WAYLAND in 2023: how GOOD (or BAD) is it? Apps, GPUs, desktops, gaming...
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- čas přidán 19. 06. 2024
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#Wayland #X11 #linux
00:00 Intro
00:39 Sponsor: 10% off your first website
01:36 X11 vs Wayland
04:47 What's missing from Wayland itself
06:22 Desktop Environment support
09:07 Wayland & GPUs
10:50 Gaming on Wayland
13:01 Apps & Wayland
14:52 Parting Thoughts
16:39 Sponsor: Get a PC made to run Linux
17:57 Support the channel
So, up until recently, all Linux desktops used the X Server, also called X.org or X11. It's a venerable piece of software, that predates even the first release of the Linux kernel, by almost a decade, and X11 is virtually unmaintained now.
And so that's why Wayland was started in 2008. In terms of advantages, it eliminates screen tearing, it lets you have multiple monitors with different refresh rates and different scaling factors, and it's more secure.
www.secjuice.com/wayland-vs-x...
The Wayland protocol still lacks network transparency: Wayland doesn't support running a program on a computer, and displaying it on another. Some stuff also isn't supported yet, on Wayland OR on X11, for example HDR.
Support for fractional scaling has just recently been added, and isn't fully supported by all major Linux desktops and toolkits just yet. Wayland also doesn't support global shortcuts by default, but it's fixed through a desktop portal.
And we need to look at desktop environments and window managers. GNOME is probably the one with the more robust Wayland support available right now: not the most feature complete, but the most robust.
On KDE, Wayland support is a bit less solid, in my experience, Plasma 6 should be THE release with good Wayland support.
As per other desktop environments: Cinnamon is just beginning, MATE hasn't started, but XFCE has published a roadmap of the things that already work, and the things that need to be worked on. Pantheon, the desktop for elementary OS, has an experiment wayland session that is, for now, not really usable, and Deepin doesn't seem to have any plans yet.
You can use Sway, which is basically i3 but made for Wayland, with support for i3 config files, you have hyprland, based on the wlroots implementation, that seems to be the fastest moving tiling window manager for Wayland.
If you use open source drivers, like the mesa drivers for Intel and AMD GPUs, or the Nouveau driver for nvidia, you're all good. These support everything you need, and work well with Wayland, just as well as on X.Org. But then, there are the proprietary nvidia drivers.
And to be fair, they do work with Wayland. it took a long while, but it works, I've been using them on hybrid graphics laptops on GNOME and KDE, and on a desktop running Fedora for a long while, and it works. But it's also not the best experience.
And since we're talking about GPUs, let's talk about gaming. Gaming on Wayland basically relies on X.org, with something called XWayland: it's and X11 server running inside of Wayland.
There is a small performance impact depending on the game. It's not huge, but it's there, so if you're struggling to keep a smooth 60FPS, Xorg will be better. This is notably true with Nvidia drivers, which don't handle XWayland very well.
For now, Wayland enforces Vsync everywhere, unless your monitor has adaptive sync, so stuff like Gsync of freesync. If you don't have that, then Vsync is, for now, mandatory.
And finally, we have application support. All the latest Kirigami apps for KDE, or QT 5 and Qt 6 apps, or Libadwaita apps will handle Wayland well, and all the portals they need to interact well with other apps, screen sharing, and the like. Electron apps using a recent version of electron will also support Wayland, but a lot of electron apps still use an old version that doesn't support it properly.
And older apps using GTK 2, or older versions of Qt also won't support Wayland. Some web browsers also don't run natively with Wayland. - Věda a technologie
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What os are you using in this Wayland video please? Thanks in advance
Considering Raspberry Pi just swapped over to Wayland in Pi OS 12 (Debian Bookworm), I think there will be a large chunk of new users who have no idea they're using Wayland running into some incompatibilities... and hopefully getting them resolved!
Yeah, the more users there are, the more likely devs will work on fixing these remaining problems!
I have a 3.5 inch screen that will not work on bookworm.
@@tonysheerness2427 Hi, for what I know Wayland talks to the graphic driver et al. in the kernel, I am not doubting you by any means, but can you elaborate why it won't work?
You load the drivers and nothing happens, but works with the previous release. Other people are experiencing the same thing as I googled the problem. @@ernestuz
Had that issue just about a week ago, all of a sudden the option to enable underscan was gone! (Im using a CRT)
Edit: important thing to note is raspi config makes it easy to switch back to X, really handy!
“XWayland works fine. You won’t notice it at all. But actually, you will, and on NVidia it completely fails.”
I personally haven't experienced any XWayland bugs but that's due to Wayland not running at all on any of my machines.
This is the entire video lol, he lists out so many major issues and then he's like "but if that doesn't affect you it's great!" I have no idea why this is shipping default now as if it's even remotely ready
@@Grapevin Because if it doesn't ship now then it never will. There needs to be users to actually resolve issues. We can't stay on X11 forever.
F*** you, Nvidia
-Torvalds
@@lucass8119I semi-agree but they need to make some changes, quick. For example, fractional scaling is basically unusable on it for any apps that were built for X11.
