GNOME is not a good representative of Wayland. Wayland is just a protocol - it's up to the compositors to have good performance to distinguish it from Xorg, and GNOME does not do well in this regard. Other compositors, particularly wlroots, enjoy excellent performance.
Wayland also opens the door to many performance improvements which are not possible on Xorg, and which take advantage of newer GPU features, especially on embedded systems but moreso every year on desktop and laptop GPUs as well.
Drew, if someone posted a comment saying "there's this Linux feature that's incredibly slow on x86-64", it wouldn't be a refutation to say "it's fast on RISC-V". That would rightfully just produce a response of "that's nice for you, it's still slow on x86-64 and that's what I'm using, so from my perspective the feature is slow in an environment many people use".
If you want this to stop, make GNOME's performance better in the ways you envision, because it is the experience most Linux users get. (Quite a lot of work has been going into GNOME Wayland performance lately.) Arguments about Wayland protocol feature politics don't necessarily make the out-of-the-box experience worse; for many people it's a good "Just Works" experience. Stop telling people they need to switch desktop environments to get a better experience; some fraction of people will go "if I have to switch, I'll switch back to Windows/macOS/etc". A vanishingly small fraction of people will go "oh, sure, I should switch to a different window manager and environment that isn't what I'm used to and doesn't necessarily have the integration I'm used to, and switch my apps to match too; this makes me happy", and those people know who they are already.
"there's this Linux feature that's incredibly slow on x86-64"
This isn't the appropriate comparison. What they said is "x86-64 is incredibly slow", and then when you teased them for details, what they meant was "this Linux feature is incredibly slow on x86-64". To which the answer isn't "it's fast on RISC-V", but rather, "that's a problem with Linux, not x86-64".
If you have a beef with GNOME, then bring it to GNOME. Don't pin it on a tangentally related technology which bears none of the fault, and which has had hundreds of thousands of hours of work invested in it by volunteers all to make something nice for you to use.
Is your goal to fix people's terminology or to fix the actual problem?
It's not an end user's job to tease apart what specific thing is the root cause. If something changes, and their system feels slower, they're going to reasonably assume the thing that changed is at fault. That's doubly true if there's an easy switch to turn that thing on and off (which there often is, by picking a Wayland or non-Wayland session at login), and they can easily evaluate the difference in isolation. It might be cathartic to spend time yelling at people about who is actually at fault, but fixing the root cause would make there not be a fault to seek blame for.
People aren't going to stop running GNOME en-masse. Distributions are not going to abruptly abandon GNOME. If (and I do mean "if") there's some issue with GNOME's Wayland implementation, that's going to be many people's primary exposure to Wayland as a technology.
People will continue working on optimizations, to many places in the stack. It doesn't matter where the fault lies or where the fixes need to happen, the net result is people saying things like "I switched to Wayland and things got slower / less smooth / etc", and they're going to continue saying things like that. It'd be nice if people phrased it more that way (slowness associated with switching to Wayland, rather than Wayland being slow), and provided more details about their environment, rather than implying that "Wayland" is a single piece of software which should incur their ire. It'd be even nicer if there were less ire to go around because more things Just Work.
It's also entirely possible that some of the people in these various threads have issues with some other piece of software in the stack.
> If you have a beef with GNOME, then bring it to GNOME.
I'm not the one with a beef with GNOME; you seem to be. If you have a problem with GNOME, take it to GNOME. GNOME works great for me, and I don't care which Wayland protocols it does or doesn't choose to implement. You haven't even specified what precise change you think ought to happen there, just some general complaints about protocol extensions.
Regardless as to whether Gnome "does well" in the regard of performance, you must admit that for some of us choosing a competitor like wlroots over one like Gnome introduces a whole new adventure in replacing all the features of Gnome with standalone applications to use with wlroots. Plus a tiling window manager is a totally different workflow.
Not everyone has the time for curating a desktop environment with individual utilities, and not everyone likes tiling WMs. i3 gave me an RSI.
It's not a particularly arduous "adventure". We maintain a list[0] of programs which use these protocols. And wlroots != tiling window manager: there are multiple wlroots-based compositors which do not use the tiling paradigm, the most developed of which is probably Wayfire[1].
Apologies; I misunderstood one of your links and thought sway had been renamed to wlroots.
To be clear the "adventure" I'm talking about is for replacing desktop environment niceties like the ones provided by gsettingsd and the tight integration provided between devices and the system management tools offered in full desktop blown environments like Gnome and KDE. I used i3 for six or seven years and it was never as nicely integrated as Gnome and I spent a LOT of time yak shaving to get it nice and keep it that way. Eventually I gave up. Gnome is really nice these days.
But maybe I missed the point of your original comment.
Gnome hasn't provided a good desktop experience since 2011. By the time they figure out how to stop sucking insofar as Wayland performance they will surely have discerned new ways to err.
There are other environments that have worked well for a decade and will work well for the next decade.
