I am seeing a number of comments from viewers about Wayland being slower than X11. Becareful when you are measuring performance of one against the other. First the timings between the two systems are going to be close, and what I am saying is a native X11 application running over the X11 protocol is slower than an Wayland native application running over Wayland. If you run X11 applications on Wayland you will be calling the XWayland translator, and that will add additional time (Linux has to schedule its execution) and that sits between the Wayland protocol and your application, so you incur the time it takes to execute the XWayland translator plus the execution of the Wayland protocol, so yeah its gonna be slower. My comment on speed is measuring two applications written for each protocol stack, and not using the XWayland translator,
>My comment on speed is measuring two applications written for each protocol stack, and not using the XWayland translator. Wayland itself might not be slower, but Mutter and Kwin are certainly much slower on older intel iGPUs. (on modern GPUs of course they are faster)
There is no doubt about Wayland being faster. I think that it is great that Wayland is being developed and I am looking forward to sometime in the future when it can finally take over from X11, I also think that it is not ready for primetime yet, partially because of the ecosystem (discussed in the comments), partially because Wayland itself lacks certain features which some/many users consider essential. Some of those have been 'solved' in a hacky way (for example via this translation layer), some have not (global hotkeys, that is a big one for me).
@@peterjansen4826 >There is no doubt about Wayland being faster. You say that & yet when using a core2duo era intel iGPU on Wayland window operations are a laggy mess, especially resizing and to a lesser extent dragging windows around, the same cannot be said about XFWM on xorg. So I would say there is plenty of doubt. (even on newer iGPUs like the intel 4600 it's not so clear..) Wayland is the future I don't doubt that, but it as of today is not always faster, certainly not in a vram constrained environment.
@@conjurermast It might also have to do with Wayland being experimental on Xfce and not well implemented yet. Maybe a translation layer gets used. I hope for you that at least you have 8 GB of RAM on that 2-core CPU, less than 8 GB is incredibly rough these days.
@@peterjansen4826 I have never tried to to run Xfce on wayland, nor do I care to. To me XFWM is the only useful part of Xfce & I only used this as an example, because XFWM offers the best compositing performance x11 has to offer by far. The fact of the matter (based on my own extensive testing on several computers & several DEs and Wayland compositors) is that if you are on an aging intel iGPU (or anything comparable in performance) compositing on Wayland will lag quite a bit, at least without using tricks, tricks that are not available for Gnome or KDE users. On a modern computer with a modern GPU -for example a 1060 even- Wayland will perform much better & overall smoother, but this doesn't come without drawbacks. The power consumption goes up during those window operations, which is obviously not great on battery. Of course there are workarounds to improve this, but those don't exists in the KDE/Gnome space. (The amount of system ram is not relevant in this conversation, I have never gone anywhere near filling it up in my testing.)
@@ActionGamerAaron That is a weird comparison considering that Manjaro is like Arch and not the other way around. Manjaro is an Arch derivative, it uses the Arch-packages and the Arch package-manager. The only relevant difference is that Manjaro uses its own repositories because Manjaro sends all the packages from Arch to its own servers to hold those packages back for a short duration. By the way, this introduces added security-risks (not a drama, it is equivalent to an Arch user who is a bit later with updating) and it causes stability-issues if the Manjaro-user uses AUR-scripts because those AUR-scripts are made for Arch and not for Manjaro (frequently out of date packages compared to what the AUR-scripts were made for). And yes, SteamOS really just is Arch but made immutable. The core components of a distro which make the distro its own distro are the repositories and the package-manager and SteamOS just uses the Arch-repositories and pacman. For example, if you suddenly run a different desktop-environment or windowmanager then it still is the same distro.
@@ActionGamerAaron At the core there really aren't that many distros on Linux: Debian, Red Hat based, Gentoo, nixOS, SUSE, Arch, Slackware and a few small ones (like Void). There are many spinoffs of those distros but those spinoffs are basically the same distro which come with a GUI-installer (sadly default without a separate home-partition) and mostly only differ in small details which the user easily could change himself: the desktop-environment/windowmanager, some chosen theming and default programs. In some cases the difference is bigger, like making it immutable, but that is an exception and also that could easily be changed by the user if he would like to do that (which would be pointless because then he would better pick another distro which does not make it immutable).
There is an old joke in England about how they are going to change their road systems from driving on the left to driving on the right. However, in order ensure people get used to the change they are going to make the change gradual.
My favourite RU-vidr speaking on one of the most important topics in the Linux world. People that are confused about X11 and Wayland should definitely watch this. This is probably the best video on X11 and Wayland. His old video about this topic was also quite good.
