They ran
rm -rfin their root directory.deleted by creator
So I only just got into linux this year. I gave some X11 distro’s a go, but the screen tearing was awwwwfulll. So I’ve been running Wayalnd/Plasma for months now.
What exactly am I missing out on? Seems lots of users here still favor X11 over wayland but as I’ve never had any problems. It’s still unclear to me why people are still sticking with X11.
If you’re fine with Wayland, go with Wayland. There are lots of reasons still that people might prefer X11 but the list has been getting shorter.
- The security model of Wayland is more restrictive than necessary for many users and means things like screen sharing and desktop toys are harder and not universally implemented or doable.
- Wayland effectively requires many things to be handled by the same process, preventing traditional modular environments (e.g. separating window manager from compositor no longer possible)
- Explicit compositor support required for more features, meaning having a feature complete environment in small projects is much harder, and the design of Wayland tends to promote a few large desktop environments rather than many small window managers.
- NVidia’s support for Wayland is still improving
- Wayland can’t rotate your screen to be on an angle to maximise the length of a line
- Several programs I rely on don’t support Wayland well yet
- Steam doesn’t stream from Wayland
- Transparent bits of FreeCAD show the background instead of what’s behind them
- Code-OSS required a very silly workaround for decent font rendering, although I think this might have been fixed in electron
I also switched to use different Wayland compositors many years ago for my main systems, but there are also still reasons to use X11. These are mine:
- X11 forwarding, with that you can connect to another system via SSH (e.g. via
ssh -Y) and just start a GUI app, and the window appears on your screen. - Sharing individual windows via WebRTC, with Wayland compositors you can normally only share full screens. Xserver allows applications to directly capture the window content of others.
- Easily mirroring screens for presentations, with some Wayland compositors you have to capture one screen and then play it back on another screen, with X11 that is integrated into the xserver.
- Automation and keyboard macros, with X11 it is much easier to automate keyboard macros and customize keyboard mapping than on Wayland. See Xmodmap, etc. Same for mouse input. That is also a reason why implementing remote control software is more difficult with Wayland, see for instance RustDesk support for Wayland (works now, but still a bit experimental).
There might be some Wayland compositors that worked around that, but on X11 this was standard. But generally X11 provides these features for all WMs, and in Wayland they have to be implemented individually.
And some just are not supposed to work, for security reasons.
But all of this depends on your use-case. I sometimes even (can or have to) go without a Wayland compositor or X11 and render GUI directly via KMS/DRM.
Multi-cursor support/multi focus
If I want two mice and monitors hooked up so me and another person can use the same computer independently it’s x11
I’ve seen some steps towards this on Wayland but it was in infancy last I checked
I think you can start two Wayland compositors, and change the compositor configuration to use different mice and outputs, but I never tried this.
Thanks for the tip
I’d wager that is true. I know, for sure, you can start one compositor inside another compositor. I do this all the time for gaming with
gamescope.
Automation and keyboard macros,
Isn’t there
xdotoolfor this?Yes, that is for X11. Now find one that works on all Wayland compositors, that doesn’t require root permissions.
I guess wtype is waylands replacement for xdotool? https://github.com/atx/wtype
Pretty good, however
wtypeis only sending keystrokes globally, with xdotool you can also move the mouse, send key events to specific windows and more.
- X11 forwarding, with that you can connect to another system via SSH (e.g. via
Wayland is the new protocol and will be the one that everything uses in the long run
If Wayland works for you, then that’s great, don’t use X11
The main reason you’d want to use X11 these days is for compatibility. But that’s getting less and less of a concern as time goes on
Xorg literally has a option to disable tearing:
Option "TearFree" "true. If that doesn’t work and your compositor neither, fix your video drivers. Lookup Hardware Video Acceleration and similiar on Arch wiki.That doesn’t answer that question though
Why not just use Wayland?
Because the DE / tool i’m used to isn’t wayland ready yet.
If you have no issues with Wayland, keep using it. You aren’t missing anything.
Linux is a vast space, and some people have use cases that aren’t covered by Wayland, yet.
So they still use X.They use it cause their desktop does not support wayland yet or their Nvidia card causes issue with it, potentially since they are using an older driver.
I like XFCE4 but there is no compositor for it yet.
It is in the works though. I’ll have to try it out when it lands
Nothing, unless you really want to use a DE that’s still lacking behind in its adoption. There are a few tools that still only offer early support for it (like RustDesk), but otherwise Wayland is a way better choice these days. However if you got an Nvidia GPU and need to use the proprietary driver you might be forced to still use X11. Their pile of garbage still routinely bugs on Wayland, and given their work on NVK I doubt that thing will ever get fully fixed.
This comic was posted in 2011 but still holds up today perfectly lol.
Gather around kids, story time. It was 2002 and I had a desktop pc with two video cards, one Matrox with dual video output (they were pretty much the only consumer ones with that at the time) on AGP slot, and one “something” (probably ATI, it still had and RCA port) on PCI. So I installed gentoo (from stage1, as it was custom at the time) and fiddled around with xorg.conf to have two monitors output from the Matrox and a third (yes, I had 3 monitors) from the ATI.
