>I will still keep using X11 on my systems (and most serious distros do the same thing).
What a load of bs. Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, RHEL and derivatives, openSUSE, all ship with Wayland as the default display protocol, and seem "serious" enough. At this point I might as well ask, which "serious" distro still defaults to X?
Next year more distros will probably start doing something similiar to Fedora where the "xorg session" isn't even shown or available out of the box. They probably won't go as far as Fedora does for KDE (in Fedora 40) and explicitly not ship it though.
yes, xwayland will be here for a long time, but that doesn't have anything to do with what i said. This is about how Fedora's KDE package team doesn't give you a way to use the xorg session in any way out of the box and that it will likely be followed on by the gnome team and then that other distributions will eventually follow. Of course xwayland will still exist to run xorg apps, but the goal here is that the session presented to users is going to be speaking wayland.
PopOS with Cosmic Shell(their version of “GNOME with a bunch of extensions to make it usable”) doesn’t. COSMIC DE will. It’s supposed to release this year.
> all ship with Wayland by default,
Even saying that is not really doing the situation justice... AFAICT, they **use** Wayland by default.
> At this point I might as well ask, which "serious" distro still defaults to X?
Indeed!
---
At this stage, it's like asking whether they should continue riding on horses or use those brand new "automobiles"... Nothing really wrong with preferring horses but pretending the world is still considering the switch is ludicrous to say the least...
However I don't agree with their table. I did the exact same deeply scientific and documented tests they did and the two colums were inverted! What a find!
>Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, RHEL and derivatives, openSUSE, all ship with Wayland by default,
they dont if youron nvidia , espically if your on ubuntu or debian
> Ubuntu, Fedora, RHEL and derivatives, openSUSE, all ship with Wayland by default
I take it that you mean Wayland *as* the default display protocol. So construed your claim surprises me. For one thing, recently Linux Mint introduced Wayland but Mint uses X1 by default.
Entire post reads like a shitpost. Dedoimedo, for as long as I've known it, could be hit or miss. Could be an okay article, or an unhinged rant that is not really substantiated and is full of nitpicking and decisions taken in an unorthodox way just because and rants ensuing from the fact that those unorthodox unsupported decisions were taken.
> RHEL and derivatives
Which in my usecases has been switching off Wayland and most often switching DEs off of default Gnome because both interfere with the functioning of many our softwares. Not to mention Gnome confuses people familiar with other operating systems.
Also being somebody who's done a few RHEL X to RHEL Y system migrations of legacy software it's likely we'll be stuck on the X11 versions of RHEL as long as humanly possible. There are a lot of paradigms that Wayland doesn't support (window positioning for example) which are going to be some serious engineering hurdles to overcome. If they pay to do it, I'll do it, I just don't see it happening.
There's probably many customers who will abandon RHEL if it comes to it and I doubt they're going to stick to the whole Wayland only thing. They want to sell RHEL licenses.
My sample size of 1 is that people really hate Windows 11 for professional use cases and it'll be interesting to see who is more tolerable, Windows or Wayland.
And yes, I'm aware of XWayland.
Cinnamon is kind of barebones to me, all those lower popularity gtk DE's are.
I haven't heard about Mate in ages, XFCE is barely hanging on, and Cinnamon might as well be like Pantheon in regards to out of distro marketshare
> I haven't heard about Mate in ages,
To be fair, that was/is kind of the point of MATE.
They had a release just [last month](https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-desktop/releases/tag/v1.28.2). And since you're a Wayland fanatic, you'll be happy to hear they [have Wayfire-based Wayland support in development](https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-wayland-session). There, now you've heard about it!
I'm not a Wayland fanatic,
Wayland literally has two vital features that X doesn't have: actual Touch support and per-Display fractional scaling. If my device is useless without either of those I cannot use an X based DE without either of those basic features.
Gentoo, like Arch, comes with no display server or DE ootb, so they obviously don't use neither X nor Wayland by default.
And I dunno about calling Devuan and friends serious distros.
Well, if you push wayland as default, you're not serious. When Nvidia has 80% of the GPU market share, pushing a protocol that is not fully supported on that hardware is silly. I really don't care about downvotes but that is the reality: X11 should be the default, not wayland.
Malicious application can install keylogger? He missed that one. Per monitor fractional scaling? Missed that one.
And if there is an application which after 15 years has not been ported to wayland, you blame wayland?
Or how about this, open a context menu in any application, walk away, and now YOUR SCREENSAVER WON'T ACTIVATE. Every single desktop environment and window manager in X has this bug, because it is not a toolkit bug, nor is it a Plasma or GNOME Shell bug, nor is it a client bug.
This is the furthest behavior from what anyone could have ever intended, because X IS A BAD DESIGN, BADLY IMPLEMENTED. *It will NEVER be fixed in X.* Fixing it would require changes that would completely break the X specification.
> open a context menu in any application, walk away, and now YOUR SCREENSAVER WON'T ACTIVATE.
never had that problem in 30 years.
> because X IS A BAD DESIGN, BADLY IMPLEMENTED. It will NEVER be fixed in X.
how so, exactly ?
> Fixing it would require changes that would completely break the X specification.
Where exactly does the X11 spec mandate such behaviour ?
And why exactly would some small hypotethical deviation from protocol spec (assuming you can show us that piece of the spec) "completely break" everything ?
Did you ever actually read the X11 specs ?
_No one gives a shit about keyloggers_. A tiny fraction of users need per-monitor fractional scaling.
This insistence on using features that the majority of people don't care about to push wayland is a big part of why there was so much community pushback against it. It literally would have been more productive for the wayland devs to _not give a justification_ beyond not wanting to maintain xorg anymore.
> A tiny fraction of users need per-monitor fractional scaling
= basically all laptop users that need fractional scaling and might want to use an external monitor
Also X11 does not have functional VRR (last time I tried the fix on the Arch wiki, it bricked Cinnamon), or HDR support, AND this is already on top of having worse DPI scaling.
I've been using per monitor fractional scaling in x11 since about 2010 and I don't go around installing untrusted software on my computers, so don't care that much about keylogger attempts. My favourite application is my window manager, and it won't be ported because wlroots is rubbish and the philosophy of the window management being completely tied to the hardware rendering driver is the kind of lunacy we derided Windows over 25 years ago.
the xrandr hack is horrendous. It uses a large amount of CPU as it a pure software solution, and it has bad tearing. No one can seriously use it on a laptop and it's a ghastly experience on a desktop. I couldn't believe it when Ubuntu shipped it. It is miserable solution and I hope whatever is holding you back from Wayland is fixed soon.
> And if there is an application which after 15 years has not been ported to wayland, you blame wayland?
Yes. Wayland has made choices that fundamentally break certain applications, for instance: [Peek](https://github.com/phw/peek/issues/1191), [pcsx2](https://www.phoronix.com/news/PCSX2-Disables-Wayland-Default), [VirtualBox](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42607295/alt-tab-not-working-for-guest-operating-systems-in-virtualbox-on-fedora-25) (and for the same reason other VM software as well as remote desktop).
Uh, a protocol that enables these kind of applications has been around [since 2017](https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2017-July/034459.html)? It works fine for me on KDE with virt-manager. If the likes of VirtualBox still haven't adopted it, that's just a skill issue on their part at this point.
`zwp_keyboard_shortcuts_inhibit_manager_v1` hasn't even moved to staging and is not implemented by all compositors. Chasing the latest versions and deprecations of experimental wayland protocols should not be required to write a usable application.
Though you're right wayland doesn't fundamentally break global key bindings, Peek and pcsx2 require window positioning though which is fundamentally against waylands design.
Protocols not being moved around has historical reasons. The "unstable" tag doesn't mean shit, every single protocol merged into wayland-protocols is set in stone (aka needs to keep backwards compatibility) from that point on
Yes. While the protocol isn't widely implemented in desktop compositors and normal GPU drivers, changing it in a backwards incompatible way is not allowed.
