this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
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    Is there something you lack in Wayland but have in xorg? (lemmy.world)
    submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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    [–] [email protected] -2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

    I was in the same camp one year ago. I sometimes still use it due to Synergy not working otherwise.

    It's a common occurrence in X11 that I get a full screen "Oops something broke. [Log out]"-screen, except you cannot log out because the screen doesn't register any inputs.

    So, these days: Wayland just works, and X11 (except for some specific software) causes problems. But, I aslo use AMD GPU.

    So, what in particular is not ready with Wayland? I hated it two years ago. Now, I have little reason to.

    [–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

    screen recording/sharing, automation, it's inherant fragmentation because it decided that basic window server functionality should be implemented on the DE, basically every driver but a super small subset of drivers for devices the devs care about which do not include nvidia drivers which are a huge portion of the userbase, the absolutely ridiculous architectural choices that intentionally blocks basic functionality, and furthermore causes a crash to completely freeze your computer which forces restart, a complete failure to understand standard monitor EDID, and a refusal to allow you to set them yourself (to this day my monitor, a bog standard 144hz 1440p LG monitor, is not supported by wayland), no global hotkeys, broken sleep mode, breaks appimages entirely, no redshift, the developers made sweeping design decisions that don't work and then get pissy and throw temper tantrums in the mailing lists when people point out that they don't work, heavily moving away from portability and modularity (the devs think nobody uses BSD?!), windows can't raise themselves or keep themselves raised, or absolutely position themselves, so toolbars/utilities/etc can just go fuck themselves, sudo gets broken and has to pipe passwords everywhere as a workaround which means sudo has increased attack surface on wayland, and color management is non-existent.

    And this is just shit I have personally ran into the last time I tried it, which was about 4 months ago.

    [–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

    I don't know about all of those. Not sure if you downvoted me, in which case you might have the predisposition of not giving a shit. In which case I'd be most happy to oblige.

    As for the technical implementations / shortcomings, I... don't really care about it. The reason I didn't use Wayland before was because things didn't work. The reasons why I don't use X11 now, is because things occasionally stop working. The reason why I still sometimes use X11, is that unless I do so, some specific software doesn't work. That's the frame of mind I have, and I don't have any allegiance or vested interest beyond that. You seem to have that, and that's great. Caring about the technical details has my respect.

    So as for the stuff you mention that is directly user-facing:

    • Screen recording used to be a problem, haven't had that issue recently. OBS records my screens and part of it, just fine.
    • Window sharing like you could with X11 with ssh -X is amazing, and doesn't work, but it's been about 15 years since I used it.
    • Crashes that completely freeze my computer. Doesn't happen in Wayland. Happens in X11 (it's not a kernel panic, but whatever it is, I have to reboot, end result is the same to me).
    • Have had no issues with any of the monitors I own.
    • Global hotkeys work, and have always worked, for me. If it didn't, I simply wouldn't use Wayland, as a lot of my workflows surround tools I have built and trigger with global hotkeys.
    • Sleep mode, I don't use. Is that the same as Hibernation?
    • I don't use a single appimage, but I downloaded one to try now, and it worked fine.
    • What is redshift?
    • "Windows can't raise themselves or keep themselves raised", does this mean to request to be in focus? I'm curious which programs benefit from this.
    • sudo is insecure by default in Wayland? How come? I'd be interested to know how it has anything to do with wayland/x11. unless you mean GUI applications executed with sudo, not having access to wayland stuff?
    [–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

    The reason I care about the technical implementation shortcomings is because they don't go away. They don't magically fix themselves over time, they snowball, especially when the maintainers refuse to admit they're shortcomings and insist on doubling down on them.

    As time goes on, new functionality and technologies are going to emerge, and you need to be able to fold those, cleanly and reliably, into your codebase. And frankly, wayland's devs are having trouble getting past and even current technologies implemented cleanly into their codebase, because they're made architectural decisions that exclude those technologies. This is just going to be more and more of a problem as time goes on, imo.

    • Screen recording CAN work... if client devs go out of their way to work around wayland, like OBS did. That is not a long term solution, or even a solution we should be encouraging.
    • yes
    • personally I have crashes on wayland, none on X11. even when x11 does crash though, you just drop to terminal. Whatever is locking your system up, it might not actually be X11 itself. Wayland, you do actually have to reboot, it's a standing architectural issue.
    • nice
    • I'm on ubuntu gnome w/ AMD gpu, and they straight up do not work. You can set a global hotkey for the OS/wayland itself, but there is no way to set a global hotkey for/from a program, e.g. set a key combo for 'clip last 30 seconds' like I can in X11. Again, conscious design decision by wayland devs that breaks a lot of use cases. I think there's some third party plugin for wayland that fixes this, but I shouldn't need the wayland equivalent of nexusmods to get my window manager working. This ain't skyrim. :P
    • sleep and hibernate are pretty close to the same thing- sleep mode saves your current state to RAM, hibernate stores it to disk. hibernate uses less power draw and recovers cleanly from power loss. These days I think most front-ends call 'hibernate' sleep, and don't actually provide sleep as an option, because it's imo better. I meant hibernate, and I should have clarified, because linux does actually allow you to pick and choose.
    • some appimages work, but it's because they work around wayland. These days there's a package you can include in your app image to hep with that iirc, but again that's kind of dumb.
    • redshift is f.lux. Basically, eye strain relief.
    • toolbars, utilities, etc. For example, I have a program that adds an overlay to my screen for discord, so when someone talks in discord their avatar pops up on the left side of my primary screen. This not only doesn't work in wayland, it can never work in wayland, because it intentionally refuses to allow programs to set their own screen position, control whether they appear over other things, or even know where on the screen they are on the screen.
    • GUI applications with sudo, yes. Basically, in wayland sudo has to pipe the password arround because it doesn't support SUDO_ASKPASS, so they work around it by piping it around with a generated shell. This vastly increases the attack surface of sudo: https://github.com/linuxhw/hw-probe-pyqt5-gui/commit/eb2d6e5145fb8571414bda57676084b7f13b94e5#diff-23cb15995f1502beebb38433bfa83204a5f45b376eaf88e2e41a0d8a1cd44722R290
    [–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

    Thanks for the clarifications.

    I do hope it improves. I never understood why Wayland became a thing, if it's fundamentally flawed. But then, on the other hand, it's strange to not make the improvements in X11, unless that too is fundamentally flawed.

    [–] Sethayy -1 points 10 months ago

    Ngl, never once had an issue with any of these.

    That being said I mainly use screen recording through kms capture with wlroots, which never once has had an issue for me