Valve Engineer Mike Blumenkrantz Hoping To Accelerate Wayland Protocol Development
Valve Engineer Mike Blumenkrantz Hoping To Accelerate Wayland Protocol Development
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I love how people are complaining about Wayland not being ready or being unstable (whatever that even means, because it's a protocol), while it's the default on both GNOME and Plasma now, which combined probably run on more than 50% of Linux desktops these days.
And not only that, but Cinnamon, Xfce and others want to follow, so very clearly people who know a fair bit about desktops seem to disagree with Wayland being "not ready".
When people say its not ready, it's normally some specific use case that worked in X11. So, they're not wrong, but not right either.
The devs have been working hard to hammer out those troublesome edge cases. There's a lot less of them than there was a year or two ago.
Wayland was subject to "first mover disadvantage" for a long time. Why be the first to switch and have to solve all the problems? Instead be last and everyone else will do the hard work for you.
But without big players moving to it those issues never get fixed. And users rightly should not be forced to migrate to a broken system that isn't ready. People just want a system that works right?
Eventually someone had to decide it was 'good enough' and try an industry wide push to move away from a hybrid approach that wastes developer time and confuses users.
The change was 95% unnoticed for me. I looked at the session one day and thought "oh yeah, I have been using Wayland". I don't mess with many games or AI GPU stuff though, so it may be that more complex use cases result in a worse experience.
Really? It was very noticable to me when I didn't have screen tairing anymore
Wayland is ready, 'nobody' else is ready to use Wayland. And by nobody, I mean any software packages that are doing anything at all out of the ordinary. Text expanders are a hot mess, remote control apps or dodgy, OBS screen capture is dodgy. We're still playing catch up, support for Wayland in applications is honestly quite lacking.
Ironically enough just 2 days ago I posted this https://lemmy.ml/post/20691536/13906950 namely how the 1st thing I do after installing NVIDIA drivers on Debian is disabling Wayland to rely on X11 simply because it doesn't work.
Sadly that's relevant here precisely because if we are talking about Valve it's about gaming, if it's about gaming one simply can't ignore the state of NVIDIA drivers.
So... it might run on 50% on Linux desktops but on mine, which I also game on, it never worked once I had drivers for gaming installed. Consequently I understand "how people are complaining" because that's exactly my experience.
That’s NVIDIA’s fault for refusing to adopt the agreed upon methods for rendering graphics on Linux. They tried to force EGLStreams on everybody for almost a decade while knowing GBM was better.
Absolutely, I'm not blaming any Wayland implementation about this, just giving my current situation as an example.
I do so because I imagine it's a popular setup (according to https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-vs-nvidia-which-more-popular-linux based on ProtonDB data, more than 60% Linux gamers had an NVIDIA GPU) and thus might prevent adoption.
I hope NVIDIA will fix that. Maybe a push from Valve would help.
Yeah. Unfortunately most consumers buy NVIDIA, even though they only care about the enterprise sector.
I mean I'm on wayland and nvidia works fine
Same here and with an Optimus configuration ( NVIDIA + Intel GPU ). Work flawlessly on my Fedora.
Great, can you clarify your setup then? I might be able to learn from it.
Just base endeavour OS with nvidia drivers, maybe they would have information on it
Most of it is just making sure that you're using the newest stable driver. The sync issues that had been plaguing nvidia on wayland since 5.40 or so were addressed in the newest series. I'm using F40 wayland with them and haven't had any notable issues since the update.
That I can understand, however I want to piont out that this is an Nvidia problem entirely. Wayland works perfectly fine under 2/3 hardware vendors.
Luckily, they finally open-sourced their shit so going forward, this will probably change. But chances are only from the 2000 series on, so it might take an upgrade for many folks...
Agreed, cf https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-vs-nvidia-which-more-popular-linux and I do hope to have the choice soon.
I just yesterday tried Wayland under Arch with a 1070 after a long time. Single WQHD monitor though. Although X11 is really performant, Wayland was more smooth regarding KDE desktop effects. Witcher 3 (via Heroic) showed fewer microstutters and I will try some more proton games and other applications over the weekend.
