[vlovich123]

> Till today I have found X11 configuration one of the toughest things in Linux. I'd rather google for some wayland specific flags than worry about X11.

My experience here is that this used to be true more than ten years ago. At some point in between that though X11 managed to get to 0 config. At least, I installed Arch & didn't have to touch the X config at all and things just worked (on NVidia at least).

I'm not trying to say needing flags is something bad. That stuff will get ironed out for sure. But if you want to avoid Xwayland, you need flags (& it's not just Chrome & Firefox - Electron needs similar things) AND Xwayland on Nvidia is a mess right now with no end in sight.

> Xwayland is a transitional thing anyways too. When X is dead we won't need to worry about Xwayland either.

Some apps don't even support Wayland and likely won't for a long time and I think you're underestimating how long XWayland will be a thing (e.g. Tcl/TK which is powers a surprising number of developer tooling UIs doesn't have Wayland & doesn't seem to have enough interest to really push this to production though previous ports have been attempted & made progress). FWIW, this argument has been made since Wayland started 15 years ago. I won't even have the same machine in 5 years.

> X11 is overcomplicated, over-engineered, barely maintained, is apparently broken from a security angle, ancient...

It's funny the kind of arguments that get made because you think I'm against your position. I agree with you and think Wayland should replace X11. But there are very real problems with it today & there's a reason anyone with an NVidia GPU goes "uggh. Wayland". The problem is not just on Nvidia's end and I see cultural problems from Wayland's side too (likely because they've faced so much drive by attacks). I feel like Nvidia is stepping up on their side though - I don't see the same from Wayland/XWayland camp.

[sidkshatriya]

> Nvidia is stepping up on their side though - I don't see the same from Wayland/XWayland camp

Genuinely curious -- what stepping up should happen from Wayland/XWayland ? Intel and AMD seem to work well on it so is it because they have some accepted some ugly hacks that Nvidia are not willing to do ? Something else ?

[vlovich123]

In terms of stepping up, they seem to be tackling through Wayland issues. The latest 545 seems to have people on forums saying “this fixed so many Wayland issues for me”. Now either they are paying professional astrosurfers, or they legitimately fixed some classes of bugs (or it’s random). My experience though is that this kind of feedback tends to be genuine. So I’m giving kudos where it’s due and it seems like the Nvidia team is starting to focus on Wayland issues. Similarly, I was observing recent bug tracker activity on Chrome and Nvidia and all that seemed to be tracking bugs on their end (which not surprising - Nvidia and Google have strong relationships between Android, Chrome, and formerly Stadia).

I don’t know the details on the Xwayland BS (which is the main visible issue I’m seeing as unhealthy). I have not done the technical research to fully understand whose position is actually justified. Heck it might be that both sides are correct on the facts (it doesn’t make sense to add the support that makes other GPUs work and it doesn’t make sense yet to add the new way for Nvidia) but the net outcome is that Xwayland on Nvidia’s propietary drivers remains broken for the foreseeable future. Both Intel and AMD both support something called implicit synchronization. But apparently explicit synchronization is “the future” because it enables more performance and Nvidia has clearly communicated they’re not going to support implicit. Xwayland only supports implicit synchronization and refuses to add explicit synchronization (I think strong arming their position is that the explicit synchronization protocol is isn’t ready or not popular enough yet in the ecosystem? I’m not sure). Nvidia has contributed some patch to fix Xwayland to use explicit synchronization when running on the propietary driver (or something like that).