I want to defend Wayland here and explain a crucial piece that I think people are missing...
The splitting of protocols in Wayland and compositor reimplementation were to allow for new form factors. It had to sacrifice the guarantee of all desktop app functionality being present to achieve that.
The idea (as I see it) was never to have 500 desktop compositors all trying to reimplement the same thing with slight differences. Iinstead, it was for 500 different interfaces for different platforms that are compatible with the same apps (e.g. desktop, laptop, phone, car screens, AR/VR, watch). Different form factors have totally different ways of dealing with interface, but share enough common features where it makes sense to have 1 base protocol and many other ones for device/form specific features.
Problem is, while in 2008-2016 we had a ton of new experimental UIs coming out on a semi-regular basis (that was the peak of the whole convergent phone/tablet craze, smartwatches started, fancy car UI, touch tables, early AR/VR) things have quieted down. The purpose of Wayland's insane modularity hasn't been visible to most people given it's almost always complained about in a desktop contest vs X11. But X11 was literally only designed for a desktop form factor and has been refined for that 1 purpose for decades!
As an example of different form factors, Wayland lets IVI (in-vehicle infotainment) systems work way better than Xorg could have. Desktop window layouting on that platform would inherently produce massive amounts of unnecessary complexity, and the ability to direct scanout saves on power/expensive compute. Automotive Grade Linux and COVESA maintain reference interfaces for cars so companies can iterate a ton faster. Wayland gives the app compatibility and they can make the system UI work with more flexibility and ease than an X11 window manager.
Take Linux Mobile too, the compositor can reliably enforce window layout and boundaries and composition. While this could technically be done with an X window manager and compositor, doing it with Wayland guarantees reliability as the app simply doesn't have a choice or room for error. Some things like drag and drop of toolbars doesn't make much sense on mobile given how small the screens are.
There's some interfaces where X11 is basically impossible to use. In AR/VR (where i am making a Wayland compositor) the concept of a screen simply does not exist. How is an app supposed to position itself when the very concept of 3D is not part of the protocol? In Wayland I don't have to implement the protocols that don''t work (e.g. layer shell) and therefore any apps that don't need it will be compatible..
Wayland has allowed for insane levels of flexibility, things that no other display server architecture can do reasonably. Total flexibility between app and screen, direct scanout without hacks, AR/VR support, etc.
Here's some fun and useful stuff that's been done with Wayland, stuff that X11 could never reasonably do:
Multiple user collaboration on touch tables with arbitrary rotation: youtu.be/8xtjJTJAQsY
AR/VR apps running in windows and volumes at the same time, all interactable back in 2014 (eat your heart out magic leap and apple): github.com/evil0sheep/motorcar
Presentation slides that were themselves a Wayland compositor written in Qt and QML so therefore allowed fully interactive live demos in an integrated form factor with a very popular and easy to code UI framework: youtu.be/mIg1P3i2ZfI
Cosmic panels are actually Wayland compositors, meaning widgets can draw literally anything from any toolkit in any language.
Now, could Wayland devs maybe have distributed features across protocols better? Worked with app toolkit devs to ensure the protocols they made actually fit what the apps and compositors needed? Stopped bikeshedding (though imo many cases of "bikeshedding" are simply accounting for other form factors)? Absolutely!
My point here is simple: there was a reason for making it this modular, for not having a standard implementation. It wasn't just devs trying to impose some ideology, it wasn't some corporate takeover. It's good reasons that people using X11 on their desktop/laptop don't encounter. If we made something that wasn't universal, most apps wouldn't be compatible with it and therefore everything but the desktop form factor would lack apps.
"If you wanna know how I write 2-3 books per year, blame the #cognitiveprosthesis of #blogging, which forces me to apply rigor to the #notes I take, and rewards me with a searchable database of everything I've ever found important, while stimulating a constant mnemonic rejuggling of all those thoughts that crystallizes into an endless stream of novel synthetic insights and road-tested ways to express them." The @pluralistic strategy you'll want to learn. pluralistic.net/2025/07/28/twi…
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Linux 6.17 Staging Continues Cleaning The Realtek RTL8723BS Driver
The staging area of the Linux kernel, where preliminary code initially appears to mature until being promoted out, continues seeing a lot of code churn. With Linux 6.17 the staging updates were submitted and now merged with one driver in particular standing out... phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.17-S…
The CRC32C cyclic redundancy check code path within the Linux kernel for error detection is much, much faster with the in-development Linux 6.17 kernel when running on modern Intel and AMD AVX-512 processors.
Xtraceroute Ported To GTK4 + Vulkan For Demonstrating The Open-Source Potential For AI
Christian Schaller, a Fedora developer and Director of Software Engineering at Red Hat, recently began exploring the potential of AI usage more from the open-source/Linux perspective. He was left impressed from his ability to easily generate a Python application for internal Red Hat use to porting the venerable Xtraceroute program to GTK4 and Vulkan... phoronix.com/news/Xtraceroute-…
xf86-video-amdgpu 25.0.0 Released With Two Years Worth Of Fixes
It had been two years since the last update to the AMDGPU X.Org DDX driver but now xf86-video-amdgpu 25.0.0 is now available for those relying on this driver/hardware-specific driver for X.Org enabled Linux systems rather than the xf86-video-modesetting generic driver or a Wayland-based desktop... phoronix.com/news/xf86-video-a…
For those shopping for a Linux friendly laptop powered by AMD Ryzen AI 300 series 'Strix Point' with Zen 5 cores and integrated Radeon graphics plus allowing up to 128GB of RAM, the 15.3-inch InfinityBook Pro 15 Gen10 was announced this morning.
