Man, I really don’t understand what the issues with Wayland are. Granted, I’m new here and a pretty basic user so there’s some underlying issue that seems to be breaking people’s setups, I guess I just haven’t encountered it. I went from using Mint for like a month before I switched to Arch. And I only did that because my second screen was acting goofy on Mint and I figured in for a penny in for a pound, let’s see why people are so afraid of this distro and haven’t had any serious issues in the past two years.
My issue with Wayland is just that not everything supports it. I tried switching to Wayland this year and immediately I ran into issues with software that weren’t compatible, like Steamlink would not stream over Wayland, but switching back to X11 it streamed just fine. At least in my experience, Wayland itself is not the problem, but developers not supporting Wayland is the problem. The moment I run into just one program that I want to use that doesn’t work with Wayland, I am going to permanently switch back to X11. I think most users think that way. Most don’t want to switch back and forth to use a program, if a single program doesn’t work they will just revert to X11 and stay within X11.
Understandable, though in the case of Steamlink, I just stopped using Steamlink. Though my thought process was, I’d rather get a $30 dock for my Steam Deck then switch to X11 but I’m stubborn ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’m the same with systemd. I’m aware it gets a lot of hate from people but I dunno, seems fine to me. It’s never given me any trouble that I can think of.
For most ”laymen” Wayland works just fine. I prefer Wayland because it has proper support for fractional scaling, which is a must for monitors with higher resolution than 1080p.
Wayland has been around for many many many many more years than Wayland has been good enough to use. I think that’s about it.
Arch is definitely the most stable and usable distro for me as well. Fedora and suse shit the bed constantly when I used them. I assume arch has the same image problem due to legacy. I know when I first tried Manjaro maybe 7-10 years ago because everyone said how great it was, doing a simple pacman update after install immediately bricked the computer. My experience with endeavor has been perfect, other than the poor spelling of the team.
Note all of the arch stuff above is for servers. I can’t stand Linux for laptop use, it’s not worth the effort.
I’d been a windows user since the DOS / 3.1 days and converted to Linux maybe 2~ years ago. I’ve found that I’m able to tailor the desktop experience (on desktop / laptop) to exactly what I need. No shitware getting in the way or annoying bundled programs.
My laptop has decent battery life and standby gives me no issues, perfect in my eyes.
I can’t stand windows anymore, and I’m not one to lash out and buy a macbook to just experience another desktop enviornment / user experience.
Admittedly there isnt any professional use just browsing / games with some codium usage.
I occasionally try it out. I do still think Mac is the worst by far, it’s fanbois I will never understand. Linux always has issues when I try it on laptop hardware. Obviously the standard response is “oh that specific hardware doesn’t work with Linux, but good news you can use this different hardware that isnt in your laptop, and also Linux supports so many more hardware types than windows; none of the ones you need, but like, in general, you know?”
It does seem like most people in Linux have had bad experiences with one distro or another, but eventually find one that works for them…then conveniently forget how much of a pain installing several different operating systems is.
You see this all the time in Linux forums (why did you use endeavor, didn’t you know arch is hard? Why did you use void, sure it’s one of the top rated distros on distrowatch but that’s for hardcore Linux users. Why did you use mint, it’s always super outdated. Why did you use suse, I’ve never had anything but issues with it and while yast was cool the whole distro was just weird. Why did you use debian, debian is super out of date. Why did you use Ubuntu, they are spyware and have snaps which suck…).
Last time I tried it for a month-ish and it was meh. I missed mpc-hc, none of the qt clones were quite good enough (and I ended up having to edit and rebuild myself just to get the behavior right even though cloning mpc-hc is literally the whole purpose). IR Camera driver didn’t work so no howdy support. Power management was a mess, it was constantly spinning up the fan to wild levels. The battery didn’t last particularly long. I tried fixing these things but it’s just not worth my time. In contrast with windows I install a crack to permanently bypass the online account nagging, open group policy and fully disable Cortana/copilot, install search everything to replace windows search with something good, pop open unigetui to install all the software I like, and I’m up and running.
There are still many things that don’t work on Wayland, which work perfectly fine on X11. If you don’t need any of them then Wayland is perfectly fine, but many people do need them.
For example programs can’t read from or interact with windows of other programs, so for example a time tracking application can’t work, or productivity scripts using xdotool don’t have a Wayland way to work.
I would love for you to dispel the problem I wrote about: how to find the list of open windows (and whether they are focused or not), for time tracking. I don’t believe kdotool can do that, from what I see.
I’m aware how buggy it was not that long ago when I first tried it, but once I switched my desktop over I need to use wayland unless I want to lock all my monitors to the same refresh rate. It’s fine. Not really had any issues in the last 6 months, and also enables HDR and freesync, though not at the same time because there’s a flickering issue with HDR and sync.
xx-zones, ext-tray and dbus_annotations are the only protocols I think add anything of value at this point, wayland is pretty close to feature complete, it’s on clients for the most part at this point
Man, I really don’t understand what the issues with Wayland are. Granted, I’m new here and a pretty basic user so there’s some underlying issue that seems to be breaking people’s setups, I guess I just haven’t encountered it. I went from using Mint for like a month before I switched to Arch. And I only did that because my second screen was acting goofy on Mint and I figured in for a penny in for a pound, let’s see why people are so afraid of this distro and haven’t had any serious issues in the past two years.
