XWayland 21.1 Release Candidate Offers Split From The X.Org Server

[mppix]

Xwayland is a Wayland client application. So its not Compositor. Thing to remember as gamescope from valve shows and the Weston reference compositor shows. Is that a Wayland compositor can in fact be a X11 application as well. So if Xwayland was a full blown wayland compositor it would be possible for it to run directly on top of X11 bare metal as well but Xwayland is not its only a Wayland client application.

Being a compositor is different to being a client application. Compositor has to have all your hardware interface library bits and those open up some really wacky running locations.

Dude, why are you lecturing? Also, you may want to address the person who brought the idea forward.

edit:removed not well articulated statement

[curfew]

PS. Xwayland is not a client, its a compatibility layer

Is this some form of autism? It is a compatibility layer implemented as a Wayland client. Why do you think they are mutually exclusive?

[blacknova]

Still, even with Gnome 3.38 Wayland have some annoying issues. Not critical but annoying as hell - I've multi-monitor setup - two displays with equal resolution and size, some applications tend to change size and/or jump from secondary display to main every time I lock and then unlock session. Namely this happen with Firefox and Gnome Terminal. That might be not exactly Wayland compositor issue, but since it happens only with Wayland session I still point finger at it.

[curfew]

Still, even with Gnome 3.38 Wayland have some annoying issues. Not critical but annoying as hell - I've multi-monitor setup - two displays with equal resolution and size, some applications tend to change size and/or jump from secondary display to main every time I lock and then unlock session.

Seems to happen on a single display too. Sometimes I realize all my apps have been packed into the first vdesk whereas I always keep them spread over two to four vdesks.

[kon14]

Thanks for this. There was a new commit there adding preliminary support for GPU offloading in Xwayland. That's the good enough solution for 99% of Nvidia users I think. Any iGPU from the last ten years can run two (or maybe three) displays at high resolution and you can lunch games, blender / whatever in the dGPU and display it using the iGPU. You can therefore avoid the pile of crap the EGLStreams backend is.

While I generally agree with you, I think that percentage is just way too random.
There's a huge amount of people using Nvidia on the desktop without an integrated gpu.

[kpedersen]

If it can't do mixed-dpi properly, no one will take this seriously. The wayland protocol solves two big problems for desktop users: security, and mixed DPI. Over time, more Linux desktops will confront or adopt mixed DPI situations. As for security, X should send shivers down your spine.

The Wayland protocol doesn't solve these issues. Some (~2) of the individual compositors do.

Security of Xorg is a little over stated. For example it doesn't even listen on TCP (or UDP) sockets any more (only internal UNIX domain sockets). So no-one external can break into my session. Any other users running on the same machine can also not break into my session due to the MIT cookie system. What many people say is the "risk" is actually that other programs in the same session can access other windows. This is obviously very important and a required feature for enterprise computing (VNC requires it for one, Web browser screen sharing also). Once Wayland matures, this will also be the case with Wayland compositors. macOS and Windows also have this feature because it is required from all but i.e phone users.

Honestly the DPI issues are a temporary thing whilst too many consumers are buying absurdly high resolution screens. This will resolve itself once people realize they can save a bit on battery power avoiding such things.

[Mez']

Debian, Fedora (and next iteration of Ubuntu) are defaulting to Gnome Wayland. It is perfectly usable in general. What issues are you referring to?

I'm not him, but here's my non-exhaustive list:

- No reset for Gnome (blocker for me, given how often alt + f2 + r is necessary)
- SMPlayer is not working properly (don't care whose fault it is)
- Unite extension doesn't run correctly (among others)
- Firefox titlebar in multi-monitor setup doesn't work too well
- Ctrl + scroll doesn't work for zooming in gthumb
- no xkill equivalent
- No support for SSD in Mutter/Gnome wayland

And no, I don't care whether it's the protocol design, the DE compositor/wayland implementation, the DE design or the app whose responsible. Maybe if it was just the one, and not properly maintained, then it might be overlooked to go forward. But when it's piling up for well maintained apps (considering many app devs never asked for it and the extra work to adapt), it means the ecosystem is not ready (which is the same as wayland is not ready in my opinion).
As a user, this is transparent to me and it should just work as it was (with a tolerance for a couple of changes).

It doesn't matter to me and most users who is to blame specifically when we just want to go about our entertainflow or workflow but somehow are not able to.

[MrCooper]

What many people say is the "risk" is actually that other programs in the same session can access other windows.

And input.

This is obviously very important and a required feature for enterprise computing (VNC requires it for one, Web browser screen sharing also). Once Wayland matures, this will also be the case with Wayland compositors.

No, Wayland doesn't allow one client to spy on the surface contents or input of another client. (Wayland protocol objects only have local IDs valid in the same client connection, there are no global IDs which could be used by another client)

Screen sharing/casting is working in Wayland sessions via separate specialized APIs which require explicit user consent. These APIs can work the same way in Xorg sessions as well, so applications only need to support those APIs to work regardless. E.g. OBS Studio just landed the basic changes needed for using those APIs (the OBS Studio flatpak has been patched to work on Wayland out of the box for some time). Current versions of Firefox & Chromium support them for screen sharing as well, it's mainly a matter of Electron based apps updating to a new enough Chromium base.

Honestly the DPI issues are a temporary thing whilst too many consumers are buying absurdly high resolution screens. This will resolve itself once people realize they can save a bit on battery power avoiding such things.

Nobody's been able to come up with a solution for X11 on mixed DPI setups which doesn't result in some apps either appearing too small or getting scaled up when they shouldn't be.

[MrCooper]

- No reset for Gnome (blocker for me, given how often alt + f2 + r is necessary)

Shouldn't be necessary ever, and isn't for me and many others.

Make sure there are reports about issues you encounter.

- Ctrl + scroll doesn't work for zooming in gthumb

Works fine here with gThumb 3.11.2, both native Wayland and with GDK_BACKEND=x11.

[Mez']

Shouldn't be necessary ever, and isn't for me and many others.

Make sure there are reports about issues you encounter.

Yes, it is.
When all Gnome apps freeze (happens once in a while, sometimes because of a bad handling of mounted drives, sometimes because of Gnome instabilities), when Gnome eats up twice the RAM of the session start RAM (a refresh solves that), when you get some kind of artifacts, when you play with theme customizations (sometimes they don't apply straight away if you don't reset), for extensions update not to disappear temporarily from the Extensions app and display correctly on the Extensions web portal. Logging out and back in is a horrible hassle to solve these issues.

Works fine here with gThumb 3.11.2, both native Wayland and with GDK_BACKEND=x11.

It works fine with Xorg but not with wayland for me (on both Manjaro and Ubuntu and 2 different computers).


Also, reporting bugs is time-consuming, especially in the wayland case, because nobody is taking responsibility for the issues and you're bounced back from one to the other, sometimes having to start over a few times. I only file bugs when it's a real blocker. And for now Xorg is working perfectly fine for me, so I'm not wasting my time if it can be easily avoided. Maybe when X becomes problematic, and if it hasn't been ironed out already, I will spend more time to it.