It's Time To Admit It: The X.Org Server Is Abandonware

[MartinN]

I run Wayland all the time on my laptop (with intel GPU), but my desktop has an Nvidia GPU and i can't get a satisfying result there
Please Nvidia, support wayland...

Buy AMD. Problem solved.

[grouillier]

Besides the fact that Wayland is still not feature complete, is there even decent amount of third party software that natively supports Wayland besides web browsers?

Why would third party software need to natively support Wayland? Most application software is written using a graphical toolkit; on Linux probably the most common ones are GTK+ and Qt. The toolkits handle rendering the output on the underlying graphics library.

[mdedetrich]

and what about running untrusted applications, like games? Or sometimes you also get malware and stuff. If the user wants to run a screen recorder or something under wayland the compositor can just allow it, but ultimately the compositor is in control and could ask the user before granting that. In X no such mechanism exists.

Why would games be more untrusted than any other type of application?

I mean in general being security aware is great, but honestly this is something that should be done ground up in the desktop environment rather than hacked onto a display protocol, i.e. something like what Android does with permissions when you install an app.

The way that Wayland is going about it seems to be the worst of both worlds. At least with Android (for example), apps can do whatever they want, they just have to ask for it. So if you play a game and it asks for all of your contact info then something is def fishy, but its not for a calendar app.

[oiaohm]

I mean in general being security aware is great, but honestly this is something that should be done ground up in the desktop environment rather than hacked onto a display protocol, i.e. something like what Android does with permissions when you install an app..

No the display protocol has to be designed particular ways that a permission system is possible.

The way that Wayland is going about it seems to be the worst of both worlds. At least with Android (for example), apps can do whatever they want, they just have to ask for it. So if you play a game and it asks for all of your contact info then something is def fishy, but its not for a calendar app.

Sorry the surface flinger protocol in Android has the same feature set as the Wayland core protocol when it comes to security. Yes its not the install permissions make the final chioce if compositor actions by application with Android is allowed or not but surface flinger itself.

For flatpak and systemd user space around applications to provide permissions on graphical desktop X11 has be deprecated. The permission systems for the desktop environments of Linux are well under way with gnome and kde both implementing running applications as system user units. Wayland is just a piece of a lot bigger security puzzle.

[karolherbst]

Why would games be more untrusted than any other type of application?

are you serious? They are known to do unwanted behaviour, especially if they have strong copy protection and strong anti cheat. Some publisher even think that kernel level anti cheat is the future. They also scan what other applications are running to detect cheaters and stuff.

So yes, they are untrusted and it is known that some take it over the top. Also, they are for most linux users the only closed source and not distribution provided software they run on their machines. And your OS provider is generally more trustful than any other binaries you install on your system.

[clapbr]

I'm more than willing to jump the Wayland boat once either Gnome or KDE sorts out VRR for both Wayland/XWayland apps. I tried to use sway for a few days and it's fast and smooth but having no DE in a Wayland WM seemed even worse than something like i3 in terms of needed workarounds for my apps.

[Fanboy80]

As long as Wayland devs live in their own bubble, X is not going to be abandonware UNFORTUNATELY.
It just escapes my mind why they force you to use VSync, at least make it opt-out...
I'd rather use X than have a stuttery mess with input lag, thank you very much.

[Ironmask]

As long as Wayland devs live in their own bubble, X is not going to be abandonware UNFORTUNATELY.
It just escapes my mind why they force you to use VSync, at least make it opt-out...
I'd rather use X than have a stuttery mess with input lag, thank you very much.

I respect the vsync argument but I never really understood it, at least not in modern times. In the past I heard a lot of issues about it, but recently I've never heard complaints about it. Primarily in Windows, since DWM forces vsync. There used to be dirty hacks to disable it (like, killing DWM), but that was when 7 just came out. That's nearly a decade ago and since then I've never heard of people complaining about forced vsync. Either it isn't an issue on modern hardware, or GNOME/KDE and other compositors are doing something wrong. Or it's nVidia's fault, could be that too.

[oiaohm]

As long as Wayland devs live in their own bubble, X is not going to be abandonware UNFORTUNATELY.
It just escapes my mind why they force you to use VSync, at least make it opt-out...
I'd rather use X than have a stuttery mess with input lag, thank you very much.

Not all wayland compositors are created equal. X11 is a very tearing mess when you don't have any form of VSync.

X11 took decades to develop to where it is today. Wayland developers fixing the issues is taking time.

Really the number of performance fixes that gnome has found in their main shell solution is insane.

There has been a lot of faults that before the wayland work we have been ignoring.

[cesarcafe]

I really believe X11 shouldn't be abandoned. And, if it really had to be replaced by something better, I don't think Wayland is the solution. The Wayland website argues that there are obsolete features in X11 which belong to the 80s and nobody uses them anymore. Well, that's fine, but such features could be deprecated if needed without starting a new thing from scratch. Moreover, then they argue that remote rendering won't be supported in Wayland because it's "orthogonal" to it and it's "too complicated". This is when they show they don't have the slightest idea of what they are doing: do they want to remove old features, or just build their dreams toy with only the things they consider cool to have? They even recommend to use Xorg if you want remote rendering!! Are they UNIX developers? I mean, don't they need to run software in a HPC server? They really look like their idea of UNIX is using Gimp in Ubuntu (because if that's your idea of UNIX, then yes, Wayland is better than X11).