Ubuntu 20.04 GNOME X.Org vs. Wayland Session Performance Impact For Gaming

[jacob]

jacob Take a +1. Here we are in 2020 with Ubuntu LTS on GNOME 3.36. And people are still discussing year old software. Mutter and Shell 3.36.1 are just released and they come with a few more fixes to the main thread blocking issues.

Some people’s mental blocking and mental lag is just horrible.

To be fair, no STABLE distro with GNOME 3.36 has been released yet. But I get where you're coming from. It's like those people who always whine that BTRFS is supposedly crap and unreliable because 15 years ago they had an irrecoverable corruption problem with it.

[zxy_thf]

To be fair, no STABLE distro with GNOME 3.36 has been released yet. But I get where you're coming from. It's like those people who always whine that BTRFS is supposedly crap and unreliable because 15 years ago they had an irrecoverable corruption problem with it.

I would not use btrfs as an example, because btrfs still doesn't have stable RAID5/6 support after 15 years, nor to say RAIDZ.

I used to believe btrfs could be a nice alternative to ZFS, but now I'm thinking of migrate away from btrfs to xfs -- the latter one is on a stable track towards a COW filesystem.

[jacob]

I would not use btrfs as an example, because btrfs still doesn't have stable RAID5/6 support after 15 years, nor to say RAIDZ.

I used to believe btrfs could be a nice alternative to ZFS, but now I'm thinking of migrate away from btrfs to xfs -- the latter one is on a stable track towards a COW filesystem.

BTRFS has no stable RAID 5/6 because no-one seems to be willing to fund it. Those who use BTRFS in production and pay for its development (directly or indirectly) all prefer RAID 10 and presumably would use that even if BTRFS had stable 5/6/Z.

XFS is a great journaling filesystem but it is far from being an actual full-fledged CoW filesystem. Maybe it will evolve towards that, but it won't be in the foreseeable future. For RAID 0/1/10, BTRFS is rock solid and if I wanted RAID 5/6 I would probably go the XFS or Ext4 over LVM route too, at the cost of losing some of BTRFS' extremely useful features.

[ernstp]

If we pause the flamewars a bit, which games have you been able to get running with SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland?
Most Linux native SDL games should in theory work in this mode, if you have new enough libSDL.
The libSDL in Steam doesn't have the wayland backend compiled in though I guess.

I tried running Jupiter Hell from Steam with SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland by copying in a newer libSDL and that seemed to work!

[ernstp]

i was fairly hostile in my original comment so i appreciate the fair reply back to it. i do hope wayland gets vrr support soon and DE's like gnome don't take their sweet time to adopt it. vrr is really nice for games...

I asked about it here and you can see they have a plan for it: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutte...98#note_738887

[ernstp]

Phoronix can you please make the comment section tree-like so that I can easier enjoy all these flame wars?
And besides "Like" please also add "Slap in the face" and "Kick in the ass".
Thank you.

Should move over to a Phoronix reddit or something...

[oiaohm]

He did not say that. He said that in 2003, "desktop linux was at a marketshare height it hasn't reached before or since". I wouldn't doubt that he's correct about that - roughly half the people locally in my industry were using some form of desktop Linux back then. I had installation disks, and was frequently asked to come to someone's house or office and help install SuSE. People used to buy a lot of PCs without an OS back then - something that MS made sure would not continue to happen..

That change also means people expectations for what the OS had to do whet up. Also you are wrong more people are able to install Linux distributions without hand helping than they use to due to improved installers and installer documentation has improved a lot since 2003 and youtube videos howto(yes 2005 change) so people needing to have a Linux skilled user to install Linux distribution dropped also X11 coming auto configuring in 2007 very big factor as well because you no longer need that configuration knowldge to get graphical up.. 2005 and before the Linux desktop market share was under 1 percent all metrics. Today we are over 0.8 percent in all surveys with peaks out to 4 percent with debate if Linux desktop is over 2 percent average or not.

So for market share we are in highest penetration of the Linux desktop time period it just does not fell like it. Us desktop Linux users felt better when Linux desktop was at 0.5 percent market share than this 0.8 to 4 percent we have now depending on what metric you read. We have really lost the marketing presence and the helping others of the early days but that does not align to current market share.

https://linux.slashdot.org/story/17/09/01/1639250/linux-desktop-market-share-crosses-3

We have seen these odd spikes up in metrics that is 2017 in the past 5 years. They don't exist at all back in 2003. A spike back in 2003 time frame was lucky to hit 1 percent.

Regarding your comments on the condition of the desktop in 2003 - KDE 3.x in 2003-2004 was a very nice desktop. I still use Trinity fairly often because I prefer some of the features that no longer exist with today's advanced desktops, I find it quite nice looking, and I like the workflow.

Trinity causes rose colour glasses in a big way but it also does remind you of some of the issues like artds causing sound issues. KDE 3.x was really in spite of X11 Protocol not because of. KDE 3.x does a lot of thing though dcop and other methods that are items covered by wayland protocol. Trinity has added a lot of support for newer drag and drop and other items since then to make it more friendly with GTK applications.

Lot of people forgot 2003 you are still in the time frame where you had to choose gnome to run gnome applications or kde to run kde applications and if you attempted to mix all hell could break loss.

2003 is not as good for the Linux desktop as what you would think. 2007-2008 is really when things improve and that shows in the Linux Desktop market shares as well. Yes this 2007/2008 improvement was mostly spite of X11 protocol not because of. It really takes at least 20 years for the X11 based desktops to get somewhat near right. Wayland taking 15 years+ is not exactly unexpected to those who looked at the history to get thing sorted out.

There has been one big difference with wayland over X11. With X11 the DE went ahead and did their own work arounds to any of X11 short coming this is how we end up with 12 different clipboard implementations. This has not been happening with wayland protocols that much its more been cooperative process to make common standard instead of going own unique ways this is really going to be easier on application developers in time.

People forgot the peak of the sound server mess where we had 12 different sound servers for different desktop environments with unique interface libraries. The Linux world has made it self some major messes over the years.

Basically there is very little duby229 is writing that is not bogus crap. Some of it like the market share feel right but are not in fact backed by the market share numbers as other factors reduced the interaction between Linux users.

[carewolf]

Phoronix can you please make the comment section tree-like so that I can easier enjoy all these flame wars?
And besides "Like" please also add "Slap in the face" and "Kick in the ass".
Thank you.

Comment trees was a more elegant technology from a simpler time. I don't see it returning unfortunately..

[Guest]

Nice trolling effort but it is not just the framerate with display protocols there are other things to consider. Besides the vast majority of commercial games still use Xwayland so they basically run on Xorg no matter the display server you use.

There are wayland games: https://www.waylandgames.co.uk/ !

... the first link, which showed up, when googled "wayland games" ...

[timrichardson]

Its embarrassing that after 15 years of development and millions spent, the supposedly superior wayland still cannot beat the "old and bloated X", not in performance or features.

I'm sorry you feel embarrassed about all your hard work and contributions you have made to wayland. I am not a developer of either platform, so I am grateful to you for your efforts to make the open source desktop modern and secure.