KDE's Nate Graham On X11 Being A Bad Platform & The Wayland Future

pnutzh4x0r@lemmy.ndlug.org to Linux@lemmy.ml – 270 points – KDE's Nate Graham On X11 Being A Bad Platform & The Wayland Future
phoronix.com

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!"

Nate's Original Blog Post

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Alternatively, instead of reading a Phoronix article that has a couple of short snippets from a much longer blog post, you can read the original blog post yourself to see the full context.

Edit: Also, it is worth noting that the author of the original blog post had previously written another relatively recent post criticizing the way in which Wayland was developed, so it's not like they are refusing to see its problems.

One of the specific issues from those who've worked with Wayland and is echoed here in Nate's other post that you mentioned.

Wayland has not been without its problems, it’s true. Because it was invented by shell-shocked X developers, in my opinion it went too far in the other direction.

I tend to disagree. Had say the XDG stuff been specified in protocol, implementation of handlers for some of that XDG stuff would have been required in things that honestly wouldn't have needed them. I don't think infotainment systems need a concept of copy/paste but having to write:

Some_Sort_Of_Return handle_copy(wl_surface *srf, wl_buffer* buf) {
//Completely ignore this
return 0;
}

Some_Sort_Of_Return handle_paste(wl_surface *srf, wl_buffer* buf) {
//Completely ignore this
return 0;
}

Is really missing the point of starting fresh, is bytes in the binary that didn't need to be there, and while my example is pretty minimal for shits and giggles IRL would have been a great way to introduce "randomness" and "breakage" for those just wanting to ignore this entire aspect.

But one of those agree to disagree. I think the level of hands off Wayland went was the correct amount. And now that we have things like wlroots even better, because if want to start there you can now start there and add what you need. XDG is XDG and if that's what you want, you can have it. But if you want your own way (because eff working nicely with GNOME and KDE, if that's your cup of tea) you've got all the rope in the world you will ever need.

I get what Nate is saying, but things like XDG are just what happened with ICCCM. And when Wayland came in super lightweight, it allowed the inevitably of XDG to have lots of room to specify. ICCCM had to contort to fit around X. I don't know, but the way I like to think about it is like unsalted butter. Yes, my potato is likely going to need salt and butter. But I like unsalted butter because then if I want a pretty light salt potato, I'm not stuck with starting from salted butter's level of salt.

I don't know, maybe I'm just weird like that.

I don't think infotainment systems need a concept of copy/paste but having to write:

Having lived through the whole "phones don't need copy and paste debate", which fortunately got solved by now having it everywhere I'm in the camp "just stick that everywhere, just in case somebody might use it one day"

Wayland has fixed so many head-scratching issues I would get running 6 monitors on 2 GPUs under X11. I'd often end up with missing monitors, placed in wrong spots that I'd have to rearrange every reboot until an update would come through that would fix it again for a few months, then all over again.

Since I moved to wayland, everything just works. When it doesn't, it's not a display server issue, it's something physical. I just had a couple monitors fail to show up and thought "oh hell, it's back to this, eh". But I open the tower, seat the offending GPU better, and everything comes up like normal, and all the screens are in the right position, it just remembers.

Anyone that thinks X11 is still superior probably runs on a laptop with a single screen.

man it crazy I switched to Wayland on my laptop and docking to 3 monitors just worked on Wayland and it would remember all my monitors settings

I hand like 2 or 3 scripts setup to try and manage that on x11

I mean I'm fully with you on the fact screen autodetect isn't stellar on X but there's no need to exaggerate with "2 or 3 scripts". It's one xrandr command.

And I'm sure all the other people using 6 monitors on 2 GPUs at the same time will appreciate it.

Seriously, how common is such a scenario that you'd even mention it in this context?

Two monitors with different refresh rates is very common. Think laptop connected to a bigger monitor.

I have 2 75hz and a 240hz. It's been alright for me on kde and x11. Although, I do want to give this Wayland thing a shot after hearing it being brought up so many times

3 monitors is probably a lot more common than you think.

I have, unironically, never seen anyone using three monitors together on a PC in my life.

Seriously? That's my home setup, and a lot of my friends also have 3 monitors.

I'm surprised you don't know anyone who has three monitors. It's common for tech-y people.

Ive seen several devs do that, and also some of my gaming friends have 3 monitors.

I barely know anyone who only has a single display. Most people I know have one high refresh rate monitor, and one office monitor for discord and the likes.

Main work + secondary work (docs, output, ...) + sensors/debug/multimedia

Hello! Nice to meet you. I know and love your kind. One monitor is pretty standard, so I have a lot of friends just like you.

