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Comment by edent | Hacker News Reader

I don't know what I'm doing wrong with Wayland. I have a cheap Linux laptop, with built in graphics. And Wayland works perfectly.

I can run multiple monitors with one of them rotated. When I tried that with X I got lots of juddery tearing.

I can take screenshots and share my screens via video calls. But everyone says it doesn't work due to security.

I have fractional scaling and it doesn't seem to burn out my CPU or battery. Yet that's frequently listed as a disadvantage.

What do I need to do in order to make Wayland as bad as everyone says it is?

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You haven't even mentioned which wayland compositor you are using.

Which is one of the biggest problems with Wayland - there isn't just one Wayland but Gnome Wayland and KDE Wayland and wlroots-based Wayland and Gamescope Wayland. What functionality is available and working and using which API varies between all of these. This includes really basic things like window decorations.

This is different from X where the core functionality is common because everyone usees X.org. If all the Wayland compositors agreed on how thing should work then multiple implementations would be much less of a problem. But they don't or at lest take ages until all but one of the NIH protocol extensions get abandoned. Some of this protocol extension zoo is hidden by applications and toolkits implementing multiple variants but even if you no longer see it as an end user this is still a cost because time spent on dealing with Gnome or KDE bs is time not spent on more useful things.

Yes this. If you use gnome or kde you probably will have no issue with the transition to Wayland. If you use any other window manager then the transition will be painful because there's a bunch of things that don't simply map over from x WMs to Wayland compositors.

I just did this switch and found it incredibly frustrating. Simple things like, "I would like to be able to log out and return to my greeter" don't just work like they do in x.org, and it is dependent on which compositor you use.

> If you use gnome or kde you probably will have no issue with the transition to Wayland

Anecdata but I've had a LOT of issues with kde & wayland, mainly due to SDDM.

> You haven't even mentioned which wayland compositor you are using.

No idea. I'm using Pop OS. So whatever that uses. Gnome is the DE, I think?

>No idea. I'm using Pop OS.

So you're being upvoted to the top by praising how flawless Wayland works on an OS that runs by default on X11? :))

Aww man, I hope there's a miscommunication somewhere, like you switched PopOS from X11 to Wayland, because otherwise this is HN comedy gold.

> like you switched PopOS from X11 to Wayland

> When I tried that with X I got lots of juddery tearing.

They said it pretty explicitly

No, they didn't explicitly say they tried X11 "on the same OS". You can assume that, but it's not explicitly stated in the context. It might as well be experiences on different OSs/instances. OP needs to clarify.

And from my experience, there's distros that work better with X11 which is why they ship with it out of the box instead of Wayland(like Mint, EndeavourOS and Kubuntu), and ones that work better on Wayland out of the box, like Ubuntu and Fedora.

I had to do some pretty hardcore hacking to get Wayland working on Pop.

I wrote it up at https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/05/fix-screen-tearing-on-rotat...

Warning - you'll need to be at least a Level 17 Linux expert to understand the complexity involved.

Sorry. Thanks for the laugh :)

And in addition there are vast parts of the API that is deprecated and no longer used, with basically no documentation of what should not be used.

It's the same issue with the "W3C is just a standard." Rather than making the lives of web developers and users easier by just basing every web browser on Chromium we have to deal with caniuse, polyfills, nonstandard extensions. Basic features like tab sharing are implemented by Google's NIH cast protocol. There's no such thing as a website anymore there's Chrome apps, Firefox apps, and Safari apps. More time is spent wrangling webpack then doing actual web development.

> because time spent on dealing with Gnome or KDE bs is time not spent on more useful things.

The entire reason there's time spent on dealing with Gnome vs KDE vs other bs is that everyone wants to build and customize their own desktop. But hey, it's OSS, freedom of choice and you're free to do it but I doubt window decorations will add very much to the overhead of all those different desktops.

The tearing situation has also recently improved [1,2,3] in X.org, including your cited use case of multiple, rotated monitors, and even if you are not using a compositor, although these improvements are only present in the latest master branch and aren't in any release and thus not shipped by most Linux distributions. I'm sure that the argument could be made about how Wayland still solves the tearing problem more optimally, and I think you should stick with Wayland if you are happy with it, but the tearing situation has improved dramatically on the X side of things since Wayland as well.

