Unpopular Opinion: Linux world felt stable until Wayland/GTK4 arrived
Posted by Borderlinerr@reddit | linux | View on Reddit | 49 comments
I remember I was having a blast on XFCE Gtk3 on X11, and then the catastrophe happened: distros forcing users on Wayland, the push to libadwaita & GTK4, Plasma 6 introduction which was buggy as hell at first. Now even after years of these changes, my Linux setups don't feel snappy and fast anymore. They're laggy, jagged animations, input delays and stutters, it just doesn't feel right. I truly hate Wayland for it and the people who pushed this junk in it's current state which is half-baked an buggy. Why the hell do we even need two display managers? They could've done what XLibre is doing and just muster up some courage and clean the existing code instead of putting all the developers, driver programmers and end users through intense pain just to get a very basic need fulfilled. Linux is perfect to me, but the introduction of wayland absolutely destroyed its perfectness.
araujoms@reddit
Ah yes, XLibre, the MAGA display server. That's the future of software right there. Not Wayland, the display server anyone with a sliver of sanity and competence is working on.
Sure, go with XLibre, have fun. In a couple of years please let us know how that turned out for you.
SEI_JAKU@reddit
Right, because XLibre is a psyop to get people disillusioned on X11 altogether. And judging by the ridiculous upvotes/downvotes on anything Wayland/X11 related, this has been wildly successful.
XLibre is terrible, but so is Wayland. Both are poorly thought out projects made by bad actors. It's that simple.
araujoms@reddit
Wow, that's quite a display of self-confidence, ignorance, and a conspiratorial mindset.
SEI_JAKU@reddit
"Self-confidence" where, when I have said anything about what I'm doing? "Ignorance" where, what have I said that's actually wrong? Why are the people actively engaging in problematic nonsense allowed to distort the people calling them out for it like this?
araujoms@reddit
This is nonsense.
This is not only absurd, but a demonstration that you don't have the faintest clue about the projects.
SEI_JAKU@reddit
I noticed you completely dropped that bizarre "self-confidence" claim.
Can you actually prove either of these things in a meaningful way that isn't just "nuh uh" (what you're doing) or regurgitating the party line (what everyone else does)?
araujoms@reddit
I didn't drop it, I merely saw no need to repeat something so patently obvious.
And I won't waste "proving" anything to you. It's all public information, just read up on the subject and stop embarrassing yourself.
SEI_JAKU@reddit
"Patently obvious", yet anything about me was never part of what I had to say at all. Wonderful.
I have researched this, and I have had to deal with these situations on an almost daily basis. That is why I'm saying what I'm saying. It doesn't conform with your broken reality, but that doesn't mean it's wrong.
araujoms@reddit
Yeah right, you have totally researched this. I'm looking forward to seeing your sources then about XLibre being psyops and Wayland being "poorly thought out" and done by "bad actors".
Guggel74@reddit
For me, it's the opposite. Everything is going well and smooth here.
proton_badger@reddit
Yeah, I've used Linux since the late nineties and for me it it the best it has ever been; System management is now incredibly capable and convenient, my filesystem does checksumming to detect corruption instead of it going unnoticed and supports neat things like reflinks, my display and DE is slick and smooth and sound system is highly configurable and has very useful plugins.
CornFleke@reddit
We don't need two display manager, we just kept X11 because wayland was not good enough for most people so you will still have the choice to use X11 if needed.
For the developers, they have the right to work on whatever they feel is right, you can disagree but you can't really impose your opinion on them.
SEI_JAKU@reddit
What do you think this huge push for Wayland is? Do you really believe it's organic?
CornFleke@reddit
Let's admit for the sake of the argument that they wanted to impose wayland for dogmatical or ideological reasons, they still have the right impose their vision on their users but you can't do the same. Why? Because it's their software.
If debian wants to organise itself in a way that made so that they adopted wayland, if you disagree you can just use another distro or accept it. If gnome devs wants to build their DE on systemd they have the right to do so if you want to do otherwise you fork it or else you accept that. I don't believe that the users have the right to impose on the devs what they should follow or not, devs have to assume that if they made a move considered to be bad people could stop using their software, and users have to accept that they don't "own" the time and the efforts that the devs are putting in the software.
