Wayland - yay or nay?

kpedersen said:
I like the simplicity of the Wayland Linux display system in many ways (it feels a bit like writing graphical software for MS-DOS again). But I don't feel that Wayland will have a substantial enough ecosystem worth committing time to until after our grandkids professional lifetime.
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That's exactly what it is. Back in the day when they floated the idea of Wayland the consensus among Linux gamers was that X did not offer the same gaming performance as gaming on Windows did. Windows allowed games to write directly to graphic card RAM while with X only the Xserver could write to the frame buffer, through the kernel. And apps must communicate with the Xserver through the X protocol. All this takes time. This is what the gamers complained about. And so here we are.

X is legacy (old) software as well. As Wayland newly written code by people who we assume have learned from the mistakes of the past is supposed to be more resilient to shenanigans to circumvent it to access RAM it's not supposed to. The fact that Wayland bypasses X protocol overhead accessing the graphics card as directly as the kernel allows it better performance just as MS-DOS apps had access to the graphics card RAM.

I don't use Wayland here because I still run apps on my machines in my basement while sitting at my desk with my laptop inserted into its base station here on the second floor of my home (with CAT6 running from the basement to various rooms of this 113 year old house). A powerful laptop generally used as an X terminal in the traditional sense. You can't do this with Wayland (except with Xwayland).
 
dandelion said:
Wayfire has zoom plugin (by default: <Super> + mouse scroll). labwc has ToggleMagnify action. Some others can probably use hyprpicker.
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I've tried zoom plugin of Wayfire, but it was not what I want. Screen around mouse cursor was magnified on rectangle and fixed size/position.
What I want is like this screenshot.

screenshot-2024-10-17 21-08-36.png


And I've not yet tried labwc and it seems to be interesting. I'll try it when I can take time for trying it. Thanks!
 
It's probably been mentioned in this thread, but there is also the xwayland package which will enable you to run various X apps in Wayland. I've not used it, so can't give any help on it, but, as an example, if one uses the ancient but still good Xbuffy, to monitor multiple mailboxes, I imagine it would with xwayland. (Xbiff, as an aside, worked for me under dwl, but only taking up 1/3 or so of the screen--when I put it into floating mode to make it small, it was just a black blob--note this was just a quick test out of curiosity.)
 
Found myself using remote X11 (over ssh) for another use.

One Linux machine has VMs with virt-manager. Instead of going down to virsh I can just call virt-manager remotely, do my thing without learning anything new and have things running. I'm not even sure where the machine physically is.
 
i got a Dell XPS 15 and had to switch to linux for a couple of years

after distro swapping between ubuntu, nixos and fedora i eventually got fed
wiped the hard drive and installed Freebsd without knowing if it would work

and was amazed the Nvidia driver not only worked but worked with Wayland
it was just before Christmas last year, so Santa may have helped
 
Though I did stop using XDMCP about 15 years ago (well, kind-of, see below), I got rid of the small X terminal machine at the time. I still use remote X apps on my servers downstairs.

I do use XDMCP on to start multiple X sessions on my laptop, primarily to show people that FreeBSD does have multiple desktops, not just my preferred CDE. The fact that one can run an X server within an X server, using Xnest, blows people away too.
 
i tried wayland for the 1st time today just because i saw a (linux related) post that the mouse pointer does not flicker as it does with Xorg (rockchip vop2 + panfrost)
i just copy pasted from the handbook instructions and it worked
mouse pointer did not flicker over an updating window (glxgears for example) like it did in Xorg
it seems it does not work with llvmpipe as opengl backend (did not work with panfrost disabled) but maybe this is a wayfire thing or its config thing
so it was okish

also Xorg (libdrm) needs a patch to work in the above setup on freebsd / without the patch its always llvmpipe and never hardware accel
 
When I got a 4K high DPI monitor I switched to plasma5 running on wayland for the hi-dpi support. It seems to work. But a lot of my fave X11 apps only work with xwayland and probably won't get ported.. you can apply a global scale factor but it's pretty naff. So my take is wayland is good for high DPI, but otherwise I'm on the fence. I don't want to lose a lot of useful X programs (including some window managers) if they get deprecated by wayland. And then there is loss of remote X, which is a userful feature of X11. It's very useful to be able to run individual X clients or even a full desktop on a remote machine (in a nested X server), if you're working in an environment with one or more test labs in other buildings or elsewhere. Vnc doesn't cut it, not really. But I guess there are other options nowadays - web interfaces, rdesktop, etc.
 
Yay.

X11 is an unholy mess of security bugs. Any app can spy on any app. I want something I can trust for online banking.

And XWayland just works for X11 apps. RDP is not something I really use. The only place where I miss this functionality is in Android though.
 
rbranco said:
Any app can spy on any app.
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Interop is a "pro" and a "con" depending on your use-case. But if you isolate the Xauthority MIT cookie you can find a good compromise.
rbranco said:
I want something I can trust for online banking.
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If browsers were less scummy then the next bastion is the display server. But at this point, X11 IPC is the least of our worries.

The only thing I would trust at this point is online banking via an SSH session. But unfortunately the mouth-breathing public prefer insecurity rather than a lack of.... pictures.
 
rbranco said:
X11 is an unholy mess of security bugs. Any app can spy on any app. I want something I can trust for online banking.
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I figure any app can spy on anything regardless of OS.

Or rather, what are people running that could fall under malware that they don't want interacting with other apps? I trust everything I run; LibreOffice probably isn't keylogging what I do in GIMP :p
 
nay on Wayland
yay on X11
yay on XLibre

Wayland is not an upgrade to X11, so I have to believe there are thousands of programs that will not work in Wayland. Destined to become obsolete because they will not be rewritten. I've read in prior comments that XWayland seems to mitigate that concern but we will see. I think I want to stay where there is more program compatibility.

XFCE+X11 running a NVidia Quadro P2200 with 2 monitors.
 
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