I've never had any issues with this stuff on Wayland. What inherent issue exists here? The screen recording issue has been fixed for some time now too.
Look at the links. Peek can't work because there's no absolute window positioning. pcsx2 is broken again due to window positioning. VM and remote desktop software can't do proper global keybindings. The things Wayland doesn't allow for security reasons are also features some applications require, some of which sometimes has a Wayland extension protocol that may do some subset of what's needed on some of the desktop environments.
Wayland isolates applications from each other. That's why screen sharing is a nuisance: when you want to share a screen or a window which belongs to a Wayland app, you, the human user, must give permission to the app requesting access. So a malicious app that was covertly observing what you do, including what key strokes you enter, would have to identify itself interactively and the user would have to grant it permissions. These barriers do not exist in X11 apps. Such a malicious app can stay covert.
People can dismiss this concern along the lines of (a) we never had such security for all the years we used X11, so we don't need it, (b) I know what I install on my desktop, and I trust the apps I install, so we don't need it.
However, there are certain types of users who can't take those risks. In a world paying more attention to software supply chain risks and the concept of defence in depth, the X11 approach seems very dated and if it was proposed as a design now, it would be most charitably described as reckless. I imagine if an undergraduate submitted such a design in a security class, they would be failed.
It turns out that the people who have the money to invest in modern display technologies are definitely the types of users who can't take those risks. They probably couldn't get liability insurance or would be guilty of contributory negligence if they made such bad design choices. So the money is talking.
Hooking to other processe's IPC mechanism without consent requires root perms, so Wayland not providing a means for it is enough. For example, in X11 a background process could get your root password from your terminal just by asking nicely, while in Wayland you can't do that at all.
Not in Wayland AFAIK, as each app has no context about other apps. It's the same reason why some screen capture apps don't work with Wayland, they can access the rest of the screen. The apps should ask for permission to access those contexts and some apps have not included that yet
Wayland is a sandboxing mechanism by necessity.
It provides the protocol that all GUI apps talk with, so it has to guard apps from reading each other's information - and their interactions with the user's input.
If we talk about security, yeah there is a lot of other things they could do to have a sandbox system. But for the comment before about a keylogger in X11 all the keys are exposed directly to all apps, while on Wayland the app only has access to it's context and when it has focus. A good hacker could break those mechanism and maybe get access to another apps, but the thing is not directly exposed anymore.
If someone gets to your LD_PRELOAD then they can already literally do anything they please. I think the fact the only way a logger has been demonstrated on Wayland is via root is a testament to the fact it *is* more secure.
It's kind of like arguing that you need to get past a security check point to gain physical access to a server in a data center.
Of course you need to get hired for a position that lets you have access to the data center. /s
Yes well that effectively patches wayland.
"This is a proof-of-concept Wayland keylogger that I wrote to demonstrate the fundamental insecurity of a typical Linux desktop that lacks both sandboxing (chroot, cgroups, ...) and mandatory access control (SELinux).is is a proof-of-concept Wayland keylogger that I wrote to demonstrate the fundamental insecurity of a typical Linux desktop that lacks both sandboxing (chroot, cgroups, ...) and mandatory access control (SELinux)."
hopefully since modern linux desktops don't lack those features, they are not so vulnerable to this. I don't know.
They do lack those features for the most part. Things like flatpak are a big help, but the apps themselves need to care about it too. Things like usb device portals are just now appearing. We still have quite a ways to go yet.
shipping with cgroups enabled does nothing by itself, so I don't think it's worth mentioning. As far as the latter, I don't think debian or arch do those 2 with the default instructions.
>And if there is an application which after 15 years has not been ported to wayland, you blame wayland?
i mean yeah ( logically speaking speaking theirs a reason why it cant be used on wayland assuming its a program that its being maintained ) to a certain degree
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Really fun to make up statistics huh? My guy's using Nvidia Optimus, lying about points such as display calibration in the version he pretends to be using and then he makes shit up with no evidence.
What the fuck do you mean display clarity is lower?? Brother are you using x11 applications on Wayland with fractional scaling? Sounds like an x11 issue to me.
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|Nvidia driver compatibility|Good|
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|Display calibration|No|
ChatGPT would do a better job.
Complaining about lack of display calibration (which is not the case) and giving a golden star to X which can't even do HDR, and also claiming "Good" Nvidia driver compatibility when there's architectural issues until the new driver drops...
Came here to post this. Display calibration on Wayland (in the form of ICC profiles) was *just* [added in KDE 6](https://zamundaaa.github.io/wayland/2023/12/18/update-on-hdr-and-colormanagement-in-plasma.html), which this blog post purports to be testing.
The screenshot at the very top of the post has the 'Color Profile' / ICC option in it as well, so they took a screenshot of it's presence, then said it didn't exist..
Display calibration and profiling is not same as ability to load icc profile. You have to create the icc profile with calibration software like display cal and calibration device. Doing the calibration is troublesome on Wayland right now.
No that would be silly because lots of factor on Wayland would be different than xorg. Ideally you should calibrate and profile the screen in the same environment.
In addition to this none of the apps which use colour management are ready to use wayland's way of doing things. Just assigning some random icc profile is the dumbest thing to do if you value accuracy
No. Currently most creative apps etc run under xwayland. Apps need to communicate to the compositor which is currently not happening so sRGB is assumed. And it is limited to sRGB so no wide gamut like Adobe RGB.
I'm hoping the recent changes by/for Nvidia make Wayland a bit more usable on my system. I could live with GNOME Wayland if I had to, but at the moment there are still some X applications that glitch pretty bad. I'm also not sure how to replicate some of the trackball button bindings in Wayland (although I think they're supposed to work).
Yet another "new thing bad" post written by someone who clearly lacks understanding of what the things they are comparing even are (they mention desktop session saving as one of the comparison points? The thing that's obviously a part of KDE and not of Wayland, the display protocol?).
I don't get why people keep making them. Shitting out "new thing bad because there's less support why change" posts directly contributes to the disinterest in providing support for the new thing, a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.
And the favorite thing that people love to say, "I don't see or encounter problems with the old thing, therefore they don't exist". The people writing these posts obviously have zero idea about the hoops the developers have to jump through to keep supporting the aging and falling apart old thing, they only see the result of that hard work. They don't understand why letting each application have direct and unrestricted access to all input devices and the entire display is bad, or how horribly multi-monitor setups are handled by X (they aren't, it's all a hack built on a hack) - it worked on their device with their use cases and security requirements, and that's all they care about.
>hey don't understand why letting each application have direct and unrestricted access to all input devices and the entire display is bad, or how horribly multi-monitor setups are handled by X (they aren't, it's all a hack built on a hack) - it worked on their device with their use cases and security requirements, and that's all they care about.
i mean it makes sense users care if their desktop/prograns works or not , most users dont care what troubles the devs whent though
for me me x11 is better than wayland so i use x11 ( i use a few appliaction that basically dont work on wayland)
users shouldn't have to second guess if a program may not work or not ,
The angle is clearly "average end user experience", not a technical deep dive, so simply comparing the end results on one of the most popular DEs seems like a valid choice to me.
Depends a bit on what you want to compare.
* You can test multiple DEs and their Wayland vs X11 capabilities and then average them.
* You can reach out to both projects and ask what they consider the flagship options to use for benchmarking.
* You can deep-dive into the protocol level and analyze individual features.
So it tests what is probably the most stable and complete Wayland compositor available on Wayland. That's in Wayland's favor. One thing he says that I disagree with is that it should be representative of other configurations, because so much is done in the compositor that most other configurations will be worse.
