Reframing The Wayland Support Problem

[@tato-chip7612]

guys its time we accepted Xorg breaks wayland.

[@syudagye2837]

Think twice about using rootfull mode, XWayland breaks EVERYTHING

[@HPerrin]

I tried to run Linux 1.0, and it breaks everything too.

[@DJgregBrown]

@@HPerrin PMSL Classic sums it up perfect.

[@piizog]

Linux was ruined the day it implemented graphics drivers.

[@aqua-bery]

​@@piizogsarcasm, right?

[@undefined6341]

As a developer with decades of experience, I hate it when other developers say "lower your expectations". Well no thanks. If the new software you are writing is simply inferior to other solutions, it's on you as the developer to make something better.

[@SnakePlissken25]

Yep.

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

I've been writing shell and Python scripts for decades, I programmed my first Z80-based computer in assembly language back in 1982-ish, but I still wouldn't call myself a developer. Nowadays, as a security consultant who tests code with developers, I know the difference between a developer and "someone who does a bit of programming on the side". As far as I am concerned, "developer" is one of the most abused words in IT.

[@undefined6341]

@@terrydaktyllus1320 In the end I don't care too much for labels and job titles either :-) The wording I used was what I felt to be the simplest way to add my $0.02.

[@stephanf17]

Generally agreed. _Sometimes_ however, it's worth it to make a step back to enable 2 steps forward. _Sometimes_.

[@setaindustries]

They really need to bring explicit sync into Wayland, without that Electron apps basically don't work with Nvidia cards. But the more concerning thing is Nvidia would also need to do some work with their proprietary drivers, and I'm scared no one will do that.

[@novazipstream2]

Same, I'm nervous Nvidia may not port over their proprietary drivers over to Wayland. I'm also equally nervous for SteamVR as that hasn't had much traction going on with Wayland support (it already struggles enough as it is on X11 even). I can actually get it to run on Wayland (i'm using ALVR) but I notice it's quite a deal slower on Wayland than it is on X11, but that could be because of the Nvidia drivers (as I use the proprietary ones). Hopefully since the open source drivers have been getting new features added into it, it'll evolve to a point where I can use it instead of the proprietary ones completely (or even better, if Nivida themselves just update their drivers).

[@notuxnobux]

@@novazipstream2 many of those issues are unfortunately valves fault (especially the performance and crash issues). There are alternative vr implementations that dont have this problem. The performance issue for example happens because steamvr uses a library that uses the cpu on linux but on windows it uses the gpu (opencl), even though it can use opencl on linux too, just that valve hasn't enabled that. Valve are really bad at programming on linux, but this is probably because they dont spend much money on it (except steam deck now).

[@DJgregBrown]

Why are you saying wayland need to fix it? Nvidia you brought that junk of card off, that needs to support they buyers, not dev that don't get paid and don't care.

[@RandomGeometryDashStuff]

nvidia x11 driver is also not good: vsync only works (works=no screen tearing) if window is full screen and there is no other window above

[@wertigon]

Most evidence is pointing towards Explicit Sync just being a convenient excuse for Nvidia to not rewrite their drivers to a modern Linux stack. Get an AMD or Intel card, works a lot better.

[@dalavitang]

I totally agree that for some users, Wayland is more or less usable already, but with inconveniences here and there. There was even an occasion where I actively avoided X11 and used Wayland - sending a clean feed image to a third monitor in DaVinci Resolve worked much better in Wayland than in X11, with X11 lagging the timeline to the point where I cannot edit at all, while in Wayland it's butter smooth. And, believe it or not, I was on an RTX3090.

[@tux_the_astronaut]

Ye ever since i got my new pc with amd graphics ive been able to use Wayland and it pretty much just works for all my desktop needs while providing a smoother experience than X11 did heck even tho vaync is still forced for games games at least using native Wayland have much less input lag for me than they did on x11

[@myownfriend23]

The craziest thing about that use-case is that Davinci Resolve doesn't support Wayland, it just runs in XWayland. I imagine it's probably going to be one of the last pieces of software that I used frequently that will support Wayland even though it uses Qt. I think part of the reason is clean feed and dual monitor mode. I'm not really sure if there's a way to do either in Wayland natively at the moment. I imagine portals would be a better solution for the clean feed functionality than Wayland anyway though.

[@hiru92]

breaks onlyoffice too

[@spaceghostmiid]

only time i’ve ever had issues on linux was under x11. switched to wayland within a week of installing ubuntu, never had another issue besides discord screenshare bugs.

[@myownfriend23]

@@spaceghostmiid Same. I switched to Linux in Oct or Nov of 2020. My first thought after installing Ubuntu was that everything worked really well. The experience on my mixed DPI setup worked so much better than on Windows, too. Then I installed the Nvidia proprietary drivers and DPI scaling stopped working well, I kept getting screen tearing, some applications scaled down so apps were unreadable on both screens, my one screen would blacked out because it was initialized to 30 fps instead of 60 like my main screen, etc. I didn't know why until I looked it up and found out that Ubuntu used Wayland on Nouveau and X11 on the proprietary drivers. For a while I just ran my 4K monitor at 1440p since mixed DPI isn't supported by X11. I was considering going back to Windows because Linux just didn't feel ready yet. After a few months seeing that Wayland fixed all the issues I had but it "wasn't ready yet", I decided to try it despite its issues on Nvidia's driver because I heard that DMA-buf support was coming soon. Initially it had no hardware acceleration at all but I still preferred doing stuff like web browsing that way because Firefox was sharp on my 4K screen and there was no tearing. Eventually I got hardware acceleration working on Wayland native apps and that was obviously better. Then DMA-buf support got added and everything was hardware accelerated. Since GBM support was added I've not had a reason to go back to X11. In short, without Wayland I would have gone back to Windows.

[@zipkitty]

Listening to all this, I get the strange feeling that X11 was more than just a display server. I fear that development of programs relied too much on and leaned too heavily on the functionality within X11/xorg and that it stunted the portability of programs.

[@w01dnick]

Yes, X11 is a platform, not less (even more in a lot of cases) than GNU or POSIX. And combined with the fact it was used in majority of NIX OSes (Linux, FreeBSD, etc) it gained monopoly.

[@Shrapnel_Music]

Thank you! I really mean that. Your comment is what actually got me to understand what fully was being addressed.. 🙏

[@davidpriestley1650]

and it "worked" (if you could cope with the chatty network traffic) I could run an X11 app on a HP-UX host, displayed on a low powered SunOS workstation, or even an have an entire desktop remotely accessed on the workstation.

[@Oktokolo]

Didn't see an actual X11 epplication for years on my desktop. It's all QT or GTK just running on X11. The toolkits are the platforms - not X11 or Wayland.

[@davidpriestley1650]

@@Oktokolo they're still X11 apps, just using Qt and GTK as their toolkits rather than native calls and the Athena widget set. Its like saying I don't use network apps as I use HTTPS and OpenSSH apps. I could write raw TCP socket code, but libraries and toolkits exist to handle the low level code for me, but they're still networking apps.

[@trajectoryunown]

"Using My PRINTER AS A DISPLAY" sounds like quite the entertaining video.

[@no_name4796]

Which you wouldn't be able to do on a fresh window install, as you would need a GUI to install the drivers, but without drivers you can't get the GUI That's why linux is superior! I use arc btw P.s: actually i use pop os. But i write code in neovim, so i should have some bragging rights, btw

[@balloontune1769]

@@no_name4796 ohh arc user 😂 i use Arch BTW..

[@shakeyourbunny]

You know, there were times, where computers did not have monitors, but just line printers.

[@trajectoryunown]

@@shakeyourbunny Wow! No, I did not know that.

[@no_name4796]

@@shakeyourbunny you know, there were times, where saying "computer" would result in you being framed as a witch on burnt alive (not because you said computer specifically, but just because you said something without a meaning, thus people would suspect you of being a witch)

[@dueeek]

Gotta share my experience. Using KDE on Arch, with a weird hybrid Intel/legacy Nvidia GPU that takes hours to set up on a fresh install just to be usable. Legacy Nvidia drivers are a must as Nouveau doesn't even list this GPU on their website. I have a lot of buffering issues on X11, OpenGL does work nice, but pretty often the entire system would freeze and just loop the last second of audio and video, and there is no way to bring the system back without a hard reset - not even REISUB works. Tried Wayland not expecting it to work at all, but it works even smoother, the random freezes are completely gone, it's as smooth as I would want it. OpenGL is a bit less reliable, but UT99 and Duke Nukem 3D being the only games I play - it's a non-problem.

[@brandonlewis2599]

Speaking as a dev, what I'll cop to is that the wayland developer community has done an absolutely horrible job communicating what wayland *is*, what the structural problems with X11 *are*, and how wayland improves the situation for everyone *over the long run*. And also, there are some "political" issues within the wayland developer community that haven't helped. We should be honest and transparent about that -- it doesn't change the fact that wayland is the right model for the hardware we have, and the foreseeable future.

[@BrodieRobertson]

I agree, the developers need to reach out and actually talk to people

[@brandonlewis2599]

Or else, folks like you and me need to spell it out, because I don't see the "wayland community" doing this, because we both know there isn't a "wayland developer community". There's the wayland project, the linux kernel and its suite of graphics drivers, and then every compositor trying to implement wayland while the protocol itself shifts and morphs underneath them. Just looking at how many comments of the form are "I tried wayland and it was bad" showcase how the fundamental misunderstanding. X.Org was a monolith. Wayland is a loose federation.

[@BrodieRobertson]

I'd love to bring more of the wayland voices like Simon Ser and especially some of the GNOME devs onto my show at some point because I feel like everybody assumes what they think and they're also really bad at explaining what they think in a short format

[@BrunodeSouzaLino]

@@BrodieRobertson I don't think bringing people that love to change the API of their DE every 6 months and remove features without asking their users the right people to have on such project.

[@BrodieRobertson]

@@BrunodeSouzaLino That's exactly why they're important to talk to

[@RedBlueProductions1]

this entire article reads like "you _chose_ to switch to wayland, right? so git gud like you did with linux" that's not a fair argument at all! we're being pushed to wayland because it's "the next thing in linux history" or whatever. the problem is that the wayland devs _refuse_ to respect alien setups to theirs, and by blocking various features, (whether that be outright refusing or by dragging out their refusal for years,) they make it clear that they want to enforce their workflow over countless others that have sprouted over the course of the linux desktop's existence. people should be able to have completely different desktop UIs from eachother, because shock, horror! different people need to use computers for different reasons!!!! the fact that the wayland devs refuse to acknowledge this is one of the most frustrating things about the prospect of moving. what if i want a certain application, but because wayland is being whiny and toxic, i have to go back to an environment _that they're begging us to switch off of_ to make the app work? it's dual booting to windows all over again. it's a nightmare. it's toxic. i've had enough of hearing about this.

