Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@probonopd

probonopd/Wayland.md

Last active November 15, 2024 01:20
Show Gist options
  • Save probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d1f2277 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Save probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d1f2277 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Download ZIP
Think twice about Wayland. It breaks everything!
Raw
Wayland.md

Think twice before abandoning Xorg. Wayland breaks everything!

Hence, if you are interested in existing applications to "just work" without the need for adjustments, then you may be better off avoiding Wayland.

Wayland solves no issues I have but breaks almost everything I need. Even the most basic, most simple things (like xkill) - in this case with no obvious replacement. And usually it stays broken, because the Wayland folks mostly seem to care about Automotive, Gnome, maybe KDE - and alienating everyone else (e.g., people using just an X11 window manager or something like GNUstep) in the process.

The Wayland project seems to operate like they were starting a greenfield project, whereas at the same time they try to position Wayland as "the X11 successor", which would clearly require a lot of thought about not breaking, or at least providing a smooth upgrade path for, existing software.

In fact, it is merely an incompatible alternative, and not even one that has (nor wants to have) feature parity (missing features). And unlike X11 (the X Window System), Wayland protocol designers actively avoid the concept of "windows" (making up incomprehensible words like "xdg_toplevel" instead).

DO NOT USE A WAYLAND SESSION! Let Wayland not destroy everything and then have other people fix the damage it caused. Or force more Red Hat/Gnome components (glib, Portals, Pipewire) on everyone!

Please add more examples to the list.

Wayland seems to be made by people who do not care for existing software. They assume everyone is happy to either rewrite everything or to just use Gnome on Linux (rather than, say, twm with ROX Filer on NetBSD).

Edit: When I wrote the above, I didn't really realize what Wayland even was, I just noticed that some distributions (like Fedora) started pushing it onto me and things didn't work properly there. Today I realize that you can't "install Wayland", because unlike Xorg, there is not one "Wayland display server" but actually every desktop envrironment has its own. And maybe "the Wayland folks" don't "only care about Gnome", but then, any fix that is done in Gnome's Wayland implementation isn't automatically going to benefit all users of Wayland-based software, and possibly isn't even the implementation "the Wayland folks" would necessarily recommend.

Edit 12/2023: If something wants to replace X11 for desktop computers (such as professional Unix workstations), then it better support all needed features (and key concepts, like windows) for that use case. That people also have displays on their fridge doesn't matter the least bit in that context of discussion. Let's propose the missing Wayland protocols for full X11 feature parity.

Edit 08/2024: "Does Wayland becoming the defacto standard display server for Linux serve to marginalize BSD?" https://fossforce.com/2024/07/the-unintended-consequences-linuxs-wayland-adoption-will-have-on-bsd/

Wayland is broken by design

  • A crash in the window manager takes down all running applications
  • You cannot run applications as root
  • You cannot do a lot of things that you can do in Xorg by design
  • There is not one /usr/bin/wayland display server application that is desktop environment agnostic and is used by everyone (unlike with 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 summarizes it very well: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/issues/233

Apparently the Wayland project doesn't even want to be "X.org 2.0", and doesn't want to provide a commonly used implementation of a compositor that could be used by everyone: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/issues/233. Yet this would imho be required if they want to make it into a worthwile "successor" that would have any chance of ever fixing the many Wayland issues at the core.

Wayland breaks screen recording applications

  • MaartenBaert/ssr#431 ❌ broken since 24 Jan 2016, no resolution ("I guess they use a non-standard GNOME interface for this")
  • https://github.com/mhsabbagh/green-recorder ❌ ("I am no longer interested in working with things like ffmpeg/wayland/GNOME's screencaster or solving the issues related to them or why they don't work")
  • vkohaupt/vokoscreenNG#51 ❌ broken since at least 7 Mar 2020. ("I have now decided that there will be no Wayland support for the time being. Reason, there is no budget for it. Let's see how it looks in a year or two.") - This is the key problem. Wayland breaks everything and then expects others to fix the wreckage it caused on their own expense.
  • obsproject/obs-studio#2471 ❌ broken since at least 7 Mar 2020. ("Wayland is unsupported at this time", "There isn't really something that can just be easily changed. Wayland provides no capture APIs")
  • There is a workaround for OBS Studio that requires a obs-xdg-portal plugin (which is known to be Red Hat/Flatpak-centric, GNOME-centric, "perhaps" works with other desktops)
  • phw/peek#1191 ❌ broken since 14 Jan 2023. Peek, a screen recording tool, has been abandoned by its developerdue to a number of technical challenges, mostly with Gtk and Wayland ("Many of these have to do with how Wayland changed the way applications are being handled")

As of February 2024, screen recording is still broken utterly on Wayland with the vast majority of tools. Proof

Workaround: Find a Wayland compositor that supports the wlr-screencopy-unstable-v1 protocol and use wf-recorder -a. The default compositor in Raspberry Pi OS (Wayfire) does, but the default compositor in Ubuntu doesn't. (That's the worst part of Wayland: Unlike with Xorg, it always depends on the particular Wayand compositor what works and what is broken. Is there even one that supports everything?)

