SDL 3.0 retains preference for Wayland despite criticism from Valve – IT Pro – News

Gamelibrary Simple DirectMedia Layer will still use Wayland as a display server in SDL 3.0, despite much discussion about it. Joshua Ashton of Valve’s Linux graphics team previously criticized some known issues with Wayland that X11 does not have.

SDL, or Simple DirectMedia Layer, is a cross-platform library that is widely used for video software, emulators and games. The library has been using X11 as a display server for some time, but decided to prefer Wayland in version 3. This caused frustration with Ashton from Valve’s Linux graphics team, among others, who often uses LibSDL. He opened a pull request in the project on March 24, stating that Wayland still has several unresolved issues.

Ashton mentions a number of known performance issues and issues with some of the protocols that are important to gamers, among other things. “There is no benefit to gaming and the average application by choosing Wayland over X11,” Ashton writes.

Ashton’s concerns led to a lively discussion within the pull request, discussing the pros and cons of Wayland and X11. After a few days Sam Lantinga chopped, maintainer from SDL and also working at Valve, a decision was made. Despite the problems mentioned, SDL 3.0 continues to prefer Wayland by default.

Lantinga indicates that the people behind Wayland appear to be aware and are working on solutions. “While they’re working on that, I’m going to leave Wayland as the default so it’s easier for others to test and [de mensen achter Wayland] to provide feedback. As we get closer to release, we will reconsider the decision,” said Lantinga. The pull request has now been closed.

Wayland has been gaining ground for years. For example, Linux Mint 21.3 comes with experimental Wayland support and more Linux distros, including Fedora, are considering bringing Wayland support out of the box. SDL also previously considered giving preference to Wayland instead of X11. In January 2022, Wayland was made the standard for SDL2, but that was reversed in April that year due to various issues.