6:04 Portals also have a few other uses. They allow for software to better integrate onto the system. For example, Firefox used to use the GTK filepicker even on KDE. But with portals, Firefox calls to the file picker portal and it will use the GTK filepicker if you're using a GTK-based environment like Gnome or the QT filepicker if you're using KDE. Portals are also used for sandboxing. An app can have no access to your filesystem, but using portals, they can be temporarily granted access to specific files or folders.
True!
What lib I import to use portals? portals.h?
that's a great feature, it always annoyed me that some programs would use the gtk picker on kde.
Portals allow Flathub and other apps to integrate seamlessly with minimal dev effort. I hope they become the standard for Linux app programming!
Another way to do sandboxing is namespaces.
The unmaintainable aspect of X11 is, to me, one of the most damning things about it. I do fpga development for a living. I've very often just straight up deleted chunks of code and rewritten them from scratch because I didn't want to deal with them. And the other engineers are surprisingly not upset when I do that. They'll tell me how much of a pain those functions were to integrate and update, and how they spent months getting it to work after trying to shoehorn a simple feature into it, and were constantly finding bugs with it, and nobody really knows how it works or wants to touch it. And it takes me all of about a week to rewrite it, it's a fraction of the size of the old code, and it works perfectly save for a few minor obvious bugs.
It's not viable to fix bad code. You'll spend so much time trying to understand how it works, and so much time discovering and fixing random bugs, and fixing those bugs is like playing jenga where your fix is going to make the code even more fragile and might break something else. It's much less effort to take what you've learned and start from scratch.
X11 is what we call legacy system. Having a new display server is way over due.
@@aziskgarion378 the fact xorg is still a thing just shows how incompetent the devs behind Linux really are
@@escapetherace1943 Lol, Linux is the kernel. X11 is userland. The people who write userland software aren't "linux devs". X11 also runs on BSD and other Unix systems.
@@lucass8119 I'm aware of that genius but you didn't think that because they are separate modules of something they don't have any crossover? The point stands xorg has been bad for so long with nobody caring to use something else. Wayland has been taking almost 2 decades now, it's a joke
As you said, it is not meant for modern hardware. It's true that X11 is old, too old even but even though it is a system made for computers back in 1987 it actually impressive that it has lasted this long and has not been decommissioned already. But, yes a successor is necessary for modern systems and it is surprising that one has not been developed and implemented already. I hope Wayland support for Nvidia will have a complete arrival soon.
Considering the fact that even Linus Torvalds hates working with them and that they ONLY would use EGLStreams when every other open source GPU driver (in Mesa) used GBM until Nvidia eventually gave in and switched to GBM (and KDE Plasma subsequently dropped EGLStreams support once this happened), I'm honestly not surprised why it's taken so long.
My Fedora 38, 39 systems, with Waland, crash and provide the black screen death. I switched to using xorg, and all is well. Today, Wayland is, in my opinion, not reliable. It just doesn't work for me as a well proven xorg replacement. Perhaps it will, by 2025, replace xorg.
The problem is more that no one wants to maintain it, than it being old per se. It being old is a reason for that (since that means there's tons of legacy code that no one wants to touch for the fear of breaking something), the reason why it has lasted this long is because of developers hacking together something that works for a modern system, but the project itself has been on life support with some occasional security/bug fixes for many years at this point.
Here we go again with nvidia owners failing on wayland and blaming the latter for it. Because hey it is a sacrilege and capital sin to blame nvidia's drivers for their wayland problems. Nvidia can't be the issue right? Fact is even very old amd and intel gpus run very well with wayland. Only nvidia causes issues after issues with their obstinate behavior. And the community can nothing do about it due to closed drivers. Instead of blaming wayland, it would really help if way more nvidia owners got more critical towards nvidia and demanded them to improve their wayland compliance. A linux standard that exists for more than ten years now while nvidia only started to support it about two years ago in a mediocre manner.
@@aladdin8623It's not just Nvidia, there are plenty of issues and missing features in Wayland. Developer actively not implementing necessary features for YEARS because his ego refused to admit it was necessary... You're trying to tell me that's the future?
I'm pretty hyped out for Plasma 6 / Qt 6.6, SO many Wayland fixes/features that are sorely needed.
Plasma 6 will be buggy for at least 2 years. Can't really looking forward to it anytime soon
@@MrQuay03 The whole point of plasma 6 is bringing stable wayland support for plasma
@@catto-from-heaven my freaking NVIDIA sucks with Wayland. I'll buy only AMD
@@MrQuay03 👍
@@MrQuay03Nvidia can go 🖕 themselves. The ONLY reason I use Nvidia on my desktop is because at the time AMD's Radeon 7900 XTX was announced but not out yet.
I use Wayland with very little issues, but i do use an AMD GPU, and I do wish there was a good application or utility to control resolution and scaling for window managers like Sway.
You may be looking for wdisplays
Have you tried wayland-displays? Atleast it provides a gui for monitor related stuff
@@flarebear5346 I couldn't find a program called that, but I did find one called wdisplays, which does provide a GUI, but none of the changes stick! I'm going to have to dig into it some more.
I tested wayland again with wine/world of warcraft and all I can get is a black screen with the "improved" nvidia 545 drivers, whereas x11 works. It seems to have gotten worse. 6 months ago I was able to use it but just with some weird visual issues and flashing.
