One day, Wayland will truly take over the Linux world, but it's not quite there yet with plenty still using X11 due to various problems some of which the new Frog Protocols aim to solve.
Announced by misyl, who does various work for Valve (like Gamescope), it certainly sounds like a good idea to give Wayland Protocols a swift kick to get into gear to improve things for users. Writing on their social media post:
Wayland Protocols has long had a problem with new protocols sitting for months, to years at a time for even basic functionality.
This is hugely problematic when some protocols implement very primitive and basic functionality such as frog-fifo-v1, which is needed for VSync to not cause GPU starvation under Wayland and also fix the dreaded application freezing when windows are occluded with FIFO/VSync enabled.
We need to get protocols into end-users hands quicker! The main reason many users are still using X11 is because of missing functionality that we can be shipping today, but is blocked for one reason or another.
You can learn more on the GitHub and see the open Mesa Merge Request to hopefully get the frog-fifo-v1 protocol into upstream Mesa drivers.
Looking at the Merge Request, it's explained that SteamOS (Steam Deck) and Gamescope are already "shipping essentially this functionality" since version 3.5 as it's a "serious and genuine problem".
There's already a little bit of push-back from one developer Simon Ser who mentioned:
I don't think adding support for protocols essentially bypassing the wayland-protocols consensus is a good idea. The bar in wayland-protocols is not that high, and adding support for third-party protocols not representative of the Wayland community isn't a good way forward.
Which had a reply from Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais to note:
There is value in rapid iteration that the current development model is missing out on. If this would be better as an ext hosted on the upstream wayland-protocols repo, that seems fine to me as well, but I'm not sure that there needs to be a bar at all for an ext protocol other than being available for whoever wants to use it. On the contrary, reducing friction there would provide invaluable experimental feedback to the upstream development effort, and serve users during those long development cycles.
Interesting times, but it's good that something is being done to hopefully kick things up a notch and improve things, especially when it comes to gaming, for the rest of us.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Mountain Man Sep 24
Last edited by reaperx7 on 25 September 2024 at 12:18 am UTC
pleasereadthemanual Sep 25
One of the points of contention was that many parties felt like outsiders to the Wayland Protocols org. Simon Ser and other members seem to be working to correct that.
Quoting: reaperx7At the rate they keep messing with and changing stuff for Wayland, we could have had X11 fixed up by now and modernized.. 🙄
Absolutely not, because nobody wants to touch X11 with a tem foot pole. Wayland was started by X11 developers because they were sick of it after all.
Quoting: Mountain ManMy plan is to start using Wayland when X11 is no longer available for my distro. I see no hurry to switch.I might be working like that, except I use Mint, which is pretty old fashioned. Probably when Mint is ready to make Wayland the default (but still retain X11 as an option) is around the time lots of other distros will no longer make X11 available at all . . .
Quoting: XpanderGreat news.
-Global hotkey support
-Copy-paste between wayland and xwayland that doesn't break
-Drag and drop between applications is finnicky and not always working
-Window management with positions, geometry etc are lacking features.
Just to name some. Hopefully things get better faster.
And lots of people use Wayland just fine already. It depends on the needs i guess.
isnt global hotkey also up to the program? like OBS has to implement it
btw OBS. recording is kinda blurry at higher resolution. i read there is an issue with scaling other than 100%. i have not tried it, because i would not use it that way anyway, when it works just fine on x11
wayland still has a long way to go
pleasereadthemanual Sep 26
Quoting: mylkaisnt global hotkey also up to the program? like OBS has to implement itAFAIK KDE has support for it and GNOME doesn't yet, maybe GNOME 48, and no production client applications use it
ElectricPrism Sep 26
Quoting: WMan22I also don't like the tendency to say "Xorg is dead" [...] while I'm not Xorg fan, understand why it's deprecated, and really appreciate a lot of what Wayland is doing
As a regular use, I'm almost scratching my head coming up with a list of things I can do in X that I can't do in Wayland.
WayPipe allows streaming applications over SSH.
Maybe some Server Client Stuff to mimic X2Go and X forewarding or whatever it's called.
And maybe some clipboard stuff like noted in the article linking up Wayland and XWayland clipboards.
Nothing really jumps out at me.
Maybe I can't do stuff when applications need to play catchup like WINE just isn't able to scale applications (StarCraft 1) on Wayland like 800p up to 3840p or Krita waiting on v6.0 and Qt6 for Wayland support.
I don't come up with a whole lot, and efforts like this to close the gaps are more than welcome, Valve has done a tremendous job getting the (linux) "ship" upgraded and optimized.
pleasereadthemanual Sep 26
Quoting: ElectricPrismFor me, the big deal is applications not having a Wayland version. It matters a lot for me because I use multiple monitors, and XWayland applications are a no-go.Quoting: WMan22I also don't like the tendency to say "Xorg is dead" [...] while I'm not Xorg fan, understand why it's deprecated, and really appreciate a lot of what Wayland is doing
As a regular use, I'm almost scratching my head coming up with a list of things I can do in X that I can't do in Wayland.
Maybe I can't do stuff when applications need to play catchup like WINE just isn't able to scale applications (StarCraft 1) on Wayland like 800p up to 3840p or Krita waiting on v6.0 and Qt6 for Wayland support.
GNOME 47 recently adopted XWayland Native Scaling as an experimental option, but it doesn't work...at all...for Lightworks. So my choices are a broken window or a blurry window on Wayland with fractional scaling, regardless of desktop.
All my Wine games are also blurry. Steam is blurry. Audacity is blurry (but Audacity 4.0 may not be!). Signal Desktop can be blurry or partially broken.
Wine might have a stable Wayland version next year, so that takes care of a lot of blurriness, and Lightworks will get there eventually.
Don't get me wrong, the ability to actually use my monitors on Linux is only possible with Wayland, but it'd be nice for every application to have a functioning Wayland version. So I guess this isn't technically "something I can do in X that I can't in Wayland"...
Session management is a big one that might be finalised next year, mayyybe. Color management is something that nominally works on X that doesn't really on Wayland yet, but it's close to being merged. I need it this week for a photoshoot though, so I guess I'll use my Mac for that...
Then there are multi-window applications which are sort of tied in with session management.
And as mentioned, there are fifo/commit-timing which is preventing SDL from defaulting to Wayland.
But Wayland nominally works.
Quoting: ElectricPrismQuoting: WMan22I also don't like the tendency to say "Xorg is dead" [...] while I'm not Xorg fan, understand why it's deprecated, and really appreciate a lot of what Wayland is doing
Nothing really jumps out at me.
Maybe I can't do stuff when applications need to play catchup like WINE just isn't able to scale applications (StarCraft 1) on Wayland like 800p up to 3840p or Krita waiting on v6.0 and Qt6 for Wayland support.
I don't come up with a whole lot, and efforts like this to close the gaps are more than welcome, Valve has done a tremendous job getting the (linux) "ship" upgraded and optimized.
Screen Readers, for one thing. I like to use Crow Translate for its OCR capabilities to sometimes get a sneak peek at some manga before it gets translated by someone, but Crow Translate is completely busted on Wayland, at least on my setup.
Additionally, while I'm not PERSONALLY visually impaired, I knew someone who was, and the lack of screen reader capabilities for Wayland in general is a gaping hole in accessibility features.
Additionally, I do not appear to be able to span a game across multiple monitors in full screen unless the game is running in windowed mode, locking me away from eyefinity-like gameplay on my main PC.
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