Think Twice Before Abandoning X11. Wayland Breaks Everything
Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago
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A GitHub gist argues that Wayland breaks many features that X11 provided, sparking a debate among HN users about the trade-offs between the two display servers.
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as far as i can tell, a good number of things not supported are intentional because of a different (better?) security model, and at least a few, like not supporting "window always on top" are simply false.
discuss away!
Other parts are things that are on the list only because X did it that way in 1985 - nobody actually does that in X but you can find a line item and scream that Wayland doesn't do that.
Most of the rest are things that can be supported but need a some more work, and progress is being made. Most are things most people don't even need/use - though of course if you are the rare person who uses them wayland won't work for you.
The remainder is NVIDIA who is way behind. We have known they are not a good linux citizen for more than 15 years now though, so I can't have sympathy for those who buy their products. (yes I know they are the fastest in other ways, but their linux support as always been a hack)
Maybe there are good reasons for Wayland to be the way it is, but my experience is that it's unnecessarily limited, it's in the way and "the rest" doesn't have these problem (Windows, Xorg, ...) so I'm not particularly fond of Wayland, even if it does a lot of things fine and it is quite stable (in my experience).
but we are getting wayland implementations that look as cool as compiz did. it's far from a corporate wasteland.
Otherwise works everything out of the box just fine for me
In fact I shudder when I remember the endless hacks I had to go through to have xorg stop tearing and/or get my C-states low enough so that I have more battery life. Things that are all way more important than literally anything on this list.
Plus I use X-forwarding quite a bit.
That is done a lot in many companies due to some proprietary applications.
The speaker didn't give any reasons, mind you, why big endian should die other than handwaving about how it means "more maintenance", and the responses to "can you give any examples of how it means "more maintenance" other than saying it?" were largely, "can you give proof it's not "more maintenance"?"
I feel the same happens with Wayland. People who don't understand its position have strong feelings in both directions, yet very little discussion is about the underlying rationale for it in the first place, about who benefits by marginalizing people with non-mainstream hardware and who benefits from forcing the software ecosystem down narrower paths.
X11 and Wayland really should coexist, at least for as long as it takes for Wayland to lose a majority of its major issues, yet Wayland designers didn't seem to think that'd be worthwhile. Some of the projects that're working on making them work together need more attention than they're getting.
The Wayland designers are the people who maintained X11 for years. They have no problem with X11 coexisting so long as they don't have to work on it. However everyone demanding X11 is really demanding Wayland designers stop their work and go back to X11 - and none of them are paying for that.
There are people paid to work on Wayland - some used to be paid to work on X11 (and sometimes still are), but they convinced their boss to pay them to work on wayland instead. Since you are not their boss you don't have any input into that.
You have it wrong. Rather than reuse parts of X11, like the compositors that support hardware that nobody will ever be paid to support, Wayland is trying to reinvent the wheel and replace X11, with support for only what's new and/or popular.
> However everyone demanding X11 is really demanding Wayland designers stop their work and go back to X11 - and none of them are paying for that.
Absolutely nobody is demanding that Wayland developers should stop their work and go back to working on X11. Nobody. That's a ridiculous, hyperbolic statement.
What some of us would like to see is Wayland not try to make everything either/or. But, just like systemd, things started with, "you can do both", then went to, "it's harder to do both, but you can", then to, "the old way is dead, so stop writing code that supports it", and eventually to, "let's completely rip out the old way of doing it because "maintenance" and everyone will be forced to use the new way". GNOME is already doing this, even though it's supposed to be open source, platform agnostic and portable.
The fact that you bring up paid work shows you're happy to accept idea that support for things is only worth what people will pay for it. Consider how that fits with corporatization, and consider how that fits with open source in general.
In other words, should all open source project be drivable by some corporation deciding to just throw money at something?
If you think about this for more than 30 seconds, you may finally understand why those of us who aren't fans of the corporatization of Linux and aren't fans of projects that don't interoperate and ultimately end up fragmenting the open source software world are not fans of the eventual consequences of projects like Wayland.
It's not "X11 is great and Wayland sucks" - it's "why is this project fragmenting things rather than interoperating, and why are people so eager to be led by corporations in to supporting corporate interests?"
No, I bring up paid work because somebody needs to do the work. Either do the work yourself, or pay someone to do the work.
