[HN Gopher] Wayland is pretty good
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Wayland is pretty good
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 74 points
Date : 2023-06-29 21:34 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (serebit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (serebit.com)
| kiririn wrote:
| Does it have hardware cursor support yet? My last experience was
| unusable for mouse-centric use, like treacle compared to Windows
| or X11. Windows has proven you can have all these nice things in
| a low latency environment
| colordrops wrote:
| You must have something wrong with your setup. I'm not seeing
| any issues with the cursor on my two older laptops.
| kiririn wrote:
| You probably won't notice it on a laptop display, especially
| not if using the touchpad
| worthless-trash wrote:
| You've just started me down a rabbit hole of reading, I'm so
| confused now that there is even the idea of a 'hardware cursor'
| of an idea so clearly implemented in software.
| kiririn wrote:
| The cursor has to be rendered outside the normal graphics
| pipeline to feel responsive. To match it you would need to
| render the desktop at 2x or so the mouse polling rate (like
| 2000 fps or so for a good mouse)
| anyfoo wrote:
| It popped up first some time in the 90s (or at least that's
| when I first became aware of it), long before any "3D
| accelerators" or similar became available.
|
| Telling a graphics card "here's a bitmap, please render it at
| these coordinates, over the framebuffer content" is so much
| easier and more efficient than, in the earlier days,
| rendering a cursor _into_ the framebuffer (and then undoing
| that for the next frame), at the rate where this needs to
| happen (pretty much every frame) to boot.
|
| I don't know if in modern times, this could be reasonably
| achieved through compositing, but I suspect "here's the
| bitmap, render it here" is still easier, conceptually at
| least.
|
| > of an idea so clearly implemented in software.
|
| As an aside, many hardware things are ideas that could be
| clearly implemented in software.
| tredre3 wrote:
| > I don't know if in modern times, this could be reasonably
| achieved through compositing
|
| Evidently it can, as Wayland does it, but the result is
| pretty mediocre.
| ary wrote:
| Related:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35935979
|
| https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/110354541574112092
| colonwqbang wrote:
| Things that I can't get to work on Wayland:
|
| * Getting the display scale just right. I have a 3k by 2k laptop
| screen. 1x is too small and 2x is too big.
|
| * Getting the mouse cursor to be drawn at a consistent size. Now
| the size varies when you move it across windows which is
| unacceptable.
|
| Am I missing something? Both of these seem like basic issues that
| someone must have figured out a solution to.
| galkk wrote:
| Wayland is supposed to have fractional scaling now. I think
| wdisplays lets you configure it.
|
| #1 was was never solved by X11 properly, and I'm forced either
| have large fonts on 27" 2K and ok fonts on 4K 32" or ok fonts
| on 27" and small on 32", because I'm limited by one Xft.dpi
| Kudos wrote:
| Search for "fractional scaling" with the name of your DE and
| you should get the answers you need.
| Schnouki wrote:
| I use 1.5x on my Framework 13 laptop (2256x1504) and it works
| perfectly :) Way better than Xorg, especially when using
| multiple displays with different scales or fractional scales.
|
| For the mouse cursor, I had the same issue with Xwayland
| windows until I explicitly setup a cursor theme. Now that works
| too... and I suspect it was also because of that display scale
| thing.
| dheera wrote:
| I can't get input methods working on Wayland in Chrome. I need
| to use the fallback X11 mode in Chrome. It's been an issue for
| months.
| timetraveller26 wrote:
| I keep hearing that, but personally I will migrate until
| something like Awesome WM is available on Wayland.
| OtomotO wrote:
| On wayland since 2018, exclusively since early 2020.
|
| Only problem left is: no browser docks in obs due to cef
| upstream.
| blinkingled wrote:
| X11 is mostly stable though. With Wayland on Fedora/GNOME or KDE
| a crash or two once in a while is still pretty much something you
| expect. Hopefully it gets better in less than 20 years :)
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| I crash constantly on Wayland and I can't talk about it or get
| help to fix it, because like all Linux problems, it all comes
| back to somehow being my fault, as all Linux issues are the
| fault of the user.
|
| As long as desktop Linux's problems keep getting blamed on the
| user, it will never achieve wider adoption.
| colordrops wrote:
| Wayland can't crash, it's a protocol. That's like saying "http"
| crashed. Chrome or Firefox can crash, but not http. Gnome and
| KDE are Wayland implementations. I'm using SwayWM which uses
| wlroots as its Wayland implementation and it's solid as a rock.
| asveikau wrote:
| I guess that raises an interesting point. The implementations
| are so divergent that there are probably a lot of very
| different crashing bugs in all the various pieces that can
| make a Wayland desktop. As opposed to Xorg, where bugs can be
| fixed in a single tree.
| Miraste wrote:
| *ahem*
|
| I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're
| referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've
| recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux...
| mort96 wrote:
| I agree. Switching from glibc + coreutils to musl + busybox
| is much more like "switching operating system" than
| switching from Linux + systemd + GNOME to HURD + SysVInit +
| KDE.
|
| Obviously not. GNU hasn't been "the operating system" in at
| least several decades.
| palata wrote:
| Unless you don't use the GNU userland... some are using
| busybox/Linux, right?