[@RedBlueProductions1]

like you can't just say "no" to people trying to port existing features and say "git gud then" when people get upset. that's just toxic

[@BrodieRobertson]

You're free to keep using Xorg if you don't feel like Wayland is ready, but some distros are starting to feel like Wayland is ready so you have the choice of accepting what that distro wants, installing your own packages if they offer them, compiling the code yourself, or moving to a distro that's a bit more conservative with it's changes. It has been a problem getting Wayland devs to listen to use cases like screen tearing, global hot keys, multi window apps, etc. but many of these problems have either been resolved or are in the process of being resolved it just takes time to find an acceptable solution

[@АлексейГриднев-и7р]

@@BrodieRobertsonLinux is not MacOS. On MacOS, Apple can just break their APIs left and right and then force developers to adapt their apps under the threat of losing money. There is no money in desktop Linux so, if Wayland devs are trying to strongarm the developers, the latter may just start abandoning their projects rather than porting them to Wayland against their will.

[@kreuner11]

turns out the things that broke wayland were the friends we made along the way

[@brandonlewis2599]

too true.

[@andljoy]

The irony that an AppImage dev complains everything is broken :P

[@angeldirk00]

considering that I can't even use firefox using pure wayland using firefox-wayland, for more than 5 minutes without the window disappearing OR disappeaing and then crashing, yes, i'd say wayland is broken

[@brandonlewis2599]

Firefox is my main browser. I'm running sway on multiple machines. I'm running vanilla fedora, didn't have to do anything special. It sounds like you have either software or hardware problems. It's not wayland per-se.

[@Sitwayen]

​@@brandonlewis2599Or you are using Xwayland.

[@Stroopwafe1]

I'm running KDE on Arch using Wayland, and using Firefox to write this comment. It sounds like an issue with your system

[@GregMan-wu2cp]

Weird argument in the middle of the video. People ship apps for Linux. Qt, Gtk, Electron, SystemD, X11, the Linux kernel, etc are all just underlying details for that goal. If Linux desktops decide to change one core pillar of how they work and that makes those apps stop working, then that change broke those apps. The switch to Wayland broke those apps.

[@scottfranco1962]

Hey... I just wrote an X11 app... Yes, I am in the "don't move it until it's needed" case. Why move to Wayland unless I have to, as in, it doesn't work on x/wayland.

[@BrodieRobertson]

A native X11 app or used a toolkit?

[@scottfranco1962]

@@BrodieRobertson Yes, I knew that was coming. Petit-ami is itself a toolkit. It is x11 and windows. I might port it to wayland, but I want to determine 1. If x/wayland breaks it, and 2. If it would be more efficient going native to wayland, otherwise not really worth it. Regards, love your channel.

[@hermannpaschulke1583]

Idk for how long i've been using wayland on my machine, but basically the only time i think about "xorg vs wayland" is when you post a video about it lol

[@shrobbyy]

Having a fresh install of Fedora 39 right now. Wayland never felt better than now. X11 actually works worse than Wayland on my PC.

[@BrodieRobertson]

What hardware are you running?

[@shrobbyy]

@@BrodieRobertson It's a new build: Motherboard: Gigabyte B650M AORUS ELITE AX CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X GPU: AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT RAM: 2x16GB DDR5-6000MHz SSD 1: Samsung 990 Pro 2TB SSD 2: Samsung 980 Pro 1TB I don't know what's causing the issues in X11 but having my monitor on 240Hz there just affects the mouse cursor movement. Everything else stays like 60Hz.

[@whtiequillBj]

@10:17, this is reminding me of an old project called KDE for Windows. The KDE stack is there but it doesn't NEED Linux to work.

[@BrunodeSouzaLino]

One of the biggest things which will slow down Wayland adoption is the fact Wayland doesn't do aliasing and scaling on its own, meaning we're gonna run another course of reinventing the square wheel (like the Linux community LOVES to do) until some "standard" pushed by one of the major enterprise distros is used and everyone bitches and moans about it, reinvents more square wheels but the majority settles on the "standard" anyways because they lack the funds to support an alternative to the same level. This happened with Systemd.

[@-yttrium-1187]

Care to explain what you mean with aliasing? wayland doesn't really get a say in how things are drawn, text is aliased, windows can be made transparent. and the compositor draws the window borders, which can be aliased if that's implemented. The few things wayland should do out of the box are things like color management.

[@thewhitefalcon8539]

Wayland is the systemd philosophy applied to X11. Literally the same people work on systemd, Wayland, PipeWire and GNOME and dictate their philosophy. They're all about reinventing the square wheel, then using evangelism instead of technical merit to make people use it.

[@spaceinterprise2963]

X11, actually don't do aliasing either (at least for text), it's the third part font library doing it for you, if you try to use the native x11 lib to draw text it will just look super pixelated, x11 also doesn't have direct support for popular image formats, so you need a parser for those on your own.

IDK... For me Wayland vs XOrg times is difficult but certainly not SO DIFFICULT as it was in 2011 when GNOME 3 and KDE 4 were both NO-NO. Unity was also crappy and honestly at that time I didn't know what distro to recommend to a beginner because all "mainstream" UIs were just awful in different ways

[@conjurermast]

It's not so easy rn either. Gnome's very weird due to muleheaded devs, KDE's still very buggy and the big 3 compositors suck a lot. (mutter, kwin, picom) So Xfce with rice then? Or Cinnamon beta on Wayland?

[@notuxnobux]

@@conjurermast KDE updated their compositor very recently on x11. It now has the same latency as wayland compositors and it seems to be less buggy. They even removed the compositor latency option as it's not needed anymore.

[@haplozetetic9519]

Those were the days I just ran Icewm, and avoided the problematic ones. The Linux life remained comfortable.

[@conjurermast]

@@notuxnobux Do I have to compile the plasma6 beta to get this magic?

[@shockwave3318]

@conjuremast That's a bad idea. I am running kde6 in a vm and its still quite buggy. Just wait for release.

[@ptr6000]

About ten years ago, I tested multiple Linux distros on my desktop, hoping to replace my hackintosh setup but after fighting X11 for days, trying to have proper acceleration, a three-screen-setup and a plug-and-play screen working I told myself to never deal with it again. Invested the same time into my hackintosh setup and I ended up with a better working system. A few months ago I heard that distros like Manjaro (sorry, I didn’t know better) default to Wayland, I gave it a try and loved it! Didn’t touch the config file a single time (no idea where it actually is lol). It just works (for me)! Setting up a working system took like 10% of a similarly configured hackintosh system and there’s so much more hardware support! Love it ♥️

[@pcallycat9043]

Linux breaks adobe, keep using windows, is exactly the right answer if you need functionality only adobe provides, until such time as it’s available in Linux. I’m all for don’t use windows where it’s feasible, but this idea we should cut our nose off to spite our face, just to use only Linux, is ridiculous. Similarly, if you need something only xorg/x11 provides, keep using it. I look forward to only needing one display protocol, Wayland support just isn’t there yet and frankly, Linux has a ‘too many consumers, not enough developers’ problem, and Wayland support will be a long time coming in too many needed apps

[@BrodieRobertson]

It's the right answer for the user in the moment but it's not the right answer for a practical solution in the long run

[@pcallycat9043]

@@BrodieRobertson Granted, unfortunately when you're stuck between the operating system you want to use, and the fact that sometimes you just have to use what you can to stay employed, the moment outweighs idealistic points of view quite heavily. Free software (as in the gnu point of view, rather than free as in beer) is borderline a religious movement, but belief and desire weight little against reality and the fact that you just can't be expected to use something that doesn't exist, if nothing exists that fits your use case. I've been windows free since Redhat 5 (actual redhat 5 of 1997 fame, not RHEL), but having spent a career in IT, I'm all to familiar with the reality of using what works, instead of what fits an ideal.

[@brandonlewis2599]

@@pcallycat9043 You might be right, but on the flip side, look at the cesspool of commercial software, and ask yourself if maybe this "borderline religious movement" isn't all that stands between you and calamity. And keep in mind that, regardless of your choice of operating system, you're using free software -- either directly, or via the web, or bundled inside even the commercial software you paid good money for.

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

@@BrodieRobertson Why? I use Linux 100% of the time on my desktops, Windows is no longer in my existence on my home network. It's a perfectly good practical solution for me given that (as I have said many times) Gentoo has been my main OS since 2003. If that isn't "in the long run" then I don't know what is. Your comment is probably entirely correct for your use case but it's also completely subjective - and what doesn't work for you, in this case, works fine for me.

[@pcallycat9043]

⁠​⁠@@brandonlewis2599which, is why, as I’ve mentioned before either here or elsewhere, I’ve been a solid Linux user for every use case that I can (so much so that in wine’s infancy I was still fighting to game on Linux, happily spending hours to make shit work). I’ve contributed code, technical documentation, and advocacy to multiple project happily. I’m not arguing the merits of free software, merely pointing out that now, as ever, sometimes there are just use cases that haven’t been addressed by free software, and that to just choose not to do those things is infeasible much of the time.

[@jUsh-Nwjz-Qn7d]

Solution not being available is pretty feature breaking though. Could it be that the project are not being ported because said features are not available and seeing how wayland is going I would also better wait till they implement the features I need rather than jump in now and try to catch up with the smooth brain committee discussing feature implementation possibilities. That is like saying you can move into a five story building with stairs for first two floors and not having stairs is not feature breaking for apartments, you can in theory move in, unless you live on the fifth floor.

[@thewhitefalcon8539]

Yes that's how Wayland developers think and why nobody uses it.

[@aaskrad]

Wayland has been my daily driver for 2+ years and I can say that everything works nicely out of the box. There were a few drawbacks (GNOME and the decorations issue), but apart from that, everything else just works. PipeWire was also a seamless transition, and in regards to Flatpak and Portals, I couldn't be happier! The upcoming features, like the USB portals and the intention to make it possible to screencast apps combined with an audio stream. This year is promising!

[@BrodieRobertson]

Pipewire might have been the most seemless transition Linux has ever seen, there were slight issues early on with capture volumes but since then it's been perfect

[@kennystrawnmusic]

Re 14:46 - You don’t hear BSD users complaining about Apple Aqua either, despite it also breaking interoperability and being essentially analogous to Wayland but for macOS. The sake of remaining true to the UNIX philosophy is absolutely no excuse to inhibit innovation.

[@MrYossarianuk]

Now screen sharing for zoom is working in KDE/Wayland i've switched over my work laptop (with intel/nvidia hybrid gpu) and I have to say everything works completely fine. The only issue I had was I had to add a taskbar for Firefox .

[@szaszm_]

What's a taskbar for firefox? You mean taskbar (KDE panel) icon or launcher?

[@theluga7363]

I'm using an AMD/NVIDIA hybrid gpu. Unfortunately no DE works good on wayland. I went back to gnome on X11. Optimus-manager doesn't work on wayland and envy control don't support AMD/Nvidia 😢 But I atleast can use hybrid graphics on X11, I can use prime-run and switcheroo-control 🎉 to launch with discret gpu. Everything works except switching to amd after loading nvidia. I saw on Optimus-manager github it should be a kernel issue. Everything would be better if nvidia open-sourced their driver on the kernel itself.

