Comment by wild_egg
6 hours ago
I've never used a system with Wayland (been on i3 for ~15 years) but every time a project like this comes up, I have to wonder why Wayland is even a thing. So many hoops to jump through for things that should be simple.
Sure, X11 has warts but I can make it do basically anything I want. Wayland seems like it will always have too much friction to ever consider switching.
I've been on wayland since KDE had it available (like the KDE 5 days) because it offered fractional HiDPI scaling that wasn't buns. As a laptop user, it has been one of the best features of Wayland.
Furthermore, getting stuff like VRR on Wayland working is way easier than X.org. And, Wayland also supports HDR.
My reason for switching from i3 to sway (about 8 years ago) is DPI support. High DPI is a pain in Xorg, and essentially impossible with heterogeneous monitors.
The migration was a one way thing. Lots of things are smoother and simpler, and not having to ever again touch Xorg.conf has improved my quality of life.
To this day, I still have different monitors with different scale factors.
> not having to ever again touch Xorg.conf has improved my quality of life
I haven't touched xorg.conf in decades. I suppose you might have to do it to configure some unique setup, but for me this hasn't been an issue in a long time.
Now with Wayland, instead of having to touch a single config file, we have to learn how each compositor/WM is configured, and do it there instead. It hardly seems like an improvement in that regard, IMO.
> I can make it do basically anything I want
X11 can't do high refresh rates every time that I've tried to do so.
It runs just fine at 165 hz for me. Given that xrandr and CRTs have been around for a while, and both have supported high refresh rates for a long while, something seems fishy here. Something is probably at fault, but it's not X11.
X11 can't do different hz on different screens. If you have a dual screen setup where one screen is 165 hz and the other is 60 you're SOL.
4 replies →
Huh ? It did in 2000.
The hoop I recently jumped through:
There's a type of input called "DeviceEvent" which is a bit lower level than "Window event". It also occurs even if the window isn't "active".
Windows and X11 support this, but Wayland doesn't except for mouse movement. I noticed my program stopped working on Linux after I updated it. Ended up switching to Window Events, but still kind of irritating.
I'm with you. I haven't had major issues with X11 for a good couple of decades. Ever since I didn't have to manually edit xorg.conf, I forget when that happened.
Granted, my requirements were simple, a laptop and occasionally one external monitor, though the issues I did run into were related to graphics drivers and NVIDIA shenanigans, but not to X11.
Now that I'm on Wayland, I do feel that visuals are slightly more responsive and crisper, but honestly, it wasn't worth replacing a bunch of my programs, significantly altering my workflow, and dealing with numerous new issues I didn't have to deal with before.
Unfortunately, the momentum is now fully with Wayland, and it's only a matter of time until X11 stops being supported altogether. The XLibre project is a noble idea, but a few contributors can't maintain an entire ecosystem on their own.
Sway is basically i3 on Wayland. You pretty much keep your config file (with a few modifications), there really isn’t much friction.
That’s not a reason to do it of course, for me the driver was support for multiple monitors with different scaling requirements.
Many theories. A simple one is that corporations wanted more control. See systemd's rise - not related to wayland as such, but to corporate-driven influence.
I am not saying all of the design is corporate-controlled. But a ton of propaganda is associated with how wayland was advertised, until some folks had enough with it and decided to stop buying the "xorg is dead" routine these corporations push on:
https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver
It will be interesting to see what will happen though. The GTK devs said they will help kill off xorg with GTK5. KDE also wants to kill xserver. It would be kind of cool if that would not happen - imagine if a non-corporate controlled ecosystem would emerge. Not likely to happen, but it would be a lot of fun. As well as more real competition with wayland. Wayland broke its biggest promise: that it is a viable alternative to the xorg-server. I don't want to lose any feature, so it is a drawback for me.