I recently had to downgrade nvidia drivers from 560 to 550 because wakeup from sleep and hibernate would coredump. I read that this is fixed with 560 but only under Wayland. The developers definitely progressed on the nvidia front.
Okay, is there a vnc server for wayland which can be autostarted and runs as a service? I havent found one and been looking for one for ages.
All I know is that there are VNC and RDP solutions for Plasma and VNC solutions for Wayland in general.
You can autostart anything on any distro by putting the command in a startup script.
I daily drive Wayland and I just have to ask, why is the clipboard and associated tooling so much worse‽ I just want input leap and neovim to both be able to properly read from and write to my clipboard. Input leap never can, and neovim has like a 50% shot at doing what I expect. Also I understand we're moving away from x11 in general but why is there no replacement for x11 forwarding over ssh?? I know I'm a niche user, but it drives me crazy.
why is there no replacement for x11 forwarding over ssh??
There kind of is. The project you're looking for is waypipe.
Knowing how these things tend to go, I predict you'll try to use it for your use case and it just won't work for whatever stupid reason. But I successfully used it to tunnel an app from my Debian machine at home to a Windows machine under WSL.
What does Xfce call itself if it starts supporting Wayland? Wfce?
I think it kills the community. Making a Wayland window manager is so much harder to do than an X one. This monolithic solution solves the problems of Gnome, and KDE developers but less people want to be involved in windowing systems. I'm just being sad for X11, because, although it had nonsense features, it made linux desktop applications compatible with every desktop and we had huge variety of wms, compositors, desktop environments. Personally I'm still on X because of bspwm, but eventually there will be wayland-only features which will slowly kill X.
There's libraries like wl-roots that make it a lot easier, no?
well, yes, but for e.g. I wrote a software piece that happened to be only a hotkey daemon. And I could write it with X. Now, hotkey daemons are no longer a separate thing unless the compositor exposes a grab API. Which never going to be in Wayland protocol, because they consider this client server architecture a problem.
Now instead of having Wayland covering everything, applications try to cover every desktops. In the good old times, it worked everywhere.
Why does flameshot need to handle different wayland desktops separately? Because simply the protocol doesn't do it's job. It doesn't cover everything. It's indeed not ready.
It won’t need to for much longer. The protocol for screen capture was merged weeks ago.
There's hope. Thanks for letting me know.
I think this is intentional. Call me paranoid.
Elaboration: we have seen in the past how RedHat's and others' policies would always not reach some part of Linux users, and those users still wouldn't feel as second class citizens - it was just a matter of choice and configuration to avoid PulseAudio, systemd, Gnome 3, one can go on. That was mostly connected to escaping major environments and same applications working the same with all of them. Wayland, while not outright making Gnome the only thing to work, creates a barrier and doesn't make that a firm given anymore.
It won't be too long until using Linux without Wayland will cut you off from many things developed with corporate input - and that's developers' time paid as opposed to donated for or volunteered, so much more effort.
Now, there was a time when there weren't that much corporate input and still things would get done. But it will be hard to fall back to it, when the whole environment, one can say, ecosystem, is so complex and corporate-dependent.
I would say this is the time of all those corps whose investment into Linux was so nice in 00s and 10s reaping what they sowed. This wasn't all for free or to profit on paid support. And people who thought that it's GPL that was such a nice license that "forced" corps to participate in FOSS projects they benefit from, with those projects remaining FOSS, are going to have to face reality.
Fat years are ending, so they are going to capitalize on their investments.
This has already happened with the Web 10 or more years ago, when Facebook, Google and others have suddenly gone Hitler, while now they are in terminal stages of enshittification.
Same process.
You can disagree, no need to insult me.
It's just that there are lots of stuff that don't really work (out of the box) with Wayland systems, an example being getting an IME with ibus/fcitx5 to work in browsers.
Wayland implementations can still be hot garbage on any of the major DE's depending on the hardware and use case. The "iT WoRks FiNe FoR mE, SmOoTh aS butter" crowd don't help this. I'm willing to bet that a lot of issues that people write off as a "linux" problem is actually a Wayland problem and don't bother to test under a true x11 only environment (KDE x11 does not count). My ultimate issue with this constant Wayland changeover evangelising is the failure to identify actual end user problems that need solving so badly that it requires forcing through an entirely new and often broken system.