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Wayland != X11
Not 100% feature compatible != broken.
My opinion and also a TL;DR: of the article.
"that thing you used to do is now impossible to do consistently across different implementations, if at all. But it's all ok, because we have decided it's not our responsibility!"
That is not what users want to hear. From a user's point of view, it is broken.
I see what you're getting at. It's a matter of perspective, I guess.
If you presented someone with a list of features from two similar but different pieces of software, they wouldn't say software b is broken because it's featureset is different from software a, right? But I acknowledge it's not that straightforward. It's more like telling them software b is going to replace software a that you're currently using, get ready to say goodbye to some features.
I still don't consider wayland broken, but I understand argument that it is.
yes, if i combare kicad with blender, neither is broken because they have different features. But also, nobody is telling users that kicad's days are over and it should be replaced by blender. If they did, and a user wanted to design a circuit board, the user is out of luck. The user is told that it is a replacement. From the user's point of view it most definitely is not.
The probeem isn't just that wayland doesn't do everything x does. But that users are told that it will replace x, deal with it and quit complaining.
We have to keep in mind that the fact that we know what wayland is in the first place puts us squarely into the "technical user" category, not regular users. Regular users are the ones who don't even know (nor should they have to care) what wayland even is
I've been using Wayland daily for a few years (2020 at least?) on intel and AMD graphics and have had few complaints:
Overall, it's just worked great though!
My anti-complaints:
Which app do you use for screen recording? That's the only thing keeping me on X11.
I record our D&D sessions with OBS. Works well.
OBS Studio mostly. It's not the most convenient for a quick screencap, but I can record 720p@60 fps video downscaled and resampled from my 1080p@144hz monitor and it just kinda works fine. The other nice feature of OBS is that you can have it recording all the time and then press a button to dump the last few seconds when something interesting happens. Handy when trying to get interesting clips of my game. For quick recording I usually just use Kooha or the built in Gnome one.
ooo, that does sound handy!
Looks like OBS is the goto. Thanks.
My experience with Nvidia+ Wayland was... Less than desirable. Enough to make me pickup an AMD card.
However, once I did that my experience instantly better. Hell, even X11 worked better - I was never able to get the desktop to stay at a consistent 60FPS (I'm still on a 60Hz panel which I'm just now getting around to upgrading shortly) in X until I moved to my AMD card.
The 545 driver update just made things so much worse. So I'd say Wayland+Nvidia is not great (for others it works fine so maybe it's down to what card you have?) however on my AMD card (and my old MacBook with Intel integrated graphics) it's fantastic.
“not everything is fully ported yet”
“There will probably be an awkward period before all of these pieces are in place for all of the people.”
I think these are the two key takeaways – Wayland is still in development and the bandwagoning are the early adopters – most of us will switch when our distros switch (and will probably be none the wiser)
the problems (and the reason we’re suffering through sensationalist stuff like “Wayland breaks everything!”) is the fanboy push to switch before it’s ready – not everybody lives on the bleeding edge (just like not everyone runs Arch) and the “switch now or be left behind” attitude does more harm than good (far more likely to alienate than convert) …
Wayland is still in development and the bandwagoning are the early adopters
Not to bust your chops but I'm not sure what you're implying. What isn't still in development? WordStar? X11? Mac System 7? And Wayland's initial release was 2008. That's 15 years ago. Who are these "early adopters" of which you speak anymore?
The things you think aren't finished because it's still in development are actually not finished because they're just the way the developers want.
Many of those things you're thinking of were declared Somebody Else's Problem by said developers. That's fine, but Wayland was not ready for use by normal end users until somebody else did finish them.
From what I hear most of them actually are finished by now, but they weren't as of a couple years ago when it started becoming commonplace to see declarations that the time to switch to Wayland was Right Now. I tried it out then, and am as a result much less enthusiastic about doing it again now even though it'd be much more likely to go well.
I really don't like nate's take here. IMO it's really not that good, Wayland is still outright lacking features, even when using the craptastic xdg portals junk
I have been using wayland on kde the last two years on Debian and MX Linux with zero issues. My general usa includes coding, music production, Libre office and web browsing. So, no much gaming, if that is your concern.
Xorg has no fractonal scaling so I have been uaing wayland since I have switched to linux on nvidia and yes I use it for gaming. Not silky smooth but great so far.