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.
That right there. X11 was released in the mid-80s and has become an unmaintainable patchwork of additions. Nobody wants to develop or maintain the code because changing one thing breaks five others.
Wayland also takes advantage of 3D acceleration, since each window is a plane rendered in 3D space. There’s no longer a choice between massive input lag with a compositor and massive screen tearing without.
I mean, the extension system means we could easily fix it, just deprecate the old paths, use the legacy xlib to set up extensions and write a lighter stack from there. A new input path too and you’re on your way.
It makes things a bit more complicated, but it’s also exactly how x86 managed to stay relevant all these decades, the old macro instructions are all slow microcode and you only use the safe stuff that’s hyper-optimized.
You mean I’ve been doing everything, from work through CGI to gaming (with 120 FPS mind you) on a display that doesn’t work?
Wayland has many issues, sure, but it’s not even close to the point where “it works” can be used to distinguish it from other display protocols. We (and by we I mean anyone willing to dedicate their life to it) could do a lot to bring X11 up to modern expectations, but it’s just not worth the effort. X11 will outlive the cockroaches, but claiming that Wayland is not a functional display protocol is incorrect and uninformed.
I installed a fresh copy of, I believe, Debian. Wayland, for some reason, couldn’t handle 4 monitors, with one above the other three.
Not the issue I expected on a fresh install. Oh, and the biggest issue I had with Windows was copied straight into Linux. I want my (single) taskbar on a monitor that isn’t my primary.
I’m currently back to Windows. It was already going to be a rough transition, and missing the ideas I was looking for while also adding complications just hasn’t made it worth it.
what desktop environment? what you described works perfectly on KDE. i have 3 monitors here and they work flawless in any arbitrary combination or orientation under wayland. side-by-side or on top of each other or even diagonal. with different resolutions and different refresh rates. with taskbars on any number of monitors and any orientation. maybe Debians KDE version is just very outdated. the 6+ versions work fantastic.
My setup is two screens side by side and one above. KDE Plasma 6.1 can handle it without issues, and you can make panels on any screen.
One of the most significant drawbacks of Wayland is feature fragmentation between compositors. Unlike the X11 stack of X.Org server + window manager + compositor, Wayland compositors have to implement all of Wayland in themselves. They have to serve as the display servers, plus manage window positioning, plus render the clients, and all of that within the confines of Wayland-protocols. Building a compositor is a massive task, which is why middleware like wlroots is such a big deal. It also means that WM-agnostic tools like xrandr and xdotool are more difficult, sometimes impossible to implement.
Consider that Wayland is still heavily under development, and that new protocols have to be implemented by every compositor separately, and that the development of wayland-protocols is an ongoing fucking trainwreck – fragmentation is inevitable, and some compositors will not have the same functionality as others (GNOME being a particularly nasty sandbag). Similarly, things that don’t work as expected in one compositor might work perfectly fine in another.
Right now I would consider KDE Plasma to be the most feature-complete compositor that is also beginner-friendly.
… is not something you should ever use on a desktop PC. Due to its eternally very outdated nature and not even shipping bugfix updates**** it is not a good fit for anything but servers.
Wayland, for some reason, couldn’t handle 4 monitors, with one above the other three.
“Wayland” doesn’t handle monitors at all. What (because of Debian, wildly outdated) desktop did you use?
Oh, and the biggest issue I had with Windows was copied straight into Linux. I want my (single) taskbar on a monitor that isn’t my primary.
Not a Linux issue, but a problem with the desktop environment you chose. KDE Plasma allows you to configure panels in any way you want.
Its Ubuntu 24.04. When I started it, it took quite awhile and then said “there as a problem, please log out”.
Now that I’ve got it started (where I’m posting from now), it still refuses to arrange my monitors. And I have no idea what this 5th, 13.3" monitor is supposed to be.
It looks like my issues are related to this hardware. I guess that’s understandable. I thought this hardware would be transparent to the OS, and apparently it’s not.
If I hit apply here, it will fail and put them back in a line. I’ll also get around 4 fps and no cursor on the additional monitors.
I mean, the extension system means we could easily fix it
If that’s the case, then why not do it? Apparently the people who actually worked on X11 had a different idea, and so they decide not to do it themselves - but the code is right there for those who do think that that’s a good approach.
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.
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.
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.
