For those using Xorg, do you have plans to move to Wayland?

zcal · 2024-12-27 15:50:30

I haven't personally made any preparations for a transition to Wayland. I've been quite happy using the Xorg-only spectrwm (formerly scrotwm) window manager for years, and I've had no use cases that have prompted me to even experiment with Wayland. It's got me thinking recently what I sh/could be doing to prepare for the inevitable(?).

For those like me who are still on Xorg, do you have plans to move to Wayland? What changes to your computing environment or workflow do you expect to make? How big of an adjustment are you expecting? Is there anything in particular that you're waiting for before you make the switch?

Lone_Wolf · 2024-12-28 10:12:05

Sofar nothing I use requires wayland to function.

wayland compositors are improving and slowly maturing, but even if dynamic compositors work fawlessly there's one thing that blocks switching for me :
HiDPI support .

Currently X support using https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HiDPI#X_Resources works much better then wayland fractional scaling .

seth · 2024-12-28 21:40:24

Which wayland?
As long as there's not even a remotely common standard for wayland compositors beyond coloring pixels, I don't even buy that they're the future of anything.
And I do also not buy that "oh, but that's a maturing issue, it'll eventually be supported" - wayland is now 16 years old. X11 is from 1987, 16 years later was 2003 - I do remember having a fully functional KDE3 desktop at the time.

What wayland currently offers from a superficial user perspective is "simpler and more reliable vsync stack", the price is that everything else maybe doesn't work or not properly (systematically, because of the rigid context isolation)
As long as I can play videos tearfree and don't care all that much if my text editor maybe or not somewhere has a tearline I never see when navigating text, wayland has no benefits to offer but a lot of headaches.

Also "Oh, but it can prevent keyloggers!!" is bullshit.
If I can make you to install a keylogger I can also make you compromise some side-channel, leaving aside people reflexively trying to sudo-fix everything.
A compromised system is compromised, your display server can provide another obstacle, but not fix you having shat the bed.

Wayland has one very attractive aspect and that's input redirection, what allows proper ZUI desktops (you never leave exposé, google "arcan pipeworld" to get an idea of the concept).
But to my knowledge no existing compositor even makes use of that (they're all just more or less fancy versions of existing X11 WMs) and absent a reliable prospect and the perceived inherent fragmentation (because of the lack of shared protocols to undermine the security of the context isolation…) I'm not interested in writing one either.

For now no plans, not even motivation to make some.
And to be very clear: X11 has some serious limitations due to its age and the fact that it was designed for an entirely different ecosystem. Nobody denies that.
But I've settled w/ just Wayland being the next Y Window System or Berlin/Fresco - failed attempts to replace X11 IN THE EARLY NINETEES.

Maybe next time.

topcat01 · 2024-12-28 21:48:40

Lone_Wolf wrote:

Sofar nothing I use requires wayland to function.
wayland compositors are improving and slowly maturing, but even if dynamic compositors work fawlessly there's one thing that blocks switching for me :
HiDPI support .
Currently X support using https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HiDPI#X_Resources works much better then wayland fractional scaling .

This pretty much sums up my take. I do have a sway setup which I am working on as an alternative to my primary i3 setup, but no compelling reason to switch completely.

duaner · 2024-12-30 03:17:16

I'd consider switching if there was ever a real replacement for the synaptics driver. I use a laptop with a trackpad for all of my input, and libinput is too simplistic to make the cut, even if you can find a compositor that makes use of all of its functions (e.g. custom acceleration curves).

I'll wait until I'm forced off of X, or wayland gets any especially useful features. Why should I cripple my machine until then?

kokoko3k · 2024-12-30 06:48:44

I've no plans to switch to Wayland.
It is true that some software runs better on Wayland (retroarch's shader performance are better on Wayland at least on my intel igp systems).
So, for those isolated use cases, I can setup a barebone Wayland environment and just temporary switch to it via ctrl-alt-fx.

Last edited by kokoko3k (2024-12-30 06:50:21)

kermit63 · 2024-12-30 10:16:30

XFCE is my primary DE while OpenBox is my fallback WM if I wanted a more minimal set-up. XFCE's support for wayland only started / became experimental very recently (a few weeks ago) and is still quite buggy, while I don't expect OpenBox to ever support it.

I may try XFCE on wayland in a year or two when it becomes more usable, but for now I'm OK with Xorg.

linuxmasteraxe · 2024-12-30 18:11:12

no i like using x11 with virtual framebuffer (i use cpu text mode when using raw tty) because i love x11 and also wayland is way to plain for me (personal choice)

mesaprotector · 2024-12-31 09:47:27

I'll switch when an application I consider essential stops working on X. Or when I'm convinced I can fully replicate my setup on Wayland, which I currently can't. Why put a lot of extra work into making my desktop slightly less the way I want?

labwc seems to be doing a decent job copying openbox's features, but it isn't copying much of what picom provides (for me, that means fading). Even if I could live with switching to wayfire/LXQT/Plasma, there's also slock with my custom patch, and perhaps a lot of my keyboard setup, that I'd lose if I switched now. Oh and uh... I've spent enough hours of my life debugging nvidia nonsense. I can't imagine changing display servers is going to make that any better.

I have played around a bit with Arcan and enjoy following its progress but it's not exactly easy to set up its actual window managers on anything but Void. The console is fun at least though my graphics card enjoys messing it up.

Roken · 2024-12-31 12:07:08

Not any time soon. Give me ancient, stable and predictable over new and still being figured out any day of the week for such a fundamental part of my desktop.

lemao · 2025-01-29 11:50:35

Yes, when Cinnamon/nVidia/etc will work as well as it does on xorg.

Arch Linux

#1 2024-12-27 15:50:30

For those using Xorg, do you have plans to move to Wayland?

#2 2024-12-28 10:12:05

Re: For those using Xorg, do you have plans to move to Wayland?

#3 2024-12-28 21:40:24

Re: For those using Xorg, do you have plans to move to Wayland?

#4 2024-12-28 21:48:40

Re: For those using Xorg, do you have plans to move to Wayland?

#5 2024-12-30 03:17:16

Re: For those using Xorg, do you have plans to move to Wayland?

#6 2024-12-30 06:48:44

Re: For those using Xorg, do you have plans to move to Wayland?

#7 2024-12-30 10:16:30

Re: For those using Xorg, do you have plans to move to Wayland?

#8 2024-12-30 18:11:12

Re: For those using Xorg, do you have plans to move to Wayland?

#9 2024-12-31 09:47:27

Re: For those using Xorg, do you have plans to move to Wayland?

#10 2024-12-31 12:07:08

Re: For those using Xorg, do you have plans to move to Wayland?

#11 2025-01-29 11:50:35

Re: For those using Xorg, do you have plans to move to Wayland?

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