So, I've been trying out Wayland for a few weeks. How many years has it been since everybody were saying that it's time to ditch X?
Well, if that's the case, why am I seeing this?
- Enabling Wayland support in Firefox causes menus to be corrupted.
- Scaling in Firefox is randomly broken (logging out and back in fixes it)
- Taking screenshots causes everything on the screen to shrink to half size while selecting what to screenshot.
- Moving a browser window resizes it to half vertical size
- After placing a window to be aligned with the top border, it sometimes moves down by 1 pixel, making it impossible to select it by moving the mouse pointer to the top of the screen.
- On random occasions, parts of my IntelliJ IDEA windows starts flashing until I force a repaint.
- HDR rendering looks horrible, so I have to turn it off.
- Every time I reboot the computer, the monitor brightness gets reset to 100% (fixed it by disabling ddcutil on powerdevil)
- And I just saw an article about the sorry state of colour management in Wayland.
Can someone tell me what's going on here, and why I should be using this thing?
@loke In fairness, it sounds like all modern software to me!
@ggn Sure. But I'd have hoped that it would at least have feature-parity before forcing it on everybody?
@loke You're just repeating what I wrote I think!
@ggn Yeah, you're right.
Like how perfectly functional native applications are replaced with some Electron garbage.
@loke If I am being serious for a minute here, the last decade all the Linux installs I've tried were either horribly broken out of the box, or broke down really quick when they came to window managers and X servers. Out of desperation I switched to ion3 or awesome and that was mostly stable. But then it was just a bunch of tiled consoles. Great experience for 2024.
So eventually I just use Windows and WSL when I do linux-y stuff, otherwise the WM jankiness is so bad that hurts my soul.
@ggn I mean, most Linux distributions default to GNOME, which has become completely unusable. The first thing I do is to install KDE, which makes the experience much more what I would expect a modern desktop to be.
@loke Skeptical about this - I still have PTSD from trying out KDE back in the late 00s, where it looked and behaved like Windows XP (was using win7 at that point, so: outdated ootb) and it was a couple of orders of magnitude more sluggish than XP on my older PC, but this on a new PC.
From that experience I developed a hatred for KDE and Qt in one go.
Maybe I should try KDE again as it might be improved since then, but right now WSL is so convenient as I'm on Win that it's a bucket list thing
@ggn Well, people have very different preferences when it comes to desktop environments, so I'm not going to tell you that you'll enjoy KDE now. All I can say is that it's quite nice to use, compared to GNOME which is almost unusable, and takes a lot of effort (and unsupported addons) to make it not awful.
I am forced to use a Windows machine at work, and while WSL works, it's a far cry from a real Linux environment.
@thamesynne @ggn Sure. I have all the sympathy in the world for that position. It's an open source project, and people can work on whatever they want (as it happens, just a couple of minutes ago I was made aware of a new Minecraft server, written in COBOL, and I applaud it).
But just like I don't see the authors of CobolCraft doing everything they can to eliminate the Java based one out of existence, perhaps the narrative shouldn't be "X is obsolete" until Wayland actually works.
@veronica@mastodon.online@loke That's surprising? I've been using Wayland for several years. There are some annoying window management issues (which are design choices on their part), but I haven't had any technical issues to speak of.
@veronica I'm not saying that this is true in your case, but I think that if I had used Wayland as-is for a few years, I might have forgotten how well X worked and just accepted all these annoyances that I listed (there's more).
@veronica@mastodon.online@loke I didn't intend it as a "it works for me" sort of response. Nor did I intend to dismiss the issues you listed. I'm just curious what could be the source of the differences between my setup and yours.
I don't see the first 5 issues you're experiencing, the rest don't really apply, so I can't say.
@veronica Yeah, something is obviously different. I think the point I'm making is that if it's not able to provide a consistent experience, and feature-parity with its predecessor, perhaps it shouldn't be default?
