Wayland. It comes up a lot: “Bug X fixed in the Plasma Wayland session.” “The Plasma Wayland session has now gained support for feature Y.” And it’s in the news quite …
So most complaints you read about Wayland missing this or that (such as fractional scaling, or screen sharing, or global shortcuts) from over a year or two ago are likely to be wrong today.
Is fractional scaling in Wayland really working now? I tried it a while ago and everything was blurry mess.
Just tried it on my laptop and xwayland apps are still blurry mess, even after restart. However, all apps I use now has Wayland support that can be enabled with some flags or environmental variables, so they are actually usable now with fractional scaling. Finally I can use my laptop with 175% scaling, which is much more comfortable than 200% scaling.
In display settings check the box to allow x11 apps to scale themselves instead of the compositor. Your cursor will still be blurry but the app content itself will be fine. A few apps like steam won’t scale without some kind of launch flag though.
I assumed you were on KDE since the dev who wrote the blog post was talking about KDE Wayland but are you on gnome? Gnome"s fractional scaling implementation isn’t as good as KDE’s.
Great article. I’m currently still on X because Plasma 5 doesn’t handle fractional scaling well. As soon as that changes (Plasma 6?) I’ll be jumping over to Wayland.
Note that there’s now a solution for this in Wayland compositors that support the InputCapture portal. This should work on the latest (or next? not sure) version of Input Leap and GNOME 45 (which launches as part of Fedora 39)
Oh, that sounds like an interesting idea. Currently stuck with teams at work. Screen sharing does work under wayland. But definitely going to try this.
Don’t let Slack launch at startup. As long as it launches after pipewire - everything works. Your can also restart it to fix sharing issue, but that can be a birch if you already started a call.
Is there a way to control the launch order? I suppose you could also find a script that waits for a given process to be responsive before launching another, but I’m not sure where I’d insert that either.
(I’ve been using Ubuntu mostly out-of-the-box so far and just now started having the time and energy to start learning about and fiddling with the internals)
I’m not sure that would work. Pipewire probably starts via system (just takes a while to become functional) and slack is started by KDE. I guess you could just add a delay to slack’s start, but I just start it by hand.
Starting by hand is fine and I do it with just about anything I need anyway (though I suspect there is still some startup bloat I’ll need to sort out, if I don’t set up an entirely new system somewhere down the line), but don’t underestimate my compulsion to automate what I can (or at least know how to).
I’m a sucker for automation for automation’s sake :D
Because Pipewire only handles and understands media streams, so it can stream the output of a window or the whole desktop, but only because the Wayland compositor has already composed the windows and other data it gets from the application to a visual and hands the final result to Pipewire.
Because it is convenient for programs to use Pipewire for screensharing, as those programs can then also use the same Pipewire support for all their audio and webcam needs. Also Pipewire is good at multiplexing the various media streams.
And what developers will hammer their apps to one sound server implementation? What is convenient here? Loosing interoperability? You always can use Wayland for screensharing, ALSA for sound and V4L2 for webcam.
A V4L2 camera can only be opened by a single application at a time, but if that application is Pipewire, then Pipewire can allow multiple applications to make use of it simultaneously. Same thing with ALSA, it’s the reason sound servers exist at all, though I suspect you’re already familiar with that.
I also hear that ALSA has some support for multiple applications per device nowadays, though I understand it is much less pleasant to use than a fully featured sound server.
To be fair v4l2 sometimes needs additional processing to allow multiple processes to use same webcam at same time. At least for those applications who use libv4l because I’ve seen mentions that this is because for some reason libv4l checks that camera is not in use.
Reading the fucking manual suggests that V4L2 is totally fine with multiple programs using same webcam without any workarounds, just only one program can set resolution and other stuff.
EDIT: found mentions of dmix in 2004. Will I find mention from 2003 to finish with round number? Also hardware mixing was in ALSA since creation, but it required hardware(thanks, cap).
I live in a time where I don’t need to edit config files by hand to allow using multiple applications with the same audio output, since I use a sound server. If you’re willing to do it by hand, then by all means continue. Though it does seem that ALSA has had support for automatically setting up dmix since 2005, after PulseAudio was released.