Wayland breaks screen sharing applications

  • jitsi/jitsi-meet#2350 ❌ broken since 3 Jan 2018
  • jitsi/jitsi-meet#6389 ❌ broken since 24 Jan 2016 ("Closing since there is nothing we can do from the Jitsi Meet side.") See? Wayland breaks stuff and leaves application developers helpless and unable to fix the breakage, even if they wanted.

NOTE: As of November 2023, screen sharing in Chromium using Jitsi Meet is still utterly broken, both in Raspberry Pi OS Desktop, and in a KDE Plasma installation, albeit with different behavior. Note that Pipewire, Portals and whatnot are installed, and even with them it does not work.

Wayland breaks automation software

sudo pkg install py37-autokey

This is an X11 application, and as such will not function 100% on 
distributions that default to using Wayland instead of Xorg.

Wayland breaks Gnome-Global-AppMenu (global menus for Gnome)

Wayland broke global menus with KDE platformplugin

Good news: According to this report global menus now work with KDE platformplugin as of 4/2022

Wayland breaks global menus with non-KDE Qt platformplugins

Wayland breaks AppImages that don't ship a special Wayland Qt plugin

  • https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2018/03/unsetting-qt_qpa_platform-environment-variable-by-default/ ❌ broke AppImages that don't ship a special Wayland Qt plugin. "This affects proprietary applications, FLOSS applications bundled as appimages, FLOSS applications bundled as flatpaks and not distributed by KDE and even the Qt installer itself. In my opinion this is a showstopper for running a Wayland session." However, there is a workaround: "AppImages which ship just the XCB plugin will automatically fallback to running in xwayland mode" (see below).

Wayland breaks Redshift

Update 2023: Some Wayland compositors (such as Wayfire) now support wlr_gamma_control_unstable_v1, see https://github.com/WayfireWM/wayfire/wiki/Tutorial#configuring-wayfire and jonls/redshift#663. Does it work in all Wayland compositors though?

Wayland breaks global hotkeys

Wayland does not work for Xfce?

See below.

Wayland does not work properly on NVidia hardware?

Apparently Wayland relies on nouveau drivers for NVidia hardware. The nouveau driver has been giving unsatisfactory performance since its inception. Even clicking on the application starter icon in Gnome results in a stuttery animation. Only the proprietary NVidia driver results in full performance.

See below.

Update 2024: The situation might slowly be improving. It remains to be seen whether this will work well also for all existing old Nvidia hardware (that works well in Xorg).

Wayland does not work properly on Intel hardware

Wayland prevents GUI applications from running as root

  • https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1274451 ❌ broken since 22 Oct 2015 ("No this will only fix sudo for X11 applications. Running GUI code as root is still a bad idea." I absolutely detest it when software tries to prevent me from doing what some developer thinks is "a bad idea" but did not consider my use case, e.g., running truss for debugging on FreeBSD needs to run the application as root. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1323302 suggests it is not possible: "These sorts of security considerations are very much the way that "the Linux desktop" is going these days".)

Suggested solution

Wayland is biased toward Linux and breaks BSD

  • https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/wayland_on_netbsd_trials_and ❌ broken since 28 Sep 2020 ("Wayland is written with the assumption of Linux to the extent that every client application tends to #include <linux/input.h> because Wayland's designers didn't see the need to define a OS-neutral way to get mouse button IDs. (...) In general, Wayland is moving away from the modularity, portability, and standardization of the X server. (...) I've decided to take a break from this, since it's a fairly huge undertaking and uphill battle. Right now, X11 combined with a compositor like picom or xcompmgr is the more mature option."

Wayland complicates server-side window decorations

  • https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2018/01/server-side-decorations-and-wayland/ ❌ FUD since at least 27 January 2018 ("I heard that GNOME is currently trying to lobby for all applications implementing client-side decorations. One of the arguments seems to be that CSD is a must on Wayland. " ... "I’m burnt from it and are not interested in it any more.") Server-side window decorations are what make the title bar and buttons of all windows on a system consistent. They are a must have_ for a consistent system, so that applications written e.g., Gtk will not look entirely alien on e.g., a Qt based desktop, and to enforce that developers cannot place random controls into window titles where they do not belong. Client-side decorations, on the other hand, are destroying uniformity and consistency, put additional burden on application and toolkit developers, and allow e.g., GNOME developers to put random controls (that do not belong there) into window titles (like buttons), hence making it more difficult to achieve a uniform look and feel for all applications regardless of the toolkit being used.

