
Some Ugly Code Can Get Nvidia's Linux Driver Working with Accelerated XWayland - figomore
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GLX-Delay-Accel-NV-XWayland
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colordrops
I tried for a while to get Wayland working in order to get rid of tearing I
saw in X Windows, until I found out a kernel module parameter for the Nvidia
driver fixed tearing in X. I run xmonad as well, which doesn't work with
wayland. Don't see any reason to run Wayland at the moment.

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bitwize
How about "X is insecure, flaky, unsupported, and solves problems nobody
actually has"? Such is the considered opinion of just about anybody who knows
spit about the Linux graphics stack. Hint: The major Wayland devs are former
Xorg devs.

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AceJohnny2
> _Hint: The major Wayland devs are former Xorg devs._

But notably, major Xorg developer Keith Packard is missing from that list.

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bitwize
Agreed, which means that right now Keith Packard is about the only person or
entity keeping X alive. Red Hat have washed their hands of it. When the legacy
versions of RHEL that still use it go out of support, maintenance on Xorg will
pretty much grind to a halt. It is a moribund project, and that presents
considerable risk.

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Hydraulix989
This is a recurring pattern I keep seeing come up again and again with open
source / Linux. I still don’t see any real benefits to switching to Wayland as
a user other than it being a Shiny New Thing. In fact, this is a net negative
for me.

When I previously tried Wayland, my DE wasn’t compatible and most of my
software had to be run through their XWindows compatibility layer and required
myriad workarounds and tuning just to get a basic desktop environment running.
This NVIDIA hack is yet another example.

It still felt like alpha quality software even though it has been in
development for 10 years(!) now. Why would users ever not stick with something
that is stable and just works?

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jabirali
I agree _in general_ that too many things pop up because people want change
without good reason. But Wayland is a highly needed replacement, not just in
my opinion, but according to the X.org developers themselves. See e.g. this
[1] talk by someone who has worked on both X.org and Wayland.

> Why would users ever not stick with something that is stable and just works?

As a user, I switched to Wayland 1.5 years ago for two reasons. The first is
that Wayland has way better performance than X. It solves some long-standing
and highly irritating issues with e.g. screen-tearing that I and others have
been experiencing with X. The second is security. Wayland is nearly a
prerequisite for proper sandboxing of GUI apps, as X apps can all keylog each
other, screen-record each other, inject keys into each other, and so on,
without much restrictions. Since Wayland is backwards-compatible with X via
XWayland, which these days has quite good performance, I haven't yet run into
an X-only app that didn't just work.

As for the issues with nVidia, that's mostly due to nVidia implementing their
own Wayland backend (EGLStreams) that is different from what every other
graphics card driver uses (GBM), resulting in every desktop environment
(GNOME, KDE, etc.) having to implement nVidia support separately from generic
Wayland support. The single biggest factor holding Wayland back at the moment
is nVidia; my experience is that currently Wayland already works way better
than X.org if you have an Intel or AMD card, but is highly broken on nVidia.

The second factor holding it back would be that the number of window managers
(compositors) for Wayland is lower than for X, currently the main ones are
GNOME, KDE, and Sway. But this is changing fast: when I first switched only
GNOME worked well; now both KDE and Sway are stable and fully usable on
Wayland; and thanks to wlroots, a lot of new window managers for Wayland have
popped up [2] and should mature over time.

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44)

[2]: [https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/wiki/Projects-which-use-
wl...](https://github.com/swaywm/wlroots/wiki/Projects-which-use-wlroots)

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ShamelessC
Why did Nvidia decide to do that anyway? I understand they have a history of
being annoying on Linux, but I'm having trouble seeing what value there is in
implementing this with your own backend.

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corty
Minimum effort. On Linux they are basically only interested in Cuda and Mining
working.