Yup, 3 monitors user here. I guarantee it's not that uncommon.

(And yes, I'm still running X11)

A lot of people that run three monitors got all three from a thrift store for $8

Since it's probably reasonably rare it's a good demonstration of the stability of Wayland. It makes sense to mention it imo

Over on Nate's other blog entry he indicates this:

The fundamental X11 development model was to have a heavyweight window server–called Xorg–which would handle everything, and everyone would use it. Well, in theory there could be others, and at various points in time there were, but in practice writing a new one that isn’t a fork of an old one is nearly impossible

And I think this is something people tend to forget. X11 as a protocol is complex and writing an implementation of it is difficult to say the least. Because of this, we've all kind of relied on Xorg's implementation of it and things like KDE and GNOME piggyback on top of that. However, nothing (outside of the pure complexity) prevented KWin (just as an example) implementing it's own X server. KWin having it's own X server would give it specific things that would better handle the things KWin specifically needed.

Good parallel is how crazy insane the HTML5 spec has become and how now pretty much only Google can write a browser for that spec (with thankfully Firefox also keeping up) and everyone is just cloning that browser and putting their specific spin to it. But if a deep enough core change happens, that's likely to find its way into all of the spins. And that was some of the issue with X. Good example here, because of the specific way X works an "OK" button (as an example) is actually implemented by your toolkit as a child window. Menus those are windows too. In fact pretty much no toolkit uses primitives anymore. It's all windows with lots and lots of text attributes. And your toolkit Qt, Gtk, WINGs, EFL, etc handle all those attributes so that events like "clicking a mouse button" work like had you clicked a button and not a window that's drawn to look like a button.

That's all because these toolkits want to do things that X won't explicitly allow them to do. Now the various DEs can just write an X server that has their concept of what a button should do, how it should look, etc... And that would work except that, say you fire up GIMP that uses Gtk and Gtk has it's idea of how that widget should look and work and boom things break with the KDE X server. That's because of the way X11 is defined. There's this middle man that always sits there dictating how things work. Clients draw to you, not to the screen in X. And that's fundamentally how X and Wayland are different.

I think people think of Wayland in the same way of X11. That there's this Xorg that exists and we'll all be using it and configuring it. And that's not wholly true. In X we have the X server and in that department we had Xorg/XFree86 (and some other minor bit players). The analog for that in Wayland (roughly, because Wayland ≠ X) is the Compositor. Of which we have Mutter, Clayland, KWin, Weston, Enlightenment, and so on. Which that's more than just one that we're used to. That's because the Wayland protocol is simple enough for these multiple implementations.

The skinny is that a Compositor needs to at the very least provide these:

  • wl_display - This is the protocol itself.
  • wl_registry - A place to register objects that come into the compositor.
  • wl_surface - A place for things to draw.
  • wl_buffer - When those things draw there should be one of these for them to pack the data into.
  • wl_output - Where rubber hits the road pretty much, wl_surface should display wl_buffer onto this thing.
  • wl_keyboard/wl_touch/etc - The things that will interact with the other things.
  • wl_seat - The bringing together of the above into something a human being is interacting with.

And that's about it. The specifics of how to interface with hardware and what not is mostly left to the kernel. In fact, pretty much compositors are just doing everything in EGL, that is KWin's wl_buffer (just random example here) is a eglCreatePbufferSurface with other stuff specific to what KWin needs and that's it. I would assume Mutter is pretty much the same case here. This gets a ton of the formality stuff that X11 required out of the way and allows Compositors more direct access to the underlying hardware. Which was pretty much the case for all of the Window Managers since 2010ish. All of them basically Window Manage in OpenGL because OpenGL allowed them to skip a lot of X, but of course there is GLX (that one bit where X and OpenGL cross) but that's so much better than dealing with Xlib and everything it requires that would routinely require "creative" workarounds.

This is what's great about Wayland, it allows KWin to focus on what KWin needs, mutter to focus on what mutter needs, but provides enough generic interface that Qt applications will show up on mutter just fine. Wayland goes out of its way to get out of the way. BUT that means things we've enjoyed previously aren't there, like clipboards, screen recording, etc. Because X dictated those things and for Wayland, that's outside of scope.

That's my problem with this. It tries to be a desktop display server protocol without unifying all desktop requirements. Sure, X11 is old and have unnecessary things that aren't relevant anymore, however, as someone who builds their own DE, (e.g.: tiling window managers) I see it as the end of this masterrace. Unless everybody moves to wlroots. Flameshot, for example, is already dealing with this, having at least 5 implementations only for linux, and only wlroots and x11 are standards.