I also don’t know if resampling and the like is automatically handled when using dmix, but perhaps you can tell me that, since it sounds like you have experience with it?
Reading the fucking manual suggests that […]
How about we keep a good fucking tone. Yes, that’s great. However my experience is that programs all want to set those properties without a way to disable it, so in practice it doesn’t really matter.
Yeah, as you mention hardware mixing used to be an option, but AFAIK hardware generally hasn’t supported that for a long time.
Another reason to use Pipewire is to enable sandboxed access to multimedia devices, for use with things like Flatpak or Snap.
I live in a time where I don’t need to edit config files by hand to allow using multiple applications with the same audio output
You don’t need to. It just works out of box.
after PulseAudio was released.
And after JACK. And PulseAudio development started after JACK was released.
I also don’t know if resampling and the like is automatically handled when using dmix, but perhaps you can tell me that, since it sounds like you have experience with it?
Eiher by dmix or by libalsa since I never had issues with samplerate.
How about we keep a good fucking tone.
Not to offend you, just saying that reading manual is one of the best ways to get information.
However my experience is that programs all want to set those properties without a way to disable it, so in practice it doesn’t really matter.
For some reason. I don’t remember having such issue, but I also don’t remember using same webcam in two applications for sure, but I think I used v4l2loopback “webcam” in VLC and chromium at the same time.
Another reason to use Pipewire is to enable sandboxed access to multimedia devices, for use with things like Flatpak or Snap.
Well, /dev/videoX can be forwarded to sandbox. Snap and Flatpak are not designed to be a sandboxes.
I also hear that ALSA has some support for multiple applications per device nowadays, though I understand it is much less pleasant to use than a fully featured sound server.
FYI
Many older sound chips had hardware support for mixing multiple streams, and so the alsa drivers for those happily allowed multiple apps to open and write to the /dev/snd/whatever device. Life was good and people got used to doing it this way.
Nowadays (since like 2000 lol), sound chips generally expect a single pre-mixed stream. So the sound device for those is exclusive open. The libalsa devs made it possible to have the first app to open the sound device act as the sound server for every other app that tries to open it later. But it was complicated and fragile and just a bad idea in retrospect.
I’d argue lazy choice of wrapping your website inside chrome instead of building a native app is Slack’s issue.
I also wonder whether Slack fixed it or just waited for Google to fix it since Slack seems to only have UI designers and no actual devs on their team. They keep pumping out useless UI changes while actual bugs take years to fix.
Many Electron maintainers are Slack employees. They’re contributing upstream more than most other companies that use Electron, especially compared to their size.
Try using XWayland video bridge. It should allow any XWayland apps to use screen sharing. Unfortunately most distros either don’t ship it yet or ship broken versions but you can download nightly Flatpaks from Gitlab CI
I’m not sure why, but every time I use XWayland Video Bridge (installed as of about 2 days ago so it should still be pretty new), I just end up with a black screen being broadcasted - not sure what could be causing that.
Stagnation isn’t always evil, it’s just part of tech. Once tech solves the problem it set out to, it should stagnate. Adding more bells and whistles makes things better less often than it makes them bloated and more prone to breaking. On the flipside, software that hasn’t changed much other than bugfixes and security patches is the backbone of a loooot of our tech infrastructure. Edit: @SkyeStarfall provides an excellent refutation, with counterexamples showing where lack of new features is hurting X11 here (direct link broke for me on lemmy.ml, hence the redirect)
I fail to see how the architectural difference fundamentally solves the issue of changes breaking compatibility. Now instead of breaking compatibility with the server, you’re “only” breaking compatibility with the compositor. But that’s okay because at least there are other compositors that fulfill this use case… oops switching to that compositor broke 3 of your other apps, well lets try another! … and now my pc won’t communicate with my GPU… well, we can always… and so on and so on.
Not saying that wayland is bad nor that X is better, but these are the two most common “cases against X/for wayland” that I hear and I just don’t buy it. As much as I argued against it, I love trying new and different software and eking every last bit of performance out of my 8 year old PCs, I can’t wait to give Wayland a try and see if there’s a noticeable difference… I just wish these two arguments would go away already
The issue is that X was never a mature, feature-complete, stable project. It was always a hideous and bloated hodgepodge of disparate and barely working patches. The entire point of Wayland is to do exactly what you say tech should do: solve the particular problem (graphics server) well and cleanly, and limit itself to a definable set of features so it can actually reach that point of stability.
