Twenty Old X.Org Components See New Updates

[kozman]

Another Phoronix thread, in which old men are shaking fist to sky because someone is trying to replace their beloved ancient software with something that meets today's needs.

Get off my lawn!

[Myownfriend]

Wayland still looks like a piece of crap.

Wayland and X11 don't look like anything.

it works more or less stable only with gnome3 - which I hate by look feel and design, and if you try to use it with something different from gnome3 - get ready for bugs.

Currently running a Wayland session on Gnome 43 which is... not Gnome 3. Prefer it over Xorg by a mile. Wayland also runs fine on Sway and KDE. I believe Raspberry Pi OS is running XFCE ontop of Mutter now

And absolutely no benefits. None. Zero. Null.

Currently running my UHD monitor with 150% scaling along side my QHD monitor without scaling. Both are sharp and windows appear the same size on both monitors. This is made possible by Wayland. That's a benefit.

Wayland creators promised performance, power efficiency etc - nothing is there.

Running Gnome 43 in a Wayland session on my Raspberry Pi 400 is noticeably smoother than an Xorg session. Phoronix has also benchmarked Wayland and Xorg sessions on KDE and Gnome on Nvidia and AMD. In all cases, the Wayland session used noticeably less power while getting the same or better performance.

Zamundaaa also tested latency between Wayland and Xorg and found that Wayland's has much less latency that Xorg with compositing.

With all the money RedHat invested in this teenage mutant technology it should fly us to the Moon for free already - but it still can not catch up with old software where nobody invest a penny.

While Kristian Høgsberg created Wayland at Redhat, the majority of his MRs were from his time at Intel.

How can that be?

Because you're wrong lol

[asriel]

Zamundaaa also tested latency between Wayland and Xorg and found that Wayland's has much less latency that Xorg with compositing.

Because you're wrong lol

Yep - here you exactly right. Wayland was created with gaming in mind. What game do - game creates 3D frame with some animals marines and tanks and game just want a framebuffer to put it directly on screen. Fast. Nothing in between. And wayland gives you it. So every client application should take care how it paints the framebuffer. Games anyway do paint their framebuffer without any help and games does not want any X-server or any other software in between. But for the rest apps - now all depends how you do care about your framebuffer. Games got a boost. Other software - did not. Teenagers love games. Actually they do not care about anything but games. So yes - razer advert "created by gamers for gamers" suits wayland a lot.

The second motivation of wayland creators was also simple - I do not understand how this X code works and why it is needed - I no not need it to paint my game framebuffer so I will drop it ant it is good. Now if you look at how it goes - the money invested to wayland are spend to get back those functions. And when they all are back - waylanf should become a pretty good thing to go if it gives games direct access to framebuffer but from the same time productivity apps get their Xorg like environment. That's what it will be - but not yet. Just tried week ago last time - not yet. Users demandig screehshare, notification icons , display gamma control like redshift etc - and it is now coming back to wayland based desktops. And more will come. Will give a try in a year. But so far there are some nice additions to Xorg.

[ClosedSource]

Another Phoronix thread, in which old men are shaking fist to sky because someone is trying to replace their beloved ancient software with something that meets today's needs.

Yes. Please replace my ancient software with something that meets your needs.

[kpedersen]

The kernel code for FreeBSD's input driver evdev is a Linux port too, no? So it is not just their Xorg implementation that will need to be cleaned up.

Indeed. This is one of those messy layers that I mentioned. FreeBSD takes the approach of borrowing parts of Linux relating to Xorg. It doesn't always work well; for example it breaks a lot of userland (xset m doesn't work to set mouse accel for example to use libinput). Likewise they have tried hald and all that other Linux crud. The entire Linux KPI stuff to borrow GPU drivers is clever but in the long run it is messy. For a while, FreeBSD's Xorg even needed dbus or some hacks to xorg.conf. Ugly.

Once Linux is out of the Xorg picture (migrated to Wayland), FreeBSD should clean itself up.

Additionally, if you look on ports.freebsd.org and look at the list of dependencies that xorg (and also xorg-minimal) pulls in; this is pretty grim and hopefully will also resolve itself once Xorg no longer needs to support Linux. Compare this to Xenocara and you can see some real elegance behind a central / tailor fit implementation. (Obviously the only real problem is it lags behind which could pose a problem for a small subset of users).

Yes. Please replace my ancient software with something that meets your needs.