AMD Streaming SDK Updated With Linux Support - But Recommending X.Org Over Wayland
AMD's GPUOpen group today released the AMD Interactive Streaking SDK 1.1 release that now delivers Linux support alongside the existing Microsoft Windows support. The AMD Interactive Streaming SDK is designed to provide pieces for developers to build-out low-latency streaming solutions for cloud gaming, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and embedded appli… phoronix.com/news/AMD-Streamin…
Farewell Benchmarks Of Intel's Clear Linux On AMD EPYC Shows More Performance Left To Tap
Last week I ran the last planned benchmarks of Intel CPU performance on Clear Linux vs. Ubuntu with Intel having ceased development of Clear Linux following the restructuring at the company. In today's article is a final look at how the AMD EPYC performance compares on Clear Linux relative to Ubuntu Linux and AlmaLinux. An AMD EPYC 9965 "Turin" dua… phoronix.com/review/clear-linu…
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UX jobs are well-compensated and prestigious. They are often advertised as creative, empowering, and impactful. However, is working for Apple, Uber, or Revolut beneficial only for financial gain and…
@tytan652 Yeah, I know. I was thinking I might be able to just "abuse" the screencast source by hijacking the PW connection with something else, or else just extract out the OBS PW stuff into a separate plugin so I can prototype with it.
Actually making this user-friendly has to wait for the portal stuff, since unfortunately the camera trick isn't going to work if it doesn't do dmabuf...
If you want to go pure zero-copy, yeah the camera source is not implemented to use DMA-BUF (and I don't think I have a camera to try to implement and test it).
I joked in stream about the OBS GStreamer plugin, but used to handle a pipewiresrc as a source could work without having to write a plugin.
@tytan652 I think I can try the gst plugin, yeah! Though when I tried standalone usage in the stream it looked like something went wrong... but maybe it works better with just the sink part.
@tytan652 I tested the "pipewire hijack" method and it works (start a screencast capture in OBS, then use pw-cli to reset the node permissions, disconnect, and connect it to another source)
Linux 6.17 Lands New file_getattr & file_setattr System Calls
Along with the better handling of multi-device file-systems such as Btrfs' native RAID capabilities and now allowing more efficient writing of zeroes to modern storage devices, the number of VFS pull requests for Linux 6.17 also added some other extra goodies... phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.16-f…
Stardock Entertainment have announced Elemental: Reforged, which is kinda of like a super remaster of three different games to finally realize their vision.
A 10x Workaround & Less Network Egress Downtime Change Submitted For Linux 6.17
The kernel locking changes submitted today for Linux 6.17 contain a temporary change worth discussion for yielding a 10x speed-up of a particular function call and as part of that yielding less network egress downtime until a better solution is developed... phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.17-L…
The kernel locking changes submitted today for Linux 6.17 contain a temporary change worth discussion for yielding a 10x speed-up of a particular function call and as part of that yielding less network egress downtime until a better solution is devel…
While the Broadcom V3D driver has been part of the mainline kernel for supporting the graphics found on recent Raspberry Pi boards, currently it doesn't support run-time power management
TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro 15 Gen10 Laptop Announced - Powered By AMD Strix Point
For those shopping for a Linux friendly laptop powered by AMD Ryzen AI 300 series "Strix Point" with Zen 5 cores and integrated Radeon graphics plus allowing up to 128GB of RAM, the 15.3-inch InfinityBook Pro 15 Gen10 was announced this morning... phoronix.com/news/TUXEDO-IB-Pr…
For those shopping for a Linux friendly laptop powered by AMD Ryzen AI 300 series 'Strix Point' with Zen 5 cores and integrated Radeon graphics plus allowing up to 128GB of RAM, the 15.3-inch InfinityBook Pro 15 Gen10 was announced this morning.
Huge Speedups For CRC32C With Modern AVX-512 CPUs Merged To Linux 6.17
The CRC32C cyclic redundancy check code path within the Linux kernel for error detection is much, much faster with the in-development Linux 6.17 kernel when running on modern Intel and AMD AVX-512 processors... phoronix.com/news/CRC32C-Faste…
It’s sad that in the age of things like the UK Online Safety Act that the bigger platforms are becoming the only ways to chat. It’s simply not feasible to run an independent forum in the UK now.
Hope we eventually see proper Group support on Mastodon.
Linux 6.17 Will Allow Writing Zeroes More Efficiently To SSDs
In addition to the VFS changes merrged yesterday for allowing multi-device file-systems to better cope with losing a disk, another notable change as part of the VFS pull requests for Linux 6.17 allows more efficiently zeroing out a range on modern NVMe SSDs or SCSI drives... phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.17-f…
Luigi
in reply to Liam @ GamingOnLinux 🐧🎮 • • •