-> The X project is largely unchanging these days

Good. It means there is a stable API. So what if it is *old*?

Imagine like the Devilfish you had gone all in on Unity, only to have the rug pulled out from under your feet. Canonical did it once, they can do it again with Mir.

I don't have anything against Wayland per se, but I haven't looked at it for a quite a while. I'm a fan of Nvidia graphics cards generally (with the binary drivers that work), and I recall Wayland not working properly or well with them. For me that means forgeddaboutit.

-> XWayland

And it had better keep working too. It's all very well for somebody to devise some new graphical desktop, but it's quite another to then expect other people to rewrite their code to work with it. If XWayland disappears that will immediately render the Linux desktop less useful.

The issue isn't that X is unstable, it is that it is obsolete. Huge chunks of it aren't used and haven't been used for years - the drawing primitives, fonts, damage model etc. Yet it all has to be maintained or it isn't the same protocol any more. And to do things approaching modern desktop requirements it had to be patched up by extensions which have to jump through hoops to function and had their own limitations and complexity.

That is why everyone including the people who wrote it have abandoned it for Wayland. It doesn't stop X running over Wayland, but X is no longer underpinning the desktop itself. This means you can still run X software but your desktop as a whole benefits from being more responsive & efficient.

There is a good overview of what Wayland is on its home page.

https://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html

I'm aware of all of this. I'm also aware that Wayland is about 14 years old now, and it is only in the last three or four years that *stable* distros have started to use Wayland as the default. (Fedora while mostly stable is not the same thing as RedHat). Ubuntu had problems with Wayland and went back to XOrg, then back to Wayland.

Does Wayland play nice with Nvidia? It's a yes or no question, not a "well if you spend hours looking through forums to see the problems that other people have had and find something which matches your problem then see if there is a solution" question.

If I do a search right now for "wayland nvidia problems" I see plenty. And I am not going to change my graphics card just to get a different graphics display.

If and when Wayland works out of the rpm/dpkg/tarball with Nvidia drivers, and XWayland also works the same, I will change. But PLEASE stop the FUD and just pretend that Wayland is the answer to a lot of problems (a lot of problems that I personally do not experience with XOrg), because it brings its own problems too.

As there is an article about Manjaro, perhaps it is relevant to quote from a Manjaro thread about Wayland and Nvidia: Currently the biggest issue is that NVIDIA does currently not support Xwayland properly, so apps that require it get software rendering. This includes most games, which are the most common use case for proprietary NVIDIA drivers. This is why GNOME automatically disables Wayland if you have NVIDIA.

It's no good pointing the finger at Nvidia. These same cards work with XOrg.

As a boring user the only case I can make for Wayland over X is that on a hi-res screen laptop it makes fonts readable in an ancient application for which I need WINE. I guess that is pretty niche.

When Wayland leaves things in the same state as it found them I'll probably not care. Until then X seems to just work.

Apparently there are lots of reasons why Wayland is a good idea but from over here it still feels like a solution searching for a problem.

>on a hi-res screen laptop it makes fonts readable

That's why we need Display-PostScript to make a comeback

I suggest you read the link I provided to understand what Wayland is. It has nothing to do with your graphics card. It is a protocol that facilitates communication between clients and window managers. e.g. it allows an application to tell the desktop that it wants to create a surface, and that it wants to render its surface, or listen for events etc.

But how the client draws into the client or how the window manager composites are their own business. Most will render with OpenGL ES and will expect a driver capable of doing this. That goes too for however XWayland work which is going to assume a functioning driver.

So if there is an issue with a driver, e.g. NVidia then the issue is with the driver. And yes you can point the finger at NVidia if things function well with in other drivers whether they are hardware or software based.

For technical reasons which are unlikely to ever go away, I want to be able to do GUI things without having any extra stuff in my process address space. The X protocol gives me that, and it sounds like Wayland has no intention of doing so. So, I'm glad things like XWayland exist and hopefully will continue to do so. My Linux is suffiently old that it still has the traditional X server, so I don't have any experience with Wayland.

And yes, I fully understand that using the X protocol makes high intensity graphical games unlikely to work. That's fine.

Does that mean that tools like Teamviewer couldn't work ?

That's a death sentence in the business arena (not that that should be a problem for a Linux distro).

I use Zoom on Wayland (Debian 11) and it can record sessions just fine, although the novelty of recording my weekely drunken virtual pub sessions wore off in the early stages of the first lockdown.

I haven't tried Teams, and based on my friend's experiences I really don't want to either.

I think it means that you can't just plug in between the application and the display, as you easily can in X11 (reparenting just one window, or even the whole screen by inserting between the display manager and the root window), although this always was a bit of a security issue if done incorrectly.

This might make screen sharing a little more difficult, but any application will still be able to record a session in the application itself, that won't change.

"One of the central functions of X is that it works over a network connection, something that Wayland by design does not do"

This is THE deal-breaker for me. Beyond just using a local display, this is the core X11 function that I use. And I do it quite frequently (last weekend, I actually had VirtualBox running on a remote system using X to display it where I happened to be). It still work reasonably well, but some applications wanting to talk to the display via D-bus or one of the other in-system communication methods does not work (so why require it in the applcations?)

XWayland and the various types of VNC or RDP, whilst they do work, I find them obnoxious, jerky, prone to block, and as they are basically remote control applications for the console of the remote box are just a broken idea for multi-user systems.Not tried waypipe, but if it works like ssh tunnelling of X, it may work OK. IMHO, for everything I do, X11 works far better, and can cope with different display resolutions on server and client (whichever way you want to see this). I also work with non-intel legacy system, and for that X11 is still a must.

This really is a case of throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Back in the last century, I worked in an environment where we had powerful centralized servers with IBM X Stations on people's desks. It worked really well for the majority of what needed to be done, and passably well for most of the other tasks, with the exception of running Windows applications (which was not a huge issue at the time). It was easy to administer (just a handful of servers serving a community of 100+ workstations), and meant that people could pretty much work on any desk without having to move any hardware around.

I regard the move to desktop Windows workstations and now laptops as a really regressive move.

For the longest time I preferred X10 to X11, especially on the Suns we were running at the time. X10 had animated icons that X11 lacked, and for many years X11 was a buggy piece of cr*p that burned far too much memory in an era when memory was a very precious resource.

Surely a perfect example of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"? Better than having a new version every year that is guaranteed to break something

Jc