Also, imo, having windows in windows is useful when you want to use your favourite terminal in your favourite IDE. But as you said DEs can implement it simply. Let's say wlroots will implement this but others can decide otherwise. And for those the app won't run.

Another example, that affects my app personally, is the ability to query which monitor is the pointer at. Wayland doesn't care having these so I doesn't care supporting wayland. And I"m being sad about this because X is slowly fading away so new apps will not run on my desktop.

Moreover with X11 I could write my own hotkey daemon in my lanuage of choice, now I would have to fork the compositor.

Do I see it wrong?

Also, imo, having windows in windows is useful when you want to use your favourite terminal in your favourite IDE.

The wayland way to do that is to have the application be a compositor, they made sure that nesting introduces only minimal overhead. And that ties in with the base protocol being so simple: If you only need to deal with talking to the compositor you're running on, and to the client that you want to embed, a wayland compositor is indeed very small and lean. Much of the codebase in the big compositors deals with kms, multiple monitor support, complex windowing logic that you don't need, etc.

Oh and just for the record that doesn't mean that you can't undock the terminal: Just ask the compositor you're running on for a second window and compose it there. You can in principle even reparent (client disconnecting from one compositor and connecting to the other) but I think that's only standardised for the crash case there's no standard protocol to ask a client to connect to another compositor. Just need to standardise the negotiation protocol, not the mechanism.

The fundamental X11 development model was to have a heavyweight window server–called Xorg–which would handle everything, and everyone would use it.

So there's a Wayland hope for systemd-afflicted boxes and their cults.

Every change will bring it's fair share of complainers, not much we can do about that. LILO to GRUB, SysV to systemd and now X11 to Wayland. No one is forcing your hand (unless you use a pre-packaged distro like Ubuntu/Fedora, in which case you go with whatever the distro provides), keep using X11 if you want stability, if you wanna dip your toes in bleeding-edge software and increase it's userbase to show hardware manufacturers that their drivers need to be updated (I'm looking at you, NVIDIA) then feel free to mess around.

Eventually the day will come when Wayland apps will simply not launch on X11 and you'll migrate too.

I'd say that's already becoming the case in a few places. Hyprland isn't just "Wayland good", it's "You should use Wayland good".

Yes, I know the devs behind it act like pissants. That's bad and I'm sorry for liking their software. I use Emacs too and RMS was kind of an asshole. Hell, I use Lemmy even though one of the devs has slighted me on more than one occasion.

I daily drive Hyprland too, there are some shortcomings with how the mouse behaves with XWayland but I don’t think it’s a Hyprland issue and Gamescope remedies that problem so overall, it’s a great experience.

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Every change will bring it’s fair share of complainers

sometimes the complainers are right and sometimes they aren't

And when they're right, it's usually addressed. I say usually because GNOME exists.

In case of Gnome it was addressed, just by different people. Gnome 2 continues to live on as MATE, so anyone who doesn't like Gnome 3 can use it instead.

Likewise, KDE3 got forked to Trinity. But KDE kept producing (largely) quality software, so Trinity is pretty much an anecdote now.

I don't understand why anyone ever expects a different outcome. They fork something that has quite some investment into the original version. How do they expect to keep up?

I seem to remember a lot of people upset about GPL V3 I don't remember how that was resolved.

It was resolved by people not using it if they didn’t want to. Linux Kernel is still GPLv2

AFAIK, Fedora is the only distro that's getting rid of X11 support, the other distros are still packaging it AFAIK.

Nobody's getting rid of X support. Not for several years.

Go tell Fedora that then lol. They want it gone to the point where Nate is telling users who want X to stay away on that post. Xwayland I believe will still be around though.

They'll recant after their usage drops to a fraction. This move makes zero sense no matter how you look at it. As a generalist distro it's too early to drop X.

If they want to become a niche distro whose only claim to fame is "we only pack Plasma 6", big whoop, like there's any shortage of that. What kind of distro defines itself by what it does not offer? And is that the kind of distro that Fedora aims to be?

Hell, GNOME has been wayland-default since twenty-fucking-sixteen if I remember my dates right. You're overestimating the value X.Org provides.

This is the kind of distro Fedora has always been, both for better and for worse.

I don't see this decision driving users away from Fedora any more than other decisions they've made in the past and will surely make in the future.

There were news about Ubuntu doing it too some time ago, maybe they realized it’s not feasible yet. I don’t follow their development as I don’t use those distros

You are right in spirit.

