KDE On Wayland: "The Biggest Thing Needed Now Is Adoption By 3rd Party Apps"

[awesz]

Yeah, right. There are no Unix-like systems outside Linux (if we're not talking about 0,000001% market share), so you can say goodbye to flawed by design X11.

If we're talking about market share, display protocol discourse is rendered moot when non-headless Linux installations can barely reach single digits.

[V1tol]

I dunno why people argue so much about Wayland today and continue reflecting about the past. Today Wayland is usable for anything that average user might need. For example, I drive KDE Wayland session (and I heard that Gnome is even better) for more than a year and doing different stuff like gaming, watching movies, making calls with screen sharing and using X apps (mostly Electron apps which are broken even in X11 session) - and adding to the top no screen tearing at all by default makes Wayland for average user almost ideal. And that drama about "wayland makes me write more code when earlier everything was done by X11" reminds me the war around OpenGL vs Vulkan. I hope nobody argues today that Vulkan is the future, right?

There are no Unix-like systems outside Linux

Сareful here, because someone might google "certified Unix systems" and see macOS in the list

[MastaG]

These are the kind of forum threads I read through when I'm sitting butt naked in my chair...

[dragon321]

You heared that probono? It's time to "unsuck" AppImage - merge the damn pull request!

Good luck with that. He strongly believes that if something is not compatible with X11 then it's "broken". My favorite anti Wayland point is the fact that he believes Qt requiring "special" plugin to support Wayland is prove that Wayland is "broken" as it requires "special plugin". In Qt every supported platform is implemented with plugin, that includes X11, Windows or macOS. Yet for some reason he doesn't consider X11 or macOS plugin as "special", only Wayland plugin is "special".

There is no technical reason for probono to not support Wayland. He simply hates Wayland and tries to justify it with technical points no matter how wrong they are.

[M@yeulC]

avis here you are with your Wayland bashing. There are always a few persistent users in the forums that refuse to accept that Wayland is good enough for 95% of use-cases as-is. X11 for maybe 75% by that metric (numbers pulled out of thin air, I just thought about a few example use-cases).

You really complain about screaming Wayland fans while we're just pushing back against Wayland haters? If X12 is such a good idea and easy to do, why wasn't it done a decade ago? How about you contribute to it? I bet you would face similar issues as Wayland did (namely, adoption). Though I agree the Wayland rollout could have been better, especially during the early days.

[nvaert1986]

I really hope that they've fixed a lot of things. Because it's far from stable in my opinion. I'm still running X11 on all of my machines, as Wayland has been a buggy mess in my experience.

- On all my systems I experience frequent crashes for unknown reasons with a variety of applications, which work without any problems under X11.
- On a Lenovo ThinkPad P52 laptop with Intel Onboard Graphics and an NVIDIA Quadro P1000 the situation is unworkable; whenever I move the mouse it just jumps over the screen and appears 2 - 3 seconds later on the other location on the external screens (the external screens are powered by the NVIDIA graphics card).
- On a Lenovo ThinkBook 3 Gen 2 laptop (Intel 12th Gen) with Intel Onboard Graphics with external screens (running different resolutions) everything is completely messed up regarding with DPI, which works fine on X11
- The fonts are vague on the Lenovo ThinkBook in Wayland with DPI scaling, while they look fine in X11.
- On a PC with AMD Graphics which I primarily use for gaming several games just do not launch on wayland or have problems with xwayland and work fine under X11.

[nvaert1986]

avis here you are with your Wayland bashing. There are always a few persistent users in the forums that refuse to accept that Wayland is good enough for 95% of use-cases as-is. X11 for maybe 75% by that metric (numbers pulled out of thin air, I just thought about a few example use-cases).

You really complain about screaming Wayland fans while we're just pushing back against Wayland haters? If X12 is such a good idea and easy to do, why wasn't it done a decade ago? How about you contribute to it? I bet you would face similar issues as Wayland did (namely, adoption). Though I agree the Wayland rollout could have been better, especially during the early days.

It might be good enough for YouTube or browsing, but my experience has been bad outside of this limited scope.

[avis]

avis here you are with your Wayland bashing.

Bashing? I quoted the KDE team lead.

There are always a few persistent users in the forums that refuse to accept that
Wayland is good enough for 95% of use-cases as-is. X11 for maybe 75% by that metric (numbers pulled out of thin air, I just thought about a few example use-cases).

You got the numbers wrong.

Xorg is fine for 99% of Linux users, Wayland is for 75%. Viewed from the other angle Wayland is inappropriate for 25 times more people.

You really complain about screaming Wayland fans while we're just pushing back against Wayland haters?

I've not complained about Wayland fans, stop putting words in my mouth. I don't like their behavior, that's it.

If X12 is such a good idea and easy to do, why wasn't it done a decade ago? How about you contribute to it? I bet you would face similar issues as Wayland did (namely, adoption). Though I agree the Wayland rollout could have been better, especially during the early days.

No idea, don't ask me. Ask those folks who misdesigned Wayland. Actually from what I remember the idea was to create something very basic and simple and build on top of it. This is not how you design a desktop graphics API. The idea certainly worked for things like kiosks where there's a single full screen application running and people just interact with it.

The computer desktop is something completely different though.

If Wayland worked, would we still have this argument 15 years after its inception? If Wayland worked, would I even post anything here? If Wayland worked, why would a KDE developer write 4 pages of text ... convincing people to give it a try or port their applications to it?

Why are people not arguing about PipeWire? Or Vulkan? Or Glibc? Or ... Wine/DXVK? Or a ton of other things in Linux? Because they were designed and developed by sensible people.

[chromer]

No doubt that wayland is the future, but still needs most stability and maturity.

[avis]

I really hope that they've fixed a lot of things. Because it's far from stable in my opinion. I'm still running X11 on all of my machines, as Wayland has been a buggy mess in my experience.

- On all my systems I experience frequent crashes for unknown reasons with a variety of applications, which work without any problems under X11.
- On a Lenovo ThinkPad P52 laptop with Intel Onboard Graphics and an NVIDIA Quadro P1000 the situation is unworkable; whenever I move the mouse it just jumps over the screen and appears 2 - 3 seconds later on the other location on the external screens (the external screens are powered by the NVIDIA graphics card).
- On a Lenovo ThinkBook 3 Gen 2 laptop (Intel 12th Gen) with Intel Onboard Graphics with external screens (running different resolutions) everything is completely messed up regarding with DPI, which works fine on X11
- The fonts are vague on the Lenovo ThinkBook in Wayland with DPI scaling, while they look fine in X11.
- On a PC with AMD Graphics which I primarily use for gaming several games just do not launch on wayland or have problems with xwayland and work fine under X11.

Blurry appearance will persist for at least a decade more (high DPI screens will hopefully become a norm later) because Wayland has no concept of DPI and everything is raster. According to Wayland fans it's all good.

Xorg, Windows, MacOS, iOS and Android all have DPI scaling, Wayland doesn't.