The biggest thing I can think of is that X11 is more flexible when it comes to specifying custom resolutions; which some people use to output 240p on CRT TVs for emulation. AFAIK, there is currently no real equivalent for xrandr on any Wayland compositor.
I’ve also noticed that Grsync’s password prompt is broken on Wayland. Thankfully, it has a feature that lets you preview the command it’s about to run, so that you can copy and paste it into a terminal.
Being a KDE user on EndeavourOS, I use Wayland everyday. I switched over a few years ago for Waydroid, but now X11 isn’t even an option for me with the current release of KDE.
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Honestly so many tiny annoyances I used to have with x11 have just gone with Wayland. Multi monitor especially seems so much easier to work with.
Drag & drop, cut n paste, and screen-recording are very iffy, even though they technically work.
I’m on Wayland and have literally never had any issues with those features. Are these problems you’ve previously had or do you have recent examples where they don’t work as expected?
Unless I’m mistaken, Wayland can’t rotate your display by 22 degrees.
This sounds like something KDE randomly adds in 5 years because why not.
Run on older video cards.
My home server has a basic Quadro K420. Since the latest KDE forced it onto Wayland, it’s unusable even for the short remote sessions I need the GUI for. Chrome hangs if I don’t disable HW acceleration, within minutes Firefox leaks memory to the point where the kernel panics, Transmission’s window gets garbled like I’m watching a coded PayTV channel.
Installed xfce and everything is back to normal. Of course nVidia shares some of the blame here, but it’s clearly working on one windowing system and not on the other.
Show me a Wayland screensaver. I’m honestly interested if one actually honestly exists.
Isn’t there a version of xscreensaver that works with Wayland? Besides that, there’s Wayfire’s rotating cube.
There’s no timed desktop lock?
The technical reasons for a screensaver pretty much vanished 10+ years ago, the security aspects are stronger than ever.
A lot of 3d software has problems with tablets on Wayland. Stuff like ZBrush, Substance Painter and even their recent AI clones:
Work with Pynput
Forcing vsync on the pointer is my biggest gripe with Wayland right now. (this has a latency cost which is quite perceptible with a gaming mouse, even with 250hz)
AFAIK, there is currently no real equivalent for xrandr on any Wayland compositor.
What do you mean? Over half of the wayland WMs can use
wlr-randrat least that is working decently well.Just wanted to point out that you can create custom resolutions on wayland with
kscreenctl(orkscreen-doctor.) I use it to create to enjoy the enlightened 2880x2160.yes, but you can’t do seperate horizontal and vertical scaling
Can Wayland do
ssh -X?There seems to be https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Waypipe which I’ve never used (unlike ssh -X which I once needed for a university course).
My personal bugbear is that there is no compositor-agnostic way to tell what workspace a window is located on. This means that taskbars cannot implement an “only show windows on the current workspace” setting, which frustrates me to no end. (Taskbars like the LXQt and XFCE panels still have the setting, but it does nothing.) There is not even any proposed protocol to support this, and acceptance and implementation would take years even if there were.
Integrated desktops like KDE probably roll their own custom implementation, but out in Labwc land I’m shit out of luck. (1 2 3 4)
Reading those issues… WTF? How many alternative implementation of basic functionalities are there? I think I remember reading back in the day that this will be the issue with Wayland, every DE will have to implement way more than with X. Now I understand what they were talking about.
In general, it’s things that Wayland chose not to do so as to have a better security model.
For instance multi window apps can’t tell the compositor where to put their windows such as snapping a window to another or following a window. Apps can’t read other windows. It’s a good thing for security but it breaks some older tools and workflows.
There’s others like multiple mouse cursors, registering global hotkeys, overscan correction etc but many of these things are being addressed and new standards are being drafted, it just takes time.
I moved to Wayland very early on and, honestly, I’ve not had any problems but I don’t have a complicated or special setup.
There’s others like multiple mouse cursors
Wayland has actually supported multiple seats from the beginning, it’s apps and DEs that don’t support it well.
TIL!
For instance multi window apps can’t tell the compositor where to put their windows
They can have positions lf existing windows saved and restored (still rolling out), and I think can ask for some details of initial placement outside of that too.
