A lot of these issues have fixes or workarounds directly in KDE.
For reference I'm using sway. swayidle is an idle daemon, where the maintainer doesn't think that it matters whether its connected to power or not. You're supposed to create your own scripts around it that handles ac connect and disconnects.
There's a tool to do flux like color warmth setting. One of them doesn't allow you to toggle, so you have create your own toggle script that kills or restarts it. The other one is controllable, but doesn't actually account for time or timezone.
XWayland has had 2 or 3 patches to handle hidpi when the main wayland screen has fractional scaling, none of them are merged and they seem hardly active. KDE works around that by allowing you to turn it off for xwayland clients. Sway just passes it down and blurs everything.
When I exit a wayland session and then restart it the screen locks up. This doesn't happen with normal X.
And then there is electron. Slack is not the only app that ignores electron settings and doesn't run with wayland support. In chrome and electron it's supposedly supported but you have to toggle it yourself? What is this madness?
These things seem like basic functionality for me. I don't really get it. Sure, maybe I shouldn't expect a proper experience for random sway tools, so that makes the first two points irrelevant. But the fact that years in they still haven't found a proper solution on passing down hidpi for xwayland? That's incomprehensible for me.
>One of them doesn't allow you to toggle, so you have create your own toggle script that kills or restarts it.
If you're not a fan of making scripts then sway (and wlsunset I assume) is not for you. My sway install is held together by a myriad of scripts - keybindings are handled by a script, starting programs via bemenu goes through a script, sway itself is started by a script, etc. That's just how this compositor and its ecosystem are designed - they're for people who want the software itself to do the smallest possible thing with the least possible assumptions so that the user can do whatever they want to fill in the rest.
Ideally you’d have some sort of offering that gives you a reasonable starting place with all these composable pieces in place, and then you can hack/replace/add/remove as needed.
Everyone starting from scratch doesn’t make sense. It’s like shipping a Unix system with no app doing it’s own paging because the devs rightly expect you to use some other tool to page output for you, but there’s no less/more installed (and no back buffer in the terminal or terminal emulator to boot). Then you complain and the answer is that you’re supposed to write your own (or research, download, compile, and install something someone else might have hacked up).
Anyways, you can't actually do proper DPI virtualization for X11 apps because afaik there is no protocol for apps to communicate the scale that they are actually rendering at, so there will never be full support for mixed or fractional DPI in XWayland to the same degree that it is supported in Wayland. I'm not 100% sure there would be a point to making such a protocol at this point, since blurry-but-correct surfaces seems like an OK trade-off to keep things working in the long term. If you run real X11 with mixed DPI or fractional DPI, you get quite a range of potential failure cases depending on what apps you run.
At this point most of my screen is filled with native Wayland apps, and Electron apps that use reasonably up-to-date Electron (like VS Code), so it's rare to see a blurry window.
I'm not doubting you, but given that ChromeOS uses Wayland I'm very confused by this.
Do you have any examples? I used ms teams in chrome yesterday, and it seemed to work fine with webcam and screen sharing.
Regarding exiting and restarting a wayland session, how do you do it? GDM, the console? It obviously works for most other people so it seems you're encountering a bug related to your hardware or setup so you could file a bug report with the appropriate project (again doesn't really seem like a wayland issue though).
> There's a tool to do flux like color warmth setting. One of them doesn't allow you to toggle, so you have create your own toggle script that kills or restarts it. The other one is controllable, but doesn't actually account for time or timezone.
I used to write little tools like his and my ~/bin is still littered with scripts from 10 years ago
Nowadays I want this functionality to work by default and I won't settle for a less usable system
I'm going to disagree pretty strongly with that. In fact, I think most of its problems are that it threw the Unix philosophy out the window. While it's true that it suffers from having made everything a implementation detail that can theoretically be plugged in with a different component, the problem is that they forced everything important to go through the compositor, which bottlenecks composiblilty and doesn't allow you to actually replace individual components without support from the (usually incomplete) monolith in the middle.
Fractional scaling, hotkeys, gamma control, screen capture, etc, all have protocols.
