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Comment by jhoechtl | Hacker News Reader

Depends on the window manager you are using.

If you are coming from i3 the move to sway is a no-brainer and works great (sway is wayland only). Firefox, thunderbird, Libreoffice all work great and look great, i.e. sharp when you need scaling for example. Sway is to thank for base work they did for other distros like a wayland clipboard protocol all the others are using.

Second comes Gnome. No issues. Gnome laid the gruntwork of porting gtk3 to wayland which works great.

Third maybe KDE. Still two years to come. KDE plasma is suffering from arguably better design decisions like client side decorations vs. Gnome serverside decorations but as many users use GTK based apps those GTK apps do not yet play nicely with the KDE design decisions. As such the brave KDE folks have to implement things themselves while those relying on GTK are done. QT is fine with wayland but not everything is QT.

That's all only true if you are not using NVidia hardware.

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Sorry, but you seemed to have missed answering the OPs question... Why they should switch to Wayland? If there were any benefits to using Wayland, like performance improvements, etc.

Personally, the one real gain I've read about previously is no tearing when watching videos or scrolling fast and security improvements. Also now these Firefox performance improvements. But that's about it.

Are there any other benefits that a normal user would see?

Here are the real, user-visible benefits that I am aware of, at the moment:

  * Fractional scaling of monitor outputs
  * Multi-touch gestures for e.g. switching desktops
  * Security sand-boxing of apps
  * Tear-free video

As the original link shows, though, the architecture has much better abstractions for software engineers to work with so developer quality-of-life is improved, too.

I forgot the most important one: per-output scaling (integer or fractional). This allows you to have your HiDPI laptop display and an external 1080p monitor set to different scale factors.

Any program using X can see the keystrokes entered into any other program using X. This has been bothering people for many years, especially those who have to use untrusted proprietary applications for work reasons. Wayland doesn't have this issue.

If you have an app that is literally attacking you then you are probably compromised. Even with wayland technology to contain hostile apps is grossly insufficient for the use case.

I would be surprised if this weren't as true in 2030 as it is in 2020.

The OS with the best isolation primitives is probably Solaris. It would be hilarious if 2020 Solaris was still better than 2020 Linux.

>If you have an app that is literally attacking you then you are probably compromised

Sure, if your adversary is some literal hacker. But you also have to worry about legit companies that use aggressive "analytics". VSCode most likely logs keystrokes. It would suck if it also logs keystrokes that you type into other applications.

VSCodium is great. It has all the MS junk removed.

https://vscodium.com/

Your point still stands, though.

Defense in depth.

>> Sorry, but you seemed to have missed answering the OPs question... Why they should switch to Wayland?

Because X is deprecated. The question isn't Why switch to Wayland, but When. You have mentioned some benefits too.

>Personally, the one real gain I've read about previously is no tearing when watching videos or scrolling fast and security improvements.

Finally, my Ubuntu box has screen tearing all the time. I'm on good hardware with pretty standard 1080p monitors so I've been absolutely baffled that screen tearing is so frequent in standard desktop use.

I think Wayland is supposed to have better support for various DPI settings and mixed DPI settings.

Having a compositor for X11 will help with the tearing some, but not completely. This will be a nice step up once Wayland is ready in other ways (mainly more window managers and a few other tools that don't quite have equivalents to their X counterparts yet).

Plasma has too many knobs to tweak and their settings menus are too modular, so it’s hard to turn those knobs (there are like 4 keyboard shortcut panels for example). IMHO, I find it easier to be keyboard driven in gnome than plasma (at least, as of a year ago)

How is this related with Wayland? I prefer having checkboxes then a regedit or gnome gconfig.

About shorcuts, I also like having the GUI there to configure the keyboard layout (like set capslook as Escape) rather then edit xorg configs. Also it makes sense to have a section for Global shortcuts and a section for regular shortcuts. If you do not know what Global shortcuts are maybe you don't need them.

Probably GHOME users complain about Firefox's "about:config" because it has too many options and their brain can't fit that many options. The point is the distro gives you some defaults and if you are competent(you know to read and use google) you can change the distro defaults. if you are not competent you find the distro that looks cool and use it as the developers intended and adapt to it not it to you.

Anything that's shown in main settings has to be QA'd and officially supported, often at a commercial level.

Anything hidden in Tweaks or about:config like settings can be classed as "here be dragons".

That's one reason GNOME has less settings (not the main one). Less Settings = less to test, less to support.

But why are some GNOME fans get irritated and irrationally in this case complain about the fact that some developers are more capable of supporting more settings. Why you as a user are bothered that application X has options for people more capable then you of using them.

