Yeah? Things like having a 60hz monitor and a 120hz monitor is basically non existent on X11, plus Wayland has this "perfect frame every time" + vsync philosophy which means no tearing and it feels much smoother to use than X11

I can never get this to work properly... Do you have any resources?

I tried unsuccessfully to get this working for quite some time and broke my xrandr settings quite a few times

With Wayland/gnome I just click a button in the settings gui and it works flawlessly

Sure but the thing is stuff that I have to edit files for install other programs just work with wayland out of the box.

I feel that the biggest mistake of X11's protocol design is the idea of a "root window" that is supposed to cover the whole screen.

Perhaps that worked greatly in the 1990s, but it's just completely incompatible with multi-displays that we commonly see in modern setups. Hacks upon hacks were involved to make multi-displays a possibility on X11. The root window no longer corresponded to a single display. In heterogenous display setups, part of the root window is actually invisible.

Later on we decided to stack compositing on top of the already-hacky mess, and it was so bad that many opted to disable the compositor (no Martha, compositors are more than wobbly windows!).

And then there's the problem of sandboxing programs... Which is completely unmappable to X11 even with hacks.

This is not an insult to the people behind X11.

The people behind X11 agree and that's why they founded Wayland.

NVIDIA dropped driver support for Kepler GPUs and older before they added GBM support which is effectively a requirement for Wayland, so you can’t use these older cards on Wayland with the proprietary drivers

That's definitively the fault of people to buy NVidia hardware which only works fine on Windows. It's not the fault of Wayland developers that NVidia is a shit company that does not care to make their hardware properly run on Linux.

The author is a Wayland fanboy which almost by definition makes them a moron. We are talking about folks who were singing the same song like 7 years ago when the crack they were promoting was outrageously broken for most use cases.

It happens all the time in the magical world of closed source, too.

Ever heard about the iOS vs Android fights? How people shame Android users for being green bubbles?

It's just the extension of the my camp vs theirs applied to the tech field, nothing new.

It sounds like you need to be complaining to nvidia to do a better job with their drivers. If the drivers suck, it doesn't matter what wayland does.

That would be a "technical merit", which the article author claims is irrelevant to the discussion.

I have not had a single X11-related issue in the last decade.

It's really not "working" per se. VRR was breaking on X11, sandboxing was breaking on X11, fractional scaling and mixed DPI were breaking on X11.

How did we achieve HiDPI on X11? By changing Xft.dpi (breaking old things) or adding random environment variables (terrible UX - do you want to worsen Linux desktop's reputation even more?). Changing XRandR? May your battery life be long lasting.

There's genuinely no good way to mix different DPIs on the same X server, even with only one screen! On Windows and Mac, the old LoDPI applications are scaled up automatically by the compositor, but this just doesn't exist on X11.

I focus on DPI because this is a huge weakness of X11 and there is a foreseeable trend of people using HiDPI monitors more and more, there are tons of other weaknesses, but people tend to sweep them under the rug as being exotic. And please don't call HiDPI setups exotic. For all the jokes we see on the eternal 768p screens that laptop manufacturers like to use, the mainstream laptops are moving onto 1080p. On a 13" screen, shit looks tiny if you don't scale it up by 150%.

You can hate on Wayland, you may work on an alternative called Delaware for all I care, but let's admit that X11 doesn't really work anymore and is not the future of Linux desktop.

I just don't think KDE will be worth it on plasma until KDE 6 / Qt 6. Basic components like SDDM supporting Wayland still have to be solved before KDR provides a first class experience. Try messing around with environments like sway, Hyprland, and Gnome the stability difference is night and day compared to KDE.

Interesting. My laptop died a little while ago, and I needed to demo a game I'm working on at a local convention. My wife had a hybrid GPU machine and let me swap in my SSD to run it. The drive had PopOS on it without the NV drivers. It did seem to run wayland fine on the internal display, but the external display was picky. (I wanted to demo on a bigger display) The only way to get the game to run smoothly was to disable the internal display using X11, and run the game using GL instead of Vulkan. >_<

So yeah, kinda mostly worked if I wanted it to be a laptop. I can see how it gets to be a pain if your needs are specific though.

The Cinnamon team didn't even consider Wayland yet.

I'll give you the multiple screens (not a use case I have myself, so I don't pay attention to support quality). Isolation of applications is another thing that most users don't really care that much about, I would say.

And don't forget 1:1 gestures and the Crash-Resilient Wayland Compositing that keep the application alive even tho the "compositor" crash, so it does restart without any data loss.

Edit: forgot to mention the lockscreen protocol, because on xorg if the lockscreen crash then you view the desktop and you have the device unlocked!

My experience has been the opposite. I won't use x after using Wayland on AMD for years it just feels so much smoother. On arch with gnome Wayland has been fantastic.

But even that's a relatively high bar. Wl-roots is self-described as "60000 lines of code you don't have to write yourself", and any arbitrary compositor may not use it or may not be up-to-date with it. In X11, you don't need 60,000 lines of code to be functional. Hell, the example Window Manager that was printed as a couple of chapters in the old X11R5 reference books works well enough especially considering its size.

I feel like I missed the historic genesis of this particular quagmire. Knowing that a composer was essential, you'd expect developers would want to make very robust core functionality-- a super-rich libweston or something like wl-roots, so that "real" compositors would just be paper-thin extensions that answered the opinionated parts. Did early Wayland design get bogged down on embedded-style use cases where such features were seen as too expensive (compare: no built-in printf in C), or was it a deliberate territory grab by early compositor developers, trying to turn it into a place they could to gain competitive advantage?

