I had a terrible time with Pipewire. I was getting audio cutouts at high CPU load, and the sound server would outright lose audio devices sometimes. So I switched back to Pulseaudio.
If everything is using PipewirePulse anyway, why not just forgo the middle man?
The same thought occurs to me with Wayland. If your applications are stuck in XWayland, why use Wayland at all?
Both part of the new crop of barely functional APIs that will finally bring us the year of the Linux desktop
I was a pretty big party-pooper when Wayland first shipped out en masse on the distro’s but nowadays, Wayland is working pretty well.
On Arch with the latest drivers, with an AMD GPU it has been largely painless. Just finding the right package to install and it’s been a pretty out of the box experience.
I haven’t had issues with Wayland itself, but I do still miss Global Hotkey support and until that’s happening I don’t see myself switching.
I tried it at various points in the past, but this is the thing that still stings.
That is an implementation issue. Restoring screen shares is supported by the protocol, and it does work.*
But as with many things Wayland, all parts of the chain need to support it. The application requesting the screen share has to, the desktop portal has to, and the desktop environment as well.
When you request a screenshare and tick the box, the requesting application receives a restoration token. But that token isn’t any good when the application doesn’t send it on future requests. If it does send it, then the portal passes it along to the desktop environment and then it’s up to that what it does with it (specifically how the window selection is implemented).
Current state is basically that at least KDE and GNOME require the window to be opened and have a similar window title before the request is made. Don’t know about other DEs.
I guess it depends what you mean with “translation/migration paths”? All major distros ship XWayland which is enough for like 99% of usecases for X-only applications.
I’ll add my 2 cents. As quite crazy workstation user I really don’t like assumptions Wayland made. I know they’re “sane” but they’re not sane for insane computers. Wayland devs say that graphics should not be client-server architecture because it’s not client-server on modern computers. Well it’s not until it is. Stuff like sharing X server to/from containers, displaying graphics on host X server from VMs and other stuff like this.
I don’t like that Wayland focuses on average user experience and decides that it’s worth to compromise flexibility and exotic setups completely for better comfort of average joe laptop user. I’ve been using workstations for years. 10 bit color in X on Quadro, multi GPU, remote rendering. These are things that I used in 2011 on X. Things that just worked.
I’m aware that Wayland is slowly catching up with everything but basing on their general attitude and focus on “most common” use cases I’m simply not “target user” of Wayland. I don’t care about “normal” computers. If I had normal laptop I’d use Windows. I have machines that are not even capable of running Windows at all due to hardware choices.
And like I said I understand that it’s sane and logical to cather to mainstream. I’m just really fed up with everyone and everything in recent years cathering to average joes and seeing power users as second class citizens. Linux was not supposed to be like this.
Also I hate GNOME, it feels dumbed down and inflexible. And afaik GNOME provides best wayland experience.
Because entire X model did not bother with security at all, thats why. It was designed in premodern era in and for use closed campus networks, where your network was both effectively isolated and trusted by default.
That is bugfuck insane assumption not only nowadays, but even as far as 2000s. And its core design assumption of x system. You are not fixing that without complete redesign.
Wayland is simply the result of infeasibily of fixing it and rather starting fres in greenfield with all the lessons learned aplied now.
And if surrounding app ecosystem and functionality is disrupted by implementing basic security? Thats just existing massive tech debt catching up to it, not fault of “security nuts”.
Wayland was good and sane and overall healthy move. It stung a bit while everyone adjusted-
But god damn the moaning and bitching on forums back tren was even worse that those anti-systemd devuan lunatics.
I’ve used Plasma with KWin_Wayland since around 2018 (on manjaro ) and I’ve been using swayWM since around 2020 (I think), both at work and at home.
I must say, back in the early days of kwin_wayland and particularly the buggy manjaro (which from what I hear online, still holds true to this day for the latter, lmao), it was a pain when the screen froze (intel pentium g4560 igpu), I had to force reboot (well, it was so bad that even ssh was getting frozen and ssh authentication stopped working - sometimes sshd was still working and I could restart sddm via ssh). Crazy that my win VM with GPU passthrough was still working, while the whole host system was frozen (not even ssh being alive).
And when I moved to sway, I immediately got a huge QoL bump. And I moved to sway when I changed my main PC from the g4560 with shared resources, to a celeron j3455. Literally a lower-powered computer, yet the experience was far superior. And once I got used to a tillingWM, I couldn’t go back to a normal one, so I had to switch to sway on my work laptop too (switched from lxqt + kwin xorg + latte-dock).
Later on, I wanted to have a portable PC that could be powered via a USB battery bank, so I bought a raspberry pi 4 and running sway on it was crazy good. I used to run jwm + compton on the rpi 2, but the experience wasn’t that great. I don’t remember if I ever got sway on the pi 2 (probably not). I initially tried jwm + compton on the rpi 4, but I still had screen tearing. Sway removed all screen tearing from the pi 4 and I could use it as a daily driver (which I did for 2 or 3 years, until I got sick of a broken repo package for libreoffice and impulse-bought an odroid h3+).