[@Myname-l3h]

@@theluga7363what about supergfxctl?

[@MrYossarianuk]

@@szaszm_ Sorry, I didn't mean taskbar (I had Covid just after Xmas and my brain is still scrambled slightly) - what I meant was 'Title Bar' i.e in Firefox -> More Tools -> Customise Toolbar -> Add tick to 'Title Bar' This was so I got minimize/maximize buttons...

[@szaszm_]

@@MrYossarianuk I'm sorry about your illness, I wish you a quick recovery to 100%. This clarifies the comment, thanks! I'm using firefox with its client-drawn title bar, without the KWin decoration, to save some vertical space, but this is just personal preference, one is not better than the other. I'm just clicking the panel/taskbar button when I want to minimize it, and drag to the top of the screen to maximize.

[@olafschluter706]

Now I am a physicist, so I should not struggle that much to follow logic, but this is beyond me: "Now, even though Wayland wasn't designed to be a drop-in replacement for X11, it was certainly intended to eventually replace it. But this implies that it was intended from the start to do less than X11, and and that would be correct." So, a thing is supposed to replace something else, and that implies it does less? No, it doesn't in my book. Quite the opposite, one thing replacing another implies it does the same (at least), but maybe in a different manner - if "doing" refers only to the result, not the way it is achieved. If we physicists ditch a theory for another then the new theory will at least explain all the ditched one did, and maybe more, and most certainly in a simpler way. That is what replacement means. There is more wrong in the discussed post. UI Toolkits there were a number of those in the 90s, and the X Athena Widgets were only one of those - and they were undoubtedly and unbearably ugly. The best looking for the standards of those times was the Motif Toolkit, but its licensing terms as payware wasn't well suited for Linux. UI elements weren't hardcoded into the X11 server, they were drawn by the client using the X11 protocol. All the designs of the 90s may look ugly today, but keep in mind that professional designers weren't that active in designing graphical user interfaces on computers those days - most of the stuff you are seeing there was made by developers, guys and girls with a totally different skill set than a designer. My guess is that anyone talking about Wayland vs X11 today wasn't there when XFree86, the x86 port of X11, was the GUI enabling server on Linux, which it was for more than two decades. And all through the 90s, when Microsoft was struggling to get Windows on PCs, the combination of Linux and X11 was technologically superior to all the competition, especially with real multi-tasking (IIRC only the Amiga could do that in those times). No one using Linux and X11 considered to switch to Windows until the NT Kernel technology got mature enough. Furthermore one needs to acknowledge that stuff like dbus is linux-specific, and there are other kernels out there using XFree86. What I personally miss most is networking. An X11 server does not necessarily needs to run on the same system as the client (ssh -Y anyone?). Wayland can't do that by design. In my book this is a major flaw and a failure of Wayland replacing X11.

[@Creepus_Explodus]

For the last one, Waypipe is a replacement for ssh -X. I've never used -Y, but according to the manpage, -Y is just a less secure alternative of -X so I think they should do the same thing. Sure it's not built into Wayland by default, but since essentially no home desktop user would ever need such an option, I don't see any issue with letting a separate project handle it. In my opinion, trying to support all these odd functions that X had would be a massive waste of time for the project and completely miss the point. The goal of Wayland is to address the shortcomings of X11 when used for a modern home desktop, and cut the fat that isn't needed there. Is networking *really* that important, that it should be a core functionality? For me, it's unbearably slow even over a local gigabit network, I can't imagine it being practical over longer distances. If I need to configure something graphically, I'd rather do it over VNC and see the entire desktop while at it, not just a single program that was forwarded.

[@olafschluter706]

@@Creepus_Explodus Well, I could have said "ssh -X" as well, it doesn't really matter. I agree that generally speaking, networked X11 applications aren't that faster nowadays then VNC is (most of the time the same protocol is used, as modern X11 clients resort to draw and send images to the X11 server these days instead of letting the X11 server draw) - if one takes Intellij IDEA as an example, there is no speed difference in running this app to a networked X11 server than running this app by VNC (from my experience feasible on LAN, but not otherwise). However, for VNC you need something like a full desktop environment running on the remote side - for running apps via ssh -X(Y) you don't. And Mathematica, which comes free on raspi, runs perfectly fine on a remote X11 server (XQuartz on macOS in my case). I do not want to stress my raspi (headless) system running a desktop environment just for being able to fire up Mathematica. And it is rather convenient to have some graphical tools available to monitor and manage server resources. So, after all, I do not find networked graphics an unimportant use case. It is one of the major flaws of Windows server that it is usually run with a full desktop environment stressing server ressources just for the sake of the admin to have access to its settings and management tools.

[@leopard3131]

Spoken like someone who is not a physicist or at least someone who has no idea what you are talking about. To oversimplify, X11 is an old set of computer code that has many bolted on features and security issues. So much so that the x11 developers are unwilling to maintain it and so far no one has volunteered to step up. As such enter Wayland. It is a major rewrite and as you were told the goal is to develop a sustainable code base, drop outdated features, security, etc. I am floored you profess not to understand simplicity and simplification. Let me give you an example closer to home. You can derive a set of equations to describe the movement of the sun, moon, and planets. One would be to assume the earth is the center of the system. The other option is to assume the sun as the center. Both equations work but one set is much simpler than the other. I can think of several instances in quantum mechanics where the math is similarly simplified. As a physicist I am 100 % certain you use and appreciate simplification of the mathematics on a daily basis. Similarly Wayland simplifies the graphical stack. Makes perfect sense.

[@olafschluter706]

@@leopard3131 But you did not discuss wether that "simplified" Wayland approach can at the same time be a) a replacement for X11 and b) do less and even claim that b) follows from a) - that is what is claimed in the post and where I need someone explain to me this "logic". Now one can ditch features no one is using like being able to print. But features of X11 being in active use should have a counterpart in the Wayland "system", whatever components are in that set. You can move things around a lot from the display server all the way into UI toolkits and back and aside and add supporting processes (like the compositor). But in the end all features Applications are asking the X11 server for should be in one way or the other being offered by Wayland as well - and the less code in application space has to be rewritten, the better. Best is not to break any app. As Linus set this as the one and only rule for the kernel: "never break userspace". But starting with libc, within userspace APIs break on a regular basis. That's why we now have things like FlatPak or snap. Wayland is just more of the breaking kind of stuff.

[@leopard3131]

@olafschluter706 In an ideal world sure but that is limited in several ways. 1. The x11 code is old and it is a mess of add ons and work around. It has been maintained as long as possible and is no longer sustainable. 2. So Wayland had to be written from the bottom up. As such one has to prioritize what needs to be accomplished first. It is impractical to expect 100 % feature compatibility unless you are going to start coding the features you need. 3. Adaptation has been slow. Fedora and gnome have been leading the way but many users, desktops, and applications simply refuse to use Wayland. Some features of x11 will never be a part of Wayland as they have been pushed to applications. If kde or xfce or fluxbox or a VNC server or does not put in the work to maintain said feature it will be missing. This is not the responsibility Wayland. Like it or not, the Wayland developers have been clear from day 1: 1. They are no longer willing to maintain the x11 code. To date no one else has been willing to step up. 2. They have been crystal clear, as has gnome, what features they are willing to maintain, which ones they will not, and which ones have been moved out of x11 and into the apps. The developers are not slaves and you can not force them to do any. Best to start working on coding as kde has done.

[@Doctor_X]

ok... i am tired of this f*cking "you the developer" crap. You do realize, there is vast majority of linux users now are not developers? I am so tired of all the elitist saying linux is just for developers platform. NO... it is a PC platform.... a multiuser platform. Gamers, mom and pop, school, businesses all use Linux as a desktop. This is my problem with wayland. The problem is Joe user doesnt care. He just wants is gamer rig or Steam Deck to work. You cannot just drop xorg just cause you are tired of it. Like it or not, MIllions of destops run linux now. And only a small fraction of those are used for developement. if Wayland WAS a drop in replacement for x11, i dont think there would be a problem. However, A developer isnt without a user to consume that project. This is the same crap that was pulled by Ubuntu and forced me to find another distro with dropping 32 bit libraries. It broke almost all gaming systems. I went to Manjaro and havent looked back. I just wish everyone would quit kissing RH's ass on everything. They are the M$ of the linux world.

[@brandonlewis2599]

Linux develpers don't get paid. We volunteer our time. And X11 is a giant fucking mess. "You users" are always asking for stuff that is difficult or impossible to deliver within the framework of X11, and then it's again our problem if we can't do it. For example, "Why can't you see how important it is to have tear-free scrolling?!?! OMG LINUX IS A JOKE". If you want that, wayland is your friend. If you want smooth video playback -- full screen, windowed, widgeted, 3D-textured, whatever. Go trawling through your system header files and if it seems overwhelming, just keep in mind that it's the responsibility of developers to know what all of that shit is. And some of it is deeply broken.

[@BrunodeSouzaLino]

@@brandonlewis2599 The problem here is the community has too many people in the space think they have the solution to a problem without knowing what the problem is. Or rather than fixing the existing solution (not to say X11 and Xorg are fixable at this stage), they create a new solution instead. And in the end, whatever Red Hat starts using in their distro is what becomes the standard, rendering the whole "quest" pointless.

[@ayaya-ayaya]

I think that if it weren't for inherent security problems with the x11 protocol, x11 would live for many years more despite other shortcomings. Programmers can live with maintenance churn, but when there are security problems, it's harder to justify the effort when a safer and cleaner alternative exists.

[@ayaya-ayaya]

@rany0 In isolation, it won't save anyone. But it won't be a vector either.

[@szaszm_]

@rany0 You can run an untrusted app in a container. In X11, it would be able to read your screen and be a keylogger anyway, just by having access to the display. On Wayland, you need to give it permissions to your screen and keyboard.

[@vilian9185]

i don't agree, because the maintence burden is a symtom of the way xorg was made, the same as the security issues

[@notuxnobux]

Those issues were fixed 20 years ago with XACE. People need to read before they speak. Not even redhat engineers read it properly. NSA fixed it (literally). But nobody actually cares about that. In the last 40 years that X11 has anyone ever had their password leaked by a malicious program that keylogs x11? no. We need to stop pretending something is an issue when it actually isn't. I can guarantee that everybody that complains about security in x11 and runs wayland instead doesn't even make their .bashrc (and sway config) read only, which is far more of a security risk (and an actual target by malware) than x11 has ever been. If you are serious about security and dont just want security theater then you run applications isolated, in which case this can even be done safely no matter if you use x11 or wayland. Btw, if you use a wlroots based wayland compositor then any program can record your screen without any special permissions.

[@notuxnobux]

That's factually false. It was fixed over 20 years ago with XACE. But quit pretending with the security theater.

[@michadybczak4862]

Since Firefox moved to native Wayland, I noticed, that clicking on links is not raising FF window. Since this happens very often, it bothers me, because I need to do additional clicks and that stacks. Any idea if that cane be fixed?