It was not sysv to systemD, and it was forced (by making udev not work without it).

Other then nvidia, wayland is still missing some protocols (example: what virtual desktop you want your window to be on). But those protocols are (still) being worked on. And you will always be able to run x11 programs on wayland.

The advantages of wayland are a more direct path to hardware, and trowing away lots of code.

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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.

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 :)

why I should bother

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 ... :)

Oh boy, 102 comments. Knowing Phoronix, I bet those are a treat to read.

Fourteen pages of comments within a day of posting in Phoronix? Grab your popcorn guys 🍿

Anecdote, I know, but for my use cases, Wayland just isn't there yet- I wind up with far more random bugs and less battery life. I don't pretend to know why, I'm a pleb non-developer, but until that's resolved I'm still stuck on X. I'd love to use the new shiny thing of The Future™, but not at the cost of stability and usability.

I think that given how frequently this argument is brought up (and it is of course true about it not being completely there yet) so this is just my opinion on the situation (and I am not a dev so I am fine with being wrong and corrected). It is kind of needed for more projects/distros to start actively using it. As a lot of the stuff kind of needs the band-aid ripped off to start forcing it to get there faster at this point. Otherwise it just keeps being held back as people on the coding end of things will keep focusing on X11 issues instead of getting things ready for Wayland.

Kind of like the conundrum of mobile OSes that aren't Android or iOS. It is hard to get people/companies to even try the new OS because the lack of apps (specifically the most common ones used by the most people). But app devs don't want to spend time re-building or starting new apps for an OS that isn't being used (or on devices people are buying). So at a certain point it needs both sides to interact and make progress. The OS needs the apps more at this point, and getting feedback and data from those devs makes it known where things are and aren't working. But it is also true the devs for the apps might end up finding out the OS is actually easier to work with compared to what they have been doing/dealing with on Android/iOS.

Getting a replacement for X11 has been needed for a long time as the OSes and features keep needing something new to better work for how computers have advanced. And it isn't something that many devs would want to take on given how easy it is to just use what is already known. Since Wayland has finally gotten to the point it is now, it is time for more devs to start learning/moving to the new thing to get attention to the stuff that they need. The hardest part is this in between period for users as it can and will cause random issues (like the ones you have seen). Stability is important, but Linux is great because there will always be distros and projects that keeping the old thing running well is the main objective. So we are in some great times for the new to be pushed hard so it can become the stable future needed.

Been trying to think of a term for this issue. It's not quite chicken or egg. But both sides need the other side to incentivize them. If one gets going the other will follow, but they're waiting for each other. Like some sort of collaborative standoff.

Wayland nearly doubled my battery life lol

I don't see why we need convincing that Wayland's better. Most Linux users either use it currently or are possibly looking to switch in the future. The other people who are not are likely going to use X for eternity

I think real X11 fanboys are almost non-existent. Wayland wouldn't be so rejected if it wasn't that it still has a lot of compatibility issues, I think most people just want everything to work and don't care whose fault it is.

Yeah I don't get why some people would think sticking to X is fanboyism. Nobody likes X, let alone love it. Most people's relation to X is pragmatic, it's "it works and does everything I need".

If anything, fanboyism is telling people they have to use Wayland when it doesn't yet work for what they need it to do.

Just keep improving the damn thing and people will switch when it's ready. There's no convincing needed.

exactly this, I'll use it when it works with no questions asked. I.e: when it becomes invisible to me as an enduser

as for now, it isn't, far from it

I remember some 10-15 years ago when I'd look at the y windows website every couple of months hoping for some news of progress, simply because I was sick of x11 being so crappy. I hated it, it was so fiddly, it didn't work right, I just wanted something that worked.
So you can imagine how happy I was when Wayland started taking off. Here was the promise of something better, something that just worked, it sounded amazing. And yet, today I'm still running xorg and I will be for the foreseeable future.

The reason is simply that in the time passed xorg just became usable, I don't have to think about it, it works reliability, it has all the features I need and I hardly ever have to touch it. Meanwhile, I log into my Wayland session and instantly 3 or 4 of the applications I use daily either don't work or act weird. I go and try and fix the issues and I'm told to just accept it, or that I actually don't exist because Wayland works perfectly for everyone. And I'm not even using an Nvidia card, just plain Radeon.

So I quit and go back to what works. Maybe in a couple of years, until then: no thanks.

It's super impressive to see Wayland having its big breakthrough moment. I remember reading about Wayland 10 years ago and worrying it was going to end up as a dead project.

