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Valve Engineer Mike Blumenkrantz Hoping To Accelerate Wayland Protocol Development
(www.phoronix.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2024
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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.
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.
My very first experience with Linux last year was switching from X to Wayland to get my touchpad to work properly. The only thing I've noticed that doesn't work on Wayland is that mouse following cat.
I think I saw something recently about the cursor getting some tweaks in Wayland, I think KDE was working on it? Not sure if it'll help this kind of stuff but they're trying to standardize the cursor a bit better
Yeah the pointer is handled differently so the old packages don't work, and I couldn't find an updated package possibly because no one has bothered to write one yet. It's perfectly understandable and not an issue whatsoever.
Trackpads are handled much better though.
There’s no protocol yet that allows apps to observe inputs. They just started working on it so it may be a while.
I haven't switched to Wayland yet cuz I'm stuck with a GT 710, which only supports the 470 series driver, which... Doesn't really run Wayland. Hopefully some day, I'll get my hands on a Radeon GPU and then fully migrate to Wayland, cuz my laptop already rocks it with Sway and, no complains at all
(I know about it having EGLStreams support which only GNOME uses, but it has no GBM support, which... well, all other compositors uses)
I see everyone say this about scaling but I still have tons of issues with it in Wayland. If I scale my 4K 150% to be the same as my 1440p ultra wide monitor in screen height so I can drag across without any borders. It for some reason sets my in game resolution to 5k x 2k instead of 1440p like it should be. Also if the screens go to sleep the windows sizing are all worst of wrong and fucked when awoken. In general just strange and not there yet imo
Edit. Steam doesn’t get scaled either.
Steam is not Wayland compatible. The games you are playing are most likely not Wayland compatible. This is not a Wayland issue.
This was my exact issue. I had a 5k2k screen and a 1440p and it choked. Electron apps (eg VS Code) were blurry.
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.
mtp has nothing to do with the display server. X11 has no mtp function either. its completely independent from that.
and i can only talk about KDE, but it has a own solution integrated which then mounts android folder in its file explorer (dolphin) while unfortunately blocking mtp over CLI at the same time. you get an "likely in use by GVFS or KDE MTP device handling already" error then.
It is possible of course that this is a thing that happens only under KDE wayland, but not because it is wayland itself but because the wayland version of KDE is maybe newer or was configured differntly by the devs.
that said, if it does not work as expected, report it as bug. usually things are fixed very quickly.
OK, I use GNOME on Wayland on EndeavourOS and have no problems regularly running a script in my phone's internal storage root directory. Go file a bug report to your distro, or at least provide some details.
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.
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.
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.
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
We need to keep a balance between security and convenience, to avoid systems becoming too awkward to use. Wayland tipped this balance too far on the side of security. Malicious local exploitation of the graphics stack has never been a big issue; consider the fact that someone or something would need to compromise your own account locally, at which point they could do much worse things than moving your windows around. It's not that the security threat doesn't exist, it's that Wayland has approached it at the wrong end and killed a lot of useful functionality in the process.
Also consider that this issue has existed for the entire history of desktop graphics on *nix and nobody has ever deemed it worth to destroy automation for it. If it were such a grave security hole surely someone would have raised the alarm and fixed it during all this time.
My opinion is that Wayland has been using this as a red herring, to bolster its value proposition.
Technically i think the worst they could do would be to record your screen. (Barring some extra fancy exploits or something.)
People often think that things like recording your screen or keylogging are the worst but they're not. These attacks would require you to be targeted by someone looking for something specific.
Meanwhile automated attacks can copy all your files, or encrypt them (ransomware), search for sensitive information, or use your hardware for bad things (crypto mining, spam, DDoS, spreading the malware further), or most likely all of the above.
Automated attacks are much more dangerous and pervasive because they are conducted at massive scale. Bots scan massive amounts of IPs and try all the known exploits and vulnerabilities without getting tired, without caring how daunting it may be, without even caring if they're trying the right vulnerability against the right kind of OS or app. They just spray everything and see what sticks.
You're thousands of times more likely to be caught by such malware than it is to be targeted by someone with the skill and motive to record your screen or your keyboard.
Secondly, if someone like that targets you and has access to your user account, Wayland won't stop them. They can gain access to your root account, they can install elevated spyware, they can patch Wayland and so on.
What Wayland is doing is the equivalent of asking you to wear a motorcycle helmet 24/7, just in case you slip on some spilled juice, or a flower pot falls on your head, or the bus you're in crashes. All those things are possible and the helmet would come in handy but are they likely? We don't do it because it's not, and it would be a major inconvenience.
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:(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 peaaaazyyyI will say that
wtypeis 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.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.
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.
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.
Not on Nvidia, but I use Wayland and play games with it every day
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.
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.
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.
Dunno what distro or hardware you're running, but I suspect Wayland is not the issue.
That is NVIDIA’s fault. They wanted everyone to use the inferior EGLStreams while knowing GBM is better. Everyone ignored them and moved on, so NVIDIA sucks on Wayland. They did change their mind recently so maybe you’ll get support at some point in the future. Unfortunately there’s nothing to do from the Wayland side to fix this, except for adopting EGLStreams which nobody will do.