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by bartvk 1203 days ago
I'm not up to date on the Linux desktop ecosystem. In what sense is Wayland struggling?
2 comments

Dudemanguy wrote about its deficiencies 2022-06-11 [0], ex lack of feature parity with X11 and self imposed limitations like only allowing integer scaling (ie to get 1.5 scaling, it uses x3/x2 scaling). For some perspective, consider checking other hn reader reactions to this post [1].

[0] https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/posts/2022-06-10-wayland-x...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31752760

It doesn't work reliably on any GPU I own, for any stable version of a linux distro I use. One GPU is too old, the other is too nvidia.
To be fair, I'm on an five-year old laptop with NVIDIA and since last year it almost works well enough to be a daily driver. For some weird reason Chromium doesn't render at all, even though Chrome does. That's the only remaining bug of significance.

Whereas when I tried a year before I had to bail after an hour because many applications would just have a black screen.

It kind of feels like it will take only one more year for this to work well enough (except then the laptop might be so old hardware support ends up lacking)

Wayland uses linux’s gpu abstraction (drm) to work and that’s it. If it fails to work than linux also does, so your setup has some issues.
I have to disable hardware compositing on X11 to get a reliable desktop (and HW rendering in individual apps like firefox). I'm not sure if something similar is possible on Wayland.
It doesn't sound like X11 is running reliably for you either
I restart X11 only when either there's a power failure longer than the battery on my UPS, or I upgrade my kernel, so it's reliable enough.
Having to disable compositing doesn't sound very reliable.
That doesn’t depend on the protocol, I think most implementations can simply choose a so-called “dumb” backend instead of hardware composition.