Until my distro forces wayland on me I'll stick with xorg+XFCE. I've played with sway and hyprland but I need my application choices to actually work well. (no I'm not going to list them).

As for the cube desktop in the image: We had this with compiz and learnt then that this is pointless.

Why are we back there?

XFCE is working on Wayland support ◉⌣⁠◉

No blame on the XFCE devs because they're trying to get a lot done with few people, but XFCE just managed to transition to GTK3, I wouldn't hold my breath for comprehensive Wayland support any time soon.

They've made great strides towards Wayland support, considering that the vast majority of the work is being done by 1 guy.
It's not just a lack of devs that's contributing to slow development time either, it's also the fact their goal is to port every single component to native Wayland without relying on Xwayland at all; which is obviously going to take way longer than just porting the essentials and saying "fuck it, use Xwayland".

It's not fully supported, parts of it do and the rest still uses xwayland where possible. https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap

most of the apps I use are shite with xwayland.

Sorry, my bad, too many crimbo drinks.

Work on your reading comprehension skills ◉⁠‿⁠◉

There's a big difference between Working on vs is working. They're Working on a full port, other than that you have preliminary access that's not intended for casual users; only developers, tinkers/enthusiast & testers.

This design document is intended for Xfce developers to begin brainstorming ideas for future development. This is a work in progress and does not imply any future implementation commitments.

Should've been your first hint.

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I love Wayland until I don't. I honestly don't think about it, it gets out of my way and my system is stable, until I go to use something like scrcpy that just doesn't work at all. Luckily, the amount of things that straight up don't work is shrinking.

Undoubtedly Wayland is the way forward and I think it's a good thing. However I wouldn't piss all over X because it served us well for many years. My LMDE 6 still runs X and probably will for the next 2 years at least because both the Mint Team and Debian team don't rush into things. They are taking it slow, testing Wayland to make sure no-one's system breaks when they switch to Wayland.

This is the best approach. Eventually it will all be Wayland but I never understood why this is such an issue. Like any tech it's progress, no need for heated debates. It's just a windowing system after all.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

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.

Nate Graham acknowledges current gaps in Wayland support but on the matter of "Wayland breaks everything" isn't really the right perspective: "Look, if I said, “Linux breaks Photoshop; you should keep using Windows!” I know how you’d respond, right?

You’d say “Wait a minute, the problem is that Photoshop doesn’t support Linux!” And you’d be right.

Because there’s nothing Linux can do to ‘un-break’ Photoshop; Adobe needs to port their software, and they simply haven’t done so 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.

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Really looking forward to the day nvidia drivers properly support wayland. Getting tons of bugs, stutters, and general usability issues with plasma wayland on my 3060. X11 just works on the other hand, even with multiple monitors running at different refresh rates (something a friend of mine said X11 doesn't work well with). But I want all the nice benefits wayland offers.

Nvidia on Wayland moment

Gaming on wayland moment

Battery/Usage on wayland moment

KDE devs making gestures only available on wayland because memes (there is literally a 3rd party github script to achieve the same thing on X11)

X11 being reliable because Xorg devs aren't stupid

My real issue with Wayland is that it took like 15 years to become acceptably usable. I'll switch once XFCE moves over in several years, but until then, there is no incentive for worse performance and non exitestent support.

X11 being reliable because Xorg devs aren't stupid

Not gonna disagree with the rest of what you said, but the Xorg devs and Wayland devs are mostly the same people

They've been working on the same software for 20+ years?

Woah.

X11 being reliable because Xorg devs aren't stupid

xorg devs are wayland devs. nowadays, most of the people that used to work on xorg now work on wayland. they're not stupid, they realised that x11 is too dated for modern systems (see asahi linux) and now are working on a replacement

It's not about reliability though, X11 is hard to maintain and the devs themselves feel burned out. Wayland at least offloads some of that burden to the desktops

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Wayland on an Intel iGPU runs flawlessly and has for several years. However, that's a matter of drivers. AMD is in the forefront regarding having dGPU support, while NVIDIA is playing catch-up.

In any case, the future is bright.

Because Wayland is only a protocol and you write the platform yourself (be it badly or not).

Would be cool if the reference implementation (Weston) were not an unusable monolith but a small plugin-based thing.

Soo support for something like synergy would be great!

Input Leap (fork of a fork of synergy) supports Wayland under gnome, although it seems there are a few bugs remaining.

fucking what synergy doesn't work on Wayland? welp. I use that daily and no, that's not optional, its rather critical for my setup

Wayland developer says X11 is bad, not Wayland

Notably absent: X11 developer saying Wayland is bad, not X11.