[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...

[2] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...

[3] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests...

On the fractional scaling side, precisely Wayland's advantage is that it works much better there than in Xorg.

Regarding the rest, I run an Nvidia laptop under Wayland since early 2022 and it's been working flawlessly. It's true that I'm using one of the cleanest, most forward thinking distros out there: Fedora. On Ubuntu it had way more issues than on Fedora, though.

I guess that’s a good way to think of Federora, forward looking. I always liked it for other reasons, but they do have just the right amount of forward focus. Ubuntu has a very different community to try and satisfy, so has to move slower.

Yes, I agree. I understand why RH splits Fedora and CentOS Stream.

Ubuntu and Nvidia are difficult. We have a Linux work station and attempt to get an Nvidia card working (drivers anyway) failed. Its was confusing and even those with more skill/experience couldn't make it work. PopOS (which is a fork of Ubuntu) with Nvidia ended up working for us. Though I'm not sure if its X or Wayland.

Pop is X, they'll move to Wayland soon.

I am not sure what happened in the Ubuntu case, but maybe you guys should try Alma, RHEL or CentOS?

If Pop works well enough, power to you! I just believe it's not a standard in the industry.

Because its Ubuntu based, we've had no issues installing/running Ubuntu software on it.

My past experiences with SuSE, Fedora, and Red Hat, RPM distributions, eventually experienced a corrupt repository that in each case took hours to fix. That's when I settled on Ubuntu in 2006 and haven't looked back.

I heard bad things about RPM before, but that was long ago. To be honest, I think by 2006 most issues were already over, and YUM was mostly on par with APT. Don't know what might happen in your specific case.

The key point your missing is that you're not using wayland. You're using a wayland. Each wayland is very different from the others in terms of features because they aren't implemented internally as a wayland standard, each wayland picks and choses between various external libs to try to reach normal desktop feature parity for things like keyboard/mouse/input device support (ie, the libei wars: some waylands use it, some hate it and never will).

There's no such thing as "wayland". There are only various different waylands. A person can have an experience with X11, there's standard reference features all X have. But your experience with a single wayland doesn't really give you knowledge of how waylands work (or don't work).

I literally cannot get Wayland working. Everything is broken. It's slow, the fractional scaling doesn't work, full screening apps like vlc or games turn off my monitors, the distro installer crashes, playing a youtube video makes my laptop heat up like crazy, one time a display change made my laptop's screen flicker so hard that it persisted after I restored the settings, another time it turned my monitor's bright red and white respectively.

This is on fresh installs of Ubuntu 22.04 and 23.10.

X11 with XFCE and i3 with picom works perfectly. It's blazing fast, has no tearing, never crashes, uses next to no resources, has no bugs and runs everything. I even use ddccontrol to change my external monitor's brightness.

Maybe try a more modern distro like Fedora. I haven't had any issue with it (intel igpu+nvidia dgpu) in a while.

Op mentioned ubuntu 23.10... which was released two months ago.

I noticed all sorts of horrible breakage in Ubuntu (including LTS updates) over the last 3-5 years (I gave up on it in the 20.* days for anything except VMs / docker containers) Examples included DNS taking 5 seconds to resolve each host, the syslog fiasco, systemd flat out not working, etc, etc.

Maybe that's what they're referring to?

(At this point, I'm looking for anything that's stable and still uses a normal init + x11, FWIW. I wouldn't consider Fedora, since it's owned by IBM, and Red Hat's new business model under them is "systematically violate the GPL and see if we can get away from it".)

That's not really what I meant by modern

So, modern by your own definition of "modern". What is it exactly besides being Fedora?

I have one machine with ubuntu 22.04, and I've never seen any of the described issues. I doubt that 23.10 regressed.

Outside of using Wayland, do you do much 3D rendering?

The symptoms you describe almost sound like a dying 3D graphics card (or 3D graphics card with misconfigured drivers). I wonder if Wayland is requiring the 3D layer to do its compositing and other window engines don't?

Wayland compositors will happily use gpu 3d engine, if it is available. Otherwise, they will do their job with Mesa's software rendering.

