this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
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What's the advantage of using wayland at the moment?
I mean that's a fair question, because I feel like mostly the advantages are, hm, not "theoretical" because it's an actual advantage, but not something you'll really encounter day-to-day. better security for example. but generally who cares because if I interact with something malicious I'm probably owned anyway.
originally I was interested in it because of fractional scaling, but I think that works in X11 for the most part now?
at this point it's mostly about using the bleeding edge stuff so I can help find problems. I do find that when it works it works very well, and the experience of using a Wayland desktop is less wonky: fewer weird rendering glitches when dealing with multiple monitors, connecting and disconnecting my laptop from a dock, etc. I find this works better with Wayland, but I wouldn't say "so much better that you must move to it today" if you're happy with what you have.
similarly full-system stability has been better, and I have fewer crashes that take down everything, I feel. it's perhaps subjective though: I've been running it for so many years maybe all I'm experiencing is that the software I run has become better in general.
so: I don't think it's a night-and-day life-changing experience or anything, but it does feel modern and stable, and it's definitely where things are heading so why not get used to it now, and help to improve it, is my thinking.
Agreed. And I do understand wayland is the future, having done studies around X11 a bit. The problem for long time users like me is that there are still expert apps and use cases that aren't covered by wayland, at least for now. And because the current benefits of wayland are not obvious they will complain if their distros transition to wayland too soon.
yeah with the exception of krita (which runs fine on xwayland, even with a tablet) I've been able to run 100% Wayland, with sway for work and KDE for home, but my needs aren't too wild. I'm sure a lot of users feel like the rug was unnecessarily pulled out from under them; change that feels like a regression even for very good reason will almost never feel like reason enough if it's your shit that gets worse, definitely.
still, I think you've got to get people using the thing if you want the thing to get better. probably more casual users didn't even notice when gnome moved over, for example. but probably even the most casual user ran into some problem, and that's a bummer.
out of curiosity what use cases/software has stopped you from running Wayland? I do miss the magic of tunneling an X session over SSH, that felt like dang magic in the early 2000s.
Remote desktops. I think the main complaints are the performance. To me the issue is that with x11vnc you could remote into an existing display, even the login screen. Recent Gnome finally seems to have it for wayland, but afaik KDE still doesn't have it.
ah definitely. I haven't tried it out yet but I think they improved that in plasma 6.1. although that's absolutely the point you were making: lots of things that used to work fine on X11 that Wayland just doesn't have yet.