SEI_JAKU@reddit
Hold up, wait, stop for a moment. Before you go any further, I want to make something very clear. If Debian of all distros went full Wayland, then one of two things must be true: either Debian of all distros is totally compromised and no longer worthwhile, or Wayland is finally genuinely at a point where it's worth using. Either outcome would be incredible and worth so much more than some random point in a desperate attempt at playing devil's advocate for Wayland.
This isn't about "users imposing demands on devs", this is about other devs imposing on devs what kind of users they're allowed to have. It is not that simple at all. The problems with Wayland have absolutely nothing to do with the problems with Flatpak or whatever.
CornFleke@reddit
That's up to the distro to decide if they feel that either of these things are true and what are their priorities. Debian was my main example because it's a well known distro and it has a pretty "original" way or organising itself, that's why I choose it.
If we take ubuntu it is entirely owned by canonical so it's the company that decides on the things to do. Either way we still have people hat are excluded from the decisions and that we don't necessarily seek approuval from.
I didn't understand your second argument. If gnome decides to drop X11 and to only build gnome with wayland in mind, it's a gnome decision, you either agree to that and you use the software or you fork it and find a way to make X11 work, for the rest xwayland is still there to make X11 apps runs inside of wayland.
Or are you talking about wayland devs wanting to impose wayland on everything? From my understanding wayland was started by X11 devs that no longer wanted to work with X11 because they thought that the code was too messy to work with. We had many years and no team arise to fix the issues of X11 and taking the torch or fully forking it into another display manager. We had Mir as an alternative but then Canonical killed it. So what are we suppose to do? The only display manager with a big team is wayland so we adopt wayland. We can't just expect another project to arrive out of thin air, if no one is working on another display manager, no other display manager will ever arrive. If the people that worked on X11 are abandoning X11 then we also have to abandon it sooner or later.
SEI_JAKU@reddit
Really can't help but wonder if you're even aware of what Debian actually is. "A pretty 'original' way of organising itself" is not at all how that distro should be described or thought about by anyone. It is the bedrock on which the vast majority of Linux functions. Any decision that Debian makes, any standard that Debian adopts, must automatically became the decisions and standards that all other distros have to see as a target if nothing else.
So you see the completely constructed situation, but instead of asking yourself if any of it is genuine, you simply accept it at face value and declare inevitabilities. Meanwhile, Wayland continues to utterly not work, XLibre continues to be a waste of time, and everyone else just wants to pretend that everything is somehow okay.
This is the exact kind of thing that makes people want to just give up on this whole Linux thing and become full-on Linux haters, you do understand this?
Borderlinerr@reddit (OP)
Every window looks different now. Devs were already having a hard time porting to gtk3, and before that was complete they introduced gtk4, and even before that port was complete, they're moving to gtk5 with TONS of deprecations. To me that's terrible engineering
Traditional_Hat3506@reddit
Clearly you never had to work with any of the things you are trying to demonize so why are you even speaking on behalf of some imaginary devs?
GTK 3 released a decade after GTK 2 at which point GTK 2 was placed into maintenance mode. GTK 4 released a decade after GTK 3 at which point GTK 3 was placed into maintenance mode. GTK 5 hasn't even started development yet. Devs have a whole decade to switch to the next major version while their current one stays maintained.
CornFleke@reddit
Okay it is terrible engineering but if the devs of GTK wants to add more features of the one working on libadwaita want to change the look of their apps they can do it.
Yes if you want a fully coherent desktop that can be an issue but I will not say that the devs of kdenlive are bad for not wanting to port it to gtk and libadwaita and letting it as a QT app. Ultimately the freedom lies with the devs, if you disagree you can try to voice it, if they refuse you can fork it, if you can't then you will have to accept that or find alternatives.
SEI_JAKU@reddit
Be advised that XLibre isn't great either. It was created by a bad actor in his own right, nobody is really working on it, and it doesn't seem to have a future. At this point, I believe that this was at least partially intentional, to steer people away from X11 once and for all. Naturally, the Wayland shills laughed me out of the room, just as they're doing to you. Wayland shills run the show around here, and XLibre killed a lot of the enthusiasm for resistance. It fits way too neatly.
sheeproomer@reddit
Yes and avoid anything Fedora and Redhat, because its parent company went to bed with something 80 years ago. Also avoid the car brand VW.
SEI_JAKU@reddit
I hope you don't think you're funny or something. Nice to know that you don't really know anything about Red Hat or VW, I guess?
