Wayland - yay or nay?

Zare

Zare

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
 
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

forums.freebsd.org

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 forums.freebsd.org

github.com

cerberus/dwl at master · NapoleonWils0n/cerberus

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

wayfire

forums.freebsd.org

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 forums.freebsd.org

labwc

forums.freebsd.org

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 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

forums.freebsd.org

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...
forums.freebsd.org forums.freebsd.org

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

forums.freebsd.org

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 forums.freebsd.org

my config on github

github.com

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.com

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.com

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 github.com
 
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.
 
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.
Click to expand...

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.
 
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. ;)
 
Yay for two days :cool: On NVIDIA. Before the very recent nvidia-drm-kmod update, Wayland on my Quadro T2000 never worked before. AMD for sure.
 
cracauer@ said:
They can wake me up when they have a remote protocol.
Click to expand...
Waypipe

gitlab.freedesktop.org

M. Stoeckl / Waypipe · GitLab

Network transparency with Wayland
gitlab.freedesktop.org gitlab.freedesktop.org

forums.freebsd.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...
forums.freebsd.org forums.freebsd.org
 
Nay at this moment, as I could not yet succeeded:
  • Japanese IME working
  • Make it working on HiDPI for all apps running
  • At least one user belonging to wheel as primary group to start compositor
A test user which primary group is NOT wheel can start x11-wm/wayfire, but the first 2 items persists.

And additionally, I still cannot find magnifier which works just as Mag plugin for x11-wm/compiz (a large lupe moves with mouse cursor) on Wayland.
More, the majority of compositors seems to be tiling style, but I dislike it (I love overwrapping window rather than tiling, so I haven't even tested tiling compositors). I'm using compiz over Mate just for compiz's excellent Mag plugin. If all the problems I've listed are resolved and any compositor appears in ports having look and feel equivalent with Mate+compiz, I would start reconsidering to switch to Wayland again. But it's not now.
 
Meh, Wayland is still nah for me.

Since 2016, my Corsair Harpoon RGB mouse at 1000Hz (several of em, different PCs, even a PRO model) all felt floaty on GNOME on Wayland, and I don't understand why end-users (Reddit, various communities) were pushing benefits of it so hard. I can understand devs and package maintainers (Fedora used "maintenance burden"), but real-world it hasn't offered me a visible benefit year ago, downsides (lower perf in games and resolution issues), and today in 2024.

The floaty mouse thing was notably improved with Fedora 41 beta and GNOME 47 (2024) to the point I'm content with it, but Xorg on Xfce still works great!
 
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Reactions: Pap
Zare said:
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.
Click to expand...

I tried Plasma 6 Wayland on Fedora 40 when it was new and OOM killer took out Plasma with 1TB swap: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/oom-kills-plasma-6/114599/1

That doesn't necessarily say anything about Plasma 6 and Wayland (it worked pretty well), but seemingly Fedora was ready to push it at the expense of end-users (no session restore; someone didn't prevent OOM killer from taking out DEs; and OOM killer on Linux being wacky enough to not care about 1TB swap).
 
NapoleonWils0n said:
another benefit of Wayland is increased security
Click to expand...
Security to protect against what?

If I'm running trustworthy apps under Xorg, I imagine I don't have to be concerned with them seeing clicks in other apps?

Like running Diablo 2 under Wine and having a Firefox window open; I'm sure they can both see each other's mouse locations and keys pressed, but what's the risk there? D2 and Wine likely aren't doing anything nefarious, and Firefox I have blocks and don't generally browse shady websites (I clear cookies/etc on exit and close the browser fully frequently throughout the day).
 
jb82 said:
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...
Click to expand...

Yes, my remote X11ing is always through ssh.

I rarely use it for browsers, because as you imagine that isn't really fast enough. Just for things like try out a profile change or a proxy on a machine that I am not currently sitting at.

Otherwise:
- I use keyboard LEDs as "biff" for my mail. The mail machine doesn't even have a X11 server, but the ledbiff works fine through ssh
- I have a program "f" for "finished" which notifies me when a shell job finished. It does that by popping up a X11 window. Obviously the work machines are usually different from the display I sit on
- XPra
 
Btw, FF font rendering looks substantially different between Wayland and Xorg. At least on my machine. For the very same GTK font setup, e.g. in the Tabs bar (captions of tabs). Does anybody know anything about that? Even the size feels different. DPI?
 
T-Aoki re Japanese input and Wayland, what input manager do you use? And, have you tried on QT applications? I'm finding that I can get it working, usually, though not always with Firefox, and less often with OpenOffice. I have no trouble with terminals, both alacritty and rxvt-unicode. I know the QT issues began when I upgraded to fcitx5 and I had to do various things to get it consistantly working, even in X.
I'm using fcitx5-anthy. Not sure if I should make a separate thread for this, but for the moment I'll leave it here.

To the original poster, since recent Nvidia updates to 550.120, Wayland works fine for me (It was already working on an L420 Thinkpad, with AMD. As far as X apps, I've only tried a few, xbiff worked but not well, if I used a floating window to make it small, and I haven't figured out how to get the date in a dwlb (bar for dwl), and I have had some issues with Japanese input. But, having my every day applications (usually terminals, browser and weechat for Slack at work), as well as playing videos, is all going smoothly. For my own use case, I am missing a few things I still have in X (such as above-mentioned date in the bar) but otherwise, I don't, at this point, see any reason not to use it.
 
scottro said:
T-Aoki re Japanese input and Wayland, what input manager do you use?
Click to expand...
I've tried japanese/ibus-mozc at the moment, because:

scottro said:
And, have you tried on QT applications?
Click to expand...
If I recall correctly,I've tried libreoffice (QT5), without luck for Japanese input.
 
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