> My # 1 issue with wayland is it is Linux Specific, not protable.
Personally my #1 is just that stuff still don't work properly in a out-of-the-box Gnome+Wayland setup (on Arch). I still see weird things like a Firefox extension for making websites darker has a white line rendering through the pages when in use (probably something regarding aspect ratio?), some Electron apps like Obsidian sometimes have individual lines jittering up/down by 1-2 pixels (like it can't find the right/stable position), running nvidia-smi somehow introduces a 0.1 lag to seemingly my entire desktop, running it in a loop introduces that every run, and so on.
None of those issues happens with Xorg, and it just works without having set extra env vars for specific applications, or having to change the configuration just for Wayland to be used properly.
It seems to be less resource intensive, and smoother overall drawing, but all these issues make it kind of hard to start using daily over Xorg.
Yeah, you're probably right. I guess as I'm just an end-user who don't mind the internals that much, I'm just seeing how Xorg/Wayland work in the context of Gnome, so when I use Gnome+Xorg, everything works while using Gnome+Wayland leads to lots of stuff broken, so I associate the broken stuff with Wayland, although it could very well be the problem of how Gnome uses Wayland.
Although I'm not sure how Gnome affects how Firefox Extensions work, or how Electron applications render, I also don't know enough about the internals to say that's because of Gnome or Wayland.
its not even just arch linux. you can literally buy a PC from anyone who sells ubuntu 24.04 and you still cant properly install (and have them work out of the box) snap store items like shutter.
>Input is more complex to get working since Wayland applications expect Linux input model with udev, evdev and libinput.
>seatd and libseat provide support for non-systemd based systems. A basic port to OpenBSD/wscons is needed
So Wayland requires Linux specific items to be ported to BSD. Maybe FreeBSD did all that work themselves. Was that work accepted into upstream ? Based on how Linux works these days, I doubt it. So maybe each new Wayland Release will need to be patched for FreeBSD.
That patching is nothing new. It's pretty automated on FreeBSD. It has a ports system that does just that.
I don't think udev is ported though. Some linuxisms are, like dbus because several desktops need it. But FreeBSD has its own udev alternative called devd. Wayland is probably configured to just use that.
The compositor needs to talk to the hardware using kernel API and there's a bit of plumbing required, like for OpenGL / Vulkan apps to get a context under Wayland. Which isn't really "particularly" tied.
How does "lots" quantify, though? There are billions of desktop Windows users. There are tens of millions of desktop Linux users. I expect desktop BSD to go beyond the thousands, but does it reach the hundreds of thousands?
I've always felt like from a purely user perspective desktop BSD doesn't really distinguish itself from Linux. The software stack is essentially the same, and they're both FLOSS so that's not a reason to switch either. Maybe I'm wrong, but the Linux/BSD choice looks a lot less relevant than the Windows/Linux choice.
So if people use desktop BSD because it essentially gives them slightly fuzzier feelings, and they are essentially a rounding error in their user base, is it really fair to criticize Linux developers for not focusing on portability? You can only spend your time once, so do you use it to work on something benefiting your tens of millions of existing Linux users, or something benefiting your thousands of potential BSD users?
The question was if anyone uses BSD as a desktop and the answer is yes people do.
> You can only spend your time once, so do you use it to work on something benefiting your tens of millions of existing Linux users, or something benefiting your thousands of potential BSD users?
I couldn’t care less how the Wayland devs decided to prioritise their time. But it is worth pointing out that Wayland was architected from the ground up to be agnostic. That’s why it’s the polar opposite to the the “batteries included” design of X.
And as others have pointed out, Wayland is available for some BSD already.
Personally my #1 is just that stuff still don't work properly in a out-of-the-box Gnome+Wayland setup (on Arch). I still see weird things like a Firefox extension for making websites darker has a white line rendering through the pages when in use (probably something regarding aspect ratio?), some Electron apps like Obsidian sometimes have individual lines jittering up/down by 1-2 pixels (like it can't find the right/stable position), running nvidia-smi somehow introduces a 0.1 lag to seemingly my entire desktop, running it in a loop introduces that every run, and so on.
None of those issues happens with Xorg, and it just works without having set extra env vars for specific applications, or having to change the configuration just for Wayland to be used properly.
It seems to be less resource intensive, and smoother overall drawing, but all these issues make it kind of hard to start using daily over Xorg.