Its his I found this guy and aim binging his vids. Im probably half his age but the audio in all his videos is super digestible and hes goes in beginner friendly detail in his videos + what is unique to him of the big youtubers, he has EXPRIENCE ! And he actually goes into release notes to sjper duper understand. Like the fedore 40 and x11 deprecation he mentioned near the middpe of the video. Or the idea of security in X11 which is just brushed and pretty much copied/quoted by other youtuber. This lad actuaply gave us an understandable real world example of security in X11. Because its non existent if youre a network with more than once PC someone can probably hijack your screen. Or something along these lines. Of course anymore detial would be time consuming but its enough for me to understand the idea of the topic :) Was it Linux Tech Hut or what is that channel called of the obese guy with a penguin poster behind him, a d a door to the right. He made a video on the topix and said the security bullet point of wayland is entirely useless. From the wording he made it clear that he diesnt understand how it works either. DJ Ware however has practical examples on the topic. Its light and dsy difference with this channel seriously. The biggest problem with Linux like ALL sciences, from quantum physics to topological algebraic mathematics is lack of beginner friendly lessons availability in a digestible/friendly video AND audio format. No one wants to watch an old man with a chalk board behind him rumble forr the sake of filling a 1hour slot. Look at Andree Tates videos, super digestible becaus ehe cares about it.
The latest SteamOS is actually based on Arch Linux, but it is not really Arch Linux. What I have read online is that it is an immutable version of Arch Linux.
@@CyberGizmo The Debian version was their original attempt at SteamOS for when they were shipping Steam Machines, which is now a dead project. The new Arch based SteamOS is only officially supported on the Steam Deck, but it runs Wayland for most things, it actually runs all games through a Wayland session using gamescope, because this is how they are getting HDR to work. EDIT: To clarify I mean Steam Machines are a dead project, I'm not sure about the Debian based SteamOS that could still be getting updates for all I know.
i have 2 steam decks and i have a lot of experience with arch linux. *With 1 command, "steamos-readonly disable" , SteamOS turns into a fully controllable unlocked Arch Linux that has weird default settings, a delayed mirror repository like Manjaro's but more intense, and a lot of files and features randomly erased from the OS* . Because I know how Arch Linux works and read its source code, it just becomes a sort of weird but fairly easy jigsaw puzzle for me to piece together and I am able to adjust the SteamOS filesystem and "fix" the deleted parts to make it become compatible with Arch Linux apps again, and this actually makes it possible for me to install *ANY AUR package* into SteamOS by just editing SteamOS and the packages a little at a time until the app works. *For someone who likes to edit source code of linux distros steamos is very good. For people who just want it to work with steam games it's good. I think that for people in between who want it to easily do everything that a desktop linux distro does without "forcing" it, it's not the best choice for them*
The X developers went on designing and developing Wayland. There's no contest. I've had a tear-free, artifact-free, smooth, scalable, color-calibrated desktop for years thanks to Wayland. And even more improvements are coming like HDR. X11 Has not had real network transparency for connections with enough latency, as the clients just move bitmaps and events back and forth using a protocol that's not optimized for this use case.
@@ImposterSloth I'm told that AMDPro always worked great with Wayland, and Nvidia is definitely working well with current releases. Fedora 38 had moved to Wayland by default and they claim it still works well if you use Nvidia as your main display. I'm using Intel on my main display and never had issues with Wayland. It is still a work in progress with new core protocols still being worked on, so your specific use case might still not be great, but Wayland is daily driven by many many ordinary users.
Meanwhile Wayland doesn’t have HDR, or color management, or loading color profiles… at least the latter bit X11 can cover which means content creators should not be moving to Wayland if they value color work.
@@gotoastal unfortunately, the powers that be decided that colour management be tied in with HDR support, so there is one protocol for those two things together - which is still in the works, though it picked up a lot of steam in the last 6 months. That being said, most of the new work is about supporting applications with different (and multiple) colour spaces - which is something X11 never did. If you want the same level of colour management support as you got off X11, where all applications are in sRGB, then you just need a compositor that supports setting ICC profiles - which at least Plasma and GNOME do support. At this early stage of development, Wayland can do anything that X11 does and in the near future it will do better.
With the looming approach of Wayland I decided several months ago to change my desktop of choice from XFCE to KDE Plasma (on Debian). The transition was a little bumpy, but not enough to put me off. I have a very simple use case (Grandpa browsing with occasional coding), so my needs are not complex. However, I've been very impressed with the KDE suite of software (e.g., dead simple uploading of pictures from my camera using Gwenview and code editing with Kate) so even if XFCE switches to Wayland I probably won't go back. The only glitch I found with Plasma on Wayland was on an ancient Dell backup laptop with old Nvidia graphics-- popups are sometimes temporarily broken up when they appear. I can live with it. Cheers from Wisconsin!
I love Kate and Kwrite for coding, I'm still on Xfce. Specifically the last no-tabs version of Kwrite from a year ago before they screwed up the UX and reason for picking Kwrite vs Kate.
Thank you for this great overview, always enlightening to hear your opinion. Myself I have been using a distro with KDE Plasma 6 for a couple of weeks now. I like it. Less issues with latency than I had before. Seems to confirm what you said in the video.