[@PeakKissShot]

womm

[@michadybczak4862]

@clemensalbrecht1469 Great, so this is a classic "throw baby with a bathtub water". Because of some fringe cases, the everyday, common actions are nerfed. And people wonder why Linux is not going mainstream.

[@MrUploader14]

I would love to use Wayland but it's unfortunately completely borked on my desktop. It doesn't even load the desktop just a black screen i have to hard power off my PC just to get back to the login page for KDE and then reboot systemctl because the boot failed.

[@Skibbehify]

I recently switched to openSUSA tumbleweed using KDE with Wayland & it's been a crazy smooth & bug free experience.

[@leevi6026]

One thing I hope you could possibly pay more attention in the future is making it more clear when you are reading someone other's text and when you are talking your own opinions. If you are watch the video then it is easy to judge based on where you are looking to, but I tend to do other things at the same time and mainly just listen and then it is many times pretty much impossible to know :D I don't know exactly what could be reasonable solution which would work without being too complex for you, but just my two cents. e: Forgot to mention that I guess I am not the only one mainly listening these kind of videos.

[@Xelosu]

Some devs choose to spend time writing articles trying to sell philosophy of "it is not Linux that breaks Photoshop".. and some like Steam put an actual effort in Proton ensuring that Linux "doesn't break games anymore" and as a result Linux popularity in gaming space skyrockets.

[@stefanalecu9532]

The hell is anyone but Adobe going to do to make Photoshop work on Linux? Maybe the Wine project, sure, but you're strawmaning so hard it's insane

[@MrMediator24]

Next episode: "The Way of Land"

[@breadmoth6443]

"wayland isn't a drop-in replacement for x11"............so then why do we have wayland? nobody is working on x11, and sooner or later not even security patches will be sent.....so as far as i know wayland is a replacement for x11......or you can just go openbsd as they maintain their own x11. ....

[@BrodieRobertson]

OpenBSD very much relies on the Red Hat work on X11, they maintain a very soft fork of Xorg and are going to be in the same position as Linux when they move away completely

[@breadmoth6443]

@@BrodieRobertson perhaps.... I am not a bsd user , i dabbled only with freebsd - but if what you say is correct, then openbsd will have to take up the mantle sooner or later or be stuck with an unmaintained code.

[@zlice0]

I don't know Nate, but this article is just another show of the mental gymnastics Wayland people do to excuse laziness and poor design choices (for themselves or others). The whole replacement/not replacement seems to self contradict itself even at the opening, and then later with the "not everything is fully ported" bit. We all know the aim was to replace X. And if you choose to close issues, call people spammers and generally ignore, write off or say "your use case is bad" for wanting compatible functionality that every modern OS has had for decades - you're being selfish and/or lazy. No other way to look at it. These people need to quit making excuses and own up to poor choices. And ideally fix or help guide people to how to implement things, or maybe find a dev. Things like VSYNC should not taken years of teeth pulling to be able to disable. The "realizing 100% isnt there" part ISNT GOOD. We should have been where we are years ago. Certain parts sounds like pushing work off onto others, which while inevitable, is not the solution for every X-vs-Wayland issue.

[@unpotatoedsalmon]

Wayland is a failure thanks to its maintainers, they did not set up goal posts to hit and instead thry stumble along like a blind man

[@yamai]

i use only wayland since nearly two years. only annoyance is screen sharing on sway. neither video or audio is working as it should be. i have some workarounds...

[@fuseteam]

The print server makes sense...........for computers 40......50 years ago Hint: a monitor was a premium xd

[@BrodieRobertson]

By the time X11 rolled around graphical terminals were relatively commonplace but it was helpful for sharing things

[@khronosschoty]

@@BrodieRobertson sharing your screen over the printer sounds fun -- if you had the correct office setup.

[@notuxnobux]

5:15 x11 never had a built-in widget toolkit. It had an optional library called xaw (x athena widgets), which was meant to be a sample widget set. It was on the same level as gtk. It was never part of xorg (or x11) itself.

[@BrodieRobertson]

Maybe native toolkit is a better term to use

[@brandonlewis2599]

You're right, but it doesn't matter. The point is that raw XLib looks like garbage. Modern X11 apps are often bypassing that rendering pathway, via various extensions, and drawing directly into offscreen buffers. Wayland just puts this style of usage front-and-center.

[@js6pak]

17:23 wdym, is fedora kde not planning on dropping X11 anymore?

[@alexeiboukirev8357]

Is there Motif for Wayland? The idea of porting it floated some years ago.

[@no_name4796]

Xorg is bloated, unmaintanable (and rn barely mantained) mess. That already should be enough of a reason

No there is no Motif port for Wayland, but Motif applications do run on top of XWayland. But there will be a lot of stuff that won't work, like missing refreshes on exposes, positioning of windows, your custom icons for the desktop application will not be used, focus on closing window will pass to wrong window, instead of parent or previously selected window. Graphical cut and paste, if you use xclip, will not work. Color picker will no longer work, but that is by design (someone might steal your pictures one pixel at a time :-). If you use MIT-SHM for fast drawing, you might also have rendering issues (totally broken on WSLG). In WSLG if you iconize the window, you can never get it back. All in all, horrible user experience, which will make you go back to X11 as soon as you can, if that is still an option.

[@Nunya58294]

I need to learn to stay out of the comments. I'm almost guaranteed to piss myself off...

[@padtrick]

hey guys, im currently still using x11, because i dont find a working alternative for barrier/input-leap. maybe someone here knows a working kvm solution for wayland.

[@d-brox]

AFAIK, input-leap does already work on gnome wayland. Other DEs still need to add support for some specific portals, and libei, to work

[@padtrick]

@@d-brox ty, using arch/kde/x11 atm, doesnt like gnome that much, but good to know

[@YellowCable]

wayland is simply not needed. There are actual problems, huge problems with Linux-based OSes as desktops, and X11 vs wayland is just not one of them. Fixing the actual huge problems of Linux (not being a targetable platform, Zero backward compatibility, fragmentation, overcomplexity etc) is really hard. Rewriting a component or subsystem from scratch is really easy by comparison. It absorbs/wastes years of technical work (so it seems hard), but solves none of the actual problems the users face.

[@Thurgenev]

This!

[@sergeykish]

XOrg developers don't want to support XOrg, you claim alternative is not needed. Some users would like to have GUI.

[@PeakKissShot]

X11 is not needed. gui is the biggest problem for end users and x11 is a big part of that

[@brandonlewis2599]

This is just so false. Literally every word here is wrong. You are exactly backward.

[@funbucket09]

I'm new to Linux and this whole wayland/X11 thing has really put a damper on my experience. I didn't understand why things weren't working when I followed guides. Nearly ALL online guides for Linux are currently out of date. I think this might have literally been the worst time to try and switch to Linux. I have persisted through all of this, but it makes me wonder how many people threw in the towel after deciding it was too much of a time sink. The experience for new users is dogshit and most of the community aren't helpful and most of the time are condescending (I got told to read documentation when that was all I had been doing for the last 3 days.... The docs are ENORMOUS and overwhelming for new users. This really pissed me off and put me off asking for help again.) Not everyone is rude but it would help Linux if the community wasn't so hostile. I don't think they actually want to gain more users to be honest.

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

"I'm new to Linux and this whole wayland/X11 thing has really put a damper on my experience." So you didn't do enough research before you started to use Linux? And why does this matter if you can just download a Ubuntu ISO and install that in 20 minutes. That's why Ubuntu and Mint exist, to get newbies "up and running" quickly. "I didn't understand why things weren't working when I followed guides." What specifically? Again, research will tell you what hardware is and isn't supported by Linux before you even try using it for the first time. "I have persisted through all of this, but it makes me wonder how many people threw in the towel after deciding it was too much of a time sink." If you're not willing to put in time and effort to learn Linux, what do you expect? You didn't come into this world knowing how to use a Windows computer either but you learned it at school, work, college or just messing about with it in your own time. I think your lack of effort and lack of patience is probably your biggest problem - and for others who "just give up". "The experience for new users is dogshit and most of the community aren't helpful and most of the time are condescending" No, the experiece for you was "dogshit" - you can only speak for your own experiences, you can't get into the minds of others. When you turn an argument into "me and my big gang of pretend friends" you weaken the point you are making. "I got told to read documentation when that was all I had been doing for the last 3 days" Perhaps be a bit more grateful to the people that take the trouble to write such documentation - we ALL have to read it at certain points, why are you so special? And if it takes you three days working though a document for it still not to work, then long before then I would be looking for other documentation - or I'd go onto the forums for the distro, I'd post a message explaining the document is problematic, show outputs from your system, give as much information as you can. Again, I don't believe you have the patience or willingness to put in the effort to do that. "The docs are ENORMOUS and overwhelming for new users." I don't know what documents you were reading but as a long-term Gentoo Linux user, most of the wiki pages that take you through setting things up are maybe two or three pages of HTML - the same for the Arch Wiki. What docs specifically were problematic for you? I think at this point you're making generalisations and you're just a bit self-entitled and lazy. "This really pissed me off and put me off asking for help again." So you gave up very easily - lack of patience. "Not everyone is rude but it would help Linux if the community wasn't so hostile." Nobody is paid to give you support and you're expected to read documents like the rest of us do. If the documents don't work then you post a message in an appropriate forum where you demonstrate (with outputs or error messages) that you've got to a certain point and are stuck. In my experience, the community is very helpful when you demonstrate you've put in effort - but they won't "wipe your backside" for you. "I don't think they actually want to gain more users to be honest." So what? Linux is my main OS, I could care less how many other people use it - 2% or 92% desktop usage would make no difference to how I use it. I'm an engineer, not a zealot. If someone wants help installing and learning Linux, I help them - but they have to show me a willingness to learn. I note by this point that you've said nothing about SPECIFIC problems you had with Linux - so even now, I can't give you any advice. It's just one long WHINE by someone who sounds extremely self-entitled and blames every problem on someone or something else.