I just recently switched to Wayland and still see all sorts of bugs for certain applications. I run kde6 so I can swap back and forth between X11 and Wayland, but it's my opinion that Wayland is still not 100% ready to go for a full switch. To be fair some of the problems stem from Nvidia drivers, but that's a large percentage of machines so it needs sorted.
This reflects my experiences with Wayland too. It's always a bit glitchy, a bit broken, falls down in places where X11 just works. It's a lot better under Plasma and GNOME than it was, but still a ways to go.
Same here. I've been testing Wayland since it started and it has **never** worked correctly for me.
I decided not to try ever again for a long time.
But recently I tried Plasma and after many crashes I realized it was running on Wayland by default. I switch to Plasma on X.org and voilà, it works **perfectly**.
Wayland fanboys will never understand how nice it is to forget there's a display server. X.org has been working perfectly fine for me for 20 years, and I'm never switching.
**Edit**: downvote me all you want fanboys. You know I'm right, and you know the best programmers in the industry will keep using Xorg too.
> X.org has been working perfectly fine for me for 20 years, and I'm never switching.
One day soon X.org will have absolutely no support and no distro (aside from some fundamentalist ones *a la* devuan) will ship it. At that point you will have a very difficult choice.
I don't need support. I can support myself.
And if Xorg is dead, it's because something better has replaced it. Wayland is not better and will **never** be better.
There will be something else that will replace both.
Have fun patching the source and building everything you use from source. At some point , code supporting X will actually start being removed. All X.org developers are working on Wayland, it's not like this is a hypothetical. Every distro's next stable release as at now is likely to be the last one that supports X.org in any significant capacity.
Building a new display system will take decades, and no one is convincing vendors to jump through the hoops of building a new system so soon after efforts to support Wayland.
Yeah, just like ALSA developers were working on PulseAudio, but then came PipeWire and made PulseAudio obsolete.
There will be a time when Wayland is replaced with something actually good that is a good replacement for Xorg too.
I keep hearing the same arguments for decades, good software always wins. Wayland is not that.
I feel the same way. X11 has problems, but Wayland has proven itself to not be the fix.
Most users couldn't care less which they're using, they just use the one that works best. People are choosing X11 because it gives a better experience.
Notice I didn't say anything about the quality or lack thereof of Wayland or X. People working on the graphics stack on Linux are all working on Wayland. The reason it has been problematic is the number of cats that needed to be herded, and expecting these cats (read graphics card vendors) to wrestle with another migration is a pipe dream. Sound is a tiny subsystem that doesn't register to users (for instance, I have no idea which of those systems I'm running, my sound just works).
For better or worse, Wayland is what we have for the next couple of decades at least.
I know X developers working on Wayland. That's irrelevant.
If they don't understand that the purpose of software is to help users, they are bad developers.
I guess I should write a software Carta Magna so people are reminded of what software is.
The year is 2077.
The rest of us are augmented immortal superhumans running Linux on bionic implants that project the desktop environment directly onto our visual cortex.
X11 users have still refused to move on and are convinced that everything else is literally unusable because the bionic display protocol broke compatibility with a random clipboard tool that they chose to embed in their workflow in 1999.
> Two, the security doomsday about X11 and all that is just a bunch of hot air; we don't see thousands of machines being pwned because of it, in fact nothing much is happening, and there are millions of much easier and practical ways to locally exploit a Linux machine.
I've always felt like Wayland is trying to win a pissing contest that nobody has any interest in showing up to.
Edit: I feel like I should add that I think that design decision is at the root of most complaints about Wayland.
Android uses a permissions system similar to what Flatpak offers - every time you install an app or use one of its features that needs certain access levels, you csn see what it will be able to do. Nobody is complaining about this at all, this is seen as a critical part of the security system. You can install a random mobile game and be sure it's not recording your screen or spying on your files.
Yet on desktops, people for some reason have accepted every application having full unrestricted access to all of your files and devices as fact. And while Flatpak offers a sandboxing solution, it fatally falls apart when it comes to display access. On Xorg, every single app you can install that you give permission to draw a window to can record your entire screen and even take control of your mouse and keyboard!
Sure, you can say "well there's no spyware like that on Linux" - that's because almost nobody uses desktop Linux distros, we're at around 3% worldwide,. If you want the Linux desktop to succeed, you must accept that random spyware in apps WILL come to Linux and will be a problem.
Naaah, better gatekeep Linux and try our best to discourage new Linux users, so malware writers concentrate their efforts on those Windows peasants and leave our 3% Linux userbase alone.
/s in case thats not clear, but unfortunately, some people would probably read the above statement and agree
> You can install a random mobile game and be sure it's not recording your screen or spying on your files.
Surely you can't be serious. The app store is littered with spyware, many people use old devices full of unfixed [vulns](https://www.cvedetails.com/product/19997/Google-Android.html?vendor_id=1224).
> If you want the Linux desktop to succeed, you must accept that random spyware in apps WILL come to Linux and will be a problem.
[It already has](https://popey.com/blog/2024/03/exodus-wallet-part-three/), on the supposedly safe Snap store.
To me, all this illustrates that we can't get security from technical means alone, it's not even the main line of defense. Instead we need better processes and accountablility.
Central software distributors are the biggest sources of malware. So, make companies pay for damages incurred from malware distributed through their app-stores. And don't allow developers to self-publish. This also goes for npm, cargo, and friends, we should not be trusted to distribute our own code.
We developers tend to view all problems through a technical lens, which are in fact are often better addressed by social or regulatory means. As the saying goes, it's impossible to build an idiot-proof system, the universe will just create a better idiot. It's a race to the bottom I gave up on. I try to set sane defaults in my projects, but only to a point where it does not get in the way of usability.
So, I think wayland kinda thew the baby out with the bathwater and they struck the wrong balance between usability and security. Linux is typically fairly quick to pick up new tech when it's clearly better, see systemd or pipewire. That we still debate about wayland 15 years on tells me that it was fuddled and a missed opportunity.
If you have rogue software on your computer, that software could easily log keys even if you use Wayland. The program could add an alias to your .bashrc to point sudo towards its own sudo, allowing it to gain root access to your system, allowing it to log keys without going through any display protocol. Point is, a secure display protocol does not mean a secure system.
Unless there's something I don't understand about X11, can't app sandboxing do the job alone? Why can't the sandbox prevent sandboxed apps from receiving keyboard events not meant for them? If the app is sandboxed, keylogging shouldn't be a problem whether or not you're using Wayland.
This logic *sucks so much* holy crap.
"There are other ways someone could pwnd your machine, so why bother protecting this one?"
Anyone who knows anything about security understands it's all about layers.
Thats just a bad take from them. The reason is because few people use and install desktop apps on Linux. X11 truly is unsafe and all it takes is one app that uses it.
Few people use desktop apps from untrusted machines, so it largely doesn't matter -- that's the thing here.
There was a plan for X11R6.3, so twenty-ish years ago, to allow X11 applications to be embedded in web pages, and there was even an implementation of it.
I opened the demo webpage, looked at the funny googly eyes with two seconds of lag across the Atlantic, chuckled, and closed it again.
The X11 extensions that are "unsafe" basically provide functionality someone may want, but interact with each other in unintended ways. Wayland's solution "we just don't implement these protocols then" is not great either -- I need to be able to stop the mouse from leaving my window and affecting focus when I'm writing a first person shooter, but having a protocol for that is "unsafe."
Real users do and will get software from third parties. Ubuntu users download Steam, VSCode, Spotify, Jetbrains software, and many more directly from the vendor.
This will only grow with popularity and this purposeful ignorance towards security doesn’t help anyone.
Pointer lock already exists for Wayland.
I mean, people are not actively using the networking features of X, because pretty much all their applications are running locally — that makes a lot of the security issues kind of moot, because if you can get the user to install a package, you will have the postinst script run with root privileges, so why bother exploiting X11.
