Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?

https://omar.yt/posts/wayland-set-the-linux-desktop-back-by-10-years

by omarroth • 4 months ago

328 482 4 months ago

superkuh• 4 months ago

And it's worse than this because there is no wayland. Without a strong reference implementation and with the very minimal wayland core protocol, each desktop environment picks and chooses and implements their own incompatible extensions for what should be wayland core features. This means you don't develop for linux, or even linux wayland. You develop for linux wayland mutter. Or linux wayland plasma. Or linux wayland hyprland. Because those three waylands are going to be doing things which you need every day on an average desktop in their own incompatible ways: https://wayland.app/protocols/

Developers have to decide which DE they'll have their applications run in rather than having your application be able to function across all linux desktops. This is different than how it was the last 20 years. No matter what else you say, this is a change from how it was. It's massive fragmentation of the userspace.

Literally the only wayland DE that supports screen readers right now is GNOME's mutter and that's mostly just for GNOME's software because of course they invented something new to work around the problems of the wayland architecture.

simonask8• 4 months ago

What is this “massive fragmentation” you speak of?

Anecdotally, I’m using Plasma, and every Gnome or Gtk app I’ve tried appears to be working perfectly, and vice versa when I occasionally try out Gnome.

Much less so for DIY/BYOB desktops like Hyprland, but I feel like that’s what you sign up for there.

nickelpro6• 4 months ago

https://wayland.app/protocols/

Click any protocol, very few outside the core and absolute essential extensions have universal support.

hakfoo2• 4 months ago

That's one of the things that freak me out about Wayland.

The DIY/BYOB experience is perfectly viable in the X11 world. I don't think I've ever had a piece of software balk at me because I used FVWM instead of kwin. I don't want to be railroaded into a desktop environment with strong opinions and mediocre tools when there's a sprawling flea maret worth of software to explore.

Blikkentrekker8• 4 months ago

“I guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or an XFCE app unfortunately. I'm sorry that this is the case but it wasn't GNOME's fault that Ubuntu has started this fork. And I have no idea what XFCE is or does sorry.”

Prophetic words were once spoken and mocked long ere.

lofties• 4 months ago

You could make this same post and replace any component with Wayland. At the end of the day the Linux community will continuously set the Linux Desktop back by N years. The most obvious case of this is Linus Tech Tips trying Linux to replace Windows for gaming, getting lost in what distro to pick, and then being flamed online for choosing the "wrong" distro. It's impossible for anyone without the time and curiosity to choose a Linux distro, and then to stick with it. My only "hope" for the year of The Linux Desktop is SteamOS, since that will have a commercial force driving adoption and removing the need for consumers to make a choice entirely.

Waterluvian• 4 months ago

I think your hope touches on what I think the issue partly is: a lack of empathy for any type of user that doesn’t resemble themselves. I think the deeper into tech you go, the more you find it. And Linux devs/fans are very deep into tech.

The commercial force behind SteamOS is largely the financial motivation to deeply care about the user who doesn’t get an apt about the technical details. They’re not there to do computers, they’re there to play a game or watch a movie or whatever. And the Linux community may benefit from the result of that goal, despite likely being salty about not being the audience.

charcircuit• 4 months ago

Not just the user, but Valve also has a financial incentive to care about developers too. Especially developers of apps who may never be updated ever again. Developers do not want to waste time trying to fight the desktop Linux software stack.

kykat2• 4 months ago

He clearly doesn't care about using Linux, he should just ignore it. It's fine.

simonask8• 4 months ago

To be fair, it’s pretty dumb that seemingly every article and LLM suggested using Pop!\_OS, which uses the Cosmic Desktop by default. At the time of writing, it is nowhere near ready for prime time. Whether that’s LTT’s fault or the community’s lack of self-awareness, I couldn’t tell you.

wredcoll• 4 months ago

I mean, the obvious point here is that none of these people are selling linux (or wayland or whatever). You could argue some of these projects over promise in terms of features and so forth, but again, it's not like people are paying for it.

You can certainly be unhappy with a piece of software regardless of if you paid for it, and there's an argument to be made that linux users benefit from it becoming more popular, but we're still mostly talking about volunteers creating software for themselves and then choosing to share it with others.

jmclnx2• 4 months ago

people may remember 'Y' from many years ago, AFAIK it was suppose to replace X, but never got to the point were Wayland is now.

