Can anyone explain why Wayland exists or who cares about it? X has been around forever, it sucks but it works and everything supports it. Alternatives like NeWS came around that were radically better, but were too soon or relied too much on corporate support, so they faded. The GNU project originally intended to write its own thing, but settled for using X. Now there’s Wayland though, which seems like a slight improvement over X, but mostly kind of a lateral move.
If you’re going to replace X, why not do something a lot better? If not actual NeWS, then something that incorporates some of its ideas. I think Squeak was like that but I don’t know much about it.
Likewise, there are plenty of definitions of “better” that make Wayland a lot better. It’s just that it’s a lot of work to make something better, especially for some interpretations of “better”.
But Wayland is waaay better than X in basically everything? Performance and security are simply in another league entirely. And these 2 are the most important factors.
The rest of the “features” will be eventually there. In fact, mostly are there already. I’ve been using Wayland 2 years without issues. The important thing is that now the sofware is solid, the code is clean and the performance is amazing. Growing from there will be so much better than from X11.
The screen capture protocol was merged a month ago. Support will come soon. wayvnc, grim (and by extension grimshot) already have support for it. No compositors have implemented it afaik, but wlroots is very close to it.
The screen capture protocol was merged a month ago.
That’s part of my issue I have with Wayland protocols. It was added a month ago. After several years! During research I found discussions ~6 years old, this PR was 2 years old, and superseded a 4 years old other request.
In the meantime some environments implemented that on their own without waiting for the protocol. If I understand correctly: Gnome as well as KDE have implemented it outside the protocol. And Hyprland devs forked wlroots to advance development faster and also add that. (Correct me if I’m wrong.)
Since labwc uses wlroots (but is a bit slow with adapting to new versions) it will take quite some time before I can put a checkmark after my last usecase. I am optimistic that it will work. But I accepted that it may take several years to add new functionality and a few months before the functionality arrives in wlroots and at some point after that in labwc.
Yes. Wayland protocols take too long to get merged. Actually, a few days ago some people (mostly Valve guys) got tired of it and took action by proposing changes[1, 2, 3, 4]to the way new protocols are handled. Hopefully it gets better. Also, if your compositor is based on wlroots, then you might get support for the new protocol very soon.
From what I can see it mostly does ease of development better; it’s a completely new and rather lean codebase, and it’s seen as an investment in compatibility with graphical applications.
Also, it has lock screens.
X cannot do lock screens; it can have an app being full screen and pray to some collection of deities that nothing will come in front of it or that the fake lock screen won’t draw far too small, but it cannot natively do secure lockscreens that are guaranteed to work.
So there, it does something much better: security.
You answered your question of why Wayland exists right after asking it. X sucks. Wayland is a very significant improvement, I’m not sure why you think it’s a lateral move.
Also, X works for some cases, but not all, just lime Wayland. Using multiple refresh rates doesnt work well, HDR has no hope of ever working, and fractional scaling is horrible. Wayland has initial support for HDR and great support for the other two.
I don’t know how or why, but I get absolutely atrocious stuttering while playing games on X11 that simply doesn’t occur with Wayland, so X is just not an option for me.
I have been using X11 since 1996, and I never felt that it was very good. Sure, at the start it was better the then state-of-the-art desktop (Windows 95), mostly thanks to Linux, but that advantage went away in 2001 when OS/X was released. And even Windows went past it at some point, perhaps around Windows 7 or 8.
Wayland took a long time to get there, but it definitely is there today.
Can anyone explain why Wayland exists or who cares about it? X has been around forever, it sucks but it works and everything supports it. Alternatives like NeWS came around that were radically better, but were too soon or relied too much on corporate support, so they faded. The GNU project originally intended to write its own thing, but settled for using X. Now there’s Wayland though, which seems like a slight improvement over X, but mostly kind of a lateral move.
If you’re going to replace X, why not do something a lot better? If not actual NeWS, then something that incorporates some of its ideas. I think Squeak was like that but I don’t know much about it.
For some definitions of “works”
“it works for me!”
Likewise, there are plenty of definitions of “better” that make Wayland a lot better. It’s just that it’s a lot of work to make something better, especially for some interpretations of “better”.
I was responding to someone who saw no need for Wayland to exist, not advocating for everyone to use it
Yeah I was just elaborating on your point.
But Wayland is waaay better than X in basically everything? Performance and security are simply in another league entirely. And these 2 are the most important factors.
The rest of the “features” will be eventually there. In fact, mostly are there already. I’ve been using Wayland 2 years without issues. The important thing is that now the sofware is solid, the code is clean and the performance is amazing. Growing from there will be so much better than from X11.
You cannot even record single windows without having your DE patching that in for you.
The screen capture protocol was merged a month ago. Support will come soon. wayvnc, grim (and by extension grimshot) already have support for it. No compositors have implemented it afaik, but wlroots is very close to it.
That’s part of my issue I have with Wayland protocols. It was added a month ago. After several years! During research I found discussions ~6 years old, this PR was 2 years old, and superseded a 4 years old other request.
In the meantime some environments implemented that on their own without waiting for the protocol. If I understand correctly: Gnome as well as KDE have implemented it outside the protocol. And Hyprland devs forked wlroots to advance development faster and also add that. (Correct me if I’m wrong.)
Since labwc uses wlroots (but is a bit slow with adapting to new versions) it will take quite some time before I can put a checkmark after my last usecase. I am optimistic that it will work. But I accepted that it may take several years to add new functionality and a few months before the functionality arrives in wlroots and at some point after that in labwc.
Yes. Wayland protocols take too long to get merged. Actually, a few days ago some people (mostly Valve guys) got tired of it and took action by proposing changes[1, 2, 3, 4]to the way new protocols are handled. Hopefully it gets better. Also, if your compositor is based on wlroots, then you might get support for the new protocol very soon.
From what I can see it mostly does ease of development better; it’s a completely new and rather lean codebase, and it’s seen as an investment in compatibility with graphical applications.
Also, it has lock screens. X cannot do lock screens; it can have an app being full screen and pray to some collection of deities that nothing will come in front of it or that the fake lock screen won’t draw far too small, but it cannot natively do secure lockscreens that are guaranteed to work.
So there, it does something much better: security.
You answered your question of why Wayland exists right after asking it. X sucks. Wayland is a very significant improvement, I’m not sure why you think it’s a lateral move.
Also, X works for some cases, but not all, just lime Wayland. Using multiple refresh rates doesnt work well, HDR has no hope of ever working, and fractional scaling is horrible. Wayland has initial support for HDR and great support for the other two.
I don’t know how or why, but I get absolutely atrocious stuttering while playing games on X11 that simply doesn’t occur with Wayland, so X is just not an option for me.
I have been using X11 since 1996, and I never felt that it was very good. Sure, at the start it was better the then state-of-the-art desktop (Windows 95), mostly thanks to Linux, but that advantage went away in 2001 when OS/X was released. And even Windows went past it at some point, perhaps around Windows 7 or 8.
Wayland took a long time to get there, but it definitely is there today.
Wayland cuts out the need for a display server. It also has the benefit of being designed for hardware made in this century