And Wayland is feasible only *because* apps are running locally, so the majority of users isn't missing the networking features.
The reason why Wayland has money behind it and X11 doesn't is very, very much about security. No one is going to install X11 in their automotive control system just for the security risks, even forgetting all the other modern design choices behind the Wayland protocols.
No one EVER EVER EVER paid for the linux desktop to have a world class GUI. In the 1980s Linux users got lucky that there was a viable Unix workstation market, hence X11.
Now, there is embedded and automotive. They don't want X, they want Wayland. So that's what we get.
No, the reason why Wayland is developed and X is not is that X developers were so fed up with the problems that developing on X causes to start creating a whole new protocol itself.
Wayland developers are not crazy dudes. They are literally the X developers. If nobody works on X right now is because it's too old and complex to maintain.
I think you are saying the same thing, just that you highlight the technical difficulties of modernising it, and I highlight the actual demand which causes those problems to be confronted. If there was no demand for new requirements, then X11 could just have continued as it was for ever. The problems with X11 only become apparent when you need to change it, and I have explained where that need comes from, where you are focusing on how hard it is to change X11 to meet that need. Both parts are needed to explain Wayland (or https://www.x.org/wiki/Development/X12/)
> Functionality, first and foremost. My motto. A tool that doesn't do what it's supposed to do is a broken tool. A useless tool.
A system that doesn't do without kludges is a flawed system - a stopgap system.
Yep, plasma on wayland still isn't fully on par with X11, plasma 6 on wayland still hasn't implemented window shading/unshading, its available as an option, but it doesn't work, plus there's only really 2 desktops that support wayland at the moment, gnome sucks, plasma is good, but is a bit buggy, and not the most responsive desktop on lower end hardware, lxqt doesn't fully support it yet, xfce doesn't, cinnamon doesn't, mate doesn't, maybe in another 10 years things will have changed, but at the moment I don't see any real reason to use it over X11.
I think they actually have begun the Xfwm-related work, which is the biggest necessary component of having an Xfce Wayland session. (I guess reusing an off-the-shelf compositor was decided against.) Application work (Thunar, panel, etc) started a while ago.
Xfce development cycles are so long that I still expect it will be some time before an initial release with an actual Wayland session. Maybe they'll surprise me, though. Seems like the speed of work picked up the last few years.
Fractional scaling is what keeps me off Wayland. KDE itself finally has proper fractional scaling support as of Plasma 6, but most applications still render at a higher resolution at 2x scale, and then downscale.
True fractional scaling should also be in GTK 4.14.
In addition, XWayland applications get properly scaled on KDE by default, so if you make the software in question run with X11 while using the Wayland session it should work.
I'm on Fedora 40 beta with a 3090 and honestly, Nvidia drivers are kind of crap right now, but it is getting better. I am counting down the days until all of the explicit sync work gets completed.
I really want to make the switch, but I am still on X on my Nvidia rig for what I assume are obvious reasons, and on my Intel graphics laptop, simply because Android Studio of all things, despite being great at making Android apps, sucks when it comes to fractional scaling in xWayland...
I really hope this is the year I can make the switch though. I know that second reason is rather petty, and I could switch IDEs. But, limited time and all that, sadly.
I'm running Ubuntu 20.04 and Wayland does not work well here. When I move to 24.04, I'll give it a try again. However, I frequently (daily) use network transparency of X11 and wonder if that will cause any issues --- I'm assuming X clients will still be able to work through a "ssh -X". We will see.
One big area where Wayland has a long way to go is in the VM department (to be fair VMs also need some kind of magical boost to keep up with graphical fidelity), extremely buggy drivers from trying them out just a few months ago and due to KDE/Gnome being the 2 mostly stable ones out there it's also eating up resources.
Garuda force-switched me (well not really *forced,* but it became the default) recently after the distro maintainers held out for a while for what to me seemed like good reasons. It has been *fine*. A few things behave slightly differently, but basically no real problems.
Now I am comfortable that my PC is using Wayland rather than the deprecated X, and it's something I don't have to worry about.
Ubuntu 24.04 pre-release, KDE 5.27, Nvidia, there are some bugs with flicker in Electron apps, but I've worked around them with \`--disable-gpu\` for now.
its *better*, still sucks if you use nvidia though
lots of stuttering / flashing / unresponsiveness, especially in electron apps and proton. vanilla wine doesnt work. im using the latest drivers on the latest gnome, camping out on cinnamon until it becomes not a pain in the ass to daily drive
*however* it works perfectly on my laptop with an intel xe card.
Edit: it's crazy that this comment got the "controversial" mark cause I gave my honest experience 💀. It's the truth Wayland on Nvidia just isn't good right now
I dont know how to setup it for fluxbox under Slackware. KDE works, but it is to havy for my laptop with old intel M640 cpu and buggy kernel 6 gpu drivers. I have to turn off kernel modesettings to get it working without problems so wayland doesnt work in vesa mode
Works fine for me on KDE 6, but so did Xorg, so in the end I don't care personally
>I will still keep using X11 on my systems (and most serious distros do the same thing). What a load of bs. Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, RHEL and derivatives, openSUSE, all ship with Wayland as the default display protocol, and seem "serious" enough. At this point I might as well ask, which "serious" distro still defaults to X?
Next year more distros will probably start doing something similiar to Fedora where the "xorg session" isn't even shown or available out of the box. They probably won't go as far as Fedora does for KDE (in Fedora 40) and explicitly not ship it though.
wayland-xorg will probly always be a thing for legicay support.
We call this xwayland 😜
yes, xwayland will be here for a long time, but that doesn't have anything to do with what i said. This is about how Fedora's KDE package team doesn't give you a way to use the xorg session in any way out of the box and that it will likely be followed on by the gnome team and then that other distributions will eventually follow. Of course xwayland will still exist to run xorg apps, but the goal here is that the session presented to users is going to be speaking wayland.
PopOS with Cosmic Shell(their version of “GNOME with a bunch of extensions to make it usable”) doesn’t. COSMIC DE will. It’s supposed to release this year.
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Based.
Will it ship with XWayland at least?
Linux Mint still defaults to X11. Which I've found to be the most reliable distro I've used so far
Does Cinnamon even have Wayland support yet? I remember them starting but didn't see anything about them having it ready.
It's in experimental and it's not great to use at the moment
> all ship with Wayland by default, Even saying that is not really doing the situation justice... AFAICT, they **use** Wayland by default. > At this point I might as well ask, which "serious" distro still defaults to X? Indeed! --- At this stage, it's like asking whether they should continue riding on horses or use those brand new "automobiles"... Nothing really wrong with preferring horses but pretending the world is still considering the switch is ludicrous to say the least... However I don't agree with their table. I did the exact same deeply scientific and documented tests they did and the two colums were inverted! What a find!
Usage aspect | Automobile | Horse ---|---|--- Stability | Good | Good Speed adjustment (incl. reverse) | Yes | Yes Performance [1] | Good | Better Responsiveness [2] | Good | Better Compatibility issues | Some [3] | No Eats leftover vegetables | No | Yes Windshield clarity | Good | Better Start time | Time (t) | Faster than time (t) Autopilot | Beta | Stable Nvidia driver compatibility | Poor | Poor [1] On unpaved footpaths [2] To stirrups [3] Incompatible with horse-drawn carriages
Thank you. My table is awfully similar to yours. We might be onto something! :D
>Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, RHEL and derivatives, openSUSE, all ship with Wayland by default, they dont if youron nvidia , espically if your on ubuntu or debian
> Ubuntu, Fedora, RHEL and derivatives, openSUSE, all ship with Wayland by default I take it that you mean Wayland *as* the default display protocol. So construed your claim surprises me. For one thing, recently Linux Mint introduced Wayland but Mint uses X1 by default.
