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Valve Engineer Mike Blumenkrantz Hoping To Accelerate Wayland Protocol Development (www.phoronix.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 153 points 2 months ago (29 children)

I love how people are complaining about Wayland not being ready or being unstable (whatever that even means, because it's a protocol), while it's the default on both GNOME and Plasma now, which combined probably run on more than 50% of Linux desktops these days.

And not only that, but Cinnamon, Xfce and others want to follow, so very clearly people who know a fair bit about desktops seem to disagree with Wayland being "not ready".

[–] [email protected] 58 points 2 months ago

Wayland was subject to "first mover disadvantage" for a long time. Why be the first to switch and have to solve all the problems? Instead be last and everyone else will do the hard work for you.

But without big players moving to it those issues never get fixed. And users rightly should not be forced to migrate to a broken system that isn't ready. People just want a system that works right?

Eventually someone had to decide it was 'good enough' and try an industry wide push to move away from a hybrid approach that wastes developer time and confuses users.

[–] [email protected] 79 points 2 months ago (1 children)

When people say its not ready, it's normally some specific use case that worked in X11. So, they're not wrong, but not right either.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 months ago

The devs have been working hard to hammer out those troublesome edge cases. There's a lot less of them than there was a year or two ago.

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[–] [email protected] 104 points 2 months ago (3 children)

They could start by making the Steam client be able to run in native Wayland

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[–] [email protected] 91 points 2 months ago (11 children)

I love wayland. I'm 100% on it since the KDE 6.0 Beta end of 2023. Back then i wanted to try the HDR of my new monitor. I can't remember the last time I had a problem of any kind or thought “That worked under X”.

Multi-Monitor setup with different resolutions and refresh-rates. wayland does not care. it just works. And this is to a big part a gaming machine btw.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 months ago

I made a gradual switch from windows to Arch starting in may. At first I had some issues but since nvidia 555.x drivers launched everything just works. Gsync/VRR? No issues. HDR? No issues. Three monitors, some rotated, with different refresh rates one of them ultra wide? No issues at all. It's amazing.

Made the full switch about 1,5 months back and deleted all windows partitions two weeks ago. Works for gaming, work and casual browsing without flaw and I'm glad I made the switch.

[+] [email protected] -1 points 2 months ago (2 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

mtp as in media transfer protocol? i fail to see what this has to do with the display server. and what do you mean with web transparency? never heard that term and google does not give any infos. If you mean something like network transparency, wayland can do that with e.g. waypipe (https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe). but not tested myself tbh.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Or try using any form of desktop automation... which is a show-stopper and it doesn't look like Wayland plans to do anything about it any time soon.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I don't see how this is a Wayland problem. X11 has no desktop automation integrated either. You had to use third party tools for that like Autokey. And admittedly, there is still no comparable replacement for Wayland as far i know (maybe KDE scripts? https://develop.kde.org/docs/plasma/kwin/api/ or https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool?). But that is because nobody has fully build one yet, not because some inherent absence of necessary wayland functions.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It actually is because of Wayland design. In their quest for "security" they've made it impossible for automation and accesibility tools to do their job.

It's a glaring omission in Wayland going forward, for zero gain. Most of the touted Wayland security advantages are hogwash.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (3 children)

I mean if it’s goal was to prevent scripts from using the graphics env maliciously then it seems to have made some progress if you can’t even automate it with good intentions

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Yup, or even a simple notify-send. Trying to work out which environment variables are needed to get the damn thing to focus on the window in question which may or may not be an X11 window within Wayland. The magic formula I've learned so far:

DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS="unix:path=/run/user/$(id -i)/bus" \
XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/$(id -u) \ 
XAUTH=$(ps aux | grep "/usr/bin/Xwayland :0 -auth" \
       | grep -v grep | sed -r 's|.*-auth ([^ ]*).*$|\1|') \
DISPLAY=:0 \
XAUTHORITY=$XAUTH  <finally your command here>

(oh and sometimes you might need to preface that all with a sudo, oh and there's no guarantee that the Display is at :0, even if no other display is in use). Eaaazyyy peaaaazyyy

I will say that wtype is the one wayland automation tool that does not need any preamble. It just works out of the box, genuinely good engineering by the developers on that project.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Yo, try it on nvidia...or try some older programs, try playing games. Wayland is already good, but if it keeps being developed at this speed, then its 10 or more years left for this things to work yet.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Not on Nvidia, but I use Wayland and play games with it every day

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Its just because xwayland is doing its job, but many games and programs don't work even on it, you just need to switch to X11 manually, this is annoying me. I don't know why people downvote, maybe because they don't have nvidia and don't know how it works there. I have nvidia and use linux 2 years already, I can confidently say from my experience, X11 is more laggy but more stable, you need special kernel for wayland to work just better on nvidia, and still it is not as good as just using x11.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Yeah and xwayland is working just fine for me right now. It'll be nice when it's no longer needed, but in the meantime, it has caused no noticable performance issues for me.

but many games and programs don't work even on it, you just need to switch to X11 manually, this is annoying me.

This has never once happened to me. I have never had to switch my session to x11 for any reason whatsoever, especially not for compatibility issues. Been over a year now.

Dunno what distro or hardware you're running, but I suspect Wayland is not the issue.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I play games all the time. Actually that is what i do the most lately. Either via Lutris or Steam. Sometime with Gamescope (for HDR) or just normal. I had not even one single problem. Including older programs, emulators, etc.

And yeah, this is a full AMD system, so quite possible that this makes the difference. But as far i read, nVidia gets better constantly too.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

IIRC Nvidia needs explicit sync support to work reliably. It's fairly new and might not have landed in some distros, especially the stable releases.

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[–] [email protected] 58 points 2 months ago (3 children)

I want to work at Valve

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 months ago (7 children)

Accelerating wayland développement would mean forking it. As it is right now there's a lot of yapping in their git for every decision, small or big.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Accelerating wayland développement would mean forking it.

You mean feurking

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (3 children)

what's feurking

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

The authentic French translation of forking.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago

Feurking deez nuts

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

what’s feurking

An optional step in the développement process

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Ah, like testing.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

Testing is actually mandatory, what's not mandatory though is to do it before deploying.

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