I've been using Linux since the mid 1990's. I'm no newbie to any of this. I literally can't tell the different between X11 and Wayland when using either of them and I don't care about all the arguing. This is just Vim vs Emacs and Gnome vs KDE all over again. At this point when I see people complaining about it I just click off the page. It's all stupid and pointless.

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wing-_-nuts 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My biggest problem with wayland was how it was basically forced on the community. It broke innumerable things for years, put all the responsibility for implementing things down on the DEs and WMs themselves.

All of this hassle, forcing so much more work on DE/WM devs, for the sake of 'better security' in scenarios that don't really apply to 99% of linux users, with the promise of 'better latency' which this very article proves is false.

I tried to be an early adopter of wayland ~ 5 years ago. Found all sorts of things broken, and I'm now using linux mint xfce edition, as hopefully by the time xfce drags itself to wayland, all the bugs and tooling will be a solved problem.

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bigcityslider 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don't know enough about this to have a favorite, just know the transition was rough. Like one day at work our DE had to get changed because of whatever reasons they couldn't use X anymore, and that affected more things like Chrome Remote Desktop. Years after I tried setting up Linux on an old PC and learned that Wayland is de facto default now, but not in Mint, even though Mint is supposed to be the easy one... and CRD was still finicky in either one.

Linux is about choice, but unless you're ready to write a lot of things yourself, it's outside your control how well parts of the ecosystem are supported. For an average user it's unacceptable for your entire GUI to suddenly change in a way that requires relearning, something that Mac and Windows have avoided doing at least since 2000. Even Win8 or Mac26 wasn't so disruptive. It's possibly worse for an average Linux user because they aren't just concerned with how it looks but also compatibility with advanced things like X forwarding or VNC or CRD.

	▲	michaelmrose an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I think Linux is about choice some folks opinions notwithstanding. It's an ecosystem where many different devs have chosen to go about the same thing many different ways. You the user then get to pick from amongst those varied and interesting choices. It however isn't about all or indeed any of those devs being obligated to support any particular choice. You can only buy a place at the table with money or sweat and merely using something isn't contributing and doesn't get you a vote. Arguably the problem isn't the display server its the fact that general linux usage tends to require a little understanding of what's going on under the hood than is strictly speaking desirable for joe average user especially when something doesn't work. EG needing to understand that your choice of display server is making your zoom calls not work and then having to open that whole can of worms. The fix is honestly more labor. The trivial way to acquire more labor is with money which is hampered by the fact that so little is paid. If you want more polished stuff pay more.

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inigyou 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And the attitude of just refusing to make things work because haha fuck you that's why. I think it was Kicad or Gimp or Blender where you can drag windows onto other windows to merge them and they had to add a warning saying this will never work on Wayland because Wayland doesn't want it to work.

	▲	wing-_-nuts 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		By the time wayland becomes the default in xfce, maybe the wayland team will have added window positioning to the protocol...

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amlib 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I tried to be an early adopter of wayland ~ 5 years ago. Found all sorts of things broken

Yeah, because it wasn't ready. Pretty much no one recommended using it back them, if you thought it was ready you were either misguided or misled. It's time to put your skepticism aside and give it another try, there is a pretty good chance it's going to work great now.

Even Valve Steam OS is now adopting it. It's a pretty good sign wayland is a viable replacement for X11, while bringing it own things.

	▲	michaelmrose an hour ago \| parent [-]
		People were declaring it ready in 2016 10 years ago and talking about how people needed to switch off the working "obsolete" X and switch ASAP to the broken wayland. It is completely counterfactual that "pretty much no one" was recommending it in 2021

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uecker an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

And all the gaslighting. Using X forward basically every day but being told it is useless and broken and nobody needs it...

	▲	cwillu a minute ago \| parent [-]
		And don't forget the “this isn't a wayland problem” whenever a major missing feature provided by the X11 ecosystem is mentioned. Guess what: if you're going to replace the whole ecosystem, you're responsible for all the missing things regardless of your opinions of the matter.

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doix 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is the complete opposite of those discussions. It's taking a specific quantifiable thing and measuring it, with enough information for anyone to try and reproduce the results.

It's the epitome of science, comparing it to a generic vim vs emacs flamewar which is pure subjective opinion is pretty baseless.

	▲	bigcityslider 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You can measure a 3.3ms difference, but whether someone will notice and care is a different thing.

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wasmperson an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sure Wayland works fine. What you're not seeing is the hours and hours of volunteer labor wasted to get it to that point. Time that could have been spent working on features users actually cared about, now wasted "adding wayland support" to your favorite applications. If you could quantify it, the waste would be borderline criminal:

- Effort spent writing sway that could have been spent improving i3

- Effort spent writing GNOME-Wayland that could have been spent improving GNOME

- Effort spent writing KDE-Wayland that could have been spent improving KDE (much of this work duplicated effort with GNOME-Wayland)

- Effort spent writing wlroots to try and mitigate the effort being wasted by people writing bespoke compositors

- Wine/Proton devs needing to waste time getting every windows application to work in Wayland

- Firefox needing to target both Wayland and X

- A bunch of graphical toolkits and window managers that were working perfectly fine but will now be "left behind" since they lack the maintainers to support a porting effort

- low-level toolkits like SDL needing to implement their own window decorations now that they're not guaranteed to be provided by the OS (what?!)

What Wayland proves to me is just how easy it is for a small number of developers to unintentionally sabotage productivity in a much larger project.

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saxonww an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

To put it in perspective: an average eye blink is 100-150 ms. The worst outcome in this test was with XWayland adding 3ms of latency. Maybe this is truly important for some exceptional pro gamers but for the majority of the world it is as you say, stupid and pointless.

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tapoxi 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I mean normally this type of discussion is silly, but in playing competitive shooters latency does make a huge difference, and it shows that XWayland is adding ~4ms of latency.

There is a native Wayland driver for Wine/Proton but it's enabled through an environment variable, not by default. This will probably be default in Wine 12/Proton 12 because Valve wants to squeeze as much performance out of SteamOS as possible. The gaming mode UI runs under Valve's own Wayland compositor (gamescope) already, but games are currently in nested XWayland windows.

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3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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umanwizard 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's really not like Emacs/vim. I use X because it works on my setup and always has, whereas Wayland has not, despite Wayland advocates claiming it's ready and X is deprecated for 10+ years.

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PunchyHamster an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

well according to post, coz they are very similar. but xwayland doubles it

which is still half a frame at best so I think any blame here would be just on a particular game being slow on inputs

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michaelmrose an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

No. Wayland has been in development for 17 years. People have been claiming its been ready for prime time when it wasn't for a surprising portion of that time while it had substantial deficiencies while the boring old shit continued to work fine.

It has been ready for users whose sole usage is an editor a terminal and a browser on their single screen intel laptop as long as they didn't also open youtube since 2015.

Imagine the boss's nephew joins the firm. He knows less than nothing and is worse than useless everything he touches turns to shit. People understandably complain. After 10 years of development and other people's time he is now moderately capable at his job. People still bitch. They aren't lying or wrong. They just aren't current.