The issue is that X was never a mature, feature-complete, stable project.
Looool. It was too stable, which means stagnation.
bloated hodgepodge of disparate and barely working patches.
You mean bloated protocol or bloated implementation? Because kwin_wayland is pretty bloated.
The entire point of Wayland is to do exactly what you say tech should do: solve the particular problem (graphics server) well and cleanly, and limit itself to a definable set of features so it can actually reach that point of stability.
Tying graphics server to audio server is very clean.
For 1., the big issue is that there constantly are appearing new standards in display technologies. Two semi-recent examples are HDR and VRR, both of which X11 struggles with, and implementing those into X11 has been said to be painful by its developers.
This is an excellent counterexample to claim 1, and I wish this was the top response to my comment. It not only negates the claim that “maintenance mode” isn’t bad, it also provides specific examples of when it is bad.
Stagnation here specifically does mean that nobody is making bug fixes or security patches anymore. Xorg is abandoned, kaput, a former software project.
The new architecture allows developers to fix one thing without accidentally breaking 3 others.
Then the problem is that it’s abandoned, not that it has stagnated (which can also be phrased as “stabilized” depending entirely on context and the speaker’s/author’s personal feelings about the project). Once again, I’m not saying that Xorg is good, but that particular critique needs to stop; it’s major flaw is that even the “maintainers” are sick of it and want it to die, not that it has ceased major developments.
Even the article acknowledges this:
Having something as central as the window server being unmaintained is a major issue, as it means no bug fixes, no security patches…
But it also falls into the “Bells and whistles” side of the critique immediately after:
… and no new features
and it even starts of explaining the problems with X by saying it’s in “maintenance mode.” I couldn’t care less about new features, the Pareto principle implies 80% of users don’t need new features regardless of how much dopamine they get from seeing the marketing hype. “Maintenance mode” isn’t a bad thing, it’s a good thing. Abandoned projects that most GUIs still rely on is a disaster waiting to happen.
The new architecture allows developers to fix one thing without accidentally breaking 3 others.
That’s an extremely bold claim, and vague, with no actual examples. Do I take it on faith that changing code can break things with X? Yes, but I, having worked with code, just assume that’s what happens to all software. Do I believe that Wayland has found a way to do away with that problem of software architecture (and not necessarily protocol architecture)? Not unless they’ve somehow found a way to compartmentalize every single module such that every aspect is fully isolated and yet has interfaces for every potential use case that could ever be dreamed up. Any devs in the comments want to pipe up and let me know how that endeavor has worked for them in past projects?
The new architecture allows developers to fix one thing without accidentally breaking 3 others.
That’s an extremely bold claim, and vague, with no actual examples.
The problem is not the code per se, but that we can’t add stuff anymore that doesn’t somehow break the core protocol. The plain fact is that we’ve been tacking on things to X11 which it was never designed to do for decades and we reached a breaking point a while ago.
Stuff like multi-DPI setups are impossible to implement in X11’s single-framebuffer model; security on X11 is non-existent, but we can’t retroactively fit any kind of permissions on the protocol as that breaks X11 applications that (rightfully) assumed they could get a pixmap from the root window. There’s so much more, just take look at www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44
Then the problem is that it’s abandoned, not that it has stagnated
By all means, feel free to start working on it!
All the people who developed Xorg for 20+ years decided that creating and working on Wayland was a better use of their time. But I’m sure you know better…
The problem isn’t that Xorg is spaghetti code (it’s pretty good for a large C project, imho). The problem is that the X11 protocol was designed to expose the capabilities of 1980s display hardware.
Wayland will become a spaghetti too, unless you do “compositorhop” because one compositor is not complete and need to use another, idk if this would be a good idea
Gamescope makes the experience a lot better with steam at least for me in swaywm. I experimented with running each game in gamescope using launch options but with gamescope’s mediocre support of the steam overlay some multiplayer invite stuff doesn’t work correctly. Running steam in bigpicture within gamescope pretty much solves all these issues and seems to improve performance too.
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