In response to Wayland Breaks Your Bad Software
I say that the technical merits are irrelevant because I don’t believe that they’re a major factor any more in most people moving or not moving to Wayland.
With only a slight amount of generalization, none of these people will be moved by Wayland’s technical merits. The energetic people who could be persuaded by technical merits to go through switching desktop environments or in some cases replacing hardware (or accepting limited features) have mostly moved to Wayland already. The people who remain on X are there either because they don’t want to rebuild their desktop environment, they don’t want to do without features and performance they currently have, or their Linux distribution doesn’t think their desktop should switch to Wayland yet.
I switched to Wayland over two years ago and these days I don’t look back at all. I don’t care if Wayland has full feature parity with X11 as long the features I actually use are supported which they are.
Clipboard sharing in VirtualBox doesn’t work right now (though I’m relatively sure it could be implemented by VirtualBox right now with Wayland as it is) and neither does AutoTyping in KeePassXC (not sure if there’s a mechanism for that on Wayland), though Autofill in the Browser works so it’s no big deal to me.
In return I get 1:1 touch gestures, better multi monitor support and an overall smoother desktop on Plasma Wayland so I’ll take it.
People often still make complaints about Wayland that have been fixed months or years ago and it’s a bit tiring.
The ability to have multiple displays at different scales is a godsend when trying to use a laptop with a 4k display connected to 1080p monitors or vice versa
This already works on X and indeed has worked longer than Wayland has existed.
I just passed scale to xrandr after computing the proper scale and then used the nvidia-settings gui to write current configuration to xorg.conf its not incredibly hard basically all you are doing is scaling lower DPI items up to the same resolution as your highest dpi item and letting it scale down the correct physical size. For instance if you have 27’ monitors that are 4K and 1080p you just scale the 1080 ones by 2 if you have a 4k 27 and a 1080 24" its closer to 1.75. The correct ratio can be found with your favorite calculator app.
You can set this scaling directly in nvidia-settings come to think of it where you set viewport in and viewport out.
I tried unsuccessfully to get this working for quite some time and broke my xrandr settings quite a few times
With Wayland/gnome I just click a button in the settings gui and it works flawlessly
With X/i3 I had to read and the result works well. With Sway I had to read and the result works poorly. So is sway better for the illiterate?
X11 is, to put it simply, not at all fit for any modern system. Full stop. Everything to make it work on modern systems are just hacks. Don’t even try to get away with “well, it just works for me” or “but Wayland no worky”.
I really don’t know if there could be a more obnoxious opening than this. I guess Wayland fanatics have taken a page from the Rust playbook of trying to shame people into using it when technical merits aren’t enough (“But your code is UNSAFE!”)
I feel that the biggest mistake of X11’s protocol design is the idea of a “root window” that is supposed to cover the whole screen.
Perhaps that worked greatly in the 1990s, but it’s just completely incompatible with multi-displays that we commonly see in modern setups. Hacks upon hacks were involved to make multi-displays a possibility on X11. The root window no longer corresponded to a single display. In heterogenous display setups, part of the root window is actually invisible.
Later on we decided to stack compositing on top of the already-hacky mess, and it was so bad that many opted to disable the compositor (no Martha, compositors are more than wobbly windows!).
And then there’s the problem of sandboxing programs… Which is completely unmappable to X11 even with hacks.
Multiple displays work fine. The only thing that needs to be drawn in the root window is attractive backgrounds sized to your displays I’m not sure why you think that is hacky or complicated.
This is not an insult to the people behind X11.
The people behind X11 agree and that’s why they founded Wayland.
No, no, they’ve got a point. The architecture of Wayland is much more sane. Because of the way refresh events are driven its also much more power and memory efficient. I’ll miss bspwm and picom but man there is a lot riding on simplifying the graphics stack under Linux. The X hacks, GLX, and all the other weird interactions X decided to take away from applications made things non-portable to begin with and a nightmare for any embedded devices that thought GLES was good enough.
