KDE's Nate Graham On X11 Being A Bad Platform & The Wayland Future
Well known KDE developer Nate Graham is out with a blog post today outlining his latest Wayland thoughts, how X11 is a bad platform, and the recent topic of "Wayland breaking everything" isn't really accurate.
"In this context, “breaking everything” is another perhaps less accurate way of saying “not everything is fully ported yet”. This porting is necessary because Wayland is designed to target a future that doesn’t include 100% drop-in compatibility with everything we did in the past, because it turns out that a lot of those things don’t make sense anymore. For the ones that do, a compatibility layer (XWayland) is already provided, and anything needing deeper system integration generally has a path forward (Portals and Wayland protocols and PipeWire) or is being actively worked on. It’s all happening!"
after more than 25 years using linux I could not care less about those dramas, when my distro will drop xorg I'll switch and that's it. I've got way too much stuff to implement myself already, there is no time for that. I mean, I've even embraced systemd...
Most distros use Wayland now and you probably won't notice a difference.
I wish that was my experience, but Nvidia drivers on KDE Wayland have had a lot of oddities and issues that have caused me to go back to Xorg every time I've tried (12 times and counting). Wayland is a good move in the right direction, and I look forward to it, but it's still being implemented.
That's less about Wayland than it is about shortfalls in nVidia driver development. Exactly like Nate's example in the blog post.
Oh absolutely, this isn't to say "Wayland bad", it's just to say that a large number of people may not have a smooth transition, so it's hard to say "just do it"
Just don't buy nvidia (or stuff from any other company openly hostile towards their users)
A sizable percentage of Linux users own Nvidia cards and "just buy something else" is not realistic, for many reasons.
Wayland will eventually have to support Nvidia one way or another. If they're seriously considering not doing that I would not bet on its future.
Eventually people will have to get new hardware. That's the moment to avoid nVidia, that's how simple this can be.
Also, the problem is nVidia giving shitty Wayland support, not Wayland providing no nVidia support. It's nVidia who has to write the drivers since they themselves opted to keep their implementation details a secret. There's nothing the Wayland people can do except plea, beg and shame. If nVidia then decide not to care, then I say fuck them.
Not supporting Nvidia cards will make Wayland unusable for at least half the Linux desktop users, probably more. Stats I recall range from 50-75%.
"Just buy non-Nvidia" is not, I repeat, a simple option. Lots of people stick with old GPU models because the price/performance ratio has gone out the window and they cannot afford to drop hundreds or thousands on one. Many others have Nvidia in their laptops.
There's nothing preventing Wayland from working with Nvidia except the political insistence that it be open sourced. Which Nvidia is not interested in, never was, and never will be. And it's a red herring to begin with.
TLDR either Wayland bends their stance on open source or their adoption will be severely limited.
OR:
Nvidia will feel enough pressure (likely from the ML / HPC space?) to provide open kernelspace support that they'll actually make that happen.
Which... Has already happened.
Nvidia took a lot of the kernelspace logic that used to be in their proprietary driver, re-architected their GPUs to move that logic into a firmware blob (GSP).
And last year they released a completely Free driver that intefaces with GSP.
This allowed Nouveau developers to finally access critical features like power management (which were basically behind a wall of DRM, as Nvidia used legal and technical measures to lock Nouveau out of their firmware).
Now Nouveau has a new shader compiler, Vulcan support is growing rapidly, and people like me will soon prefer the Mesa stack for Nvidia over Nvidia's own drivers.
And you can bet that Nouveau will work great with all of the Wayland compositors.
This is really the exact wrong point in history to be making the argument you're trying to make 🤣.
Wow you got that backwards. They don't do any of that for the sake of Nouveau or Vulkan or Wayland or whatever. They don't care what people use their open scraps for.
They open up the minimum they can get away with because it's ultimately meaningless — their proprietary stuff is still hidden away and it's not like you can use the parts they open with anything else.
This, btw, applies to AMD and Intel too. The only choice you get with proprietary hardware that you have to use (like GPUs) is whose dick you want to suck. They're not your friend and they won't let community pressure then into decisions.
It was a birthday gift from my wife, and lets not alienate people who don't know computer hardware very well and pick up something from Best Buy. I agree that Nvidia sucks, and many of the issues are indeed their fault, but we also can't neglect the fact that they own the vast majority of the market.
I've been a Linux user since the 90s, and nvidia has been a problem as long as I can remember. The wayland issues are just a new chapter in a long saga. ATI used to be the same, but they came around after having been bought by AMD.
If you're already planning to use Linux on something a quick search will directly tell you that nvidia is a problem. If you got the hardware before nvidia that sucks - but again, it's nvidias fault.
I think we absolutely should neglect nvidias market share, and just fully drop support for nvidia cards - either they'll get pressured by angry users to no longer behave like dicks, or they keep doing it, and people will only make the mistake of buying nvidia once (or not use Linux) - either way, we'll have gotten rid of a massive headache.
Running AMD/AMD right now for cpu/gfx, and I'm happy with my gaming laptop (and it's price point).
Linux support and general support of open source was amajor factor in my decision. Intel is also really good on the CPU front, but I want to support AMD for its ooen source and speedy graphics offerings.
Also quite important to make sure we don't have just a single strong x86 vendor - even though currently looking at price/performance you'd almost always go for AMD.
The time before ryzen was horrible - a 4-core-CPU was considered high end, and if you needed something more you needed to go for ridiculously overpriced Xeons. Similar for servers - you could get slightly higher core counts there, but when going for more than 8 cores it'd also get expensive very quickly.
Now we're talking about 16 cores in high end notebook, and 64 cores in still reasonably priced pro workstations.
Indeed.
Hopefully your card is new enough that NVK will work with it.
I'm sure hoping so, I haven't followed development super closely, but I'm kinda imagining that the 3080 ti should be new enough :)
It is. RTX 20 series and up use GSP which nouveau/NVK needs for reclocking on modern cards
yeah but the point is why bother? :) especially if I wouldn't notice differences...
To provide features that Xorg can't.
If you don't need features like fractional scaling, VRR, touchscreen gestures, etc. you won't notice a difference.
People who do use those, will. Because for them, those features would be missing or not complete on Xorg.
mmmh, I bet I will not notice any difference also if I don't do shit and keep whatever is working until the day I'll have to switch because my distro drops the packages 🤷🏼
Because it fixes all the issues I had with X. Everything runs a bit faster and is smoother plus inputs behave like they should.
sorry, my rhetorical question was obviously intended as why I should bother. I don't see any value in stopping you doing whatever you think is better for you, in fact it is exactly what annoys me the most :)
Bother to do what? As you said, when your distro switches you go with it and notice no difference. You don't have to bother to do anything.
yes!
The point of open source is kinda that you have the freedom to do as you will.
The point of packaged distros is so that you don't have to do too much.
Do as you will, brother, do as you will.
Well Xorg is pretty much unmaintained and is on its death bed. Modern hardware and software are slowly favoring Wayland due to it being much simpler by design.
well, everything which I use runs well on xorg, and I'd need to change relevant parts of my daily stack in order to use wayland sooo ... :)
Why bother what?
yes!