Comment by its_ubuntu 7 hours ago
Isn't it great how we just keep reinventing the same old wheel over and over and over again?
A light weight, minimal window manager for Wayland! How nice! We already had a hundred of those for X11.
Wayland got rid of screen tearing, an issue that plagued every machine I had used with X since I started using Linux in 2003/2004. That alone was enough for me to switch to sway in 2016, and I've never looked back. Xorg was nothing but headaches. Let's not even mention its security model.
Screen tearing is due to single buffering. Double buffering fixes that. It's easily enabled. This is basic stuff.
Now thanks to Wayland you have increased latency on top of the screen tearing "fix." Plus all the other Wayland irritations and problems that we've been hearing about for decades (plural) even as we're told the whole time X11 is obsolete. lol.
Damn it feels good not being a 24/7/365 alpha tester of other people's shitware.
Enjoy reinventing the wheel, badly, over and over again.
You can minimize tearing with double buffering so it's pretty rare but you can't completely eliminate it. Xorg by design cannot guarantee perfect frames. Tearing is something you'll notice every time it happens, whereas latency is not something that's necessarily an issue, and modern compositors have substantially reduced this latency.
I'm not really sure why Wayland gets all the hate it does, you'd think desktop Linux was perfect before Wayland came along and made everything totally unusable. As for myself, it's been a much better experience than Xorg ever was, pretty much since day one -- I've never had a torn frame, I've never had any issues with input lag, and I've never had to fuss with video settings. Not once. I'm sure some people have, but across a dozen machines I've had exactly zero problems in...a few months shy of a decade.
Let's not forget Xorg's own devs have put it on life support and recommend Wayland, which was created by Xorg devs, going forward. Nobody wants to maintain 35-year old spaghetti code of a fundamentally flawed design.
I prefer X11 as well, but it has some security issues. Notably, all applications can read your input at any time. It's really hard to sandbox.
Wayland brought some irritations, including increased latency, and an architecture that requires rethinking all window managers. A rewrite is not enough. Very annoying.
I will never understand why "the computer can tell what input it is receiving" has turned into an accepted threat model.
I understand that we have built a computer where our primary interface depends on running untrusted code from random remote locations, but it is absolutely incredible to me that the response to that is to fundamentally cripple basic functionality instead of fixing the actual problem.
We have chosen to live in a world where the software we run cannot be trusted to run on our computers, and we'd rather break our computers than make another choice. Absolutely baffling state of affairs.
This is not a window manager, so thanks for stating the obvious. You might not like wayland and that's fine with me, but if you decide to hate on it, you should at least know what you are hating on. There are good reasons to prefer a wayland compositor over X11. If you don't care about these reasons, that doesn't mean nobody should.