Ubuntu 21.10 "Impish Indri" Development Begins

[Myownfriend]

wayland has been "the future" for more than a decade and its still not "the future". maybe will soon be the past hopefully

Wayland is still "the future" and will continue to be "the future". The thing about something being "the future" is that there's generally a period of time where it's just "the future" and not "the now and the future". At this point, Wayland is finally becoming "the now and the future", and it's just a matter of other software actually adopting it and Nvidia releasing its next drivers.

Since Qt and GTK both support Wayland, most software has some amount of support for it. Now it's just a matter of them putting the effort into testing and fixing bugs in there software when running in Wayland.

[vegabook]

Anyway Wayland had no advantages right now but only better paths in the future ... so there is no hurry at all - most part of X will have to stay for a very long time even after that switch.

Wayland offers much better heterogenous scaling across different DPI monitors, right now. Where X breaks completely on my (admittedly complicated 125% 5k + 125% 4k + 100% 1080p portrait setup), Wayland works beautifully.

[JMB9]

Wayland offers much better heterogenous scaling across different DPI monitors, right now. Where X breaks completely on my (admittedly complicated 125% 5k + 125% 4k + 100% 1080p portrait setup), Wayland works beautifully.

Yes, it is fine for me - but from my point of view this is no professional setting. Different DPI values mean distortion of the entire image - so working on a part of a single screen and not the entire picture ... I would have got 3 4k-s (same DPI) if this would be usable for me ... but I have to wait for 8k - even DP2 is not there yet (with first bits landed some time ago in Linux, though).
As said: currently X.org is trapped under ice and Wayland is worked on - but it is a matter of fact that it will last some time till Wayland allows for professional workflows (which GNOME typically neglects ... KDE is for me a much better experience - and it is expected that KDE needs more time - and this is a good thing from my perspective) and being as stable as X is today. This matters ... and I am working more than 8 h/day and would not be happy to see any problem I did only see in mid 1990-ies.
And the stupid "each window manager needs it's own implementation of Wayland" with a very tiny part of code being reused is against good programming standards.
So the bug count is enormous (about multiplied by the number of implementations) and the time to fix them much larger than having one shared project like X.org.
But this is only my 2ct.

[vegabook]

Yes, it is fine for me - but from my point of view this is no professional setting. Different DPI values mean distortion of the entire image - so working on a part of a single screen and not the entire picture ... I would have got 3 4k-s (same DPI) if this would be usable for me ... but I have to wait for 8k - even DP2 is not there yet (with first bits landed some time ago in Linux, though).
As said: currently X.org is trapped under ice and Wayland is worked on - but it is a matter of fact that it will last some time till Wayland allows for professional workflows (which GNOME typically neglects ... KDE is for me a much better experience - and it is expected that KDE needs more time - and this is a good thing from my perspective) and being as stable as X is today. This matters ... and I am working more than 8 h/day and would not be happy to see any problem I did only see in mid 1990-ies.
And the stupid "each window manager needs it's own implementation of Wayland" with a very tiny part of code being reused is against good programming standards.
So the bug count is enormous (about multiplied by the number of implementations) and the time to fix them much larger than having one shared project like X.org.
But this is only my 2ct.

Well actually it is to prevent the exact problem you are mentioning, "distortion of the entire image", that different DPI scaling is there. With 125% x 125% x 100% I get exactly the same simulated DPI across all three monitors, so images and applications are not distorted at all. They're perfectly proportioned even when a window straddles different DPI monitors, yet at the same time, if I understand correctly, Wayland is still using the full resolution of each monitor (as opposed to, and correct me if I'm wrong, Gnome's attempt implement scaling on X by doing a post-process interpolating hack on the screen image which ruins, for example, font rendering).

I've had many heterogenous DPI setups in the past (particularly with 4k notebooks with external monitors) which were a complete and utter mess, as you describe. Ubuntu 20.04 with Gnome on Wayland is the first time I've had a painless and excellent experience. I still have to logout to X for teamviewer screen sharing but that's a small price to pay for me at least.

That said this part of your complaint "And the stupid "each window manager needs it's own implementation of Wayland" with a very tiny part of code being reused is against good programming standards" I feel completely able to agree with, but I did not know this was the case.