@@CyberGizmo that's the old page for the old SteamOS project, from a while ago when they were building the Steam console. it's a bit confusing and they should probably get rid of it
1 - Wayland do have network transparency, at least in the way most people use it. (to run remote apps). And it really works, not like X (You can actually run a browser from a remote machine at normal speeds). It's called waypipe. Basically creates an "tunnel" for the wayland protocol inside a ssh connection. 2 - Wayland has no concept of "window managers", well not in the way that they are swappable components. In wayland, the server IS the windowmanager. (There's no "wayland server",but the sway server or the mutter server, etc...). Wayland is just a protocol and a library, each compositor ("windowmanager") has to implement everything. (Wayland provides a reference implementation called weston, but to create one from scratch, there's wslroot which is made to be extendend/modified easily) 3 - Wayland has a full X11 emulation layer, so X11 apps are covered (Minus things that break security; mostly screen recording, keyboard mapping changes, etc... but the "portals" from the flatpack world are offering solutions to that) 4 - And that's an opinion: X11 will not be updated or maintained for long, better jump now and help create the last few features missing from X11 and have a clean future. Wayland consensus protocol definition based approach (RFC like), that has been working so well for networking, is a very good way to ensure a well structured evolution from now on.
you are all gonna go to wayland but i am going to stay on Xorg forever and ever and even when Firefox stops working on Xorg i will keep using the last version and get hacked but i will just restore from backup every time i get hacked
@@voidwalker7774 Well Wayland is just a protocol - so it's not written on specific programming language - you can write a wayland compositor that implements this protocol on different languages of your choice. There are actually already several Rust-based Wayland Compositors such as COSMIC-Comp (Which will be a core part of the new COSMIC Desktop Environment for Pop OS) and Niri
7:02 It was fixed over 20 years ago with XACE which gives you mandatory access control. It's just not used by people because its not a real security risk. But isolating x11 by user is already done in all distros. One user on the system cant interact with another users X11 session. This is thanks to the security extension in X11.
Honestly if Wayland was called X12 I bet most people complaining about Wayland would be much more supportive of it. There's just not enough understanding of WHY Wayland is necessary.
The showdown has been decided in 2023 :) All major distros moved to Wayland! All software has an expiration date, even X11! The interesting question is, which vintage pockets and distros will remain for X11. The only exception might be Windows NT releases from Windows NT 3.1/3.51/4.0 to Windows 2000/XP to Windows Vista/7/8 to Windows 10/11 :) :)
It moves slow because literally everyone cares. Every single step has to be deliberated and consensus established between the parties involved - because once it's in the protocol, it most likely won't ever be removed again. No is temporary, yes is forever, as they say.
I've spun up Wayland a few times just to see what it felt like... it's great as a proof of concept. In a vacuum, just interacting with desktop menus and windows etc, it's smooth as butter, great. But it doesn't work everywhere it needs to. A lot of the newbros think it's as easy as snapping your fingers and forcing everyone to make their stuff compatible... but it's under a huge technical and historical debt of an older rendering protocol, it ain't ready. Most people clamoring for Wayland aren't even technically able of contributing, they're just aestheticists who are timing actions and looking for "window ghosting" when they move windows around, wanting the Platonic ideal of a desktop. I'll continue to use X11 and resist any calls to try and "force" the Wayland issue... if Wayland is capable of supporting all the things people do with Linux desktops in the 21st century, they should get it done. None of this "by hook or crook" violent garbage... they can't even contribute anyway cuz they're non-skilled newbros. Does X feel sluggish and slow compared to Wayland? Yep. Does Wayland work in all areas I need it to work? *Absolutely not.* And getting my stuff done is more important than the smug satisfaction of a high refresh rate that makes me feel like I'm in the Matrix. (Sorry for my acidic tone, I've been in way too many arguments about this, as you can probably tell.) Fun fact: X11 is a protocol where the server program typically runs on the client, and the client software runs on the server. 😏
I find it fascinating that you only mention one of the advantages of Wayland while neglecting other aspects like added security. I understand that it does not yet cover all use cases, however, by now it covers the needs of most users. Obviously not covering everything yet creates friction and annoys some users. If I may ask what are the features you are missing as of now?
Wayland as a "proof of concept"? Maybe a decade ago, but not in 2024. Debian - default is Wayland. Raspberry Pi OS - Default is Wayland. Fedora - Wayland by default. You must be talking about a different Wayland. It's tropes and misinformation like this that hamper the adoption of new technology.
@@liquidmobius It's a proof of concept in that it doesn't/can't do some percentage below 70% of what many people currently do with their desktops. It may be an ideal display server protocol for some mythical universe where a significant amount of current applications/uses don't exist, but for many it is unworkable. See Google search for examples. RedHat is largely a server/dev/services company that can afford to cut X11 loose, because it doesn't care all that much about end-users on desktops sitting at home doing daily driving desktop-things. RaspPi is also another platform where a bunch of whizbang GUI stuff rarely happens. I'm not a luddite, I'd love to use Wayland! But I've evaluated the software, done research, and it isn't up to snuff for my and many end user's use case. Countless others have some to the same conclusion. And I'm not interested in getting into philosophical arguments about what should/could happen, and I certainly don't care about what you think my comment on a goofy video site is hampering or not. If Wayland works for you, great. If you want to evangelize and browbeat people about it, I'd suggest a better course of action is contributing some solutions so that some day in the future, Wayland serves the needs of a larger percentage of people. That day is not today. My comment simply stated my position that I'm tired of other end-users, who have no skin in the game beyond the skin that *I* have in the game (read: getting software I use that other people wrote to work) demanding everyone be forced to switch to Wayland at the end of a metaphorical rifle. Leave people alone. You're not an eVaNgElIsT, you're a harping annoyance. Have a good day.
