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ELI5 the whole Wayland vs X11 going on.
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this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2024
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It’s not some huge controversy. Almost everyone that works with/on X11 has thrown in with weyland years ago.
I would say that is a false dichotomy. Almost everyone agrees that X11 isn't the future but the support for Wayland and the specific ways it does things, is not nearly as universal as that. It is just that the problem is huge and has already taken 15 years or so and so it looks like if we want some alternative to X11 that will be done any time soon Wayland is unfortunately the only game in town, no matter how flawed it is.
I think the main problem is that Wayland is not a drop in replacement.
Every software needs to support Wayland, new environment flags need to be created, flags must be used with electron apps...
Nvidia support has been spotty and some functionality has not yet been implemented. I use a custom .xcompose file, which doesn't work on electron apps. Let me know if there's a better way to mimic window's dead keys.
Overall, it's hard for an end user to change from a solution that is working perfectly to a solution that requires a ton of work and doesn't yet have the same functionality.
Everyone can understand that Wayland is the future but depending on your needs and hardware the current experience can be great or terrible.
Sure but as someone starting with a new system Wayland just works. Example multitouch works right away on Wayland and if I remember correctly needs configuration on x11.
"just works" depends on your needs. There is. Polarizing opinion on the Wayland vs x11 because the experiences are also very polarizing.
I had to set a ton more. Without the ozone flags my electron apps flicker and have this sync problem that appears to eat letters while I type them. Different electron apps use different configuration files, it's a mess.
I wouldn't consider my setup to be complex enough for the amount of trouble I had to make the system work under Wayland.
I'm using an Nvidia GPU, I'm sure things would be more streamlined if I had something else.
A switch from X11 to Wayland is not just a minor change to your workflow though unless you used all defaults before.
It requires you to replace your window manager, all the little tools related to things like clipboard, automation, screen locking,...
And you would have to do pretty much all of that up front to be able to use Wayland long enough to know if it even works on a permanent basis for you. That is a lot of work to put into a project that has a sketchy history of people claiming for nearly a decade now that it works just fine for everything while clearly not working fine for all use cases.
I was talking about tools like xsel or xclip or clipboard managers for multiple clipboards.
The point wasn't so much that there are no replacements, more that every script and every shortcut and everything else using them will have to be changed to work with the Wayland alternative.
You use requires but those are not requirements. It applies to some cases.
Sketchy history? Seems biased.
I’m not a Wayland fan by any stretch, but I’ve come to the same confusion you did. And so has almost everyone else. Which is the real point of my comment I guess.