GNOME 3.26: Wayland vs. X.Org Performance - Boot Times, Power Use, Memory Use & Gaming

[pal666]

From my understanding, GNOME Shell is the best of the lot. Do you have other suggestions?

weston

It would be insane, however, to claim that nobody uses it. There are plenty of voices complaining that Wayland has no alternative (although as I've said in this thread, there's nothing that prevents Wayland from getting this as an extension).

there are plenty of crazy voices on any topic, just compare with systemd

That's interesting, I've never seen anyone say it. But if you compare KDE's and GNOME's budgets, GNOME doesn't do too bad: http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online...ls-and-culture.

according to those budgets kde can employ one developer and gnome can employ two. obviously there are other sources of developers, but still kde's wayland support should be worse than gnome's

[jpg44]

The numbers cause one to answer the question, whats the point of Wayland, and what was the problem with X? I cant see anything that Wayland does that X cannot do. They talk about visual artifacts. But visual artifacts can be eliminated on X with apps synchronizing themselves to the refresh rate and use double buffering to make sure no incomplete frame ends up on the monitor. There are no performance gains you cannot get on X with DRI. Wayland is much worse as far as window manager selection, choices and design. For instance, it breaks the clean seperation of window manager and window system on X that allows one to reload and change window managers without bombing the applications. There is no network transparency so far, when network transparency is actually MORE needed now than it ever has been before with how ubiquitous the internet is. All I see here is wheel reinvention over some long falsified myths about X.

[Vasant1234]

My company (volkspc.org) makes a Linux distribution for ARM based on MicroXwin, our X11 replacement. For MicroXwin we created a Xlib compatible library that seemlessly runs
all toolkit and applications with improved performance.

I think Wayland team did not address the issue of backward compatibility. This means applications such as Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice etc cannot really benefit from any Wayland
improvements until they all get ported to the new graphics stack. The current solution of running these applications with Xwayland will only degrade performance since there is
another layer in the graphics stack.

Vasant

[mulenmar]

The current solution of running these applications with Xwayland will only degrade performance since there is
another layer in the graphics stack.

Vasant

Not that much, anymore. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...pha-Game-Tests

Back in 2014, sure, there were big losses, but that was three years ago. Outside of the sound system latency, things improve quickly.

[GrayShade]

For MicroXwin we created a Xlib compatible library that seemlessly runs all toolkit and applications with improved performance.

Previously covered on: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...tem&px=MTc0NDQ.

While those videos don't seem too impressing, it still sounds like a neat idea.

[Vasant1234]

Here is a video comparing our distribution based on MicroXwin versus Ubuntu Mate on ODROID-C2.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jmvYryz2hw&t=2s

Gtkperf on MicroXwin is about 2X faster while at the same time we can run an estimated 2 Million Android Apps.
I think it is impressive , but I admit I am a bit biased -.

Unfortunately since Wayland doesn't support legacy toolkit, it is hard to make the same comparison.

[Brisse]

Updated from Ubuntu-GNOME 17.04 to Ubuntu 17.10 today, and the Wayland experience seem very much the same. Mouse pointer doesn't refresh at more than 60fps it seems, despite running 120hz on my monitor.

Played some Mad Max and that went fine. Not sure if it stutters more than X or not...

Can't get hardware accelerated video decoding to work. Totem + gstreamer-vaapi crashes. Mpv falls back on software no matter if I choose vdpau or vaapi. All this stuff works fine on X, except Totem+vaapi which didn't crash, but displayed a purple'ish image.

[sheldonl]

The wayland protocol is only *described* by xml, it doesn't use it. Anything passed over a connection would be binary, and also not directly part of wayland but rather an extension or application on top of it.

X runs ok over a LAN, but it shows lots of problems if you try to run it over the internet.

Good to know for Wayland, not as crazy then as I thought.

As far as X goes, there seem to be many round trips needed between client and server, so bandwidth here is probably not as important as a low latency connection between both endpoints. Over the internet you are bound to have problems.