I love how the "every application can see all keystrokes" thing is brought up every time. It's a total non-issue in real life, but it enables a lot of use cases (like sxhkd). Also, modern X shields access to the X server from other users. So, if you install and start a key logger as your user, then, yes, wayland would be more secure. But honestly, don't you have other problems then? That thing can also just send your whole home directory somewhere...
I don't think it's a non-issue. If you want your lock screen to, you know, actually lock your screen, X is really bad at doing that. The lockscreen is just another X client, just like any other X client. The problem isn't another application seeing your keystrokes. The problem is: what if your lockscreen program crashes? This isn't a hypothetical non-issue. People have from time to time found that certain combinations of random or deliberate keystrokes will crash the program. On X, if your lockscreen crashes, there's nothing else preventing the person at the keyboard from getting to your desktop. On Wayland, the lockscreen is the compositor. If it crashes, then the logged-in user is forcibly logged out, since the compositor is what runs the login session. So the lockscreen actually works in Wayland. JWZ has an entire series of blog posts about the security dangers of screen savers and lock screens on X.
@@DavidJao prime example of "whataboutism". I'm not going there. If this would be important a similar thing could be built into Xorg. Apparently nobody cared that much. I also think wayland does it wrong. A locker should simply be restarted and not kill the whole session. Well, if one thing didn't crash on me in the last 20 years, then this would be xlock.
@@c0dev0id whataboutism is when someone brings up something completely unrelated and says "what about that?" But that's not what I did. The fact that everything is a client in X is central to its security shortcomings, which is exactly the topic that you originally brought up. xlock never crashes because of the heroic efforts of JWZ, which I already mentioned. Other screensavers in X have not fared so well.
I have no direct reason for wanting Wayland over X11, but my indirect one is "Whatever XFCE runs the best with". Fortunately I'm on Slackware which isn't exactly known for making rash decisions.
Good morning DJ. Another excellent video sir. I've been running Wayland for several months on some PCs. It has been flawless, but I don't do content creation. On this desktop, I am still stuck with X-11 with my nVidia 2070 Super, but I spent a couple of days on Wayland last week and basically my only problems were flickering in things like Brave, but my Steam games ran just fine. I can't live with it yet, but it is so much better than it was a couple of months ago when I tested it. I tend to test it every few months. How soon will we be all be running Wayland, I don't know, but I would expect the majority of users running it in the next two years. Maybe everyone in 5 years? I am a glass half full guy though.
X11's Implicit Sync has gone down in history as the most harebrained decision of the entire X11 protocol. Imagine expecting the GPU driver and compositor to waste CPU cycles constantly guessing about when applications have stopped drawing the current frame and when it's safe to show that on screen. Has the bitmap drawing ended? Has the font drawing ended? Have the vertex shaders ended? Have the compute shaders ended? Was the drawing done to a backbuffer which will be swapped with the frontbuffer? Do we need to wait for vertical sync? Is it safe to wait for vsync or do we need to waste lots of time copying the buffer in case the app starts drawing another frame already? Implicit Sync is a mess for drivers and wastes 5-20% performance according to AMD and NVIDIA. Some of the mentioned complexity didn't exist back when X11 was created. But even for simple bitmap drawing without any 3D in sight, it was such a dumb decision to expect the display to constantly guess about when it's safe to display the frame. It shows no forward thinking at all. I would even say that it shows no sense of intelligence at all either. But, because this was the earliest way of doing things in X11, people got stuck with it due to Linux's inertia. Much to the pain of Intel, AMD, NVIDIA and Google (Android), whose engineers have all expressed how much they despise implicit sync. Google literally had to invent their own explicit sync display technique for Android, because the existing Linux implicit sync would have drained the battery due to its wasteful design. Such a huge miss for X11. To really illustrate how insane Implicit Sync is, it's the equivalent of a kid asking "Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? How about now, are we there yet? Are we there yet?". And unlike the kid, there's no grownup who can answer X11 to say "yes we are there now". It has to guess and predict when things may be safe to render. It may guess too early or too late, and will end up with all kinds of synchronization issues, in addition to all the wasted performance. X11 and unwanted Screen Tearing due to synchronization issues: Name a more iconic duo. 🥳 Wayland unfortunately began its life a long time ago and carried on the awful status quo. But the explicit sync protocol is being added to Wayland, and will finally solve everything. Linux will then finally be on par with Windows and macOS.