Red Hat employee Matthias Clasen ("I work at the Red Hat Desktop team... I am actually a manager there... the people who do the actual work work for me") expicitly stated "Client-side everything" as a principle, even though the protocol doesn't enforce it: "Fonts, Rendering, Nested Windows, Decorations. "It also gives the design more freedom to use the titlebar space, which is something our designers appreciate" (sic). Source

Wayland breaks windows rasing/activating themselves

Wayland breaks RescueTime

Wayland breaks window managers

Apparently Wayland (at least as implemented in KWin) does not respect EWMH protocols, and breaks other command line tools like wmctrl, xrandr, xprop, etc. Please see the discussion below for details.

Wayland requires JWM, TWM, XDM, IceWM,... to reimplement Xorg-like functionality

  • Screen recording and casting
  • Querying of the mouse position, keyboard LED state, active window position or name, moving windows (xdotool, wmctrl)
  • Global shortcuts
  • System tray
  • Input Method support/editor (IME)
  • Graphical settings management (i.e. tools like xranrd)
  • Fast user switching/multiple graphical sessions
  • Session configuration including but not limited to 1) input devices 2) monitors configuration including refresh rate / resolution / scaling / rotation and power saving 3) global shortcuts
  • HDR/deep color support
  • VRR (variable refresh rate)
  • Disabling input devices (xinput alternative)

As it currently stands minor WMs and DEs do not even intend to support Wayland given the sheer complexity of writing all the code required to support the above features. You do not expect JWM, TWM, XDM or even IceWM developers to implement all the featured outlined in ^1.

Wayland breaks _NET_WM_STATE_SKIP_TASKBAR protocol

  • https://git.521000.bestelectron/electron#33226 ("skipTaskbar has no effect on Wayland. Currently Electron uses _NET_WM_STATE_SKIP_TASKBAR to tell the WM to hide an app from the taskbar, and this works fine on X11 but there's no equivalent mechanism in Wayland." Workarounds are only available for some desktops including GNOME and KDE Plasma.) ❌ broken since March 10, 2022

Wayland breaks NoMachine NX

Wayland breaks xclip

xclip is a command line utility that is designed to run on any system with an X11 implementation. It provides an interface to X selections ("the clipboard"). Apparently Wayland isn't compatible to the X11 clipboard either.

This is another example that the Wayland requires everyone to change components and take on additional work just because Wayland is incompatible to what we had working for all those years.

Wayland breaks SUDO_ASKPASS

Wayland breaks X11 atoms

X11 atoms can be used to store information on windows. For example, a file manager might store the path that the window represents in an X11 atom, so that it (and other applications) can know for which paths there are open file manager windows. Wayland is not compatible to X11 atoms, resulting in all software that relies on them to be broken until specifically ported to Wayland (which, in the case of legacy software, may well be never).

Possible workaround (to be verified): Use the (Qt proprietary?) Extended Surface Wayland protocol casually mentioned in https://blog.broulik.de/2016/10/global-menus-returning/ "which allows you to set (and read?) arbitrary properties on a window". Is it the set_generic_property from https://github.com/qt/qtwayland/blob/dev/src/extensions/surface-extension.xml?

Wayland breaks games

Games are developed for X11. And if you run a game on Wayland, performance is subpar due to things like forced vsync. Only recently, some Wayland implementations (like KDE KWin) let you disable that.

Wayland breaks xdotool

(Details to be added; apparently no 1:1 drop-in replacement available?)

Wayland breaks xkill

xkill (which I use on a regular basis) does not work with Wayland applications.

What is the equivalent for Wayland applications?

Wayland breaks screensavers

Is it true that Wayland also breaks screensavers? https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/09/wayland-and-screen-savers/

Wayland breaks setting the window position

Other platforms (Windows, Mac, other destop environments) can set the window position on the screen, so all cross-platform toolkits and applications expect to do the same on Wayland, but Wayland can't (doesn't want to) do it.

  • PCSX2/pcsx2#10179 PCX2 (Playstation 2 Emulator) ❌ broken since 2023-10-25 ("Disables Wayland, it's super broken/buggy in basically every scenario. KDE isn't too buggy, GNOME is a complete disaster.")

Wayland breaks color mangement

Apparently color management as of 2023 (well over a decade of Wayland development) is still in the early "thinking" stage, all the while Wayland is already being pushed on people as if it was a "X11 successor".

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pq/color-and-hdr/-/blob/main/doc/color-management-model.md

Wayland breaks DRM leasing

According to Valve, "DRM leasing is the process which allows SteamVR to take control of your VR headset's display in order to present low-latency VR content".

Wayland breaks In-home Streaming

Wayland breaks NetWM

Extended Window Manager Hints, a.k.a. NetWM, is an X Window System standard for the communication between window managers and applications

Wayland breaks window icons

Update 6/2024: Looks like this will get unbroken thanks to xdg_toplevel_icon_manager_v1, so that QWindow::setIcon will work again. If, and that's a big if, all compositors will support it. At least KDE is on it.