Can't wait for full wayland support in wine.
I play osu so its very latency sensitive. Sticking to X for now but already ricing a river based wayland setup for when it's ready for me. HDR and better hdpi handling are an icing on the cake. Feels like linux desktop is gonna be a lot better in the next 5 years to what it is now.
kid named osu!lazer :
@@bluetoothspeakergamingSoonTM
@@bluetoothspeakergaming I use osu!lazer, kinda tired of farming pp and I'm enjoying lazer
System76's upcoming Pop release with Cosmic is going to be wayland-only with xwayland.
It will be interesting to see what they can do to help with Nvidia situation as they use these GPUs in their hardware.
What impress me the most is that the videos you and other linux chanels do, the great content and information is not just on the minutes of recording, but also in the comment section, where are several different information and discussion that always tends to get a more complete vision on the topic. Very nice and thanks for the videos you do, can't believe this world where me in Brazil, watch videos in English from a guy at France with several people from different continents participate on comments and other things
As someone who tried Wayland with an NVIDIA GPU and live streaming, there are few issues I encountered that makes my display (1080p165Hz) runs at 60fps where my OBS frame rate is set to. This is not an issue with X11 and I fallback to it just to avoid that annoying locked FPS when using OBS and streaming a competitive game.
But for normal use, this is completely fine.
I didn't know OBS worked with Wayland now...
@@uzefulvideos3440 Yeah. I remember hearing mention that it has screen-sharing portal support now, though I can't remember if it's native or via a plugin.
*makes my display […] run (bare infinitive, because of "makes")
@@uzefulvideos3440 It works right now thanks to PipeWire which handles both audio and video streams. It does its job capturing video but in some instances it breaks when I try to capture a specific game.
It's not like I could do better, but it's kinda nutz that Wayland as a replacement for x11 hit 1.0 back in 2012 and we're in 2023 and it's still not fully replaced it. Even more surprising is there isn't 8 different alternatives to Wayland in competition with each other like snaps, flat packs, appimages, etc.
There were a few actually, but they didn't quite make it.
Well, there was MIR but that's mostly because Ubuntu/Canonical suffers from a very strong NIH syndrome and can't stand the idea of contributing code/resources to something that they don't control or benefit the most. And by most accounts, MIR was a knee jerk reaction from them not understanding Wayland design goals. Once they realized it was a dead end and that they failed to attract attention from the X11 developers to get it going, they quickly tossed it aside.
@@johnwayne-kd1pn I meant alternatives in active competition with Wayland.
Well, no one wants to invest money in such an alternative given how much it would cost and how little Linux desktop actually matters. If there was any money in Linux desktop, I guarantee you there would already have been a server/protocol/whatever which would actually work and provide compatibility with both X11 or Wayland apps.
As for my personal use, there are two reasons why I won't be using it any time soon:
1. I use AwesomeWM, which does not, and most likely never will, support Wayland. Having a simple, imperative window manager like it under Wayland is tough to say the least.
2. While I tried to switch to a DE (at least on my Laptop), the blurring issues with fractional scaling made immediately leave them. You tend to call this a little bit of blur, but to me, this is totally unusable. It feels like I try to read a far away road sign while having forgotton to put on my glasses. On Xorg, I've configured it to use 150% scaling and it's all super crisp.
Have to use X11 because I like to play video games and have an nvidia card. I initially tried Wayland when I set up my new system, but I was getting a lot of after images moving stuff around, while X11 just werks. I hope nvidia decides to make some more updates for Wayland compatibility sooner rather than later. Lesson learned: do all the research!
This is exactly my experience on Wayland, unfortunately. I'm fairly new to Linux; I've been running Kubuntu on my gaming rig for over 2 months after running Kubuntu on my laptop for 2 months prior. My laptop has basically no issues (other than the fact that Discover likes to crash after updates, but it tends to fix itself later). My desktop on the other hand has this exact same display issue, and it's jarring sometimes. However, the system fundamentally works, and I can still play games, so I'm still sticking with it.
well if you think wayland is bad with the nvidia drivers take a look at wayland with the nouveau drivers, totally fucked!
Small correction to what you said: Per the quote on the Buddies of Budgie blog post, Magpie "v1" and later releases (which will be the wlroots-based Wayland compositor) will be used in both Budgie 10.x and Budgie 11, in the case of Budgie 10.x it is as soon as porting of Budgie 10 from X11-specific code to libraries like libxfce4windowing which supports both X11 and Wayland, and of course when Magpie v1 is actually released. At that point in time, Budgie 10 will be Wayland-only, and Budgie will continue being Wayland only going into the future and all parts of 11 are designed with Wayland-only in mind.
Thanks for the correction!
Ever since the Fedora Project announced the removal of X11 in a future release of Fedora, I moved to Wayland. So far it's good, the only issue I had was my '/etc/profile' containing paths of programs was not being read. But I fixed it by having the file read when ~/.profile is read.
So the X11 Killer Feature, that Wayland can do exclusively, is still just rotating windows? It's a such an important feature. Rotating windows versus remote desktop!
What a joke!
I want to make a small correction about Deepin. Deepin is working towards v23 release and beta version of it has actually Wayland support. So we probably will see Wayland in Deepin v23 even though I am not sure if it will be the default one.