You have impeccable timing sir, I was researching this very topic for the last couple days trying to decide what to build my stable production machine on. This was very informative and helpful. Thank you!
I've switched from i3wm to Hyprland and things are going well so far even tho I'm using an Nvidia GPU. Sway was fine too but Hyprland feels more modern and is surprisingly versatile, the hy3 plugin simulates i3's manual tiling and tabbing pretty well. There is also Qtile which apparently supports Wayland but I've not tested it yet.
As what I've read the articles by System76 , PopOS will only feature wayland, they have developed some protocols to run games with xwayland layer and nvidia drivers will be supported with hybrid mode only as unlike as of now.
Wayland is basically here, i switched from dwm to hyprland 2 months ago, everything i do just works, even if all my programs are still x11 they run perfectly on xwayland.
The main thing is that apps today haven't cut over to Wayland yet, but Wayland is definitely the future of display on Linux. Anything that doesn't move to Wayland will be either reliant on xwayland or gone in ten years.
Great breakdown sir. I was curious about my X11 forwarding, so its not for me, at this time, I have a couple boxes where we use linux apps on our windows PC via X11 - Same at home, I dont want a VM, I want an actual hardware box
X11 forwarding is alive and well in the Wayland world - don't you worry about a thing! When you open your Wayland terminal emulator app on your Wayland desktop and SSH to another machine, openssh will open the X11 forwarding ports in the same way as it does under X11, and when your remote client tries to connect to those ports - your desktop XWayland support will kick in and show you that X11 application in all it's glory. There are some features that won't work well due to the stricter security under Wayland - like global hotkeys - but under most conditions you won't even notice.
I disagree that KDE isn't in high gear for Wayland - KWin has been one of the better Wayland compositors for years now, and I've used KDE with Wayland for years. Edit: corrected from KDM to KWin
Don't forget that the Plasma folks are volunteers. They have full time jobs and do this in their spare time. Even so, the progress they are making lately has been amazing.
Wholeheartedly agree. KWin_Wayland is very good already and it's my daily driver as of now. Though I am a bit concerned about losing simpler WMs / giving up features X11 used to give to stuff like dwm. I'm also very concerned that there's many implementations of Wayland and each one has its quirks.
I had issues running KDE with Wayland on Kali Linux 4 months ago. I had to default to X11. However, I recently installed Arch on the same device, and KDE has been seamless with Wayland. The X11 network transparency was a huge concern for me.
Great video, nicely put together. SeamOS v1 & v2 use to be based on Debian and used Gnome as it's preferred DE. However from V3 StemOS switched to Arch Linux and the new steam deck also switched to KDE DE. So from Debian/Gnome 》》》to Arch/KDE. Arch is a lot more fluid to integrate to wayland quicker over Debian. The amount of inovation and speed of the SteamOS I'm not surprised they switched to Arch as it is much more aligned with valve's philosophy. It will also help them to adept to wayland a little faster.
Its not a case of X11 or Wayland, it is a case of WHEN to switch. X11 won't be maintained, so its Wayland at some point in the future. As for compatabilty, things move on. Take M$ Windows for example, I have seen many apps that say "Requires Windows 8 and above". Also many older apps wont run on newer OS versions, but nobody bats an eyelid. If the apps are still in production, they are updated to support the newer OS version. This should be the case for Wayland. Instead of filling it with bloat, the apps should be updated for Wayland. Keep in mind that X apps should work through XWayland. Apps that fail through XWayland are those that used unsupported X protocols (bybassed X protocols really). I have tried Wayland on LMDE. It was notably faster. Some things did not work though. The Update Manager failed to update anything for instance. So Wayland not ready, but it is still the direction.
Cinnamon doesn't have wayland support yet. And nvidia is not playing nice with wayland either. I am pleasantly surprised you made it run 😊 wayland on gnome is effortless on my nvidia system. I haven't tried screen recording etc. Just routine Web, docs etc stuff.
@@costascostas1760cinnamon does have wayland support. Just experimental support atm. The basics work decently if you use the 535 or 545 drivers from nvidia. It just doesn't do any of the content creation stuff yet as you can't properly use portals.
There was same experience for me on Ubuntu with huge performance drop after switching to Wayland. For me trouble was in absence of libnvidia-egl-wayland1 package, that was'nt installed with NV prop. driver on some reason
KDE Plasma 6 got released and they default to Wayland as well. I am still on KDE 5, but switched to Wayland 2 days ago from X11. Besides the Wacom tablet addon, it seems to work just fine. So yeah, 2024 is the year of Wayland.
I know I don't keep my ear to the ground on secure display servers as well as I used to, but I'm not sure that the removal of network transparency was motivated by security concerns. As far as I understood, it was for performance reasons. There are a lot of security related changes in Wayland, notably the lack of commands for taking control of other windows, but if you happen to have the reference describing how transparency relates to security could you share it? There's something to be said about the old auth methods, to be sure.
I dont think its for performance reasons. Modern X11 doesn't have more overhead than Wayland. The main reason is to reduce complexity. Also modern remote desktop solutions work by streaming video instead of remote graphics primitives, and it's on a layer above the display server (a standalone application).