The original conceit behind Wayland is to only implement what is needed for a simple Linux desktop

And this is my biggest issue with Wayland. If it started out with portability in mind maybe I would give it a try. But I am sticking with X because it is fully usable on the BSDs.

MBCook12• 4 months ago

I don’t blame the developers.

I do wonder what the BSDs will do. The Wayland developers were the X developers. The problems with X all still exist.

How big a share of the desktop market do the BSDs have compared to Linux? I imagine it’s quite small, unfortunately.

jcranmer• 4 months ago

How big a share of the desktop market do the BSDs have compared to Linux? I imagine it’s quite small, unfortunately.

Good stats are hard to come by, but the Linux : BSD ratio is probably no larger than the Windows : Linux ratio (which is actually running relatively low these days--Linux seems to be closing in on ~3% desktop share). That puts the BSD overall in the 0.01% range, which is really too little market share to accurately measure.

MBCook12• 4 months ago

The major comitters and maintainers of X decided it was a lost cause and unfixable.

Were they just supposed to keep working on the massive pile of hacks they felt needed abandoning?

They did what they thought was best. You hate it. Fine.

Do you think things would be better if they kept working on the unfixable mess?

I trust them to know what was going on better than random commenters.

PunchyHamster2• 4 months ago

That is fine. X11 needed fresh start. But they also failed to learn any lessons from X, just assuming "if X11 did it it must've been a bad idea, let's do it differently".

X11 did chalk many lines of abstractions in absolutely the right places, it's just the implementation was crufty in places, and just not designed for modern hardware in some other places, while wayland just tried to kick as much as possible to the WM side, making it so instead one place where those things need a bunch of code (the display system/its plugins), now every WM have to repeat that work and (more importantly) add incompatibilities because of that

000ooo000• 4 months ago

now every WM have to repeat that work

wlroots?

JoshTriplett• 4 months ago

But they also failed to learn any lessons from X

Why do you believe that the developers of X failed to learn lessons from X when developing the replacement of X? Perhaps they learned lessons from X and decided to build it differently as a result?

jmclnx2• 4 months ago

I believe most of the original committers and maintainers of X are long gone, if still around they could very well be in their late 70s and 80s.

I would agree if you said many of the Wayland Developers people started with Xfee86. But I think the 'complexity' of X has to do with the fact no one of this generation fully understand why X11 did things the way they did, so Wayland was started. That is OK, but here we are.

I think the main issue is proprietary video companies did not to release their specs. I think if the Wayland people told the GPU Companies (like Nvidia) they will not support your hardware unless you release full specs, they would be further along.

OpenBSD is getting along fine without companies like Nvidia, I wish Linux and Wayland would tell these companies their GPUs will never be supported until full documentation is provided.

simonask8• 4 months ago

I think you severely overestimate the amount of leverage the FOSS community has over companies like NVIDIA.

0x1ceb00da• 4 months ago

I think the main issue is proprietary video companies did not to release their specs. I think if the Wayland people told the GPU Companies (like Nvidia) they will not support your hardware unless you release full specs, they would be further along

Why?

yjftsjthsd-h6• 4 months ago

I think if the Wayland people told the GPU Companies (like Nvidia) they will not support your hardware unless you release full specs, they would be further along.

You realize nvidia managed to ship proprietary drivers for linux, right? They really don't need the support

jcelerier• 4 months ago

OpenBSD is g̶e̶t̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶a̶l̶o̶n̶g̶ ̶f̶i̶n̶e̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶o̶u̶t̶ ̶c̶o̶m̶p̶a̶n̶i̶e̶s̶ ̶l̶i̶k̶e̶ ̶N̶v̶i̶d̶i̶a̶ unuseable for any professional video-related work

starky• 4 months ago

This is true, and it is also true that the maintainers of Wayland have done a terrible job of developing the replacement. It is mostly good enough now to replace X11, but based on what I've seen reported about different features, they frequently let "perfect be the enemy of done" when it comes to implementing critical features. I mean, just look at the drama around remembering the position of a window, its absolutely ridiculous that after years they haven't picked a "good enough" direction and implemented it.

naikrovek4• 4 months ago

The people behind Plan 9 did a much better job than was done with X11 and that was completely ignored as a path forward from what I can tell.

It’s tiny, secure, graphics subsystem independent (it’ll work on just about anything with or without a GPU, I would expect, given the API is so damn simple) and already designed.

