this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023

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So let’s talk about this Wayland thing (pointieststick.com)

submitted 2 years ago by Vincent@kbin.social to c/linux@lemmy.ml

68 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Wayland. It comes up a lot: “Bug X fixed in the Plasma Wayland session.” “The Plasma Wayland session has now gained support for feature Y.” And it’s in the news quite …

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[–] kool_newt@lemm.ee 35 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I have to use Slack for work and screen sharing doesn't work when I'm using Wayland.

[–] daq@lemmy.sdf.org 41 points 2 years ago (15 children)

Don't let Slack launch at startup. As long as it launches after pipewire - everything works. Your can also restart it to fix sharing issue, but that can be a birch if you already started a call.

[–] luciferofastora@lemmy.zip 5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Is there a way to control the launch order? I suppose you could also find a script that waits for a given process to be responsive before launching another, but I'm not sure where I'd insert that either.

(I've been using Ubuntu mostly out-of-the-box so far and just now started having the time and energy to start learning about and fiddling with the internals)

[–] vividspecter@lemm.ee 13 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

If it launches via a systemd service, you can perhaps edit the file such that it depends on Pipewire before it launches.

Or disable the built in startup support and create your own service that does the same.

[–] daq@lemmy.sdf.org 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I'm not sure that would work. Pipewire probably starts via system (just takes a while to become functional) and slack is started by KDE. I guess you could just add a delay to slack's start, but I just start it by hand.

[–] luciferofastora@lemmy.zip 5 points 2 years ago

Starting by hand is fine and I do it with just about anything I need anyway (though I suspect there is still some startup bloat I'll need to sort out, if I don't set up an entirely new system somewhere down the line), but don't underestimate my compulsion to automate what I can (or at least know how to).

I'm a sucker for automation for automation's sake :D

[–] kool_newt@lemm.ee 2 points 2 years ago

Oh, thx for the tip!

[–] vancent@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago (3 children)

That has nothing to do with Slack's screen sharing issues. Screen sharing was broken due to Electron bugs and it's fixed in Slack 4.34.

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[–] eksb@programming.dev 19 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I started running OBS with a virtual camera to do screen sharing. It is so much nicer to manage sharing with OBS than with Slack/Google Meet/Discord.

[–] kool_newt@lemm.ee 4 points 2 years ago

Oh, never heard of this, I will check it out thx.

[–] riotrick@lemmy.world 3 points 2 years ago

Oh, that sounds like an interesting idea. Currently stuck with teams at work. Screen sharing does work under wayland. But definitely going to try this.

[–] Sh1nyM3t4l4ss@lemmy.world 8 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Try using XWayland video bridge. It should allow any XWayland apps to use screen sharing. Unfortunately most distros either don't ship it yet or ship broken versions but you can download nightly Flatpaks from Gitlab CI

[–] russjr08@outpost.zeuslink.net 2 points 2 years ago

I'm not sure why, but every time I use XWayland Video Bridge (installed as of about 2 days ago so it should still be pretty new), I just end up with a black screen being broadcasted - not sure what could be causing that.

[–] kool_newt@lemm.ee 1 points 2 years ago

Thx!

[+] BaumGeist@lemmy.ml 31 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)

[deleted]

[–] verdigris@lemmy.ml 38 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The issue is that X was never a mature, feature-complete, stable project. It was always a hideous and bloated hodgepodge of disparate and barely working patches. The entire point of Wayland is to do exactly what you say tech should do: solve the particular problem (graphics server) well and cleanly, and limit itself to a definable set of features so it can actually reach that point of stability.

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[–] 0x0@social.rocketsfall.net 13 points 2 years ago (2 children)

As I understand it, Wayland offloads a ton of stuff that was core to X11 (like input device handling) directly to the compositor. The end result is every compositor handling things differently. Compare something like i3 to Sway. Sway has to handle input, displays, keyboard layouts, etc directly in its config. If I switch to Hyprland I then have to learn Hyprland's configuration options for doing the same. Meanwhile, switching from i3 to dwm requires only setting up the WM to behave how I want - no setting up keyboards, mice, etc. It just feels clunky to work with Wayland compositors, frankly.

Also when something breaks in Wayland the fix is almost always hard to find or incredibly obscure because the fix isn't for Wayland- it's for the compositor. If your compositor isn't popular then good luck!

[–] jack@monero.town 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Can someone debunk this please? It feels like something is overlooked here

[–] chaorace@lemmy.sdf.org 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (5 children)

They got all of the basic facts right and their general experience mostly mirrors my own, though in my case the majority of problems encountered apply to Wayland in general and are rarely compositor-specific. That is to say that I can usually Google "[APP]" [FEATURE] not working "Wayland" and find people from a variety of different Wayland compositors all experiencing the same thing[^1]. Maybe I just got lucky when I chose my specific compositor?