X11 is so old that a lot of developers are not familiar with the internals. This is a debate not unlike bias ply tires versus radials; one is clearly on the way out.
@@notuxnobux ah yes, you said what I meant to say; network transparency is removed not because there's some tangible security problem with it, but because applications and toolkits are moving consistently toward DRI, which is a local-only API which is much faster than using the network-portable alternatives. Wayland simply standardises on DRI because it's a much better local user experience.
@@catsupchutney I'm not entirely sure how your answer relates to inherent security problems with network transparency, which is what I asked about. I must admit (as a prior xorg contributor) that I find arguments about code quality and age a bit disingenuous. The current version of xorg is not the implementation that was written in the 1980s, but the newer KDrive implementation that was adopted in the late 00s. It is _not that much older than wayland_ at this point.
Wayland doesn't offer remote execution of windowed applications. Yes, it's a big deal for some, as I have some apps on my server that I need to run on a local machine.
Wayland is not faster than modern X11. Both work in the same these days. X11 also doesn't have more latency than Wayland. In fact, for fullscreen applications X11 has lower latency than wayland because of disabled compositor and no vsync. I tested it myself. I ran benchmarks and X11 got higher fps and less stutter and latency than Wayland (even on AMD).
At the moment I'd rather stick with tried and trusted (?) X11. Just because X11 is old doesn't make it rubbish just as because Wayland is "new", doesn;t make it better.
I've been on Fedora with KDE Plasma/ Wayland for about a year and love it. I have 4k and 1080p monitors at different refresh rates as well as lots of virtual machines. Wayland solves x11's horrible handling of these.
Screen tearing and vsync issues haven't gone away in Wayland. If you are referring to High Definition Scaling and decent font rendering? I guess. I have experienced far more compatibility problems with EGL and Nvidia Drivers on Wayland than X11.
Very true. I don't have, or really need a discrete GPU. Hopefully future Nvidia drivers will be much improved. The newest Vulkan implementations are a big improvement and the plans for the next major release are huge for Nvidia users.@@Anonymous______________
Thanks for very informative and easy to understand video about wayland and X11. I just trashed windows 11 because of obvious reasons (bloatware, ads, privacy issues etc). I've had issues with Plasma 6 and wayland and wanted to know what it even is, since I don't have the same issues with X11.
I've played around with Linux many many times over the last two decades and as someone who has only recently switched to Linux full time (I've been Linux full time for a year now), I can tell you Wayland has been a dream. It just feels so much better than X11 to me. I also game, a lot, and I have had zero issues. Between Wayland, and Steam's Proton, the Linux experience has never been better.
I tried to use Wayland on a virtual machine, but turns out it isn't supported. The Gnome session ran in Wayland in the Web console, but when I logged in remotely from my desktop, it was using X. Turns out, Wayland would only support screen sharing. Plus, it seemed as if screen sharing had limitations as many of the apps wouldn't open. They opened on the Web console, but not in the Remmina window. Having to log into the session first on the Web console was not really what I was interested in doing. Wayland also seemed to only support on session at a time. If it supported more, I could not find any option that allowed it. It was like Windows Home Edition. I'm not against Wayland, but it doesn't seem to function in a useable way for me. Now I was using Tricia, so maybe Debian hasn't configured it properly yet, so I'll give a Wayland version of Ubuntu or maybe even Fedora and see if the have remote login
There is one simple reason why I won't be using Wayland in the next years. There is no tiling window manager compatible with Wayland which is as good for me as the one which I currently am using on X11 (dwm), that is a showstopper. So I will stay on X11 as long as I can, if eventually gaming would get better on Wayland (which is not generally the case yet) then I might use one windowmanager for gaming and the other for all the rest.
@@CyberGizmo Hi! Yeah, it is a dilemma. I would love Suckless to port dwm to Wayland. There is another project called dwl (not from Suckless), they try to do something like dwm on Wayland but so far their execution has some problems for me, mostly that a large number of patches is lacking (logical, still relatively new, that is fine) and that they don't support a built-in panel (difficult on Wayland according to the developers but I want to be able to neatly hide it with the contents of the windows being adjusted without any flaw) and they don't support a systemtray. I don't need a systemtray often but when I do need it I really need it, for example to manage VPN (I use the nm-applet for it) or to check if a launcher which I started up via Lutris truly is closed, those you can't easily kill via pkill or xkill because the names are not particularly simple for Windows programs (the entire path is in the name).
@@liquidmobius No, it is not! It is from other developers, it comes without a systemtray, it comes without an integrated panel, it comes without many patches which I use. Yes, those things matter a lot to me, it is one of the reasons why I use dwm: properly integrated panel and systemtray. Not hacky, not improper hiding of the panel with systemtray, just easy. I hope that dwl one day will become as good as dwm but so far the updates from the developers don't make me hold my breath for it, they explicitely pointed out that they don't intend to support an integrated panel and systemtray.