Maybe it wouldn’t work, but I bet it would have.

pjmlp14• 4 months ago

Everything is a file doesn't play well with how GPUs work, especially modern ones.

Plan 9 and later Inferno, just had plain 2D rendering.

Krssst• 4 months ago

Anecdotal evidence: when using X11 years ago I could never avoid screen tearing despite trying various options, except with one option that seemed to replace it with random frame drops. (to be fair that's probably related to my GPU, which is also the reason why I could not use wayland for so long)

Wayland just fixed all that, making it at least usable for multimedia/gaming use with my GPU.

themafia2• 4 months ago

They did what they thought was best.

My problem with it is their proxy for "best" seemed to be "opposite of X11." This was not a solid engineering choice, and I think this post is trying to demonstrate, that had costs.

I'd probably be completely fine with Wayland if it didn't have this obsession with military style desktop security. If it was as open as extensible as X11 by default then we all would have switched. X11 isn't pretty to write code for, but when it works, it works exceptionally well. Wayland seems to have made the wrong sacrifices where it mattered most.

MBCook12• 4 months ago

They were in a better position than anyone else to be able to make those calls.

To whatever degree the choices didn’t work out, which I think is likely overstated, they learned something. But if they just threw everything away again, people would be pissed. Again.

This all feels like so much Monday morning quarterbacking.

QuantumNoodle• 4 months ago

I'm just lurking in the comments with popcorn, but if what you said is true and the maintainers of X decided it was a lost cause and unfixable, well that is the most informed opinion of them all. Nobody knows better then the maintainers. Sure, the replacement might have feature gaps initially but that is a transient issue.

yjftsjthsd-h6• 4 months ago

Sure, the replacement might have feature gaps initially but that is a transient issue.

It has been 17 years.

fulafel2• 4 months ago

Data point: On my current and previous work laptops (iGPU ThinkPads) I switched from the default Wayland back to X11 because of various bugs (hangs, stutters, resume failures), in X11 they don't happen, seems to work flawlessly.

Sometimes it's worse to live in a mess that is being constantly fixed I guess.

ghusto2• 4 months ago

That really isn't his gripe. In fact near the end he describes would have been a good direction for starting fresh.

His pain is that it's been 17 years and some basic core functionality is either still broken or entirely missing. It's not my expertise so I don't know if it could have been planned any better, but 17 years and _basics_ still being broken doesn't sound great.

fluffybucktsnek3• 4 months ago

I think part of the issue is that there's a couple of misconception about Wayland. Wayland focuses, exclusively, on being a window management protocol. Use cases such as screen sharing and accessibility are out of scope for such. Instead, they were supposed to be implemented through their own protocols. But those protocols didn't show up for a long while.

martinald2• 4 months ago

FWIW I recently switched full time to Linux and have had absolutely 0 problems with GNOME, Wayland and Fedora, though I am using an AMD GPU.

wl-copy works fine, askpass works, copy and paste works, screen sharing with Google Meet works, drag and drop works. Using an iphone as a webcam works as does recording my screen.

Most importantly using multiple monitors with fractional scaling works perfectly. AFIAK this is not possible to do well (at all?) on X11, which is a complete show stopper for me.

If anyone's reading this and sitting on the fence, I would really give Fedora a go. I've found it so much more polished than Ubuntu, and loads of things which didn't work on it work out of the box on Fedora (at least compared to 24.04 LTS).

seabrookmx• 4 months ago

That's probably just due to the older kernel.

I go back and forth between Fedora and Ubuntu a lot, and once you get past the snap/flatpak and the apt/dnf differences everything feels the same.

I usually format my Fedora disk ext4, add flatpak to my Ubuntu installs, manually override the fonts, add dash-to-panel.. the resulting experience ends up identical.

tmtvl5• 4 months ago

Separate scaling fractions on separate monitors doesn't work under X. Well, I lie: it does work under zaphod mode, but no applications other than Emacs support that.

spudlyo2• 4 months ago

Heh. Just today I started fooling around with a new X11 setup on a barebones Ubuntu Server VM with just xorg, xinit, xterm, Emacs and i3.

