As much as I want to support the idea of a well supported, modernised graphical protocol system, wayland simply isn’t ready yet. There’s so much shit that simply doesn’t work, and they’re all made up of little niche cases that will take substantially longer than a few months to resolve, and I still haven’t seen anything that suggests Wayland has a practical equivalent to xorg.conf.

Is Alma Linux rolling their own version of Plasma with x11? Or are they just sticking with an older version of Plasma? Is anyone else planning on hacking x11 back into the DE?

edit: To the people leaping down my throat, the last time I tried wayland was around five months ago. I have a substantial list of thi gs noted down somewhere that I was considering trting to work around or fix. off the top of my head:

  • remote desktop is a fucking pain. remmina would not allow a multiple monitor remote session at all, and a single monitor session was frequently unstable. What I really wanted was something simple that I could start from a bash script, like XFreeRDP.

  • nvidia drivers were spotty at best. I’m not too fussed about them being proprietary, but they never seemed to quite function properly. I have a 1660ti.

  • applications in general felt sluggish

  • it was hit/miss when attempting to disable desktop composition. sometimes it would cease, sometimes it would not. for skme full-screen applications, I require this as desktop composition can make input responses fairly latent. Trying to type out a class is unpleasant and somewhat halting when it takes 200ms for a character to appear after it is typed.

  • lack of a pre-init config option. I currently use a xorgconf to set screen position, layout, and resolution (including a virtual resolution) before any graphical environment starts. this stops my vertical monjtor being displayed sideways before I log in. I have yet to see something similar for wayland, but this feels like it should exist - please prove me wrong.

  • screen tearing. although the environment claims to be running my monitors at 60hz, a 60fps test sample revealed they were actually being driven at 50hz. thjs is not a hardware limitation, as all my monitors currently drive at 60hz.

  • application and desktop sharing. this flat out didn’t work. I’m told it should work, but it doesn’t.

here’s the thing. I’m not arguing against the inclusion of wayland. I’m very pleased that we have new options. I’m arguing that we should have the choice to choose the most suitable option for some time yet. I like Plasma a lot h despite it being horribly bloated, unnecessarily complex, and somehow oddly lacking in some basic features whilst simultaneously having some fantastic built-ins such as window rules.

so no, this isn’t a “self report” as one profoundly inciteful respondent put it. this is me looking for any possible solution that will allow me to run a modern DE whilst retaining features that I require.

  • Cryxtalix@programming.dev
    11·
    1 day ago

    What exactly isn’t ready? All I know is the lack of trackpad gestures and fractional scaling(even though I don’t use it) in x11. X11 is the one that feels more janky while wayland has been smooth sailing.

    I’m even developing a gtk4 program, I assume if there were problems with wayland I’ve would’ve noticed it by now. On the other hand, testing my program on debian 13 with x11 did make the experience a little jankier.

    Given such huge differences in reported experiences, I can only assume it’s a difference in hardware compatibility? Are some machines just better in x11 and others in wayland? Is that why everyone has such different experiences?

    • swelter_spark@reddthat.comEnglish
      2·
      12 hours ago

      I don’t notice any difference in performance between x11 and Wayland, but there are some things I just haven’t been able to get working right in Wayland. Changing font DPI. Screenshots, when I want to capture a selected area and not the entire screen. Color pickers. I’ve tried several that supposedly work with Wayland, but they don’t. Screensavers. Alt-tabbing between a fullscreen game and the desktop or another window. I should mess around with it some more. I know my own distro is getting rid of x11 at some point.

      • Cryxtalix@programming.dev
        1·
        10 hours ago

        Have you used a different machine? None of your issues are what I experience(on both x11 and waland). My issues on x11 are to do with general lags and unreliable sleep/wake. It’s weird how there’s no consistency, everyone seems to have a different set of issues. If even the issues are different, I wonder how the devs can even fix it.

    • LeFantome@programming.dev
      5·
      24 hours ago

      Wayland has improved a lot in the last few years. And yes, there are and have been differences in hardware.

      I think the biggest difference is likely to be software though. Primarily in two ways.

      First, a lot of people are using older software. Not to pick on Debian but it is a good example. A Debian Stable user may be using NVIDIA drivers that are literally years older than what an Arch user is using. Paired with Wayland compositors and XDG portals that are older as well. So when they talk about Wayland (even today), they are really describing the experience from years ago. Alma Linux probably falls on this camp.

      Second, what use cases are well supported on Wayland still varies from compositor to compositor. Somebody using Plasma 6 may experience that pretty much everything just works. Somebody using Sway may find that some uses cases are still immature.

      Put these together and you have a lot of NVIDIA on Debian people telling you things don’t work and a lot of AMD on Fedora people wondering what they are talking about.

      Today, Wayland and Xorg are more “different” than better or worse. If you are happy with Wayland, migrating to Xorg would probably feel like a real step back and there would be all kinds of issues and deficiencies. But, for some, the reverse can still be true. Wayland still has a few gaps.

      Finally, they ARE different. Which means that if you insist on trying to make Wayland work exactly like X11, it is easy to make it seem like it is not working, even if Wayland can do exactly what you need in some slightly different way.

      The important thing to acknowledge though is that more than half of Linux desktop users run Wayland now. And the majority of new users start in Wayland and will never switch. So X11 is the weird one now. And while Xorg is about as good as it is ever going to be, Wayland gets better every day.