@@peterjansen4826 Well you're more than welcome to write that software yourself. No one's paying the dwl developers, and you're certainly not. Everyone expects everything for free and developers to add their special little features with their own precious time. Learn to program and contribute back.
My preference is x11. IE: XFWM/XFCE. I have no need for multiple monitors anyways. IMO too, there should no need to consider dropping either or, allow the ppl to have freedom to choose. That's how it should be anyways.
Depends on the Display Manager, GNOME has an inbuilt screen snap shot and recording feature, but if you are capturing video for a live stream you will have to use something like OBS or an external capture device. You can find it on GNOME 45 where the controls are for network, audio, etc is look for the camera icon
video and audio capture already works great in OBS on Wayland, though global hotkeys (i.e. starting/stopping a recording while another window is focused) are still kinda new so you might have to work around that
The choice of which one to use is out of the user's hands, unless they're willing to go to extraordinary lengths, and is based entirely on which distro & desktop environment they use. When their distro & DE of choice switches to Wayland, guess what: they will switch too. Because, again, NOT switching would require extraordinary effort. SO, they will switch, except for those edge cases where some compatibility or performance issue(s) with Wayland inhibits their use of the system. In that case, they will hop to another distro that still uses X11. That's the calculus. It's that simple. EDIT: are there ACTUALLY apps that use WINE that won't run under Wayland? Or is this a theoretical concern only? I'm going to have to look into that...
I think there would be less resistance to Wayland if the compatibility hadn’t been trashed with older programs and they’d just developed the same features into a new X12 instead. I think that would have changed everything. If I could have the same functionality / compatibility of X11 and cleaner and more secure, I’d take it in a heartbeat. I’m very frustrated about the security issues in X11, and its horrid architecture and bloat, but Wayland gives me Microsoft styled vibes. I don’t like who are aligning with them as it’s all the wrong people and groups. I feel another systemd moment is coming not too far down the road and people’s choice will yet again be taken away from them. It’s probably the end of Linux as we know it if there’s another big split like this again.
First SteamOS that Valve released was based on Debian, and it was an OS for home consoles to be displayed on big TVs. Current SteamOS that runs on the steamdeck is an immutable snapshot of Arch.
For most of my use, Wayland is okay. Sure, some things aren't fully done yet, like IM module or how remote desktop is still in porting. But they are good enough and I'd rather base my solutions on Wayland than mess around with x11 (especially touchpad gestures, it's nice having that on KDE Wayland).
For my old macbook on which I switched to EndeavourOS I am glad about that X11 still exists. Because the legacy nvidia drivers doesn‘t support wayland. So I‘ve choose Cinamon as my desktop. It is a modern desktop but with a classic use and feel. It works very good with the high resolution of the Retina display and has X11 support.
Doesn't matter if Wayland is better than X or not. Wayland is going to replace X in every Linux distro. Just like Systemd did. Doesn't matter if some of us old farts don't like it. Linux is going to drive me to *BSD.
Regarding System76's Cosmic - that is a Wayland-only desktop based on their new rust written Wayland compositor. It isn't offered in X11 "flavour" though like all Wayland desktops they will support X11 apps using XWayland.
@@CyberGizmo I'm not sure what you mean. I follow cosmic development and noticed no such update. The cosmic compositor is based on Smithay, which is a Wayland only thing - it does have an X11 backend that allows you to run the compositor as an X11 _client_, for debugging. PopOS isn't "dumping" X11 support - you will still get XWayland, but there will be no Xorg server managing your graphical display - that will all be cosmic-comp and Smithay.
X11 need to drop pixman and use a modern pixel management library to match today's hardware without opengl acceleration and make every window get their own buffers by default(make dri2 use software/cpu buffers instead of opengl) and use opengl only when needed (use up the power of modern CPUs for 2d acceleration)
You are theorizing about latency and performance comparisons without having measured anything. If you do measure, you will find no trace of the overhead you imagine exists with X11.
We will need some kind of legacy support for X11 until the sun burns out. XWayland will get better and better over time until nobody complains any more.
I've been using Debian for many years and Gnome for most of that time but recently my display got reduced to lower resolution with updates so I tried updating my Nvidia drivers but that led to not having a desktop anymore! I have two computers and it happened to both of them. Everything works in Wayland except rendering in cycles in blender and as soon as I install Nvidia it never boots to a desktop again. I tried Arch and had little trouble getting everything to work. Even several updates later, and Arch updates a lot more often than Debian stable, it's still fine even though I'm not well versed in Arch. It seems rather malicious to me that a distro that prides itself on stability pushed that hard. Especially since I don't bother updating very often and apparently didn't half to on my own for this to happen... I just hope Arch continues to be as slick as it is so far.
Thanks for the development history towards the end. Throughout much of the presentation, I was wondering why X11 wasn’t updated or upgraded. Now I know. I do have a question, DJWare: if X11 needs a server, where is the server found? Does it eke out a corner of the OS and run in the background analogously to Apache2? (I understand the analogue is weak at best.) Thanks for an informative and interesting presentation.