[Myownfriend]

Wayland offers much better heterogenous scaling across different DPI monitors, right now. Where X breaks completely on my (admittedly complicated 125% 5k + 125% 4k + 100% 1080p portrait setup), Wayland works beautifully.

That's one of the main reasons that I use Wayland from day to day even though I have an Nvidia GPU and XWayland stuff is running on the CPU and I just move to an X session when that becomes an issue. I have an Ultra HD monitor and a 1440p monitor. The UHD monitor is scaled 50% and looks great. Dragging a Window from screen to screen looks completely natural and doesn't have the popping effect that Windows DPI scaling gives you. It even scales mouse movement and positions.

DPI scaling isn't the only reason to use Wayland though. In an X session, if my secondary monitor doesn't match the frame rate of my primary monitor, it blacks out the second monitor. Wayland can actually handle mixed frame rates.

These benchmarks, at least to me, show that Wayland is higher performance than X11. These show that applications run through XWayland seem to have the same or slightly better performance than running on Xorg natively. One would assume that Wayland's performance would show even more when applications don't have to be run through a compatibility layer.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=gnome-xwayland-games2021

[higgslagrangian]

wayland has been "the future" for more than a decade and its still not "the future". maybe will soon be the past hopefully

Oh look, you can play with words.

Wayland is the default for Ubuntu 21.04, and has been the default in Debian (!) and Fedora for a number of *years*.
Wayland *is* the present. I use it daily in production.

[lyamc]

Something that I remember from the Mir vs Wayland days was that while Xwayland was showing very good framerates, there was a noticeable latency, specifically, moving the mouse around felt like garbage.

Recently I don’t remember experiencing that, but I’m mentioning it because “good framerates” does not necessarily mean “good experience”.

[calc]

Something that I remember from the Mir vs Wayland days was that while Xwayland was showing very good framerates, there was a noticeable latency, specifically, moving the mouse around felt like garbage.

Recently I don’t remember experiencing that, but I’m mentioning it because “good framerates” does not necessarily mean “good experience”.

If I remember correctly that Wayland latency issue you are describing was actually due to gnome-shell itself being buggy, among other things having a builtin javascript interpreter.

Mir (Unity) didn't have that problem since it wasn't insane.

[ix900]

Oh look, you can play with words.

Wayland is the default for Ubuntu 21.04, and has been the default in Debian (!) and Fedora for a number of *years*.
Wayland *is* the present. I use it daily in production.

That's not what that person was saying. Just because x application runs while you're in Wayland doesn't necessarily mean what you think it means. There can be other things happening for backwards compatibility.

If you strictly limit to only Wayland applications, well have fun with that lol.

[idash]

There are still many programs which don't support wayland, only X. Ok, you can use them via xwayland, but what's the point? So I really don't care what is default option in an OS/distro, I just want stuff to work

I use Wayfire full time with XWayland disabled, which means that anything that does not support Wayland natively wouldn't even start, and it's a pure Wayland session.
And surprisingly, I don't have any problems at all for daily usage, and things do "just work". Even screen recording is fine with wf-recorder.
The only applications (in my case) that require XWayland to be enabled are emulators. I don't play any Steam games at all so I have no idea how that works, but presumably similar.
So basically it's just games that have problems with Wayland (for now).

You say "what's the point?"
The point is basically performance and security, as well as more control on the developer side.
On Xorg, if you don't use a compositor, you get screen tearing. And if you use a compositor, you get lag.
Wayland does not have any of those issues. Video playback, for example, is very smooth on Wayland, without any tearing or stuttering. And when you move windows around, same thing. That's what I mean by "performance".
Security is also a good thing, obviously.

Keep in mind that all of that is just my own experience, and I'm not saying you're wrong or trying to challenge you.
I'm simply saying that Wayland now is perfectly viable for daily usage and does actually have tangible benefits.

So my point is that I support that distributions are moving forward with Wayland, and if your use cases have problems with Wayland, Xorg is still here, and I don't expect it to just disappear any time soon. At the same time, Wayland implementations will continue to improve until every use case "just works".