Gaming on Wayland
This is a neat and helpful comparison, but to me the issue was never really latency; it&#x27;s more the fact that Wayland isn&#x27;t neccesarily a direct upgrade over x11 in a lot of ways.<p>Now, I can anticipate a number of responses to this. Firstly, a lot of people will (correctly) point out that x11 isn&#x27;t a very good window server, and doesn&#x27;t account for things like compositing, security or proper window management. Fair enough, they&#x27;re all valid complaints. Wayland&#x27;s solution to the dog bite seems to be pulling the teeth off the dog though, and I don&#x27;t really agree with a lot of the design philosophy that went into making it. It reminds me of the recent GNOME releases, where their solution to inconsistent user theming and poor extension support was just to remove both features altogether. The trap that a lot of modern Linux developers seem to fall into is fragmenting their userbase under the guise of &quot;finally fixing&quot; some pain point or bug, and cutting off the users who disagree with them instead of Doing One Thing, and Doing It Well. Everyone is big-picture these days, wanting to take giant leaps for the Linux desktop experience without really considering how extensible or feature-complete their program is, and slamming the &quot;f*ck it, ship it&quot; button before it&#x27;s ready.<p>Admittedly, there&#x27;s not an elegant solution to any of this. However, in this specific example, I think the best course of action would have been to just outright plagiarize Apple&#x27;s Quartz. The development cycle for Wayland has been painful to say the least, and a lot of it came from wildly unnecessary breaking changes, vendor apprehension and arguments about ideology that really shouldn&#x27;t have wasted our time in the first place. Now that it&#x27;s &quot;ready&quot;, there&#x27;s a couple hundred asterisks following every feature, and the experience is generally shaky enough to keep me fearful of God and contented with x11, no matter how bad it is.<p>Edit: Quick shoutout to PipeWire while I&#x27;m here, for <i>actually</i> creating a crowd-pleasing solution where nobody had to be thrown under the bus. They were given a herculean task of unifying 4 different audio standards, and they shipped it when it was ready instead of letting it languish in development hell. The result was fantastic, and distro uptake was almost immediate. If more projects were like PW, we wouldn&#x27;t be here having this conversation right now.