Oh nice, I missed that!
I'd just like to note that I think this take is a bit *too* pro Wayland, at least in the introductory X11 vs Wayland part.
Wayland has less code...Because they're offloading a bunch of functionality from the Display server to other projects. This is causing a huge schism where there's plenty of scientific software that requires certain functionality afforded by X11, that literally cannot be ported to Wayland in any practical sense. This could drive many researchers and professionals who used to use Linux to Windows.
Wayland *fixes* screen tearing...By forcing Vsync, which eliminates the latency advantage you mentioned. This one is baffling to me, personally, as plenty of people with high refresh rate monitors accept screen tearing for the lowest possible latency.
And yes, X11 has a lot of legacy code. But the thing about big projects with lots of legacy bits of code is that people think "oh, we're going to make a new standard and it'll be better", but they end up having to engineer a very similar looking end piece of code because those legacy bits of code *were there for a reason*. Those asterisks that make the code look unreadable aren't there because the developers were stupid, they're there because they fixed a problem that probably took hundreds of engineering hours to sort out, and will take hundreds of engineering hours to sort out in the new protocol.
Also, I would absolutely not agree the Gnome has excellent Wayland support. Gnome was one of the first adopters of Wayland, but an issue with that is that plenty of features they adopted were then adopted differently by most other projects looking at Wayland (try playing a VR game in Gnome. I'll wait.), so they're in a weird spot of being mature but in all the wrong areas, and a great deal of their implementation is overdue a fundamental re-write.
Beyond that, this is not something covered in the video, but in my experience X has had better hardware support in my individual case, as when I've had to install a distro with a Wayland session by default in my setup (I use a 4k monitor, but drive it at 1440p for cost of GPU reasons, and currently have to convert from mini displayport to HDMI), it's caused a massive issue where certain distros literally will not boot without adjusting certain parameters related to the initial splashcreen that displays before the login manager starts. I literally cannot log in on distros that use Wayland by default. I spent almost an entire day trying to get an Arch Linux installation working (I was guided by someone more experienced with the distro) but the script they gave me to run installed Wayland by default, but I gave up and just installed a distro that used X by default instead, and I only found out the issue was with Wayland after the fact. That's a horrible and frustrating experience that could seriously prevent someone with a similar setup from installing Linux for the first time in the future.
But all of the above are just bellyaching. They're reasons that a person might be a bit put off by Wayland, but not necessarily a reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. My primary issue with Wayland:
The developers are way too opinionated about "what a display server should be" and are focused on implementing their vision, and dragging the entire ecosystem with them kicking or screaming. This is absolutely not an attitude I can condone, because it's causing massive issues with adoption of Linux apps on Wayland and might drive certain important sectors from Linux to Windows. Linux is already on shaky footing and I don't really think we have the political clout in the software world to be breaking backwards compatibility in such a dramatic way. It's possible that in ten years Linux would have a strong enough adoption and community that moving to a more modern protocol would be viable, but I think we're right on the edge of being a viable option, and I don't want to throw that out because a few developers jumped the gun way too early and in too opinionated a manner.
Well, the good thing is that Wayland is built with Xorg compatibility, not only can you run Xorg stuff inside Wayland, but also separate from Wayland (at the same time).
@@johnwayne-kd1pn XWayland is far from being complete.
One of the biggest issues with Wayland (which is not the fault of Wayland itself) is the blurry text when using fractional scaling with XWayland apps. I use the Jetbrains suite of apps for my development needs (mainly IntelliJ, PyCharm, and CLion) and they still have not been updated to work with Wayland natively. This means that using fractional scaling in a wayland session leads to blurry text on those apps. I noticed the same thing in FF until I set the experimental property to enable wayland support. I ended up having to revert to X11 and simply can't use Wayland on a 2560x1440p laptop screen until they fix that.
I recently switched to KDE and just found out that they have (mostly) fixed this problem already. In Plasma 5.27 Display Settings, you can allow xwayland applications (notably IntelliJ apps like Android Studio, PHP Storm, Web Storm etc.) to scale themselves without being forced by the system. I am using 125% scaling and the text look crisp and it has been a good experience for me so far!
Same
You rock! I learned a lot about linux in general, but everything about the past, present and our future was really clear. Thank you!
Very informative and well presented! It was everything I wanted to know pretty much in the exact order of how I wanted to know it too Thank you.
I've been running Sway in VMs for a year or so until I got the new AMD Framework 13. Haven't tested everything that's known to cause issues but so far it's very stable and does everything I need it to. I might try Hyprland later but I don't need the extra features and I love Sway's minimalism!
Great summary, thanks for keeping us uptodate!
Great video. I get excited whenever a Wayland related video show up on my feed and what is better than Nick's video? :)
Great overview for wayland in october 2023. Thanks a lot for this!
I agree that hyprland is the fastest moving wayland tiling compositor, at this pace it will overtake gnome in approximately 3-4 months
Thx for the update on Wayland. I am using it on nvidia and I see some issues with soma app like for example Discord going black when it is not focused and on the non main screen... But generally I like it.
Migrated from DWM to Hyprland a few weeks ago, and it's honestly working much, MUCH better than I thought. I even get more FPS when gaming, which was definitely a surprise.
