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by simoncion 144 days ago
> It's baffling why you would run X11 today.

As I mentioned:

  It works fine for what I'm doing. I don't do anything that depends on Wayland.
> Sure that's convenient but so many apps don't even support X11 anymore.

Really? If true, I don't seem to run any of them. I've certainly not noticed anything I've been running over the past couple of decades suddenly stop working on X11. Given that QT, GTK, FTLK, and other cross-platform GUI toolkits support X11, these must be particularly special programs.

> Just as one example[, screensharing...]

Sure, it is a bit nicer to be able to control which windows which other programs can see. I've been watching the slow-moving, many-years-long shitstorm that has been "actually get screensharing that works the way ordinary people need it to". It's been quite a show.

Thing is, I do know that the X Access Control Extension was standardized in ~2006 and updated through 2009 with the aim to make additional fine-grained access control modules [0] easy. I don't know how long it would have taken to use what existed (or even write something new) and update the major Desktop Environments with tooling to manage it... but I suspect it would have taken far less than seventeen years.

> I noticed so many quality of life fixes...

I'm sure that were I 16, I'd believe that I cared very much about that. Now, -mumble decades later- the fanciest things I want are OpenGL and Vulkan support with performance at least on par with what you get from Windows, a window manager that lets me Alt+mouse-button to move or resize a window, functioning global hotkeys that I can command to run arbitrary programs (and that I can permit any arbitrary program to hook into... permanently), and functioning screen-sharing (that can I can permit any arbitrary program to hook into... permanently). And it's so, so silly for me to feel the need to mention anything other than Alt+mouse-button. You'd think that the rest would be "table stakes", but the Wayland development process has demonstrated that many folks disagree.

[0] Ones that could -for instance- prevent undesired keyloggers and screenshot tools
1 comments
hparadiz 144 days ago
The problem is as soon as you run something new and it doesn't scale properly in X11 you're gonna be making a bug report instead of using what everyone else is using. Currently just with the screen sharing thing it's not even just graphical. There's also updates for Pipewire so you can select the audio output you wish to stream with your video feed. That dialog simply doesn't exist at all in X11. You probably don't even know it exists. It's been feature complete now for YEARS. There's a reason that Valve is using Wayland on SteamOS. It's cause it's feature complete now and they are working on stuff like HDR which won't work at all on X11. I'm guessing that X11 support will start to be dropped in the next few years by major code bases. It's hard for me to even explain some of the bugs I saw with X that disappeared overnight when I switched to Wayland. You talk about OpenGL and Vulkan support but hilariously that's what I'm trying to explain to you has *better* performance now than even Windows.

Just basic stuff wayland has that X11 will never have:

- No screen tearing by default - Proper vsync - Lower latency for input → display - Per-monitor refresh rates (144Hz + 60Hz works correctly) - Fractional scaling is actually correct (no blurry hacks)

Seriously, move on.

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simoncion 144 days ago
> The problem is as soon as you run something new and it doesn't scale properly in X11...

QT, GTK, FLTK, and friends handle scaling correctly. Perhaps in the future there will be a Wayland-only GUI library, but I'm not sure why anyone would bother when there exist Wayland backends for the major existing ones.

> Pipewire

I don't use it. I use JACK2 with a PulseAudio fallback for Steam games and other programs that don't know how to hook into JACK.

> - No screen tearing by default

If you're using an AMD graphics card, the TearFree option gives you this. If your distro hasn't enabled it by default, then it's two minutes work, and work that I did years ago.

> - Per-monitor refresh rates

  $ xrandr | grep -A2 DisplayPort
  DisplayPort-0 connected primary 3840x2160+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 698mm x 393mm
     3840x2160     60.00 +  60.00    50.00    59.94    30.00*
     2560x1600     59.94  
  --
  DisplayPort-1 connected 1200x1920+3840+0 left (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 546mm x 352mm
     1920x1200     59.95*+
     1920x1080     60.00    50.00    59.94    59.99
  --
  DisplayPort-2 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
  HDMI-A-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
The rest of your concluding list is just as poorly-informed.
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