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.

gxt25 · 2025-02-08 03:28:38

No. Everything I use works the same or better under X11. I tried Wayland under a few different variations but nothing was better and some things were worse.

ReDress · 2025-02-09 11:03:52

My plans on moving to Wayland are to move when my distro starts leaning to that direction :-)

Evidently, based on this thread, for instance, it seems like there is still time.

Last edited by ReDress (2025-02-09 11:05:22)

HobbitJack · 2025-02-10 21:10:02

I like my window manager, and I don't want to give it up. For me it's that simple.

manyroads · 2025-02-10 21:21:28

I spent the better part of a year trying to something other than sway almost work okay on wayland. Given my age (think old as dirt) and the speed with which wayland is blazing along (think slower than molasses runs in January in Canada) I'm going to be just fine on x11 with dwm and almost any tiny wm I want.

Succulent of your garden · 2025-02-12 11:14:25

I think the lack of common standard is one of the main issues. Since Nvidia is open sourcing their drivers slowly like a snail and plans to have wayland support, maaaybe that could make the push to force everyone to start working with the Nvidia drivers and create a common standard during that process. But to be honest I don't think that will happen. Nvidia is more like a AI accelerator company now, so I don't think that the main focus is wayland support and probably the drivers are going to be release first with Xorg working in mind .

Nevertheless I think projects like Hyprland are great and I think people really like that kind of stuff, so starts to think is the future to soon without checking the main issues in detail. Also there is that trending from some distros to starts shipping wayland by default. Ubuntu does have it and I think fedora also, but I don't think that is a good idea, it took me by surprise that ubuntu is now using wayland and you can change to Xorg if you want. I consider that the worst Linux experience is the current Ubuntu desktop version, it's not for Gnome, it's because is so bloated that make the system very slow, you feel the system pain with the delay of launching programs and the snap approach, it's too obvious. I don't understand what there were thinking when they made the decision to switch to wayland by default. It's like they start liking to suffer, and want to suffer even more.

On the other side of the street Xorg just works, so if you just want to go and walk in the sunny side of the street, most of the time the Xorg street is a old one street but always shines, wayland is partially cloudy for some people and sometimes can rain for others, default Ubuntu desktop is a storm.

Hope the weather analogy helps to clarify my opinion.

Last edited by Succulent of your garden (2025-02-12 11:16:52)

seth · 2025-02-12 14:51:12

maaaybe that could make the push to force everyone to start working with the Nvidia drivers and create a common standard during that process

The nvidia binary drivers have given up on eglstreams and support GBM since the 470xx series.

That part of wayland is not an issue. It really addresses a couple of things that are un-enforced, voluntary and depend on cooperation in X11 (notably buffer sync and logical DPI) reasonably well - it just completely ignored the entire rest and turned stuff like copy-pasting into "yeah, maybe works with some of your tools"

Succulent of your garden · 2025-02-12 16:21:44

https://xkcd.com/2347/

So the little block is not the driver ? I made a quick research and it seems that nvidia want to add more features available to work in wayland. So maybe the driver works for most common usage but wayland crashes with some dependencies when using nvidia cards or all gpu cards ? So the main issue is from wayland communicating with apps in userspace ?

btw thanks for the help in the dwm, I'll reply as soon as i can, doing my research and also too much to do in my life now. TY

guiodic · 2025-02-12 17:13:18

I should mention that I use my PC mainly for work. I mainly use Chromium, Libreoffice, Okular, Scribus, Inkscape, GIMP, Krita and KDELive.

I also have a craze for the global menu but especially for Locally Integrated Menu (LIM).

Unfortunately the only decoration that supports LIM is incompatible with Wayland so I decided to use the standard KDE global menu anyway, even though it is not as convenient.

In a week of intensive use I realised this:

* Libreoffice on Wayland runs heavily jerky. The only way to fix it is to use it with Xwayland

* For some strange reason, KDEnlive crashes when using the global menu. So not wanting to give up the global menu I start it with Xwayland

* All GTK applications (in particular I use GIMP and Inkscape a lot) do not support the global menu unless you start them under ... Xwayland.

* Okular does not support inertial scrolling, making its use painful for very long files. Here the solution is to use Chromium to open PDFs.

* Of course, also Libreoffice and other programs don't support inertial scrolling either, and even in these cases use under Wayland often becomes very uncomfortable.

* windows not_being brought up automatically for some apps

So I went back to X11, also because in the end, apart from Chromium, the bulk of the applications I was using I had to run on X11 anyway, via Xwayland.

Now I expect of course Wayland fans to say that these are all problems with the applications, not Wayland itself.

Maybe this is the case but frankly after many years of development if this is still the situation, I don't hold out much hope for the future. Maybe in a year I will try Wayland again, hoping that something has changed.

I also avoided mentioning minor annoyances such as Nextcloud always being in the middle of the screen because Wayland does not allow windows to open where they want to. Again, however, a very basic desktop function that has not been implemented due to a design choice.

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?

#12 2025-02-08 03:28:38

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

#13 2025-02-09 11:03:52

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

#14 2025-02-10 21:10:02

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

#15 2025-02-10 21:21:28

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

#16 2025-02-12 11:14:25

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

#17 2025-02-12 14:51:12

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

#18 2025-02-12 16:21:44

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

#19 2025-02-12 17:13:18

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

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