[HN Gopher] PCSX2 Disables Wayland Support
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       PCSX2 Disables Wayland Support
        
       Author : MaximilianEmel
       Score  : 75 points
       Date   : 2023-11-26 20:23 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | iamcreasy wrote:
       | > KDE isn't too buggy, GNOME is a complete disaster.
       | 
       | What did the author mean by this? Don't know much about Wayland
       | other than it is window system, replacing x11.
       | 
       | KDE Plasma wiki[1] says, "KDE Plasma 5 is the fifth and current
       | generation of the graphical workspaces environment created by
       | KDE....KDE Plasma 5 uses the X Window System and Wayland."
       | 
       | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE_Plasma_5
        
         | lights0123 wrote:
         | There is no de-facto Wayland software like there is the X.org
         | server. Wayland is just a protocol--KDE and GNOME (through
         | Mutter) both implement it. The author is saying that KDE did so
         | better than GNOME.
        
         | djbusby wrote:
         | Briefly: it's a big lift for all the different desktop
         | environments (DE) to move from X11 to Wayland. Lots of moving
         | parts; re-implementing and re-factoring is needed.
        
           | londons_explore wrote:
           | The vast majority of users today run a hybrid of Wayland and
           | XWayland... Getting the worst of both worlds, and extra bugs
           | to go on top...
        
             | nolist_policy wrote:
             | That is not true though, XWayland is better maintained than
             | native Xorg. It is here to stay for backwards
             | compatibility.
             | 
             | Disclaimer: I run ChromeOS and Wayland just works.
        
         | jacoblambda wrote:
         | KDE and GNOME roll their own wayland libs for their compositor.
         | 
         | These have varying levels of quality with their own unique
         | quirks and bugs. The "gold standard" for wayland at the moment
         | is wlroots which is what basically every other wayland
         | compositor uses. PCSX2 apparently works perfectly fine on
         | wlroots based compositors but has some quirks with KDE wayland
         | and is nigh unusable with GNOME's super janky wayland
         | implementation.
        
         | DistractionRect wrote:
         | Basically Wayland only supports a subset of what X11 could do.
         | It's more scoped and does a good job with what it's supposed to
         | do.
         | 
         | That said, the rest of the functionality is now an exercise for
         | desktop environments, and they can (and do) things differently.
        
         | OmarAssadi wrote:
         | As noted by other commenters, there are several compositors
         | available for Wayland (essentially the bit that actually
         | implements Wayland).
         | 
         | Some are compositors are developed independently of any
         | particular DE, like wlroots, labwc, hikari, etc, but some are
         | part of a larger project, as is the case with mutter and kwin
         | (GNOME and KDE, respectively). And most of the time you install
         | some sort of GNOME/KDE + Wayland distro, you'll usually also
         | end up with their compositors.
         | 
         | GNOME's implementation in particular has historically caused a
         | lot of drama relative to some of the others. MPV used to have a
         | pretty spicy wiki section dedicated to GNOME (it still kind of
         | exists, though has been toned down a fair bit and addresses
         | NVidia and some other specific issues more directly [1]):
         | 
         | - https://github.com/mpv-
         | player/mpv/wiki/FAQ/ddcbe1b88a99d2568... (2020)
         | 
         | [1]: https://github.com/mpv-
         | player/mpv/wiki/FAQ/a70c96040ad4fa374...
         | 
         | -
        
       | seeknotfind wrote:
       | What a refreshingly honest commit message. The corporate over-
       | professional dribble on work commit messages is so bland by
       | comparison. That being said, I'm still left wondering if Wayland
       | support on one of my projects is a problem.
        
       | jdlyga wrote:
       | Are we subjecting ourselves to the sunk cost fallacy with
       | Wayland? It's been "almost ready" for 6 or 7 years at this point.
        
         | OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
         | Ignoring the exponential pace Wayland has improved for end
         | users in the last 36 months (see for example Plasma/Wayland
         | Showstoppers[0]), would staying on X11 not be more of a sunk
         | cost fallacy? There aren't even any Wayland alternatives with
         | meaningful momentum
         | 
         | [0]
         | https://community.kde.org/index.php?title=Plasma/Wayland_Sho...
        
           | barkingcat wrote:
           | It's entirely possible that _both_ suffer from sunk cost
           | fallacy, and from that analysis there isn 't a "better" or
           | "more" sunk cost. It's already sunk, anything you sink
           | further into it is a waste.
        
         | rcxdude wrote:
         | A way forward probably looks like a more feature-oriented fork
         | of wayland than a do-over. The basic protocol is fine, it's
         | just there's no sense of urgency to actually add important
         | features to the standard, just a long design-by-comittee
         | process which bogs down progress and frustrates developers and
         | users.
        