Heh, additionally I am not sure that entirely playing SteamDRM games and scrolling through web browsers even counts as a valid use-case

Poor Solaris and BSD guys having to keep a dead horse walking...

But at least it *is* a horse. When another horse comes along, please let us know.

[cl333r]

Poor Solaris and BSD guys having to keep a dead horse walking...

Those that are paid are not so poor, I imagine it's called a job.

[mangeek]

I've said it before in other threads, but I've been daily-driving Linux desktops since around 1998, and I was an early adopter of Wayland. I've had a trouble-free experience since Ubuntu 20.04 or so, and Wayland solves some very basic problems I had with X11, like fractional scaling that isn't slideshow-speed and sensible behavior docking and undocking my laptops.

[middy]

i like wayland, especially since 10 bit works (except for xwayland, but the bonus, steam doesn't crash on xwayland since its 8 bit for the color drawing) but latency sucks. it really sucks. fast paced games are just so much smoother under x11 and the lack of freesync support with gnome sucks as well. though freesync works well for me under kde but like gnome, latency still sucks. the only way i can explain it is that in battlefield v, 80fps feels like 30 fps. slow paced games the latency doesn't matter much so its not really noticeable.

[Myownfriend]

Wayland was created with gaming in mind.

Wrong again.

What game do - game creates 3D frame with some animals marines and tanks and game just want a framebuffer to put it directly on screen. Fast. Nothing in between. And wayland gives you it. So every client application should take care how it paints the framebuffer. Games anyway do paint their framebuffer without any help and games does not want any X-server or any other software in between. But for the rest apps - now all depends how you do care about your framebuffer. Games got a boost. Other software - did not.

So I guess you aren't very familiar with how modern applications work. Have you ever heard of Direct Rendering Infrastructure? Since 2008, X11 applications of all kinds have been using draw to their own buffers. That was the year of Wayland's first commit. With DRI3, clients were able to allocate their own buffers.

The thing that you're claiming is the biggest distinction between X11 and Wayland is something that they have in common.

The benchmarks that I cited don't even run any of their games via Wayland directly, they use XWayland. So even if you thought that Wayland was seeing a benefit in games because it uniquely allows games to access their own frame buffer, that wouldn't even be in a scenario that it would be able to take advantage of that because the games are using X11.

So yes - razer advert "created by gamers for gamers" suits wayland a lot.

It doesn't. As shown above.

The second motivation of wayland creators was also simple - I do not understand how this X code works and why it is needed - I no not need it to paint my game framebuffer so I will drop it ant it is good.

Again, it wasn't created for gaming. It was just designed around hardware that actually has GPUs while X11 was created at a time before GPUs, before multi-monitor setups, and high resolution displays, so it definitely pre-existed DPI scaling and mixed frame rates. These are all things that Wayland deals with incredibly well. Notably, almost no games can use multiple displays. Those that do will render to each at the same frame rate and no games care about DPI scaling at all. Most of the time windowing isn't even relevant to games. So if Wayland was made around gaming then why does it do so many things better than X11 that have no benefit to gaming?

Users demandig screehshare,

It's so boring repeating all of this. Wayland is not getting a screensharing protocol. X11 doesn't have one either, it has a security flaw that can be exploited to do screensharing. Wayland does not have that same flaw. You can still do screensharing in Wayland by using xdg-desktop-portals which work with both Wayland and X11 so it has the benefit that clients that record or share the screen/windows don't have to implement the feature twice.

notification icons

From what I can tell, you're talking about is the system tray which should not be the compositors job.

display gamma control like redshift etc - and it is now coming back to wayland based desktops

Wayland is not getting display gamma control. The equivalent features in KDE and Gnome use CRTC_GAMMA_LUT which is a KMS property. X11 allowed any application to control the gamma for the entire screen so some games used under the assumption that people would be running the game fullscreen. But if they ran it windowed then everything else on the screen would look wrong. That sucked and was stupid.

What Wayland is getting is something that X11 never had: a way for the client to broadcast it's color space so the compositor can transform it into the screen's color space. This will not only allow colors to be displayed accurately, it will also allow HDR and SDR clients to be displayed on the same monitor without looking bad.

[ClosedSource]

Heh, additionally I am not sure that entirely playing SteamDRM games and scrolling through web browsers even counts as a valid use-case

I don't even know what a SteamDRM game is.

I use my computer for work. Any web browsing I do (with the exception of Phoronix) is very much warranted for...

Also the last game I played was mines on windows 95.

What qualifies as a use case? Only what you do on your computer?