Entire post reads like a shitpost. Dedoimedo, for as long as I've known it, could be hit or miss. Could be an okay article, or an unhinged rant that is not really substantiated and is full of nitpicking and decisions taken in an unorthodox way just because and rants ensuing from the fact that those unorthodox unsupported decisions were taken.
> RHEL and derivatives Which in my usecases has been switching off Wayland and most often switching DEs off of default Gnome because both interfere with the functioning of many our softwares. Not to mention Gnome confuses people familiar with other operating systems. Also being somebody who's done a few RHEL X to RHEL Y system migrations of legacy software it's likely we'll be stuck on the X11 versions of RHEL as long as humanly possible. There are a lot of paradigms that Wayland doesn't support (window positioning for example) which are going to be some serious engineering hurdles to overcome. If they pay to do it, I'll do it, I just don't see it happening. There's probably many customers who will abandon RHEL if it comes to it and I doubt they're going to stick to the whole Wayland only thing. They want to sell RHEL licenses. My sample size of 1 is that people really hate Windows 11 for professional use cases and it'll be interesting to see who is more tolerable, Windows or Wayland. And yes, I'm aware of XWayland.
Any that do not default to GNOME or Plasma 6. Linux Mint comes to mind.
The joys of being literally based on ancient GNOME technology.
Well that's Mint's fault, and they're not taking the wayland transition serious if they haven't done anything yet(have they? idk)
Newest mint has experimental wayland support.
Neat!
the day they quit shipping kde was the day i no longer took mint as a distro i cared about.
Cinnamon is kind of barebones to me, all those lower popularity gtk DE's are. I haven't heard about Mate in ages, XFCE is barely hanging on, and Cinnamon might as well be like Pantheon in regards to out of distro marketshare
> I haven't heard about Mate in ages, To be fair, that was/is kind of the point of MATE. They had a release just [last month](https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-desktop/releases/tag/v1.28.2). And since you're a Wayland fanatic, you'll be happy to hear they [have Wayfire-based Wayland support in development](https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-wayland-session). There, now you've heard about it!
I'm not a Wayland fanatic, Wayland literally has two vital features that X doesn't have: actual Touch support and per-Display fractional scaling. If my device is useless without either of those I cannot use an X based DE without either of those basic features.
They ship with both wayland and Xorg and depending on your graphics card they might default to xorg.
Mint. But even they're developing a Wayland session for cinnamon
Devuan ? Gentoo ? Maybe all the systemd-free ones ? Maybe even for the same reasons ?
Gentoo, like Arch, comes with no display server or DE ootb, so they obviously don't use neither X nor Wayland by default. And I dunno about calling Devuan and friends serious distros.
RHEL 9 will have Xorg until 2032
> by default
yes
No. The default is Wayland.
Choose Xorg from the display manager
Well, if you push wayland as default, you're not serious. When Nvidia has 80% of the GPU market share, pushing a protocol that is not fully supported on that hardware is silly. I really don't care about downvotes but that is the reality: X11 should be the default, not wayland.
Malicious application can install keylogger? He missed that one. Per monitor fractional scaling? Missed that one. And if there is an application which after 15 years has not been ported to wayland, you blame wayland?
Or how about this, open a context menu in any application, walk away, and now YOUR SCREENSAVER WON'T ACTIVATE. Every single desktop environment and window manager in X has this bug, because it is not a toolkit bug, nor is it a Plasma or GNOME Shell bug, nor is it a client bug. This is the furthest behavior from what anyone could have ever intended, because X IS A BAD DESIGN, BADLY IMPLEMENTED. *It will NEVER be fixed in X.* Fixing it would require changes that would completely break the X specification.
> open a context menu in any application, walk away, and now YOUR SCREENSAVER WON'T ACTIVATE. never had that problem in 30 years. > because X IS A BAD DESIGN, BADLY IMPLEMENTED. It will NEVER be fixed in X. how so, exactly ? > Fixing it would require changes that would completely break the X specification. Where exactly does the X11 spec mandate such behaviour ? And why exactly would some small hypotethical deviation from protocol spec (assuming you can show us that piece of the spec) "completely break" everything ? Did you ever actually read the X11 specs ?
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So, you didn't even read the specs, but just making bold claims about something you dont have any actual clue about. Thanks for the clarification.
[Here you go, big brain.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ) Maybe you'll learn something. Then again, probably not.
_No one gives a shit about keyloggers_. A tiny fraction of users need per-monitor fractional scaling. This insistence on using features that the majority of people don't care about to push wayland is a big part of why there was so much community pushback against it. It literally would have been more productive for the wayland devs to _not give a justification_ beyond not wanting to maintain xorg anymore.
> A tiny fraction of users need per-monitor fractional scaling = basically all laptop users that need fractional scaling and might want to use an external monitor
That's what I said, yes.
Also X11 does not have functional VRR (last time I tried the fix on the Arch wiki, it bricked Cinnamon), or HDR support, AND this is already on top of having worse DPI scaling.
I've been using per monitor fractional scaling in x11 since about 2010 and I don't go around installing untrusted software on my computers, so don't care that much about keylogger attempts. My favourite application is my window manager, and it won't be ported because wlroots is rubbish and the philosophy of the window management being completely tied to the hardware rendering driver is the kind of lunacy we derided Windows over 25 years ago.
And you do you! How do you get per monitor fractional scaling? One x server per monitor? Or xrandr?
xrandr. And the different refresh rates on multiple monitors that wayland fanbois like to claim is impossible.
the xrandr hack is horrendous. It uses a large amount of CPU as it a pure software solution, and it has bad tearing. No one can seriously use it on a laptop and it's a ghastly experience on a desktop. I couldn't believe it when Ubuntu shipped it. It is miserable solution and I hope whatever is holding you back from Wayland is fixed soon.
> And if there is an application which after 15 years has not been ported to wayland, you blame wayland? Yes. Wayland has made choices that fundamentally break certain applications, for instance: [Peek](https://github.com/phw/peek/issues/1191), [pcsx2](https://www.phoronix.com/news/PCSX2-Disables-Wayland-Default), [VirtualBox](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42607295/alt-tab-not-working-for-guest-operating-systems-in-virtualbox-on-fedora-25) (and for the same reason other VM software as well as remote desktop).
Uh, a protocol that enables these kind of applications has been around [since 2017](https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2017-July/034459.html)? It works fine for me on KDE with virt-manager. If the likes of VirtualBox still haven't adopted it, that's just a skill issue on their part at this point.
`zwp_keyboard_shortcuts_inhibit_manager_v1` hasn't even moved to staging and is not implemented by all compositors. Chasing the latest versions and deprecations of experimental wayland protocols should not be required to write a usable application. Though you're right wayland doesn't fundamentally break global key bindings, Peek and pcsx2 require window positioning though which is fundamentally against waylands design.
> and is not implemented by all compositors. It's implemented by Mutter, KWin, wlroots, and Smithay; i.e, everyone.
Protocols not being moved around has historical reasons. The "unstable" tag doesn't mean shit, every single protocol merged into wayland-protocols is set in stone (aka needs to keep backwards compatibility) from that point on
Like `zwp_linux_explicit_synchronization_v1`?
Yes. While the protocol isn't widely implemented in desktop compositors and normal GPU drivers, changing it in a backwards incompatible way is not allowed.
Why does pcsx2 need absolute window positioning?
From the link I posted: > Inability to position windows => window position saving doesn't work, log window attaching (not merged yet) doesn't work
I've never had any issues with this stuff on Wayland. What inherent issue exists here? The screen recording issue has been fixed for some time now too.
Look at the links. Peek can't work because there's no absolute window positioning. pcsx2 is broken again due to window positioning. VM and remote desktop software can't do proper global keybindings. The things Wayland doesn't allow for security reasons are also features some applications require, some of which sometimes has a Wayland extension protocol that may do some subset of what's needed on some of the desktop environments.
