Well known KDE developer Nate Graham is out with a blog post today outlining his latest Wayland thoughts, how X11 is a bad platform, and the recent topic of “Wayland breaking everything” isn’t really accurate.
“In this context, “breaking everything” is another perhaps less accurate way of saying “not everything is fully ported yet”. This porting is necessary because Wayland is designed to target a future that doesn’t include 100% drop-in compatibility with everything we did in the past, because it turns out that a lot of those things don’t make sense anymore. For the ones that do, a compatibility layer (XWayland) is already provided, and anything needing deeper system integration generally has a path forward (Portals and Wayland protocols and PipeWire) or is being actively worked on. It’s all happening!”
Wayland has fixed so many head-scratching issues I would get running 6 monitors on 2 GPUs under X11. I’d often end up with missing monitors, placed in wrong spots that I’d have to rearrange every reboot until an update would come through that would fix it again for a few months, then all over again.
Since I moved to wayland, everything just works. When it doesn’t, it’s not a display server issue, it’s something physical. I just had a couple monitors fail to show up and thought “oh hell, it’s back to this, eh”. But I open the tower, seat the offending GPU better, and everything comes up like normal, and all the screens are in the right position, it just remembers.
Anyone that thinks X11 is still superior probably runs on a laptop with a single screen.
Anyone that thinks X11 is still superior probably runs on a laptop with a single screen.
It really does seem that way. I’ve dealt with many different multi-monitor setups on X11 and only ever had problems. For example, I have an AMD based setup with 3 monitors, 2 are average 1080p60 displays and the third has a higher refresh rate. On X11 this setup always has either screen tearing/flickering, unusually high CPU usage by the compositor or the refresh rate seems noticeably off and hot-plugging additional monitors makes things behave weird or even crash, especially when unplugging monitors. On setups with multiple monitors across multiple GPUs it’s the same but worse. On Wayland it all just works without any problems, no matter the setup. Hot-plugging monitors on Wayland is very seamless. Even X11 software runs better for me on Wayland.
And I’m sure all the other people using 6 monitors on 2 GPUs at the same time will appreciate it.
Seriously, how common is such a scenario that you’d even mention it in this context?
Two monitors with different refresh rates is very common. Think laptop connected to a bigger monitor.
I have, unironically, never seen anyone using three monitors together on a PC in my life.
man it crazy I switched to Wayland on my laptop and docking to 3 monitors just worked on Wayland and it would remember all my monitors settings
I hand like 2 or 3 scripts setup to try and manage that on x11