         | Gigachad wrote:
         | It's been ready ready for a long time now. It's been on by
         | default in Fedora for a long time now and I've not experienced
         | issues. Or at least fewer issues than with X11.
        
           | askonomm wrote:
           | Ready ready on what? Select hardware? I've thrown 4 regular
           | off the shelf laptops at various DE's using Wayland and they
           | all suck in various ways to the point that they're not even
           | usable. Meanwhile I can throw Windows on all of them, and
           | they work flawlessly. I'm quite tired of Linux guys saying
           | their stuff works just fine, without mentioning how extremely
           | limited is the hardware support to actually run any of those
           | things, and judging from various forums, even if you have
           | supported hardware, things break.
        
             | Laaas wrote:
             | This is about X vs Wayland, not Windows vs Linux.
        
               | askonomm wrote:
               | It's about the GPU used in regular laptops, I'd imagine,
               | for which Windows has drivers and support, and Linux does
               | not. That's my point. X11 for those laptops works more
               | reliably, but even then there's immense screen tearing,
               | blurry texts, broken fractional scaling, etc. I just
               | don't know why I would ever use software of this quality
               | when even Windows XP had less issues like this in its
               | hayday, and it released 20 years ago.
        
               | bryanlarsen wrote:
               | The large majority of laptops use Intel or AMD APU's,
               | both of which work fabulously. Gaming laptops using
               | NVidia chips aren't regular laptops.
        
             | Gigachad wrote:
             | It's ready for me in that it works better than X11 on my
             | hardware. No it's not flawless like MacOS and to some
             | extent Windows, but it's certainly an improvement over what
             | we had.
        
               | LtWorf wrote:
               | Works flawlessly if you've never edited a Xorg config
               | file... if you did, there is no way to keep using the
               | same configuration
        
         | agildehaus wrote:
         | I'm using it full-time and the only issues I experience are
         | with XWayland. But even those have been going away as native
         | Wayland support lands in apps and nVidia slowly improves their
         | drivers.
         | 
         | Scaling and overall performance it's night and day versus X11.
        
         | tannhaeuser wrote:
         | If you mean wayland compositors in general, that's more like 15
         | years according to [1].
         | 
         | For gnome's Mutter, it's 12 years:
         | 
         | > _Until they sort their s*t out, which is unlikely, since
         | there 's been very little progress over the last decade, just
         | keep it disabled._
         | 
         | Begging the question if Wayland itself is already antiquated
         | and if its maintenance perspective is any better than X.org's.
         | When lack of developer motivation to work on X.org appears to
         | be the sole point of leaving it behind since new apps haven't
         | been created and (Nvidia) drivers for Wayland may still be
         | problematic.
         | 
         | I can totally understand the desire to start with a clean
         | architecture, but chances are we have to basically start over
         | at square one, with the problem of how to attract younger devs
         | now who want to invest their time into newer languages and/or
         | graphics pipelines rather than maintaining Wayland.
         | 
         | [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_(protocol)
        
       | haunter wrote:
       | Further down:
       | 
       | >... it is disabled on our release builds, because it's nothing
       | but headaches for us, because of its broken by design nature
       | causing issues for users. I listed a bunch of them in the OP as
       | well.
       | 
       | >We're sick of getting blamed for bugs in wayland compositors,
       | while the various committees sit around arguing with each other,
       | finally decide on standard ways of doing things after half a
       | decade, then GNOME ruins it all by refusing to implement it.
        
         | MuffinFlavored wrote:
         | Linux in general...
         | 
         | Think of the efforts wasted in duplicate/overlapping
         | functionality between maintenance + development of
         | distributions, package managers, shells, compilers, C
         | libraries, desktop environments, etc.
        
           | idle_zealot wrote:
           | Unfortunately that's not avoidable. The duplication exists
           | because of disagreement regarding how things _should_ be
           | done. The alternative is not  "my preferred project gets all
           | the resources" but "my preferred project doesn't exist and
           | all the resources go to some fundamentally flawed project
           | that I don't want to use". See Windows or macOS for how that
           | turns out.
        
             | MuffinFlavored wrote:
             | > The duplication exists because of disagreement regarding
             | how things should be done.
             | 
             | Is there too high a level of this disagreement in open-
             | source software? Should it be called out from the
             | perspective of "please try to use your time more
             | effectively instead of contributing to fragmentation
             | because it's harmful to the ecosystem from a macro
             | perspective"?
        
       | oynqr wrote:
       | Wayland lacks a crutch to work around broken multi-monitor
       | handling in composit
        
         | oynqr wrote:
         | Side note: The Glider HN client makes it real easy to fat
         | finger comments since the rewrite. No editing or deleting
         | either. Sigh.
        