Hyprland has changed everything for me. I’d never used a TWM before, but my experience with Hyprland has completely killed the traditional desktop paradigm for me.
Hey, I've been using DWM for a couple of years now and also thinking of switching to Wayland and Hyprland makes the most appealing choice.
@@NerdistRayHyprland is by far my favorite choice. It looks super clean out of the box and it's really easy to configure!
You have been claiming that Wayland is ready for months (or years, idk)... So I am glad you FINALLY put the spotlight on the parts where it's not (especially Nvidia, which is still very widespread, especially in the laptop market (even with Tuxedo))
As a new Linux user, I have never even touched the X11 session on my PC. From my experience I can say that Wayland is suitable for daily use and even gaming. I only had one major issue, because kwin crashed once, but it wasn't too serious.
Wayland can only suitable for average american. If you are japanese or chinese and need inputmethod. Throw away wayland after few hours play with wayland
You should try running KDE under Xorg instead of Wayland. Such crashes are pretty-much unheard of under X11.
I use linux.
I like trains.
@@piotrpajor997 then chances are your trains are running on Linux (and train tracks).
Thanks for the video Nick. Great explanation on wayland (and also x11). Unfortunately wayland still has its issues but hopefully soon it will be great for most people.
I hope the x11 network view comes to Wayland. Working directly on the renderfarm with the full GUI would be amazing.
Currently running Fedora 38 on my Laptop and Desktop, both on Wayland, both full AMD. Brilliant experience. I've needed to tweak a few things here and there but overall my experience with Wayland has been extremely comfortable and performance with it and XWayland is really great. Games run fine, scaling between my two monitors works great and it all just works quite well. Of course it still has some jank here and there but it's making fast progress!
In the last year and a half I had the same experience you describe with Wayland. I use Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with a hybrid graphic hardware with Intel and Nvidia graphic cards almost without problems.
Your video are really interesting, clear and well organized. Your english is very understandable and nice to listen. Keep it up, Nick! 👍
Superb video. I learned so much. Merci beacoup :)
Nice, and wide review, thanks!
I'm using Fedora, Gnome, Wayland with nvidia drivers for a working(I use two monitor), for personal stuff and for a gaming. And for me it works fine, sometimes I have an issues but they are not critical.
No keylogging, and no network transparency, are two of the main reasons I don't use Wayland. It gives drop shadows and slightly higher frame rates, but it doesn't provide core features I rely on every day for basic computer use.
I cut over to Wayland for my everything -- gaming included -- and have been pleasantly surprised at how little disruption there has been. Like others a lot of this may go back to the fact that I choose AMD graphics whenever I can, but I also think it demonstrates how much work has been done by the Wayland developers.
Ye every since i got a new computer with AMD gaming on wayland has been pretty seamless only thing i spend extra time configuring is forcing apps or games to use wayland instead of preferring X like for example making unity unreal and source games use wayland with the SDL environment variable to force wayland
I would love to see additional video covering the Enlightenment Desktop, which does have its own implementation of Wayland and the EFL library supposedly supports it as well. Maybe it is not completely finished, but it is still interesting.
Recently had to switch to Wayland for real because of my current game obsession that for some reason only runs well in Wayland.
My one big issue so far is that Krita doesn't work at all and just crashes immediately 😭
Other than that, I will occasionally get some weird refresh rate issues with CZcams , but nothing major. Not like just earlier this year when Wayland would randomly crash the whole computer every session.
For me, KDE Plasma 5.27.0 would constsistantly be unusable upon log in, but as of Plasma 5.27.6, it now mostly works. (And yes, I'm using an Nvidia GPU because of CUDA.)
Great video! By the way, I'm not an experienced Linux user, but I have a NVIDIA GPU and I use Sunshine/Moonlight a lot to stream games from my PC. I don't have issues using X11 while on Wayland it's not reliable at all, at least on my experience, using Nobara Linux on Gnome.
I'll answer it for you. No, Wayland is not ready but we are being forced into it regardless.
It's pretty bizarre that there's talk of "switching" when Wayland depends on X11 for a lot of its core functionality.
@dreaper5813 One example is running Wayland applications over the network. The Wayland developers could never get the "proper" solution (waypipe) to work correctly so it's been abandoned with the new official solution being to tunnel remote Wayland applications over X11! There's a whole bunch more "won't fix" bugs where the official solution is to use XWayland.
It was incredibly short sighted to omit network transparency and remote rendering. It's hardly "niche" these days and the abstraction would have spared them the trouble they are having with HDR and scaling. The reason given for not wanting to define a rendering API doesn't make sense, those APIs already existed from the start. Anything, even PDFs would be better than Wayland's dumb bitmaps
Actually, you're probably right. Today that might even be more important than ever, considering the increasing popularity of virtual machines and namespaces (containers).. There are so many potential use cases for remote rendering.. Even game companies are talking about it, things like offloading game rendering partly to servers and whatnot, all kind of things like that.
@@johnwayne-kd1pn As far as I can tell the only real plan Wayland had was to provide a workaround for DRI's shortcomings.¹ Since then they appear to have been winging it.
¹ Ironically, DRI2 fixed these issues... 6 months before Wayland was released.
This video and explanation is so good. Thanks.