They also accept dma-buf handles from clients, so if other software on the system does use gpu, the compositor has somehow to do its composition, and zero-copy if possible.

My laptop isn't dying, dude. It works perfectly in Windows 11 and X11, including running the latest games.

Fair enough. I only suggested it because it turned out to be the root cause the last time my video flaked that badly. Heat sink had failed.

You only get one chance to make a good first impression.

Wayland is probably much better than when I tried it in 2019 but all I remember is the 2019 experience. I think a lot of people are in the same boat.

Really? I can’t help but notice that nobody is describing X as if it hasn’t improved since XFree86 in the 90s so perhaps it is possible for technical professionals to update their understanding?

You seem to be seeing a confrontational message where I didn't mean one. Yes I'm sure you could find some old posts complaining about X that would illustrate the same phenomenon. My point is pretty much exactly that. Fast forward the next 5-10 years and we might all be on Wayland but they blew their first impression and that's delaying adoption.

It sounded like a but of a misdirected excuse: if someone is still complaining about Wayland now based on an initial experience half a decade ago, wouldn’t the first step be getting up to speed with the current state? When I read that I was reminded of how many Linux users had issues with things like mode lines back in the day, and that was a non-issue only a few years later.

The problem is 20 years ago you had to use XFree86 if you wanted graphical output in Linux, there was no other choice, so you had to put up with it no matter the craziness.

Now X.org works fine for the majority of users, so for them (/raises hand) it is very hard to see the value proposition of switching to Wayland, especially if prior attempts were less than successful.

The fact that X11 development has stalled might be a plus for those that just want a stable system, are used to the limitations and don't need new features.

We will migrate eventually, likely at next distro upgrade, but there is no hurry.

You also didn't have much choice; XFree86 is what everyone used and it more or less the only realistic option.

Also doesn't help some people have been rather aggressively banging the Wayland drum for a long time now in a way that quite a few people find rather unpleasant. About half a year ago someone told me I "need" to switch to Wayland because programs will drop X11 support "any time now", all with a sense of glee. A quick search on https://hn.algolia.com with "Wayland by:username" showed they have been telling people that for about 7 or 8 years. Clearly that hasn't happened, so... And when they started banging this Wayland drum so aggressively there really WERE actual problems. Textbook "toxic fanboy" stuff. At some point people start filtering this sort of stuff out.

The first time I really looked in to Wayland was when "I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit" article took off, which starts by comparing "anti-Wayland activism" (something which doesn't really exist as an organised force) with "anti-vaxxers, flat earthers, 9/11 truthers", dismisses anything that disagrees as "lies", and is generally just a stupid rant with a number of fairly obvious factual inaccuracies. To say this rather put me off from Wayland would be an understatement.

I'm not holding you responsible for any of that of course, nor am I saying this is representative of people interested in Wayland as a whole, but at the same time ... I do think Wayland has burned a lot of goodwill with stuff like that, and that people voted that stupid insulting conspiratorial rant to the frontpage did no one any favours – it's not just a single person who wrote that article, it's the hundreds of people who voted on it, and some of whom defended it.

> XFree86 is what everyone used and it more or less the only realistic option.

Not really; in the 90s, there were many X servers, each implementing a different set of extensions. Not just for other Unices, even for Linux, you could purchase a proprietary ones.

For XFree86, it was a monolith, that you had to compile for a specific chipset. Distributions shipped with many binaries, each intended for a specific graphic card and the installer symlinked the right one for you. It was only later, that XFree86 became modular and everyone converged on it.

That's what I mean with "more or less", and they were all more or less compatible and was mostly a "Vim vs. Emacs" type situation, not a "plz rewrite your entire stack"-type situation. That's really the key difference here.

I wonder if you asked people their feelings about 1) Wayland, and 2) systemd, whether or not sentiment would be highly correlated. My first impression of both was when I had a problem.

Add BTRFS to that list; I hear it's gotten better, but I lost 2 root filesystems to the thing and the impression rather stuck.

> You only get one chance to make a good first impression

There plenty of chances to make good non-first impressions though.

I used to check periodically whether Wayland works better than X for me, until it does one day, and I switched.

Not everybody hold on to the shadow of a bad first impression. It’s unfair when subject to another human being, and irrational when subject to a product.

