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

[Mez']

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

Fixed.

[pazns]

Why everybody is trashing Wayland but here we only see Mutter, which is GNOME implementation of Wayland protocol??
Doesn't make sense.

Also someone asked "why is there no common impl done by Wayland team" :
there is, it's called Weston.


Anyway, what I find interesting here is we get lower RAM consumption with Xwayland, which indicates Mutter is still a big pile of memory waste that only the GNOME team can deliver for almost ten years straight... Metacity was barely making it and Mutter is not far from the tree. Makes you wonder if GNOME devs learnt anything.

The issue here is not in Wayland.
Would be interesting to compare native Wayland-ready softwares running on Mutter vs Kwin vs Enlightment vs whatever other Wayland impl.

[blacknova]

Why everybody is trashing Wayland but here we only see Mutter, which is GNOME implementation of Wayland protocol??

Because AFAIK it is the only commercially supported implementation on Linux desktop. On top of that it is the one of the oldest implementations, so it should be most feature complete. Right?

I'm not sure if E's implementation is commercial supported and KDE's is community effort.

[caligula]

Anyway, what I find interesting here is we get lower RAM consumption with Xwayland, which indicates Mutter is still a big pile of memory waste that only the GNOME team can deliver for almost ten years straight... Metacity was barely making it and Mutter is not far from the tree. Makes you wonder if GNOME devs learnt anything.

Also note that the test setup had a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels. A single 1920x1080x24b backbuffer requires a bit less than 6 MB of memory. Typically you don't need a full alpha channel since the whole layer shares the opacity value for transparent windows. The extra overhead here is larger than 33 times the size of the desktop. While it's not that much if your system has 32 to 64 gigabytes of RAM and 6+ GB of VRAM, it's still significantly more than expected.

[Mez']

What's a bit funny with all of these X11 "fans", is that they treat this like some kind of contest where X11 could somehow "win". When the truth is that X11 will slowly but inevitably be phased out during the coming years by wayland. That's just the way it is. And the reason is that the main development happens on wayland and not X11. Many of the wayland contributors are in fact prior contributors to X11. So right now I would say that xorg X11 is in the same position as XFree86 used to be in. It will still be there and used, but it's importance will slowly but surely diminish until one day when it will be so obscure that only old timers like me will remember it. Right now Fedora uses wayland (gnome) by default and the next Ubuntu LTS (22.04) most certainly will as well. And this transition will just keep happening on more and more distributions over the coming years. Sure, there will always be some obscure distro that refuses to move and that will offer xorg X11 for some time, just like there is devuan for those that don't like systemd, but in the broader picture it will not matter much. And when the major graphical toolkits like gtk and Qt someday drops X11, then that will be the end of it.

That's just not true. X11 users don't treat it like it will win. They are neither fans nor supporters, they are very well aware wayland will be default at some point.

The only thing these users are saying (and I'm among them) is "We're not there yet". And 10-12 years later, yes it raises concerns and a little bit of mockery.
I've played a lot with wayland lately and I could list at least 10 blocking things which makes me go back to X every single time. I've discussed this enough and won't start the same discussion all over again, but users (many have already raised their complaints) have still too many issues.

We are fine with Fedora guinea pigs testing wayland, and we'll thank them for that when the time comes. There's no right or wrong or winners here. But early adopters do not make a mature solution, as convinced as they are that it works (for them). Most people will only switch when everything's ironed out.

I might even do it if I can finally watch a video in 4k60 without it being a speedfest with a high pitched distorted voice. Even better, if SMPlayer is updated to work with it. If they find an alt+f2 + r alternative (I'm not going to log out and back in to correct Gnome RAM issue or to recover from a broken DE). If or when Ctrl + scroll zooms again in gthumb. When Unite extension will work seamlessly with it. When Firefox title bar won't be lost somewhere in full screen on the screen with no top bar (talking about Firefox wayland, not Xwayland). Etc... Too many things still...

[Ardje]

I want to see a test with google-chrome with the wayland renderer. If I am correct, it should be out now as one of the rendering backends.

[tomas]

That's just not true. X11 users don't treat it like it will win. They are neither fans nor supporters, they are very well aware wayland will be default at some point.

That is the right attitude.

The only thing these users are saying (and I'm among them) is "We're not there yet". And 10-12 years later, yes it raises concerns and a little bit of mockery.

As I said. I think it's dishonest to claim that it has been 12 years. Or even 10. A specification of a protocol being 12 years old has nothing to do with the state of the compositors implementing that specification. The first gnome release with support for wayland was 4 years ago. Also, I realize that replacing something as fundamental as the display system is not going to be done just like that. Perhaps it's because I have programming as a profession myself, but I'm not that surprised that wayland is taking this long time to gradually replace a beast like X11, and also that it's not there yet for all (relevant) use cases. It will be, however. Eventually.

[andyprough]

Volta - "can you explain why 30 years later I still can't use alt+Tab with Quake live in Steam?" Because you don't know how to play or configure Quake?

[tildearrow]

X11 is dead.

X11 Just Works.

[tildearrow]

Opinions doesn’t matter. Contributors matter. They all moved to Wayland.

In that case. Give me an excuse to your propaganda.