Excellent video Nick!
As fractional scaling is still considered experimental in GNOME 45, there is a big trouble with Xwayland apps. All of scaled X applications are blury, and I'm still looking for solution. If the app doesn't support Wayland natively (like Chrome does), there is no way to solve that. Workaround I've found is not to scale the whole interface but just the text using GNOME Tweaks or Accessibility settings. For my 14-inch 1080p laptop it makes text bigger keeping all the other UI smaller, so there is more useful content on the screen. But if there are any ways to use fractional scaling in a proper way, I'll be glad to read your replies on that, guys!
3:30 Keylogger protection can be implemented by extending grabs to have an option to also report to parent windows.
Finally! Cinnamon with Wayland is the only thing I'm missing on Linux. Switched to Gnome in the meantime, but just temporarily.
Thank you for what you do. I have been using linux as desktop os for almost 20 years. Currently I have been running PopOS for the last 3 years more or less.
After the video I have tried to enable Wayland and logged in using the proper session type, but unfortunately it does not work very well, I have tried gaming and the experience is awful and also the fractional scaling with the configuration I normally use is not working.
The positive thing is that all this can only improve 😅
I run hyprland on my laptop, and you used to be able to set your screen to 125% size in the config file and it would scale perfectly (while using the scaling variable for the exact same thing would make text blurry). A shame they “fixed” it with an update and now the display just becomes bigger than the screen.
It wasn’t a bug, it was a feature 😭
Hopefully, with the switch to Wayland, we'll get better RDP support at some point.😊
I'd doubt it. They've dabbled with (and then abandoned) screen-scraping network support something like four times now. They seem to have no interest in actually implementing remote application support. In fact, per the Wayland developers, the currently-recommended method for running remote Wayland applications is to tunnel them over X11!
Speaking for myself, I've had a significantly improved gaming experience on Wayland (Hyprland) compared to X (KDE and Qtile). My main issue on X was the massive input latency introduced by the compositor (Kwin and picom respectively), so any time I wanted to play a game without a 50-100 ms delay on the mouse, I just had to deal with screen tearing.
Same here. Cyberpunk2077 works for me a lot better under wayland. X11 gave me a horrible screen tearing.
Well I just turned of the compositor, because i dont care for fancy desktop effects.
Same here even with vsync on games running natively on wayland i have much less input lag than on x with vsync off
Very good overview thanks! Considering a hybrid AMD iGPU and Nvidia discrete graphics for my next laptop.
I left LTS for Ubuntu Studio 23.10 for the Wayland support and I absolutely love it. I was actually going to hop to a new distro but took a chance on 23.10 and now I'm not going anywhere for a while.
Any decade now..
Great video!
I ended up having to go back to X11 for a couple of reasons. Mouse movements on Wayland were sketchy and I was also having screen tearing. The big selling point of Wayland was that it could scale up or down (down being my preference). However when you do this, fonts weren't rendered correctly and looked blurry. This might be a KDE thing, but in the end it's not working too well. I look forward to seeing what happens with Plasma 6
Probably it is a KDE issue.. From what I gather Wayland doesn't really do much aside from the basics, which is display server and protocol for things like KDE.
I had some mouse behaviour issues with KDE on Wayland too, which made it unsuitable for daily use for me.. I think it had something to do with touchpad and tapping not working, so I had to click the button instead, and after decades of not using Windows, I just can't handle crappy design and inconvenient desktop use like that. I get sore just thinking about double clicking in Windows.
@@johnwayne-kd1pn Thats the way I felt about Linux for 20 yrs LOL. I finally switched over a couple of years ago when I found KDE distros and thought this is great, Linux has come so far over the last few years. Then they introduce Wayland and it feels like many steps back.
Although, I find it interesting that its supposed to be the future of Linux, yet they started it back in 2008 (15yrs ago) and its still not up to scratch. While I'd love to swap over 100% to Linux, its just not possible for some things and I'm resigned to the fact it probably never will.
@@peterschmidt9942 For quite awhile decades ago, I was dualbooting GNU/Linux and Windows. But you don't have to abandon Windows fully to really move to GNU/Linux.
I moved fully to GNU/Linux and started using Windows only as a virtual machine with Virtualbox, and eventually I've stopped using Windows alltogether. You don't need Virtualbox, you can use the native KVM/QEMU for virtual machines.
Virtual machine is very convenient if you still need Windows for some things, as you don't need any reboots, and you have quick access to Windows on your GNU/Linux desktop.
Might be a driver issue or kde depending on what version. im on nobora/fedora and kde works great on wayland for me
I was trying Wayland with KDE not too long ago, can confirm the part about mouse movements being sketchy. I don't think it's a KDE thing to have issues with Wayland, because before trying KDE I was using Gnome with Wayland and that worked far worse for me - lots of outdated frames being rendered in applications when scrolling or navigating through them. It's just not ready yet, at least on Nvidia
I was a holdout for the longest time. Then a kernel update started causing some weird lockup issue where if I moved the mouse over a video playing in my browser, the whole desktop would lock up. I troubleshot, and even distro hopped, and then decided to give Wayland a shot and the issue was gone. This was about a month ago and I haven't looked back to X11 since.
