[uecker]

Is is a regular occurrence that students in my lab that use or switch to Wayland still run into problems. Switching back to X11 reliably works as a fix. The sad thing is that there is also no apparent advantage to Wayland, it is just pushed down to us via distributions.

[array_key_first]

I've been using Wayland for a while now on Debian as of 13, and the advantage is that it just works so much better.

Animations are much smoother, frames are dropped much less, and there's very little artifacts. It's almost uncanny how good desktop compositing looks right now.

Naturally, some people don't care or don't notice. I notice because I run everything at 240hz and I'm a freak. But, for me, so far everything has worked in wayland. I have not had to boot up an x11 session on Debian 13 with KDE. And, mind you, this is Debian - not bleeding edge. But, screen sharing works, audio works, everything.

[redeeman]

I guess things like HDR support, high bitdepth, per-screen refreshrate/scaling, and all those things are just "no apparant advantage" to you.

Thats okay, just understand that it DOES matter to some people.

what also matters is the actual developers doing the work, which GREATLY prefer wayland

[uecker]

It might matter to some but not to many, and in practice the pain imposed on many others could have been avoided by simply improving X. That developers already like to rewrite things is well known, but nobody should pay for this.

[amlib]

Do you want the indisputable advantage of Wayland? No dropped frames in the desktop, even at high framerates. Back in 2023 when I was still using X11 dropping frames was par for the curse, no matter the machine, the configuration or the DE. You could only hope to get a fluid presentation when using a full screen program that used DRI unredirection (or DRM or whatever it was called) because... it eschewed X completely. Now, it used to be even worse if you go back many years from that, so there was progress, but there were always these tiny drops impacting fluidity. It also got worse the more loaded the machine was, any task in the background consuming 40% of the machine could make it feel like you were using a 30hz monitor. Or, if you dared to use 120hz it felt more like a stuttery 70hz, even at idle.

That same year I decided to give Wayland my third shot and what you know... it not only was perfectly smooth all the time but it had finally reached a point where I could use it on my HTPC. Less than a year later and it was finally usable on my desktop and laptop, and since then I haven't really looked back.

[uecker]

This sounds more like random configuration problems with your drivers. The rendering model for modern X clients is the same as for Wayland, so the idea that there could be room for a fundamental improvement is based on misinformation.

[amlib]

Random? I saw it happen on every linux machine running X I came across over the last two decades, it wasn't just mine, it was colleagues machines and so on. Maybe if you combined KDE, AMDGPU drivers, the right distro and X from around 2022 and onwards you could get a mostly smooth experience, but the behavior when pushing the system a little bit or trying high refresh rate would prevail.

The point is, even if you could get a smooth experience it was at best an exception, specially across most of X11 life. There are many reasons why the Steam Deck shipped with Steam running through the gamescope micro compositor, and one of them was sidestepping some of the X11 jank.

[uecker]

Not my experience and we have lot of Linux machines. Drivers and hardware expectations of programs certainly change over time, but this has not much to do with Wayland vs X.

[andrewstuart]

My Wayland development work has gone extremely well.

I’m amazed at how smooth it is and how much just works.

Not my usual Linux development experience with xorg.

[redeeman]

a great many people use external displays.

besides, even without using that, for the vast vast majority of users, there is no pain, they dont even realized they've switched to wayland, their distributions simply did it.

and people ARE paying a price staying with xorg, theres a reason projects like KDE are very happy about the change.

[uecker]

Well, I can only report from my experience and this is the pain I still see with Wayland but not really with X. If KDE wants to hurt some of their users, this is their decision.

[redeeman]

what kind of thinking process is this? do you for real think any KDE project member has thought "yeah, I want to hurt some of our users".

this is not how it works. They have actual real data from real users about how many use wayland vs xorg, they also sit on the bugtracker, and they sit with the code. they also have very clear knowledge of how much time they can dedicate to make KDE better, both for themselves and EVERYONE.

They have decided that it is best for everyone to outphase X support. Several top contributors to KDE have also explained how several issues that people kept having under X, resulting in LOADS of bug reports, have more or less vanished now during wayland.

You might be having issues, others might too, but its arrogant to presume to think you know that most people are not better off than before, and of course those that at the end of the day matter most, the developers. This does not mean they want to hurt anyone.

[uecker]

Sure, they know best of course ;-) This is the arrogance and gas lightning we are talking about.

But I am not complaining about KDE, they can do whatever they feel best for their projec.t I do not use KDE and - if they make decisions like this - never will.

But please do not tell me my real world experience is an imagination because someone else decided what is best for me. This is like Microsoft telling me I need to like clippy.

[tosti]

It's exactly this kind of arrogant attitude that makes me hate everything from dbus onward.

[redeeman]

what is arrogant? that some features matter to some users? or that developers that work for free have things that matter to them in trying to develop better code?

[tosti]

There's really no need for any finger-pointing while bragging about features.

[array_key_first]

It's not bragging - the commenter stated that Wayland has no advantage, which isn't true. It has many features which just are not possible in X. Many of these features are par for the course on Windows and MacOS. They do matter to some people, but not all of course.

[uecker]

It has no fundamental architectural advantages. That some newer features are now only implemented on Wayland makes the situation worse.

[tosti]

Bragging isn't the problem.