GNOME X.Org vs. Wayland Performance + Power Usage On Fedora 32 With AMD Renoir Laptop

[AndyChow]

Wayland isn't new. It's 12 years old and aging badly. The cracks are starting to show, and become more obvious every year that passes.

[DanL]

X11 is dead.

... Long live X11!
Typical trolling from you. State something you wish was true as a fact.
On a related note, I just inherited a billion dollars!

[johnp117]

Given that even if this is running with `MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1`, Firefox 77 is missing quite a bit of Wayland improvements and things like WebGL+dmabuf, VAAPI+dmabuf, software decoding to dmabuf, and wayland-native vsync are not enabled by default and still in development, I'm not sure how useful this comparison is.

At least, if this is using the Fedora 32 build (which, again, is not disclosed), Martin Stransky backported a lot of (his) patches to F32's SRPM (Hell, I now see that he even enabled WebGL-to-dmabuf by default in the F32 build! Something even the official Nightly doesn't have! (though he probably did this to work around a Mesa regression starting with Mesa 20.0.5)).

IMHO the benchmarks are not chosen well, since it is not surprising that JavaScript/WASM/CSS performance are barely, if at all, affected by X11/Wayland. WebGL/Video/VAAPI/Vsync would be another thing entirely, but I'm looking forward to more Renoir tests anyways

I'd like to see a similar test with KWin/Plasma.

I've tested Firefox Nightly on Plasma Wayland (and kwinft) extensively on Fedora 32, and I can tell you that it's very much full of bugs (that mostly seem to fall into KDEs court, though 5.18 improved things a lot and I hope 5.19 fixes the rest; should land in F32 these days).

[tomas]

While technically wayland might be 12 years old, the accompanying compositors are far from that. And that is what matters. Look, wayland has the broad support from the industry. It's used in car infotainment systems, it's used in phones and now it's starting to be used on the Linux desktop. It will even be used on Windows through the means of WSL2 in order to support graphical applications. All of you that state that "wayland is already 12 years old and nowhere to be seen" have the wrong perspective. Replacing something so fundamentally as the display system in an operating system is a gargantuan task that takes a long time. And that time is far from being 12 years yet. More honest would be to start counting from the first release of Gnome that supported wayland.

[andre30correia]

wayland only will become the default and somehow good when canonical puts it in desktop ubuntu, the others distros are irrelevant

[tomas]

To add to my previous post: according to Wikipedia, Gnome 3.20 was the first version to offer wayland support. It was released March 23, 2016. Which is about 4 years ago. That is very far from being 12 years.

[skeevy420]

I see an interesting correlation in behavior to X11 supporters and devoutly religious people.

[acobar]

I see an interesting correlation in behavior to X11 supporters and devoutly religious people.

Really? Can you explain what/which is it?

[rmfx]

How MacOS and Windows Android work ? Maybe Linux works should take example for once. 13 years this Wayland bs is the miracle solution. Problem is that it needs everyone to do a personal implementation meaning that efforts are waisted and quality/implementations are heterogenous. Instead of being a dumb protocol that describes the basis, couldn’t it become a full library implemented once for good and for everyone ?

[bug77]

While technically wayland might be 12 years old, the accompanying compositors are far from that.

This is not that relevant and also not technically true: Weston is the same age as Wayland.

And that is what matters.

I thought all that matters is if can replace X while also offering roughly the same experience. And by "replace" I mean work where X already works.

Look, wayland has the broad support from the industry. It's used in car infotainment systems, it's used in phones and now it's starting to be used on the Linux desktop. It will even be used on Windows through the means of WSL2 in order to support graphical applications.

Yeah, well, broad support and "phones" just goes to show how much you have to stretch to make your argument. Wayland is used in Jolla and they no longer make phones.

All of you that state that "wayland is already 12 years old and nowhere to be seen" have the wrong perspective. Replacing something so fundamentally as the display system in an operating system is a gargantuan task that takes a long time. And that time is far from being 12 years yet. More honest would be to start counting from the first release of Gnome that supported wayland.

First of all, Wayland (or X) are not part of an operating system. They're just user-space applications (technically, Wayland implementations are).
Second of all, implementing for the second time is the easiest task in the programming world. But instead of working X's kinks out, Wayland set out to replace a de-facto standard with a generic specification that everyone is now required to implement. That's not going to work out fine, no matter what you're replacing. Just for fun, imagine if instead of being a concrete implementation, systemd was a spec and every distro had to implement it (and that right there is a real complex part of the operating system).

And I'm not dismissing Wayland or anything. It's just that Wayland (be it young or old at this point) has already made some pretty big (and avoidable) mistakes. Therefore, 12 years later there's still no date in sight where we can guess we can all leave X behind for good. Thus, I'm just really, really not excited by Wayland anymore, that's all.