If you want "just works", stick to X and a mature desktop environment like KDE or Gnome for now (especially if you do any gaming).
Have we hit the two decade mark yet?
This stuff “just worked” in the late 90’s (and probably earlier, assuming access to unix workstation hardware) with X11, when it was roughly the age Wayland is now.
Yeah, the existing tools are pretty low level. For now you need to write your own "scripts" for matching different states from different places (e.g.: idle + battery charging state). Hopefully someone will build higher level tools on top of the existing tools. The APIs are all there (i.e.: there are no technical limitations, it's just that nobody has done it yet).
> There's a tool to do flux like color warmth setting. One of them doesn't allow you to toggle, so you have create your own toggle script that kills or restarts it. The other one is controllable, but doesn't actually account for time or timezone.
Try gammastep.
> swayidle is an idle daemon, where the maintainer doesn't think that it matters whether its connected to power or not
Sounds like a problem with the tool, not Wayland.
> color warmth setting
This is a general issue on Wayland but GNOME has this built in. I'm surprised that KDE doesn't.
> In chrome and electron it's supposedly supported but you have to toggle it yourself?
I guess Chromium's Wayland support isn't considered production ready? I don't use Chromium often but running on XWayland hasn't bothered me much. I guess this would be more annoying if it was your primary browser.
I wouldn’t be surprised if slack just ships with a much older chrome build that wasn’t built with wayland support.
Also, have a look at Gnome’s wayland offering. It is by far the most complete as of yet.
Alright first off: file a bug! How am I supposed to know there is a user with a problem, if they don't tell me!
That said not sure what you mean by this exactly... gammastep 100% does account for the local time. But it does choose the time of day to transition based on the location. Are you in a different location than your timezone is set to?
Or if you have the skills please contribute back and fixes these things that bug you!
XFree86 (and later, x.org) have always had better support for hidpi rendering than MacOS X and Windows (by my definition, which is based on the quality of tear-free vector, font and bitmap rendering at non-standard DPIs while using mainstream hardware).
The wayland developers apparently couldn’t figure out how to read the X11 manual. Why expect them to reimplement it in a superior way?
If everyone uses the API the "wrong way", now you're stuck supporting the "wrong way" or everything breaks and people WILL complain.
> But the fact that years in they still haven't found a proper solution on passing down hidpi for xwayland? That's incomprehensible for me.
It's crazy how this is incomprehensible despite it being explained quite clearly every time it comes up. There might be patches, but they are incomplete and they are kludgy and the experts that could push it through ARE WORKING ON IMPROVING WAYLAND. If it remains incomprehensible, go read through the fractional scaling protocol merge and see how much discussion there was for designing that protocol, not even considering the X interop scenario you want.
You can: (1) try really hard to convince volunteers to spend huge amounts of time supporting something they deemed dead years ago, or (2) try to get shitty proprietary companies to, you know, fund a single developer part time to do basic maintenance, (3) use less crappy tools and/or demand that you aren't forced to use shitty tools.
Why is it ALWAYS that people reach for (1)? I swear to god I hope it's folks that don't do OSS development themselves. The entitlement and ignorance makes me head spin. But hey, random OSS devs are much easier to rage at than your CTO, or some random "chat startup" that doesn't give a fuck. So rock on with your ire against OSS devs not working on your explicitly deprecated scenario.
So defeating.
I don't know, given that the UX situation in Windows UI - itself a inconsistent disaster that makes the disjointed things that make up KDE looks like a consistent desktop experience. They can't decide what UI framework to keep supporting, they keep changing what you're supposed to use to build your GUI every bunch of years.
As for the Apple side, well, destroying everything every few years with almost no regards for backwards compatibility isn't "figured out 20 years ago".
On Windows not all Apps do scale on a HiDPI display. You then have to fiddle in the program's launch options and hope it's not too blurry when scaled.
Wayland does only have blurriness with certain Xwayland embeddings.
It's not a solved problem.
MS does a lot of things wrong, but backwards compatibility is still their strong point.
Tangible benefits of switching to Wayland. And by those, I don't mean "no screen tearing", since it practically did not exist on most desktop environments with half-decent compositors.
