alt Hacker NewsI've never used a system with Wayland (been on i3 for ~15 years) but every time a project like this comes up, I have to wonder why Wayland is even a thing. So many hoops to jump through for things that should be simple.
Sure, X11 has warts but I can make it do basically anything I want. Wayland seems like it will always have too much friction to ever consider switching.
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My reason for switching from i3 to sway (about 8 years ago) is DPI support. High DPI is a pain in Xorg, and essentially impossible with heterogeneous monitors.
The migration was a one way thing. Lots of things are smoother and simpler, and not having to ever again touch Xorg.conf has improved my quality of life.
To this day, I still have different monitors with different scale factors.
> I can make it do basically anything I want
X11 can't do high refresh rates every time that I've tried to do so.
The hoop I recently jumped through:
There's a type of input called "DeviceEvent" which is a bit lower level than "Window event". It also occurs even if the window isn't "active".
Windows and X11 support this, but Wayland doesn't except for mouse movement. I noticed my program stopped working on Linux after I updated it. Ended up switching to Window Events, but still kind of irritating.
Sway is basically i3 on Wayland. You pretty much keep your config file (with a few modifications), there really isn’t much friction.
That’s not a reason to do it of course, for me the driver was support for multiple monitors with different scaling requirements.
I've been on wayland since KDE had it available (like the KDE 5 days) because it offered fractional HiDPI scaling that wasn't buns. As a laptop user, it has been one of the best features of Wayland.
Furthermore, getting stuff like VRR on Wayland working is way easier than X.org. And, Wayland also supports HDR.