As a corporation, Red Hat is genuinely suspicious, and they always have been. They are perhaps better than Canonical, but it's quite easy for them to become just as bad at any time. Red Hat does push things onto the public, not necessarily out of merit and entirely through corporate pressure: systemd is the diamond standard example. Blah blah "80 years ago" nothing.
Volkswagen shouldn't be avoided because of "alleged Nazi ties" (much of what they are today is due in part to the British anyway) or whatever, they should be avoided because they typically make terrible cars and constantly pull shady corporate nonsense. They are very much the GM of Europe and everyone knows it. And that's in the EU where you can at least try to afford the damned things. For anyone outside of the EU, any other European car make would be a smarter decision.
InfiniteSheepherder1@reddit
When Fedora switched to Wayland by default I didn't even notice at work, if not for the Paradox Launcher being broken on not x11 until like late 2018 i want to say I wouldn't have noticed too much beyond suddenly now I have less tearing issues.
Libadwaita and GTK4 is when Linux truly felt fast to me it is when we got really robust GPU acceleration and GNOME got even better looking then.
The developers of X11 moved to Wayland because they felt x11 was not maintainable anymore. https://youtu.be/RIctzAQOe44
natermer@reddit
Nothing in your post makes any sense.
XFCE didn't have even experimental Wayland support until Dec of last year with the 4.2.0 release and since then there hasn't been any major releases.
So if you were impacted by Wayland then that means you went out of your way. Nobody forced anything on you.
sublime_369@reddit
With Linux there are always the type who sit on old technologies until the bitter end, then when it becomes undeniable that it's unmaintainable.. the inevitable gnashing of teeth and complaining that it SHOULD be maintained.. but always of course by 'somebody else' because the whingers won't develop anything, they won't fund anything.. they'll just do what whingers do.
VoidDuck@reddit
I don't get your point: Xfce is still using GTK3 and X11, what's preventing you from using it and still having a blast?
SEI_JAKU@reddit
Because this recent trend has clearly shown that those days are numbered.
Robbi_Blechdose@reddit
Nobody is "putting the developers, driver programmers [...] through intense pain". The developers started wayland because X11 was such an unmaintainable mess and it was easier to start fresh with a properly designed architecture.
SEI_JAKU@reddit
It's blatantly clear at this point that this isn't really what happened, even if it might have been the very initial intent. Please don't whitewash Wayland like this.
Borderlinerr@reddit (OP)
What now? This doesn't support wayland, that doesn't support wayland. Oh are you on X11? Are you on wayland? This is pure hell, nobody should ultimately care about the display servers. I'm not against wayland philosophy at all, just don't push unstable garbage into stable repos that's it.
nightblackdragon@reddit
I don't know anything about popularity of your opinion but I do know it's not true. You surely don't remember the unstable mess that was KDE Plasma 4 and the first versions of GNOME and GTK 3 and that was years before Wayland was resembling anything useful. If anything state of Linux GUI is much better than it use to be because current versions of KDE and GNOME are way more stable and usable than Plasma 4 and GNOME 3 used to be. Same goes for Linux drivers, what we have now it's way better than the things we had 10 years ago.
We always had more than one display manager, even on X11. You probably meant compositor and the answer is - why not? X11 already tried to be for everything that resulted in big and complicated codebase that is not only not very efficient but has its own issues that are difficult or even impossible to fix without major rewrite. Wayland compositors are way less complicated and they can focus on doing their job in proper and efficient way.
XLibre is not doing anything significant, most of development activity is focused on code refactoring and clean-ups, if they start making big changes and fixing X11 biggest flaws they will need to sooner or later break API and ABI which is something what Xorg developers are trying to avoid by not making unnecessary releases. Also compatibility is probably the biggest advantage of X11, if you don't care about it then why bother with X11 at all?
ir0nslug@reddit
oh my God... I stopped using Linux for about two years when KDE 4.0 and GNOME 3.0 were released. They were unbelievably broken! I remember KDE 4.0 had widgets for everything, even the desktop icons were widgets! Doing something as simple as moving your mouse across the screen would cause it to crash. GNOME 3.0 was just as awful, and you could barely even call it a desktop environment, Crashed just as much.. It was a joke compared to GNOME 2. I'm still a GNOME user today, but my experiences are much nicer for both DEs lmao. Those were some very dark times in linux if you used KDE or Gnome. Came out so close together too. :(
PaperDoom@reddit
I don't agree that the feeling of instability came about because of wayland, because everyone has been able to continue to use X this whole time. Up until recently, nobody has been forced onto wayland.