I've been running Linux for over 20 years and remember having to write config files just to get X running and if I can jump on the Wayland bandwagon, I think everyone else will eventually too. It's not perfect (far from it), and I do notice the performance hit in gaming, but for me, it's time to move forward. It's probably still about 5 years out before it's really "ready" for prime time IMO, but what we have now is working really well.
Graphics are complicated, and that's why it's taking so long, but I think Wayland is probably in a state that's "good enough" for a lot more people than it used to be.
very very useful video, thank you 👍🏾
I remember having borked system because of Kwin-wayland crashing during update. And it was like 4-5 months ago, very recent. Now, I rarely, if ever, having any crash at all. True testimonial of how fast the development.
It's still X11 for me but we getting much closer faster and faster.
The closer I look at Wayland's architecture and implementation(s) the more I realize that Wayland's future on desktop Linux looks rather bleak. It's really not designed for general-purpose use (its main use seems to be in automotive applications, i.e. the embedded space, for which it seems reasonably well suited).
Amazing video!
Is Wayland ready? No. Back in 2019 when I gave an assessment of Wayland and compositors at the time, I was community crucified for saying it was at least 2 years off. And here we are, more than 2 years later, likely still looking at least at another 2 years. Anyway, it's good to see the progress. I'm just not going to "sugar coat" it. In all fairness, I should have been crucified for saying "at least 2 years off" because I was so so so very wrong. I should have said 5 to 6 years off (and even that in 2019 would likely still not have been enough). No shortage of work to do. Remember, Wayland + compositors isn't Xorg/X11, not even close. The fact that Xwayland works mostly is pretty amazing. We're not talking about two different kind of cars, gas combustion engine vs. battery electric. More like two modes of transportation, one being "house cat" and the other being "aircraft carrier". That is, while there is a way of looking at the two for similarity, they are pretty radically different. And this is the biggest reason why it's taking this long. So, no harm, no foul to the (evil) crucifiers from 2019, but there is a realistic view that needs to be kept in mind. And yes, there will absolutely positively be loss and some of that loss will be permanent (never fixed/done in Wayland + Compositors). At the same time, there are certain things that will make more sense using Wayland + compositors, but since that's not the "here and now", it's not something we get "mad about", because it's something yet unseen. Anyway, nothing that hasn't been stated, just they way it is when making a radical change, which is what this move is. So, try it out, realize there's still more work to do. Realize that not everything "of old" will still work moving forward.
I switched to Wayland full-time somewhere around a year or so ago, with the occasional minor issue being a worthwhile price to get rid of the screen tearing when scrolling web pages and watching YT, but it's not like there were occasional issues with X11, so I don't know whether I've had a smoother or bumpier ride ... aside from the smoother experience.
I will try Wayland next decade. It is getting there, but progress is super slow. Since like 2008, I do try to use Wayland every few years, and it essentially was always a disaster. It is now finally usable, but I still cannot switch on most of the systems (some older Laptops I have, with Intel graphics; and some remote VMs, etc), because it just does not work, or not support what I need. Also my favorite desktop manager does not support Wayland. They are working on it, but the most favorite feature of that desktop manager is being reworked and essentially removed, because it cannot be easily supported on Wayland.
So no. I will continue using X11 for very long time.
Same.
A few years ago Wayland at least used to run (and then promptly crash) on my machines. Currently it won't even start on any of them.
The one thing missing for me is mapping external touch screens. On X11 I can use xinput map-to-output, but on Wayland that doesn't work - I know I can map the touch screen on Sway and KDE, but I prefer Cinnamon so I'll be giving Wayland a go in Mint 21.3. Plus I have a GTX 1650, but I bought that before I committed to daily driving Linux.
I love Ubuntu-desktop on wayland. Things have evolved very quickly the last year for it. But I also have xfce4 installed for gaming and when I need x11. Good to still have both. But x11 its days are numbered.
Nice video,Following his speech and and knowing how Linux's characteristics are, why does Wayland only work in a large limited amount of distributions, desktop environments and window administrators?
small correction, the lack of screensharing support for wayland isn't related to the app supporting wayland natively or not
supporting wayland screensharing is another thing, for example there are xwayland only apps that support wayland screensharing (signal desktop for example), and wayland native apps that do not support wayland screensharing
@ThelinuxExperiment what Linus Distro are you using in this particular video please? Thx
10:08 I feel like it can be important to note how crucial some settings in the Nvidia control panel can be
I, for instance, have an older display that needs a limited color space, but that simply isn't an option on Wayland. So if I don't want all colors on my display to look completely off I can't use Wayland
10:40 - Aand this is where I'm a bit stuck up, I guess. I refuse to make my hardware fit my software - I'd rather do it the other way around.
It still has a few holdout bugs and missing features for me such as support iGPU as secondary screens (glitchy atm) and HDR + 10bit color.
I think once those are sorted out I'll be pretty damn happy with Wayland AND Plasma!
Yes the X11/XWayland global shortcut translation is going to become a massive issue, for the moment XWAYLAND windows can talk to each other via shortcuts such as discord ptt while in a proton/wine game... BUT that will eventually go away as Wine/Proton moves to wayland.
I didn't notice i was running Wayland, until it was downloading the other day. Shows how much I pay attention. 😊
Nice!
