Hey Community,
Since I just read a post about the X11 vs. Wayland situation I’m questioning if I should stay on X11, or switch to Wayland. Regarding this decision, I’m asking you for your opinions plus please answer me a few questions. I will put further information about my systems at the bottom.
- What are the advantages of Wayland? What are the disadvantages?
- I do mostly music production, programming, browsing, etc, but occasionally I’m back into gaming (on the desktop). How’s performance there? Anything that might break?
- what would be the best way to migrate?
- why have/haven’t you made the switch?
Desktop: Ryzen 3100, 16 Gig Ram, Rx 570 Arch Linux with KDE 144 hz Freesync Monitor and 60hz shitty monitor
laptop: Thinkpad L540 (iirc), i3 4100, 8 GB Ram intel uhd630 gfx (iirc) Arch Linux with heavily customized i3-gaps
No, you shouldn’t.
If you need Wayland you will know, if X worked for you well and you didn’t search for how to sandbox it or maybe for some other functions that Wayland has then don’t switch and don’t break what works for you.
If it ain’t broken don’t fix it.
What are the advantages of Wayland?
More modern and in some cases better performance (as if Xorg performance were bad … but hey)
What are the disadvantages?
Basically none of your current software works out of the box (you’ll need a special Xorg implementation that works with your Wayland implementation in order to run non-Wayland applications). Most applications are specific to your Wayland implementation instead of a general application that runs in all environments.
why have/haven’t you made the switch?
I did not find one single floating WM that is as good as Openbox for Xorg. Also: Screen recording with OBS is problematic in some constellations.
Basically none of your current software works out of the box (you’ll need a special Xorg implementation that works with your Wayland implementation in order to run non-Wayland applications).
I’ve never seen any distro with Wayland that didn’t have XWayland set up and working out of the box, so that’s not something the end user needs to worry about. And “Basically None” is also not true anymore. Practically anything made with GTK3/4, Qt5/6, SDL2, recent Electron versions etc. natively runs on Wayland. It’s mostly games, Wine and a lot of proprietary software that doesn’t.
Most applications are specific to your Wayland implementation instead of a general application that runs in all environments.
Wdym by that exactly? I mean, a KDE application will run just fine on GNOME or Wlroots compositors.
you’ll need a special Xorg implementation
Ok it’s true that op would need XWayland for some things, but that will be installed alongside the rest of the Wayland packages, and will run seamlessly.
Most applications are specific to your Wayland implementation
This isn’t true. Some applications will use features that aren’t available in all Wayland compositors, but they are rare. The main offenders are apps that interact with other apps, apps that take screenshots or record, or apps that draw outside of a window (like docks).
I did. It misses (or missed?) most of the functionality I use with Openbox.
- shading (rolling up) windows
- “resistive” window borders
- menu icons
- pipe menus
- freely bindable key-and-mouse combinations for window movement (including all buttons and including all 5 wheel directions/clicks)
- customizeable decorations (no minimize/maximize buttons, for example, size, mouse interactions, etc.)
- and some other minor issues.
Especially the menu stuff makes me not wanting to use it. Since my Openbox menu uses icons for 100% of the entries and 95% of the menus come from pipe menus this is an absolute deal breaker.
The biggest Sin by far of Wayland is making users think about the graphics stack. Does this feature or this app support Wayland or X? Does this Compositor support this GPU? Does this particular environment support this mixture of displays with this DPI? Do I need to set a particular env variable or change a setting to force this app to start in Wayland mode because under X11 its scaled funky. What works in each environment? What doesn’t work between environments?
Well before you reach the end of this flow chart you have lost virtually all of your users. This transition has single-handedly set the Linux desktop back by 20 years in terms of supporting more users whose level of interest in configuration is limited to clicking a control next to their monitor and making things bigger or smaller.
A saner design would have handled scaling correctly from the start and would have had a permissive mode which just made everything from the users perspective work while progressively adding a correct UI to provide features like global hotkeys, screen sharing, only to those apps users had authorized like android. If it wasn’t a such a clusterfuck to use it would have had orders of magnitude more users much earlier in the development phase and perhaps attracted more development interest as well.
Nobody’s requiring you to use Wayland currently, I mean realistically name a Wayland-only app (excluding the ones like remote desktop apps that are replacing X11 apps that don’t work at all on Wayland), they don’t exist. But with new technologies will always be growing pains, the X11 -> Wayland transition will still be another few years I imagine, I mean at this point we’re really only waiting on NVIDIA 🫠. It’s a painful process, but one that is only so painful because it’s been put off for so long, if we put it off for any longer it would’ve just been even worse.
It’s painful because the developers took 14 years to produce something semi usable while ignoring incredibly common use cases and features for approximately the first 10 -12 years of development
Well, such is the downfall of OSS, I mean look at VR on Linux, Mesa straight up will hard crash if you try to run SteamVR on the latest versions, and the time it takes for VR related bugs in Mesa to get patched are insanely long.
Just gotta make a hubub about it until someone with the knowhow can fix it.
Nobody’s requiring it until devs start not supporting X11 anymore and start saying things like “won’t fix, use Wayland”. Which is already happening
See: GNOME’s response to a critical GTK4 bug on x11 that makes any program using GTK4 unusable on certain devices under x11
I think that’s a little bit premature for GNOME to do, though I have to ask, what “certain devices” are we talking about?
No it’s bad.
E: anti wayland, anti pulseaudio, anti systemd, pro xscreensaver.
