Comment on Screw it, I’m installing Linux
mlg@lemmy.world 4 months agoWayland is responsible for kneecapping linux desktop in so many ways its infuriating, especially since linux basically figured out the golden standard of UX design back in the 2000s with stuff like GNOME 2 and Compiz.
It’s such an unnecessary burden with progress as slow as ripoff projects like star citizen.
I hope valve picks up the slack with frog protocols or at least gets PRs merged, because it would be stupid to ship steam machine and then explain to the user that the clipboard doesn’t work yet, even though it used to work perfectly fine in X11.
Except accessibility, Wayland has been a huge upgrade over X11.
Much better security isolation, proper HDR, full multi-monitor support, full VRR support, better application scaling, no screen tearing and reduced latency. (The clipboard also works fine)
Without Wayland I would not be on Linux right now.
Latency actually is increased on Wayland: mort.coffee/home/wayland-input-latency/ and Dedoimedo’s Wayland articles.
Please correct me if I’m wrong and provide a source.
Their measurements are correct but not surprising, Wayland triple buffers everything on desktop. Currently triple buffering is only disabled in fullscreen applications, when the compositor supports it.
I wanted to take my own measurements with the newer tearing control protocol but didn’t get to it yet.
Almost nothing you mentioned here has to do with accessibility and accessibility tooling.
I get the feeling that most of the people replying here and downvoting the folks that are right don’t actually know what accessibility means.
My comment starts with “Except accessibility”. I’m not downvoting anyone because they say accessibility on Wayland sucks, because it does.
I’m downvoting the other person that compares Wayland to Star Citizen, because they paid so much for Wayland and they take so long.
proper HDR
Is completly up to each compositor to implement properly. Its still experimental in KDE because afaik theres no proper SDR + HDR tone mapping for mixed apps on the display, like a desktop.
Valve made their own compositor and cheats the problem by ensuring their client and overlay supports HDR colors + only having to handle the HDR from game output.
full VRR support
Not if you have an Nvidia GPU before 2017, and again already a thing in X11.
no screen tearing and reduced latency
Again, VRR and wayland’s ingenious solution to this was triple buffering, which is a pure software solution that adds latency making it unsuitable in several cases like this: github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland/issues/3373
The clipboard also works fine
Welcome to Xwayland clipboard hell: github.com/hyprwm/Hyprland/issues/6132
Its not that Wayland can’t easily fix any of these issues or that the other major improvements you mentioned are not worth it, its that it took Wayland like 13 years to do so.
Most of this should have been sorted out in the first couple years of development. People were already making fun of Wayland back in the day for pretending to be “decoupled from the graphics hardware” and then deciding on the aforementioned triple buffer.
Wayland didn’t even merge in HDR support until 9 months ago: gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/…/14#note_2777587
The graphics stack is better, but the security isolation is IMHO solving a problem no one really had, at the cost of breaking a bunch of integration mechanisms people actually used.
You want UI security isolation for something like Android, where most software being run is fundamentally opposed to the interests of the user and wants to steal anything not nailed down, and you also contain things at the file system level. If Facebook could screenshot every other app all the time it absolutely would, and people would download it anyway. To some extent the enforceable promise that it can’t do that is why people are still willing to download it anyway and let it do all the other things it does to compromise a system.
In a distro shipping legitimate software, isolation at the desktop UI level is nice for defense in depth, but not really drawing a real security boundary around any program to the point where a user can trust a machine with malicious software running. It doesn’t matter if I can’t steal Firefox’s pixels if I can echo “export PATH=$HOME/.evil-firefox/bin:$PATH” >>~/.bashrc.
Raptorox@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
Have you last used wayland 6 years ago??
Here’s a feature list
mlg@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Yes it wasn’t viable until around late 2023 and early 2024.
My complaint isn’t that it sucks now, its that it sucked for a solid decade doing nothing.
Raptorox@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
If it doesn’t suck now, then valve doesn’t have anything to explain, no?
mlg@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Its still lagging is its MRs, like HDR coming in just less than a year ago.
Valve’s complaint was that even after getting approval from at least 3 DE projects, protocols were not getting merged due to hypothetical discussions and implementation baggage.
I imagine it all started with them making their gamescope compositor a few years ago and realizing a bunch of stuff was still missing.