Adam Jackson On The State Of The X.Org Server In 2020

[M1kkko]

Replying to myself here. According to this thread: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/1058 it appears that the wayland developers are at least aware of the situation. To quote:

Reopening, as this one is about still using drmModeSetCursor() when there is no cursor plane advertised. #1042 (closed) is about falling back to OpenGL when the hw cursor doesn't succeed.

So that's cool.

What's less cool is that I'm struggling to find documentation on how to check which cursor is in use. Also I came across bug reports reporting sluggish hardware cursor as well when the system is under load. It has reportedly something to do with the cursor being controlled from the main thread.

Maybe I can wait a few more years...

[Shiba]

But I don't understand! So many people in this forum (obviously more qualified than ajax himself) said that X is so much better than Wayland!

/s

It is, but it's not very much Xorg merit, it's Wayland compositors that simply suck. We'll see if and when they'll manage to make something usable.

[ferry]

Everybody here thinking wayland is so great, why don't you just go ahead and use it. Why bother people getting actual work done using X?

Seriously, if wayland was up to it, in kde you only need to flip the switch on the login screen. And after that it's the new default. There is no need to wait for Canonical to do that for you.

The reality is, there are too many applications that won't work well or at all on wayland. And until they do, we will all be using X happily. Thanks for making that possible Adam!

[Zan Lynx]

What's less cool is that I'm struggling to find documentation on how to check which cursor is in use. Also I came across bug reports reporting sluggish hardware cursor as well when the system is under load. It has reportedly something to do with the cursor being controlled from the main thread.

Maybe I can wait a few more years...

Optimization on Wayland compositors keeps moving forward. My personal opinion is that gnome-shell won't be any good until they split it into a real-time rendering thread and everything else.

The hardware cursor under X.org stays responsive only because of cheating. X moves the cursor in an IO signal handler that triggers on cursor input events.

So you can wiggle it around. But does that mean anything? Not really. Under the same loads that cause a Wayland compositor to get laggy, the X server is equally laggy. You can click that mouse all you want, the application still won't get it for a second or two.

[karolherbst]

The end-users or the developers? Because end-users shouldn't have to "commit" to such a thing. It shouldn't be an undertaking for the end-user but a drop-in, seamless replacement. It's not. I could switch, if I switched to a different WM and avoid using apps that are broken in Wayland. Not only might that affect my productivity (which my employer will not like) it might mean learning a new workflow. I'm not going to commit to that, unless Wayland brings something so good it makes it worth it.

Not saying I'll never switch, but I won't switch today. Probably not tomorrow, either.

Stop blabbering nonsense.

If your favourite WM is not wayland compatible, bother them to port. Also, Wayland already comes with a couple of benefits: 1. proper HiDPI support 2. proper infrastructure to be able to deal with hot plugged devices (X and eGPU... sure... never going to happen) 3. sane security model no "every application can grab everything" bullshit X is all about. 4. proper representation model a.k.a. the concept of frame, which X doesn't have and everything needs to workaround that. and a couple of more things.

The biggest problem is just that nobody else cares besides people working on the low end infrastructure and _that's_ sad.

Can you all please stop continuing with your none sense if you have obviously no idea on what's going on?

[karolherbst]

Everybody here thinking wayland is so great, why don't you just go ahead and use it. Why bother people getting actual work done using X?

Seriously, if wayland was up to it, in kde you only need to flip the switch on the login screen. And after that it's the new default. There is no need to wait for Canonical to do that for you.

The reality is, there are too many applications that won't work well or at all on wayland. And until they do, we will all be using X happily. Thanks for making that possible Adam!

I am using KDE with wayland and most of the things just work. There are some random issues here and there, but those need to be reported and developers need to work on them.

[DanL]

Nobody from Linux gives a shit about nvidia and their binary blob.

And that's a problem. Why did they push ahead with GBM instead of working on a better allocator using standard EGLStreams?
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...Allocator-2019

Pick a better Wayland compositor

Most of them are experimental or minimal. They're not really made for KDE. And GNOME sucks. Maybe MATE will continue to make progress towards being fully Wayland compatible.

[BesiegedAce]

Oh no Michael, why did you do this.... The thread is split now and we couldn't make it to 300 comments :<

Just get a few people to reply to pal666 and it'll happen.

[andre30correia]

I was talking about kernel developers. If nvidia doesn't work, blame nvidia. It's such simple. Kernel devs won't fix proprietary crap and proprietary crap has to obey the law.

you have what age? 13? you are what the worst exist in Linux world, a stupid troll.


Wayland implementation with kde and gnome is not ready in my opinion. X works much better for development and gaming, and don't come with the story because the games are writing for X is the problem. We need a good Xwayland implementation and we need X for many years because of it. with ubuntu pushing gnome and maybe wayland the things will improve no other company cares about desktop in Linux and what we need are pro devs for this, community is a great thing but people don't have so much time this days after work

[remenic]

Stop blabbering nonsense.

If your favourite WM is not wayland compatible, bother them to port. Also, Wayland already comes with a couple of benefits: 1. proper HiDPI support 2. proper infrastructure to be able to deal with hot plugged devices (X and eGPU... sure... never going to happen) 3. sane security model no "every application can grab everything" bullshit X is all about. 4. proper representation model a.k.a. the concept of frame, which X doesn't have and everything needs to workaround that. and a couple of more things.

The biggest problem is just that nobody else cares besides people working on the low end infrastructure and _that's_ sad.

Can you all please stop continuing with your none sense if you have obviously no idea on what's going on?

Presumptuous of you to think I am clueless on the subject. I understand fully well how software development works, open soure included. But Wayland is incomplete in its current form, even the team behind Ozone/Wayland for Chromium have realized that. That doesn't mean Wayland is a dead horse, it isn't. But for most users it also isn't ready yet. It has some nice features, but for me nothing that I find valuable enough to deal with the other issues.