[Decabytes]

I don’t know how I feel about Wayland. On the one hand it’s being made by x11 devs so I think they more than anyone else know why they would need to start from scratch over improving x11. On the other hand, moving away from x breaks so many things and I haven’t heard anyone singing it’s praises yet about how happy they are to use it.

I understand apps are breaking because they relied on features of x that were security risks but it doesn’t seem like Wayland provides a safe or convenient alternative to the way apps were doing things before.

I wonder if it will ever reach the adoption level of x11

[scaladev]

I am a happy Wayland user, and have been for a long time. There are many more out there. You don't often hear us because we don't spend every waking hour shitting on Xorg and praising Wayland for how good it is (maybe we should?)

>I wonder if it will ever reach the adoption level of x11

It will, considering that Xorg is effectively no longer maintained and its developers have switched to working on Wayland protocols long ago, which they have stated on multiple occasions.

Somehow I doubt that the loudmouths you often hear will step up to maintain X.

[sprash]

What is the process to become a release manager for X11 without forking it? I assume you can't just walk in there and say "I'll do that".

[tinus_hn]

I assume it starts with showing you’re up to it by putting in the work. You don’t need to be the release manager to contribute patches.

[codewiz]

But who will review your patches, if all the core devs have already moved on to Wayland?

[tinus_hn]

Who will give you maintainership?

[iampivot]

It's open source, you can provide your own distribution of it.

[bombcar]

You fork it and your fork becomes the mainly used one is how it normally happens.

[sergeykish]

Who would risk stability? And what is the issue with forking? ffmpeg/libav, openssl/libressl managed fine. No fork is the symptom.

[sprash]

The other forks you are mentioning are a completely different problem because there were inherent philosophical differences among developers.

X11 just needs "a release" so that package maintainers and distros can push updates. If you fork it you only make things worse.

[sergeykish]

Just needs a release that could contain bugs, could contain exploits. And current maintainers are not going to risk? I'm typing on X11 system, and it works, proving previous maintainers got it right. I am fine if active developers make a fork, prove its worth, some distributions adopting it, finally fork merged into base with new leadership.

[vially]

> and I haven’t heard anyone singing it’s praises yet about how happy they are to use it

As is often the case, people are much quicker to go to forums to complain about issues than to sing praises so I'm here to add a data-point trying to balance the scale.

I've been using Wayland for a few years now and it does everything I need it to do. I understand that everyone has different needs and maybe it doesn't work for everyone, but then again, neither did X11.

Some of the things that work out of the box in Wayland which didn't work in X11:

- proper HiDPI and mixed DPI support (e.g.: you can finally move windows from one screen to another in mixed DPI setups and everything scales properly)

- variable refresh rates/FreeSync (for all apps and all screens)

- no more tearing

- no more hot-plugging issues

[gurkendoktor]

Besides security concerns, mixed-DPI setups are such a major pain point with X11 that many people who use a laptop with additional screens would probably switch to Wayland just for that alone. That's a large demographic.

[tyfon]

Do any desktop system handle mixed DPI well?

I mainly use Linux so I don't know, but one of my work laptops have windows on it and it freaks out every time I connect it to a 4k monitor.

At least in linux I can use triggers and xrandr [1] to manage it even if it's not pretty, never figured out how to do it automatically in windows.

Edit: I am using KDE/Qt apps for 99% of my gui stuff. Gnome etc might be worse.

[1] http://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/mixed-dpi-x11/#therandrway

[Mister_Snuggles]

> Do any desktop system handle mixed DPI well?

MacOS handles it very well, moving a window from a high-DPI display to a low-DPI display works perfectly.

I'm not sure about how Windows handles mixed-DPI, but it handles DPI changes mostly OK. I only access my Windows machines via RDP, so sometimes they get a high-DPI display and sometimes they get a low-DPI one. Apart from one program (there are per-program settings available in Windows to help fix scaling issues) everything seems to handle it fine.

[kevincox]

IIUC the macOS approach is functional but not perfect. I believe it renders all apps at a high resolution (higher than the highest attached display), then the compositor downscales them to the display. This means that apps are using more resources to render and are unable to render pixel-perfect.

I believe that on Wayland the apps are told the scaling factors of the monitors that they are on (or the compositor can scale them if they don't want to switch resolution or are across multiple monitors).

AFAIK apps can't work around this very easily (if at all).

[kitsunesoba]

IME mixed DPI under Windows is a mixed bag, with behavior varying on an app to app basis. For instance Telegram (Qt) can’t deal with being moved from one screen to the other and will look either tiny or huge, but most Win32 and WinUI apps work just fine.

This distinction doesn’t exist on macOS for the most part, even “foreign” UI libraries will appear the correct size when changing screens.

[Cu3PO42]

Anecdotally both macOS and Windows have handled mixed DPI just fine for me.

