Comment by pkulak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pkulak | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I'm kinda new to Linux as a desktop, and thus went straight to Wayland, so these kinds of comments from ol'-timers are super interesting to me.

I run a Wayland desktop, and I start it by typing it's executable from the TTY after I log in. No fuss, no muss.

Everything works great, except there was this one game I wanted to try out that's a Windows .exe and needs to run in Wine and I couldn't quite get it to run in Wayland. So I installed xorg-server and an X window manager. Tried to just run it from TTY and it complained that there was no X server running. Okay, turns out I need another program to start X, then start my window manager, as a kind of desktop chaperone. Finally get that worked out, try running my game, and the screen tearing is a nightmare. So now I have to run a compositor in there as well to be an intermediary in the already extremely complicated X protocol. And since X needs to run as root (I think?), half the time I try to start it, I get odd permissions errors, or it tries to use the wrong TTY. As someone going the _other_ direction, I can't fathom how anyone puts up with X.

The good news, is that after it did it's initial setup and install in X, the game now seems to run fine in Wayland. :D

X11/Xorg was the default on many distros, so often it was preconfigured in a working state. I started my Linux journey around...2004? And booting into Mandrake or Slackware (or a Knoppix Live CD, my true beginning), X would work fine. But as soon as I had to install it myself (minimal Fedora, minimal Debian, or my fave, stage 1 Gentoo), I'd hit all kinds of issues with configuration and starting the X server.

As a counterpoint, I tried to set up Wayland a couple years back on Ubuntu and Fedora before it was default anywhere, and that was also a nightmare.

It's easy to forget sometimes just how much the distro maintainers make our lives easier.

Xorg has definitely become easier to configure. Back in the old days, you had to write the XF86Config file, either manually or automatically during installation, or else it wouldn’t do anything. These days, Xorg auto-detects everything and you only need an xorg.conf if you’re doing something weird.

Yeah, back then I was using one of the glorious Trinitrons at 75 Hz and 1600x1200. To work at all, I had to manually look up the horizontal and vertical sync ranges and put 'em in the XF86Config.

most people don't start X from the TTY, they use a display manager that starts X and manages the login.

The screen tearing isn't caused by X. It's a faulty video driver.

Lies.

We found the Nvidia fanboy.

More uninformed lies...

Debian 11, AMD RX560, KDE on X, FreeSync on and working, screen tearing appears in landscape orientation and isn't there in portrait. If that's the driver problem, then show me any reason it works fine on the same buffer size.

You had decades to fix the faulty video drivers for X11.... Meanwhile they work on Wayland since day one.

Vendors with closed source drivers had decades to fix.

> Meanwhile they work on Wayland since day one.

So how's that Nvidia support coming along?

There used to be all kinds of nice rules. Like that X would run on tty7.

> I can't fathom how anyone puts up with X.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome

I use ssh -X multiple times per week in general. Wayland in itself does not provide something equivalent.

Keep an eye on the waypipe project for the equivalent functionality: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/

I don't think any solution based on video streaming can ever match what X11 provides, which is, remote apps use the settings of the client computer for rendering. e.g. with ssh -X, if I set my dpi in my .Xresources, no matter the machine to which I'm ssh'ing to, I'm always getting a correct font size for my local screen.

I haven't tested but there is no reason that can't be done in waypipe. It works by intercepting certain protocol messages and proxying them over the network. The client just has to be given the output information from the remote machine.

I don't think it's the case. X just works for me. Had to configure it once, after that I experienced no friction using or updating it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com