| Conscat wrote:
| Yeah, it's only GNU/Linux if it uses the GNU OS API with
| the Linux kernel, as opposed to GNU/Hurd for instance,
| which also uses the GNU OS API.
| mort96 wrote:
| Dude the "OS API", in the Linux world, is the syscall
| interface. Some programs use the wrappers provided by GNU
| libc, others use the wrappers provided by musl, others
| yet (such as Go programs) issue syscalls directly.
| augusto-moura wrote:
| You either understood the point and purposely ignored it or
| just missed it completely. The parent reply clearly means
| support for wayland, not the protocol.
|
| Being pendantic about the definition doesn't help the
| discussion at all. It is the type of response you would get
| on the red website
| anyfoo wrote:
| I agree, but I'm curious what the "red website" is? I
| thought maybe reddit or lobste.rs, but they seem more blue
| to me. Unless because their logos/favicons are red?
| Seriously not trying to be annoying, generally curious.
| augusto-moura wrote:
| I don't know if you mean blue as in politics, but I mean
| the literal color red. And well, red is on its name :p
|
| The orange website and the red website are popular slang
| that you hear around here from time to time
| rubiquity wrote:
| Wayland (wlroots/sway) hasn't crashed on me once in the four
| years I've been using it.
| SushiHippie wrote:
| Second this, sway is very very stable. And super
| snappy/minimal, I like it.
|
| The chance that I will use another WM any time soon is
| absolutely low.
| sylware wrote:
| The second the steam client drops its 32bit legacy code and
| finally has a wayland backend, I start to code my wayland
| compositor (probably based on the drm/vulkan one from valve
| deck).
|
| That said, be careful, one of the big mistakes from x11 was those
| bazillions of libs with their quite not stable ABI/API to deal
| with, the wlroots lib from this article _must_ stay
| private/static for a wayland program!
| jakedata wrote:
| Yes, Wayland is pretty good.
|
| https://www.niche.com/places-to-live/wayland-middlesex-ma/ra...
|
| Unfortunately the whole Linux display thing has rather confounded
| searches about the town. Any open source contributors who live
| here are probably mildly annoyed.
|
| Why don't then name projects the way Amazon sellers name
| products, with a semi-random agglomeration of letters instead of
| taking a perfectly sensible name that is already in use. Would
| you call your display driver brooklyn?
| fifteen1506 wrote:
| We used to have cool names like gaim or something. Then stupid
| trademarks started going after names whose substrings matched
| the trademark and no-one wanting to avoid a heartattack chose
| again original names.
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| I propose a committee that allocates sets of random letters on
| a first-come-first-serve basis. That way, we will not suffer
| the undue burden of having multiple names for things.
|
| The name of this committee shall be 'mvphjguq'. Not only is the
| name unlikely to collide with any existing place names, it is
| nigh unpronounceable! And because it is only 8 letters long, it
| is easy to remember, while also having a 1 in 26^8 chance of
| having a collision with another randomly generated value
| (although we can check for collisions before dispensing new
| names).
| aidenn0 wrote:
| And once I upgrade from my 1050Ti, I might be able to use Wayland
| without it crashing...
| mikepavone wrote:
| The core of Wayland does seem to be pretty good, but I think
| adoption has been hurt by a tendency to push things out of the
| core protocol and the lack of a unified implementation between
| major desktop environments. Screenshots and screen capture got
| pushed out to dbus protocols and are quite limited in some ways
| compared to what you could do with X (good for sandboxing, but I
| think rather unfortunate for the non-sandboxed case). Window
| decorations are a huge mess because GNOME/Mutter don't support
| server side decorations at all, but non-GTK apps don't
| necessarily know how to draw their own. Even VRR support is kind
| of a mess because it's up to the individual compositors to
| implement it and one of the most commonly used ones (Mutter, used
| in GNOME) doesn't support it.
| mkozlows wrote:
| I've been using Wayland (on Fedora) for a while, and it's been
| fine. No crashes, no weird performance problems. I wouldn't even
| know it's not X...
|
| ... EXCEPT THAT it doesn't support color management (or at least,
| Chrome doesn't support it under Wayland, I'm never clear where
| exactly the problem lies), so my wide color gamut monitor goes
| fluorescent in Wayland, while staying properly subdued in X.
|
| There, I've now fulfilled the contractual obligation to gripe
| about Wayland in every post about it.
| tomalaci wrote:
| Problem is always with software having good support for these
| "newer" protocols. Most just seem to test and develop against
| X11.
|
| In general, it would be great to have more first-class support
| for Linux from many major software developers (in my opinion,
| Valve is a pretty good leader in this area). Linux always feels
| like second class citizen that you need go in manually tweak and
| fix something to make it work (thankfully, there is plenty of
| info to do it but it is still a hassle).
| spdy wrote:
| Just went through a sway install and its on the right path but
| still needs alot of work.
|
| Alot of digging is needed to get nvidia accelerating / mouse
| cursor to work and performance is not comparable to X11 atm from
| my experience.
| OtomotO wrote:
| This is on nvidia or as I say "nie wieder" for "never again"
|
| I haven't bought an nvidia powered device since 2007 and am
| using amd exclusively since 2011. No regrets. Open source
| drivers rock!
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