Mostly they are the same people.

Well, yes, except that those X11 developers agree that Wayland is better.

Nobody, other than you and them, cares. Have a good day.

Eh, I always discredit people when they say X is bad.

It's been around for over 20 years. That kind of longevity should be praised.

Really glad probonopd is doing this, X11 is dying but wayland isnt ready to replace it, so it's nice to have this

EDIT, paste didn't work https://github.com/probonopd/wayland-x11-compat-protocols

Read the article, specifically the part mentioning where X11 is going and distributions that aren't fedora.

woops my bad, I mean to link this https://github.com/probonopd/wayland-x11-compat-protocols it's a repo of going to be protocols, to fill in the gap instead of pretending the issue doesn't exist

Also read the article (as in the original blog post) about that repo.

I did and quite frankly it's trash, XDG portals are a clunky and quite frankly terrible and poorly thought out api. I'm not the only one that disagrees with this sentiment as multiple people are trying to get protocols like ext-screencopy-v1 for screen recording and ext-foreign-toplevel-* for window management upstreamed into wayland so that xdg portals aren't necessary for these use cases. I don't mind the reliance on pipewire too much, but I too think that It shouldn't be necessary for screen capture.

IMO It is one of nate's worst takes of all time if not the worst. Usually I agree with most things he writes, but not this, xdg-portals is a travesty, pipewire is nice and all, but I don't see why we should need an entire media system for basic screen capture capabilities. and clearly im not alone on this sentiment

And that'll shake out in the time it takes for X11 to go away. I get what you're saying, although I don't share your opinion about portals from a user perspective: I'm just happy that Firefox finally uses the Plasma file picker.

I have a couple of issues with portals. One is that we're putting too much eggs in the basket of something that is designed for containers. XDG portals Have rejected features that people have requested because they don't want to expose that functionality to a container and they are allergic to permission prompts apparently.

I also have other issues with the portals for instance video capture. It requires you to have a camera portal. It requires you to have a desktop capture portal. It also requires you to have an app to app, video, portal, which doesn't exist yet. All of these things require pipewire pretty much in most cases, so why can't we just have a single pipewire portal? It may not scale well in the future, but it doesn't scale well now anyways. If you want just a generic pipe wire stream, you're not gonna be able to have it, you're going to have to conform to one of the standards anyways. For a case in point example, the OBS pull request for Game Scope Capture is the perfect example of this over reliance in XDG portals.

I'm showcasing this just to highlight the fact that the XDG portals are incredibly poorly thought out, and I don't think that it's a reliable method for the future going forwards.

PS. Please pardon any oddities in this, I had to use speech to text, since my RSI is acting up.

I think having separate standard APIs for screenshots, screen capture, and video capture that aren't married to one implementation makes sense.

I partially agree about the focus on containers/sandboxes. Yes, it makes sense to criticize that something designed for a different use case results in different trade-offs. But on the other hand, are the use cases really that different? We're talking about standalone desktop apps, they need some common building blocks no matter if they're containerized or not, right?

Otherwise I don't know enough about the standards to comment there, you're probably right!

I think having separate standard APIs for screenshots, screen capture, and video capture that aren’t married to one implementation makes sense.

The idea of a using a separate thing for it is fine, in itself, but necessitating it is an issue to me. There are a LOT of wayland compositors now, for all sorts of systems, each one also new needs a compatible xdg portals implementation (or whatever third party tool you like), in the case of xdg portals this also means pulling in things like dbus. It actually becomes a lot to build a "Minimal but fledged out" ecosystem. something which should otherwise be possible.

we’re talking about standalone desktop apps, they need some common building blocks no matter if they’re containerized or not, right?

sure but then you have xdg-portals denying actually useful a11y protocols because they "don't want to expose it to containers" -_- apparently they never heard of a permissions system? but this also highlights why the wayland ecosystem right now is so poor for select individuals (and why they get heated when told that they need to swap to wayland)

Nate Graham acknowledges current gaps in Wayland support but on the matter of "Wayland breaks everything" isn't really the right perspective

That's rather disingenuous. It's meant to be a replacement for X11. So it does break things.

It's not intended as a drop in replacement.

Backwards compatibility forever sounds great, but the technical debt eventually becomes a giant fucking limitation on improvement. They chose not to stay backwards compatible for a reason.

I agree that at some point you have to be able to ditch technical debt, but you still should be able to do more or less the same things with the new system as with the old system and that's currently still not the case.