Wayland breaks drag and drop

Wayland breaks ./windowmanager --replace

  • Many window managers have a --replace argument, but Wayland compositors break this convention.

Wayland breaks Xpra

Xpra is an open-source multi-platform persistent remote display server and client for forwarding applications and desktop screens.

  • Under Xpra a context menu cannot be used: it opens and closes automatically before you can even move the mouse on it. "It's not just GDK, it's the Wayland itself. They decided to break existing applications and expect them to change how they work." (Xpra-org/xpra#4246) ❌ broken since 2024-06-01

Xwayland breaks window resizing

Workarounds

  • Users: Refuse to use Wayland sessions. Uninstall desktop environments/Linux distributions that only ship Wayland sessions. Avoid Wayland-only applications (such as PreSonus Studio One) (potential workaround: run in https://github.com/cage-kiosk/cage)
  • Application developers: Enforce running applications on X11/XWayland (like LibrePCB does as of 11/2023)

Examples of Wayland being forced on users

This is exactly the kind of behavior this gist seeks to prevent.

History

  • 2008: Wayland was started by krh (while at Red Hat)
  • End of 2012: Wayland 1.0
  • Early 2013: GNOME begins Wayland porting

Source: "Where's Wayland?" by Matthias Clasen - Flock 2014

A decade later... Red Hat wants to force Wayland upon everyone, removing support for Xorg

References

@Monsterovich
Copy link

Monsterovich commented Nov 5, 2024 •
edited
Loading

Many of these features will never work on wayland or gnome wayland. As a developer I fucking hate wayland. It has ruined linux.

GTK5 devs: hey guys, we wrote a spec on which you write your own framework from scratch for your own app.

That's what Wayland is in a nutshell.

@zDEFz
Copy link

zDEFz commented Nov 6, 2024 •
edited
Loading

First off, global hotkeys. These only work properly on kde plasma (they are manual and buggy on hyprland). The application also needs

Do you have any idea how broken those large Desktop environments are because they try to accommodate everybody?
No matter if xorg or wayland.
I say it once, use sway or i3, maybe even hyprland, and roll your own user experience over the years.
It will fit you like a suit. Stuff may misbehave over the years randomly, but thats just the nature if you are the newest and greatest.
Or you upgrade software only once in a while.

@Sazu-bit
Copy link

Sazu-bit commented Nov 6, 2024 •
edited
Loading

Ok so this gist's whole argument is "Wayland isn't xorg therefore it sucks". Great.

That doesn't seem to be the gist of it. It's not that "Wayland isn't xorg" but "I can't do the things I want to do reliably". For me this is about the age of Wayland and is one of the reasons I don't use it.

Xorg is a titan, the coding is a mess, it's not the most efficient... but... it's reliable and practically never fails and if it does fail it fails gracefully. That's what I want, something reliable that fails gracefully and I can do the things I want to do with it.

If something fails like buttered toast on the floor...and doesn't do the stuff it's supposed to do... are we supposed to say it's great because it isn't xorg?

@max0x7ba
Copy link

max0x7ba commented Nov 6, 2024 •
edited
Loading

Ahh I fucking hate wayland again. In my nvidia shadowplay alternative for linux it's basically impossible to make anything work on wayland. First off, global hotkeys. These only work properly on kde plasma (they are manual and buggy on hyprland).

Global hotkeys work in KDE Plasma Wayland but not in hyprland. Why is that not hyprland's fault?

The application also needs to be a fullscreen transparent overlay, which wayland compositors dont want to allow.

KDE Plasma Wayland displays transparent overlays over any windows, e.g. Volume OSD. Heck, in rare instances when plasmashell crashed taking down panels and the desktop with it, the Volume OSD and KRunner still displayed flawlessly and with transparency.

Then some features, such as saving a video recording to a folder with the name of the game you are recording. Thats not possible on wayland either.

Spectacle just saved a video of a window for me titled "Think twice about Wayland. It breaks everything! - Google Chrome.20241106T041330.webm". How is that possible?

There is also a power saving option to only run instant replay when a fullscreen application (game) is running, which is not possible to detect on wayland. The application also uses custom notifications (which also allows notifications to show when in "do not disturb mode" which some wayland compositors enable when recording the screen). These are not possible on gnome and never will be because its against gnome devs design of a desktop.

Many of these features will never work on wayland or gnome wayland. As a developer I fucking hate wayland. It has ruined linux.

I'd rather an application used OS notifications mechanisms, style, behaviours and obeyed the settings, rather than implementing its own square wheels. KDE Plasma Wayland apps display configurable notifications and always-on-top OSDs.

It appears that these always-on-top OSDs can be used to implement something similar to NVidia Experience overlay, which you'd like to copy.

How does KDE Plasma Wayland implement all these things you claim are impossible in Wayland?

