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by bpfrh 503 days ago
I mean most of the things are the fault of a badly designed or non existent protocols:

-Problems with non western input systems

-Accessibility

-Remote control(took around 2 years to be stable I think?)

-Bad color management

Then there's the things that did work in x11 but not in wayland:

-Bad support for keymapping(the input library says keymapping should be implemented by the compositor, gnome says not in scope, so we have a regression)

-bad nvidia support for the first two years? three years?

While these things are compositor/hw vendor faults, the rush to use wayland and nearly every distro making it as default, forced major regressions and wayland kinda promised to improve the x11 based experience.

5 comments

Yes, and to the parents point it was a CHANGE in protocol.

I get there was cruft in x. But the moment selected was a barrier to Linux desktop adoption precisely when the greatest opportunity in decades was present.

And the desktop was reimplemented.

Now in this period kde and gnome both decided to do rewrites, Ubuntu did their own desktop, got it up to snuff, and abandoned it. The lunacy wasn't just Wayland.

If we are complaining the gnome compositor sucks... I mean , should that be the goddamn reference implementation? What percent of desktops are gnome, 80% at least? If the gnome composting ready for primetime, then Wayland isn't ready for primetime.

>If the gnome composting ready for primetime, then Wayland isn't ready for primetime.

I use Sway, which uses a different compos[i]tor than Gnome. I would like to see similar results for wlroots, Sway's compositor, though I'm not actually interested enough to do the experiment (I guess that would be comparing Sway with i3). Cursor lag in Sway is not enough to bother me. I have on occasion used Gnome on the same machine(s), and never been bothered by lag.

As others have pointed out, Wayland is a protocol, not a compositor.

"As others have pointed out, Wayland is a protocol, not a compositor."

But the Wayland protocol requires a compositor, so here we are.

I have no idea of the difference(s) in performance between wlroots and Gnome's compositor. Protocols do not have performance, implementations do. If someone can prove that the Wayland protocol, on a certain set of tasks, and in a certain environment, has a better or worse performance than the X11 protocol, then it might be possible to make abstract comparisons on protocol.

Given that Gnome runs on both X and Wayland, it might be interesting to hear from the Gnome authors on the performance differences.

Nvidia support is still poor (at least on latest cards), I'm forced to use X or I get tons of glitches. I need the proprietary drivers for machine learning.

Not that I mind particularly, X is fine and everything works as expected. I can even have the integrated (amd gpu) take care of the desktop while the Nvidia gpu does machine learning (I need all the vram I can get, the desktop alone would be 100-150mb of vram) - then I start a game on steam and the nvidia gpu gets used.

Funnily enough I had wayland enabled by default when I installed the system and I didn't understand why I was getting random freeze and artifacts for weeks. Then I realized I was not using X11

nvidia has been great on wayland since 550; Everyone running CachyOS is on 570 now
Isn't this an issue with Nvidia not releasing open source drivers ?
> the rush to use wayland and nearly every distro making it as default,

Which rush? It has been done by only a small fraction of distros like Fedora, after years of development of the first wayland compositors. Fedora main purpose has always been to implement bleeding edge tech stuff early so that bugs get found and fixed before people using more stable distros have to suffer from it.

Nobody has been forced in any regression and x11 has continued to be available until now and there is no sign that the most conservative distros will drop x11 support anytime soon.

I have run Wayland since it was available for testing on Fedora Workstation and I have had zero problems inputting Japanese and Chinese.

With regards to accessibility, what problems have you had exactly?

> With regards to accessibility, what problems have you had exactly?

Fedora shipped a broken screen reader for 8 years.

Is there a bug report for this anywhere? Does everything work now?
I vaguely remember someone made a blog post about it and got piled-on. I think it's now fixed or being fixed.

Edit: Found it https://ar.al/2024/06/23/fedora-has-been-shipping-with-a-bro...

> I have had zero problems inputting Japanese and Chinese.

That may be fine.

Neo2 does not work. Neo has 3 modifier keys, Gnome/Mutter/Wayland/Whatever does only support two. Neo2 has a compose key, Wayland does not honor it.

https://neo-layout.org/

I use mod4 for navigation (arrow keys, site up) and compose for Slavish (read Polish) input (źżąę)

2 finger scroll doesn't work on my thinkpad model.

Not a bug, apparently. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/issues/10...

I think that gnome has had built-in IME, but at least for a long time, it wasn't possible to use a third party system with gnome, or use gnome's with other compositors. And I'm pretty sure the situation was the same for sreen readers and on-screen keyboards. The wlroots project created their own protocols to support external applications to provide such features, since that is out of scope for a compositor like sway, but there are still missing pieces.
I've used Wayland on Fedora for 16 years. Had to disable Nvidia GPU on laptop And use Intel GPU for first 11 years. Now have been using AMD GPU smoothly for 5 years. But I hear Nvidia is slowly getting back on the game. Let's hope they get stable support less than 20 years of wayland being in use on major desktop Linux distros.