Wayland really breaks things… Just for now?
Wayland really breaks things… Just for now?
This post is in part a response to an aspect of Nate’s post “Does Wayland really break everything?“, but also my reflection on discussing Wayland protocol additions, a unique pleasure that I have been involved with for the past months.
Before I start I want to make a few things clear: The Linux desktop will be moving to Wayland – this is a fact at this point (and has been for a while), sticking to X11 makes no sense for future projects.
By switching to Wayland compositors, we are already forcing a lot of porting work onto toolkit developers and application developers. This is annoying, but just work that has to be done. It becomes frustrating though if Wayland provides toolkits with absolutely no way to reach their goal in any reasonable way.
Many missing bits or altered behavior are just papercuts, but those add up. And if users will have a worse experience, this will translate to more support work, or people not wanting to use the software on the respective platform.
What’s missing?
- Window positioning
- Window position restoration
- Window icons
- Limited window abilities requiring specialized protocols
- Automated GUI testing / accessibility / automation
I spent probably way too much time looking into how to get applications cross-platform and running on Linux, often talking to vendors (FLOSS and proprietary) as well. Wayland limitations aren’t the biggest issue by far, but they do start to come come up now, especially in the scientific space with Ubuntu having switched to Wayland by default. For application authors there is often no way to address these issues.
To me, saying "wayland breaks things" is putting it backwards: at this point, it should be "[thing] still doesn't work on wayland".
Yeah.
If I installed, say, a messenger app on my phone that supports Android 4.0 but not Android 13, my reaction wouldn't be "Android breaks this app!!", my reaction would be "wow, this app hasn't been updated to support any modern Android version, they need to fix that"
If Wayland was brand new and X11 was going to be killed in the very short term, then I'd agree, but that's not the case. Wayland is over a decade old. Prominent distros have had it as the default since 2016. Shit, Debian has had it as the default since 2019. And that's Debian.
100% for the applications I use daily.
They did bring up a few specific scientific applications though that can't be ported right now even though they would.
Can people who very clearly haven't read the article stop commenting the equivalent of "works on my machine", please? I know it's a long article, but it's worth a read. It's not anti-Wayland and it's definitely not pro-X11. It just outlines a few limitations of Wayland and problems with how Wayland is currently being developed. It's a great follow up to Nate's blog post, which was posted here a while back and got pretty popular.
I forced myself to use Wayland for a week.
Most of the applications worked out of the box. For some I had to manually change the settings and/or environment variables to make them work on Wayland.. And single ones did not work at all.
If it weren't for the fact of these "single ones" I would have stayed on Wayland.
However, as long as I can't use my system fully functionally, I remain on XOrg.
What are these "single ones", if I may ask?
What apps didn't work on Wayland at all? Java apps usually work through xwayland, and most other toolkits are wayland native. Of course, except features like screen sharing, which have to be supported by the developer. And 5 missing features from the blog.
I've been using fedora for the last couple years and I finally got an AMD card for myself and holy shit Nvidia sucks. Everything I thought was a Wayland bug was just an Nvidia bug
Unpopular opinion, maybe, but Wayland has been just fine for me. All amd system, single monitor, on fedora since f37. Even before that, on other distros like Manjaro it was fine. I don't think I use anything that really cares what display management I use.
I can sympathize with those that this is an issue. As Wayland continues to becoming the standard.
Same here (thumbleweed, kde, amd), I've been using wayland for around a year with zero issues.
I meant to comment on this comment haha anyways
I just got an AMD card for myself and holy shit. Everything I thought was a Wayland bug was a Nvidia bug. I've been using fedora for a couple years now.
I've been using Wayland since like 2016 and the only issues I've had have been with Discord and Steam's in-home-streaming (and they still aren't sorted).
Everything other than that for me has been smoother than X11 ever was.
If Discord and steam streaming were a deal-breaker to me though, then I'd obviously use X11 still. Apps need to have proper support.
Yea, my experience with Wayland has been that things work but most work through Xwayland so I may as well keep using X11 anyways. If things aren't easy to port over it will hurt adoption.
Everything works fine for me on AMD system with Pop. These types of posts are usually from folks with systems that have poor compatibility. That's not Wayland's fault.
Meanwhile, after updating my nvidia driver to 545.x, I can no longer play games on Wayland due to heavy flickering. Ah well, at least I can still switch to X11 for gaming. But Nvidia really drag their asses when it comes to Wayland (or linux gaming in general) support.
I got lucky and found an Rx 5500 for $70 in a pawn shop. I had a 1650 for a while and I didn't realize how bad Nvidia drivers actually are. All the bugs and flickering is gone. I thought it was Wayland not being ready but Nvidia is actually just trash
I experienced some bugs while gaming on Wayland even with an amd card. My workaround was switching back to X11 for gaming. That said, I didn't even notice that I was using Wayland by default for a long time until Firefox completely switched to Wayland I experienced some heavy artifacts in Firefox (only if it's full screen on my second monitor, but that's a daily thing). And because of that, switching back to X11 isn't a workaround anymore, unfortunately its my new default.
We built a new standard giving zero backwards compatibility, no path to migrate and removed existing functionality. You can't blame us when things don't work!
I run Wayland and it's definitely worse than X11, but it's getting better day by day. I always struggle with Wayland and I literally did nothing different than installing KDE Wayland. For example, ever since I moved to Wayland, Firefox will randomly freeze and crash when I'm using my PC - this happens at least once per gaming session.
Also, Wayland is still not feature complete and assuming it's the system fault for poor compatibility is wrong.
Just give arewewaylandyet.com a read.
I've been using sway for ~2 months extensively and didn't experience a single firefox freeze or crash. Before that I played around with weston and firefox crashed every 15 minutes.
I disagree.