should check every piece of software that runs.
There aren’t newsworthy breaches involving x.org because it’s widely regarded as not to be trusted, and has been for so long that nobody uses it for anything that needs security.
Flatpak is great and has a verification system so you know when the app is by the developer… It’s sandboxed so the clients can’t do as much damage, this is significantly easier for users to manage and prevents terrible things while not limiting anybodies usecase and allowing apps to be packaged for every distro at once. That’s pretty awesome, actually, and you can use different repos if you don’t trust flathub, i’m sure once flathub does something bad there will be alternate “more secure” ones.
Either way, I don’t want to live in the world where you make the choices for software, it seems like you want a world where everyone needs a license to use their computer.
What the fuck are you smoking dude, X11 is used all over the place
and we should minimize the amount of damage shitty clients can do.
Can’t have global shortcuts or share my screen but at least my system is secure from these non-existent threats snort
Why don’t I just smash my computer with a sledgehammer for the ultimate protection from flatpak malware.
Global shortcuts and screenshare are supported fully…
also the places where a newsworthy leak would happen do not use x11 and/or carefully vet their software. The average user should not need to do that, it would be bad design to make them
When they port FVWM.
yeah, i’ll think about it when notion runs on it
I use it on my Surface Pro 8 with PopOS as Xorg doesn’t work properly
ye. i’ve been using wayland since forever.
started on hyprland, and then moved to sway, but it’s been an almost perfect experience for me
sometimes i have to install a different version of a package or smth, but otherwise everything works fine.
Why did you switch from hyprland to sway?
I have no experience with both, but to my knowledge they are similar, but hyprland is aheads of wlroots
they are very similar. my only problem with hyprland was that the mouse is still required for some things, and it’s a bit annoying having to switch back and forth.
on sway, everything can be done by keyboard. i still use the mouse a lot, but there’s less switching in the middle of tasks.
it’s a little difference, but it was worth it for me.
there’s also the drama about some people being transphobic (i think?) in the hyprland discord, but i try not to pay too much attention to that.
hyprland accomplishes it’s goal of being pretty (and i got some really cool screenshots), but sway is pure functionality, and it’s damn good at it.
