Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by fhars 12 days ago
On the other hand, I recently installed a system with debian 13, and it was really easy to distinguish between X11 and wayland sessions: if the session displays a plasma desktop, it's X11, if it crashes on login, it is wayland. YMMV if you try to switch to wayland.
4 comments

I upgraded to the latest PopOS with Cosmic running on Wayland.

Honestly everything just worked, but using it made me so nauseous. There was some latency somewhere, never figured it out. Running Cinnamon on X11 now. I did read some suggestions to improve latency but I have PTSD so it's going to take a while before I try Wayland again.

That’s interesting. I have the opposite effect—X11 always had jank and latency, to the point that it drove me to windows for a couple of years.

This is with multiple monitors on Nvidia’s, all of which support vsync. Disabling that did help, but why would I want to?

Wayland, currently, is butter smooth.

It's faux smoothness caused by the mandatory vsync. There's several frames of delay in Wayland which apparently you're not sensitive to
I’m sensitive enough that I bought 180Hz monitors.
I've found Cosmic to be rather flaky, sadly (I'm rooting for it to succeed), so the latency issues may not have been Wayland-related.

Both KDE and GNOME seem to run very smoothly on Wayland.

You might have an older GPU that doesn't work with wayland like me. My Radeon HD5870 also won't do Vulkan and anything wayland has never worked properly for me.
I'm not questioning what you are saying, but Wayland's only requirement is DRM, which is a Linux kernel capability that is supported for basically everything that you can push some sort of display cable into. It's for buffer management, and X was also ported to use this API.

Unless you have proprietary X server blobs, you have mostly the same low level route in either case to display stuff, so it's on the exact compositor you have tried, not on the wayland protocol.

I agree, it should work. It just doesn't. I haven't had the time yet to figure out why it doesn't because everything is fine on X11.
I have the same issue using either an older AMD card and an RTX 3 series card. Both are fine with X11.
Then something os wrong is in your machine. I'm just using KDE on Wayland on Debian 13 and just works fine.
What did you learn when you checked the logs to see what was wrong?
Probably didn't even bother to diagnose the issue. It's hard to tell if it was even wayland related without logs and some digging. But lets just blindly blame wayland cause new thing bad!
Log in using wayland -> no desktop. Log in using x11 -> desktop. Clearly it's "wayland related" even if whatever root cause it is is something you wouldn't consider directly attributable to it. Logging into a graphical session is something that has just worked out of the box each other install on whatever random hardware I've used for many years. How is that classified as some nitpicky "new thing bad" complaint?
Well, it's like new car doesn't start but you have forgotten to put fuel into it, and now blame the car.

This is Linux desktop, like if you have never had a black screen before then I'm not sure what you expect. One culprit could actually be the home .config/.cache folders that have all kind of sh*t accumulated (like why do we still do it this way? It's horrible), so I usually rename them and try again to see if this is the problem behind the scenes.

Well, if I never had to put fuel into my old car then this would be a step back, no? I'm not a stranger to troubleshooting, and do a lot of it already, which occupies my energy and time for troubleshooting. I use Debian stable for a reason. It's mostly that if I didn't go looking for a new thing, it doesn't provide anything new that I want, it removes old things that I want, and it doesn't work without troubleshooting, why do I want this thing?

This specifically isn't the biggest issue for me right now because I use this machine mainly over ssh, but if I eventually can't do x-forwarding, RDP, or log in manually without finding some fix, that's a lot of extra work and lost functionality.

Blame on Wayland is absolutely justified here. If you force changes onto others its up to you to make sure you're not breaking things.