this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2024
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Wayland seems ready to me but the main problem that many programs are not configured / compiled to support it. Why is that? I know it's not easy as "Wayland support? Yes" (but in many cases adding a flag is enough but maybe it's not a perfect support). What am I missing? Even Blender says if it fails to use Wayland it will use X11.

When Wayland is detected, it is the preferred system, otherwise X11 will be used

Also XWayland has many limitations as X11 does.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Because Wayland is STILL lacking a lot of things that people need.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It's the opposite for me. X11 is unusable on my laptop because it doesn't support fractional scaling well, whereas on my desktop it doesn't allow for a multi monitor setup with different refresh rates. Both dealbreakers are not present with Wayland. Though your point still stands; NVIDIA GPUs continue to suck more with Wayland than X11 for example.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

I'm not defending x11, both wayland and x11 are trash, it's just whichever trash pile you find yourself most comfortable in.

On x11, fractional scaling is more or less just handled by the gui toolkit. It does suck that you need to set an env var for it, but IMO that isn't too bad.

the multi monitor stuff does suck for sure. It's not an issue for me personally. One thing that is a massive issue for me is x11's terrible handling of touch, I use touch screens daily so that's a massive issue for me, wayland compositors are also typically quite a bit faster then x11 + wms on low end systems now too (not to be confused with total resource usage/lightness).

Wayland has a lot of things going for it, but it also has a lot going against it. Both are terrible. Arcan save us (oh how a man can dream)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Could you give me some examples so I can understand what's missing and being waited on?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Someone above mentioned screen reader support for blind use accessibility stuff. For users who are blind, this is critical.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

This is actually one thing that doesn't involve wayland, as pretty much everyone is using at-spi. It's not great, but it does work.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

for one, it's missing a good chunk of A11y stuff, activity watch requires something to monitor the active window, there is a PR for that, still not merged, this has been an issue for years

It's missing protocols that will let applications request to be a privileged application, which is necessary for applications to use other functionality.

Missing protocols to control always-on-top / layers, which is needed for OSKs to function, and a couple other A11y things off the top of my head.

It's not just a11y either, Window positioning still isn't merged, which means if your app opens two "windows", you cannot currently select where to open them, or to even bind two windows together (Android emulator does this for instance).

There is a LOT wayland is missing, it IS getting better, just at a snails pace.