@max0x7ba
Copy link

max0x7ba commented Nov 6, 2024 •
edited
Loading

Xorg is a titan, the coding is a mess, it's not the most efficient... but... it's reliable and practically never fails and if it does fail it fails gracefully. That's what I want, something reliable that fails gracefully and I can do the things I want to do with it.

Xorg X11 served well, but Wayland provides much better user experience, even on NVidia now, I must concede.

NVidia reported actual display dpi to Xorg, unlike other drivers, and that caused different apps to render at different scales depending on whether they used display dpi, font dpi, both or none (Google Chrome applied both dpis for its GTK UI, but only one dpi for pages rendered by WebKit and looked horrible in X11 as a result). That "actual display dpi" feature could be turned off, but that caused font sizes in points render poorly/blurry/fuzzy in all apps on HiDPI displays, because that sub-pixel font anti-aliasing rendered for "large" low-resolution pixels of the Xorg hard-coded 96dpi when it gave up on the idea of per-display DPI. HiDPI displays have finer pixel grid for the same point size, so that sub-pixel font anti-aliasing should blur smaller edge pixels relative to font size in points, resulting in sharper looking texts.

KDE Plasma Wayland seems to use exactly the same DPI for display and fonts in all applications regardless, there is no "force font DPI" option at all. Wayland originally promised display-specific DPI, but what KDE Plasma currently implements appears as "uniform 96dpi resolution for all apps", so that point font sizes in all apps render at exactly same pixel sizes now, unlike in Xorg X11. Fonts render equally blurry/fuzzy in all apps with that enforced fixed 96dpi now. And that's actually a great thing, FREETYPE_PROPERTIES="truetype:interpreter-version=35 cff:no-stem-darkening=1 autofitter:warping=1" in /etc/environment now uniformly fixes blurry/fuzzy fonts in all apps.

KDE Plasma Wayland display color management just works - brighter gamma and richer colors on first login out of the box even with display low brightness. Provides an option to use the display color profile from its EDID (should be the default, IMO), finally letting Linux users enjoy this display feature other OS users enjoyed for a decade. Xorg X11 could never use display color profiles, assigning one manually didn't have any visible effect in any apps I use, and required high display brightness for colors to not look bleak and similar. Switching display color profiles in KDE Plasma Wayland has immediate and dramatic global effect. The display colour profile and night light feature seem to be in perfect harmony now, one doesn't undo the other.

KDE Plasma Wayland global keyboard shortcuts work as they ever did in X11, no regressions here. Screenshots, screencasts, KColorChooser, the desktop clipboard shared between all apps, a 3rd-party keyboard heatmap app, Steam - all work as well in Wayland as they ever did in Xorg X11 for me.

There is still an issue with emacs-gtk display corruptions in Wayland, and Wayland-native emacs-pgtk being a proposed potential fix/replacement, but currently lacking features and performing worse relative to emacs-gtk. But that may have little to do with emacs, rather gtk/GNOME ignoring their user wants, losing developers interest and bit-rotting, unsurprisingly.

nvidia-settings is still dysfunctional in Wayland, cannot adjust GPU fan speeds. Luckily, CoolerControl solves the problem of NVidia fans control in Wayland.

@Monsterovich
Copy link

Xorg X11 served well, but Wayland provides much better user experience, even on NVidia now, I must concede.

Wayland provides nothing. The user experience is provided by DE in the case of a self-written DE server. Whether it's right to create fragmentation of graphical servers is the right question and the answer is obvious - absolutely not.

@Consolatis
Copy link

Wayland provides nothing. The user experience is provided by DE

In fact, wayland provides a way to tell applications about the expected scale factor based on which output a surface is located. It is a wayland protocol. fractional_scale_v1 to be precise. Thus that statement is just another clueless bashing of wayland.

@richRemer
Copy link

Wayland provides nothing. The user experience is provided by DE

In fact, wayland provides a way to tell applications about the expected scale factor based on which output a surface is located. It is a wayland protocol. fractional_scale_v1 to be precise. Thus that statement is just another clueless bashing of wayland.

Do you seriously think X11 couldn't add that feature more simply than reinventing the wheel with Wayland?

@Consolatis
Copy link

Do you seriously think X11 couldn't add that feature more simply than reinventing the wheel with Wayland?

I should not respond to straw man arguments. But I am here now so..
I never said that and wouldn't say it either. I don't care if people use X11 or wayland or what they consider better for their use-cases.
However, I do care if people spread lies.

@richRemer
Copy link

Do you seriously think X11 couldn't add that feature more simply than reinventing the wheel with Wayland?

I should not respond to straw man arguments. But I am here now so.. I never said that and wouldn't say it either. I don't care if people use X11 or wayland or what they consider better for their use-cases. However, I do care if people spread lies.