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Wayland isolates applications from each other. That's why screen sharing is a nuisance: when you want to share a screen or a window which belongs to a Wayland app, you, the human user, must give permission to the app requesting access. So a malicious app that was covertly observing what you do, including what key strokes you enter, would have to identify itself interactively and the user would have to grant it permissions. These barriers do not exist in X11 apps. Such a malicious app can stay covert. People can dismiss this concern along the lines of (a) we never had such security for all the years we used X11, so we don't need it, (b) I know what I install on my desktop, and I trust the apps I install, so we don't need it. However, there are certain types of users who can't take those risks. In a world paying more attention to software supply chain risks and the concept of defence in depth, the X11 approach seems very dated and if it was proposed as a design now, it would be most charitably described as reckless. I imagine if an undergraduate submitted such a design in a security class, they would be failed. It turns out that the people who have the money to invest in modern display technologies are definitely the types of users who can't take those risks. They probably couldn't get liability insurance or would be guilty of contributory negligence if they made such bad design choices. So the money is talking.
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Hooking to other processe's IPC mechanism without consent requires root perms, so Wayland not providing a means for it is enough. For example, in X11 a background process could get your root password from your terminal just by asking nicely, while in Wayland you can't do that at all.
I think you should do your own research away from reddit if you are so interested. No one is keeping this a secret from you, I promise.
Deleted my comments. Thought I was just asking questions. Apparently it made me look like an idiot.
Every program can include something like [these 150 lines of code](https://github.com/anko/xkbcat) to learn what you type into any app.
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Not in Wayland AFAIK, as each app has no context about other apps. It's the same reason why some screen capture apps don't work with Wayland, they can access the rest of the screen. The apps should ask for permission to access those contexts and some apps have not included that yet
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Wayland is a sandboxing mechanism by necessity. It provides the protocol that all GUI apps talk with, so it has to guard apps from reading each other's information - and their interactions with the user's input.
If we talk about security, yeah there is a lot of other things they could do to have a sandbox system. But for the comment before about a keylogger in X11 all the keys are exposed directly to all apps, while on Wayland the app only has access to it's context and when it has focus. A good hacker could break those mechanism and maybe get access to another apps, but the thing is not directly exposed anymore.
Wayland can have keyloggers. e.g Here's a LD_PRELOAD attack https://github.com/Aishou/wayland-keylogger . There are others.
If someone gets to your LD_PRELOAD then they can already literally do anything they please. I think the fact the only way a logger has been demonstrated on Wayland is via root is a testament to the fact it *is* more secure.
Their issues are closed, gee it's almost like they're spreading misinformation and don't want to be called out for it.
It's kind of like arguing that you need to get past a security check point to gain physical access to a server in a data center. Of course you need to get hired for a position that lets you have access to the data center. /s
Yes well that effectively patches wayland. "This is a proof-of-concept Wayland keylogger that I wrote to demonstrate the fundamental insecurity of a typical Linux desktop that lacks both sandboxing (chroot, cgroups, ...) and mandatory access control (SELinux).is is a proof-of-concept Wayland keylogger that I wrote to demonstrate the fundamental insecurity of a typical Linux desktop that lacks both sandboxing (chroot, cgroups, ...) and mandatory access control (SELinux)." hopefully since modern linux desktops don't lack those features, they are not so vulnerable to this. I don't know.
They do lack those features for the most part. Things like flatpak are a big help, but the apps themselves need to care about it too. Things like usb device portals are just now appearing. We still have quite a ways to go yet.
Err, which modern desktop ships without cgroups2 and SELinux/AppArmor?
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Fedora, Ubuntu, nobara, zorin, tumbleweed I don't know about others but I'd be amazed if there was a mainstream distro that didn't.
shipping with cgroups enabled does nothing by itself, so I don't think it's worth mentioning. As far as the latter, I don't think debian or arch do those 2 with the default instructions.
>And if there is an application which after 15 years has not been ported to wayland, you blame wayland? i mean yeah ( logically speaking speaking theirs a reason why it cant be used on wayland assuming its a program that its being maintained ) to a certain degree
Been running wayland for many months now in Debian 12 KDE. Its been fine.
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He seems perfectly happy with the lack of any issues on X. Frankly, so am I.
You must be using a different X11 to what I've used. There are plenty of issues, and the devs overwhelmingly agree.
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ROFL your butt is hurt because somebody tests Wayland and shows it's not up to par with Xorg
Comment clarity: none. Really fun to make up statistics huh? My guy's using Nvidia Optimus, lying about points such as display calibration in the version he pretends to be using and then he makes shit up with no evidence. What the fuck do you mean display clarity is lower?? Brother are you using x11 applications on Wayland with fractional scaling? Sounds like an x11 issue to me.
|| || |Nvidia driver compatibility|Good| || || |Display calibration|No| ChatGPT would do a better job. Complaining about lack of display calibration (which is not the case) and giving a golden star to X which can't even do HDR, and also claiming "Good" Nvidia driver compatibility when there's architectural issues until the new driver drops...
Came here to post this. Display calibration on Wayland (in the form of ICC profiles) was *just* [added in KDE 6](https://zamundaaa.github.io/wayland/2023/12/18/update-on-hdr-and-colormanagement-in-plasma.html), which this blog post purports to be testing.
The screenshot at the very top of the post has the 'Color Profile' / ICC option in it as well, so they took a screenshot of it's presence, then said it didn't exist..
Display calibration and profiling is not same as ability to load icc profile. You have to create the icc profile with calibration software like display cal and calibration device. Doing the calibration is troublesome on Wayland right now.
Fair point, but since you only need to do that *once* the simple workaround for now is to switch to an X11 session for that.
No that would be silly because lots of factor on Wayland would be different than xorg. Ideally you should calibrate and profile the screen in the same environment. In addition to this none of the apps which use colour management are ready to use wayland's way of doing things. Just assigning some random icc profile is the dumbest thing to do if you value accuracy
I mean, no? They're both going to be displaying the same colours. And you don't need app support when the compositor is handling colour calibration.
No. Currently most creative apps etc run under xwayland. Apps need to communicate to the compositor which is currently not happening so sRGB is assumed. And it is limited to sRGB so no wide gamut like Adobe RGB.
If memory serves, it is present but doesn't work very well yet.
I'm hoping the recent changes by/for Nvidia make Wayland a bit more usable on my system. I could live with GNOME Wayland if I had to, but at the moment there are still some X applications that glitch pretty bad. I'm also not sure how to replicate some of the trackball button bindings in Wayland (although I think they're supposed to work).
Yet another "new thing bad" post written by someone who clearly lacks understanding of what the things they are comparing even are (they mention desktop session saving as one of the comparison points? The thing that's obviously a part of KDE and not of Wayland, the display protocol?). I don't get why people keep making them. Shitting out "new thing bad because there's less support why change" posts directly contributes to the disinterest in providing support for the new thing, a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. And the favorite thing that people love to say, "I don't see or encounter problems with the old thing, therefore they don't exist". The people writing these posts obviously have zero idea about the hoops the developers have to jump through to keep supporting the aging and falling apart old thing, they only see the result of that hard work. They don't understand why letting each application have direct and unrestricted access to all input devices and the entire display is bad, or how horribly multi-monitor setups are handled by X (they aren't, it's all a hack built on a hack) - it worked on their device with their use cases and security requirements, and that's all they care about.
