this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2023
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Does Wayland really break everything? (Nate Graham's OG post ref'd in the Phoronix article) (pointieststick.com)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 36 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Been on Wayland since 2016 and to this day my only issues (apart from when I had an Nvidia card for a few months, that is...) was video sharing in Discord/steam in-home streaming, both of which still don't work right.

Other than that, it's been great. Multi-monitor works way better, far fewer bugs, my desktop feels a lot more fluid and smooth.

On laptops, Wayland+Gnome gestures are exceptional, putting even Apple's gestures to shame. I cannot stress enough how good of a job Gnome+Wayland does with trackpad gestures. It makes other gesture systems, especially ones under X11, feel like they were cobbled together by a Fallout 3 modder.

Overall Wayland has been great for me. I just wish Discord would fix their shitty app.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

If you just want video sharing with audio in discord, vesktop implements that. https://github.com/Vencord/Vesktop

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

This!

[–] [email protected] 24 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Been using Wayland since 3'ish years ago and my desktop experience has been really smooth -- no crashes, errors or anything of the sort. Everything "just werks" just as if I were on Xorg instead. Even on a completely obscure/zero linux support single board computer (Orange pi zero 3).

[–] [email protected] 23 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Graphics drivers are what matters. Your orange pi uses a mali GPU which is well supported by Linux (thanks ARM).

nVidia is just barely at the point where their most recent gpu drivers aren't terrible under Wayland. It's taken a while to get there.

GPUs with good open source drivers will fare fine.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

maxwell users are fucked tho

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Not as bad as you might think. The nouveau drivers have come a long way for maxwell. You should give it a shot if you haven't. But, unfortunately, if you are using anything new then nouveau sucks. It's a fun game where you get to wait until nvidia no longer wants to support your GPU and hope by that point that nouveau has progressed far enough that you won't be looking at noman's land.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I meant the GTX900 series. I'm aware the 700s have decent support in nouveau, but the 900s has already been dropped by nvidia so we are on older drivers not capable of the latest vulkan extensions required by modern Proton.

For nouveau it needs GSP firmware that wasnt released as part of that release they did a while ago. I think pascal users are on the same situation, they just havent been dropped by the proprietary drivers yet. I wonder if we are gonna be stuck on xorg forever.

The newer cards got the important bits released by nvidia so the community can at least have a path forward...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I wasn't fully aware of NVK and where it's at. It's actually pretty exciting. I wouldn't mind dropping my current nvidia binary blob for fully open source drivers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

it didnt work ootb for me on ubuntu so i dropped it, but i hear it can already be made to work well with the desktop and basic stuff. performance in games is still bad but they are running.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago

It still sucks for me at least. Doesnt respect scaling, or work after suspend, also discord streaming still broken for years. Also push to talk.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

I've switched away from Xorg a few years ago because of its terrible multi monitor support and bad experiences with picom. Sway and now hyprland are imo a better tiling wm experience then their Xorg equivalent.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I've been using Wayland daily for a few years (2020 at least?) on intel and AMD graphics and have had few complaints:

  1. Some games didn't work right a few years ago. (Under Proton or otherwise. Haven't had issues for a while)
  2. RenderDoc, a vital bit of graphics debugging software, works poorly on Wayland. (Easy fix is to force X11 for QT via QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb)
  3. Had some issues with mixed integrated/NVidia graphics on a laptop I was using for a demo once.
  4. Covering or otherwise hiding a Wayland window blocks a program's graphics thread. This is sometimes problematic.
  5. VR development had issues a while ago? (This was for work. It just... stopped working at some point. Dunno if it was a Linux, SteamVR, or Unity3D issue. My work machine mostly runs Windows 10 now as a result. Oh well.)
  6. Screen recording didn't work well a while ago... (continued)

Overall, it's just worked great though!

My anti-complaints:

  1. Mixed refresh rates on monitors "just works" now. (I have a 1080@144 for gaming, and a 4k@60 for work)
  2. Video frames don't have half drawn content. (ex: when resizing windows), except on XWayland stuff
  3. Video tearing has basically disappeared.
  4. Video timing issues seem to be improved.
  5. Input handling for keyboard layouts has improved.
  6. Screen recording in Wayland is way better than it ever was on X11 now. I do this a lot to share gamedev stuff I'm working on.
[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Which app do you use for screen recording? That's the only thing keeping me on X11.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

OBS Studio mostly. It's not the most convenient for a quick screencap, but I can record 720p@60 fps video downscaled and resampled from my 1080p@144hz monitor and it just kinda works fine. The other nice feature of OBS is that you can have it recording all the time and then press a button to dump the last few seconds when something interesting happens. Handy when trying to get interesting clips of my game. For quick recording I usually just use Kooha or the built in Gnome one.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

ooo, that does sound handy!

Looks like OBS is the goto. Thanks.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago

I record our D&D sessions with OBS. Works well.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago

I wouldn't say it breaks everything. Franky it fixes / handles better issues that are common usecases today that was not the case during the time X11 was still the norm / actively maintained such as:

  • Multiple monitor support with varied refresh rates
  • Hybrid GPU setup (including being able to use your motherboard's hdmi socket and your dedicated gpu hdmi at the same time)
  • Display scaling
  • Better isolation of applications (to the deterrence of existing linux applications)

Of course granted its a new protocol, it doesn't support all the usecases that X11 was designed for due to variety or reasons (including controversial decisions)

Mind you, Wayland isn't perfect either. For example, I found out that despite Wayland having better Hybrid GPU setup support out of the box, there are applications that ended up having broken multi-gpu support (where the application in question can choose which gpu it would utilize for its processing) where it works fine X11.