Which embedded systems actually run GLES on Linux stably enough to do anything with Wayland? My experience is the choices are:
Use a binary blob that only works with a 3 year old vendor kernel, and works most of the time (but you can't fix it when it doesn't work, and if you are compositing most of the time isn't good enough)
Use a mainline Linux kernel that is so buggy that fixing the bugs in it is a full time job
I am not aware of any up-to-date benchmarks which make a fair comparison (i.e. not just benchmarking GNOME), but I am intimately familiar with the technology and its performance characteristics.
It's not a fair comparison. You're benchmarking GNOME, not Wayland, and making generalizations about Wayland based on GNOME benchmarks is a false equivalency.
Is GNOME on Wayland worse than GNOME on X11? Perhaps. Is Wayland worse than X11, based on that answer? No.
Protocol limits what is possible. Legacy defines performance. Gnome is X11 first. Wlroots in Wayland first. It should be possible to optimize Gnome.
Wayland was created because of horrible X11 performance [1]. It is not Waylands prime time yet but X.Org still works and maintained. Phoronix.com should have checked contributions [2].
Most of the pragmatic solutions were built by contributing to existing things, not starting over.
Think risc v cisc. It isn't that there are not points to be gained from the alternatives. It is that leaving the past behind is not necessarily the best way to get progress. And even when enough time passes that the alternative gains ground, it often looks more like what it was replacing than less.
You clearly have not watched video by X.Org developer, have not you? I expect you are better informed, worked a lot with X.Org codebase and can show some links on your commits.
Or if you truly believe there is nothing wrong with X.Org you would become maintainer.
> My (often incorrect) views and opinions are my own and not those of anyone I currently or have ever worked for. Please help me make them more informed (and hopefully more correct) whenever you can!
Goal shift much? My point here has been to point out that gnome is the benchmark that matters most. That one side seems bent on ignoring that is baffling to me.
Sadly, for the most part I have been discouraged from Linux desktop usage in recent years. Shame, as I have been on Linux for a couple of decades now. That said, I confess this is opening my interest. Would love to get myself and my children contributing, and I will start looking for ways to make that possible.
> I only really care about performance and Wayland hasn’t been very convincing [0] with no discernible improvement over X11.
there would be no controversy with
"I only really care about GNOME performance and GNOME Wayland hasn’t been very convincing [0] with no discernible improvement over GNOME X11"
GNOME matters for you, it does not matter for me (xmonad, xterm, browsers). If all user see is GNOME he can decide it is Linux that is broken as well.
"The real story behind Wayland and X" by Daniel Stone (link above) specifically shows X11 performance problems, it is view from developer what is wrong with X. The story which we, as users, do not know. We can't blame developers for trying to implement something sane.
I have no contributions to core projects but I don't blame them either.
Ah, fair. Taking back to the root, I see the connection. Since you directed specifically at me, I took it just back to my entrance.
Continuing in that vein. I stand by pointing that the choice of benchmark matters. I've been burned by my own choices and choices from peers too often to agree that hypothetical benchmarks will see improvements for everyone.
I also find it dubious that there are many use cases that are better served today than in the past. I want to believe you, but the evidence is coming in weak with a ton of argument from authority. You don't get a pass just for being a developer to tell users they are wrong.
It would be nice to reproduce phoronix results. Do they run in GNOME shell? What if I run in Sway? What exactly they expect of Selenium? I've heard gedit startup example.
Sorry, I can't continue until you've watched presentation [1]
You are asking us to literally draw conclusions from hypothetical benchmarks where the opposite results will exist.
I am sympathetic to the idea that things needed to start over. I'm annoyed with the lack of honesty and self critical approach. As framed by you, Wayland is above criticism. Which immediately raises my suspicions.
I have not said that Wayland is above criticism. I have said that the criticism which has been raised thus far is largely invalid, and that the benchmark you pointed to is flawed. If you insist on using flawed benchmarks as evidence for the inferiority of a technology simply because no less-flawed benchmark exists to provide a counterpoint, you are wrong.
How is it wrong? You felt it was just unfair, earlier. :)
To an extent, I actually agree. I just don't care, though. Pointing at comparisons that are not real world user cases is... Annoying. And feels ridiculously bad faith in argument.
Worse so, when it has been a prominent argument in this space for a long time.
So what? What percentage of Wayland desktops are on Linux? Do comments on Wayland generalize to comments on Linux? What percentage of Linux installations are on x86_64? Do comments about Linux generalize to x86_64?
If the majority of new users are exposed to linux via wayland and exposed to wayland via gnome and the gnome experience sucks people will perceive that linux wayland and gnome suck regardless of who is at fault.
Have anyone ever bought a car or piece of electronics that was bad because of a particular component and though wow <component oem nobody has heard of> really sucks instead of <name on the box> sucks?
Desktop linux may be a niche but window managers are a niche among niches. Interesting window managers implemented via Wayland are a niche in a niche in a niche.
Wayland also opens the door to many performance improvements which are not possible on Xorg, and which take advantage of newer GPU features, especially on embedded systems but moreso every year on desktop and laptop GPUs as well.