I just setup wayland a couple months ago, so everything should be pretty recent, and couldn't ever get screen sharing to work. It's discord electron, which I think is having some weird interaction with xwayland, but I only researched it for a bit before deciding it wasn't worth it.

Games though can be a nightmare, a recent nvidia driver seems to have created stuttering across all games using X to varying degrees. (downgrading the driver fixes the issue)

> Games though can be a nightmare, a recent nvidia driver seems to have created stuttering across all games using X to varying degrees. (downgrading the driver fixes the issue)

On ubuntu (Kubuntu really), and as a gamer, I've seen no issues with nVidia on X, both native Linux and Steam Proton games rock on.

The games use X, but I'm using Wayland. Wayland native is fine, X games are not.

I've been using Wayland for 5 years now. Never had any serious issues with it either. I have always used AMD GPUs though.

I think the place you get into trouble is when you try and DIY the config. I'm using Fedora and everything works perfectly out of the box. But when I was using arch and was trying out Sway (i3 + wayland) I was constantly running into issues.

Odd, I use Arch (well, EndeavourOS) with Sway and have experienced no problems. Quite on the contrary, my setup with a high-DPI laptop + external monitors is far nicer with Wayland than with X.

Tbh I think a big part of my woes came from my Nvidia card.

How is it nicer with Wayland? I have a high-DPI laptop and it works great with X11. What would I gain with Wayland?

Screen tearing is the big pain of X11 in my experience. Most things work fine, but watching videos or playing games is a terrible experience when dealing with constant screen tears.

I tried a bunch of different configs and was able to minimize them significantly, but they were still there.

What you gain is that programs render at the native resolution of both displays. In terms of appearance, it looks noticeably clearer, since no downsampling or upsampling necessary. But the nicest thing is that it just works — I don’t need to configure any settings to prevent windows from being displayed unreadably small or gigantically large.

I don't know either, I use it for the more than a year and it just works. Used GNOME at first, now on Sway.

But every time Wayland is mentioned on HN, it's always orange display protocol bad.

> What do I need to do

I think you just need to be less lucky tbh.

Out of curiosity, what distro do you run. I'm running Wayland pretty seamlessly right now on Ubuntu: it's not a distro I would normally choose but I cycled through 3 others before "giving in" & going to Canonical. Hardware aside, there's also a lot to be said for sticking to the mainstream software-wise; though it's certainly an oddity for me to be so limited with software-choice in the Linux world.

Pop OS. Very happy with it.

You probably need an Nvidia graphics card. That was the source of all my problems when I first tried it. I dumped that shit and been using Intel graphics and Wayland (sway) happily since 2019.

Any ATI/AMD graphics card too old to use amdgpu has the same problem. I have two machines using the "radeon" driver and Wayland had so many issues on them as well.

Someone on HN pointed me at setting LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=true which makes it stable on my "radeon" driver GPUs at the cost of some performance (e.g. moving a window that is playing video causes the entire screen to freeze only while the window is moving). That should make it pretty stable with any KMS driver (though the nouveau module still crashes on me every 10 days of uptime or so; I've never been able to figure that one out).

I always point out that all of the issues I run into with Wayland on ATI/AMD GPUs also happen with hardware-compositing on X, but I can turn compositing on X off since it's optional, but, as the figures in TFA suggest, it's a core part of Wayland. I think one minor thing that has put so many people (or at least me) off of Wayland is how many issues are dismissed as "your GPU driver is broken." Well I can't write a GPU driver, and Xorg works better with a broken GPU driver than Wayland does.

My several years old laptop with an Intel P530 runs Wayland with zero issues, to the point where I can't tell you when I switched because it was zero drama. Maybe about a year ago? There was one feature in plasma that I needed to wait on before switching, but I don't even remember which one it was.

Which DE are you using?

Pop OS's Gnome.

try running VLC

what happens with vlc ?

Yup, plays everything just fine - on both laptop and external screen.

you might be playing tricks with us...vlc is known to be broken with wayland...if your being honest consider yourself lucky

Source? Regardless, even if VLC or a version of VLC is broken in some configuration, it's not universally broken on wayland. I have been using it on Wayland for multiple years (some of that might be through XWayland, I don't think all of it, but I'm not sure).

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