There are several remarks in that article that bothered me. I agree with their message overall and am a strong proponent of Wayland but…
Unless your workflow (and hardware) comes from 20+ years ago, you have almost no reason to stick with Xorg
There definitely are valid use cases that aren’t 20 years old that will keep you on X11 for a little while longer. And hardware too: NVIDIA dropped driver support for Kepler GPUs and older before they added GBM support which is effectively a requirement for Wayland, so you can’t use these older cards on Wayland with the proprietary drivers
Of course, NVIDIA likes to do their own thing, as always. Just use Nouveau if you want to do anything with Xwayland, and you don’t have several GPUs.
Uh, no. Nouveau is not a serious option for anyone who likes using their GPU for useful things. And on those older cards it will likely never work well.
The author of that article seems extremely ignorant of other people’s needs.
NVIDIA dropped driver support for Kepler GPUs and older before they added GBM support which is effectively a requirement for Wayland, so you can’t use these older cards on Wayland with the proprietary drivers
That’s definitively the fault of people to buy NVidia hardware which only works fine on Windows. It’s not the fault of Wayland developers that NVidia is a shit company that does not care to make their hardware properly run on Linux.
Can we stop shaming people who buy NVIDIA?
For one, people want to keep using what they have and not buy something new just because it may work better on Linux, abd they may not even be able to afford an upgrade. They probably didn’t even know about Linux compatibility when they got it.
And additionally, some people have to use NVIDIA because e. g. they rely on CUDA or something (which is unfortunate but not their fault).
And honestly, NVIDIA is fine on Linux nowadays. It sucks that support for older cards will likely stay crappy forever but hopefully with the open kernel drivers and NVK newer cards won’t have to suffer that fate.
I find that usually when people write “Full stop”, it’s best to just stop reading there in most cases.
It comes off as “I am correct, how dare you think that for a moment I could be wrong”.
I’d love to use Wayland, but until it works properly on Nvidia hardware like X11 is, then it’s not a viable option for me. Of course, then someone always goes “Well then use an AMD card” but money doesn’t grow on trees. The only reason I’m not still using a 970 is because a friend of mine was nice and gave me his 2080 that he was no longer using, along with some other really nice upgrades to my hardware.
Honestly it’s one of the biggest issues I have with the Linux community. I love Linux and FOSS software but the people who go around and yell at anyone who isn’t using Linux, and the people who write articles like this who try to shame you for your choices (something that is supposed to be a landmark of using open source software) only make Linux look bad.
There’s a difference between someone kindly telling others that X11 is not likely to receive any new major features and bug fixes (which is the right thing to do, in order to inform someone something they may not know) - and then there’s whatever the author of this quote is doing.
It happens all the time in the magical world of closed source, too.
Ever heard about the iOS vs Android fights? How people shame Android users for being green bubbles?
It’s just the extension of the my camp vs theirs applied to the tech field, nothing new.
I laughed off reports about this kind of thing, thinking “omg who could possibly give a shit about what color their text bubble is in a group chat?” Later my gen Z office mate told me about how he uses an iPhone and cited this exact reason unironically. I was stunned into silence.
Oh absolutely, I am sadly all far too well aware of those cases (especially the “green bubbles” thing, I’ve never rolled my eyes harder at a silly situation).
It’s not even strictly a tech thing either, its a long standing thing in human history no matter where you look, and unfortunately I don’t see it going away any time soon.
Ok but then how about the developers of X11 who decided it wasn’t worth fixing the issues and to start a new project called Wayland where they could start from scratch to fix the issues. Does that change your mind at all?
I don’t want to sound rude, but how old is your setup? Are you using a desktop or a laptop computer?
Because I’m daily driving a late 2015 Dell XPS 9350 and X11 just ain’t cutting it, even though the laptop is nearly a decade old. On X11, its trackpad would be garbage, GNOME’s animations would be stuttery, and fractional scaling would be a mess, because I have a docking station with a 75 Hz ultrawide monitor, meaning that I must utilise both 125% and 100% scaling factors, as well as 60 Hz and 75 Hz refresh rates and different resolutions. Sure, not everyone uses multi monitor setups, but those who do serious office tasks or content production work often cannot imagine their workflow without multiple monitors. Point is, X11 is to ancient to handle such tasks smoothly, reliably and efficiently.