That right there. X11 was released in the mid-80s and has become an unmaintainable patchwork of additions. Nobody wants to develop or maintain the code because changing one thing breaks five others.
Wayland also takes advantage of 3D acceleration, since each window is a plane rendered in 3D space. There’s no longer a choice between massive input lag with a compositor and massive screen tearing without.
I mean, the extension system means we could easily fix it, just deprecate the old paths, use the legacy xlib to set up extensions and write a lighter stack from there. A new input path too and you’re on your way.
It makes things a bit more complicated, but it’s also exactly how x86 managed to stay relevant all these decades, the old macro instructions are all slow microcode and you only use the safe stuff that’s hyper-optimized.
Meanwhile you get the one thing X has: It works.
You mean I’ve been doing everything, from work through CGI to gaming (with 120 FPS mind you) on a display that doesn’t work?
Wayland has many issues, sure, but it’s not even close to the point where “it works” can be used to distinguish it from other display protocols. We (and by we I mean anyone willing to dedicate their life to it) could do a lot to bring X11 up to modern expectations, but it’s just not worth the effort. X11 will outlive the cockroaches, but claiming that Wayland is not a functional display protocol is incorrect and uninformed.
I installed a fresh copy of, I believe, Debian. Wayland, for some reason, couldn’t handle 4 monitors, with one above the other three.
Not the issue I expected on a fresh install. Oh, and the biggest issue I had with Windows was copied straight into Linux. I want my (single) taskbar on a monitor that isn’t my primary.
I’m currently back to Windows. It was already going to be a rough transition, and missing the ideas I was looking for while also adding complications just hasn’t made it worth it.
what desktop environment? what you described works perfectly on KDE. i have 3 monitors here and they work flawless in any arbitrary combination or orientation under wayland. side-by-side or on top of each other or even diagonal. with different resolutions and different refresh rates. with taskbars on any number of monitors and any orientation. maybe Debians KDE version is just very outdated. the 6+ versions work fantastic.
Ok but it’s not called Kdeland.
OK but Wayland is not responsible for arranging monitors
If Wayland is so fragile as to only work with KDE, and is not responsible for anything, how long until it’s relegated to a KDE internal subsystem?
My setup is two screens side by side and one above. KDE Plasma 6.1 can handle it without issues, and you can make panels on any screen.
One of the most significant drawbacks of Wayland is feature fragmentation between compositors. Unlike the X11 stack of X.Org server + window manager + compositor, Wayland compositors have to implement all of Wayland in themselves. They have to serve as the display servers, plus manage window positioning, plus render the clients, and all of that within the confines of Wayland-protocols. Building a compositor is a massive task, which is why middleware like wlroots is such a big deal. It also means that WM-agnostic tools like
xrandrandxdotoolare more difficult, sometimes impossible to implement.Consider that Wayland is still heavily under development, and that new protocols have to be implemented by every compositor separately, and that the development of wayland-protocols is an ongoing fucking trainwreck – fragmentation is inevitable, and some compositors will not have the same functionality as others (GNOME being a particularly nasty sandbag). Similarly, things that don’t work as expected in one compositor might work perfectly fine in another.
Right now I would consider KDE Plasma to be the most feature-complete compositor that is also beginner-friendly.
… is not something you should ever use on a desktop PC. Due to its eternally very outdated nature and not even shipping bugfix updates**** it is not a good fit for anything but servers.
“Wayland” doesn’t handle monitors at all. What (because of Debian, wildly outdated) desktop did you use?
Not a Linux issue, but a problem with the desktop environment you chose. KDE Plasma allows you to configure panels in any way you want.
Its Ubuntu 24.04. When I started it, it took quite awhile and then said “there as a problem, please log out”.
Now that I’ve got it started (where I’m posting from now), it still refuses to arrange my monitors. And I have no idea what this 5th, 13.3" monitor is supposed to be.
It looks like my issues are related to this hardware. I guess that’s understandable. I thought this hardware would be transparent to the OS, and apparently it’s not.
If I hit apply here, it will fail and put them back in a line. I’ll also get around 4 fps and no cursor on the additional monitors.
Wayland works.
If that’s the case, then why not do it? Apparently the people who actually worked on X11 had a different idea, and so they decide not to do it themselves - but the code is right there for those who do think that that’s a good approach.
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”.
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.
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.
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