I enabled wayland recently and there’s been a lot of annoyances to the point that I wonder why I bother considering X11 works without these issues. For example:
* Chrome needs a bunch of extra flags to launch in Wayland mode
* Firefox needs extra flags to launch in Wayland mode
* Xwayland is just broken on Nvidia with both sides refusing to compromise (implicit vs explicit synchronization - Nvidia refuses to add implicit and Xwayland refuses to take Nvidia’s patch to do explicit). What this means is that you get tearing, flickering and all sorts of terrible graphical artifacts
* Chrome only just fixed HW acceleration for Nvidia (latest m120 beta)
* enabling vulkan causes Chrome to fail to render (although this may just me needing to try reinstalling Nvidia drivers)
* I thought it was an acceleration thing, but even with HW acceleration fixed Chrome has a bug where the mouse pointer leaves behind white speckling when mousing over on a dark background. VSCode doesn’t have this issue.
None of these issues appear in X and this is from someone who thought Wayland is the right way to go (eg you didn’t see this kind of story on Mac when they switched to HW accelerated compositing).
Maybe Firefox needing flags is a per-distro thing? I’ll have to check and make sure but I think Firefox works with Waylad sessions out of the box on my Fedora laptop. That’s using an Intel iGPU instead of an Nvidia GPU though so maybe that’s also a factor.
I have three laptops each with Intel graphics, each from a different generation. They all have the same show stopping (as in screen locking gotta reset) bugs after a fresh distro install, no adjustments.
Another regression is that KeePassX/C AutoType doesn't work with Wayland, so now instead of a simple CTRL+V in KeePassXC, I have to separately copy and paste the user and the pass.
I'm another X holdout because of random issues like this. X just works for me, and I don't have the time and energy to care.
I try to test my system setups with qemu, but I cannot for the life of me figure out which combination of whats I need to get wayland to run there. There's apparently two? framebuffer implementations which work with none of the desktops I want to use. All the documentation points to other projects that should be documenting X or Y, but don't.
It's possible some of these things are really distro+hw related, but for the sake of argument:
> * Chrome needs a bunch of extra flags to launch in Wayland mode
I'd rather have to worry about adding a few extra flags than worry about X11. X11 is overcomplicated, over-engineered, barely maintained, is apparently broken from a security angle, ancient...
Till today I have found X11 configuration one of the toughest things in Linux. I'd rather google for some wayland specific flags than worry about X11.
> * Firefox needs extra flags to launch in Wayland mode
See argument above for Chrome.
> * Xwayland is just broken on Nvidia with both sides refusing to compromise (implicit vs explicit synchronization - Nvidia refuses to add implicit and Xwayland refuses to take Nvidia’s patch to do explicit). What this means is that you get tearing, flickering and all sorts of terrible graphical artifacts
Xwayland is a transitional thing anyways too. When X is dead we won't need to worry about Xwayland either.
> * Chrome only just fixed HW acceleration for Nvidia (latest m120 beta)
One more reason got added to use Wayland from now onwards.
> * enabling vulkan causes Chrome to fail to render (although this may just me needing to try reinstalling Nvidia drivers)
Vulkan unlike OpenGL is also quite new. Give it a couple of years for every combination to get ironed out. X11 is hardly the answer here. If you're going to gripe about Wayland, X11 is never the answer.
It's been kind of buried, but KDE has the first steps of tiling mode built into it now, in addition to the default screen edge tiling (on KDE 5.27.8 on up). Meta + T to enable tile editor. Shift + window drag to move a window into a tile.
Hopefully a lot more coming, including different layouts per virtual desktop & full keyboard nav for the tiles. But it's a decent start.
I really wanted to try plasma with i3 but the big problem I ran into was that different monitors can't have independent workspaces, which was a deal breaker :(
The advantages of tiling window managers are so tied to muscle memory, I’m not sure many people will want to switch from, say, sway or i3 or whatever. But at least new people will be able to give it a try.
I’m not sure how much work is involved in replacing the window manager inside a desktop environment. It would be nice to just drop sway into kde. Dunno if that is possible though.
Thanks for this. As a new user of Ubuntu I stumbled into the meta-T shortcut but couldn't find out how to take advantage of it. Shift-T is what I was missing. I didn't have the terminology I needed to search effectively either.
> - Plasma's start time is up to a few seconds faster.
On the one hand, this is impressive. On the other, this is a vague indictment of modern software. Plasma logs you in, draws a background and the taskbar thing across the screen. There shouldn't be seconds involved in that to shave.
This must be a recurring feature, every few years someone goes through and fixes up load times.
They mentioned that the culprit for those additional load times was loading all the search backend for their application launcher which they deferred to the moment when there was actually the first search query (still shouldn't take multiple seconds)
I'm surprised whenever I hear Wayland works flawlessly for someone, since I've tried using it on the NixOS unstable channel for a few releases now, and there are a few major bugs that make it unusable for me.
