Comment by anglesideangle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anglesideangle | Hacker News Reader

As someone who actively uses a wayland compositor and has done so since switching to linux ~4 years ago, I often feel like I live in a different world from the authors of articles discussing its usability. Just to discuss a few points made about wayland's supposed inferiority:

> Wayland cannot do (or do well) tons of things:

> VNC server

> remote desktop

I don't regularly use either of these so I cannot attest to whether they work on wayland.

> SSH X forwarding

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe

> custom keyboard bindings

I currently have caps lock bound to esc

> numerous accessibility options

This is likely true

> legacy software

xwayland

> absolute desktop positioning

Once again, I'm running absolute desktop positioning right now

> screen sharing and recording

I just installed and ran obs, told it to use screen capture as a source, it recorded fine

> CAD/EDA tools

CAD software only runs on windows anyway. For KiCad, it's seemingly blocked on a window positioning protocol, which wayland will hopefully adopt soon

The remote desktop is one of the reasons I haven't switched to wayland on a few machines. I used Anydesk to manage them, and Anydesk says they are unable to support Wayland.

the remote desktop stuff is important for some. Waypipe was very slow last time I tried it.

That all being said, I actually found the remote desktop situation to be /okay/ on wayland. `gnome-remote-desktop` is decent; though it uses quite a lot of bandwidth, it appeared to be smoother than xrdp when that bandwidth is available. And the sunshine/moonlight pair, while intended for game streaming, worked fine as a usual remote desktop server/client under wayland.

The only wayland compositor that I know of that handles XWayland correctly is hyprland.

And when I say correctly, I mean that if I am on a non 96 DPI display, e.g. a 168 DPI display (1.75x) and want things scaling properly, Xwayland gets told to pretend that the display size is some resolution in the vicinity of ~1097 by ~686 (not sure how this part works, and honestly I don't think it's relevant) and a DPI of 96. Then xwayland does the most idiotic thing imaginable, it takes the output of applications running under it and stretches it.

And now I have vaseline on my screen.

No thanks.

I may try hyprland at some point to see if there's actual value to using Wayland over X but so far every time I've tried to switch it has been random obstacle after random obstacle.

One of the most baffling has been arbitrary restrictions on the scaling factor.

KWin/Plasma have a switch in the settings where you can toggle vaseline on or off. If you run modern X11 applications that are HiDPI-aware, or you can crank the size of fonts and controls however you want, you may turn it off. If you have that Athena widget application that is tiny otherwise, you turn it on (alas, there is no possibility to have two sets of X display and putting apps on the one you need).

The only thing that for some stupid reason can't be solved is that I can't turn off blurry interpolation on the low DPI applications. Come on! The low DPI layer is in integer multiples, make it nearest-neighbor pixelated but crisp! How hard is that!?

(same goes for QEMU. Argggh!)

Okay, so there's _two_ options now which handle this properly. One conventional desktop environment, and one tiling window manager.

> Once again, I'm running absolute desktop positioning right now

How?

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