Well known KDE developer Nate Graham is out with a blog post today outlining his latest Wayland thoughts, how X11 is a bad platform, and the recent topic of “Wayland breaking everything” isn’t really accurate.
“In this context, “breaking everything” is another perhaps less accurate way of saying “not everything is fully ported yet”. This porting is necessary because Wayland is designed to target a future that doesn’t include 100% drop-in compatibility with everything we did in the past, because it turns out that a lot of those things don’t make sense anymore. For the ones that do, a compatibility layer (XWayland) is already provided, and anything needing deeper system integration generally has a path forward (Portals and Wayland protocols and PipeWire) or is being actively worked on. It’s all happening!”
Wayland has fixed so many head-scratching issues I would get running 6 monitors on 2 GPUs under X11. I’d often end up with missing monitors, placed in wrong spots that I’d have to rearrange every reboot until an update would come through that would fix it again for a few months, then all over again.
Since I moved to wayland, everything just works. When it doesn’t, it’s not a display server issue, it’s something physical. I just had a couple monitors fail to show up and thought “oh hell, it’s back to this, eh”. But I open the tower, seat the offending GPU better, and everything comes up like normal, and all the screens are in the right position, it just remembers.
Anyone that thinks X11 is still superior probably runs on a laptop with a single screen.
man it crazy I switched to Wayland on my laptop and docking to 3 monitors just worked on Wayland and it would remember all my monitors settings
I hand like 2 or 3 scripts setup to try and manage that on x11
I mean I’m fully with you on the fact screen autodetect isn’t stellar on X but there’s no need to exaggerate with “2 or 3 scripts”. It’s one xrandr command.
And I’m sure all the other people using 6 monitors on 2 GPUs at the same time will appreciate it.
Seriously, how common is such a scenario that you’d even mention it in this context?
Two monitors with different refresh rates is very common. Think laptop connected to a bigger monitor.
I have 2 75hz and a 240hz. It’s been alright for me on kde and x11. Although, I do want to give this Wayland thing a shot after hearing it being brought up so many times
3 monitors is probably a lot more common than you think.
I have, unironically, never seen anyone using three monitors together on a PC in my life.
Seriously? That’s my home setup, and a lot of my friends also have 3 monitors.
I’m surprised you don’t know anyone who has three monitors. It’s common for tech-y people.
Ive seen several devs do that, and also some of my gaming friends have 3 monitors.
I barely know anyone who only has a single display. Most people I know have one high refresh rate monitor, and one office monitor for discord and the likes.
Main work + secondary work (docs, output, …) + sensors/debug/multimedia
Hello! Nice to meet you. I know and love your kind. One monitor is pretty standard, so I have a lot of friends just like you.
Yup, 3 monitors user here. I guarantee it’s not that uncommon.
(And yes, I’m still running X11)
A lot of people that run three monitors got all three from a thrift store for $8
Since it’s probably reasonably rare it’s a good demonstration of the stability of Wayland. It makes sense to mention it imo
Ultra wide for cheap is one of uses
It really does seem that way. I’ve dealt with many different multi-monitor setups on X11 and only ever had problems. For example, I have an AMD based setup with 3 monitors, 2 are average 1080p60 displays and the third has a higher refresh rate. On X11 this setup always has either screen tearing/flickering, unusually high CPU usage by the compositor or the refresh rate seems noticeably off and hot-plugging additional monitors makes things behave weird or even crash, especially when unplugging monitors. On setups with multiple monitors across multiple GPUs it’s the same but worse. On Wayland it all just works without any problems, no matter the setup. Hot-plugging monitors on Wayland is very seamless. Even X11 software runs better for me on Wayland.