Wayland is a new ecosystem that aims to take over for X11 (as X11 was developed in mind with a lot of functionality that many do not care about, and just want a desktop environment).
But it's a controversial effort, and Wayland still doesn't support a lot of the functionality even from the desktop perspective.
Wine is not something that lets you (just) play games, it is effectively a re-implementation of windows low level apis, on top of linux. It lets you call the dlls, and kernel functions, effectively running windows applications in linux.
The wine community is opinionated, and effectively weren't going to support Wayland; because it has some shortcomings in terms of api surface or ways that wayland handles things.
Someone decided to try to support wayland anyway.
That’s not really the primary job of these protocols - they are primarily about interfacing with GUI apps and displaying their content — compositing those contents on top of each other in one way or another is the job of a window manager, which can be in-built, or separate from the display server.
> Wayland still doesn't support a lot of the functionality even from the desktop perspective
This has been less and less true. Plenty, or even most distros ship with wayland by default and people don’t even realize it. Under gnome which is arguably the most complete implementation I really have a hard time listing things that don’t work.
It's the thing that makes graphics on the screen, i.e. why you're not looking at a terminal. For some reason, the decision was made to drastically revamp it in such a way that trying to switch caused a lot of problems. This is like a TEN YEAR OLD deal.
The only issue with wayland usage currently is apps in the xwayland compatibility layer are lacking the new features wayland adds like dpi scaling across screens.
I’m very happy that wayland + pipewire + flatpak now gives us basic security practices like apps having to ask permission to record the mic/screen/webcam vs the state of things in X where being able to draw a window also grants full access to everything.
Not according to their references.
> They created SteamOS for Valve.
Obviously not. They created some parts of the update system for SteamOS 3.0.
Even when the driver was being developed around 2021, it seems like the Wine developers only begrudgingly accepted it[2].
Exciting to see this finally hitting upstream. Progress in desktop Linux often seems slow, but things are moving forward.
[0] https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42284#c1
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19127952
[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Wine-Julliard-Wayland-2021
However, for wine, as a compatible layer with windows, every deviation from windows behavior is seen as a missing feature.
I am not sure if constantly creating artificial restriction and working around them is "moving forward".
I have heard there are still some tricky impedance mismatches though. I have no idea what they're doing for the system tray, for example. Right now, if I cause a tray icon to exist in Wine with Wayland patches on SwayWM, what happens is I get a "Wine System Tray" window. Not ideal to be sure.
I can't live without Office! My personal favorite is 2010 x64, as Word then starts faster than the current Wordpad.
Office 2010 works great in Windows 11, but there've been some suspicious move making me believe old office version will be given a poison pill or something under the plausible deniability of "security risks of 13 year old software", like how Outlook 2010 can't connect to outlook.com anymore (though it works great with gmail using google's GWSO plugin)
On MY computer, I run what I want. So I'll try Office 2010 in wine within Wayland.
You can always do so, as long as you're not connected to the internet. In the same way that on your property you can drive what you want, but on the road there are minimum standards of safety that are supposed to be met, and some authority might enforce them. I completely relate to the "who moved my cheese?" effect, but unpatched internet connected software affects more than just yourself. This is not giving companies that completely disable software that could otherwise be hardened with some minimal loss of functionality (like disabling the old Office equation editor) a pass.
Vulnerable pieces of software can be exploited to receive or transmit viruses. The viruses spread through the crowd to anyone who is vulnerable. But just because someone spread the virus doesn't mean an authority is going to crack down on them for being intentionally reckless. If you crash into somebody on the road however...
Many Windows applications since Windows 7 support fractional scaling natively (125%, 150%). Is there any way of accessing these modes with WINE? Is this really the same thing as simply setting the font DPI scale (which is what the WINE docs suggest doing)?
The only thing I really hit that would be nice to fix is that it appears tablet support isn't in yet, or at least it didn't work for me. Of course, tablet support is a thing I generally wish could be improved in Wine, especially because Windows apps are slowly moving towards more modern APIs than the old wintab32 defacto standard.
I ran a few tests and it works for games well already, but there are still some issues to iron out. I'll run more tests once it's upstreamed.