And I really tried to get well-supported hardware and software Radeon graphics, standard 4k screen at 60 Hz, off-the-helf KDE desktop), yet nothing seems to work smoothly.
@veronica@mastodon.online@loke Yeah, as I mentioned in the branch of the thread, I have a double-wide screen with no scaling. There may also be Gnome / KDE differences here. I've had a fair bit of trouble with UI scaling and Qt5 at least (not tried Qt6 much).
I do have some issues with pixel round-off and window placement. But I suspect that's caused by the addon I use and the fact that I have the favourites bar on the left screen edge – because who needs a 5120 px favourites bar 
@veronica@mastodon.online@loke I'm running on Debian 12 Bookworm, so very stable, and I recently switched from Radeon to Nvidia. Radeon worked fine on Wayland, but with Nvidia I can no longer select it.
Until I checked now, I didn't even realise I was back on X11
@veronica@mastodon.online@loke Granted, it's only my laptop that's currently on Wayland. My desktop, which I use the most, is on X11 since I switched to an Nvidia card recently, but it was on Wayland too before that.
@veronica I explicitly chose a Radeon card in the hope that things would work better.
I think a lot of my issues has to do with the fact that I use a 4k monitor, and scaling on Wayland is quite terrible. Which is ironic, since that's what people tout as being the benefit of Wayland.
On X I just set the font DPI to 120 and everything looks good.
@veronica@mastodon.online@loke Ah, that may be it. I run at 5120 × 1440 resolution at 100% scale.
I also use Gnome, not KDE (in case you do) and I know that Qt has some issues with scaling too.
@shinmera@tymoon.eu@loke Hey, at least you're not trying to develop applications for it, because hooooo boyy....
@shinmera I just don't get it. It feels like the perfect example of second-system effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
@shinmera@tymoon.eu@loke The short of my impression is they wanted to solve the DRI issue and then only solved exactly that, leaving everything else up to an "extensible protocol". And you know how Linux is when things are extensible....
@loke report report report (as a bug to the compositor, e.g. gnome)
i haven't faced anything like this in Wayland for years, and I'm sorry you had a bad experience
Well, you see, the source for Wayland (which you will never look at) is way cleaner than the source for X (which you will also never look at.)
@loke I've been using gnome with Wayland on Debian for years with mild problems.
I left X because a high DPI screen and x screen scaling went over the X maximum desktop size.
Most of my Wayland problems were I can't get windows to be the same physical size on different DPI screens.
I think Debian has been pretty slow about moving apps away from using xwayland though. It could be your environment they turned on the wayland client support which may not be sufficiently mature for your apps
For example the Firefox Wayland support has been slowly being added and they switched the default to Wayland with 121. You can go back to x protocol on wayland with
MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=0 firefox
@alienghic It's certainly off by default in FF, since I had to manually add MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 to enable it. And after doing so I noticed that menus were completely broken.
After removing that environment variable, it worked again. I'm using Firefox 133.
@loke also what video card are you on?
I've had the best experiences with intel integrated (laptops) or AMD, I still haven't figured out how to turn wayland on with nvidia. (And I think nvidia's wayland drivers are ages behind the other two.
I searched for intellij and their support looks pretty new too.
https://blog.jetbrains.com/platform/2024/07/wayland-support-preview-in-2024-2/
Also theres a cute easy way to tell if a window is using X or Wayaland protocol. If you run xeyes, the eyes will only move if youre over a window being rendered with the X protocol.
The shifting down a pixel and the resizing during screenshots are baffling issues to me,
I think gnome's wayland support is most developed, KDE was behind several years ago but has had some more time to mature, and I have no idea about any of the other combinations.
@alienghic I'm using a 7800XT.
You're having a worse experience than I'd expect for that card.
I tried searching for bugs about a 1 pixel border and found this:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=459373
Are you using fractional scaling? Maybe try adjusting it a bit and seeing if the layout bug changes?