Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

Wayland is good, and I use it on all my devices (even my Nvidia desktop). Still, I think the author's syllogism of "Wayland good, x11 bad" isn't very constructive or original. x11 was designed at a time when CRTs were the main display medium and VGA was the cable you used. Wayland's greatest achievement is that it's greenfield project that doesn't suck; taking pot-shots at x11 is kinda like insulting grandpa for laughs.

Plus, not all of these comments really line up in my opinion:

> Just use Nouveau if you want to do anything with Xwayland, and you don’t have several GPUs.

No? Nouveau is an awful experience on Wayland if you intend to get more than 30% of your GPU's performance, doubly so for a recent GPU. The benchmarks are atrocious: https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-nouveau-2019

Not sure where that one's coming from. I've been using Java apps in xWayland on Nvidia native drivers without issue for a while now.

> Wayland technically has nothing to do with screensharing - this is all handled separately, in PipeWire and xdg-desktop-portal.

> Look at Xorg, and you get a worse UX

...because it's 30 years old, and (like Wayland) was not designed with screensharing in mind?

There's nothing that stops you from using PipeWire and XDG portals to get roughly the same experience on x11. It would suck for other reasons, but this is a really strange point to highlight.

> Application development PoV

> Hell.

It's really not. I've written software that unconsciously targeted both x11 and Wayland perfectly fine. Even native applications in xWayland run... like native.

I'd keep going but I'd rather not. Their article seems to be hyperbolic and overly hypocritical.

> No? Nouveau is an awful experience on Wayland if you intend to get more than 30% of your GPU's performance, doubly so for a recent GPU.

I mention this in the article.

> ...because it's 30 years old, and (like Wayland) was not designed with screensharing in mind?

And unlike Xorg, Wayland didn't have it hacked on. There was an actually decent library available (PipeWire) and portals that made it work nicely, and fit with the vision of the Wayland developers.

> It's really not. I've written software that unconsciously targeted both x11 and Wayland perfectly fine. Even native applications in xWayland run... like native.

I am interacting with the X protocol and trying to sort it all out and no, it is NOT perfectly fine. It's enough of a hell that I'm considering leaving the heavy lifting to third party libraries like SDL, Winit, and Smithay.

> No? Nouveau is an awful experience on Wayland if you intend to get more than 30% of your GPU's performance, doubly so for a recent GPU. The benchmarks are atrocious: https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-nouveau-2019

Forget performance, I get display corruption and crashes on both Wayland and X/kwin with compositing enabled if I use Nouveau. This is on a GTX 1050 Ti. I should point out that the issues Nouveau went from daily occurrences to a bit less than weekly over the time I've owned the card, but I'd like to not have to restart my desktop that often.

>No? Nouveau is an awful experience on Wayland if you intend to get more than 30% of your GPU's performance, doubly so for a recent GPU. The benchmarks are atrocious: https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-nouveau-2019

To expand on this, nouveau is cryptographically handicapped by nvidias decision to lock reclocking and power management API's behind cryptographic firmware signing required to execute in FALCON High-Sec mode processors since the GTX 9xx series (Maxwell I think?) and on.

Even if someone cracks that nut; which they have, nouveau can't really reap the benefits of it due to the DMCA anti-circumventiom violation that leveraging that nut cracking would likely entail.

Therefore, nouveau is quite literally cut off at the lnees by Nvidia, and their decision to lock away those critical API calls where no fully compliant, "good-faith" FLOSS dev can actually get at them.

So saying nouveau is terrible is a huge misnomer/misconception, as it is entirely Nvidia that are responsible for the inability of anyone else but them to write legally unencumbered firmware to leverage the full functionality of the hardware boards they sell.

Going and placing the blame for "terribleness" on X11 vs. Wayland, then completely mischaracterizing the situation around nouveau, which os in the most heartbreaking state as a project that I can possibly imagine I tend to take as a glaring indication that someone knows nothing about the stack beneath them.

Wayland vs. x11 is honestly one of those things that infuriates me in the sense that instead of looking at X11 for what it was; a godsend in terms of providing a graphical desktop environment in a network transparent way, on machines that often were spec'd in the M prefix in terms of RAM and processor cycles, vs Wayland, a project born out of an impetus (from automotive and embedded systems groups if I recall the origin story) to have a quicker graphics environment spin-up on bespoke hardware.

I'll give props where props are due, but I still find the X Protocol to be a far from obsolete protocol. Even of graphics ptogramming isn't my bag, and counts itself as one of the chief items in my "bag of crap I haven't had time to sit down and really read/dig through yet

[1]https://hexkyz.blogspot.com/2021/11/je-ne-sais-quoi-falcons-...

> Going and placing the blame for "terribleness" on X11 vs. Wayland

> So saying nouveau is terrible is a huge misnomer/misconception

I'm not trying to misrepresent them at all. The performance experience is miserable, and you're wasting power to run it (especially on newer systems). The software effort is noble, and Nvidia is terrible for being so mean and stingy with their hardware. That being said, they ship a perfectly usable driver that I've daily driven, on Wayland, for years. Bringing DEs into the equation is just so I can refute the lousy argument that people should be using Nouveau on a daily basis. Unless you have an ideological objection, the proprietary driver is unfortunately the best no-hassle experience for Nvidia GPUs on Linux. That's the sad part.

> I still find the X Protocol to be a far from obsolete protocol.

That's very much what got me to write my original comment. The original article feels weird and combative, like x11 and Wayland are competing protocols. It's dead, Jim.

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