You claim Wayland is offering a feature that would have probably been added to X11 a decade ago if Wayland hadn't detracted from development of X11. I'd say it's you putting up a straw man.

But, whatever. Different people want different things.

@Monsterovich
Copy link

Monsterovich commented Nov 6, 2024 •
edited
Loading

Wayland provides nothing. The user experience is provided by DE

In fact, wayland provides a way to tell applications about the expected scale factor based on which output a surface is located. It is a wayland protocol. fractional_scale_v1 to be precise. Thus that statement is just another clueless bashing of wayland.

Fractional scaling is generally flawed because, by definition, it will make stuff blurry. The way Wayland uses scaling is also a waste of resources. It's better to use a 4k display where the scaling is 200%.

However, you'll have to scale content in all apps by 2x (pray that apps X and Y support it) - that's the price you pay for having a HiDPI monitor. Historically, applications have been tied to a certain DPI value range.

@Monsterovich
Copy link

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1758

@Consolatis
Copy link

Fractional scaling is generally flawed because, by definition, it will make stuff blurry.

No. Exactly the opposite. It allows applications to render in the requested size (e.g. larger in most cases) because it then doesn't require the compositor to scale up pixels. (To be precise the fractional scale protocol only supplies the requested scale factor for the output a window is on to the application which in turn uses the wp_viewporter protocol to tell the compositor that it doesn't need to scale up the buffers).

@Monsterovich
Copy link

Monsterovich commented Nov 7, 2024 •
edited
Loading

@Consolatis

No. Exactly the opposite. It allows applications to render in the requested size (e.g. larger in most cases) because it then doesn't require the compositor to scale up pixels.

Pixels are integers, you cannot physically make, for example, 1.33... pixels, no matter how much you want to, the image will be interpolated and be blurry. There is no way to get around physics.

Even if you take numbers between 1 and 2 [1.25, 1.5, 1.75] that give an integer result when scaled, good luck finding a monitor that matches that value. That just leaves us with 4k, which is exactly 4x the size of Full HD.

@probonopd
Copy link
Author

...and one more:

Xwayland breaks window resizing; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G9zX8CkGTY

@gusbemacbe
Copy link

I used KColorChooser yesterday and today in KDE Neon 6.2 with Wayland session, it picks colors from any window without fail.

@max0x7ba, unfortunately, I didn't like this app. But I found a few Flathub colour picker apps that worked on Wayland, in spite of not liking them.

For the worst, I am dealing with another KDE bug on Wayland – KDE Clipboard. I also have already changed the Clipboard settings, but the bug continues. It keeps pasting the old paste and doesn't allow to copy the new stuff, what forces me to have to clear the clipboard to remove all the old pastes every time.

I will migrate to i3 and Sway when my dotfiles are ready.

@Monsterovich
Copy link

Monsterovich commented Nov 8, 2024 •
edited by probonopd
Loading

70 year old [...] hating on new technology without even understanding it

The point is, we understand what it is and that it's a piece of sh*t, but you [...] don't.

@Espionage724
Copy link

DWM's still doing pretty good on W10 :p

@gusbemacbe
Copy link

I am experimenting another KDE bug on Wayland. See if it happened with you like:

Screenshot_20241108_153328

@dec05eba
Copy link

dec05eba commented Nov 8, 2024 •
edited
Loading

Global hotkeys work in KDE Plasma Wayland but not in hyprland. Why is that not hyprland's fault?

It works in KDE plasma, not any other wayland compositor. Wayland is not a platform developers can target if something only works on kde plasma. Why do you think there are almost no applications that supports global hotkeys on wayland? My other application is one of the only ones that does.

KDE Plasma Wayland displays transparent overlays over any windows, e.g. Volume OSD. Heck, in rare instances when plasmashell crashed taking down panels and the desktop with it, the Volume OSD and KRunner still displayed flawlessly and with transparency.

Read what I wrote properly. I said fullscreen transparent overlays, not just overlays.

Spectacle just saved a video of a window for me titled "Think twice about Wayland. It breaks everything! - Google Chrome.20241106T041330.webm". How is that possible?

Spectacle uses a kde internal protocol that it says other application must not use. Even if you tried to use it anyways it says that it can change at any time, breaking such applications.

I'd rather an application used OS notifications mechanisms, style, behaviours and obeyed the settings, rather than implementing its own square wheels. KDE Plasma Wayland apps display configurable notifications and always-on-top OSDs.

This is not just making an issue out of something that isn't. Its a real issue for my users that they have reported. Am I supposed to show a popup for all kde users that they have to manually go into settings and disable "do not disturb"?
KDE plasma wayland apps do not count. Both KDE and gnome apps uses internal apps to bypass limitations that normally exists in wayland, while not allowing other applications to do the same.
Always-on-top OSD are possible on KDE though, but it's because kde implements a wlroots specific protocol. This will never work on gnome as they refuse to support it

How does KDE Plasma Wayland implement all these things you claim are impossible in Wayland?

