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The cost of maintaining Xorg

mastodon.social Carlos Soriano (@csoriano@mastodon.social)

One thing I saw in comments about the removal of xorg server is that some might not see how much work is/was to maintain xorg server. I understand is hard to see from outside, but maintaining xorg server with the standards we have in RHEL is not a small beast. Let me share some:

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  • The sense of entitlement in some of the replies on that post are absolutely awful

    As for me personally, I want to love Wayland. It has great performance on ALL my devices, (except one with a nvidia GPU) and is super smooth compared to X11!

    However... the secure aspect of Wayland makes it very difficult, if not impossible to easily get a remote desktop going. Wayvnc doesn't support the most popular desktop environments depending on how Wayland was compiled, and the built-in desktop sharing on distros that have switched over to Wayland often require very specific Linux-only VNC and RDP clients, otherwise you run into odd errors.

    I really hope the desktop sharing situation improves because it's a pretty big showstopper for me. On X11 you just install & run x11vnc from a remote SSH session and you have immediate session access with VNC from Linux, Android, and Windows. If you want lockscreen access too then you run as root and provide the greeter's Xauth credentials. But Wayland's not so simple sadly AFAICT...

    Waypipe is something I've found out about recently though, so need to check that out and see how well it works at the moment. If anyone has any helpful info or pointers please share, I'm completely new to Wayland and would appreciate it!

    • For me its especially services like RustDesk or even RealVNC that are essential, because I have no DynDNS

    • I know this is not useful for most use cases, but if you login to the desktop on the 'remote Wayland', locally first then RD will work as expected. So if you can change the behaviour of the remote desktop to stay unlocked (IE its in a secure place where others cannot just access the device), then and RD will work with Wayland.

      I use NoMachine (since I manage all sorts of devices, and its nice that there is a client and server for everything including phones/arm) and it works for me because many of the machines are actually VM's and I can keep the desktops unlocked and logged in. NoMachines solution for Wayland - is to disable it and use X11 !!

      But I wish many of the RD developers would just embrace Wayland and add/rewrite code to support it (If it is in their scope, I don't know) It might not be, since I am aware of Waypipe and Pipewire, but I'd assume that RD devs would still need to include support for that.

    • Also wayland is just slower for gaming

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        • Looked at it. It seems GNOME are doing dirty hacks, since AFAIK they don't have tearing control in their compositor.

          And game fps is not directly translated to perceived performance on wayland. For example in Xonotic 90-95 fps on wayland feel laggy, but if enable glFinish, I'll get 80 fps in same area, but game will feel much better. But it causes game to run in 20-30 fps in places and cause more lag there, where it would run 30-60. For context runnung game in X11 without glFinish gets me 110 fps in same area, which feel like 110 fps. Running game in kmsdrm gets me 120 fps in same area.

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