What a stupid article. It's like saying "stop using electric vehicles because you can't use gas stations". I don't understand why he's so adamant about this? It's not like Wayland had about 20 years of extra time to develop like X11. People keep working on it, and it takes time to polish things.

As someone with 0 investment in this whole ecosystem, I saw and perused this article like a week ago, and my immediate impression was "Why is this guy constantly saying 'Wayland breaks XXXXX'? Wayland isn't breaking anything, it's new tech. Wayland has certain features, or it doesn't or doesn't yet. The only folks breaking anything are those swapping use of X with Wayland, within various apps or tech stacks, potentially prematurely, where Wayland doesn't yet have the full set of features needed."

Whoever this is seems to have a really poor understanding of long-term software development, despite being way more invested in it than I am.

TLDR of linked gist: wayland is not X therefore it is bad. end of.

Wayland breaks Xclip: As you said it yourself, Xclip is an X11 application, so it doesn’t work on Wayland. Of course it wouldn’t work on Wayland. With Wayland, we’re trying to prevent what happened with Xorg from happening again, or am I wrong?

also, https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard. perhaps all OP (of gist) needs is a simple shim that can convert calls to xclip to wl-copy/paste? that doesn't seem too hard to make compared to keeping X.org alive I'd say (perhaps they should try making it if it's that much of a problem)

Wayland breaks screensavers: Yeah, that seems to be the case.

from the dev of xscreensaver at https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/09/wayland-and-screen-savers/ :

[...] Adding screen savers to Wayland is not simply a matter of "port the XScreenSaver daemon", because under the Wayland model, screen blanking and locking should not be a third-party user-space app; much of the logic must be embedded into the display manager itself. This is a good thing! It is a better model than what we have under X11. [...]

[...] Under X11, you run XScreenSaver, which is a user-space program that tries really hard to keep the screen locked and never crash. It is very good at this, but that it needs to try so hard in the first place is a fundamental design flaw of X11. [...]

other people can comment on the parts they know about, these are two i know of off the top of my head

Wayland does not work properly on Intel hardware: Again, I’m using AMD, so I can’t confirm or deny this, but considering the Intel drivers are open source, and I’ve heard about many, many improvements made on the Intel side of things, I think it would be reasonable to assume it has been fixed.

Posting this from Plasma Wayland on Intel right now. If something is broken, it's something not apparent to me.

XKCD#1172 is very relevant here.

A crash in the window manager takes down all running applications: Yes, because the compositor IS the server, window manager AND compositor at the same time.

Maybe not anymore in the future: https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/qt6_wayland_robustness/

Wayland is biased towards Linux and breaks BSD

FreeBSD already has working Wayland compositors by the way.

Wayland break games

The Steam Deck uses wayland so I guess that's not true (anymore?)

• Wayland breaks in-home streaming: Not familiar with this, so will assume true.

False. Sunshine works perfectly on Wayland, and last I checked Steam's in-home streaming works fine on AMD/Intel, it's an nvidia driver thing.

I used to be super excited about Wayland but it's been 15 years, now I'm too old to care.

My favorite distro still runs on xorg and it runs so well that I don't remember why we needed Wayland in the first place. (I am not saying that there is none)

Tearing videos and games have been fixed on xorg when Wayland was supposed to be the only solution.

I am sure Wayland will eventually make X completely obsolete and will be a much needed modernisation of the Linux desktop stack.

But I can't help but notice that it is not there yet, is old enough to carry it's own significant technical debt and might never bring the simplification and streamlining that it once promised.

In what kind of world is a missing feature or a broken feautre due to incomplete migration to a new ecosystem, a reason to boycott that new ecosystem?? Those are simply not valid arguments to me.

They are obviously valid arguments to say, hey, this work is not completed, is not mature enough etc. So, therefore, you stay with previous ecosystem. But to boycott it because of that? That does not make sense to me at all.

xorg is going to die eventually. probably long after the xorg fanbois, but it will die - and wayland or something better will take its place.

Man. That is a fair and well thought over response.

I appreciate this! Articles like this is what I'm on lemmy for!

Because calling your post a response would not do it justice enough. An article indeed.

♥️

Wayland ... uses some Linux-specific components or libraries

No. Wayland is a protocol, not software.

all of these arguments are great and all but as an enduser: I just want things to work

I don't care about the why's or hows. A lot of these arguments explain and justify breakage

I am an enduser. I expect things to work, specifically I expect the programs I already use to continue working. I expect to lose no functionality

If they don't work, then clearly its broken. If I lose functionality, Wayland clearly wasn't ready

Wayland is great! Except for all list of not-a-bugs that I'd like to see fixed. Still, I'm not going back to X, so take that how you will.

What are the not-a-bugs? Things like covering up a Wayland window will block it's rendering thread indefinitely with no way to detect it happens to handle it. This can lock up some games, or cause you to time out in a networked application. Some Wayland core folks don't want applications to know if their window is visible or not because it's mild information about a user's attention that should be private. Every game dev on the other hand is asking "WTF!?" as it causes their games to break randomly.

Another mild example is that windows cannot be raised except by the user or by launching them. This is supposed to be a mild security precaution so a program can't pop up a legitimate looking dialog over another application and trick the user. Realistically it means that applications can't open and focus URL in your web or file browser. Instead they have to give you a notification telling you "Firefox is Ready" and make you do it manually.

