This Could Be Bad …

20 thoughts on “This Could Be Bad …”

• 3:04 Reminder: VSYNC =/= FPS CAP! It's an extremely important distinction!
  – The Windows approach is to use FIFO (First In – First Out) presentation mode: the first frame rendered is the one that's going to be displayed when monitor's next refresh cycle comes. Hence there's no point in rendering more frames during that period between finishing first frame and displaying it – we get a frame cap.
  – The Wayland approach is to use mailbox presentation mode: frames are being rendered without a frame cap and when monitor's refresh cycle comes it's the last fully finished frame that gets displayed, which is way more recent than the first frame.
  It's still not as fast as tearing, but it's pretty close, and definitely miles ahead of the Windows' frame-capped experience!
  Let's assume you're rendering at over 3x the monitor Hz:
  – FIFO will show you the 1st frame rendered, which is awfully old by the time it displays on screen;
  – Mailbox will show the 3rd frame, which is 2 frames-worth of time newer than the 1st frame
  Things worth noting:
  Mailbox presentation mode can be enabled on Windows at least on Nvidia, I think only for DX9-11 games, and they call it "Fast sync".
  Wayland's mailbox, as well as mailbox in general has its caveats:
  – mailbox might lead to microstutter at FPS around double of your monitor's Hz (you preferably want a stable FPS=~3xHz or even higher). It's especially noticeable in racing games.
  – on Nvidia KDE in particular: fullscreen XWayland windows get framecapped, you need to either make your game windowed, run as a native Wayland window or wait for the 545 driver which is supposed to fix this bug

• funnily enough, nvidia is actually more enjoyable for me on wayland than on xorg. the reason can be summarized in one word: optimus

• good progress being done. im really hyped for plasma 6, it seems like lots of small important things are being looked at, which is great to see.

• I only use wayland – I do not have any issues I can see and I tried to use x11 but it's terrible with gaming. I feel the choppy when playing games on x11 especially when playing competitive fps games. I use xwaylandvideobridge for any type of screen sharing until wayland gets screen sharing natively. X11 has slowed down with security issues not being fixed. Also here is an improvement on wayland, crashes in plasma 6 all QT apps is going to survive crashes.

• You're saying these things as if they're a wayland issue, things like screen capture can easily be done using XDG portals. And VRR is a thing on Wayland, so yes there's obviously a way for Nvidia to implement it.

• No granular per software permission yet…

• Question though: if we have a game that was made long ago and isn't maintained anymore, can we hope to have it run on wayland even if it was initially done for x11?

• A quick correction/update on the Cinnamon situation; according to a blogpost made by Clem (the leader of Mint), work has started on Cinnamon on Wayland and will be available as an experimental option in 21.3!

• Nice follow up on Wayland. I've just switch to it about 2 weeks ago on KDE Plasma. My only problem I had with it was the lack of screen grabbing tools and screen sharing in meetings. Both seemed to be resolved now; I can use Spectacle for screen grabs and Teams PWA (still a garbage application) supports screen sharing. So far so good…

  However, I haven't addressed how I will manage opening up applications over SSH like I did with X forwarding. So far, I did not have to use this feature. My plan is to force apps to run in Xwayland when I start them over ssh so I can forward them to a local X server running on my host. I didn't do the research yet, so maybe it's not even possible… I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

• I have tried Wayland for few days. I cannot do my job with it. So many little things which I'm using are not supported. X is old and gold, still..

• Debian 12 defaults to Wayland in KDE Plasma. So far is OK, but first time I couldn't understand why screen sharing doesn't work. For some reason Debian did not pre-install Pipewire, I ought to do it myself.

• Xorg is better for the time being as for Wayland its hope of becoming the best protocol has a long way to improve

• Speaking as a user with little understanding, it appears to me that the solitary issue with Wayland is that it needs a centralized way to grant applications permissions. Right now it's a mishmash of demand for pam, xhost, and a plethora of polkits. Not to mention the scattered chain of environment variables.
  Wayland generally works beautifully when configured properly, but it seems the only way to get that as of now without sinking dozens of hours into configuration is installing Gnome.

• Variable refresh rate is a compromise between no tearing and lowest latency. Where having tearing is purely to have the lowest latency as possible, it should be less noticeable the higher the framerate is.

• wayland devs treat nvidia users like how photoshop treats linux users

• you really need to work on the way you speak man.
  cant help but notice the tone pattern, it dose not sound right.
  other than that, video is pretty good.

• X11" will never be dropped, it will always be supported with XWayland. What may be dropped is the Xorg implementation.

• There are still a few things that the compositor implementers need to do before I can daily drive Wayland, but hopefully they'll get there soon. However, I'm curious if you're also having problems with YouTube? I've found that if I try to open something in a new tab, so I don't have to reload the subs feed over and over again, that it gives me a nearly blank page with some grayed out elements at the top. The only way to get it to cold load is to enable an ad block and then it prevents me from playing the video, and if I turn off ad block then hit refresh it blanks again. Only way I've found for it to work is to click on to a content creators video list and then let it steal that tab. It's highly annoying because it breaks my usual flow.

• I dont like that wayland has hard dependency on linux and doesnt work on all unix like systems , but freebsd hacked something around it (wayfire and hyprland "work" there) and openbsd and netbsd are working on making it work. But hey, who uses bsds, right?

• Why people running for wayland??? Xorg is just far better and stable for 99% linux users.

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