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!”
Alternatively, instead of reading a Phoronix article that has a couple of short snippets from a much longer blog post, you can read the original blog post yourself to see the full context.
Edit: Also, it is worth noting that the author of the original blog post had previously written another relatively recent post criticizing the way in which Wayland was developed, so it’s not like they are refusing to see its problems.
One of the specific issues from those who’ve worked with Wayland and is echoed here in Nate’s other post that you mentioned.
Wayland has not been without its problems, it’s true. Because it was invented by shell-shocked X developers, in my opinion it went too far in the other direction.
I tend to disagree. Had say the XDG stuff been specified in protocol, implementation of handlers for some of that XDG stuff would have been required in things that honestly wouldn’t have needed them. I don’t think infotainment systems need a concept of copy/paste but having to write:
Some_Sort_Of_Return handle_copy(wl_surface *srf, wl_buffer* buf) {
//Completely ignore this
return 0;
}
Some_Sort_Of_Return handle_paste(wl_surface *srf, wl_buffer* buf) {
//Completely ignore this
return 0;
}
Is really missing the point of starting fresh, is bytes in the binary that didn’t need to be there, and while my example is pretty minimal for shits and giggles IRL would have been a great way to introduce “randomness” and “breakage” for those just wanting to ignore this entire aspect.
But one of those agree to disagree. I think the level of hands off Wayland went was the correct amount. And now that we have things like wlroots even better, because if want to start there you can now start there and add what you need. XDG is XDG and if that’s what you want, you can have it. But if you want your own way (because eff working nicely with GNOME and KDE, if that’s your cup of tea) you’ve got all the rope in the world you will ever need.
I get what Nate is saying, but things like XDG are just what happened with ICCCM. And when Wayland came in super lightweight, it allowed the inevitably of XDG to have lots of room to specify. ICCCM had to contort to fit around X. I don’t know, but the way I like to think about it is like unsalted butter. Yes, my potato is likely going to need salt and butter. But I like unsalted butter because then if I want a pretty light salt potato, I’m not stuck with starting from salted butter’s level of salt.
I don’t know, maybe I’m just weird like that.
I don’t think infotainment systems need a concept of copy/paste but having to write:
Having lived through the whole “phones don’t need copy and paste debate”, which fortunately got solved by now having it everywhere I’m in the camp “just stick that everywhere, just in case somebody might use it one day”
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.
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
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.
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.
Over on Nate’s other blog entry he indicates this:
The fundamental X11 development model was to have a heavyweight window server–called Xorg–which would handle everything, and everyone would use it. Well, in theory there could be others, and at various points in time there were, but in practice writing a new one that isn’t a fork of an old one is nearly impossible
And I think this is something people tend to forget. X11 as a protocol is complex and writing an implementation of it is difficult to say the least. Because of this, we’ve all kind of relied on Xorg’s implementation of it and things like KDE and GNOME piggyback on top of that. However, nothing (outside of the pure complexity) prevented KWin (just as an example) implementing it’s own X server. KWin having it’s own X server would give it specific things that would better handle the things KWin specifically needed.
Good parallel is how crazy insane the HTML5 spec has become and how now pretty much only Google can write a browser for that spec (with thankfully Firefox also keeping up) and everyone is just cloning that browser and putting their specific spin to it. But if a deep enough core change happens, that’s likely to find its way into all of the spins. And that was some of the issue with X. Good example here, because of the specific way X works an “OK” button (as an example) is actually implemented by your toolkit as a child window. Menus those are windows too. In fact pretty much no toolkit uses primitives anymore. It’s all windows with lots and lots of text attributes. And your toolkit Qt, Gtk, WINGs, EFL, etc handle all those attributes so that events like “clicking a mouse button” work like had you clicked a button and not a window that’s drawn to look like a button.
That’s all because these toolkits want to do things that X won’t explicitly allow them to do. Now the various DEs can just write an X server that has their concept of what a button should do, how it should look, etc… And that would work except that, say you fire up GIMP that uses Gtk and Gtk has it’s idea of how that widget should look and work and boom things break with the KDE X server. That’s because of the way X11 is defined. There’s this middle man that always sits there dictating how things work. Clients draw to you, not to the screen in X. And that’s fundamentally how X and Wayland are different.
I think people think of Wayland in the same way of X11. That there’s this Xorg that exists and we’ll all be using it and configuring it. And that’s not wholly true. In X we have the X server and in that department we had Xorg/XFree86 (and some other minor bit players). The analog for that in Wayland (roughly, because Wayland ≠ X) is the Compositor. Of which we have Mutter, Clayland, KWin, Weston, Enlightenment, and so on. Which that’s more than just one that we’re used to. That’s because the Wayland protocol is simple enough for these multiple implementations.
The skinny is that a Compositor needs to at the very least provide these:
- wl_display - This is the protocol itself.
- wl_registry - A place to register objects that come into the compositor.
- wl_surface - A place for things to draw.
- wl_buffer - When those things draw there should be one of these for them to pack the data into.
- wl_output - Where rubber hits the road pretty much, wl_surface should display wl_buffer onto this thing.
- wl_keyboard/wl_touch/etc - The things that will interact with the other things.
- wl_seat - The bringing together of the above into something a human being is interacting with.
And that’s about it. The specifics of how to interface with hardware and what not is mostly left to the kernel. In fact, pretty much compositors are just doing everything in EGL, that is KWin’s wl_buffer (just random example here) is a eglCreatePbufferSurface with other stuff specific to what KWin needs and that’s it. I would assume Mutter is pretty much the same case here. This gets a ton of the formality stuff that X11 required out of the way and allows Compositors more direct access to the underlying hardware. Which was pretty much the case for all of the Window Managers since 2010ish. All of them basically Window Manage in OpenGL because OpenGL allowed them to skip a lot of X, but of course there is GLX (that one bit where X and OpenGL cross) but that’s so much better than dealing with Xlib and everything it requires that would routinely require “creative” workarounds.