As I said, by using internal kde protocols or doing things that only work on kde. These things are not possible on wayland for third party applications or applications that want to work even for a majority of wayland users. You have to understand, when you target wayland you dont target wayland. You target kde, gnome, wlroots, weston, hyprland, cosmic, gamescope, etc. Often with the no option to implement a feature because only internal applications are allowed to do so.

At least do some basic research about the topic before you defend it. The only thing you are saying is that "kde plasma applications can do this thing by using internal protocols that other applications cant use, therefore wayland is good".

@Monsterovich
Copy link

I am experimenting another KDE bug on Wayland. See if it happened with you like:

Screenshot_20241108_153328

Nice flashback from MS Windows.

@regs01
Copy link

regs01 commented Nov 11, 2024

Pixels are integers, you cannot physically make, for example, 1.33... pixels, no matter how much you want to, the image will be interpolated and be blurry. There is no way to get around physics.

That's why it's needs to support fractional scaling, and ppi-based, not pixelratio-based, so component libraries/widgetsets can know and do proper composition. Win32, Qt5 and GTK2 are properly designed for that. At 150% apps should receive 144 ppi, so they know how to adjust all bounds and constraints. Qt5 can even do it universally, while GTK2 and Win32 relies on apps and their component libraries. Qt6 though degraded dramatically. And instead of ppi-based scaling it's using pixelratio-based, similar to GTK3+. That is float point pixel ratio, not an integer one, like in GTK. But both locking apps at 96 ppi, making it impossible to draw natively anything own with direct pixel access and forcing to rely on own limited set of components. Although there is a hack with environmental variable to enable ppi-based scaling in Qt6, they removed all related function from API. That hack would enable it for entire app though, not per-window base.

So what is needed from Wayland is to provide always real resolution and ppi, which desktop environments can set. Everything else is done by widgetsets and/or component libraries. And document it. As Wayland seemingly largely remains undocumented.

They recently seem did that for XWayland. But it's whole subsystem-based. You can't even enable or disable it per application in case if application is made without support of scaling.

@regs01
Copy link

regs01 commented Nov 11, 2024

X11 can do all those things even though all this features weren't invented in the 80s because they didn't put the kind of security focus that wayland put, and it seems wayland did think about all those either at first that why users are having problem with all this features.

Security is no more than just a convenient excuse for laziness. They pushing DE/WM developers to do their job. But effectively it will be less secure and less reliable, as all small and lightweight devs do not have experience and expertise of whole Unix community together. Needless to say about apps. With X11 you can have universal global hotkey, universal screenshot etc etc. In Wayland every single small application would have to develop support for tones of every single DE and WM. That's impossible and would lead to abandonment of Linux by app developers.

@ElryGH
Copy link

ElryGH commented Nov 11, 2024

Ah the amount of braindead Posts here is amusing. Keep crying about random false facts.
Wayland is really cool and will be included as a DM in the future of most Distros.
Most of the "facts" stated here are complete bs, like the previous message, wayland supports global hotkeys lol.
I wish yall the best, but you need to get some more power in your noggin.

@ElryGH
Copy link

ElryGH commented Nov 11, 2024 •
edited
Loading

Xwayland breaks this or that, cuz XWayland is cursed and should be avoided, we should try to get as much software run nativly under wayland as possible, not use a Wayland-X11 bridge

@ElryGH
Copy link

ElryGH commented Nov 11, 2024 •
edited
Loading

90% of the wayland haters here are over 60 People that dont like technological advancements.
You are like the people that hated on the button phone and said "that will never replace a telephone with a dial plate"

@Consolatis
Copy link

like the previous message, wayland supports global hotkeys lol.

Not from what I remember. There is a pending protocol about that but it hasn't been accepted so far. There may be specific compositors which support some random private wayland protocol or expose the functionality via a dbus service but that is not wayland.

@birdie-github
Copy link

birdie-github commented Nov 12, 2024 •
edited
Loading

90% of the wayland haters here are over 60 People that dont like technological advancements.
You are like the people that hated on the button phone and said "that will never replace a telephone with a dial plate"

What's "technologically advanced" about Wayland?

  • No reference implementation and huge fragmentation? Weston is not it. wlroots is not it either.
  • Missing crucial features required for power users or even simple human beings https://gitlab.xfce.org/panel-plugins/xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin/-/issues/112? Oh, and this applies to multiple Windows applications running under Wine as well. Oh, and good luck using GKrellM or Conky under Wayland. Oh, wait, no one has bothered to port them to Wayland because it's nearly impossible at the current state.
  • No true DPI (scaling) support like any other sane OS has including Windows, MacOS, Android and iOS?
  • No low level drawing protocol? No RDP alternative? Welcome VNC like bitmap sharing of entire application windows?
  • Doesn't support even 5% of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Display_Driver_Model features?
  • Has now taken over 15 years to draft and it's still hugely incomplete?