       | hashworks wrote:
       | Actions like this will just hurt Wayland in the long run. It
       | needs more users, and for that more applications that support it
       | by default. No one will bring X11 to the level of Wayland, but
       | someone might fix the existing Wayland problems.
        
         | Gigachad wrote:
         | Not sure it will do anything to hurt Wayland. The app will just
         | run in XWayland which is mostly impossible to tell between a
         | native Wayland app for users.
        
           | rowanG077 wrote:
           | Xwayland is instantly recognizable as shitty due to
           | fractional scaling. Which almost everyone with a modern
           | laptop uses.
        
             | Gigachad wrote:
             | I might not be up to date on this, but does fractional
             | scaling work at all on Linux under any setup? Last I
             | checked GTK just flat out didn't support it or something.
        
         | imiric wrote:
         | X11 today works better for more users than Wayland. No user
         | will want to switch to something that provides a worse
         | experience.
         | 
         | Until these issues are ironed out, it's delusional to think
         | that making Wayland the default will make users happy. Keep it
         | as an experimental feature, and once it provides an objectively
         | better experience for everyone, make it the default.
         | 
         | These technical discussions by folks in the trenches often miss
         | the forest for the trees. Users don't care that X11 is
         | difficult to support, develop and maintain. They just want a
         | working system. By the looks of it from this GH issue, Wayland
         | is also a pain for developers. What a sad state of affairs for
         | Linux.
        
           | hashworks wrote:
           | I guess I'm just hoping for some user that will be bugged
           | enough by problems in Wayland that they decide to fix them.
           | The chance of that increases with user count.
           | 
           | I understand that the bulk "forest" of Linux users don't care
           | about their window manager / desktop environment, but it's a
           | higher number than in other operating systems. This approach
           | wouldn't work in Windows or MacOS, in Linux it might.
        
       | dinckelman wrote:
       | As long as the option to keep it turned on exists, I have no
       | issues with this. It's one thing to move forward with a new
       | stack, but it's a different thing to have it as default when it
       | doesn't fully work
        
       | BaculumMeumEst wrote:
       | I'm not sure if it's funnier to see popular projects shunning
       | wayland because it sucks or Linus looking to move kernel
       | development away from an email based workflow because "it really
       | isn't working anymore". There is such an insane amount of coping
       | about both of those topics online.
        
       | Laaas wrote:
       | FWIW all the reasons seem like an aversion to complying with how
       | Wayland works.
       | 
       | Yes, you can't position windows absolutely, but that's because
       | you're not supposed to do that.
       | 
       | In any case I don't see how being able to position windows is
       | relevant at all to PCXS2's functioning on Wayland? Just don't
       | position windows if you can't?
       | 
       | It's an incredibly dumb reason not to support the protocol. Xorg
       | is mostly unmaintained AFAIK.
       | 
       | See https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-
       | protocols/-/m... for the discussion on this
        
         | fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
         | One person's unmaintained is another's stable
        
         | asveikau wrote:
         | > Yes, you can't position windows absolutely, but that's
         | because you're not supposed to do that.
         | 
         | I think about 40 years of GUI APIs disagree with this.
        
         | ryandrake wrote:
         | > Yes, you can't position windows absolutely, but that's
         | because you're not supposed to do that.
         | 
         | Why not? This seems like a pretty opinionated policy from
         | something that's supposed to be a platform to enable
         | applications. Why should some other developer dictate how an
         | application should work? I'd expect "My way or the highway"
         | from Apple, but not from a linux API.
        
           | Arnavion wrote:
           | It's more nuanced than "should be able to do it" and
           | "shouldn't be able to do it". The problem is covered in the
           | wayland-protocols MR that the PCSX2 PR author also linked to
           | (and failed to appreciate):
           | https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-
           | protocols/-/m...
        
         | kcb wrote:
         | Even if X11 goes away XWayland will be around.
        
         | stefan_ wrote:
         | That thread is a fantastic reason to never run wayland.
        
       | bryanlarsen wrote:
       | Another option might be to disable only on Gnome or Nvidia since
       | those seem to be the source of most of the problems.
        
       | apatheticonion wrote:
       | As a naive user who largely hasn't had any issue with it. Is
       | Wayland that bad?
        
         | bryanlarsen wrote:
         | In my experience Wayland is pretty bad on Nvidia binary driver,
         | has some annoyances on Gnome and works fabulous on AMD hardware
         | with KDE or a wlroots based compositor.
        