This is what’s great about Wayland, it allows KWin to focus on what KWin needs, mutter to focus on what mutter needs, but provides enough generic interface that Qt applications will show up on mutter just fine. Wayland goes out of its way to get out of the way. BUT that means things we’ve enjoyed previously aren’t there, like clipboards, screen recording, etc. Because X dictated those things and for Wayland, that’s outside of scope.
That’s my problem with this. It tries to be a desktop display server protocol without unifying all desktop requirements. Sure, X11 is old and have unnecessary things that aren’t relevant anymore, however, as someone who builds their own DE, (e.g.: tiling window managers) I see it as the end of this masterrace. Unless everybody moves to wlroots. Flameshot, for example, is already dealing with this, having at least 5 implementations only for linux, and only wlroots and x11 are standards.
Also, imo, having windows in windows is useful when you want to use your favourite terminal in your favourite IDE. But as you said DEs can implement it simply. Let’s say wlroots will implement this but others can decide otherwise. And for those the app won’t run.
Another example, that affects my app personally, is the ability to query which monitor is the pointer at. Wayland doesn’t care having these so I doesn’t care supporting wayland. And I"m being sad about this because X is slowly fading away so new apps will not run on my desktop.
Moreover with X11 I could write my own hotkey daemon in my lanuage of choice, now I would have to fork the compositor.
Do I see it wrong?
Also, imo, having windows in windows is useful when you want to use your favourite terminal in your favourite IDE.
The wayland way to do that is to have the application be a compositor, they made sure that nesting introduces only minimal overhead. And that ties in with the base protocol being so simple: If you only need to deal with talking to the compositor you’re running on, and to the client that you want to embed, a wayland compositor is indeed very small and lean. Much of the codebase in the big compositors deals with kms, multiple monitor support, complex windowing logic that you don’t need, etc.
Oh and just for the record that doesn’t mean that you can’t undock the terminal: Just ask the compositor you’re running on for a second window and compose it there. You can in principle even reparent (client disconnecting from one compositor and connecting to the other) but I think that’s only standardised for the crash case there’s no standard protocol to ask a client to connect to another compositor. Just need to standardise the negotiation protocol, not the mechanism.
The fundamental X11 development model was to have a heavyweight window server–called Xorg–which would handle everything, and everyone would use it.
So there’s a Wayland hope for systemd-afflicted boxes and their cults.
Every change will bring it’s fair share of complainers, not much we can do about that. LILO to GRUB, SysV to systemd and now X11 to Wayland. No one is forcing your hand (unless you use a pre-packaged distro like Ubuntu/Fedora, in which case you go with whatever the distro provides), keep using X11 if you want stability, if you wanna dip your toes in bleeding-edge software and increase it’s userbase to show hardware manufacturers that their drivers need to be updated (I’m looking at you, NVIDIA) then feel free to mess around.
Eventually the day will come when Wayland apps will simply not launch on X11 and you’ll migrate too.
I’d say that’s already becoming the case in a few places. Hyprland isn’t just “Wayland good”, it’s “You should use Wayland good”.
Yes, I know the devs behind it act like pissants. That’s bad and I’m sorry for liking their software. I use Emacs too and RMS was kind of an asshole. Hell, I use Lemmy even though one of the devs has slighted me on more than one occasion.
… has gotten some help and is now a pretty well-adjusted human being, who still tells right wing trolls to go suck it, and still tells paid professionals that they should have known better when they should have known better, but in language that isn’t abusive.
So I don’t know why you bring him up.
Every change will bring it’s fair share of complainers
sometimes the complainers are right and sometimes they aren’t
And when they’re right, it’s usually addressed. I say usually because GNOME exists.
In case of Gnome it was addressed, just by different people. Gnome 2 continues to live on as MATE, so anyone who doesn’t like Gnome 3 can use it instead.
I seem to remember a lot of people upset about GPL V3 I don’t remember how that was resolved.
AFAIK, Fedora is the only distro that’s getting rid of X11 support, the other distros are still packaging it AFAIK.
Go tell Fedora that then lol. They want it gone to the point where Nate is telling users who want X to stay away on that post. Xwayland I believe will still be around though.
You are right in spirit.
It was not sysv to systemD, and it was forced (by making udev not work without it).
Other then nvidia, wayland is still missing some protocols (example: what virtual desktop you want your window to be on). But those protocols are (still) being worked on. And you will always be able to run x11 programs on wayland.
The advantages of wayland are a more direct path to hardware, and trowing away lots of code.
after more than 25 years using linux I could not care less about those dramas, when my distro will drop xorg I’ll switch and that’s it. I’ve got way too much stuff to implement myself already, there is no time for that. I mean, I’ve even embraced systemd…
I wish that was my experience, but Nvidia drivers on KDE Wayland have had a lot of oddities and issues that have caused me to go back to Xorg every time I’ve tried (12 times and counting). Wayland is a good move in the right direction, and I look forward to it, but it’s still being implemented.
That’s less about Wayland than it is about shortfalls in nVidia driver development. Exactly like Nate’s example in the blog post.
Just don’t buy nvidia (or stuff from any other company openly hostile towards their users)
yeah but the point is why bother? :) especially if I wouldn’t notice differences…
To provide features that Xorg can’t.
If you don’t need features like fractional scaling, VRR, touchscreen gestures, etc. you won’t notice a difference.
People who do use those, will. Because for them, those features would be missing or not complete on Xorg.
Because it fixes all the issues I had with X. Everything runs a bit faster and is smoother plus inputs behave like they should.