That’s up to the wayland compositor implementers (i.e. gnome’s mutter team, kde kwin_wayland team, enlightenment’s EFL maintainers etc.) to handle. The fact that we already have wayland variants of these (screenshot tools, screen recorders) shows it’s possible and that the security “inherent” in the protocol doesn’t need to translate to implementations.
Works on my intel igpus (jasper lake uhd from pentium n6005 and on whichever igpu the atom z3740 has) and on my amd rx6400. It’s definitely smooth in both video playback and in gzdoom and dsda-doom (n6005 and rx6400). I would’ve tested with my rx6600 xt if I hadn’t put it in its box a long time ago (I was planning on using it on another build, but I never ended up building another thing… maybe with ryzen 8 or 9k series, but the 1st gen TR is still too powerful for what I need). But I’d bet it works just as good.
And not to mention the pi 4! Nothing runs on it as good as sway does.
I’m so glad I’m boycotting d*scord.
IDK, wf-recorder works fine on sway for recording my dsda-doom playthroughs. It’s not smooth by any means though, but that’s because my n6005 is not up to the task, on our threadripper (comrade), it records smoothly. I should start using wlstream at some point…
I’ve had only issues with it. Pipewire and pipewire-pulse fixed my audio experience in linux by A LOT.
I start pipewire via dbus-run-session pipewire & and if audio craps out (up to this point it was always because I updated my system and pipewire got an update too), I just kill the dbus and pipewire processes, launch them again and everything just works again.
I doubt that, given how bad of an experience I had with GNOME Wayland on a RPi 4 and how smooth sway was running on the same hardware. I haven’t tried it on threadripper, but sway worked just as good and I had (and still have) the same config that I can easily move between PCs.
I find it crazy that devuan still ships sysvinit as the default. It’s fine not having systemd, but sysvinit… it’s showing its age (just like xorg, aayyy).
Heh, I practically entered profession during the syvinit → systemd switchover era and I also cannot find any compelling reason to stay on sysvinit.
And I learned the linux on syvinit arch and lfs projects before that. Only problems with systemd were due to my own ignorance , and that was easily rectified by shutting up and sitting down to read fo few hours. Same for selinux.
Author sometimes came across as opinitate d*ck in some bug reports, but well a lot of people in IT are the same.
An he has produced very interesting software since.
I switched to Linux with Nobara at the start of this year and ye it was trash, but after struggling with it, fedora 40 with kde 6 released and I didn’t had any issues since. So I feel like it really depends on distro.
I have been running Wayland for 4y i think, because i have a vertical display, and scrolling text without v-sync broke me.
Running Ferdora, it have been really smooth sailing TBH. I have more issue with Selinux and proton/wine that i do with wayland
my 5 monitor setup with multiple resolution and refresh rate work very well.
Freesync also work, Multi GPU output isn’t an issue, Screen recording ans sharing work well (i have less issue than coworker on windows with teams :D) but i had to install a small proxy that’s transparent and run in the background. Gnome remote desktop protocol support hardware acceleration so no need for the x11 exclusive one …
I’m very happy with wayland, I will only miss the dumb client terminal capability out of nostalgia
I switched to Linux a year ago. I first started on plasma and X11. But I have two different monitors with two different resolutions and framrates. So I had to switch to Wayland for VRR. I have no strong feelings one way or the other. But Wayland is getting new features, X11 isn’t. For me Wayland does what I need it to do.
I don’t remember having significant issues with Pulseaudio but then again I only used it in the most simple way for playback, and occasional mic use. Although, thinking back, I remember having some delay issues with Bluetooth that I could never totally fix. Pipewire-pulse seems to work just fine nowadays, though.
I only wish Linux distros would embrace more simple and proven solutions, such as sndio (OpenBSD’s native sound daemon, also frequently used on FreeBSD), instead of reinventing the wheel when a perfectly good one exists.
GNOME is absolutely not the best eayland experience, I got a new laptop (sys76 actually) and have had nothing but issues with GNOMEisms and unfinished or unplanned issues. KDE is way ahead of them as my desktop workstation is Fedora KDE. I honestly cant understand why people use gnome im using the latest version and its still full of unplanned or unfixed issues from 10 years ago, about the only reliable use-case is a laptop and simple email / browser system, which it excels at, but as soon as you step out of that bubble, prepare for trouble.
On topic, on Fedora KDE at least wayland seems mostly ready for many use cases, but there are still significant gaps with any kind of “screen sharing”, like steam stream flatout doesnt work and most remote desktop viewers dont work with various issues in my experience, on all AMD. I think most applications I had tried including many games worked as you would expect though, its mostly just any sort of screen sharing.