[@funbucket09]

@@terrydaktyllus1320 lol ok. I wasn't asking for any help here. So didn't go into specifics. I'm not really interested in arguing with you about my intentions here I was just making a statement about my general experience. Never said I wasn't interested in learning, infact that is why I am here. You can deny that some things are a bit of a mess if you want that's fine. They are though. Is it solvable? Sure. That isnt the point. Of course I'm speaking about my own experience. Who else's would I be talking about? I will refrain from making assumptions about you as you have done for me. Did I ever say that the problems I have come across make Linux not worthwhile to learn? No! I said I've stayed because I know this is all new territory for even long term Linux users. Basically I was just saying I wish I was learning this all a few years later (or earlier) when the foundations of Wayland were working better. I didn't blame anyone for that. It doesn't cancel out that I was made to feel unwelcome (here too) when I asked for help. Unlike here, when I was asking for help I was very detailed, explaining what I tried, what was happening, and what I expected to happen etc. Just like I would do when troubleshooting anything else. Anyhow you have a good weekend mate 👍

[@arcidalex910]

I feel you. Ive been using linux for some time now for work and home but the fact of the matter is that a normal user should not have to care about the type of windowing protocol they use. I get theres a transition going on and for good reason, but still For the most part major distros do a good job in handling this for you, but if youre on something like say Arch, yeah you’re going to have to do this on your own To what ive seen over the years, the Linux community has a very ‘RTFM’ vibe to it and isn’t particularly helpful which results in experiences like yours. But the actual devs behind it all have been waking up to the things that limits desktop Linux’s adoption and Wayland is part of that effort to fix it. Hopefully in the next year or so alot of these Wayland issues are finally dealt with and the desktop Linux userbase can go back to not caring about this

[@funbucket09]

@@arcidalex910 Hey man. Thanks for understanding what I was trying to say. As an example, I had never heard of Wayland (and didn't really understand these protocols yet) until all of a sudden my VNC connections didn't work they way I expected. I was using RasPiOS (Debian 12) and didn't have the option of just going back to Debian 11 as I was running new hardware not supported by the old kernal. So I did my own research, discovered there are this things called display protocols and that Debian12 now defaults to Wayland (previously X11). I spent a long time in the manuals before I decided to ask for help (long story short). Don't get me wrong I am super grateful that the manuals exist in the first place and don't feel I am 'too entitled' to need to read them like everyone else (as insinuated by the other gentleman's comment). Again, long storey short I basically got called lazy and told to read the docs.. Ok sounds good. Can you at least give me a hint as to which docs I should be reading? I had a feeling I had gone down the wrong road with my research/troubleshooting and all I wanted was a push in the right direction. I didn't want to be spoon-fed, I actually like figuring things out myself and enjoy the learning experience. I did eventually get it all sorted myself but I was a little disheartened at the attitude and assumptions that were made against me. To top it off I voice my opinion here just in brief and get accused of all those things again (when I didn't even come here to ask for help). Thank you again for showing me that there are people in this community willing to have a civil conversation and not take a minor criticism of an operating system as an attack against them personally. I'm enjoying the learning experience so far and look forward to learning more. I'm actually so excited I don't know what I should learn first! The freedom to configure things exactly as you like is very welcoming. Have a good day/night mate! :)

[@thewhitefalcon8539]

Don't let the evangelist fool you - most people are still using X11 because it's just fine.

[@TheBuzzSaw]

I'm a simple man. I see a Wayland rant; I click.

[@raddinox2707]

I would love to try wayland, but with my Nvidia card could login to my KDE session. It worked but it was like 4 fps. Now I have switched to an AMD GPU and I can't even login to my kde wayland session.. I did choose to buy a new AMD GPU just because everyone and their mothers says they work better on Linux than Nvidia. But so far the experience has been pretty similar. I am using Barrier to make my second computer+monitor act as a secondary monitor to my main machine. But that requiers Xorg to work. Anyone know a good replacement for wayland?

[@EscapeVelocity1]

I've been waiting decades for Wayland. No more delays, bring it.

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

Wow! You've not used a computer in that long, huh? And what does Wayland bring you, precisely? Particularly as the old boomer you must be now, given the decades you've been waiting for it.

[@blinking_dodo]

Using Xorg on my Linux Mint PC. Using ??? on my Windows 10 laptop. What does windows actually have? Does windows even *have* a CLI-only version? 🤔

[@szaszm_]

On Windows, the GUI is part of the kernel. They made a GUI-less version of Windows Server a few years ago, but they did that by removing the GUI from the kernel codebase. Otherwise GUI is an integral, inseparable part of Windows.

[@blinking_dodo]

@@szaszm_ Oh wow, that's another way to do things, i guess?

[@l5248]

dwm (.exe) 😅

[@AwesumIndustrys]

I think the closest thing you can name in terms of drawing the desktop is the desktop window manager. Otherwise, most if not all of the componetry of Windows is… Windows. They’re baked into the kernel.

[@xan1242]

I love how nobody _actually_ knows what Windows uses. It's kind of funny to see. Windows uses a kernel-mode driver called Win32k.sys which is used to draw stuff on screen (cursor, window, shell, etc.) DWM is just a compositor that plugs in and enables GPU accelerated tear-free drawing on screen. Windows does have a kernel-mode graphics mode, too. If you've seen CHKDSK run back in the day, that's basically what NT has. The boot screen also uses this IIRC. There is no true "CLI-only" version officially (the Windows Server mentioned is still using user-mode), but, there are custom made drivers that use kernel mode and provide a basic terminal. (Forgot the exact name of it, but there are videos of it on YT). There used to be the Windows Recovery Console as well, which also ran directly under NT. But that's long gone since Vista.

[@jagagemo8141]

Windows 11 breaks Lutris and Proton.

[@donaldmickunas8552]

Microsoft doesn’t care,

[@alphaomega154]

i think thats there the problem is. is due to linux developers scene REFUSES to see linux as a platform. because each of them want to have their own way. this is DETRIMENTAL to linux base. this is the part of why hardware companies DONT WANT to invest or taking risk much on linux. its so sporadic. its unclear where the standard is. the same sentiments from the gaming developers. why would any of them risking the headaches of problems caused by the linux uncertainties? as soon as everybody working on linux develpments can agree to see linux as a PLATFORM, as soon as they can start working on a STANDARD. and maybe as soon as COMMON PEOPLE/USERS will have a good reason of moving to linux.

[@PeakKissShot]

It is agreed upon by basically everyone that Wayland and pipewire with portals form the basis of the Linux desktop platform

[@BrunodeSouzaLino]

It's that whole reinventing the square wheel thing Linux people love to do. Instead of going for the most plausible solution to a problem, they all think they have the correct solution.

[@AndersHass]

As I said in the Linux Experience video, I expected you to cover this article, lol

[@adambester3673]

how is gaming on Wayland? if the distro I use switches to Wayland would I even notice?

[@temari2860]

I'm a Linux user and always was, but honestly I wish for a perfect future where BSD is the desktop OS we're all using. It's just better in it's design.

[@JurisLLM]

Could you maybe do an item on explicit sync? I've been reading a lot about the way Nvidia wants to fix their support for Wayland, and why it's been stuck as a PR for years. Could you maybe give your views on it?

[@wilfridtaylor]

Just got a new laptop with a 4060 RTX in it and worked out of the box with Hyprland and latest drivers on arch. Was very pleasantly surprised.

[@kxuydhj]

i just read Nate's post ten minutes ago and this pops up, pretty funny ngl.

[@adibemaxwell6111]

Let's also not forget, Wayland will break Linux for users that use older computers with older graphics cards that simply aren't supported by Wayland and will NEVER be fixed to support Wayland. So people who buy older Thinkpads are screwed. Because they won't be able to use the GPUs on those machines because Linux will no longer support X11. They will be unable to install Linux on those computers. They become useless. And let's not ignore the fact these older thinkpads are extremely popular with Linux users because those machines are very well supported and cheap to acquire for hackers on a budget. Does Linux really, really want to abandon all of those Linux users because of their push towards Wayland?

[@brandonlewis2599]

I run sway on an X220. How far back in the thinkpad lineage are you going?

[@BrodieRobertson]

To be fair Intel drivers are kind of cracked

[@Phos9]

Oh I think I get why X11 had the ability to output to a printer, it was if you were using it to send output directly to a printer in the same manner as you used to see with a printer terminal

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

Incorrect. X11 has nothing to do with printing, it's purely a display server. An application running in Xorg (e.g. LibreOffice) makes calls to the printer device via the kernel to do its printing. I can send a text file to a printer from the command line using the "lp" command that goes nowhere near Xorg. Still, you're not alone - the 3 people that like your comment (so far) also clearly haven't got a clue about how Xorg or Linux printing works either.

[@Phos9]

@@terrydaktyllus1320 look up Xprint and ignore the SOE’ed printing company if you want to find out who is clueless

[@Phos9]

@@terrydaktyllus1320 X11 did have a print server. You can look it up.

[@Phos9]

KZbin keeps eating my replies for what I'm sure a good reasons to someone, but yes, as pointed out in the video, X did have printer capabilities. As I said, probably not for documents, more likely for a continuous print out of some monitoring device. For a notable example of such a thing, the big ear telescope's output was such a device.

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

@@Phos9 I repeat for the last time to the "hard of thinking" - Xorg or X11 has NO printer capabilities.

[@mskiptr]

There's a value in keeping that dependency chain small. But that requires having well-structured libraries, accurate abstractions and orthogonal, non-overlapping interfaces. X11 is neither of those, but more importantly, solving the same problems again and again by always sticking to the low-level interfaces in every single program is really not a good approach.

[@thewhitefalcon8539]

Wayland does the same thing on the compositor side though? Every window manager has to solve compositor problems and every compositor has to solve window manager problems.

[@mskiptr]

Oh great. YT got rid of my reply (sorry, I'm not writing it again)

[@ManuFortis]

Something that would help me with with using wayland, is making it so that some older webcams and other video devices that used to work just fine under Qt work again under wayland. Example is the Kinect camera for windows. The original one they sold separate 'windows' versions of. In windows you have to re-enable directplay to get it to work, along with installing the exact right drivers to make it connect to applications again. (It's a bit of a chore.) Under linux, this was basically plug and play; or it was. An update in 2019 broke it. Not sure exactly what and why, but it has to do with Qt. My only way to get it to work afterwards was to install my pre-updated iso again, and not update it ever due to not knowing which specific thing was the problem in Qt. I just knew it had something to do with it, because the applications using Qt stopped working entirely. Which was basically all the applications that captured webcam input on my install.

[@thewhitefalcon8539]

And this is the attitude all the wayland developers have. If it works for their use case, it's done. Screw YOUR use case.

[@ManuFortis]

@@thewhitefalcon8539 Yeah, it's like how with what I said in Brodies newest video about kernel 6.8. Not everyone should be contributing to Linux. Sure, it's open source, so technically anyone can. But not everyone should. Wayland devs. Pay attention. If you annoy the people who use linux into going back to windows or mac, or further down the rabbit hole into BSD land; you're messing up. No, we don't have to do what you want. That's not how it works. You do what we *all* want. Because if you don't, then our stuff doesn't work. And you have no right to break the usability of our stuff just to suit your ego. Qt devs. Same deal.

[@thewhitefalcon8539]

@@ManuFortis The Wayland devs don't care about messing up the ecosystem, they only care about their own popularity.

[@ManuFortis]

​@@thewhitefalcon8539 Somehow I feel like this is nothing new in the land of linux and 'open source contributions'. Just watched another video recently where Linus Torvalds was ripping some contributor a new one over putting C code in a header file (if I remember it correctly). Simply put, the main gist of his rip was that such errors should be getting caught well before he ever sees them. If he's seeing them, somethings funky. Methinks those (particular) contributors are focusing more on trying to be useful, than actually being useful.