[vially]

> Do any desktop system handle mixed DPI well?

This works today out-of-the-box in Wayland as long as the applications are Wayland native (e.g.: not being run through XWayland).

[solarkraft]

This is a major pain with the current generation of Electron apps, but luckily the newest version supports Wayland.

HiDPI is also in the works for XWayland, but it looks complicated and still a few months out.

[sz4kerto]

Windows handles it perfectly (anecdotal). Not sure what do you mean by freaking out.

[411111111111111]

Probably how the scaling is off while you drag windows from/to hidpi displays. The scaling is only adjusted once the pointer moves to the other display.

At least that's how it was for me when I used a high dpi display (160 dpi) 2 yrs ago. (I switched back to 90dpi at some point, so they might have improved it by now)

[bombcar]

Mac OS X handles this by rendering everything at some insane resolution and the scaling just before displaying

[kitsunesoba]

That only applies for non-integer scales. If you run at clean 2x or 3x everything is drawn at native scale, unless the app doesn’t support HiDPI in which case it’s drawn at 1x and scaled up.

[solarkraft]

Works perfectly on Wayfire and I assume Sway.

I briefly tried out Gnome and KDE, with the former "meh" (no fractional scaling, scaling glitches when dragging between displays) and the latter garbage (couldn't find scaling settings at all, so nothing is readable on the laptop display).

Widows is between "okay" and "nice" (somewhat fractional scaling, glitches between displays, some wrong scalings, but it's rare).

I haven't tried macOS yet, but expect it to be flawless, like or slightly better than the experience on Wayfire.

[sho_hn]

Fwiw, System Settings -> Display has the per-screen scale settings.

My wife got a 4K desktop screen for her FHD laptop a few months ago and it made us switch her system to Plasma's Wayland session. Mixed DPI works fine, also dynamically (i.e. dock/undock).

[COGlory]

KDE scaling settings are pretty obviously in the Display Settings page so I'm going to say that one is user failure.

[sprash]

This is not the fault of X11 since it exposes all necessary data via the xrandr extention[1]. It is just toolkits like Gtk that choose to ignore that information on X11 but not on Wayland.

1.: http://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/mixed-dpi-x11/

[naranha]

> I don’t know how I feel about Wayland.

Me neither. On the one hand I switched over 2 years ago and it worked fine for the most part, there a still a few things missing. One of the things were headless displays and it seems like there will be something like that in GNOME 40 - though probably experimental.

What bothers me most is that innovation is so difficult. Everything needs to be standardized first and then implemented in all different desktops like KDE and GNOME each in their own way. And this process is extremly slow. Back in the Xorg days many cool programs were made by independent users (for sceensharing, automation etc.). Writing a new Desktop or porting over one from X is almost impossible, were it not for wlroots. I wonder if we are not sacrificing too much in the name of security (OK an evil program can not keygrab and control other windows, but it can still read all my SSH keys etc.).

[mrweasel]

If Wayland doesn’t replace X11, then something else needs to show up, or we drop the idea of a Linux/BSD desktop. X11 is pretty much abandoned as this point. It’s only a few RedHat engineers who are doing minor patches and no one want to manage the future releases.

[sprash]

There are still contributors and maintainers. Just release management "decided" that X11 is now deprecated.

[andrewaylett]

I've been running Wayland for a few years now, and while I wouldn't say I've had a _perfect_ experience, I don't think I've had a time when logging out and trying an X session worked any better.

X has always had niggles, which I don't miss.

So right now, it's very much at the same level as many other system features: consistently works, and maybe the reason I'm not singing its praises more loudly is because I've come to take that for granted.

[flas9sd]

> I haven’t heard anyone singing it’s praises yet about how happy they are to use it

to benefit from every feature one has to run current software, as the ecosystem catches up. And as others write, AMD/Intel gfx have a better time than if you're on Nvidia.

Wayland as of writing has my use-cases covered: hw accelerated video decode in Browsers (FF and Chrome), Browser screensharing (via pipewire) and via VNC (conveniently surfaced to gnome-settings if gnome-remote-desktop is present). Most current distributions do not carry all necessary packages in their defaults last I checked, so one had to have some interest and flip one or two browser config flags.

[sildur]

> I haven’t heard anyone singing it’s praises yet about how happy they are to use it.

I'm no expert on either X11 or Wayland. But I can tell you that happy people are usually silent while unhappy people are noisy.

[destructionator]

> they more than anyone else know why they would need to start from scratch over improving x11.

That's not what they actually say though:

https://wayland.freedesktop.org/faq.html#heading_toc_j_5

"It's entirely possible to incorporate the buffer exchange and update models that Wayland is built on into X. "

Again, they literally say "It's entirely possible". They just didn't want to.

[nialv7]

> ... over improving x11

They have literally been improving X11 for several decades.