Of course still very limited and not handling the specific cases you mentioned.registering global hotkeys
Setting up hotkeys is possible, just in a very different way. You have to have the desktop environment forward it, and for now specifics differ from de to de. Generally they can all bind actions though. A safe minimum-viable way should be to add shortcuttable actions to the desktop file I think, though the qt shortcut stuff should also generally work I think.
overscan correction
kwin at least has had that for a while
Personally for me I used to have a script invoked by tilting the sceoll wheel that’d send a shortcut (e.g. ctrl+page-up/down) to the window under the cursor without focussing it, letting me change tabs of unfocussed windows.
I think I did that by quickly changing input focus, sending it, then changing it back, with xdotool etc…
On wayland I’ve tried implementing that via kwin scripting a few times, but found it so hard to debug and to work with in comparison I never managed to recreate that simple tool.Having universal posix-like tools to affect the window manager and user input from console is definitely something I miss occasionally.
Largely this is just a lack of wayland tools I am sure. And I must admit it’s been a while since I last tried.No global hotkeys is a dealbreaker for me, though.
Once you get used to using custom global hotkeys as part of your workflow, you can never go back.
It’s not about creating global hotkeys, it’s about registering them from a running program. There is nothing preventing you from creating a compositor-level keybinding, but an app cannot do that unless it figures out what compositor you are running and then handles the configuration for each and every compositor in existence.
Ah, okay then. Might be worth a try.
I wouldn’t worry about supporting every compositor in existence. Ideally, the Wayland spec would be unified, but it’s not.
I feel like if someone created a compositor with an extension for that feature, it’d eventually become popular enough that people would start implementing that extension in other compositors.
I wouldn’t want that. I’m fairly content with the fact that no random apps can grab my keystrokes unless that specific app is focused. From what I heard, for most people the only global keybind they want is muting their microphone. You can implement that yourself with absolutely no trouble, it will usually be the first example in the global keybinds configuration docs for pretty much any compositor. People who don’t want to deal with writing configs can use KDE where you have a GUI to configure the same thing.
Like I said in a different comment, if such a feature exists, it should be an opt-in thing. It shouldn’t be something that’s enabled by default. Heck, I think you could use a permissions-based model where you could specify which apps can read your keystrokes, and which can’t.
It would be nice if end users had more choice in the matter. It’d be cool if someone made a Wayland compositor that allowed some of these features as an opt-in thing.
wayland dwms can and do absolutely implement that. For example kwin has a setting to let programs access keyboard input in the X11 way for the old method of global shortcuts. And to disable the framebuffer for fullscreen games.
If you wanted, you could probably write a wayland compositor that has all the X11 apis that old management tools use. Wayland is just an api at the end of the day.
Users do have choice, X11 still exists, there’s lots of distros to choose from, but Wayland is the culmination of 40 years of learnings from the X11 project.
Linux hosts with desktop managers/window managers were loved by security testers and threat actors for how darn easy it was to get spyware running - logging all keystrokes, recording the whole screen, etc. X11 gave all apps the keys to the kingdom regardless of security policy.
Wayland is vastly more secure. Sure, there’s work to be done to build out a few edge cases - they’re known and have been in discussion for years at this point - it just takes time.
X11 had 40 years, Wayland had only had 18. With most mainstream distros switching display server, we should have the remaining sticking points ironed out in the next couple of years.
Users do have choice, X11 still exists
Not if you want to use KDE on Arch or derivatives.
It is nice that Wayland is more secure, and that’s one of the reasons I started using it before my DE started mandating it. But, it’d be nice if I could keep most of that security, while having the option to enable certain things that are disabled for security by default where I need them.
Going back to X11 and its total lack of security isn’t an ideal option, and I can’t even use my preferred DE with it on my preferred distro.
Just looking at these comments, and the fact that wayland still isn’t as good as x11 after all these years (10, 15?) And all this budget shows that wayland is architectually wrong and will never be actually good.
Any software engineer will understand this. If your project is still in basically beta after more than a decade and that much budget, and it’s only selling point is that “but it’s slightly better than the decades old legacy system”, that project has been architectually wrong, and also definitely has awful management, and you call it failed.
Have you ever considered a career in set theory?
down voted for telling the truth. I use Wayland on my laptop and it works fine, but x11 is honestly still the defacto window system
I have to use x11 on my desktop (yes Nvidia) and it’s a nightmare. I try it every now and then though
Talon Voice and other accessibility tools like cursorless. I am destroying my hands because I can’t do handless input on Wayland.
Support for stylus / pen writing on screen.
