Wayland - yay or nay?

Zare · 2024-10-16T12:52:20+0100

Hello everyone,

I've been avoiding Wayland on Linux for some time, but I was provided a work machine with KDE Plasma that works great and very fluid, and wasn't aware that it's running on Wayland. E.g. there was absolutely 0 problems with it and I didn't even had to know what underlying DS is that Linux using.

I know there's a myriad of threads here but versions are moving and support is getting better all the time. So what's the current status, I can see it works on FreeBSD, does it work nicely all the time, and do all X apps work normally under Xwayland? How about DRI eg 3D ones?

I presume that everything using Qt and GTK will natively switch to wayland, I'm curious about the "old" X stuff. It's common to have a previous, not up to dadte version of some infrequently used piece of software in ports.

Currently, I have KDE 5 on X11 on 14.0 and it's working good. I guess several forum people have moved and daily driving Wayland and/or KDE, so give out your story/verdict is this a good move to be doing now.

Thanks

NapoleonWils0n · 2024-10-16T13:09:03+0100

hi mate

yay

i have been using Wayland since last December with no issues at all

dwl is the best wayland compositor because it has independent workspaces per monitor,
labwc is a wayland version of openbox, wayfire has lots of effects if thats your thing

kde 6 doesnt work with Wayland properly on Freebsd yet,
for instance it still tries to use a kde5 package to shutdown

dwl

freebsd dwl wayland tiling window manager install

freebsd dwl wayland tiling window manager install with patches in a separate git branch. the reason why you need to build dwl on freebsd rather than using the port or packages is because the dwl package lets you set an variable called DWL_HOME_CONFIG that points to a dwl config.h file which...

forums.freebsd.org

cerberus/dwl at master · NapoleonWils0n/cerberus

cerberus code library. Contribute to NapoleonWils0n/cerberus development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

wayfire

Freebsd 14 Wayland and Wayfire using Nvidia on Dell XPS 15

Freebsd 14 Wayland running the Wayfire compositor on a Dell XPS 15 2019 using a Nvidia graphics card All the hardware works but you need to use wifibox for the wifi drivers, and nvidia on freebsd doesnt yet support nvenc and cuda the packages needed are nvidia-driver nvidia-settings...

forums.freebsd.org

labwc

labwc a stacking wayland window manager inspired by openbox

Labwc is a wlroots-based window-stacking compositor for wayland, inspired by openbox. In this video i cover window placement , setting the theme, creating keyboard shortcuts to switch workspaces and move windows to different workspaces and monitors How to warp your cursor between monitors...

forums.freebsd.org

XWayland programs work with no issue,
you have to configure dwl to use XWayland

i run Davinci Resolve 19 as a XWayland app in a Rocky Linux 9 jail for video editing

Davinci Resolve 19.1 installed in a Rocky Linux jail

Davinci Resolve 19.1 video editor installed in a Rocky Linux 9 jail on Freebsd 14.1 p4 https://github.com/NapoleonWils0n/davinci-resolve-freebsd-jail-rocky Davinci Resolve on linux is actually tested with Rocky Linux it used to be Centos We use the Rocky-9-Container-Base.latest.x86_64.tar.xz...

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I run Duke Nuke em on Wayland as well
come get some

Duke Numem on Freebsd

Duke Nukem install on Freebsd using the eduke32 package Come get some Duke Nukem install instructions on github https://github.com/NapoleonWils0n/cerberus/blob/master/freebsd/eduke32.org

forums.freebsd.org

my config on github

GitHub - NapoleonWils0n/freebsd-root-xps: freebsd root dotfiles for dell xps 15 2019

freebsd root dotfiles for dell xps 15 2019. Contribute to NapoleonWils0n/freebsd-root-xps development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

GitHub - NapoleonWils0n/freebsd-dotfiles-xps: freebsd dotfiles dell xps 15 2019

freebsd dotfiles dell xps 15 2019. Contribute to NapoleonWils0n/freebsd-dotfiles-xps development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

GitHub - NapoleonWils0n/freebsd-bin-xps: freebsd-bin-xps

freebsd-bin-xps. Contribute to NapoleonWils0n/freebsd-bin-xps development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

eternal_noob · 2024-10-16T13:14:10+0100

I'd get used to Wayland rather sooner than later since X11 will die.

cracauer@ · 2024-10-16T13:19:09+0100

They can wake me up when they have a remote protocol.

eternal_noob · 2024-10-16T13:30:45+0100

I don't think that networking capabilities should be a core feature of a display server / protocol.

The prevailing philosophy of the Unix operating system is simple: do one thing well.

cracauer@ · 2024-10-16T13:38:50+0100

eternal_noob said:
I don't think that networking capabilities should be a core feature of a display server / protocol.

The prevailing philosophy of the Unix operating system is simple: do one thing well.

That's a good philosophy to have. But I don't see how to add a single-client remote protocol (without having a local client copy or even a local server) by tagging on a different program later.

Then there is advanced usage such as XPra.

kpedersen · 2024-10-16T13:57:43+0100

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.

So I think it is admirable people using immature software today and pushing things forward. But they are effectively limiting themselves to very early software. Think the X11 equivalent being TWM vs OpenBox. It took many decades for X10/X11 to become "good". In other words, the terminal emulators are immature, the xrandr equivalents are immature, the "WMs" are immature. And thats fine. Still early days

.

After my decades of using computers, I just kind of expect more than that in 2024. So just like Linux itself, I am happy to exploit Wayland as i.e part of an appliance but I sure as hell won't be using it on my day to day workstation.

(As for enterprise usage requiring a network aware display system, Wayland is effectively irrelevant. No products are using it even after decades. This doesn't look to be changing. The use-case for Wayland and X11 are quite different).

TL;DR: Linux crap. Non-Linux operating systems will of course support it for compatibility but it will always be crap until the next crap thing comes along.

fmc000 · 2024-10-16T14:16:49+0100

Xfce4 defaults to X11 -> I use X11 on my laptop. Simple as that.

jb82 · 2024-10-16T14:21:20+0100

Yay for two days

On NVIDIA. Before the very recent nvidia-drm-kmod update, Wayland on my Quadro T2000 never worked before. AMD for sure.

jb82 · 2024-10-16T14:22:55+0100

cracauer@ said:
They can wake me up when they have a remote protocol.

I'm curious. Remote protocol as in ssh -X/Y? I've never made that work good enough even for a single Firefox window and even on a bhyve based localhost VM. It was barely usable...

NapoleonWils0n · 2024-10-16T14:27:09+0100

cracauer@ said:
They can wake me up when they have a remote protocol.

Waypipe

M. Stoeckl / Waypipe · GitLab

Network transparency with Wayland: https://mstoeckl.com/notes/gsoc/blog.html

gitlab.freedesktop.org

Solved - waypipe display linuxulator wayland applications running in a chroot on freebsd

waypipe is x-forwarding for wayland whats really cool is you can use waypipe to forward a wayland application running in a linuxulator choot to freebsd on the same machine running wayland using waypipe sockets in the tmp dir of the chroot i have wayland set up on both freebsd and the ubuntu...

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