This is literally the exact bad attitude of your average Wayland proponent. The thing which has worked for 20 years doesn’t work you just hallucinated it along with all the show stopper bugs you encountered when you tried to switch to Wayland.
It’s really not “working” per se. VRR was breaking on X11, sandboxing was breaking on X11, fractional scaling and mixed DPI were breaking on X11.
How did we achieve HiDPI on X11? By changing Xft.dpi (breaking old things) or adding random environment variables (terrible UX - do you want to worsen Linux desktop’s reputation even more?). Changing XRandR? May your battery life be long lasting.
There’s genuinely no good way to mix different DPIs on the same X server, even with only one screen! On Windows and Mac, the old LoDPI applications are scaled up automatically by the compositor, but this just doesn’t exist on X11.
I focus on DPI because this is a huge weakness of X11 and there is a foreseeable trend of people using HiDPI monitors more and more, there are tons of other weaknesses, but people tend to sweep them under the rug as being exotic. And please don’t call HiDPI setups exotic. For all the jokes we see on the eternal 768p screens that laptop manufacturers like to use, the mainstream laptops are moving onto 1080p. On a 13" screen, shit looks tiny if you don’t scale it up by 150%.
You can hate on Wayland, you may work on an alternative called Delaware for all I care, but let’s admit that X11 doesn’t really work anymore and is not the future of Linux desktop.
Outside of your fantasies high DPI works fine. Modern QT apps seem to pick it up fairly automatically now and GTK does indeed require a variable which could trivially be set for the user.
Your desktop relies on a wide variety of env variables to function correctly which doesn’t bother you because they are set for you. This has literally worked fine for me for years. I have no idea what you think you are talking about. Wayland doesn’t work AT ALL for me out of the box without ensuring some variables are set because my distro doesn’t do that for me this doesn’t mean Wayland is broken.
How did we achieve HiDPI on X11? By changing Xft.dpi (breaking old things) or adding random environment variables (terrible UX - do you want to worsen Linux desktop’s reputation even more?).
You seems to have dealt with windows recentely.
Regarding linux on desktop… as long as you don’t involve smelly gamers, it’s perfectly fine.
Replacing good legacy will always be a struggle. X11 works pretty well and has been stable for decades. Most of the things that suck about it already have workarounds.
The advantages of Wayland are not directly visible for the end user. The security part will be great once it’s completely integrated on the distributions to give granular permissions to software. The simpler apis and greater performance will help libraries creators, but most developers don’t touch X directly and won’t touch Wayland either.
Being stable for a couple of months is not good enough. People will use it once distros trust it enough to make it default, and this will probably only happen once Wayland or its compatibility tools work with most software and major applications work significantly better on it.
Every time I try Wayland, something doesn’t work. The time before last, subpixel DPI scaling was badly broken. This last time, there’s some glitch where the screen jumps right a couple pixels (and back) every dozen seconds. I don’t have any interest in spending my time trying to fix Wayland issues when X just works.
Amen.
When something crashes on Wayland, my entire system goes down. When something crashes on X, I can at least kill it with a GUI. I refuse to use Wayland as long as it has the potential to freeze my entire machine.
(This is on KDE Plasma.)
I just don’t think KDE will be worth it on plasma until KDE 6 / Qt 6. Basic components like SDDM supporting Wayland still have to be solved before KDR provides a first class experience. Try messing around with environments like sway, Hyprland, and Gnome the stability difference is night and day compared to KDE.
Yep I second this. I’ve been using GNOME, hyprland and sway interchangeably since 2021 Oct on my system as my main DEs. I recently wanted to give Plasma Wayland a try. Was met with multiple crashes, and freezes that required me to long press the power button to reboot to get it working again.
While the new rootless wayland on SDDM worked fine for me, there are several things in Plasma that still don’t yet have support for Wayland. I could never get screen sharing to be reliable on Plasma Wayland, despite having the right portals installed.
GNOME, Sway, and Hyprland are miles ahead in having a stable system on Wayland.