Today, at work, I had to plug in another screen, and it was horrible - it was blurry and the picture was jumping visibly, while some lines were distorted. I switched to Wayland - all issues went away. The screen had crisp image. It shows that multimonitor support is superior on Wayland.
Synergy (a kvm software) sadly does not work with Wayland - which makes now sense as it basically captures the mouse/keyboard and share it via the network
Still waiting for it to support my hybrid graphics Gtx 1060 laptop. As soon as that happens I’ll be all in on wayland
running Wayland on Gnome with an AMD gpu...... pretty much smooth sailing. I can feel a difference in responsiveness of my desktop if I switch to a x11 session
I've been using Wayland on my hybrid GPU laptop with Nvidia proprietary drivers for a while and it works well enough, but I can't use it on my game system yet (also Nvidia GPU) because of a couple issues like Steam's new BPM doesn't start in full screen even if it is set to it and the mouse cursor becomes invisible while using a game controller with Steam Input when using Wayland(unless there's been a change in the last few months).
I am using Hyprland for a couple of months now and I am very happy with wayland.
Especially after switching to an AMD GPU.
I am running Fedora on a laptop with integrated AMD graphics and a NVIDIA gpu with Wayland and I have had a great experience!
can we hope for remote desktop support in wayland in the future? or is it just at odds with wayland's core?
I apparently have the option of choosing a Wayland session on my Cachy install. Blank desktop that doesn't load, yet X11 works. NVIDIA card and AMD CPU, not on alien tech over here.
Lemme try again, will prolly have to restart entire PC for that genuine Wayland experience.
Also, no troubleshooting. It either works as point and click on common hardware or it fucks off entirely and X11 gets forked into XXX222.
HDR, 10-bit+, VRR support then we can talk forced default changes just like our fav MS (Milk Straws) company loves pushing on us all.
It's unfortunate about the network transparency. I like doing x forwarding for some of my apps in certain use cases, and I like x2go the application. Giving me full access to my desktop from anywhere at any time.
I have 0 issues so far with Wayland on Arch and Gnome 45 with 2 dedicated GPUs (intel & Nvidia) :D
Plasma and wayland have two issues for me:
- kwin crashes when you disconnect external monitor when internal screen is in powersave mode (turned off)
- a few desktop icons that I have don't save their positions, at least widgets do stay pretty intact
Minor nitpick:
- 3rd party themes like Klassy and Inspire or even Aurorae-themes can have a few issues. (If you have panel on top)
My main Problem is that I have a nvidia graphics card (RTX 2080). Its improving but still not there for me. And in fact this there has been a lot of change.
Earlier this year I had like 10-20% performance loss overall in dxvk/vulkan. This was resolved in 525 or 535 (cant remember). The fix was some reduction in Overhead.
Whats still the matter: 535 drivers still have vsynch force. Or at least its a bug. So the option that fullscreen resolutions can ignore vsynch is simply not applied.
With the recent 545 driver that bug got fixed. I can easily verify with some phoronix test suite tests.
But then I get really ugly screen tearing in some applications and even somehow hitching image - like sometimes even like an older frame gets rendered in between - through dxvk with wayland/545.
I guess that is a byproduct by their current "fix".
Looks promising. I will miss remote xsessions but yeah, almost never used them.
why kde is unable to open fonts under wayland?
I started using wayland when i bought my 3060 Ti and i loved it (on my laptop intel core i5 from 2011 now an amd ryzen+radeon fujitsu i switched when i switched to gnome+arch from windows+linux mint to wayland) and recently i bought an amd radeon 7800 xt and it is way better under wayland (2 crashes because of full ram)
My laptop is about 10 years old and relatively low spec. But I never had issues with Linux, until recently I tried Ubuntu 23.04... Fresh install and at first login I started experience issues, software would take longer to launch, apps will not render correctly and or become distorted when moved. At first I thought something else was at fault, but after reboots, drivers up to date, it still was doing the same. Then I remembered it starts by default in a Wayland session. So I restarted in Xorg session and all issues were gone... Maybe my computer is to old for Wayland? But seems I'll have to Xorg as long as I can. BTW, my laptop does not have a NVIDIA GPU of any sorts, it's a basic laptop...
Nick, could you please tell us how you managed to run Wayland on a hybrid-graphics laptop?
I'm a slow poke. Still using X11, and pulseaudio :D. I'll make the shift to wayland when KDE has it more or less locked.
I really wish I could get Visual Studio Code to work with with fractional scaling in Wayland. Every time I try the assorted command line options to try and force ozone to use wayland, VS Code just crashes on startup instead.
Seems the problem is from the electron
In what state are the new Nvidia open module gpu drivers rn; are these out of alpha state yet, do they support more cards and how do these perform with Wayland and gaming via proton?
I have switched from Fedora 38 (X11) to Fedora 39 (Wayland). I have noticed that the setting for picture in picture windows, to always stay in the foreground, no longer persists. I have to enable it every time I activate picture in picture mode.
I recently got a new computer with AMD so i can now fully use wayland and its been a lot smoother than my experience on X11 was dont get weird graphical glitches or random freak outs with my multiple monitors anymore and games now have much less input latency. its not perfect but so far its been stable for me