         | LtWorf wrote:
         | The internet is full of people that will inform you that all
         | the stuff that stops working when switching to wayland is your
         | own fault and you're a liar anyway.
         | 
         | I'm quite convinced these people just use windows and
         | occasionally open linux in a vm for 10 minutes.
        
       | TillE wrote:
       | Aside from bugs and driver issues, Wayland has some unfortunate
       | design limitations. For example, Dear ImGui multi-viewports don't
       | work because "Wayland doesn't let application read or write
       | windows positions."
       | 
       | https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/wiki/Multi-Viewports
       | 
       | This is a feature available on Windows, macOS, and of course X11.
       | Making choices like this means desktop Linux becomes even more of
       | a weird island that nobody wants to support.
        
       | reisse wrote:
       | Quoting @stenzek
       | 
       | > But Wayland is just broken, and everyone would rather sit
       | around arguing with each other instead of actually addressing the
       | design flaws.
       | 
       | > It's not the first time such a proposal has been put forward.
       | Something that developers need for their applications to work
       | properly on WL (particularly multi-window applications), and it
       | gets vetoed. Every other OS manages this fine. But apparently
       | we're in the wrong for not conforming to some warped view of how
       | applications should be, despite our applications working fine on
       | every other platform.
       | 
       | This is so damn true. Wayland lacks a Linus-style BDFL saying
       | that the kern... the compositor is for applications, and not the
       | other way around. We won't have nice things until Wayland
       | maintainers stop thinking about what their end users must or must
       | not do, and start closing feature gaps with X and
       | compositors/window managers on other OSes. Right now they're
       | reinventing the wheel while making it square.
        
       | NekkoDroid wrote:
       | My opinion on a few of the points they have:
       | 
       | > Stupid obsession with CSD in Gnome
       | 
       | I get why GNOME devs don't wanna implement it (most of the times
       | looks out of place for the app, or the app looks out of place to
       | the system if it doesn't use the system toolkit, so it's just
       | better for them to roll something that looks good for the app)
       | and the XWayland implementation for SSDs are still a holdover
       | that would need to be ported that they don't want to do. But then
       | again to my knowledge QT has a way to make a header bar (I
       | _think_ even one in GTK style) and there is libdecor that handles
       | headerbars.
       | 
       | > Inability to position windows
       | 
       | xdg-session-management is being worked to handle restoring of
       | window positions. There are some contensious extensions being
       | discussed about other window placements but they are still very
       | much in flux. I personally am impartital for the actual use of
       | the features and if they are really that necessary.
       | 
       | > Hacks in render-to-main because WL craps itself otherwise
       | 
       | This sounds more like a problem with the project itself than
       | wayland considering the meriad of other things able to work, but
       | then again its an emulator that might be doing some very weird
       | stuff so I can't say much about it.
       | 
       | > Despite said hacks, game list still glitches after stopping
       | emulation, happens more often in gnome
       | 
       | Probably a cascading problem from the previous
       | 
       | > NVIDIA just crashes in swap chain creation under Wayland
       | 
       | Not exactly _too_ surprised, although my laptop with Intel /NV
       | hybrid has been working mostly fine for my mostly basic usage.
       | 
       | > Broken global menus
       | 
       | Those are a thing anywhere other than OSX? How do they handle
       | this on Windows?
        
         | anaisbetts wrote:
         | Windows doesn't have global menus, it defines an API to get the
         | workspace coordinates, which allows apps to know the area
         | available to the window (i.e. not covered by the Start Menu)
        
       | anaisbetts wrote:
       | GNOME as a platform (and by extension, all of their associated
       | projects which unfortunately includes the Wayland protocol) has
       | such a bizarre worldview - it's like they think they can treat
       | the Desktop OS, with all of its user expectations and existing
       | working software, and remake it as a bigger iPadOS, to no one's
       | actual benefit.
       | 
       | What do I get in return for having to give up all of these things
       | that used to work? It's not faster, it doesn't do extra things I
       | couldn't do before - it's _strictly_ downsides all the way down
        
       | shmerl wrote:
       | _> NVIDIA just crashes in swap chain creation under Wayland_
       | 
       | I'd say ignore Nvidia, their Wayland support is junk (until
       | nouveau+nvk catches up). It's not a Wayland problem, it's Nvidia
       | problem.
       | 
       | For dealing with CSD mess, there is libdecoration that SDL
       | started using.
       | 
       | In general - just use SDL for for DE integration, instead of
       | trying to reinvent the wheel.
        
       | evanjrowley wrote:
       | Due to the headline, it has dawned on me just now that the Steam
       | Deck uses X11. Been using PCSX2 successfully on it for several
       | months now. I never thought about whether it was using Wayland or
       | X11 until reading this.
        
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       (page generated 2023-11-26 23:00 UTC)