this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
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Honestly, Wayland just doesn't give the impression of working well enough with everything to replace my window manager and all kinds of utilities that grew around it (or X11 in general) for a decade or two just to only notice after using it for a few weeks that it won't work with some things. It demands a huge time investment up front for questionable gain basically.
As a multimonitor user with mixed properties, and an AMD user, Wayland has been nothing but a massive gain for me and continues to get better in equally massive strides on KDE (been using kwin-wayland for almost a full year as a daily driver now). It even improved the user experience on my surface pro that I'm running the surface-linux kernel on.
I am not using a Desktop Environment and if switching to Wayland means I will have to give up tiling window managers for DEs I will never switch to Wayland.
https://hyprland.org/
The Arch wiki lists more options to choose from: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/wayland
https://swaywm.org/
Considering how many things Wayland apparently still lacks that need to be implemented in each compositor separately a last release in February sounds like a half-dead project.
Sway is based on wlroots and therefore does not need to implement the complete Wayland specification itself. Many other Wayland window managers are also based on wlroots and therefore share a common base (compositor).
Furthermore Sway's git repo has activity up to a couple of days ago: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/commits/master
Dude, why are you so annoying about this topic? sway is a very good tiling window manager that IIRC two years ago was able to do things X11 based window managers will never be able to (different VRR on multiple monitors) and its basically the reference manager for wlroots, a library implementing the Wayland functionality. I've been using Wayland exclusively since about 2021 and I can say all my stuff now works better than under X11. Does it mean everything under the sun works better or is possible? Probably not, but at the same time, the people putting in the work have decided that the old concept was no longer maintainable for them and no one else is willing to pick it up.
Because Wayland proponents have been at it for over a decade now pointing at their broken mess saying "look, everything works" and yet somehow the longer these posts stick around the more comments accumulate about things that do not work, and not minor edge cases either but major features like screen recording, games, one of two major graphics cards vendors, remote desktop, significant applications not working,... I am sick and tired of this broken project pretending it is ready to replace X11 over and over and over again.
If they had acknowledged that it was 20% done, 40% done, 60% done (that is maybe where it is now) it would be different but Wayland developers seem to live in their own bubble where "works on my machine sometimes, with half of all applications" is considered done.
Today I can install any game, any application on Linux and know it works with X11, no ifs, no "only on that vendor", no "only on the latest unreleased bleeding edge version". Why should I give that up for years of Wayland pain just to get back to where I started minus the things Wayland will never implement like network transparency.
Sure thing. I use Wayland exclusively and have been able to play and stream games no problem. Screen capture, window capture, both work. So I don't know where these comments are coming from nowadays.
Let me just take this opportunity to say Nvidia can get fucked, I can't wait for the entertainment Linux 6.6 will bring.
Yeah. On the other hand, providing the desktop functionality over network is kind of an edge case: it makes sense to me to keep it out of the core protocol, otherwise even systems that don't even have network access would need to include it if they implement the Wayland protocol. Nobody is stopping anyone to develop a protocol for secure remote input.
If your significant application includes e.g. Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop, X11 won't help you either.
I don't have a single case here where something works on X11, but not on Wayland. Except for my old Nvidia Optimus card, but that's so old it doesn't even work properly under Xorg anymore it feels like. But since I don't game on it anymore it doesn't matter, chip is 10 years old at this point and I just don't buy Nvidia anymore.
You're most likely not using X11 network transparency anyways. At first approximation, no one is. What most people rather do is forward X over SSH. For Wayland, waypipe exists and covers the same use case.
The project you're looking for is called wlroots, everything will be based on it eventually, the only compositors that aren't are gnome and kde and that's because they made their compositors BEFORE wlroots existed.
Remind me in 2 years /s
The time-investment is short-term pain, long-term profit. That's kinda our thing as Linux guys
But where it the long-term profit? Every time Wayland comes up in the last 15 or so years since it was first mentioned somewhere it is an endless list of comments about things that don't work and "will work soon" (TM). Meanwhile in all that time there hasn't been a single exploit for the security issues Wayland claims to fix. X11 has worked just fine for all this time.
I am not opposed to replacing things in general (e.g. I do like systemd and never want init scripts back) but Wayland just seems like a bad design with bad goals and bad implementations.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/XOrg-Vulnerabilities-Since-1988
That talks about typical implementation vulnerabilities. I am talking about the kind of vulnerabilities the Wayland design supposedly protects us from by design.
You do realize you're comparing wayland to a protocol that doesn't even make an attempt at stopping keylogging, screengrabbing, or really implements any form of security whatsoever, right? I could make a list but it'd be effort, you should really research this stuff before you spread FUD on accident.
I'm just going to point out that there's a reason EVERY SINGLE PERSON who worked on X11 has moved onto wayland. Imagine how hard of a sell it'd be for most people to move on from a project that has THIRTY YEARS of work, to redoing everything from scratch, how many people in any other situation would ALL choose rewriting from scratch.
They learned from their mistakes, and that's why they restarted from scratch.
I have to research more thoroughly what the promised advantages of Wayland are, but from what I've heard is that the capability system is much more secure and the architecture is more decentralized, not a single server which takes everything down with it when it breaks.
Anyways, Wayland has a LOT more growth behind it. X is in the process of being deprecated. So I'm pretty sure Wayland must be better in some general way, otherwise it couldn't have gotten this momentum.