[@thewhitefalcon8539]

@@ManuFortis I can understand that from Linus because he's right. If there's something like that that goes against his standards, it should've been caught before it gets to him. The kernel's too big to be just his - now his job is basically to merge together what's already approved by the section leaders (don't know what they're called in the kernel project), and have the final say over whatever needs a final say. Anything Linus doesn't like probably should have been caught by the hierarchy of people under him who feed the approved work up to him. Wayland and systemd are like projects that are meant to feed their creators' ego (and some people were creators of both projects). They aren't focusing on being great to everyone so people switch over by choice, they're focusing on being plausibly better than the old system, and then indoctrinating people to make sure they use the new one.

[@ChrispyNut]

Feels bad to see Brodie get increasingly moist as videos go on during peak summer, where I'm assuming whatever cooling's turned off cos noise ... if so, thank you for suffering for those of us with noise sensitivity, good sir.

[@卛]

...summer?

[@ChrispyNut]

@@卛 Wait, are you the incarnation of the stereotypical American .. oblivious to the existence of other countries and even that the earth is sphericalish with an axial tilt?

[@BrodieRobertson]

I try to keep cool but sometimes I do get a little shiny, it's been mid 30's this week

[@jfolz]

@@ChrispyNut an oblate spheroid.

[@ChrispyNut]

@@jfolz Still an ish because it's lumpy and jagged (albeit by a teeny, tiny fraction, relative to the overall surface area/volume). That is the term that escaped my brain when I sought it however, so, thank you. 😘

[@khronosschoty]

I like the fact that I can hookup an old teletype, glass or otherwise, and X would be totally fine with it.

[@unforkableonion5081]

the platform name should be the peepoway! Also really enjoyed this video on my 144Hz pixul printer.

[@vanodon2257]

I just have a function in my compositor that implementa a system wide accessible portal that sort of fixes most issues that annoyed me like uberzug not working tmux window management issues and drag and drop between some windows not working like becuase dev didnt implement a protocol

[@walter_lesaulnier]

I have a large 4k monitor and a 1080p one at different resolutions. X11 was horrible- I hated it. Wayland was a godsend for me. X11 was also horrible moving in and out of virtual machines... at least for me. If someone has concerns with Wayland, I suggest using a distro that comes with it natively.

[@ItsYogSothoth]

That's pretty much the reason why I moved to Wayland - I got myself a 4K screen and put it next to 1080p screen. On X11 the image was either huge on 1080p or tiny on 4K so I needed something that would allow me to scale each screen individually. I've found a way to do it on X11, but the image on 4K screen was just blurry (basically it did some upscaling of 1080p to 4K). On Wayland... it just worked out of the box. As a Nvidia GPU user I had some compatibility issues here and there, but once those were figured out (either by setting some env variables or having Nvidia actually fix them) all I can say Wayland for now is a rather smooth sailing experience for me. I've never came back to using X11 ever since I did the switch.

[@walter_lesaulnier]

The newest Vulkan drivers are supposed to fix a lot of things with Nvidia on Wayland. @@ItsYogSothoth

[@pennyandrews3292]

Well, one thing I kind of dislike about that framing is that it suggests it's fair to put the kind of burden on small projects to "port their stuff to Wayland" that one would put on large developers like Adobe to "port their stuff to Linux." The key here is that Adobe could port their stuff to Linux, they have the resources and money, they just won't and see Windows as more profitable. The majority of people being negatively impacted by Wayland are not only smaller, one-man projects without the resources to "just transition to Wayland," but they are also projects that have supported Linux and other Unix operating systems for years and are now having the rug pulled out from under them. Another reason it's not really comparable is that X11 itself is open source... we know exactly how X11 works, the Wayland devs knew how it works from the beginning. In the past, compatibility was desired and we went out of our way to have stuff like Wine that would allow Windows applications to work. But with Wayland, then they deliberately went in a different direction and made no effort to have it be backwards compatible at all, giving the middle finger to everyone who didn't have the resources to learn and implement their new way of doing things. What Wayland has done, in my view, is shown people that Linux cannot be trusted to have a stable API, and that if you build your stuff on Linux, it's like building your house on sand. Wayland isn't alone in this, though... the whole libc5/glibc thing didn't help either, it killed off a lot of Loki games that weren't open source. In general, Linux developers are way more apathetic about breaking legacy support than most proprietary OS vendors are. A lot of times you could write an application for Windows 95 and have it still work on Windows 11 as long as you use the Win32 API properly. With Linux? Things break all the time, and you are expected to recompile, debug, or die. It's an ecosystem that actually punishes small projects and makes it so only projects with large teams can thrive. It's very much a "this treadmill moves fast, you have to keep up or die, and only popular stuff that attracts mass interest from the people willing to do the work can not die." In some ways, I would say this makes Linux a "tyranny of programmers," or a technocracy. Regardless of what end users actually want or care about, the big decisions are made by the people with the skills to do the work, and forced down the throats of end users who maybe don't have the skill to create an alternative. That is, those with the technical ability to maintain X11 have formed a weird kind of "union," and largely decided for everyone else that we don't get to have it anymore and the new shinies will be forced down our throats and we will lose all our old stuff that relies on it. Does it matter what the average end user thought? Nope, only what the security experts at Red Hat and the majority of programmers with the ability to maintain X11 thought, and the rest of us are basically at their mercy. They're being the kind of geek-bullies within the Linux community that I think the engineers at Google and other major tech companies are being towards the rest of the population, with stuff like Android and various Google services. I feel like the rise of technology is slowly leading to the rise of technocracy and this weird "father knows best" approach to software. At the end of the day, if I really thought Wayland was what the average person actually thought they wanted or needed, I would be more okay with it, but it really feels more like it's what big companies with paid programmers and security experts think we need, and we are being forced to "take our medicine" like children. You know what I mean?

[@brandonlewis2599]

You have wl-roots. You have XWayland. GTK apps will transparently and dynamically switch between X11 and wayland, as would any other self-respecting tooklit. There's very little porting, unless you are relying on X11 extensions that are themselves quite brittle across existing X11 environments. The only thing I get from this wall of text is that you do not understand what wayland *is*.

[@BrodieRobertson]

At the end of the day, if you write an application and you want it to remain supported on modern systems you've always been required to maintain that software. Whether that means updating to deal with dependency changes, porting it into a new toolkit, supporting it on the various distros that decide to package it differently. Yes porting to Wayland is another piece of work that needs to be done, but the only reason this was less of a concern on X11 is because Xorg is basically a dead platform that hasn't had a signicant change in over a decade.

[@fintomoon]

it seems to me that you believe that x11 developers owe you something. they've been maintaining it for some time therefore they must do it until the end of time. but it is not how it works. they are mostly volunteers who do what they want and what they feel comfortable doing. they were tired of dealing with all the x11 nonsense and went on to develop Wayland. they didn't force anyone to use it. it just so happened that others noticed and believed in that project. not because they had to, but because they wanted to. and yes, it is an unfortunate reality, that if you decide to rely on others, especially if those are volunteers not contractually bound to do something, you may have to adapt. and it's actually not even that bad. most apps already use a toolkit that allows for seamless transition most of the times. even if that's not the case there are things like xwayland. in the end, if you don't want to continue x11 development, why does anyone else has to want?

[@LordHonkInc]

4:30 I can't quite follow the logic of "[Wayland] was certainly intended to _eventually_ replace [X11]. *But this implies* that it was intended from the start to do less than X11,[…]" (bold emphasis mine.) Like, how does it imply that? I mean, wouldn't it be just as fair for me to say Wayland is intended to do _more_ than X11 if it wants to replace it, the same way systemd does more than runit?

[@BrodieRobertson]

Nate phrased that really badly

[@brandonlewis2599]

The best way I can explain this: X11 and Wayland are both *protocols*. In the case of X11, literally a *network protocol*, whereas wayland is merely a form of "IPC", or "interprocess communication". And the choice is deliberate. Wayland is designed and optimized to run on the end-user's machine, so that graphical data can be directly shared between the application and the wayland compositor. X11 is desinged to work over network connections. X11 was designed for a different time, and as originally conceived, applications sent high-level graphics commands "over the wire". But this didn't scale, as graphics became more sophisticated. Over time various extensions were devised to bring us closer to what wayland is. But meanwhile, there's a ton of baggage and overhead, and barriers to optimization. I do sometimes use `ssh -Y`, but definitely it's the exception and not the rule.

[@Rand0081]

The replace intent was justified (and rightfully, IMHO) by the fact that modern platforms (QT, GTK, whatever) already used a very small subset of essential X11 features, while providing advanced features in their own library. Rendering the window was already performed by the toolkit, which then asked X to just show it on screen. That's why features are added to wayland only when there is no way to add them in app-space.

[@Mpdarkguy]

Wayland must have been quite the rabbit hole lately, it at least certainly feels that it’s been your go to subject in the past few weeks

[@PeakKissShot]

X11 monkeys have been seeing how well things are going in Wayland and are throwing a fit

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

@@PeakKissShot Nope, just checked. Still no Wayland on all my Gentoo Linux machines and everything still working fine, just as it should be. It's the "gaming wankers" demanding a few more FPS in "Cybersplatt 4044" and "Starfailed" that get into a froth over Wayland and numbers as they play "PC Top Trumps" on social media with each other. ("Ha, ha, I win, my Ryzen CPU has 48 cores while your one only has 32!")

[@ТеншиТевссар]

Wayland in current state quite broken. Scaling not working properly(both native and xwayland apps have blurry fonts). Immense VRAM usage(2 Gig for empty desctop alone). Some parts of KDE contantly disappearing and reappearing. let alone tons of things that just don't implemented yet.

[@TemporalOnline]

Every time a solution in foss is almost "perfect" (for the user) everything has to be rebuilt from the ground up because of sEcUrItY, sTaNdArDs, or whatever, and everyone moans and complain because everything was working and all the kinks were ironed out (for the user) but they all cane back with a vengeance. Remember the transition from Firefox 3 to the new one? What happened because of ~security~? I remember. Until today. That made me switch reluctantly to chrome, and I wasnt alone. And again now, everything was working, yeah in the back things were bad, but the front was "perfect". I just hope they learned from the past mistakes, but by the shitshow I am seeying, looks like totally not.

[@notuxnobux]

Maybe you should talk about how portal and pipewire were pushed by redhat because they made them and they go hand in hand and they want control over the entire desktop functionality and how pipewire protocol isn't even documented. It's one company (IBM) that has control over the future of the linux desktop and you are _forced_ to use their implementation of software since it doesn't use an open protocol. Everybody that runs pipewire runs the same IBM implementation and are locked to IBM. If this was google/microsoft doing it everybody would lose their shit.

[@PeakKissShot]

Maybe you should talk to a therapist about your schizophrenia

[@anonymouscommentator]

"its not broken, it's just broken and there is no solution for it (yet)" Sure maybe in 2 years it will not be broken anymore then people won't complain about it. But the fact of the matter is it does very well break lots of workflows *right now*. I feel like you are misunderstanding the criticism here. What good is a solution in 2 years if i need it NOW. I've been using wayland myself for almost a year now and truly believe in wayland but it is important to take the criticism serious and propose actual solutions instead of just downplaying it.

