from Hacker News

Wayland in 2021

by _7ffc on 3/14/21, 1:36 AM with 142 comments

  • by rnhmjoj on 3/14/21, 1:24 PM

    I think Wayland, and the modern desktop in general too, has forgot about a few good ideas that the original X system had. I will miss them once Wayland has taken over:

    - A unified way to change applications settings. All old X apps used to read the X resources database (xrdb): you could set a global color scheme, fonts, window geometry and what not, all in one place using a simple but powerful text format.

    - The simplicity of the window managers, hotkey daemons and other X clients. You can implement a functional wm in a few hundred lines of C[1] because the X server takes care of most of the stuff. In comparison a compositor has much more work to do and it's difficult to implement one, unless using a big library like wl_roots.

    - A base graphics API based on drawing primitives like the original X, SVG or Cairo, rather than just bitmaps. This would make writing a simple application without importing huge frameworks feasible again. Also sending the drawing calls over the network would probably be less bandwidth intensive.

    [1]: https://github.com/vardy/aphelia

  • by Decabytes on 3/14/21, 11:32 AM

    I don’t know how I feel about Wayland. On the one hand it’s being made by x11 devs so I think they more than anyone else know why they would need to start from scratch over improving x11. On the other hand, moving away from x breaks so many things and I haven’t heard anyone singing it’s praises yet about how happy they are to use it.

    I understand apps are breaking because they relied on features of x that were security risks but it doesn’t seem like Wayland provides a safe or convenient alternative to the way apps were doing things before.

    I wonder if it will ever reach the adoption level of x11

  • by k_sze on 3/14/21, 5:52 AM

    Does ibus work seamlessly in Wayland yet? As a person who regularly needs to input French, Chinese, and Japanese, besides English, I tried Wayland in Kubuntu 20.04 and a non-working ibus was a complete showstopper for me.
  • by halz on 3/14/21, 10:49 AM

    A project to keep an eye on, to replicate 'autotype' support offered by many password managers, is wlrctl¹. A popular alternative is ydotool², but brings some additional risks the operator might not be comfortable with.

    ¹https://git.sr.ht/%7Ebrocellous/wlrctl

    ²https://github.com/ReimuNotMoe/ydotool

  • by reidrac on 3/14/21, 1:05 PM

    If this was 20 years ago, when I was kind of starting with Linux, I would love it: lots of possibilities and customisation.

    But the truth is that I don't have time for all that in 2021. When XFCE supports Wayland and I get a good experience out the box, I may stop using X11.

  • by xrd on 3/14/21, 4:28 AM

    The author uses Pipewire with WebRTC in Chrome, very cool.

    Pipewire is showing up all over the place. I've been reading a little about it, but I finally got a comfortable setup of jackd and pulseaudio and am worried it might interfere with my stable setup.

    Am I being paranoid?

  • by colordrops on 3/14/21, 5:23 AM

    Is it still the case that Nvidia drivers don't work with Wayland?
  • by shmerl on 3/14/21, 5:42 AM

    Still waiting for KWin to support adaptive sync and then I'll be switching to the Wayland session.
  • by ElijahLynn on 3/14/21, 2:04 PM

    I am on Arch + Gnome for 3 years now and tried Wayland again this year and experienced too many broken things (Screen.so screensharing, Fireshot screencapture, I think CopyQ clipboard manager too) and had to switch back to X11. This article shows it is still not ready for the masses, yet.
  • by c-c-c-c-c on 3/14/21, 7:07 AM

    Not a single screenshot
  • by mulle_nat on 3/14/21, 11:45 AM

    I was really looking forward to Wayland, when I moved to Linux. It was then said to be right around the corner. That was six years ago. If the current state of Wayland is as bare-bones as depicted in the article, it's just sad. And as there is no support for OBS on the horizon, it's a non-topic for me. And I never liked X11 to begin with...
  • by denysvitali on 3/14/21, 9:33 AM

    If you are looking for an alternative status bar that works with sway, you can use my fork of yagostatus :)

    https://github.com/denysvitali/yagostatus

  • by Cloudef on 3/14/21, 4:32 AM

    It's possible to also configure bemenu with BEMENU_OPTS env variable. I usually create wrapper script in my local bin path however, as that method will work universally with any program.
  • by Klwohu on 3/16/21, 12:35 AM

    I'm not switching to Wayland. It simply doesn't do anything for me. It also doesn't function with many of the GPUs I use.
  • by rwmj on 3/14/21, 11:07 AM

    Can I run applications transparently over the network yet?