You are welcome, the X11 server is called Xorg, on my system the executable is in /usr/lib/xorg and it runs on your workstation or virtual machine when you have enabled X11
The X11 server isn't really analogous to an Apache http server - usually a server runs in the background and works only with network requests (sometimes with "unix sockets" which is like an internal network). The X11 server OTOH is the main application that is running on your screen when you interact with the desktop - if you see a pixel on the screen, it's there because the X11 server put it there. The server in X11 is in charge of the desktop equipment: display, keyboard, mouse, etc. It serves the "graphical applications" that connect to it, ask it for keyboard and mouse input and send back commands to show graphics. The browser window you see on your screen? That's not Firefox - that's X11 showing you the graphics that the Firefox application sent over the X11 protocol socket, while the Firefox process is sitting in the corner of the CPU, sending and receiving X11 commands.
More like X11 apps still run as X11 on the backend (many parts of X11 are still installed) but the X11 output is directed into Wayland. Roughly speaking.
I tried wayland recently on the latest plasma and had worse performance than on X11, video playback on mpv and chromium used more cpu, scrolling on chromium wasn't as smooth, window shading didn't work, window position settings on mpv didn't work, so I went back to lxqt with kwin on X11, where everything just works, I can't see wayland taking off until more desktops support it, at the moment its only really plasma and gnome, and gnome sucks, so that just leaves plasma, there's no light weight desktops that currently support it.
Gnome didn't have seamless transition. I've had nothing but troubles with it, slowness, flickering, strange change in colors, not always responsive to mouse clicks, logout for no reason. Gnome's shell was hell to use at a time. Than they "solved" the problems by cutting down all hardware they don't want to support. Gnome 3 became my transition to KDE. I've tried Plasma with Wayland every time a big release comes out right until i had some worse experience than revert back to X11 session. But i have all of my problems solved and programs receive good wayland support in late 2022 or early 2023 so i'm using it exclusively without any troubles ever since. The only thing i will miss from X11 is network transparency. I both liked and hated it. At times it worked well enough but slow as hell. However i've never liked to work with partitions by using command line and that's why i was always using Gparted through X11. However that was the only use case for me. If they could do it on a toolkit level that would be even better, faster and reliable. For now i have to use parted, very cautiously. P.S. I have Radeon graphics.
I don't care about network transparency, there is already rdp or vnc ,if Wayland offers proper functionality for desktop, then Wayland it is. X11 isn't even being updated anymore except for security patches. So if my distri that wants X11, they will have to go the openbsd route and maintain it themselves. Everyone is whining about Wayland, but are also whining that X is old. Well eventually the bandaid will have to be ripped.
18:08 - "KDE ... its not as deeply integrated as GNOME is [with Wayland]" ?? really? I mean - it is true that initially a lot of the Wayland developers happened on GNOME (and you can see this with the Wayland default of "client side decorations" only which is a unique feature of GNOME), but these days everyone sit at the same table and KDE people have an equal say and equal support, or better: KWin supports more Wayland protocols and more completely than GNOME's mutter does; The XWayland Video Bridge from KDE is **required** for screen sharing to XWayland; and more. On the contrary - if you look at current discussions in the Wayland community about protocols, you'd notice that GNOME are the only ones not playing ball - every time there's a suggestion for a protocol improvement or a new protocol, GNOME people are the first to say "no" and the last to agree - if at all. Also: - "KDE has traditionally been an X11 environment" ?? really, unlike what? Fresco? All Linux desktop environment traditionally have been X11 environment - if only for the reason that there was nothing else (except new Wayland-specific DEs, like Sway or Hyprland). - "KDE as a team have not come out and said that we are going to do away with X11" - wrong. KWin's X11 support is in maintenance mode and all new features are developed for Wayland, since at least 2022. This has been discussed extensively in and around the KDE community. I recommend you check out Plasma 6 (currently in RC2 and scheduled for release by the end of the month) - it is Wayland by default and is choke-full of Wayland, Pipewire and Portal features.
Wayland is the future IMO. Distros that want to live on better adapt soon. I've used both and Wayland is WAY more responsive. And we'll get heaps of features on it that are never going to show up on X11 like HDR etc.
I like Wayland on my Ubuntu that I use on my TV to watch RU-vid and stuff. It's the only way to get 4k @60Hz and a smooth experience. However on my Ubuntu PC for work I still have to use X because I've got some weird problems with 4 monitors connected to it, I was not able to make screenshots, OBS also had issues capturing video, and I am not able to use Barrier to remote control mouse and keyboard because there seem to be some features missing that enable mouse control from a user space application. I don't know any more about the details here. But yeah, unfortunately it's still no alternative for me although I really like it on my TV Ubuntu. Maybe I should try it again when I have upgraded to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS in a few months.
Hi Santa Claus! I know that evdev file in your first diagram. It use to manipulate it to transfer key signals to other keys. E.g. CTRL is on my ö key. Btw. I am using Debian/Gnome on a macbook-air from 2010.
