Why Wayland adoption to have official support in programs is so slow?

j4k3 , 1 hour ago

So software like CAD is funny. Under the surface, 3d CAD like FreeCAD or Blender is taking vertices and placing them in a Cartesian space (X/Y/Z - planes). Then it is building objects in that space by calculating the mathematical relationships in serial. So each feature you add involves adding math problems to a tree. Each feature on the tree is linearly built and relies on the previously calculated math.

Editing any changes up tree is a massive issue called the topological naming problem. All CAD has this issue and all fixes are hacks and patches that are incomplete solutions, (it has to do with π and rounding floating point at every stage of the math).

Now, this is only the beginning. Assemblies are made of parts that each have their own Cartesian coordinate planes. Often, individual parts have features that are referencing other parts in a live relationship where a change in part A also changes part B.

Now imagine modeling a whole car, a game world, a movie set, or a skyscraper. The assemblies get quite large depending on what you’re working on. Just an entire 3d printer modeled in FreeCAD was more than my last computer could handle.

Most advanced CAD needs to get to the level of hardware integration where generalizations made for something like Wayland simply are not sufficient. Like your default CPU scheduler, (CFS on Linux) is setup to maximize throughput at all costs. For CAD, this is not optimal. The process niceness may be enough in most cases, but there may be times when true CPU set isolation is needed to prevent anything interrupting the math as it renders. How this is split and managed with a GPU may be important too.

I barely know enough to say this much. When I was pushing my last computer too far with FreeCAD, optimising the CPU scheduler stopped a crashing problem and extended my use slightly, but was not worth much. I really needed a better computer. However looking into the issue deeply was interesting. It revealed how CAD is a solid outlier workflow that is extremely demanding and very different from the rest of the computer where user experience is the focus.

possiblylinux127 , 37 minutes ago

Wayland will perform better than X as there is no server it has to go through. It can talk almost directly to hardware

possiblylinux127 , 1 hour ago

May programs do though

sramder , 1 hour ago

Because it’s so complicated that given a page (page and a half) to answer the simple question, “Why does Wayland support still give you more problems than solutions?” We had to describe it like the summary of a PHD theses in client server architecture?

Come on with that load of hot trash 😭

Procapra , 1 hour ago

Wayland isn’t even adopted by every desktop environment yet. xfce, cinnamon, mate, lxqt, and all the ancient window managers all use x11, and all have their users.

If it works on xwayland, chances are it won’t be switched for a long time.

possiblylinux127 , 1 hour ago

Xfce4 and cinnamon are close to wayland support.

visor841 , 1 hour ago

Also XWayland has many limitations as X11 does.

If an app has only ever supported X11, then it probably doesn’t care about those limitations (the apps that do care probably already have a Wayland version). And if an app doesn’t care about the extra stuff Wayland has to offer, then there’s not really a reason to add the extra support burden of Wayland. As long as they work fine in XWayland, I think a lot of apps won’t switch over until X11 support starts dropping from their toolkit, and they’ll just go straight to Wayland-only.

Psyhackological OP , 1 hour ago

Yeah I agree. Maybe some day X11 will be seen as something legacy that needs to be deprecated. But not now…

gazby , 1 hour ago

Plasma deprecated their X11 session in v6 pending removal in the future, and Redhat has already dropped it in Fedora & will do for EL in the next release.

Psyhackological OP , 1 hour ago

So it begins…

that_leaflet , 31 minutes ago

Plasma didn’t deprecate X11. Though some developers hinted that the Xorg session will probably be dropped before Plasma 7 and before Qt drops X11. But nothing concrete.

gazby , 26 minutes ago

Oh indeed not deprecated, my bad. Wayland is default and “preferred” (how they’re deciding what to prefer I can’t imagine), and X11 is confirmed to be removed in a future release.

umbrella , 6 minutes ago

xwayland covers most use cases already

MoogleMaestro , 2 hours ago

Some applications, such as those with tablet demands, are not met by current wayland des with proper tablet support and xwayland is currently the better option. This may have changed in the last year or so, but this is roughly my recollection of certain big art programs.

Psyhackological OP , 1 hour ago

Some many specific issues with Wayland… Maybe that’s a reason. X11 is a huggeee dependency for a long time.

that_leaflet , 2 hours ago

Blender’s Wayland support is not great because they’re doing stuff from scratch. They’re not using an existing toolkit like GTK, Qt, Electron, or even something like SDL to get Wayland support.

But if you’re using an existing toolkit things are much easier and support is automatically there, you just need to do testing to ensure everything works.

The common biggest things that still use Xwayland are Chromium based apps and programs running under wine/proton. Chromium has an experimental Wayland mode that works well enough, but definitely has some bugs, especially around windowing. Wine Wayland is in the works.

Psyhackological OP , 1 hour ago

Thanks for the inside.

Yeah Blender seems like an exception.

Also that means I play lots of Wine/Proton games and many web apps / Electron don’t care.