My issue with Wayland is just that not everything supports it. I tried switching to Wayland this year and immediately I ran into issues with software that weren’t compatible, like Steamlink would not stream over Wayland, but switching back to X11 it streamed just fine. At least in my experience, Wayland itself is not the problem, but developers not supporting Wayland is the problem. The moment I run into just one program that I want to use that doesn’t work with Wayland, I am going to permanently switch back to X11. I think most users think that way. Most don’t want to switch back and forth to use a program, if a single program doesn’t work they will just revert to X11 and stay within X11.
Understandable, though in the case of Steamlink, I just stopped using Steamlink. Though my thought process was, I’d rather get a $30 dock for my Steam Deck then switch to X11 but I’m stubborn ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’m the same with systemd. I’m aware it gets a lot of hate from people but I dunno, seems fine to me. It’s never given me any trouble that I can think of.
For most ”laymen” Wayland works just fine. I prefer Wayland because it has proper support for fractional scaling, which is a must for monitors with higher resolution than 1080p.
I prefer Wayland because I use a 2-in-1 ThinkPad. No thanks X11, I don’t want a click on touch mouse pointer.
Wayland has been around for many many many many more years than Wayland has been good enough to use. I think that’s about it.
Arch is definitely the most stable and usable distro for me as well. Fedora and suse shit the bed constantly when I used them. I assume arch has the same image problem due to legacy. I know when I first tried Manjaro maybe 7-10 years ago because everyone said how great it was, doing a simple pacman update after install immediately bricked the computer. My experience with endeavor has been perfect, other than the poor spelling of the team.
Note all of the arch stuff above is for servers. I can’t stand Linux for laptop use, it’s not worth the effort.
I’d been a windows user since the DOS / 3.1 days and converted to Linux maybe 2~ years ago. I’ve found that I’m able to tailor the desktop experience (on desktop / laptop) to exactly what I need. No shitware getting in the way or annoying bundled programs.
My laptop has decent battery life and standby gives me no issues, perfect in my eyes.
I can’t stand windows anymore, and I’m not one to lash out and buy a macbook to just experience another desktop enviornment / user experience.
Admittedly there isnt any professional use just browsing / games with some codium usage.
I occasionally try it out. I do still think Mac is the worst by far, it’s fanbois I will never understand. Linux always has issues when I try it on laptop hardware. Obviously the standard response is “oh that specific hardware doesn’t work with Linux, but good news you can use this different hardware that isnt in your laptop, and also Linux supports so many more hardware types than windows; none of the ones you need, but like, in general, you know?”
It does seem like most people in Linux have had bad experiences with one distro or another, but eventually find one that works for them…then conveniently forget how much of a pain installing several different operating systems is.
You see this all the time in Linux forums (why did you use endeavor, didn’t you know arch is hard? Why did you use void, sure it’s one of the top rated distros on distrowatch but that’s for hardcore Linux users. Why did you use mint, it’s always super outdated. Why did you use suse, I’ve never had anything but issues with it and while yast was cool the whole distro was just weird. Why did you use debian, debian is super out of date. Why did you use Ubuntu, they are spyware and have snaps which suck…).
Last time I tried it for a month-ish and it was meh. I missed mpc-hc, none of the qt clones were quite good enough (and I ended up having to edit and rebuild myself just to get the behavior right even though cloning mpc-hc is literally the whole purpose). IR Camera driver didn’t work so no howdy support. Power management was a mess, it was constantly spinning up the fan to wild levels. The battery didn’t last particularly long. I tried fixing these things but it’s just not worth my time. In contrast with windows I install a crack to permanently bypass the online account nagging, open group policy and fully disable Cortana/copilot, install search everything to replace windows search with something good, pop open unigetui to install all the software I like, and I’m up and running.
There are still many things that don’t work on Wayland, which work perfectly fine on X11. If you don’t need any of them then Wayland is perfectly fine, but many people do need them.
For example programs can’t read from or interact with windows of other programs, so for example a time tracking application can’t work, or productivity scripts using xdotool don’t have a Wayland way to work.
Both of these use cases are needed to me.
Major desktop environments have an override for global interaction.
xdotoolhas been ported to kwin viakdotool.Any other imaginary problems standing in your way I can help dispel?
I would love for you to dispel the problem I wrote about: how to find the list of open windows (and whether they are focused or not), for time tracking. I don’t believe
kdotoolcan do that, from what I see.My main issue is the lack of xdotool support. It can’t ever be supported because of the way Wayland isolates processes from each other.
See https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d1f2277
I’m aware how buggy it was not that long ago when I first tried it, but once I switched my desktop over I need to use wayland unless I want to lock all my monitors to the same refresh rate. It’s fine. Not really had any issues in the last 6 months, and also enables HDR and freesync, though not at the same time because there’s a flickering issue with HDR and sync.
xx-zones, ext-tray and dbus_annotations are the only protocols I think add anything of value at this point, wayland is pretty close to feature complete, it’s on clients for the most part at this point