x11 vs wayland

I use the command line a lot, too. But doing it in a GUI terminal emulator gives you so much more capability (e.g. copy/paste between windows, scrollback) than running a plain text console.

When I switched Kubuntu on Intel from X11 to Wayland performance notably improved, perhaps due to better use of the GPU. I haven't tried it on a Pi.

Theo

Hi,

I'm just considering switch from openbox to libwc on my rpi4b 4gb.

Is there a performance drop or increase of mem usage I should worry about? I use it as a desktop.

Roto

.... expert (n): Someone who knows where to look for the answer.

There is a general rule that after a time, any chunk of software is so full of bodges and patches and hacked on bug fixes and cruft that is worth rewriting from the ground up.

You can go back and forth so no risk if you don't like it. I have an LG monitor that doesn't like to play with Wayland, so the screen saver turns off the monitor but won't turn it back on. Wayland doesn't work with RealVNC (I'm quite fond of RealVNC). There are other options. Menus and panel changes are different but more or less understandable.

It's a great way of creating a whole new set of bodges and bugs, by throwing away all the years of knowledge and bug fixes.

The Wayland crew decided to avoid some of this by simply not implementing great chunks of functionality and refusing to ever get to feature parity with X11.

---druck

Yeah I use tmux. But for my use, a gui isn't necessary unless i need a ful web experience - not often. Yes yes I'm a freak.

Try a GUI terminal emulator. Being able to have multiple windows/tabs open at once is a game-changer.

Yes, but usually from a better starting point

Indeed. My one experience of trying to run X over a network revealed dire performance and flaky behaviour.

Like, who needs it?

Depends: many of my machines have no GUI at all. Except via a web application.

I run X apps across the home network all the time. I have a small 1L computer that acts as a NAS and runs headless. Mostly I just ssh into it but there are times when it's easier to run X across the net.

At work I use RDP onto a Windows server over the VPN to access data centre developmemt machines in Netherlands from my home. I use X for accessing the Linux machines onto the Windows server and RDP to get it to my laptop. X across the data centre 1/2.5/10Gb network is plenty fast and RDP compresses the data nicely to me. Fast enough to watch video generated on a Linux box, X its way to Windows and RDP its way to me.

ssh -C -X someone@somehost to enable compression and X11 forwarding.

A while back I was playing running remote Wayland apps over ~50Mbps VDSL using Waypipe. It works impressively fast - eg remote Youtube video playing works well enough. You can also tunnel audio. Due to latency it works a lot better than X forwarding over the same connection. However it doesn't let you have persistent apps, ie you close down the client (eg a laptop) and want the app to stay running to reconnect later.

wprs supports that, but there was a bug with screen scaling (for X11 apps using Xwayland) that made it awkward to use. I should go back and see if they've fixed that.

Theo

Current main home machine runs Debian 13 + Mate with X not Wayland. I must try more options including Waypipe. One day there won't be any X so it would be nice to know how to move from there. Nice to know now not when an update removes X ;-)

Oh sorry it's not Windows. Did my last Win10 upgrades on the old machine this Debian box has replaced and also on a W10 VM I have on here for 2 mapping programs that are Windows only. Oh how I was delighted to see a list of updates and also OneDrive installed on to the W10 instances without asking or appearing in the list of things to be installed. F****ng Windows, die, die, die!