Comment by uecker
1 day ago
Is is a regular occurrence that students in my lab that use or switch to Wayland still run into problems. Switching back to X11 reliably works as a fix. The sad thing is that there is also no apparent advantage to Wayland, it is just pushed down to us via distributions.
I've been using Wayland for a while now on Debian as of 13, and the advantage is that it just works so much better.
Animations are much smoother, frames are dropped much less, and there's very little artifacts. It's almost uncanny how good desktop compositing looks right now.
Naturally, some people don't care or don't notice. I notice because I run everything at 240hz and I'm a freak. But, for me, so far everything has worked in wayland. I have not had to boot up an x11 session on Debian 13 with KDE. And, mind you, this is Debian - not bleeding edge. But, screen sharing works, audio works, everything.
I guess things like HDR support, high bitdepth, per-screen refreshrate/scaling, and all those things are just "no apparant advantage" to you.
Thats okay, just understand that it DOES matter to some people.
what also matters is the actual developers doing the work, which GREATLY prefer wayland
It might matter to some but not to many, and in practice the pain imposed on many others could have been avoided by simply improving X. That developers already like to rewrite things is well known, but nobody should pay for this.
Do you want the indisputable advantage of Wayland? No dropped frames in the desktop, even at high framerates. Back in 2023 when I was still using X11 dropping frames was par for the curse, no matter the machine, the configuration or the DE. You could only hope to get a fluid presentation when using a full screen program that used DRI unredirection (or DRM or whatever it was called) because... it eschewed X completely. Now, it used to be even worse if you go back many years from that, so there was progress, but there were always these tiny drops impacting fluidity. It also got worse the more loaded the machine was, any task in the background consuming 40% of the machine could make it feel like you were using a 30hz monitor. Or, if you dared to use 120hz it felt more like a stuttery 70hz, even at idle.
That same year I decided to give Wayland my third shot and what you know... it not only was perfectly smooth all the time but it had finally reached a point where I could use it on my HTPC. Less than a year later and it was finally usable on my desktop and laptop, and since then I haven't really looked back.
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My Wayland development work has gone extremely well.
I’m amazed at how smooth it is and how much just works.
Not my usual Linux development experience with xorg.
a great many people use external displays.
besides, even without using that, for the vast vast majority of users, there is no pain, they dont even realized they've switched to wayland, their distributions simply did it.
and people ARE paying a price staying with xorg, theres a reason projects like KDE are very happy about the change.
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It's exactly this kind of arrogant attitude that makes me hate everything from dbus onward.
what is arrogant? that some features matter to some users? or that developers that work for free have things that matter to them in trying to develop better code?
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