The problem is that the architecture of Wayland and the organization around it themselves impose limitations that have a chilling effect on development for it. One issue is that Wayland has been deliberately left very slim, leaving a lot of complexity and implementation details up to the compositor. A compositor can be seen as something that approaches the size and complexity of an entire X display server. This means that if someone wants to create a window manager, they have to implement a whole compositor first. So instead of writing window manager code, which is what the developer is probably the most interested in, they are spending most of their time implementing the compositor.

Naturally this also leads to a lot of duplication of effort. For example: GNOME, KDE and the window managers that have implemented a wayland version each have their own compositor that by and large does the same thing.

Another issue is the standardization of the protocols and interfaces that the different compositors use, or lack thereof. There is a steering group containing the major stakeholders that votes on proposed extensions, but good proposals often get shot down because the major stakeholders can't agree on it and sometimes ego or principles gets in the way. And then you have cases where one compositor just goes their own way and implements something regardless of what the others do.

For example, as a result of this there's still no standard screen capture API, so if you want to do things like screenshots, remote desktop, desktop streaming, ... whether or not you can do that, and with which tool, depends on the compositor you use. Another example: they're currently still bickering over whether or not an application should be allowed to place windows with absolute coordinates, and how that should be implemented. We're currently 15 years after initial release of Wayland...

In my opinion, this is all completely backwards. Both in an organizational and technical sense way too much has been left up to the individual compositors that should have been a core part of Wayland itself.

Unfortunately, it's all too late to fix this. We're 15 years into Wayland development, and the flawed architecture has been set in stone. Wayland isn't going to go away soon either, too many parties are invested in it. So for me the reasonable thing to do is to wait and stick with X11 until the dust settles and something emerges on the other side that is better than what I currently have.

This means that if someone wants to create a window manager, they have to implement a whole compositor first. So instead of writing window manager code, which is what the developer is probably the most interested in, they are spending most of their time implementing the compositor.

wlroots has existed for almost 7 years and this misconception is still repeated.

I know wlroots exists. It's a library that helps you implement a compositor (i.e. does some of the heavy lifting), but at the end of the day the window manager developer is still implementing a compositor and is responsible for maintaining their compositor.

The mere fact that wlroots, and other efforts like louvre, are necessary at all actually prove my point that it was an idiotic design to push everything off into "compositors".

It's not intended as a drop in replacement.

... Which is why it "breaks everything"

As railways were a replacement for canals.

It was not the railways that broke the barge. But the companies expecting to gain the advantages without adapting there transportation.

Replace not upgrade.

PS i still use canals. Bur do not blame the raIlway for not fitting my boat.

Railways are not a "replacement" for canals.

Duh. But you do understand what purpose the metaphor serves?

Yes. And it's a bad analogy. Nobody is expecting you to be able to take a barge on railways. But existing linux applications are being expected to run on Wayland. As I said - railways didn't replace canals - they're different types of things.

Within the last 10 years and the next 5 years, software using old hacks instead of GUI toolkits are expected to switch, yes.

People can choose to continue to use X11 until KDE Plasma 6 hits Debian stable.

I don't see a problem. Nobody forces Wayland onto anyone yet, except for bleeding edge distributions like Fedora. And unless you've been severely misled, you should know what you signed up for when you installed Fedora.

I don’t see a problem.

I didn't say there was a problem. I'm saying it's pretty disingenuous to act like Wayland isn't intended as a replacement for X11. All of which you seem to agree with. As you say "nobody forces Wayland onto anyone yet" (emphasis mine).

Also - I just love how your comment is written like a politician would have written it. "Sure you can use the dirty old X11 if you really want to, or you can use the nice new God-fearing Wayland".

If you bring the two parts of your comment together and dial back the assumptions of bad faith, you'll get a consistent picture:

Wayland is a blank slate replacement for how to do window management on Linux. At some point it'll become the standard for software that's new or maintained. Unmaintained software that doesn't talk to the internet and is therefore safe to run even with security holes will continue to be supported via XWayland. The giant scope and API surface is part of the reason why it's deprecated. Maintainers are expected to target the new way to do things going forward, because there are people able and willing to maintain that support (many of those people former X11 maintainers who are looking forward to stop having to deal with that legacy behemoth)

That's the state of things I wanted to express. Not my opinion, no agenda, just how I understand the situation.

Lol. Learn your history.

In the UK railways very much were a replacement for canals.

Both being built to transport good accross the nation.

Lol. Learn your history.

Don't be shitty.

Yeah sorry. But when you look at the events building europeen railways. More so in the UK as we had a huge canal system built in a few decades. But most of Europe denser areas.