I am a developer and I understand the part of more coptions and more code paths means more things to test, but with robust code it is not a big deal. Imagine the wallpaper would be hard coded because the developers are lazzy and won't test with a different wallpaper. As a person with dsabilities I contributed a few patches and it would suck to have them rejected because I would need to bring a proof that there is a majority of users that need those things addressed.

Anyway i was not complaining about GNOME removing options or hidding them but complaining that some insecure person for some reason had to complain about KDE into a topic about Wayland support.

Also worth mentioning: Wayland has no support for color management at the moment. Work has been ongoing on this for about a year now, but I think it hasn't really solidified yet into something you can use.

This is the biggest show-stopper for me. Color management is a minimum for usability.

I'm using i3 right now instead of sway, but even in that case all you've said is that I won't lose too much by the transition. You haven't mentioned anything (except scaling, which I don't need) that I have to gain. I'm open to new info, but what's the benefit of wayland for me?

I am not an X/wayland dev, but:

I don’t think it’s supposed to be an upgrade from the users perspective, just a new display driver. Maybe a few new native things like rotatable windows etc which if exist in X11 are probably emulated.

X11 by modern standards is a shitshow of dirty hacks, I spent the weekend researching ‘how can I not have notifications pop over my lock screen using openbox and any composite manager’ and it ended up in the top hard basket. Also repeat this story for screen tearing, DPI, acceleration, weird bugs, etc etc.

Wayland is maturing which is nice, but you really won’t notice many changes, but youll be much cleaner / less buggy in the long run.

The way I see it, Wayland itself is better in some ways but not great. For one thing, it's so secure that things like menus can't show outside window borders - hence, case-by-case handling of exceptions to the security model. Read: dirty hacks built in from the start. I think clipboard handling also falls under this category.

Edit: to me, it seems like wayland isn't fundamentally better. It's just a "new and improved" version of the same system architecture paradigm X is built with. I'd be more interested in something that follows the 'everything is a file' paradigm that made Unix so great to begin with.

> For one thing, it's so secure that things like menus can't show outside window borders

This isn't true.

FYI GTK apps look native now under plasma 5.18

Although Sway is great, they may miss out on certain features they'd need like screen sharing, especially for applications like Zoom which is used by many enterprises.

> If you are coming from i3 the move to sway is a no-brainer and works great

It may work great, but it's not as well packaged by/for upstream as i3.

I recently started running wayland+gnome (rather than i3) on my Ubuntu 18.04 at work - because less bad support for fractional scaling looks a bit better on my two 24" with different dpi.

But there didn't appear to be a "no effort" way to install sway (yet). Especially not with automatic (security) patches.

I'm hopeful it'll be in 20.04?

Sway is in 19.10 already, but 20.04 also adds some nice extras like wofi, wdisplays and mako.

Compiling sway is literally three commands (not counting cloning the repository).

Sure, the instructions are clear. But since there isn't a build ready for 18.04 - that kind of makes me wonder about the versions/state of dependencies too - that is - the packaged dependencies in 18.04.

They'll generally be frozen at the point 18.04 was frozen - so api and versions from 2017 or so. With 20.04 around the corner, I'd rather wait than faff around.

> If you are coming from i3 the move to sway is a no-brainer

I was thinking of waiting another year to jump as I'm having no issues with i3, what are the advantages?

Sway has nicer configuration for multihead display setups than you ever get with xrandr, which is very nice on laptops if you often connect to different external monitors. There's also some clunky support for moving windows around with the mouse, which I've found to be occasionally useful.

Then there are the wayland advantages: very little screen tearing if any, no blanking the screen when connecting to a new display, better security properties.

There's disadvantages as well. There's no xdotool support, and if you want to use any sophisticated keybindings or remapping keys, you'll be forced to rely on Sway's configuration language to do that for you. On i3 I was able to bind ctrl_r to right click, but that is — as far as I know — not possible on sway without rewriting the libinput event stream, which is very painful.

  There's no xdotool support

Have you looked at ydotool?

https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool

Also, do you know about the "i3 Migration guide"?

https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/i3-Migration-Guide

Given the need to access /dev/uinput as a, user doesn't this require negating the supposed security gains of wayland?

Also not exactly maintained

>Since Jun, 2019, I have little time to maintain this project because I'm striving to start an undertaking (instead of working 996).

You can implement a xdotool's equivalent by using virtual-keyboard and virtual-pointer Wayland protocols.

Can you use `bindsym ctrl+r seat - cursor press button2, seat - cursor release button2`?

Sorry, I was unclear. By ctrl_r I meant the right ctrl key, pressed on its own with nothing else. Binding Ctrl+r might be possible. It's also been about a year since I last tried, so there may be a solution now.

When I left Linux for Mac a few years ago, the Wayland situation was about as you describe it. Cannot say I'm surprised.

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