[@iplyrunescape305]

This right here ^^^^^^ Wayland is not ready.

[@brandonlewis2599]

So just be patient, then. Keep using an old distro, if it's working for you. And upgrade in 2 years, or whenver the dust settles. Some of us need to be on wayland for development purposes, and some of us want to be on wayland for bragging rights. But it's only by trying to use it, and getting cut on the sharp edges, that we ultimately arrive at the goal: an optimal graphics experience on linux.

[@ZonyaZeraora]

My gtx 1650 performs poorly on wayland, and overall is a bit better on tweaked windows 11. I recently got a friend with an rx 560 to give running linux full time a try, but I specifically set it up to use X11, since they prefers tearing over latency (ik wayland vsync adds less latency but xorg without vsync is still slightly more responsive, especially apparent on lower refresh rates). I'm hoping a user-friendly windowed tearing protocol becomes commonplace (something like windows 11's windowed optimizations?) , so I can finally recommend updating and switching to wayland in that dropdown on the login screen.

[@tux_the_astronaut]

Ik some desktops like lde have a tearing protocol but ive never tried it since i hate any sort of tearing and would rather have slightly more input lag than a tearing screen and for me at leather with games in native wayland input lag is pretty minimal on my computer at least

[@merthyr1831]

I'm pretty sure Wayland is adding back tearing (not sure if its merged) but I bet it'll be paired with the Window content-type protocol to enable tearing for low-latency applications like games.

[@SnakePlissken25]

Precedence has importance in this framing. Incompatible new thing breaks existing things that worked before the new one came along, not the other way around.

[@alexanderkoskovich8993]

What you guys need to keep in mind is that it doesn't matter where the blame is shifted, if something doesn't work it doesn't work. Saying "it hasn't been ported yet" is a garbage excuse. There has to be a 1:1 compatibility layer that fully 100% works before a transition can be made, and that does not exist for X11 -> Wayland. XWayland is not a proper compatibility layer when you have stuff like flickering text in Discord while typing on a NVIDIA GPU. Forcing Wayland on people before it is ready for everyone is not acceptable, and would never happen in the Windows space. Microsoft cannot and will not break applications built using established protocols, while people in the Linux space almost seem excited by the prospect of doing so. Also, whether people like it or not NVIDIA is the biggest GPU manufacturer on the planet, they make the best cards and have the most market share. Having them not work out of the box is unacceptable.

[@brandonlewis2599]

What you need to keep in mind is that you don't understand what you're talking about, as evidenced by this stream of gibberish. Incremental change is a fact of modern development. XWayland is *by definition* a compatibility layer, and nothing more -- bugs do not change this, and are merely implementation concerns. Forcing wayland on people is the *only* way we move forward, and for everyone to ultimately get what they actually want. NVIDIA has been a poor partner for linux, compared with ATI and Intel, and they will figure out eventually that the linux community requires support for KMS and DRM graphics APIs and not custom binary X servers as they have done. NVIDIA cannot simply stonewall the linux dev community forever.

[@ukyoize]

​@@brandonlewis2599 But do we NEED to "move forward"?

[@alexanderkoskovich8993]

@@brandonlewis2599 There's a lot of words here, but really it just boils down to "my shit doesn't work". If you're apart of 70% of desktop users, Discord will flicker for you on Wayland. Simple as that. That's not an acceptable bug for any user. I am aware that NVIDIA is a poor partner for *desktop* Linux, but again, this doesn't the fact that Wayland is not ready for those users, so it shouldn't be made the default. If such a change was made in Windows, it would immediately be labeled as a stopship and would not be shipped until addressed.

[@__christopher__]

​@@brandonlewis2599if forcing it on people is the only way forward, it means that Wayland isn't good enough. Because if it were, you would not need to force it on people. If you force something on me, I'll resist. If you want me to switch, make a good offer instead. Just look at how Firefox lost almost their entire user base by trying to force unwanted change on their users.

[@BrodieRobertson]

When something doesn't work for the user, the user doesn't care who's at fault you're absolutely right however if we're talking about who's actually at fault for a problem it's important to properly frame a problem otherwise you're just yelling at people who have no ability to solve the problem. If your distro is dropping Xorg and you feel that it's too soon to do that then that is not the distro you should be using and most distros aren't considering dropping it for the forceable future. As for Nvidia I have a lot of hope that RHEL dropping Xorg will give them the kick that they desperately need

[@xymaryai8283]

Windows is the same way, you don't write all of the code to draw windows, you interface with the window manager for that version, which interfaces with the NT kernel for that version. which is funny, because Proton can now intercept that, so programs that use a specific subset of calls that Proton supports, they aren't just developing a Windows app anymore. within Linux, this is also true. someone developing a KDE app is also developing a Gnome app, because Gnome can interpret it. Developers will eventually figure out which one will be best supported. Thats what the Linux platform is, whichever standards support the most future users.

[@splitprissm9339]

Literal window managers in X11 don't work like that (some but not all are actually compositors, but even these don't get explicitly talked to by apps to render window contents). X11 can somewhat work without any window manager at all.

[@methos1024]

Wayland isn't away anytime :-) its already for years an Option to use for all that have Workloads that fits it. No Beta 🙂Just wanted to write my Jist about "Wayland is XX Days/Months/Years/Centuries away"

[@DePhoegonIsle]

Honestly the problem I have (not that I am invested into the space like that) is that .... there talking about depreciation of applications for the fact of changing the display server ... that in all intents & purposes .. is flat out worse with less features & fewer options, along with critical design shifts from the prior display servers (even when retaining to visual displayers only). I've a real question... why should it matter what your display output is, so long as it accepts the signals? Seriously, this is the same moves MS made in windows for their direction... and it was .. bitching up & down with linux users being smug aholes about it as well. I honestly haven't really heard one good argument 'why' replacing X11 is a good move? Should X11 be just remade and done in a more condensed fashion for modern HW.. yes, but it shouldn't break the entire ethos of how it works or functions... which wayland has.. and the only reason wayland is 'any good' is because the big public developers got sold on it's idea... of which I don't even understand or have actually heard been said. Imagine MS replacing DirectX with something utterly brand new instead of releasing new versions..... that's what this is doing.

[@tux_the_astronaut]

X11s tho can still work on wayland with Xwayland tho and its not like X11 is just gonna disappear tomorrow its gonna be around for a long while still just wont rly get much updates since nobody rly wants to maintain the mess of its codebase anymore

[@Hanzo.876]

Wayland needs two functions to really take off, wl_image and wl_ window

[@rebok232]

Screen sharing portal supports remote control, at least on gnome

[@wisnoskij]

"Linux breaks Photoshop; you should keep using Windows" OMG. I cannot stand these sanctimonious blind Linux fanatics. YES, if you need to use Photoshop you should use Windows. Alternatively, if you have enough skill, a second option would be to try and change Linux(wine) enough that photoshop will run In no universe is the correct response to this situation to wait for Photoshop to be ported to Linux. Yes, if the software you depend upon does not work under Wayland, you should use X11. If Wayland want more users and more systems to use them, it is in their court to give people reasons or at least the ability to switch.

[@BrodieRobertson]

That's why things are constantly being improved

[@iplyrunescape305]

@@BrodieRobertson it is not being improved fast enough. X11 is very old and we should move from it, but Wayland is not ready. It must be fully capable as X11 on basic tasks and especially on the issue of drivers. Wayland can be great, sure! BUT it's not ready *now*.

[@BrodieRobertson]

@@iplyrunescape305 the issue of drivers isn't the fault of Wayland developers that's entirely on NVIDIA

[@iplyrunescape305]

@@BrodieRobertson and I understand that, but we can't do anything to force Nvidia to move their ass. So what, we suck our thumb to wait for them to?

[@BrodieRobertson]

@@iplyrunescape305 that's why I'm excited for Rhel dropping X11 support, they actually can do something. They have clients with expensive contracts, the other option is support open projects like Nouveau

[@Gotblade]

How small is the group of people who use Blender? Will Wayland handle cycles? People who have been using Nvidia cards for 20 years or more? I've been uploading daily progress on a project in blender that, after over 85 videos, is less than half way done. I don't want the screen resolution to deteriorate all on its own because some developers can't be bothered to tolerate my existence.

[@kreuner11]

Nvidia progress is good, and not sure how wayland is incompatible with Blender? and their rendering engine? can you elaborate what's the issue? i might be able to help out a bit

[@Gotblade]

@@kreuner11 this has happened to both my computers now. They apparently receive some updates even though I don't have automatic updates turned on. They both were running Debian for many years with no problems. After one of them went down several steps in available resolution I tried reinstalling Nvidia drivers but it wouldn't come back up to the desktop. I wasn't running Wayland or nouveau on either system either. I tried purging nouveau several different ways thinking some semantic variable would get it accomplished but it didn't. So I tried a different version of Linux and had no problem getting Nvidia working so I know it's not the hardware. Now I've had to do the same thing with the other computer. They both run better than they did with Debian which I used to really like. If code writers could maintain so many different variables for so many decades up to now what changed? Are we doing more complicated things now than before in the Linux realm or is that just assumed while the community degrades? I don't actively seek new versions of everything. I just want it to run a few appimages that use their own libraries. m.kzbin.info/www/bejne/ZmaZg2t_Zs2mfq8

[@khoidauminh]

I think you're having a misconception. I'm pretty sure the issue with Wayland on NVIDIA has nothing do to with using NVIDIA for blender's render engines. The latter works just fine as it does on X11, because it's independent from the display server. Neither does Wayland or X11 handles scene rendering in Blender Blender itself has been on Wayland since 3.4, which was back in Dec 2022. I've been using Blender on Wayland and it's been working great

[@Gotblade]

@@khoidauminh cycles in debian requires Nvidia-cuda-toolkit. I may be conflating Wayland with nouveau in some respects but disabling nouveau means no desktop on both of my computers on a fresh install of Debian. As I've said this is not hardware related or other versions of Linux would have the same result. There's also a difference running the same keyboard layout on different environments like kde vs gnome. One giving me the productivity I need and the other not reacting the same way to shortcuts I use all the time.

[@khoidauminh]

​@@Gotblade Do you have problems with the proprietary driver? Debian ships a rather old version of the driver and it's not recommended to use wayland on debian with NVIDIA. Using old NVIDIA cards probably will also give you those problems. I'd advise you to stick on X11 for this one. About the keyboard layouts, Plasma and GNOME uses different input-method software (fcitx on plasma and ibus on gnome), so there will be different behaviors. But I'm guessing GNOME is being problematic. Global shortcuts are not supported in GNOME (yet I think) except for running user scripts, so if you rely on global shortcuts a lot, use Plasma, a WM or an X11 DE

[@tech34756]

Can't help but laugh because of the timing, in the last hour I had to install Weston (Wayland compositor) because Waydroid doesn't work on Cinnamon.

