worth switching to wayland?

[wanne32]

[kj184050]

[wanne32]

[ChrisJumper]

yes, cause there is no future without.

[greyspoke]

The issue with smplayer playing stuff in a separate mpv window when using wayland disappeared on my latest update, things now play in the main smplayer window. This is using a plasma-wayland session.

[tnt]

It seems Wayland will support HDR.
Quite important for HTPC builds.
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gentoo user

[pun_guin]

Sorry, it's been a while since I was here. I think I have a good excuse: my Gentoo computer has a hardware defect and I just haven't managed to get it fixed yet. (I'm afraid I'll have to get a new one in due course.)
Nevertheless, this topic has caught my attention, partly because the developer of XScreensaver has just recently made a fuss about Wayland:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/11/the-war-on-screen-savers-continues-apace/

I am fundamentally sceptical about Wayland. There are several reasons for this:

• The developers are very Linux-focussed. It is not good news for the open source world (which also includes other systems such as *BSD and illumos) if desktops are increasingly tailored to the Linux niche and tried-and-tested ecosystems are (or have to be) abandoned without technical necessity.
  
• XWayland cannot completely replace X11, see for example above. I assume that in the long term this will not only affect software such as XScreensaver, but also desktop environments. (Does Window Maker actually work properly with XWayland?)
  
• Wayland seems to be fundamentally and deliberately broken as far as existing software is concerned.

I don't rule out trying Wayland at some point. But I just don't think much of "modern" desktops.
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I already use the new Genthree.

[flexibeast]

In terms of Wayland on non-Linux platforms, Matthieu Herrb gave a presentation at EuroBSDCon in September last year, "Towards running a Wayland Compositor on OpenBSD" (PDF of slides).

[pun_guin]

I think you underestimate the stubbornness of OpenBSD’s core team.
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I already use the new Genthree.

[flexibeast]

[pun_guin]

What I mean is that just because something works, it does not mean that it will end as a part of OpenBSD.
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I already use the new Genthree.

[flexibeast]

Depends what you mean by "part of OpenBSD"; i presume you mean "in base", because increasing amounts of Wayland stuff is appearing in ports. It's true that just because it's being worked on, doesn't mean it's going to end up in base; my comment upthread made no claim otherwise. That said, the final slide of the presentation i linked to says:

[eeckwrk99]

Anyone running Wayland on old hardware?

I've recently installed Gentoo on my laptop (HP Compaq 6710b) and went with Plasma + Wayland. The only issue I noticed so far: video playback performance is much worse on Wayland compared to X11 for rather high quality videos.

I'm using mpv. A 1080p / x265 video plays normally on X11 but lags a lot on Wayland. I tried with

[Screenager]

I have wayland running on a thinkpad x220t and a T500 (using the intel onboard graphics, forced in BIOS). Both are working great, in fact better than on my desktop where I get the freezing KDE taskbar bug. The T500 is capable of playing youtube in 720p(which was completely impossible in Win7) but lags a little bit while video playback is not in fullscreen.

[flexibeast]

[eeckwrk99]

[pizza-rat]

Is there any standalone program for Redshift-like functionality on nvidia gpus on wayland yet? That's still my current dealbreaker, or I'd at least be messing with labwc (though I'm more interesting in XFCE wayland, or something like icewm or fvwm). I heard Plasma 6's night light covers it but I'm not at all a fan of Plasma.

[e8root]

Tried Plasma 5 Wayland and it setup xwayland as DISPLAY=:0.0 which was the same as I had on my already running X11 session and some programs opened in one environment opened in the other. No X11 sessions could be opened once I started kwin_wayland because it somehow didn't advertise its spawning X11 session. -100 for cooperation with other environments.

There were some other bugs but from nice things at least VRR worked out of the box.

Other Wayland DE I tried and actually running now is Wayfire with wf-shell. VRR didn't work until I emerged 9999 which required some tinkering and the whole thing required some manual configuration to show anything except cursor. 9999 is obviously development build and not proper release and there are some issues but so far application compatibility is good and I like animations and especially wobbly windows.

VirtualBox works just fine and from programs which do not work I found xeyes - I guess I need to use X11 for programs to be able to look at what happens in other programs

So far Wayland itself so far seems ok.
There is no idiotic issue like on X11 where applications like web browser playing YT will stop after switching to other TTY. It can be fixed on X11 for as long as compositor is not used.
But here is the thing with compositor - originally compositors were invented to solve one issue and then throw some effects on top of things - tearing. The thing is I do not see any tearing in X11 without compositors and with that any hacky and inefficient things compositors do does not concern my system. With that I could even argue X11 will be inherently more efficient as it doesn't use GPU nearly as much as Wayland does. With Radeon 6900XT this hardly seems like an issue but for weaker systems it might as well be. Raspberry Pi 4/5 where I also checked Wayland struggle a lot with Wayland while flying on X11. There X11 has tearing so Wayland solves important issue. That said my understanding is that Wayland on RPi4/5 having choppy framerate is more due to VC4 driver being terrible at executing multiple things at the same time and it should be possible to fix that.

Oh, I'd almost forget: from Wayland I also tested Enlightenment and Hikari. The first one had some tearing issues and other issues and Hikari just freezes. I didn't try to resolve these issues.

Anyways, I'll continue checking Wayland but I will still default to Xfce4 on Xorg for now.
It might just as well be I will make switch to Wayland this year. Would happen already if issue with X11 stopping stuff when switching TTYs could not be solved as it was my biggest gripe with X11 so far.
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Unix Wars - Episode V: AT&T Strikes Back

[logrusx]

[pizza-rat]

[fictitiousexistence]

[logrusx]

[pizza-rat]