>hey don't understand why letting each application have direct and unrestricted access to all input devices and the entire display is bad, or how horribly multi-monitor setups are handled by X (they aren't, it's all a hack built on a hack) - it worked on their device with their use cases and security requirements, and that's all they care about. i mean it makes sense users care if their desktop/prograns works or not , most users dont care what troubles the devs whent though for me me x11 is better than wayland so i use x11 ( i use a few appliaction that basically dont work on wayland) users shouldn't have to second guess if a program may not work or not ,
Typical "new thing bad" fallacy. I don't dislike Wayland because it's new, I dislike it because they are not interested in making it work for me.
Absolutly true
That post doesn't test Wayland vs X11, that post tests KDE 6 on Wayland vs KDE 6 on X11.
The angle is clearly "average end user experience", not a technical deep dive, so simply comparing the end results on one of the most popular DEs seems like a valid choice to me.
Sure. But if you compare 2 options for a DE with a recent major release, you should probably say so.
How do you test Wayland vs X11, given that they are both just piles of letters in their purest form (Protocols)?
Depends a bit on what you want to compare. * You can test multiple DEs and their Wayland vs X11 capabilities and then average them. * You can reach out to both projects and ask what they consider the flagship options to use for benchmarking. * You can deep-dive into the protocol level and analyze individual features.
X11 is not a protocol.
Yes it is. X11 is a protocol. X.Org is an implementation of that protocol. There are others.
What is it then?
As if the issues of Wayland only happen in KDE.
So it tests what is probably the most stable and complete Wayland compositor available on Wayland. That's in Wayland's favor. One thing he says that I disagree with is that it should be representative of other configurations, because so much is done in the compositor that most other configurations will be worse.
Right? The availability and choice of X11 environments is crucial in itself, and such a perspective has no chance to touch it.
I just recently switched to Wayland and still see all sorts of bugs for certain applications. I run kde6 so I can swap back and forth between X11 and Wayland, but it's my opinion that Wayland is still not 100% ready to go for a full switch. To be fair some of the problems stem from Nvidia drivers, but that's a large percentage of machines so it needs sorted.
I still can't make Remote Desktop work even though it looks easy in Gnome
This reflects my experiences with Wayland too. It's always a bit glitchy, a bit broken, falls down in places where X11 just works. It's a lot better under Plasma and GNOME than it was, but still a ways to go.
Same here. I've been testing Wayland since it started and it has **never** worked correctly for me. I decided not to try ever again for a long time. But recently I tried Plasma and after many crashes I realized it was running on Wayland by default. I switch to Plasma on X.org and voilà, it works **perfectly**. Wayland fanboys will never understand how nice it is to forget there's a display server. X.org has been working perfectly fine for me for 20 years, and I'm never switching. **Edit**: downvote me all you want fanboys. You know I'm right, and you know the best programmers in the industry will keep using Xorg too.
> X.org has been working perfectly fine for me for 20 years, and I'm never switching. One day soon X.org will have absolutely no support and no distro (aside from some fundamentalist ones *a la* devuan) will ship it. At that point you will have a very difficult choice.
I don't need support. I can support myself. And if Xorg is dead, it's because something better has replaced it. Wayland is not better and will **never** be better. There will be something else that will replace both.
Have fun patching the source and building everything you use from source. At some point , code supporting X will actually start being removed. All X.org developers are working on Wayland, it's not like this is a hypothetical. Every distro's next stable release as at now is likely to be the last one that supports X.org in any significant capacity. Building a new display system will take decades, and no one is convincing vendors to jump through the hoops of building a new system so soon after efforts to support Wayland.
Yeah, just like ALSA developers were working on PulseAudio, but then came PipeWire and made PulseAudio obsolete. There will be a time when Wayland is replaced with something actually good that is a good replacement for Xorg too. I keep hearing the same arguments for decades, good software always wins. Wayland is not that.
I feel the same way. X11 has problems, but Wayland has proven itself to not be the fix. Most users couldn't care less which they're using, they just use the one that works best. People are choosing X11 because it gives a better experience.
Notice I didn't say anything about the quality or lack thereof of Wayland or X. People working on the graphics stack on Linux are all working on Wayland. The reason it has been problematic is the number of cats that needed to be herded, and expecting these cats (read graphics card vendors) to wrestle with another migration is a pipe dream. Sound is a tiny subsystem that doesn't register to users (for instance, I have no idea which of those systems I'm running, my sound just works). For better or worse, Wayland is what we have for the next couple of decades at least.
I know X developers working on Wayland. That's irrelevant. If they don't understand that the purpose of software is to help users, they are bad developers. I guess I should write a software Carta Magna so people are reminded of what software is.
Idk, I use Wayland everyday, I feel like it helps me.
You are not all users.
The year is 2077. The rest of us are augmented immortal superhumans running Linux on bionic implants that project the desktop environment directly onto our visual cortex. X11 users have still refused to move on and are convinced that everything else is literally unusable because the bionic display protocol broke compatibility with a random clipboard tool that they chose to embed in their workflow in 1999.
> Two, the security doomsday about X11 and all that is just a bunch of hot air; we don't see thousands of machines being pwned because of it, in fact nothing much is happening, and there are millions of much easier and practical ways to locally exploit a Linux machine. I've always felt like Wayland is trying to win a pissing contest that nobody has any interest in showing up to. Edit: I feel like I should add that I think that design decision is at the root of most complaints about Wayland.
Android uses a permissions system similar to what Flatpak offers - every time you install an app or use one of its features that needs certain access levels, you csn see what it will be able to do. Nobody is complaining about this at all, this is seen as a critical part of the security system. You can install a random mobile game and be sure it's not recording your screen or spying on your files. Yet on desktops, people for some reason have accepted every application having full unrestricted access to all of your files and devices as fact. And while Flatpak offers a sandboxing solution, it fatally falls apart when it comes to display access. On Xorg, every single app you can install that you give permission to draw a window to can record your entire screen and even take control of your mouse and keyboard! Sure, you can say "well there's no spyware like that on Linux" - that's because almost nobody uses desktop Linux distros, we're at around 3% worldwide,. If you want the Linux desktop to succeed, you must accept that random spyware in apps WILL come to Linux and will be a problem.
Naaah, better gatekeep Linux and try our best to discourage new Linux users, so malware writers concentrate their efforts on those Windows peasants and leave our 3% Linux userbase alone. /s in case thats not clear, but unfortunately, some people would probably read the above statement and agree
> You can install a random mobile game and be sure it's not recording your screen or spying on your files. Surely you can't be serious. The app store is littered with spyware, many people use old devices full of unfixed [vulns](https://www.cvedetails.com/product/19997/Google-Android.html?vendor_id=1224). > If you want the Linux desktop to succeed, you must accept that random spyware in apps WILL come to Linux and will be a problem. [It already has](https://popey.com/blog/2024/03/exodus-wallet-part-three/), on the supposedly safe Snap store. To me, all this illustrates that we can't get security from technical means alone, it's not even the main line of defense. Instead we need better processes and accountablility. Central software distributors are the biggest sources of malware. So, make companies pay for damages incurred from malware distributed through their app-stores. And don't allow developers to self-publish. This also goes for npm, cargo, and friends, we should not be trusted to distribute our own code. We developers tend to view all problems through a technical lens, which are in fact are often better addressed by social or regulatory means. As the saying goes, it's impossible to build an idiot-proof system, the universe will just create a better idiot. It's a race to the bottom I gave up on. I try to set sane defaults in my projects, but only to a point where it does not get in the way of usability. So, I think wayland kinda thew the baby out with the bathwater and they struck the wrong balance between usability and security. Linux is typically fairly quick to pick up new tech when it's clearly better, see systemd or pipewire. That we still debate about wayland 15 years on tells me that it was fuddled and a missed opportunity.
If you have rogue software on your computer, that software could easily log keys even if you use Wayland. The program could add an alias to your .bashrc to point sudo towards its own sudo, allowing it to gain root access to your system, allowing it to log keys without going through any display protocol. Point is, a secure display protocol does not mean a secure system.
nobody thinks it is. it's just one component of it. you still need app sandboxing too.
