Maybe a silly question, but what is the Wayland advantages for endusers? The only one I remember is that screen lock is directly build in and thus more saver than the X-lock versions which can bypassed on regular basis.
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Years After Wayland 1.0, Will 2016 Be The Year Of The Wayland Desktop?
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Originally posted by Brillus View PostMaybe a silly question, but what is the Wayland advantages for endusers? The only one I remember is that screen lock is directly build in and thus more saver than the X-lock versions which can bypassed on regular basis.
The core one for end users is Security, Unlike X11 Input is only passed to the application with focus and applications have no way of viewing other applications input or buffers. (This does break a couple of apps that use these features for good purposes). Wayland sessions also run as the logged in user and use various newer api's like policykit to give the right users access to read and write to the hardware devices, this is also possible with X11 but in most cases X11 is run as root using a SUID bit.
Over time there will also be a slight performance increase due to 1 or 2 less buffer copies, atm any X11 Compositor will write to a X11 buffer which is copied to the hardware where as in wayland the compositor writes directly to the display device buffer. Until everyones driver / other implementations are fine tuned though its likely it will perform a little worse though.
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I'm playing around a bit with Wayland on my Poulsbo tablet right now. Unfortunately, Weston with Pixman is still significantly slower than Xorg with XRender (about 40 FPS vs 160 FPS, the latter with Compton).
My goal is to get Plasma Mobile running, and it sort of runs with X11, but it's mostly a blank screen with a few widgets that are not interactable. Whereas kwin_wayland crashes because somehow it fails to start XWayland.
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Originally posted by Master5000 View PostOK so people will have to suffer poorer performance and bugs for a while (wayland will not be perfect in the beginning). But they don't gain anything. Niiiiiice! I wonder why Windows is so much more popular....
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Originally posted by Brillus View PostMaybe a silly question, but what is the Wayland advantages for endusers? The only one I remember is that screen lock is directly build in and thus more saver than the X-lock versions which can bypassed on regular basis.
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Benefits will often be for developers where they no longer have to worry as much about bad design decisions made 20 or 30 years ago.
For end users, there are benefits too. Security, less/no tearing and efficiency/power.
I recall a demo comparing X against Wayland in power usage or performance where the benefits of Wayland were substantial.
The reason why it is taking so long is that in the past, instead of developing the stuff in its proper place, everything was added to X as the "lowest common denominator". This meant X sprouting many useless features such as a print server, but also having many useful things which over the past few years have been moved into the correct OS layer (libinput).
For everone interested, this video from 2013 is a Must watch - even for non developers. It is an eye opener and I think it played a large part in "winning" the argument in favour of Wayland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44
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