In fact, despite being on Wayland for about a year now, the only compositor-specific issue I've ever encountered is a broken controller configuration overlay when using Steam's Big Picture Mode. It's actually super frustrating because I have absolutely no idea if it's an issue specific to my compositor, wl-roots, or something unique about my configuration. All I really know is that it works correctly if I launch Steam in a nested gamescope compositor, so it's not a bug in the protocol nor xwayland.

[^1]: Some recent examples: broken Steam Controller cursor, busted SDL in TF2, Invisible Emacs cursor

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[–] uis@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

Wayland offloads a ton of stuff that was core to X11 (like input device handling) directly to the compositor.

Not exactly. Imagine if xorg was also desktop environment with own compositor and effects. That's what wayland compositor is.

[–] SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

For 1., the big issue is that there constantly are appearing new standards in display technologies. Two semi-recent examples are HDR and VRR, both of which X11 struggles with, and implementing those into X11 has been said to be painful by its developers.

[–] thalience@lemmy.world 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Stagnation here specifically does mean that nobody is making bug fixes or security patches anymore. Xorg is abandoned, kaput, a former software project.

The new architecture allows developers to fix one thing without accidentally breaking 3 others.

[–] const_void@lemmy.ml 18 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Great article. I'm currently still on X because Plasma 5 doesn't handle fractional scaling well. As soon as that changes (Plasma 6?) I'll be jumping over to Wayland.

[–] Tschuuuls@feddit.de 4 points 2 years ago

X handles fractional scaling terrible as well lol. Has caused terrible tearing and framedrops for me on a Framework 13.

[–] uis@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago

And this is what I am talking. Fragmentation. Fractional scaling extension exists in wayland protocol for a year of more.

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[–] macallik@kbin.social 18 points 2 years ago

Good read, provided context that I didn't have before as a newbie

[–] Hairyblue@kbin.social 15 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

I want to switch to Wayland. I try it every month to see if it is working with my system and so far it is not.

Ubuntu 23.04/Nvidia 3080/Steam. It use to work with the old big picture mode but when steam went to the new one, Wayland broke for me.

[–] d_k_bo@feddit.de 8 points 2 years ago

That's weird. I thought Steam doesn't support Wayland at all and runs using XWayland.

[–] mranderson17@infosec.pub 2 points 2 years ago

Gamescope makes the experience a lot better with steam at least for me in swaywm. I experimented with running each game in gamescope using launch options but with gamescope's mediocre support of the steam overlay some multiplayer invite stuff doesn't work correctly. Running steam in bigpicture within gamescope pretty much solves all these issues and seems to improve performance too.

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[–] redcalcium@lemmy.institute 10 points 2 years ago (2 children)

So most complaints you read about Wayland missing this or that (such as fractional scaling, or screen sharing, or global shortcuts) from over a year or two ago are likely to be wrong today.

Is fractional scaling in Wayland really working now? I tried it a while ago and everything was blurry mess.

[–] wheels@lemmy.world 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I just tried this and it was blurry until I logged out and back in!

[–] redcalcium@lemmy.institute 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Just tried it on my laptop and xwayland apps are still blurry mess, even after restart. However, all apps I use now has Wayland support that can be enabled with some flags or environmental variables, so they are actually usable now with fractional scaling. Finally I can use my laptop with 175% scaling, which is much more comfortable than 200% scaling.

[–] nora@slrpnk.net 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

In display settings check the box to allow x11 apps to scale themselves instead of the compositor. Your cursor will still be blurry but the app content itself will be fine. A few apps like steam won't scale without some kind of launch flag though.

[–] redcalcium@lemmy.institute 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I don't see this option. I didn't even see the option to set fractional scaling without enabling experimental flag from command line.

[–] nora@slrpnk.net 2 points 2 years ago

I assumed you were on KDE since the dev who wrote the blog post was talking about KDE Wayland but are you on gnome? Gnome"s fractional scaling implementation isn't as good as KDE's.

[–] vividspecter@lemm.ee 3 points 2 years ago

It's working with Sway from a quick test:

swaymsg output DP-1 scale 1.7

But XWayland is blurry as expected (that's the big blocker, or all useful apps being ported to Wayland).

[–] clemdemort@lemmy.world 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I'd run Wayland on my main PC but Nvidia drivers don't support Wayland too well, when they do I'll switch over but for now I'll wait

[–] Holzkohlen@feddit.de 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I'm gonna give it an honest go once KDE Plasma 6 hits the arch repos.

[–] clemdemort@lemmy.world 1 points 2 years ago

I also want to try COSMIC when it comes out apparently it's got Wayland support built in and looks pretty good imo

[–] Drito@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

We need another display system. Something more dev friendly and more desktop agnostic.

I seems Wlroots is designed to be server agnostic (despite the name), if it is bound to a new display server many apps should be available.

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