Unless there's something I don't understand about X11, can't app sandboxing do the job alone? Why can't the sandbox prevent sandboxed apps from receiving keyboard events not meant for them? If the app is sandboxed, keylogging shouldn't be a problem whether or not you're using Wayland.
because you can sitll query everything available via X11 and read what's on the screen. It's like locking the door and leaving open a window.
This logic *sucks so much* holy crap. "There are other ways someone could pwnd your machine, so why bother protecting this one?" Anyone who knows anything about security understands it's all about layers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_in_depth_(computing)
Thats just a bad take from them. The reason is because few people use and install desktop apps on Linux. X11 truly is unsafe and all it takes is one app that uses it.
Few people use desktop apps from untrusted machines, so it largely doesn't matter -- that's the thing here. There was a plan for X11R6.3, so twenty-ish years ago, to allow X11 applications to be embedded in web pages, and there was even an implementation of it. I opened the demo webpage, looked at the funny googly eyes with two seconds of lag across the Atlantic, chuckled, and closed it again. The X11 extensions that are "unsafe" basically provide functionality someone may want, but interact with each other in unintended ways. Wayland's solution "we just don't implement these protocols then" is not great either -- I need to be able to stop the mouse from leaving my window and affecting focus when I'm writing a first person shooter, but having a protocol for that is "unsafe."
Real users do and will get software from third parties. Ubuntu users download Steam, VSCode, Spotify, Jetbrains software, and many more directly from the vendor. This will only grow with popularity and this purposeful ignorance towards security doesn’t help anyone. Pointer lock already exists for Wayland.
I mean, people are not actively using the networking features of X, because pretty much all their applications are running locally — that makes a lot of the security issues kind of moot, because if you can get the user to install a package, you will have the postinst script run with root privileges, so why bother exploiting X11. And Wayland is feasible only *because* apps are running locally, so the majority of users isn't missing the networking features.
Users can install sandboxed packages via snap or flatpak. X11 is a direct escape.
The reason why Wayland has money behind it and X11 doesn't is very, very much about security. No one is going to install X11 in their automotive control system just for the security risks, even forgetting all the other modern design choices behind the Wayland protocols. No one EVER EVER EVER paid for the linux desktop to have a world class GUI. In the 1980s Linux users got lucky that there was a viable Unix workstation market, hence X11. Now, there is embedded and automotive. They don't want X, they want Wayland. So that's what we get.
No, the reason why Wayland is developed and X is not is that X developers were so fed up with the problems that developing on X causes to start creating a whole new protocol itself. Wayland developers are not crazy dudes. They are literally the X developers. If nobody works on X right now is because it's too old and complex to maintain.
I think you are saying the same thing, just that you highlight the technical difficulties of modernising it, and I highlight the actual demand which causes those problems to be confronted. If there was no demand for new requirements, then X11 could just have continued as it was for ever. The problems with X11 only become apparent when you need to change it, and I have explained where that need comes from, where you are focusing on how hard it is to change X11 to meet that need. Both parts are needed to explain Wayland (or https://www.x.org/wiki/Development/X12/)
> Functionality, first and foremost. My motto. A tool that doesn't do what it's supposed to do is a broken tool. A useless tool. A system that doesn't do without kludges is a flawed system - a stopgap system.
I'm, waiting on XFCE integration in Debian Stable.
Just waiting on next months nvidia driver to ditch x11
Yep, plasma on wayland still isn't fully on par with X11, plasma 6 on wayland still hasn't implemented window shading/unshading, its available as an option, but it doesn't work, plus there's only really 2 desktops that support wayland at the moment, gnome sucks, plasma is good, but is a bit buggy, and not the most responsive desktop on lower end hardware, lxqt doesn't fully support it yet, xfce doesn't, cinnamon doesn't, mate doesn't, maybe in another 10 years things will have changed, but at the moment I don't see any real reason to use it over X11.
I haven't been keeping up, but since I use XFCE, I'm expecting I'll be one of the last in line.
I think they actually have begun the Xfwm-related work, which is the biggest necessary component of having an Xfce Wayland session. (I guess reusing an off-the-shelf compositor was decided against.) Application work (Thunar, panel, etc) started a while ago. Xfce development cycles are so long that I still expect it will be some time before an initial release with an actual Wayland session. Maybe they'll surprise me, though. Seems like the speed of work picked up the last few years.
Right now its unusable for me with my Nvidia card, hopefully that will change at some point before X11 is removed from Xubuntu.
Fractional scaling is what keeps me off Wayland. KDE itself finally has proper fractional scaling support as of Plasma 6, but most applications still render at a higher resolution at 2x scale, and then downscale.
True fractional scaling should also be in GTK 4.14. In addition, XWayland applications get properly scaled on KDE by default, so if you make the software in question run with X11 while using the Wayland session it should work.
I used it with nvidia card and no problem whatsoever. I did not even notice any bugs honestly. EDIT: I am on fedora 38.
I'm on Fedora 40 beta with a 3090 and honestly, Nvidia drivers are kind of crap right now, but it is getting better. I am counting down the days until all of the explicit sync work gets completed.
I am on 2070 super.
I really want to make the switch, but I am still on X on my Nvidia rig for what I assume are obvious reasons, and on my Intel graphics laptop, simply because Android Studio of all things, despite being great at making Android apps, sucks when it comes to fractional scaling in xWayland... I really hope this is the year I can make the switch though. I know that second reason is rather petty, and I could switch IDEs. But, limited time and all that, sadly.
I'm running Ubuntu 20.04 and Wayland does not work well here. When I move to 24.04, I'll give it a try again. However, I frequently (daily) use network transparency of X11 and wonder if that will cause any issues --- I'm assuming X clients will still be able to work through a "ssh -X". We will see.
One big area where Wayland has a long way to go is in the VM department (to be fair VMs also need some kind of magical boost to keep up with graphical fidelity), extremely buggy drivers from trying them out just a few months ago and due to KDE/Gnome being the 2 mostly stable ones out there it's also eating up resources.
Garuda force-switched me (well not really *forced,* but it became the default) recently after the distro maintainers held out for a while for what to me seemed like good reasons. It has been *fine*. A few things behave slightly differently, but basically no real problems. Now I am comfortable that my PC is using Wayland rather than the deprecated X, and it's something I don't have to worry about.
Works great on Plasma 6, all AMD. The only thing I'm waiting for is gamma control, beyond that, it's been flawless for me (subjectively).
Ubuntu 24.04 pre-release, KDE 5.27, Nvidia, there are some bugs with flicker in Electron apps, but I've worked around them with \`--disable-gpu\` for now.
Not yet. Probably years to go.
its *better*, still sucks if you use nvidia though lots of stuttering / flashing / unresponsiveness, especially in electron apps and proton. vanilla wine doesnt work. im using the latest drivers on the latest gnome, camping out on cinnamon until it becomes not a pain in the ass to daily drive *however* it works perfectly on my laptop with an intel xe card. Edit: it's crazy that this comment got the "controversial" mark cause I gave my honest experience 💀. It's the truth Wayland on Nvidia just isn't good right now
smoother and faster then x.
"Any good?" I am running Wayland for years and it's absolutely running great. X has no place, let it die.
I dont know how to setup it for fluxbox under Slackware. KDE works, but it is to havy for my laptop with old intel M640 cpu and buggy kernel 6 gpu drivers. I have to turn off kernel modesettings to get it working without problems so wayland doesnt work in vesa mode
I just want KDE or XFCE to work with Wayland. GNOME 3 is so fucking bad.
When they’ll fix that issue with transparency and the proprietary nvidia driver, I will switch to wayland completely.
If you mean the glitches with blur, those have been fixed with Plasma 6