Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by earthscienceman 931 days ago
As usual, everyone is having a different experience. Exact opposite here. I've been on Wayland two years and it's far more stable and reliable and pleasant. Are there problems, definitely. Are they different than the problems you're used to with X? definitely.

But in general everything works much better. Lower CPU usage, no random tearing or glitching or lost windows, hidpi percentage scaling is amazing and a godsend (and the reason I switched originally) and I couldn't be happier.

Thank you to all the devs for the amazing hard work!

4 comments

> hidpi percentage scaling is amazing and a godsend (and the reason I switched originally)

Fractional scaling is quite new (first introduced Nov 2022) in Wayland and still pretty experimental, I tried it last year with Fedora and couldn't get satisfactory text rendering. In X I've set fractional scaling with .Xresources Xft.dpi for over 10 years with great results. I'm having a hard time understanding how you switched for this.

It seems to me that Wayland is a little bit better than X11 at all of the common things, at the cost of being way, way worse than X11 at the uncommon things.
Agree with GP, I ran Wayland (sway) for a few months and eventually switched back to X11. Graphical glitches, compositing latency, no reasonable screenshot tool and daily "I hope screen sharing works today" eventually became too much. For me, X11 just works and always has.

I hope X11 will work long enough for Wayland to sort out all its small annoyances.

Many of those major problems (which you call annoyances) will never be sorted out because the "Wayland Comitte" has decided that even the basic functionality is "out of scope".

After 15 years of development Wayland developers have not only proven to be incompetent but also resistant to learn. As such they can't be trusted to ever come up with anything functional.

The Wayland developers are the X11 developers. The reason there's no more development on X11 is because everyone got fed up and left for Wayland.
This is obviously wrong. The most capable X11 developers retired (like KP) and the least capable developers of the younger generation started Wayland.
Keith Packard was working on Wayland and XWayland...
It's as the other commenter says. This is just a story you told yourself to justify your opinion after the fact. X11 is ancient and its sprawling patchwork codebase shows it.
Despite being ancient it's still better than Wayland. The "same developers" narrative is just a story you tell yourself to justify your opinion after the fact. Wayland is fundamentaly flawed on every level. Its sprawling patchwork of parallel infrastructure an duplicated effort shows it.
On Gnome everything you mentioned should work, for me much better than in X11 (except probably your graphics issues which sound like driver bugs). Even proprietary apps like Zoom support Wayland screen sharing now, so I don't think there are many issues left.

However, if you want a tiling window manager, then Wayland will not be the most pleasant experience right now. I guess the issue is mostly that there is a lot that has to be ported from X11 to Wayland, and standardization of new protocols takes time.

But screenshots are easy, try e.g. grimshot.

More stable, as in you have experienced X crashing? In my decades of using it, I don't think I've seen X crash once. Well, maybe once when I was futzing around with Bumblebee?