A lot of this is slowly (painfully?) changing, and the adversarial nature is a bit frustrating. Wayland fixes so many little things that I find it well worth it though, and I say that as a game developer frustrated by many of the core design decisions.

Nvidia works on Wayland now. And in 6.6 the noveou will support reclocking on 2xxx+

Games also work fine under Wayland. Either with gamescope or kwin.

Mutter works well but they haven't yet merged vrr support so you have to get that separately.

As someone who has written client code targetting X11, it's indeed quite unfortunate that, to properly target Wayland, it'd need to all be replaced, but... good riddance. Working with X11 was fucking hell. X11 has so much broken/unreasonable garbage in, like, most places. Working with X11 has been, by far, my programming worst experience.

This is not to say that Wayland is automatically better at everything (I haven't looked into it much, and the server-side decoration problem is indeed a problem) but it'd be damn hard to be worse than X11 or be anywhere close to it.

Boycott Wayland. It breaks everything!

Other should stop just using it because it doesn't work for you? Wouldn't it make more sense that those who do work on it keep improving it so it doesn't break?

Wayland breaks global hotkeys: I present to you: Hyprland (where you can get global hotkeys). Now, it is normally not allowed by design, as a security measure

Not disagreeing at all, but I'd like to add some information here to support your correction

There's a GlobalShortcuts portal ( https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/docs/#gdbus-org.freedesktop.impl.portal.GlobalShortcuts ), and this is implemented for hyprland in xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland ( https://github.com/hyprwm/xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland/blob/b2fc1110963fa583ad5348a9dc0101bd58ceac7a/hyprland.portal#L3 )

So, technically, there is nothing in the wayland collection of protocols that supports global keyboard shortcuts, but (along with lots of other supporting functionality), this is addressed via the collection of portal APIs

As it happens, KDE already supports the GlobalShortcuts portal: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/xdg-desktop-portal-kde/-/blob/master/data/kde.portal#L3

Any desktop can provide an implementation of the GlobalShortcuts portal, and any app can adopt it as required (although if it's implemented within popular toolkits/frameworks, then app developers won't have to even think about it)

Here are related tracking issues:

• https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/xdg-desktop-portal-gnome/-/issues/47
• https://github.com/pop-os/xdg-desktop-portal-cosmic/issues/4
• https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr/issues/240
• https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/38288
• https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri/issues/3578

Amazing text! I was just commenting how ridiculous the article is this morning and now you have written a more lenghty criticism.

As for the Zoom bit. I will add my 2 years experience of using it on Wayland on Artix as well as Void Linux - I never used Gnome and it worked fine on Sway and River on my iGPU. In between a few updates I did face a few crashes of zoom when rendering on my nvidia gpu but it was still fine. I have not used zoom in over an year so I can't comment on how it is now.

As for "wayland does not work properly on nvidia." Solely nvidia is blame. They have been pushing out patches to bring out more support but it's just nvidia who can fix that in the end. While I would not want to assume what hardware the author uses. Wayland works like butter on my Intel hardware.

Great alternatives for xclip and many other X-tools are already in the market.

The VSync issue on wayland is genuine. Disabling it in-game does not affect anything because it is enforced by the compositor. VSync is an integral part of Wayland Compositioning (acc. to the wlroots dev) but a solution to automatically disable it in full screen applications, etc is down the pipeline and work is ongoing. I have not been following it but I think some fixes were already released, I could be wrong.

As for X11 Atoms: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41005297/x-to-wayland-what-about-atoms Just boils down to the application dev's willingness to port the app to Wayland. The author of the 'boycott wayland' article seems to just want wayland to implement Xorg 1:1 for it to not fail their stupid standard of what-should-be-boycotted. And at that point Wayland is not Wayland but Xorg.

Most of the arguments presented in the 'Boycott Wayland' article are either generic issues being worked upon by the devs or things that don't have much relevance but put down in a manner as if to almost fear-monger that Wayland is the spawn of the devil and must not be used at all.

Add screensavers or take X11 out of my cold, dead hands. I don't use a CRT but still like screensaver since it prevents me from having to wait 5 years for my screen to turn on.

Good post.

Despite all the progress in terms of Wayland, I still find my laptop to be unstable with plasma + Wayland on fedora 38. Many visual bugs, when the screensaver is entered and I move my mouse again, the screen just stays black until I close and open the lid.

Some booting and spontaneous shutdown issues too, but I assume that's something else. (Framework 12 DIY)

Sadly, this is going to be preaching to the choir. Wayland has its faults but if it truly was an inferior approach compared to X then someone would've forked X or spawned a totally new project. Turns out it takes time, money, and developer power that simply isn't coming into X or any competing standard. Wayland is "good enough" to be the next standard and that's how it'll be for the foreseeable future.

If a BSD fan really thinks X is pivotal to BSD's future, then maybe BSD will need to consider forking it and fixing it, but I'm sure the real solution will just be supporting Wayland on BSD too.

idk i feel the window manager space its losing a lot with wayland and i didnt have a great experience with any wayland versions of existing WM. without even talking about the nvidia shitshow, does sway still call you a bitch for even trying to run it on nvidia?? imma stick to dwm as long as it works

Wayland does not work properly on Nvidia Hardware: It keeps on getting closer but is not there yet, or so I've heard. Apparently, the issue is with the proprietary drivers, as noveau works well. But I use AMD, so I'm only working off rumours and opinions here.

Posting this from Hyprland on NVIDIA, arch (btw) and the nvidia-open-dkms driver, but yes, NVIDIA isn't fully there yet.