Now, I really like Wayland, and it’s definitely better than the mess that is X11
BUT
I think the approach to Wayland is entirely wrong. There should be a unified backend/base for building compositors, something like universal wlroots, so that applications dealing with things like setting wallpapers don’t have to worry about supporting GNOME, Plasma, Wlroots, AND Smithay (when COSMIC comes out). How about a universal Wayland protocol implementation that compositors are built on? That way, the developers of, say, wayshot, a screenshot utility, can be sure their program works across all Wayland compositors.
Currently, the lower-level work for creating a compositor has been done by all four of the GNOME, KDE, Wlroots and Smithay projects. To me, that’s just replication of work and resources. Surely if all standalone compositors, as well as the XFCE desktop want to, and use wlroots, the GNOME and KDE teams could have done the same instead of replicating effort and wasting time and resources, causing useless separation in the process?
Am I missing something? Surely doing something like that would be better?
The issue with X11 is that it got big and bloated, and unmaintainable, containing useless code. None of these desktops use that useless code, still in X from the time where 20 machines were all connected to 1 mainframe. So why not just use the lean and maintainable wlroots, making things easier for some app developers? And if wlroots follows in the footsteps of X11, we can move to another implementation of the Wayland protocols. The advantage of Wayland is that it is a set of protocols on how to make a compositor that acts as a display server. If all the current Wayland implementations disappear, or if they become abandoned, unmaintained, or unmaintainable, all the Wayland apps like Calendars, file managers and other programs that don’t affect the compositor itself would keep on working on any Wayland implementation. That’s the advantage for the developers of such applications. But what about other programs? Theme changers, Wallpaper switchers etc? They would need to be remade for different Wayland implementations. With a unified framework, we could remove this issue. I think that for some things, the Linux desktop needs some unity, and this is one of these things. Another thing would be flatpak for desktop applications and eventually nix and similar projects for lower-level programs on immutable distros. But that’s a topic for another day. Anyways, do you agree with my opinion on Wayland or not? And why? Thank you for reading.
Wayland is a classic case of underspecification. They set out to replace X11, but their replacement only covered maybe 50% of what people were actually doing with X11, everything else was left as an exercise for the reader. That’s how you get this sluggish progress of the whole thing, as people will either ignore Wayland because it doesn’t work for their case, try ugly workarounds that will break in the long run or implement the thing properly, which in turn however might lead to multiple incompatible implementations of the same thing.
This also creates a weird value proposition for Wayland, as it’s basically like X11, just worse in every way. Even 14 years later it is still struggling to actually replace the thing it set out to replace, let alone improve on it in any significant way.
I have seen some improvements to be honest. I have never seen screen tearing (was quite common on X11) and Compositors run more smoothly for me, with less resource usage (that is unfortunately taken up by heavy bars like Waybar). For example, Qtile would usually run at about 780 Mb on a coldboot on X11, while on Wayland, it averages at about 580-600 Mb.
The thing is, what are the chances that those improvements needed a complete rewrite and couldn’t just be patched into X11? As for lack of screen tearing, is that even an advantage? In X11 to get rid of it I can do (dependents on driver, but AMD had it for ages):
But more importantly, I can also do
TearFree offto get a more responsiveness. Especially when it comes to gaming that is a very important option to have.There are also other things like CSD which I consider a fundamental downgrade to the flexibility that X11 offered.
Hard disagree there.
My desktop is far smoother, works much better with multi-monitor, Gnome’s trackpad gestures work amazingly, I never see ugly tearing, there are fewer instances of bugs and instability. Then on top of that there’s the far better security aspect.
So far the only issue I’ve experienced is screen sharing on discord.