How? Would that be in the compositor input rules or somewhere else?

NVIDIA?

For gaming AMD is as good as NVIDIA or even better. For anything else tho it's a dumpster fire. Amf still isn't on par with nvenc, rocm is pure garbage and they are basically useless for any compute task

I already do ml on amd, and it works great. There's usually a few extra steps that need doing as binaries aren't always available, but that, too, will improve with time.

Neat. There's hope in the world yet :-)

This seems good. Is there a preferred solution for headless Wayland desktops?

My desktop is basically just used for gaming so like nothing there is FOSS. My laptop is used for work which requires a ton of remoting so again Wayland would not work.

I would not bother, Wayland doesn't have many advantages, at least not from my point of view. I would honestly switch my install to X11 if I wasn't lazy.

I haven't tried it yet because it appears to be a client, and my Linux machine is the synergy server in my setup (work windows laptop is the client).

rerequisites

 undefined

        wayland, including wayland-scanner and the base protocols
    libxkbcommon
    libtls (either from libressl, or libretls)
    A compositor making use of wlroots, or (on an experimental basis) KDE, or (if all else fails) the willingness to run questionable networking utilities with the privileges to access /dev/uinput
    wl-clipboard for clipboard support (only works on wlroots, not KDE/GNOME)

  

...

In my case, a 'uinput' group is created, and a udev rule is used to modify the permissions appropriately:

/etc/udev/rules.d/49-input.rules, in my case

KERNEL=="uinput",GROUP:="uinput",MODE:="0660"

From here, one could assign one's users to this group, but doing so would open up uinput to every program, with all the potential issues noted in the first paragraph. The safest approach is probably setgid:

as root -- adjust path as needed

chown :uinput waynergy chmod g+s waynergy

If this doesn't still doesn't seem to work (as in #38) be sure that the uinput module is loaded properly. This might be done by creating a file /etc/modules-load.d/uinput.conf with the contents of uinput

This is compared to just installing synergy which takes 7 seconds. I'm not sure why anyone imagines this is a credible alternative.

Client machine is a Windows box, and I can't change that, unfortunately.

I've saved your comment and will give it another try when I get chance. Thanks.

The reason is that Wayland support in Plasma will only be finalized by 6.0, therefore you’re using an experimental feature.

Okay so I need to use X11 because you think the Wayland support for KDE Plasma isn't finalized? Well consider the fact that on Linux no support is ever "finalized". Even something that should be mature like pipewire still causes issues from time to time. Or even bash itself. Most likely Wayland will still not work consistently past Plasma 6.0. I don't put much faith into your claim.

I think that you're factually wrong about me being wrong about Wayland support. Most applications I use still run xwayland. Steam for example cannot be run in Wayland, Discord and some other applications only works through Electron which I admittedly don't know a lot about but doing so seems like running it through yet another compatibility layer. Therefore I wouldn't consider an application run through Electron as Wayland compatible either.

Your post paints the picture that Wayland is "just a thing for Gnome", but I'm not going to change to Gnome to run Wayland. Of course nothing ill meant toward Gnome users but I think Gnome is ugly as sin and hard to work with. Maybe my negative perception of Wayland would change if it had better support for KDE. Or if KDE had better Wayland support as this could also be an issue with the kWin rather than Wayland. I have to admit, I've never liked kWin either. I mean as much as I love Plasma, I think the compositor coupled with it is generally dogshit and unstable and it's a travesty KDE pushes kWin so hard down my our throats.

Wayland developers are X11 developers. Wayland if the official successor to X11 because its developers agreed that X11 is too broken to be worth it.

Of course I know that, but if Wayland has such low support and low adoption and "just a thing for gnome" then maybe Wayland isn't so successful after all is what I'm saying. Kind of a bad result to work on a display server that only really works well on Gnome and leaving KDE out in the dark.

I'm on nvidia, have 2 screens mixed resolutions and mixed framerates with kde plasma at the moment. I use jetbrains a lot which only really works through xwayland. I've tried every nvidia friendly DE there is and nothing ended up working consistently. I had been on wayland for more than a year on my previous Intel gpu machine but I had to go back now to x11 for stability and haven't really had any issues ever since. Think whatever you wish but nvidia still has a large market share so until wayland works solidly with nvidia then lot of people will have issues with it. I imagine it works great on amd same as it does on Intel. (yes I know it's debatably nvidia's fault for this mess)

I run KDE Plasma and very rarely have issues with wayland either. Maybe I am imagining it but it feels smoother than X11. I love that in wayland I can use adaptive sync with multiple monitors connected. X11 can't do that. My main issue with it is that anything involving screenshare doesn't work properly. So steamplay (as host, client is fine), slack screenshare (again, as the sharer) don't work. I don't understand all the people having issues, maybe it's a hardware/driver thing? On my AMD GPU it is practically flawless.

No it would make me feel better if Wayland ran properly.

As someone who constantly checks in on the Nvidia + Wayland combination every time there is a Nvidia driver update, it "works" but only by the loosest definition unfortunately.

just check out a compatible desktop environment/window manager. you don't need to do a full distro change.

if the base is the same (ie. debian, arch, etc) there is no point in changing distros anyways.