That’s when I understood the power of Linux (no way win2000 was able to do that).
“Story time” is just another word for “I’m showing my age”
It is a good way to know who’s a Grey Beard
Well, in case my username wasn’t clear enough lol
Even worse, its ChromeOS (ewwww)
I’m pretty sure it is because nobody knows. Xorg is a massive project that has tons and tons of duck tape.
They still use X. You must never go there.
As an X user I support this message.
I get the joke, but I’m getting tired of these very, very old memes being reposted ad-nauseam when they’re so outdated. I did not have to open the xorg.conf file for at least a decade, probably more. It was a very annoying thing to do, yes, but hasn’t been an issue for a lot of install in forever.
There’s a resurgence of these “but it’s very weird/difficult/annoying” outdated memes these last few weeks on a lot of websites, and at this point I’m wondering if it’s just people discovering them or just some people bashing linux systems based on their experience from the last century.
I did xorg.conffrom the example on Arch wiki and it worked. Then i did it the correct way from the official documentation and it didn’t.
I did not touch an xorg.conf file in forever and it just works out of the box, whether I’m running debian, kubuntu, or mint, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
My screen has graphical glitches on default 59.99 Htz, not on other frequencies. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
xrandr --rate 60. No need to mess withxorg.conf. And you put that on a start script to never have to type it again.
It’s people entering the Linux space and wanting to join the tribe by posting Linux memes they found on google.
I broke xorg.conf when i installed Linux Mint about a year ago, but i forgot what for. Ironically i never had issues with an Arch based distro.
X11 was worse
Y’all have Desktop Environments?
I remember when loading a GUI in *NIX systems was frown upon and would get you judged by your peers…
Yeah but that was before Hi-Res images of BBTs.
Y’all are still using xorg?
I am definitely going to need my morning coffee. I see the word “Y’all” and I’m somehow thinking “shouldn’t it be Xall if we’re taking about X11? Wait what’s wrong with my brain”
X trama
I still remember the old times before xorg.confs were modular. The truly hard times.
I remember when /bin/sh was the default shell, when you had to build grep from source. LILO was our bootloader. Dmesg was our seer. We made fire from a friction drill. Knapped our own blades from flint.
Simpler times.
… I don’t remember building grep, nor do I remember a time before bash.
Are… Are you God?
I was there when the dark magic was written. In the time before git. The shell had not yet been born again.
The great wizard Stahlman still held sway in the high court, his Gknights of Gnu were just building their kernel. Lo gaze upon their mighty works and see they lie in ruin.
Torvalds was the true vanguard, he lead us to build the mighty kernel, to reverse engineer the binary blobs, coax the meaning from machine code, a thin line from serial to stdout.
No heirarchy but those inherited from the libraries. User space was our land, ~ was our home, #! was our flag. No gods, no masters, only code.
Genuinely curious. When was your first time touching Linux/GNU?
'94 but I was on Usenet (actually probably not usenet but definitely one of the “readers”) when I heard about it first. That would’ve been around '93. Me and a buddy were pretty nerdy and his dad worked at Bell Labs and they got a couple floppies. That was my start. It was just the kernel and Gnu Utilities. Literally Linux+Gnu. Shortly after that I grabbed SLS Linux, that became Slack. Then Debian, I was in the listserve when Ian would still answer questions and fix bugs. I hope he’s found the peace now he was searching for in life.
I’ve contributed to quite a few open source projects over the years, nothing foundational. I didn’t really know anybody from the old old days. Just a geeky kid lucky enough to have a computer and a modem at the time. I am very privileged to have grown up when I did and where I did.
I don’t envy the kids coming up now. Completely abstracted away from their systems to the point where they actually think it’s magic. I had a very junior engineer ask me how to print a pdf the other week at work. I can’t imagine how modern education and tech have failed them. I hope I’m wrong but it feels like LLMs are talking away curiosity and hacking. I’m sure that’s just me being a crusty old bastard though.
Speaking of I’ve been having fun playing around with this as of late.
You’d need to have access to the prompt tooling, or worse yet the RAG, otherwise you’re just hoping that a user feeds your email into an LLM. The hidden ascii though, old tricks are new again.
I’m close, 93 also I think, slack on a 386.
Got stuck in vi, had to reboot.
Remember thinking how awesome 6 virtual consoles were. I think my tmux addiction came from there.
Lol! I thought vi was genuinely a new layer of the OS, like an embedded console. Ended up creating 10 files containing exit, or quit, or ^c, until I hit the escape key and the cursor changed…then I rebooted from frustration and actually read the man page. The controls are all from this dumb terminal keyboard that had useful decals on them. That’s where navigation with kjhl came from and :q to quit.
https://pikuma.com/blog/origins-of-vim-text-editor
Rage quitting vi/vim really is a right of passage.
Remember ed?
I dearly miss lilo, it was the best bootloader. But then everyone started using grub which I hated with a passion. So glad that there are so much better options nowadays.