Fuck this "technologically advanced" crap. Deprecated Xorg runs circles around Wayland.

Why are you in this discussion is a conundrum to me. You may need to go to r/Linux and peddle your idiocy over there.

@navid-zamani
Copy link

navid-zamani commented Nov 12, 2024 •
edited
Loading

90% of the wayland haters here are over 60 People that dont like technological advancements. You are like the people that hated on the button phone and said "that will never replace a telephone with a dial plate"

Look who’s come out! The disciples of the Church of Wayland! Against the seeming disciples of the Church of NotWayland. 🤣
(Quick side note: The Nokia N900/N950 was actual advancement. The iPhone was neither regress nor progress, but sideways, with loopy loops, into the batsh*it insane; merely sold to make tech illiterates /believe/ they are part of the advancement now.)

So to stop this fight of blind ideologies … again …, let’s make this clear for “both“ “sides”:

PROTIP: Despite the text at the top being a list of criticisms…

This is not about Wayland, the software. AT ALL.

This is about Wayland, the cult.

I’ve looked into Wayland, the software, to a level that I planned inventing my own equivalent, and … it’s just a library for display- and input-related IPC. That’s it!
I mean it’s not well-designed, and essentially just re-inventing ideas, badly, that wouldn’t even be necessary without other bad ideas that were re-inventing ideas from Plan 9, really badly. (A common theme nowadays.) But it’s far better than the horrible mess X became due to having to add functionality far beyond its original design (like Windows ME kinda). Everything that is possible with X is possible with Wayland, the software. The code just hasn’t been written yet. Because the code is for a server (“compositor”) and that is a distinct thing from the API/library that is called Wayland.

The problem is, that Wayland has become a cult. It will never be finished because it is not supposed to be finished! The building of Wayland is a ritual, and ending that would end the ability to do that ritual.
The problem is the annoying aggressive cultists that come out whenever anyone criticizes their God. They always claim that anyone opposing it are “haters” and blind idiots, and cannot ever see their own blindness and hate. Acting like victims to hide aggression. (Compare: SJW, Disney, SystemD, Trump, Musk, Apple, and of course official e.g. Abrahamic cults.) … I got LITERALLY asked “Why don’t you love Wayland?” … WAT? Is that like “Why don’t you love Jesus”? … (Hint: In religious schizophrenia, when people say “God”, they mean “I”, as in: Their split personality or shared alter ego. … Yes, I know psychology.)

This has gone so far, that critics actually fell for it and believed themselves they were haters and started actually hating. (Not only because of the aggressive response they got.) … I fell for that! … And it took me quite the time, but unlike the Israel/Palestine situation, I found myself again, and noticed that I have nothing against this random low-quality API/library. Then I noticed again, where the real problem lies.

So: GTFO. Nobody’s hating Wayland except for the ones you yourselves intentionally induced because you can’t handle criticism. And you’re not the victims.
And no, I do not mean everyone who thinks he is “pro Wayland” with this. I only mean the cultists with this. Everyone else: We’re good.

Just make a Wayland 2 (not 2.0. But 2! As in “SomeMovie 2”). Start from scratch, use from Wayland 1 what was good, and design something proper from scratch for everything that was problematic (hint: At least try to understand Plan 9); then adapt your libraries; and we’re all friends again.
It will be really easy! I know because that’s what I literally looked into the past week! But you have to want it. And hence have to know that you are accepted. WE ARE NOT ENEMIES!
No, it still won’t be Plan 9. Because the Linux kernel itself is fundamentally mis-designed¹.
But it will definitely be acceptable, and way better than what that shambling Brundlefly that is X can still adapt to.

</thread>

(¹ Not everything is a file. (1. Due to incompetence in API design.) → Epic fail. // 2. Due to not starting out with a modular kernel and clean and stable APIs. Something that Linus himself stated as his biggest mistake with Linux. // 3. Due to not having had the graphics drivers in the kernel from the start. Which is mainly the fault of hardware vendors, like all for-profit organizations by definition, being hostile to the progress of humanity. Unless you got some nukes, we ain’t curing that psychopathy.)

@Espionage724
Copy link

Espionage724 commented Nov 15, 2024 •
edited
Loading

90% of the wayland haters here are over 60 People that dont like technological advancements. You are like the people that hated on the button phone and said "that will never replace a telephone with a dial plate"

Yeah and kids like slower Rust cuz EZ and have reaction times slower than snails to have tolerated Wayland up until 2024 :p

Wayland is really cool and will be included as a DM in the future of most Distros.

If by the time it's used everywhere it's actually a good replacement for Xorg, fine. It's not there yet, or I'd be using it and not typing from Windows 10 about to hop back to Xorg Xfce :p

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment