this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2024

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Valve Engineer Mike Blumenkrantz Hoping To Accelerate Wayland Protocol Development (www.phoronix.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 150 points 2 months ago (28 children)

I love how people are complaining about Wayland not being ready or being unstable (whatever that even means, because it's a protocol), while it's the default on both GNOME and Plasma now, which combined probably run on more than 50% of Linux desktops these days.

And not only that, but Cinnamon, Xfce and others want to follow, so very clearly people who know a fair bit about desktops seem to disagree with Wayland being "not ready".

[–] [email protected] 79 points 2 months ago (1 children)

When people say its not ready, it's normally some specific use case that worked in X11. So, they're not wrong, but not right either.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 months ago

The devs have been working hard to hammer out those troublesome edge cases. There's a lot less of them than there was a year or two ago.

[–] [email protected] 56 points 2 months ago

Wayland was subject to "first mover disadvantage" for a long time. Why be the first to switch and have to solve all the problems? Instead be last and everyone else will do the hard work for you.

But without big players moving to it those issues never get fixed. And users rightly should not be forced to migrate to a broken system that isn't ready. People just want a system that works right?

Eventually someone had to decide it was 'good enough' and try an industry wide push to move away from a hybrid approach that wastes developer time and confuses users.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The change was 95% unnoticed for me. I looked at the session one day and thought "oh yeah, I have been using Wayland". I don't mess with many games or AI GPU stuff though, so it may be that more complex use cases result in a worse experience.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago

Really? It was very noticable to me when I didn't have screen tairing anymore

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[–] [email protected] 104 points 2 months ago (2 children)

They could start by making the Steam client be able to run in native Wayland

[–] [email protected] 36 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Or be 64 bit now that it’s 2024.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago

Wait does that mean I can only have up to 4 billion games on my client before the game list overflows and I start losing games at the end of the list?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago

SteamLink not allowing me to stream just my desktop (rather than a specific game) on Wayland is really the only thing keeping me on X11 at the moment. I use that feature almost nightly to keep watching something from my PC while I cook dinner

[–] [email protected] 103 points 2 months ago

Just please get us proper color management. Creators need accuracy & HDR is still a mess.

[–] [email protected] 90 points 2 months ago (29 children)

I love wayland. I'm 100% on it since the KDE 6.0 Beta end of 2023. Back then i wanted to try the HDR of my new monitor. I can't remember the last time I had a problem of any kind or thought “That worked under X”.

Multi-Monitor setup with different resolutions and refresh-rates. wayland does not care. it just works. And this is to a big part a gaming machine btw.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 2 months ago

I made a gradual switch from windows to Arch starting in may. At first I had some issues but since nvidia 555.x drivers launched everything just works. Gsync/VRR? No issues. HDR? No issues. Three monitors, some rotated, with different refresh rates one of them ultra wide? No issues at all. It's amazing.

Made the full switch about 1,5 months back and deleted all windows partitions two weeks ago. Works for gaming, work and casual browsing without flaw and I'm glad I made the switch.

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[–] [email protected] 53 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I want to work at Valve

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I do love how they just kind of like picked up Linux and dragged it into mainstream gaming lol. Hopefully they're doing the same thing to Wayland now.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 2 months ago (10 children)

How would y'all feel if Valve started selling PCs with their flavor of Linux on it?

[–] [email protected] 32 points 2 months ago

Steam Deck?

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago

No "if", no "would", we are millions of gamers using our (portable) PC with SteamOS running on it for few years now already.

As others have pointed out already, the SteamDeck is exactly that. I even travel with it, use desktop mode with my BT mouse&keyboard with a USB-to-HDMI adapter and work on large screen and do my presentations with video projectors.

If they were to sell a desktop too... well I have a Corsair ONE already, naming a gaming desktop (2080Ti) with a very small footprint and relatively silent. It is not easily upgradable due to how compact it is (but can be done) so if I were to have an equivalent of it from Steam and they were to keep on contributing to FLOSS it would probably be an even easier buy because I trust their RMA and I imagine I wouldn't pay a "Windows tax" with it as it would "only" come with SteamOS.

TL;DR: I'd prepare my credit card.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Didn't work out that well last time. But Valve got a lot better with Hardware since then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Machine_(computer)

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I had an alienware Steam Machine and it was perfectly fine.

I think the criticisms of the Steam Machine suffered from what I would call the Verge Syndrome, which is only being able to comprehend things in a binary of instant success or failure, with no in between and no comprehension of other definitions of success.

Steam Machines were a low risk initiative that were fine for what the were. They did not have a ring of death, they didn't have a blue screen, the OS itself was not glitchy, they didn't lose money, and they didn't fail any stated goals. They got the Proton ecosystem up and running, and got the ball rolling on hardware partnerships, which led to the smash success of the Steam Deck which would not have been otherwise possible.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (2 children)

You mean like Steam Machine?

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 months ago (7 children)

Accelerating wayland développement would mean forking it. As it is right now there's a lot of yapping in their git for every decision, small or big.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (6 children)

Accelerating wayland développement would mean forking it.

You mean feurking

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[–] omgitsaheadcrab 17 points 2 months ago

Ok but now I want a life size sentry

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (4 children)

I personally think it is a very bad idea to "speed run development" of protocols. This will only lead to broken designs which will then cause each desktop top do things differently.

Wayland protocol development is slow and heavily debated in order to make sure everyone is happy implementing them. You want all desktop to use the same spec and this could lead to additional desktop specific protocols which would totally break compatibility.

In short, this is a really bad idea and should be rejected by everyone

[–] [email protected] 41 points 2 months ago (5 children)

I personally think it is a very bad idea to “speed run development” of protocols.

Stalling the development of protocols for nearly a decade is bad, too.

They should talk and meet somewhere between “Just develop in production!” and “I personally dislike it for non-technical reasons, so I will block it for everyone!”

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

Wayland development is crazy. The features it needs to include are those that Mac OS and Windows support. The debate should be around implementation, not the necessity. I’m still on Xorg in 2024 because of idiosyncrasies in Wayland that I don’t want to deal with, particularly regarding HiDPI and screen sharing. I personally wish Wayland were developed by the Pipewire team. Maybe something would get done.

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[–] skulkingaround 26 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

I've been waiting for HDR and color management for like 5 years now and it feels like progress is dead in the water and now we've ended up with two custom implementations between KDE and gamescope. Heck, Kodi has supported HDR for ages when running direct to FB.

I know it's tricky but geez, by the time they release an actual protocol extension we'll already have half a dozen implementations that will have to be retooled to the standard, or worse yet we'll have a standard plus a bunch of fiddly incompatible implementations.

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[–] winterayars 21 points 2 months ago (2 children)

That depends on how you speed it up. For example, the Covid vaccines were "accelerated" compared to normal vaccines but they did that by spending additional money to run the steps of the process in parallel. Normally they don't do that because if one of the steps fail they have to go back and those parallel processes are wasted. For the Covid vaccines, the financial waste was deemed worth it to get the speed up of parallelization.

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