Navigating in the mini timeline is very CPU intense

Installation & Configuration Linux
#1

When navigating in the mini timeline in Ardour 9, my CPU usage goes to round 12 % and the CPU temperature rises from 40°C to 74°C. This is not the case when using the scroll wheel, so it doesn’ t seem to be a problem with the navigation in general. Maybe a wayland issue?

Graphics:
  Device-1: AMD driver: amdgpu v: kernel
  Display: wayland server: X.Org v: 24.1.6 with: Xwayland v: 24.1.6
    compositor: gnome-shell v: 46.0 driver: X: loaded: amdgpu
    unloaded: fbdev,modesetting,radeon,vesa dri: radeonsi gpu: amdgpu
    resolution: 1920x1080~60Hz
  API: EGL v: 1.5 drivers: kms_swrast,radeonsi,swrast
    platforms: gbm,wayland,x11,surfaceless,device
  API: OpenGL v: 4.6 compat-v: 4.5 vendor: amd mesa v: PPA renderer: AMD
    Ryzen 7 9700X 8-Core Processor (radeonsi raphael_mendocino LLVM 20.1.8
    DRM 3.64 6.17.0-14-generic)

Also getting those glitches when selecting something in the pianoroll

Bildschirmfoto vom 2026-02-07 20-36-32
Bildschirmfoto vom 2026-02-07 20-36-321342×750 31.2 KB

#2

Quite possibly. The official statement is that Ardour on [X]Wayland is not supported.

#3

oh, ok. Wasn’t aware of this. Then I have to wait another 5 years :smiley:

#4

Always the optimist :slight_smile:

2 Likes
#5

I can’t fathom why people would depend on a new, incomplete and relatively unproven windowing and compositing system on their Studio workstation, it’s kind of an essential base-level thing to be able to rely on… :thinking: Red Hat seems to like making all of Linuxdom their beta-testers (if early PipeWire and Wayland are any indication) :roll_eyes:

My good vibes are all aimed at XLibre, hoping they can achieve the impossible and make X11 so good that it’s a viable alternative for Wayland for many years to come… :crossed_fingers:

1 Like
#6

I have a new PC Ryzen 9700X with iGPU and had a lot of graphic issues with X. Wayland works flawlessly instead :wink: .

1 Like
#7

Maybe Studio One is for you!

#8

I have Reaper also and Renoise.

1 Like
#9

Wiki says that “Initial release 30 September 2008; 17 years ago”, so it’s not like Wayland was released as a Christmas gift last year.
Lots and lots of programs work just fine under Wayland.

The fact that Ardour depends on the ancient Xorg is a bit sad, though quite understandable given the number of developers.

XLibre appears to have some quite severe moral and technical quality issues so it’s unclear if one really wants to rely on them going forward.

1 Like
#10

I’m surprised it managed to live that long :slight_smile:

Also keep in mind that there are currently no plugin standards that support Wayland.

I expect those are mostly single Window based ones. While Ardour is in the same boat as e.g. KiCad and Wayland Support | KiCad

I don’t see X11 going away anytime soon, ideally XWayland would get some attention, other than that XNest is perhaps the option that sucks least.

Wayland’s design omits basic functionality that desktop applications for X11, Windows and macOS have relied on for decades…

#11

Sure, it has it’s work cut out for it and ‘corporate Linux’ wants it to fail for sure… As far as morality give me a break, Canonical and Red Hat are beacons of morality!?.. if you read the XLibre development statement in it’s entirety they welcome all comers to contribute, their contributions are going to evaluated on their coding skills above all else, if that’s immoral then I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree…

1 Like
#12

Somewhat interesting lobste.rs thread on KiCad and Wayland:

#13

That is why I stick with Mate DE on Fedora. Mate does not yet support Wayland so it still includes Xorg.

#14

Gnome and KDE: Yes, progressing well all things considered to be fair, still some caveats…

Cinnamon, XFCE4, LXQt, Enlightenment: Kinda but not really ready yet for daily use without a list of caveats.

Mate, Moksha, Fluxbox, Openbox and a whole host of other lightweight WM’s: Anywhere from maybe someday to never gonna happen…

1 Like
#15

Is 12% a typo? If your CPU is 74C at 12% usage then you have a problem with your hardware cooling.

2 Likes
#16

Well, as much as I like XOrg, it’s really on life support by now.
As far as most distros go Wayland is what the future will hold.

If plugins don’t support Wayland I’d think that’s a plugin problem, not a Wayland one.
It’s not been a secret that XOrg has been more or less deprecated for quite some time now.

#17

alas no. Wayland doesn’t provide a clear path for “hi, i’m an application and this is my window, and i’d like to put this other window inside it”.

It’s not that it can’t be done, but it is already the case that there are two “competing” ideas about how to do this with Wayland (and they are incompatible). All because Wayland doesn’t seem to imagine that this is a thing anyone would ever want to do.

1 Like
#18

Well, even the Xorg developers themselves have concluded that XWindows is yesterday’s news, so I don’t really blame distros for finding new and supported alternatives…

It is a bit strange that XLibre welcome all contributions but still feel the need to to specifically point out that they’re explicitly free from any “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” policies.
I would think that “all contributions” would include such policies…

As much as many of us would like to stay in the comfort of Xorg, ALSA, and JACK we probably have to face the reality that Wayland and Pipewire is the future for most of the major Linux distros.
If we want to cling on to Xorg, pulseaudio, SysV-init, a static /dev, being able to boot a 32bit system with more than 4GB RAM and so on we’d would also be expected to find a niche distro that provides all those features of days gone past.

IIRC people have questioned the quality of the code that’s been included in XLibre.

And it seems the Benevolent Penguin Dictator himself didn’t like some of the fringe idea comments Mr. Weigelt has made :
https://lkml.org/lkml/2021/6/10/957

1 Like
#19

Is there a bug report regarding that problem?
I would think, and hope, that if it’s something many projects stumble upon it would eventually be addressed by the Wayland community.

Just as I hope that my Ardour bug 0010015: Ardour crashes when compiled with clang19+ - MantisBT will be fixed in the near future :slight_smile:

#20

@peder You’ve never noticed that some highly intelligent people can be a little ‘off’ about some things and absolutely brilliant about others? Epidemiology and Computer windowing systems are pretty disparate topics, I fail to see how getting your ass deservedly chewed off for being wildly off-topic on a mailing list means you are automatically a moron at software development… Mr. Torvalds has a pretty colorful history of not suffering fools gladly on his mailing list. Stuff like this is great revisionist history, the fact is nobody knew WTF was going on during Covid and some things (not vaccines) that were in the realm of conspiracy theory were actually not as outlandish as we were led to believe in hindsight but I digress. XLibre will fail or succeed as a fork of Xorg, that is all that should matter. I don’t deny that Wayland is the future and I’m hoping it improves significantly, something so fundamental being deployed like this is pretty ridiculous, especially from a development viewpoint. I can’t imagine it happening on any other platform.

1 Like