If you are not willing to do either than shut up: you get no voice. While you can ask someone else to do something, you don't get to force them.
I'm not willing to develop X11. Thus I'm going to let the people who are doing the work do that work even if I don't agree.
Don't tell me to shut up. That's not very nice, no matter your justification. The open source world is definitely not do it yourself or pay, and everyone else needs to shut up. Again, it's more likely that you know this, but you want to be intentionally antagonistic.
You also neatly avoid discussing what I brought up. These things all make me think you're not participating in good faith.
I like those scare quotes. They really show the lack of respect for the people who actually maintain the stuff you use daily, most of them in their free time, including the ones that get paid (all the paid maintainers I know go well beyond the work hours, by a big margin).
Claiming that actual maintainers spend more than trivial amounts of time on "maintaining" endianness correctness, I think, is somewhat disrespectful to those maintainers.
Many of the issues this post has with Wayland are by design, applications shouldn't have full access to what everything else is doing to the compositor and instead request permission via a protocol. It's like complaining kernels are dumb because you need to make system calls.
My personal anecdotal experience is that wayland is a lot better than X11 performance wise. It feels snappier, and it has been rockstable. Please note I'm using a KDE based distro(neon) and on both nvidia and intel gpu it has been great.
If you are looking for raw performance based on simple frameworks, I do believe X11 will probably better, but for most people wayland will bring improvements. Yes I could get insane terms performance in an urxvt with FB under X11. Do I need it? Not really when my the system still behaves.
As a devil's advocate argument, it is true that wayland has come from being a lot worse O(years) ago.
some complaints from OP: * "A crash in the window manager takes down all running applications" - this was true, but it has started to change, see https://www.phoronix.com/news/Qt-Wayland-Compositor-Restart#... * "You cannot do a lot of things that you can do in Xorg by design" - I do not see this as an issue, other than having emotional attachement to Xorg. * "It offloads a lot of work to each and every window manager. As a result, the same basic features get implemented differently in different window managers, with different behaviors and bugs - so what works on desktop environment A does not necessarily work in desktop environment B (e.g., often you hear that something "works in Wayland", even though it only really works on Gnome and KDE, not in all Wayland implementations)." - this is true, but again, it means that instead of complaining to a monolithic project you complain to a specific implementation. And I disagree this would be wasteful as there are clear design decisions done differently by different wayland implementation. * "Wayland breaks screen recording applications" - Google Meet, Zoom, OBS Studio all work fine here. I guess if you mean X11 recording, then yeah it's broken. * "Wayland breaks automation software" - yeah, again, changed of display protocol will break existing automation. That's called change, and is not inherent to wayland * "Wayland is biased toward Linux and breaks BSD" - that one's valid. * "Wayland requires JWM, TWM, XDM, IceWM,... to reimplement Xorg-like functionality" - Well duh, it's not X11, it does require a lot of new implementation. X11 was made as a kitchensync that can do everything. That's not necessarily a good thing in the modern world.
I think there is a pattern there, the OP is mostly complaining that things are changing and some new things don't yet work. But he forgets that wayland appeared out of very good reason: - inefficient indirect rendering - security flaws(too easy to actually do a keylogger) - kitchensync approach(where it did everything) making it large and monolithic.
I've been on Arch + Gnome for 6-7 years by now, started on Xorg and today using Wayland 24/7. I tried moving to Wayland maybe once a year or something like that from when it was available, until last year when I had less troubles than I had benefits when I tried it. But before that, the issues were plenty.
Probably the biggest change is how much smoother everything is. The performance certainly feels way better with Wayland than Xorg today, both input responsiveness, drawing and everything else. It does use more RAM and VRAM though, but the difference is marginal at best.
Probably it matters a lot what distribution + desktop environment you use, but with Arch+Gnome3 I haven't noticed (today) "Screen Recording / Capture" not being supported (it works just fine?) or "Clipboard Access" being broken, just different.
In fact, the only issue I can think of currently, is trying to move dockable windows in Unreal Engine from separate windows into tabs in the main window, which seems broken/not possible probably because of some Gnome stuff showing a notification when you start to drag the dockable window, as far as I can tell.
Otherwise all the software I use day-to-day just kept working the same way. Many applications got a sharper look with Wayland, and overall it's just smoother.
https://community.kde.org/Plasma/X11_Known_Significant_Issue...