With the state of the hardware we are having, it is understandable why distros have been focused on pushing Wayland as the default, although honestly, it would be wise for these distros to not completely phase out x11 because currently, Wayland isn't perfect.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago (1 children)

My experience with Nvidia+ Wayland was... Less than desirable. Enough to make me pickup an AMD card.

However, once I did that my experience instantly better. Hell, even X11 worked better - I was never able to get the desktop to stay at a consistent 60FPS (I'm still on a 60Hz panel which I'm just now getting around to upgrading shortly) in X until I moved to my AMD card.

The 545 driver update just made things so much worse. So I'd say Wayland+Nvidia is not great (for others it works fine so maybe it's down to what card you have?) however on my AMD card (and my old MacBook with Intel integrated graphics) it's fantastic.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Nouveau + NVK is the hope 🙏

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

How do we as the community turn hope into help? Is there a way to contribute directly to the NVK developers?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Check their project page or hit them up on their repo. I'm sure any help will be welcomed.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Quite literally, the only problem or "stuff broken because or Wayland" is some old ass apps or lazy companies that won't update their electron version. Looking at you discord, screen sharing COULD WORK if you managed your stuff

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago

They make enough money off nitro and shit to not care. Everything becomes worse when they start making money

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (2 children)

KDE gui scaling problems too?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Kinda. The problem was fixed in Qt6 and current KDE is Qt5. It'll be fixed once Plasma 6 releases in February.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Great news. Thank you for the headsup

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Idk I use gnome on 200% scaling on my laptop and on desktop gnome at 100%

[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Wayland != X11

Not 100% feature compatible != broken.

My opinion and also a TL;DR: of the article.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

"that thing you used to do is now impossible to do consistently across different implementations, if at all. But it's all ok, because we have decided it's not our responsibility!"

That is not what users want to hear. From a user's point of view, it is broken.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I see what you're getting at. It's a matter of perspective, I guess.

If you presented someone with a list of features from two similar but different pieces of software, they wouldn't say software b is broken because it's featureset is different from software a, right? But I acknowledge it's not that straightforward. It's more like telling them software b is going to replace software a that you're currently using, get ready to say goodbye to some features.

I still don't consider wayland broken, but I understand argument that it is.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

yes, if i combare kicad with blender, neither is broken because they have different features. But also, nobody is telling users that kicad's days are over and it should be replaced by blender. If they did, and a user wanted to design a circuit board, the user is out of luck. The user is told that it is a replacement. From the user's point of view it most definitely is not.

The probeem isn't just that wayland doesn't do everything x does. But that users are told that it will replace x, deal with it and quit complaining.

We have to keep in mind that the fact that we know what wayland is in the first place puts us squarely into the "technical user" category, not regular users. Regular users are the ones who don't even know (nor should they have to care) what wayland even is

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (2 children)

“not everything is fully ported yet”

“There will probably be an awkward period before all of these pieces are in place for all of the people.”

I think these are the two key takeaways – Wayland is still in development and the bandwagoning are the early adopters – most of us will switch when our distros switch (and will probably be none the wiser)

the problems (and the reason we’re suffering through sensationalist stuff like “Wayland breaks everything!”) is the fanboy push to switch before it’s ready – not everybody lives on the bleeding edge (just like not everyone runs Arch) and the “switch now or be left behind” attitude does more harm than good (far more likely to alienate than convert) …

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Wayland is still in development and the bandwagoning are the early adopters

Not to bust your chops but I'm not sure what you're implying. What isn't still in development? WordStar? X11? Mac System 7? And Wayland's initial release was 2008. That's 15 years ago. Who are these "early adopters" of which you speak anymore?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The things you think aren't finished because it's still in development are actually not finished because they're just the way the developers want.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Many of those things you're thinking of were declared Somebody Else's Problem by said developers. That's fine, but Wayland was not ready for use by normal end users until somebody else did finish them.

From what I hear most of them actually are finished by now, but they weren't as of a couple years ago when it started becoming commonplace to see declarations that the time to switch to Wayland was Right Now. I tried it out then, and am as a result much less enthusiastic about doing it again now even though it'd be much more likely to go well.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

I have been using wayland on kde the last two years on Debian and MX Linux with zero issues. My general usa includes coding, music production, Libre office and web browsing. So, no much gaming, if that is your concern.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I’ve been using Wayland sessions as default since plasma 5.22 came around, and with other window managers before that too. Everything that has ever been broken for me, was broken because of X11 or XWayland. I’d rather take a considerably better experience with an occasional issue, that an experience that is held together by candy wrappers and hot glue, and is widely considered obsolete

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Im in the same boat. Been using wayland since around that version or a little later and it has only been uphill (except for right now since i am on the development build and Qt broke itself causing the system config menu to fail to load 80% of KCMs, but this is my fault for switching to alpha software lol)

[–] [email protected] -3 points 10 months ago

Pics or it didn't happen.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

Xorg has no fractonal scaling so I have been uaing wayland since I have switched to linux on nvidia and yes I use it for gaming. Not silky smooth but great so far.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Same topic, original article linked in post description. https://lemmy.ndlug.org/post/523560