A show stopping one is that the bottom panel is stuck in the middle of the screen, with no way to move it down that I could find, and clicks register in completely different parts of the screen. It's difficult to explain. I noticed this starts happening after I start an Xorg session for the first time, which for some reason always switches back to the default after an upgrade.
If someone knows what bug this is and how to fix it, I'd appreciate it.
Then there are other minor issues like the cursor being tiny when hovering over a Firefox window, which I guess uses Xwayland(?).
The fact each application needs to explicitly support Wayland, and I need to switch to an entirely different app ecosystem, is insane to me. I'm willing to make the jump if it offered a truly better experience than X, but I've yet to see that.
Wayland has a few glitches, but in general it's good to use.
For example, it doesn't have an API to get current cursor position (which breaks keepassxc's browser popup, goldendict's query popup), an API (which most compositor implements) to get current window state, which makes me unable to find an alternative of autokey (kwin script can do this, though, but it lacks the ability to execute arbitary commands..).
On the other hand, I don't see a killing feature that drives people switch to wayland.. (HDR can be one, but I don't use it) I mean, yeah X11 is old and unmaintained, but it WORKS.
I really like KDE. I feel like it's what the windows DE wants to be when it grows up. Everything is configurable and it's usually fairly obvious how to do so.
Coming from a long time 'minimalist' linux users, my biggest issue with it is that there's no ~/.config/kde that you can just copy between machines and get set up the way you like it. It's spread out all over the show.
Wayland doesn't fractionally scale chrome, discord, vscode, spotify, beeper, and other appimage and non-native applications. So even if KDE enables it by default, most users will have to switch back to X.
It doesn't scale the rest, because those are electron apps that either ship with old electron version, or disable wayland. Special mention goes to vscode, which ignores *-flags.conf and provides no other way to enable wayland, except for command line argument.
So basically it is maintainers of these apps dragging their feet.
I've been using Wayland KDE on my gaming machine recently, it somehow made my cursor movement stutter. Switching to KDE X11 or Gnome Wayland solved the issue.
I hope they address this kind of thing prior to making it a default.
I use Wayland KDE but have shortcuts for Steam to launch within Gamescope [].
# normal steam with experimental HDR enabled, native resolution for my laptop and 165hz refresh rate.
alias steam 'steam-run gamescope -f --hdr-enabled -e -W 2560 -H 1440 -r 165 -- steam'
# full screen gamepad ui
alias steam_gamepadui 'steam-run gamescope -f --hdr-enabled -e -W 2560 -H 1440 -r 165 -- steam -gamepadui'
Computer is Asus G513qy, a a full AMD laptop with discrete graphics. Janky thermal design, no thunderbolt... so more like a stationary desktop. Wouldn't buy something like this again but for now it does the job and runs great with any modern distro.
This is great. Running Wayland has only been getting better.
Hoping this transition to default will get the attention of developers at Zoom, and they can get screensharing to work in their native app without resorting to browser mode or some virtual camera hack. My biggest gripe for sure.
I think I'll wait for another cycle or two before moving to Wayland. Seems like there's a long tail of small issues that need polishing. The zoom screenshare one scared me off a long time ago.
last I checked nvidia on wayland was all kinds of broken, especially with multiple displays, can't rotate a display either. So I assume that has all been fixed then? (j/k)
[+] [-] vlovich123|2 years ago|reply
* Chrome needs a bunch of extra flags to launch in Wayland mode
* Firefox needs extra flags to launch in Wayland mode
* Xwayland is just broken on Nvidia with both sides refusing to compromise (implicit vs explicit synchronization - Nvidia refuses to add implicit and Xwayland refuses to take Nvidia’s patch to do explicit). What this means is that you get tearing, flickering and all sorts of terrible graphical artifacts
* Chrome only just fixed HW acceleration for Nvidia (latest m120 beta)
* enabling vulkan causes Chrome to fail to render (although this may just me needing to try reinstalling Nvidia drivers)
* I thought it was an acceleration thing, but even with HW acceleration fixed Chrome has a bug where the mouse pointer leaves behind white speckling when mousing over on a dark background. VSCode doesn’t have this issue.
None of these issues appear in X and this is from someone who thought Wayland is the right way to go (eg you didn’t see this kind of story on Mac when they switched to HW accelerated compositing).
[+] [-] jwells89|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tormeh|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brnt|2 years ago|reply
But ofcourse, Wayland isn't the problem...
[+] [-] beebeepka|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] npteljes|2 years ago|reply
I'm another X holdout because of random issues like this. X just works for me, and I don't have the time and energy to care.
https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/2281
[+] [-] rendaw|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sidkshatriya|2 years ago|reply
> * Chrome needs a bunch of extra flags to launch in Wayland mode
I'd rather have to worry about adding a few extra flags than worry about X11. X11 is overcomplicated, over-engineered, barely maintained, is apparently broken from a security angle, ancient...
Till today I have found X11 configuration one of the toughest things in Linux. I'd rather google for some wayland specific flags than worry about X11.
