Wayland vs. X – Overview

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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    You also didn't have much choice; XFree86 is what everyone used and it more or less the only realistic option.

    Also doesn't help some people have been rather aggressively banging the Wayland drum for a long time now in a way that quite a few people find rather unpleasant. About half a year ago someone told me I "need" to switch to Wayland because programs will drop X11 support "any time now", all with a sense of glee. A quick search on https://hn.algolia.com with "Wayland by:username" showed they have been telling people that for about 7 or 8 years. Clearly that hasn't happened, so... And when they started banging this Wayland drum so aggressively there really WERE actual problems. Textbook "toxic fanboy" stuff. At some point people start filtering this sort of stuff out.

    The first time I really looked in to Wayland was when "I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit" article took off, which starts by comparing "anti-Wayland activism" (something which doesn't really exist as an organised force) with "anti-vaxxers, flat earthers, 9/11 truthers", dismisses anything that disagrees as "lies", and is generally just a stupid rant with a number of fairly obvious factual inaccuracies. To say this rather put me off from Wayland would be an understatement.

    I'm not holding you responsible for any of that of course, nor am I saying this is representative of people interested in Wayland as a whole, but at the same time ... I do think Wayland has burned a lot of goodwill with stuff like that, and that people voted that stupid insulting conspiratorial rant to the frontpage did no one any favours – it's not just a single person who wrote that article, it's the hundreds of people who voted on it, and some of whom defended it.

  • cage

    A Wayland kiosk

  • > As a developer, I needed to port a custom Linux system to hardware that only has Wayland drivers and it was a giant pain. Wayland offers no advantage at all for that system but it broke a lot of functionality that relied on X in terms of window placement, etc.

    FWIW, I've had decent luck running cage ( https://www.hjdskes.nl/projects/cage/ ), then on that xwayland, and then just ignoring wayland and running X clients. The result does still have some slight quirks, but it mostly works fine.

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  • barrier

    Open-source KVM software

  • libei looks useful. But IDK why libei is necessary to run Barrier with Wayland?

    For client systems, couldn't there just be a virtual /dev/inputXYZ that Barrier forwards events through

    And for host systems, it looks like xev only logs input events when the window is focused.

    Is xeyes still broken on Wayland, and how to fix it so that it would work with Barrier?

    With Barrier, when the mouse cursor reaches a screen boundary, the keyboard and mouse input are then passed to a different X session on another box until the cursor again crosses a screen boundary rule.

    Barrier is a fork of Synergy's open core: https://github.com/debauchee/barrier

    libei:

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