Railways were very much a replacement for the to slow canal system.

Canals built a huge industry allowing manufacturers to ship goods to cities while shipping resources from the mines and farms etc.

But industries like meat fish milk and strongly enough market gardening (fresh flowers) were very limited to local areas before the railways. Took off hugely when the railways intentionally set up in direct competition to the canals.

Canals survived for a while moving the slower stuff. But started needing to redesign to support bigger and more boats faster. Before finally closing down.

The UK and most of Europe rebuilt/renovated them as a leasure activity from the 1950s. But most of the late 1800 to early 1900s railways vcompanies actually worked to replace and put canal companies out of business.

Passenger rail really was not a big thing untill about the 1920s.

We're getting well away from the topic now. It depends on what you mean by "replace". Railways and canals exist side-by-side as different solutions to similar problems - sure. And some railways have replaced some canals. But the panama canal will not be replaced by a railroad for example. It couldn't do the same job. The pros/cons of each option depends on many factors.

The analogy is poor for comparing software. Linux distros will likely replace X11 with Wayland over time. To do the same thing that X11 was doing. It will be replaced "in place". The very same thing you were using with X11 will now need to work on Wayland. This would be like running your barges on the railroad? Maybe? Depending on how you squint?

I wouldn't expect my barge to work on the railroad. I do expect that Firefox will run on Wayland after having used it on X11 for 20 years.

But as a user of a barge if you needed wanted to use railways. Because they are faster. It would be the barge maker or a new train maker you would look at. Not the railway.

Just like canals X11 still exists. And is still being developed. It has its limitations but some applications are choosing not to port. Because like barge makers. They simply do not see the need. Or merit.

If the makers of railways insisted that all current users agents had to work on them without adaption. Many of the advantages would no longer be there.

Just as if waylaid did not expect Firefox et al to adapt to its methods. The security and other advantages they seek would not be practice.

Waylaid is a replacement. Not an upgrade.

(PS yeah living in the UK replace canal with inland waterways navigation. Tends to be how we think of it. As they are such a huge part of our industrial history. I forget the US really never went through that part of europeen industrial development. Your example is a fairly unique and modern by comparison, it dose not link to any network. Where as the inland waterways accross the UK and parts of Europe were a linked inferstructure like our railways. When the railways in Europe were built. They were very much seen as a replacement to our existing canal system. By both the corperations set up to build the inferstructure and the media of the time. It is literally a part of our industrial history thought is schools here. As so much of our culture and industrial revolution is built around the events)

But not "everything", which is the point.

Just the apps and DE's that don't/can't support it ...hmmm

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Wayland doesn't support Nvidia GPUs yet

I'm sorry, my bad, I was unaware.

Nvidia GPUs don't support Wayland yet. As Linux Torvalds would say, "NVidia, Fuck You"

"Wayland" doesn't support any GPU's, it's the job of each GPU driver to support Wayland (and Nvidia's now does).

*Nvidia didn't support Wayland

This is the big thing that all these Nvidia comments miss. It's not up to Wayland to support a given GPU. Nvidia is actively hostile to Linux users. If you aren't making money with cuda there are zero reasons to choose Nvidia on a Linux machine over the competition. I've been on Wayland for almost a decade now and there's no way I'm going back to X at this point.

Uh reading the article, pretty sure the author would phrase it as "Nvidia GPUs don't support Wayland yet" and that author would be absolutely right.

I've switched to Wayland on my Nvidia GPU and I'm taking the FPS hit. OBS crashes when I run a wine game on x11

Yup, but my external monitor stuttered insufferably, so I still stuck with X11. Didn't try OBS but Wine worked like a charm.

FWIW, I'm typing this on the latest GNOME, on wayland, on nvidia proprietary drivers; and it works just fine --- EXCEPT for suspend & resume, which is annoying to be sure; but on 2 screens with different refresh rates & different dpi ratios I at least don't run into some of the weird behavior I do run into using X11.

I used to be an Xfce purist; but this particular setup is even less taxing on the GPU (GTX 970) compared to Xfce's standard compositor (around 20W on light usage, vs. 35+W); & and the font rendering is slighly better, which is a huge factor AFAIC.

Hey there, what tool do you use to find power usage? Thanks

Hi; I rely on nvidia-smi mostly; but the nvidia-settings gui app also shows temperatures & wattage (though that app might be x11-only).

Trying to gaslight others? nice

No, they're discussing the way forward and what they think makes sense. In fact, they're even clearly stating that there will be pain, because Wayland intentionally does less than X11. And they're encouraging people with unsolved pain points to speak up.