> * Firefox needs extra flags to launch in Wayland mode
See argument above for Chrome.
> * Xwayland is just broken on Nvidia with both sides refusing to compromise (implicit vs explicit synchronization - Nvidia refuses to add implicit and Xwayland refuses to take Nvidia’s patch to do explicit). What this means is that you get tearing, flickering and all sorts of terrible graphical artifacts
Xwayland is a transitional thing anyways too. When X is dead we won't need to worry about Xwayland either.
> * Chrome only just fixed HW acceleration for Nvidia (latest m120 beta)
One more reason got added to use Wayland from now onwards.
> * enabling vulkan causes Chrome to fail to render (although this may just me needing to try reinstalling Nvidia drivers)
Vulkan unlike OpenGL is also quite new. Give it a couple of years for every combination to get ironed out. X11 is hardly the answer here. If you're going to gripe about Wayland, X11 is never the answer.
[+] [-] smallerfish|2 years ago|reply
Hopefully a lot more coming, including different layouts per virtual desktop & full keyboard nav for the tiles. But it's a decent start.
[+] [-] shawnz|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ollien|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bee_rider|2 years ago|reply
The advantages of tiling window managers are so tied to muscle memory, I’m not sure many people will want to switch from, say, sway or i3 or whatever. But at least new people will be able to give it a try.
I’m not sure how much work is involved in replacing the window manager inside a desktop environment. It would be nice to just drop sway into kde. Dunno if that is possible though.
[+] [-] esquivalience|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] senectus1|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] creesch|2 years ago|reply
This article from september goes into wayland (and KDE) much deeper and is worth a read: https://pointieststick.com/2023/09/17/so-lets-talk-about-thi...
[+] [-] schmorptron|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roenxi|2 years ago|reply
On the one hand, this is impressive. On the other, this is a vague indictment of modern software. Plasma logs you in, draws a background and the taskbar thing across the screen. There shouldn't be seconds involved in that to shave.
This must be a recurring feature, every few years someone goes through and fixes up load times.
[+] [-] theHamsta|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MarcusE1W|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imiric|2 years ago|reply
A show stopping one is that the bottom panel is stuck in the middle of the screen, with no way to move it down that I could find, and clicks register in completely different parts of the screen. It's difficult to explain. I noticed this starts happening after I start an Xorg session for the first time, which for some reason always switches back to the default after an upgrade.
If someone knows what bug this is and how to fix it, I'd appreciate it.
Then there are other minor issues like the cursor being tiny when hovering over a Firefox window, which I guess uses Xwayland(?).
The fact each application needs to explicitly support Wayland, and I need to switch to an entirely different app ecosystem, is insane to me. I'm willing to make the jump if it offered a truly better experience than X, but I've yet to see that.
[+] [-] espadrine|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coherence73|2 years ago|reply
For example, it doesn't have an API to get current cursor position (which breaks keepassxc's browser popup, goldendict's query popup), an API (which most compositor implements) to get current window state, which makes me unable to find an alternative of autokey (kwin script can do this, though, but it lacks the ability to execute arbitary commands..).
On the other hand, I don't see a killing feature that drives people switch to wayland.. (HDR can be one, but I don't use it) I mean, yeah X11 is old and unmaintained, but it WORKS.
[+] [-] LAC-Tech|2 years ago|reply
Coming from a long time 'minimalist' linux users, my biggest issue with it is that there's no ~/.config/kde that you can just copy between machines and get set up the way you like it. It's spread out all over the show.
[+] [-] dinckelman|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lxe|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brobinson|2 years ago|reply
The absolute state of desktop applications in 2023. Everything is a web browser. God help us all.
[+] [-] vetinari|2 years ago|reply
It doesn't scale the rest, because those are electron apps that either ship with old electron version, or disable wayland. Special mention goes to vscode, which ignores *-flags.conf and provides no other way to enable wayland, except for command line argument.
So basically it is maintainers of these apps dragging their feet.
[+] [-] bloopernova|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dheera|2 years ago|reply
Also, Nvidia drivers don't work with Wayland.
So I'm still stuck with Xorg.
[+] [-] IshKebab|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sintax|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wasmitnetzen|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Conscat|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] chmod775|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whalesalad|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wetpaws|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] adamkf|2 years ago|reply
I hope they address this kind of thing prior to making it a default.
[+] [-] irusensei|2 years ago|reply
[] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope
[+] [-] ta988|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oh_nice_marmot|2 years ago|reply
One of the main reasons I went back to Gnome was the out of box support for RDP.
[+] [-] Zardoz84|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] e-brake|2 years ago|reply
Hoping this transition to default will get the attention of developers at Zoom, and they can get screensharing to work in their native app without resorting to browser mode or some virtual camera hack. My biggest gripe for sure.
[+] [-] AzzyHN|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] The_Colonel|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dopeboy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gbtw|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway914|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lyu07282|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spandextwins|2 years ago|reply