X.Org Server Development Hits A Nearly Two Decade Low

[kpedersen]

As far as I can tell everyone who doesn't use Wayland is using Nvidia or has some strange edge case I would have never imagined needing.

People use window managers other than Gnome and Sway. As far as DEs go, possibly the majority use Xfce these days. So many fewer people use Wayland than you probably think.

[aksdb]

I've been using Wayland on all of my physical Linux systems since about 2016. It's been solid.

As far as I can tell everyone who doesn't use Wayland is using Nvidia or has some strange edge case I would have never imagined needing.

Notebook with Intel graphics, ArchLinux as distribution. Tried wayland multiple times and always end up switching back due to bugs. Since my notebook display has a different DPI than the attached monitors, the mouse cursor is either far too small or far too large. Some applications outright crash. Some applications render with black borders or other stuff like that. The gnome desktop itself and all the gnome tools work fine. But I cannot work with that alone. I do more than just browsing the web and clicking on my desktop.

In my most recent try it didn't even start anymore. The DM is running (in wayland mode) but once I try to login I see the cursor and boom, back to login screen. With X everything is still running smoothly.

I see the architectural problems in X and would like something "better". But I do not see wayland being there (or anywhere close) yet. Plus, I also don't think the design choices for wayland are good ones. IMHO they should have taken a plugin based approach and defined proper APIs to deal with them, so GTK and QT can hook into it and the DEs can do their stuff. (e.g. plugin a "service" that deals with window decorations so the applications DO NOT have to deal with that shit themselves unless they really want to, in which case they simply could set a flag like "undecorated" and render it however they like.)

Whatever ... We'll see where it goes.

[Bigon]

Fedora already uses Wayland protocol by default since its 25th release and recently Red Hat Enterprise 8 series and its derivative.

Debian Buster also uses it by default

[kpedersen]

Debian Buster also uses it by default

Not if you install via the CD that comes with Xfce.

Basically it only comes with Gnome. If you install Gnome; you get Wayland. If you install anything else; you don't.

[brent]

I don't understand claims about running Wayland for several years with no issues. Might be OK if all you do is run some terminals, but beyond that? It's just *barely* becoming usable at the moment. I'm currently running Wayland w/ gnome-shell and with the newest release, it's the first time where I would say it might be OK for some general use. Not great, just OK. However, there are still odd visual glitches and issues (mostly with X applications), reproducible crashes in various situations, missing features (can't configure full/limited color range) and performance problems. Just a year ago, it was an unusable clusterfuck, so that's great progress.

[Zan Lynx]

I don't understand claims about running Wayland for several years with no issues. Might be OK if all you do is run some terminals, but beyond that? It's just *barely* becoming usable at the moment. I'm currently running Wayland w/ gnome-shell and with the newest release, it's the first time where I would say it might be OK for some general use. Not great, just OK. However, there are still odd visual glitches and issues (mostly with X applications), reproducible crashes in various situations, missing features (can't configure full/limited color range) and performance problems. Just a year ago, it was an unusable clusterfuck, so that's great progress.

What can I say? I run Fedora with Gnome user sessions. I do terminal windows, various games, Android Studio, LibreOffice, Firefox, Chrome, Thunderbird. Rhythmbox for music and podcasts, and Totem for playing video files.

My laptops for the last five years have been Dells with 4K displays. I use external monitors quite a lot. They are mostly 4K as well, but I have indeed used 1080p projectors and such.

I honestly never noticed any serious problems. I had to tweak Firefox DPI settings a couple of times and at one point Chrome had to be launched with a command-line option to adjust its DPI, but that affected X also so it was never a Wayland problem.

[finalzone]

However, there are still odd visual glitches and issues (mostly with X applications), reproducible crashes in various situations, missing features (can't configure full/limited color range) and performance problems. Just a year ago, it was an unusable clusterfuck, so that's great progress.

Wayland protocol is deliberately made minimal letting other functions to the toolkits. Some missing features need permission from a trusted applications. Applications themselves especially newer version needs to get rid of the X legacies.
If MacOS was able to get rid the old quartz and X11, why not GNOME and KDE?

[Lycanthropist]

This is quite interesting. Do you have any links to your projects or documentation you have been following?

Genuinely asking because my experience is that Wayland is all far to young and primitive at this stage. Everything is ad-hoc as hell!

So far most people "pro Wayland" have either never developed in the underlying tech (such as libX11/xcb equivalents) or just dabble with Gtk / Gnome and very high level interfaces. You might be fairly rare in that regard!

For documentation, I used the examples that come with Weston [1] as well as the protocol itself [2]. Every interface, event and request are actually very well documented.
I have also used parts of the xdg-shell protocol [3], which is necessary for desktop applications.
I haven't looked at window decorations yet (because I don't need them in sway) or other more advanced features such as screensavers.
As a C++ programmer, I'm using Waylands inofficial C++ bindings [4], which makes things a lot nicer. It also comes with some very simple examples.
Unfortunately, there is no nice Wayland tutorial as there is for xcb [5]. I hope this will change in the future. It would certainly draw more developers towards Wayland.

[1] https://github.com/wayland-project/w...master/clients
[2] https://github.com/wayland-project/w...ol/wayland.xml
[3] https://github.com/wayland-project/w.../xdg-shell.xml
[4] https://github.com/NilsBrause/waylandpp
[5] https://xcb.freedesktop.org/tutorial/

[betam4x]

Bad news. Wayland is for "gamers", Xorg for serious Linux users. Does this mean we should aspect "bugs" in Xorg code to force people to adopt the unwanted Wayland?

Wayland actually does not function very well for gamers. There are several rather annoying bugs in pretty much all Wayland compositors. For example, unless a game is able to bypass Wayland, v-sync apparently is forced enabled, even for a full-screen game. Currently, pretty much all Wayland implementations suffer from this as well as high input latency (for games, as they are all piped through XWayland) , so I really do not know where you get your information from.

At any rate, Xorg could use quite a few improvements. Honestly, they should stop treating it like a dead platform and actually focus on evolving things. Many of the improvements in Wayland could be implemented evolutionary style in Xorg.

[betam4x]

What can I say? I run Fedora with Gnome user sessions. I do terminal windows, various games, Android Studio, LibreOffice, Firefox, Chrome, Thunderbird. Rhythmbox for music and podcasts, and Totem for playing video files.

My laptops for the last five years have been Dells with 4K displays. I use external monitors quite a lot. They are mostly 4K as well, but I have indeed used 1080p projectors and such.

I honestly never noticed any serious problems. I had to tweak Firefox DPI settings a couple of times and at one point Chrome had to be launched with a command-line option to adjust its DPI, but that affected X also so it was never a Wayland problem.

I expect he is talking about 'pure' Wayland. You are running XWayland, i.e. Xorg on top of Wayland. (Your app list tells us as much).