However, even if it were true that transitioning to wayland makes the space feel unstable, it was long overdue and a small period of instability is worth it in the long run to move away from X, which is completely unmaintainable at this point.
SchellingPointer@reddit
You're going to get downvoted to Tartarus for stating the obvious.
Gnome 3 should have been trashed at the ideation stage. GTK4 is a massive regression. Xorg isn't perfect but Wayland is a mistake. Just as the latest KDE/Plasma bugs get ironed out it's time to upgrade to the next major version of Qt. Constant churn is the reason the linux desktop experience is dogshit because everything is broken and nobody cares. Because "what's the use case?"
Borderlinerr@reddit (OP)
The moment they introduced systemd I knew everything else was about to depend on it or basically left to die
viva1831@reddit
It's the new culture - push incomplete software, call it "innovation" and "disruption". Wayland does have good ideas that are important, but the spec was simply not ready for production at the point it was pushed out to average users
This isn't going to end unfortunately. It's the culture now, with the exception of some distros. What we had before was the result of using a decades-old design (unix), and as the new stuff departs quite strongly from how things were always done, that in turn means they don't have so much testing and experience behind them
I think the worst part of destructive updating is how it's harmed accessibility, at least temporarily. Breaking things and starting from scratch is fun for devs, maybe less fun for users
Borderlinerr@reddit (OP)
Exactly my point
trowgundam@reddit
What is your hardware? Because I don't have any of these issues. Unless you are on a truly ancient GPU (talking a pre-Vulkan GPU, or a pre-10 series Nvidia GPU), Wayland should be fine. At worse some launchers (Battle.net in my case) are a bit flaky, but they were like that on Xorg too, so not really any different.
Also, why do we need Wayland? Because some things just aren't possible under Xorg, or would take such a massive refactor it would likely break Xorg anyways. Do you have two monitors? Well better hope they are the same refresh rate or don't need different scaling factors, because Xorg can't do that. Oh and forget about VRR if you have more than 1 monitor, even if they are identical. HDR? Ya never gonna happen under Xorg. Wayland as it is should be perfectly usable for like 90% of users, and for those others, it's not like X11 went anywhere. Go use it.
Borderlinerr@reddit (OP)
Intel Xeon with UHD 630, mouse lag all over the place, especially when moving to window titlebars
ParaboloidalCrest@reddit
I can't be happier with my headless Linux installation. It's serenity itself.
Rocky_boy996@reddit
Xorg is pretty unbloated so xorg is fine
formegadriverscustom@reddit
Bait used to be believable.
glotzerhotze@reddit
ain‘t nothing more stable than working on a command line with linux
sibelaikaswoof@reddit
My experience was quite the opposite before 2020 or so. Most distros were using X11 and pulseaudio by default, and for me, a bedroom musician who used multiple audio and midi devices, as well as two screens with different resolutions and refresh rates, Linux was unusable. Sure, I could have spent hours figuring out how to configure audio and video to ensure it doesn't break on the next reboot but nobody has time for that.
Now, with Wayland and Pipewire, low latency audio not only works perfectly out of the box but the performance, latency and stability wise, is much better than on Windows and on par with macOS. Audio routing is so effortless and efficent I can actually play guitar live with zero noticeable latency while watching a YouTube video on a dual core laptop from 2015...
bawng@reddit
I'm having a much nicer experience on Wayland then X. Fractional scaling never worked properly for me.
transconductor@reddit
It's interesting how different the experiences are. Wayland has fixed quite a few things for me. And I was impressed by how much works ootb on Sway compared to i3.
I think that it's a little harsh to tell volunteers to "muster up". Especially because no one even wanted to work on some of the X11 stuff at all. And they probably would have rewritten most of it anyways, breaking stuff in the process. X11 is ancient by computing standards.
I understand that this post is a rant, though. And I can see how this transition has been frustrating.
Afaik it's still possible to stay on X11? I know some folks who do at least.
SomeRedTeapot@reddit
Eh, for me personally Wayland is smoother and has less input delay. With X11, either a window was lagging behind the cursor when dragging, or I had to disable vsync and live with screen tearing. Now on Wayland it's smooth and doesn't have that lag
mattias_jcb@reddit
No one forced anyone. They released new versions of their software. It's up to you to run it or not.