Honestly, I’m still worried about getting pilloried for this. Systemd-boot on BTRFS with snapshotting is awesome. Bonus points if your system is entirely in initrd.
https://github.com/uszie/systemd-boot-snapshots
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/initrd.html
I was there, Gandalf, I was there when the modelines of xf86config failed…
professional tip for those who decided to rock Debian on a laptop with two GPU’s.
Envycontrol will take the headache away from manually configuring your xorg & xrandr, trust me, compared to the Debian documentation this will save you hours of your life.
Did they finally stop with that crap? Having 4k on a display size where it makes no sense but needs a dedicated GPU because iGPU were not good enough then.
…who… IN THE FUCK!!! Reads Debian docs?
Arch are the true Linux docs, maybe Gentoo docs, worst case Ubuntu forums.
Run a ton of Debian, only time I check their docs is when I’m trying to remember what the current stable release is called.
The Debian docs are pretty solid. Not as large as Arch but still just as useful
…who… IN THE FUCK!!! Reads Debian docs?
How else does one learn the distro they use without consulting the documentation?
Like I said, I use debian docs to install.
After that arch docs are INCREDIBLY thorough, they cover almost all of linux and are far more exhaustive than any other.
Like I said, I use debian docs to install.
You didn’t say that, you said.
only time I check their docs is when I’m trying to remember what the current stable release is called.
After that arch docs are INCREDIBLY thorough
Yeah I wouldn’t trust the documentation for another distribution on my install, you do you though.
I’ve had some good experience in the past. All the Debian specific information was properly documented in the packages README files.
I agree.
But honestly, how much Debian specific anything is there outside the install?
In fact debian is branded as the most boring vanilla distro there is, for good reason.
Almost everything Linux you do is better documented in the arch docs imho.
Honestly, Linux has progressed immensely the past decade and I only read documentation when setting up servers these days. I’m mostly an Arch derivative desktop user but I still love Debian on the server side.
The Debian specific stuff are usually in the service description (email, web, ssh servers), and they are quite nice.
Debian is godly for servers, stable, robust, and most software is supported one way or another.
Also none of that redhat bs like their management stack, or Ubuntu and snap.
Their only weakness was they were far dated on kernels and software and that changed over the last 5 years, they’re often ahead of ubuntu now.
My first choice is always freebsd if I don’t need kvm or docker and the software is there, arch if it’s more workstationy, Gentoo if I’m in a fun mood (mained it for years but it kept breaking), and finally Debian if I just want something that works.
Even with Debian, wrote an lxc-based stack so it’s often just a base for arch for fun and Ubuntu for work. This is where it truly shines.
I do that. Why not? Best source on Debian specific stuff.
mandb -su | man man
Can it force apps to use iGPU when dGPU is on? It’s one of the things I miss from windows and couldn’t figure out on linux
It has this hybrid option, that’s about it from what I know.
Set graphics mode to hybrid and enable fine-grained power control:
sudo envycontrol -s hybrid --rtd3Edit: the
—rtd3flag seems to have different levels of power management.--rtd3 [VALUE] Setup PCI-Express Runtime D3 (RTD3) Power Management on Hybrid mode. Available choices: 0, 1, 2, 3. Default if specified: 2
Funny how vocal Wayland haters used to be until they tried Wayland.
I mean, there was a point in time, quite some years back, when I had to do up modelines, but Xorg can generally handle things without an xorg.conf.
It has improved, but most developers working on Xorg have moved to Wayland. I’m not saying Xorg isn’t still useful at times, like forwarding over SSH, but Wayland has more isolation & security considerations, which can be seen as both an advantage & limitation. However, Wayland compositors have implemented most controls & protocols now to fill in the gaps.
Still gathering up my courage to make the switch. The better security / isolation between apps is a huge feature for me. But porting all of my shitty xorg-specific scripts and hacks will be a pain.
Still won’t handle popup menu correctly, still won’t allow copy/paste with CLI programs without using an extra, implementation-specific, piece of software, still won’t allow some window to correctly detect their position.
Wayland might be interesting, but between blind haters and blind supporters, it’s really annoying. Forcing people to switch while some basic features are “mostly working” is not helping.
still won’t allow copy/paste with CLI programs without using an extra, implementation-specific, piece of software
What are you referring to here? I haven’t noticed anything out of place on KDE regarding copy/paste…
vim can’t use the kde/wayland clipboard to copy/past properly, you have to script it through something. I’ve read it’s related to non foreground app not being able to manipulate the clipboard or something close to that, which a CLI app will never be.
There are “solutions”, mostly overriding vim behavior to write/read from that dedicated program, though. It’s not a show stopper, but not every software allow this kind of flexibility.
Do you really think ppl don’t break their wayland setup? For example, some systems don’t get a mouse cursor in wayland umless they switch the cursor to software rendering. To do that, they must often set an env var for the wayland process, but there is no standard way to do it. Half of them starts tinkering with their PAM and the others with their .profile . Sometimes this breaks every way to log in.
I’m sure some people do, but for the most part it is much better than X in that regard.
Dunno. Me and a friend had issues with Wayland, so we switched to X11 and that’s already like forty percent of Linux community.
Idk what I’ve traded to never have issues with that file, but I worry every day that the horror is ahead of me and not behind