[@brandonlewis2599]

At least the mint devs have reluctantly decided to support wayland eventually. I used to like cinnamon, but their initial refusal to support wayland caused me to move away from mint and LMDE, before the whole project became irrelevant. And having looked around, I am not sure I want to go back.

[@tech34756]

@@brandonlewis2599 TBH, I only know of Wayland because of this channel, if I wasn't subscribed I'd probably have been wondering what Wayland is when I was looking up my issue, otherwise I'd probably have just blamed Mint for being incompatible with something....again. Mint for me is a mixed bag for one reason or another, I've been meaning to move away from it for years as a 'go to' because of them. I only installed it because at the time my main intent of this machine was just 'web and video', which has since expanded, but I also plan on using this machine to experiment with other distros, so I gave it a large ESP for distros like Pop.

[@softwarelivre2389]

Let's make PW² a thing

[@Chaos666Theory]

Shouldn't it be P²W?

[@softwarelivre2389]

@@Chaos666Theory Portals, Wayland, PipeWire = PWPW = (PW)²

[@onceuponaban]

@@Chaos666Theory Pronounced "Pow".

[@softwarelivre2389]

@@Chaos666Theory KZbin censored my previous comment, let's try again... Portals, Wayland, PipeWire = PWPW = (PW)²

[@Chaos666Theory]

@@softwarelivre2389 I hate KZbin so much, bro.

[@cheako91155]

Better than b4 is a weird benchmark, I prefer best possible. xwayland still fails in this regard and it was designed that way, to not be the best possible.

[@BrodieRobertson]

I'd prefer to make things incrementally better than wait a decade for something to be perfect and it turns out countless use cases weren't considered (kind of the state we were previously in with Wayland)

[@splitprissm9339]

Oh, you missed one class of "apps" that is often is programmed straight on top of X11: Minimalistic window managers. Remember that window managers are basically perfectly normal apps in X11 (Yes, you could run a desktop with no window manager at all and use a tool like xwit to manually manage windows from a terminal. Yes, the window manager can run on a remote machine.) , and that is likely the major reason (feature, not bug IMAO) there are so many ways to interact with random other apps on the same display. --- The bigger picture missed: There are users that care about Photoshop not about the OS. --- The built in print server idea might come from the Windows world actually ... the idea of GDI "device contexts" for both printers and screen has been in there for a long time... --- "Unix is now Linux" is exactly what's wrong with the FOSS space these days. Takes away the "Be portable or GTFO" spirit that's brought us so far!

[@methos1024]

@21:29 swayperland?

The photoshop analogy is dishonest. What about "Linux breaks Windows Games"? That's why proton and a big part of wine were done! Yes, it's important, essential even, to respect users' use cases and keep compatibility to maximum, even if one's purist biases point otherwise. A display framework should be comprehensive and inclusive to everyone, not a-na/lly retentive from important functionality!

[@BrodieRobertson]

Sometimes there are workarounds developed but that wasn't a Linux project, that was the dedicated WINE developers, and the corporate interest from Valve who were terrified when the Windows Store launched.

@@BrodieRobertson yes, it was another party involved that provided the solution, but that doesn't change the fact that the case in the analogy was correct in the first place -- there is a demand for photoshop (or windows games) on Linux. And I've been following the emails on the wine-devel mailing list concerning the wayland output for wine and it is struggling exact in cases like photoshop _because_ wayland does not have absolute positioning. Showing that the lack of support of old X11 stuff has long ramifications which cannot be ignored lest all the ecosystem will suffer. To be frank I find wayland to be badly designed and implemented -- it doesn't even implement queue theory correctly and can lose windows with a full enough queue -- and would prefer if a superior solution like Arcan FE was the popular one. Wayland is no good and I am going to resist it while I can, or at least that they change this absurd attitude of being tone-deaf to users.

[@wagyourtai1]

5:40 I wonder if any standard printers print pages fast enough, and facing a convienient way, to get a decent framerate. and by decent I mean like >=.5fps can't wait for someone to try to make "bad apple on a hp printer" or whatever also still using x until discord updates, need to be able to share my screen when developing code. if only the video bridge worked at more than .5 fps on my 7900x & 7900xtx pc

[@BrodieRobertson]

The intention isn't to keep printing, it's to print a single frame but I'm going out on a limb to say that no there's probably not any commercial printers that can do it

[@brandonlewis2599]

While you're at it, try running `ssh -Y` using IP-over-carrier-pigeon.

[@khronosschoty]

DON'T BREAK USER SPACE. Wayland sucks because it breaks user space... the concept of not breaking user space, undermines the entire center of logic that you present. 30 years of support doesn't mean its high time we do away with it, 30 years of support means its worth continued investing in ( NOT starting over).

[@dreamhollow]

I like what Wayland is capable of, but I want more of a compromise between managing system resources and the higher fidelity that Wayland seems to be associated with. I've got older hardware, and even if I had a really powerful computer I'd want a display system that uses as few resources as possible. It helps me do a lot more things at once, something I value incredibly highly as someone who multi-tasks a number of different projects at the same time. XOrg is a nearly obsolete mess, but it's incredibly resource light. Wayland is resource heavy, but more modern. It would be great to see Wayland provide a better emphasis on general system usage and general compatibility. From what I've seen with KDE Plasma, I'm impressed by it's looks but disillusioned with it's resource consumption.

[@tostadorafuriosa69]

what hardware are you using?

[@sergeykish]

Sway does not consume much.

[@Tynach]

@@sergeykish I think what they mean is that they want a system that doesn't require hardware acceleration _at all._ Wayland uses hardware acceleration to run, literally requiring the use of OpenGL by the compositor.. But they want to run a system that doesn't use or require compositing _at all._

[@EduardoMedinaEdlinks]

Wayland is lighter than Xorg. On Xorg, you have the server (Xorg), the compositor (Mutter or Kwin), and the desktop with the apps. On Wayland, you have a protocol implemented in the compositor (Mutter or Kwin) and the desktop with the apps. The problem you have is that the drivers are not adapted to Wayland.

[@dreamhollow]

Something like that, honestly, yes. @@Tynach

[@t1m3f0x]

Obviously it doesn't matter what desktop environment an app was designed for, I've installed both qt and gtk apps on a computer running windows. So if any one ever tells you you can't use qt apps on gnome, or gtk apps KDE, that person is a software architect and deserves to be mocked. Only software engineers should be listened to, software architects should be mocked. #RCE_propaganda 🍆

[@quarkquark1]

This is the Year of the Wayland Desktop

[@maxanimator9547]

"Wayland breaks everything" is quite reminiscent of "most apps aren't supported on Linux". edit : that seems to be the very first thing you use as an example, hadn't watched yet.

[@Lampe2020]

15:05 Well, I think MacOS is the biggest UNIX, although almost nobody actually sees it as a *NIX.

[@BrodieRobertson]

That's true but it's also not really part of the discussion, much like sure ChromeOS is the biggest Linux distro but it's not part of the desktop environment discussion

[@Lampe2020]

@@BrodieRobertson That's what I meant with "nobody actually sees it as a *NIX".

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

Nobody sees Android as a *NIX but there's a lot more of that about than MacOS.

[@Lampe2020]

@@terrydaktyllus1320 Yeah, okay. Android is probably even bigger than MacOS, but maybe not if you count iOS as "mobile MacOS", which it practically is.

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

@@Lampe2020 From a StatCounter Pi Chart from 2018 showing global OS usages: Android 41.7% Windows 35.9% iOS 13.5% OSX 5.5% Linux 0.8% Unkown 2.7% (Total is 100.1% probably due to a minor rounding up error.) So you're completely wrong according to that, despite my doing "homework" on your behalf. But happy for you to put in some work yourself to disprove that, possibly in a more recent chart that maybe shows a different trend?

[@paherbst524]

While it's true that from the app side everything targets a toolkit. It is not true for window managers. And this is where Wayland screwed up. They should have had, just like pipe wire has a pulse audio compatibility layer, Wayland should have had a window manager x11 compatibility layer. This layer could stand up a basic compositor and allow window management, using the same x11 API. And even for those rare app side x11 calls, why couldn't they provide a compatibility API for those? It could just be wrappers around pipe wire and dbus.

[@brandonlewis2599]

See: "root-full" mode. That's basically what you want. And there's no reason, in principle, that we can't have a minimalist wayland compositor whose main purpose is as a shim for legacy X11 window managers and environments. Sure, there's some issues around multi-monitor support at the moment -- this can be fixed, there's nothing about wayland that would prevent such a thing from existing. But as we devs like to say, patches welcome.

[@sergshutk2757]

Кажется кто-то не понимает о чём говорит. Если говорят что "Wayland ломает всё", это не говорят что он не работает, это говорят, что функции которые работали годами при переходе с одной версии Linux на более новую, при использовании Wayland - перестали работать или работают не правильно. По тому, что вы тут говорите понятно, что вы не разработчик. А разработчику надо чтоб он мог собрать своё приложение и оно будет работать на любом Linux. Не зависимо от того что используется X11 или Wayland. А это может предоставить только X11 !!!

[@POINTS2]

I'm almost read to switch to Wayland. Wayland supports my 3-monitor setup with mixed VGA and HDMI / Display Port. However, I'm waiting for KDE to somehow get session restore working with Wayland because I really like being able to pick up right where I left off after starting up and logging in.

[@BrodieRobertson]

Session restore may be coming in a early Plasma 6 update but don't quote me on that

[@YaroKasear]

Here's the think about the "Wayland is Linux" thing. It... it isn't. Wayland's a protocol. It's... there's nothing requiring actual Linux-exclusive functionality. It's just that Linux has the lion's share of developers and the people who designed the specification where developers who worked almost exclusively on Linux as a platform. There's nothing stopping Wayland from being implemented on any flavor of BSD aside from developer apathy, or this idea that "it came from Linux therefore bad."

[@BrodieRobertson]

The issue is much of the desktop implementations are now developed around Linux being a target, the BSD needs to do a lot of additional work to get things working over there

[@supercellex4D]

Why not do what fffuckign systemd does and just call 2000 different binaries "X11" or "XDG" or whatever-the-hell platform? Systemd is mass-adopted on every distro despite being 2000 things in a trenchcoat labeled an init system, why can't someone do the same to the graphics stack? So then pipewire would be overtly considered _part_ of the windowing infrastructure and not a seperate app, and various portals would be just part of the desktop platform, solving the branding confusion. That's half of why Wayland is so confusing, nobody can communicate wtf it's actually doing. Pipewire doesn't _seem_ related to Wayland when it is, and all of them are XDG, yet nobody says the XDG desktop stack, they say the Wayland desktop stack and then everyone goes 'wtf what's portals and pipewire gotta do with this' when in reality you are running XDG for your desktop stack the same way you are running GNU for your coreutils.

[@BrodieRobertson]

It would be neat if all of it was clearly part of the graphics stack but systemd is one single project, these others are all seperate things that are often used together, it's a bit of a different structure