sometimes i use x11. sometimes i use wayland. i don't...

Alyssa Rosenzweig 💜's posts Post Back to profile

sometimes i use x11. sometimes i use wayland. i don't care what you choose as long as you pick up the pieces when it breaks. the zen of display servers.

Like 13 May 2023 at 15:00 | Open on social.treehouse.systems

6 comments

Alyssa Rosenzweig 💜

i think these days i'm running sway everywhere. so i guess wayland now. but it wasn't like i thought to myself "I should switch to x11/wayland/pineapples/whatever". i have computer problems and nowadays sway is the best tool for me 🤷‍♀️

though it probably helps that i'm a linux graphics dev and have stared into the x11 void.

(it stared back 🙀 )

...honestly x11 doesn't even start for me on half my machines (it's handling of split display/render hardware, including virtually all arm devices, is broken beyond repair so it is literally a coin toss where x11 + opengl will work on an arm device without piling on the hacks).

though it probably helps that i'm a linux graphics dev and have stared into the x11 void.

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13 May 2023 at 15:05 | Open on social.treehouse.systems

Alyssa Rosenzweig 💜

tbh the biggest problem facing wayland isn't the features WAYLAND supports but the proliferation of compositors supporting different extensions. something that works in sway might not work in gnome and vice versa, which is really unfortunate. and then users will scream online that "wayland doesn't support $feature" when in reality it's that "gnome doesn't support $feature (but sway might)" or "sway doesn't support $feature (but gnome might)" or most pathological of all "gnome and sway both support $feature but it needs to be used in slightly different ways and i'm following instructions for gnome when i'm actually using sway or vice versa".

there is such a disconnect between the perspectives of those of us actually developing the linux graphics stack and users trying to use the polished system we release. and yeah, if you do things The GNOME Way or the KDE Plasma Way things are usually mostly ok. when your point of reference is some funny boutique setup (I once ran MATE with i3-gaps as window manager, I get it), yeah things don't look so nice.

i don't know where we go from here. my ux profs have thoroughly convinced me not to blame users since it's our own damn fault for publishing 4 different independent compositors with different feature sets and different configuration mechanisms and all calling them "Wayland". but as long as DE tribalism plays a role in protocol negotiation it's uphill.

wayland started with a simple graphics idea -- every frame perfect. it's accomplished that. graphics under wayland are years ahead of anything x11 is architecturally capable of.

unfortunately it turns out graphics is easier than politics.

i'm not going to tell you what to do. but there are excellent reasons why graphics developers are pushing wayland. and there are understandable reasons why users push back.

i can't solve ecosystem-wide conflict. hence the zen of display servers. use x11. use wayland. use pineapples. i don't care what you do, just don't bother me about it.

i should get back to reading my book now.

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13 May 2023 at 15:16 | Open on social.treehouse.systems

Alyssa Rosenzweig 💜

post-script: the X server will live for a long time in Xwayland form. that's not going anywhere and nor should it. a big "hope is lost for all ye that enter" part of the X server is running natively against the hardware with graphics acceleration, that's the part that gets skipped when using a Wayland compositor with all Xwayland apps.

no shame in using Xwayland, I run like half my system in Xwayland at this point.

X11 is dead, long live X11!

13 May 2023 at 15:22 | Open on social.treehouse.systems

Alyssa Rosenzweig 💜

post-post-script: @AsahiLinux targets (only) split render/display hardware with open drivers and no display controller support for vblank irqs. so you get the "X11 broken on our platform in 2 ways" mixed in with "no NVIDIA problems on our platform". given that linux is moving in the direction of wayland (even if it's not ready for your personal use case yet), it's the right call for us to focus on wayland compositors for Asahi and push things forward. KDE, GNOME, sway, weston all work great on linux-asahi-edge with the GPU drivers.

if you want to hang onto the old way of doing things, hang onto your X200 thinkpad 🤷‍♀️

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13 May 2023 at 15:27 | Open on social.treehouse.systems

Janne Moren

@alyssa @AsahiLinux
If you want to hang on to your old way of doing things, Xwayland is fully stable and functional for all your X11 binaries.

I've used Xwayland for a few years at home and work, and I've had only a single real issue in that time (screen sharing with Zoom), that is solved by now.

13 May 2023 at 15:43 | Open on fosstodon.org

Jasper Vinkenvleugel

@alyssa I once accidentally clicked the Wayland option on Fedora about 9 years ago and as far as I know it’s still on.

13 May 2023 at 16:55 | Open on mastodon.social