As an end user, is there any immediate usability gains to be had with Wayland today? I understand X is old and crufty, but if I embraced the switch do I gain anything? Or more it sets the stage for future improvements kind of thing?
- Support for multiple monitors with different scale factors, eg. a high-DPI internal laptop screen and a low-DPI external screen. Dragging windows between each display is seamless with Wayland, which is better than you can even say for Windows.
- Touchpad scrolling in web browsers is now smooth tear-free 60fps+. For some reason, both Firefox and Chromium-based browsers had frame pacing issues with Xorg, especially on low-powered hardware or with full desktop composition. These issues were so well known that testufo.com refuses to give results on Linux browsers. But both browsers work about as well with Wayland as they do in macOS and Windows.
For me it's exactly the same two points and I think for many more people as well.
It's crazy to imagine that "just" these two points are what's making people move to a completely different architecture. I wonder how things would be if xorg implemented multi monitor scale factors and fixed their tearing and performance.
Multimonitor with different scaling mostly "just works". You can do some tricks on X to achieve something similar, but you'll be likely running into issues. (I'm not sure any DE even exposes that in a simple way)
I had a nightmare trying to get a 4 x 4k monitor setup using Xorg. When I switched to Wayland, basically all my problems were solved and it worked out of the box. The Xorg multiple monitor support is really bad and barely works if you are trying to do anything complex with it.
If that's not a problem you have then great! But most people today are using multiple monitors.
> If that's not a problem you have then great! But most people today are using multiple monitors.
Just out of curiosity, what was complex about your quad 4k monitor configuration? As a lark, I've used xrandr to do all sorts of weird stuff and it has handled it just fine.
I've been using multiple monitors with xorg for fifteen, twenty years. (For quite a while, I used three monitors, but now I just have two.) Until XRandR became a thing, configuring them was definitely a headache, but after its release, everything Just Works(TM).
On my laptops, I've always used Intel hardware, and on my desktop, I've always used ATi/AMD hardware. Are you -perhaps- using nVidia hardware? If you are, that may be the source of your problems... nVidia's Linux support for the little things that make using a graphical desktop not tear-your-hair-out bad has always been pretty awful. (Usually because they typically refuse to do what everyone else does and go off and make an incompatible version that's generally worse.)
The problem with xorg is per monitor scaling. If your laptop is 4k and you want 2x scaling and your external monitor is a 32" 4k monitor that doesn't need scaling (or 1.25x) then you're basically shit out of luck with Xorg.
I think it's on the verge of being impossible to be honest. If you don't need any scaling then yeah, xrandr is fine. I ran 4 24" monitors, 2 horizontal and 2 vertical and xrandar handles it just fine.
> The problem with xorg is per monitor scaling. If your laptop is 4k and you want 2x scaling and your external monitor is a 32" 4k monitor that doesn't need scaling (or 1.25x) then you're basically shit out of luck with Xorg.
> I think it's on the verge of being impossible to be honest.
You sure about that? QT seems to handle per-monitor scaling fine (at least with 'kwin'), so it doesn't seem to be at all a problem with xorg. Read on:
On my system, I have two monitors, DisplayPort-0 (a 32" 4k) and DisplayPort-1 (a 24" 1200p). I also have Dolphin installed, and it has a "Desktop" item in its sidebar that has a "minimal" square-cornered icon. When I run:
Dolphin produces a "Desktop" square on DP-0 that's 42x43. (There's some dithering/blending/whatever going on that's obvious when you zoom way in.)
And, when I move Dolphin to the DisplayPort-1 monitor, once more than half of the window is on DP-1, the icons shrink to 16x16, and scale back up when I move back to DP-0.
Now, for some reason neither 'QT_ENABLE_HIGHDPI_SCALING' nor 'QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR' seem to do anything at all. Given that xrandr knows the physical size of each monitor, and how many pixels each is configured to output, my expectation is that they simply never wired this up when running on xorg. I wonder if they're accepting patches.
EDIT: I also wonder if the reason they never wired this up when running with xorg is because nVidia's scaling performance is absolute dogshit, and they (somewhat reasonably) really want to have this autoscaling stuff on by default.
I think you're right it's probably nvidias fault rather than xorg - but my problems were solved by Wayland so it got me out of trouble.
I had a similar problem to what the sibling comment mentioned - scaling was causing me performance issues. I disabled the laptop monitor and just ran multiple screens of the same resolution, and need about 150 % scaling to have text visible on these 4 X 32 inch 4 K monitors, but it was causing a huge amount of lag in xorg. It was solved by switching to Wayland which reduced the lag completely, and also let me run fractional scaling (I think I use 135 %) which wasn't available in xorg. I spent a lot of time with combinations of drivers and inputs and docks and scaling and couldn't get xorg to work. The laptop is a dell precision 3580 with a 4 GB NVIDIA gpu so a pretty standard piece of hardware
EDIT: Oh, and yeah, your multi-monitor setup sounds not even a little bit complex. Four or more monitors on Xorg? Easy as pie, when you've not made the mistake of using nVidia hardware.
Most of it's really for developers IMO, but the biggest gains users is better multi-monitor handling, better security potential (so apps can't spy on each other) and the the upcoming support for HDR which will never happen on xorg.