It's pretty neat learning about iommu groups and doing NVMe passthrough with KVM/Qemu, and also messing around with the new (to me) Spice/virgl 3D acceleration. I was impressed I was able to play YT videos in the Ubuntu Virtual Machine Manager with hand-built mpv/ffmpeg + yt-dlp setup without dropping too many frames or serious glitches. Huzzah for libgl1-mesa-dri.

After that, I rebooted the host OS, jumped into the UEFI boot menu and booted the "guest" NVMe disk directly with my actual GPU, and it still worked. It's quite a trip down memory lane, typing 'startx' and having a both a :0.0 and :0.1 displays. That muscle memory from the 1990s is still going strong.

lnx01• 4 months ago

Running X11 on Ubuntu 22.04 - I have a 2650x1600 main at 150% scale and a 1920x1980 secondary at 100% scale. Essentially they're the same virtual size side-by-side. This _only_ works on my nVidia GPU...

andrewstuart22• 4 months ago

My experience lately has been similar. Most things work well now.

But, I think the article has some valid points about how long it's taken to get even this far. And it just kinda sucks that some things are still broken or don't have alternatives (the #1 thing I miss right now is Barrier (Synergy) for using my macbook from my linux desktop). HDR gaming on linux is possible thanks to Valve but it's still nowhere near as simple as plugging in your HDR display and toggling one switch.

And it's been rough getting here, and it seems like there are still some things that are slow and hard to get right. I'm not a display protocol dev, so I don't really have educated opinions about the protocol. But I know it's been a rough transition relative to other projects I've adopted even when there was major pushback (systemd springs to mind).

martinald2• 4 months ago

No I do get that, it's definitely been a slow and painful migration. But just having a very insecure X11 "forever" with no fractional font scaling wasn't a long term plan either imo.

saghm2• 4 months ago

the #1 thing I miss right now is Barrier (Synergy) for using my macbook from my linux desktop)

It's admittedly tough to keep up with all of the forks that have happened, but the current iteration, Input Leap, has worked for this for me for years now

https://github.com/input-leap/input-leap

MBCook12• 4 months ago

Does HDR work anywhere other than Mac?

I’ve heard reports of issues on Windows were you often have to switch between HDR and non-HDR modes to get the colors or brightness to appear correctly. Something about tone mapping I think?

I don’t know if that’s fixed in newer versions or if it has to do with specific drivers or what. But it didn’t sound like it worked very well.

MBCook12• 4 months ago

The amount of time it’s taken to get here I think is THE fair criticism.

They had an absolute ton of work to do to design it and get it all running. It was never going to be fast. And it’s not like they could order any of the desktop environments to do what they want.

There have always seemed to have been commenters who were annoyed it didn’t come practically done with every feature from X plus 30 more from the day of announcements.

But, we’re here now.

Cyph0n6• 4 months ago

If the Python 2 to 3 migration took a decade, isn’t it reasonable for a display server migration to take even more time to stabilize?

Especially given:

(1) The (relatively) fragmented reality of Linux distros and desktop managers. I am sure that such a migration could have been executed faster had the Linux desktop world been more centralized like Windows or macOS.

(2) The age and maturity of X11

wildredkraut8• 4 months ago

Yeah? Then try to drag out a tab of firefox or GNOME files to the upper direction, good luck. Then check how "awful" Blender 5.1 titlebar and window frame integrates to GNOME. Have fun trying to make Deskflow/Synergy working on GDM.

iknowstuff2• 4 months ago

Wow what a showstopper!

flexagoon2• 4 months ago

Don't know about the last two, but I just tried dragging a GNOME Files tab up and it worked just fine?..

Ardren• 4 months ago

Then try to drag out a tab of firefox

Works fine here?

DANmode2• 4 months ago

Have fun trying to make Deskflow/Synergy working on GDM.

Just install less secure packages, or an entire less secure OS,

we’re not stopping you.

chillfox• 4 months ago

I recently had to go through several remote desktop apps before I found one that would work.

atomicnumber3• 4 months ago

You don't even need fedora - clean arch install, install vim gnome and Firefox, and boom your computer now just works.

glouwbug• 4 months ago

Hyprlands been making waves

zahlman2• 4 months ago

I already have stuff that works out of box (based on 24.04 as it happens), and from what I've seen of GNOME Desktop I really just don't like the design — and its maintainers generally just impress me as insufferable people any time a story comes up.

Overall I think it's much better that options exist. I'm even willing to tolerate GUI inconsistency across the Linux ecosystem in exchange.

Rapzid• 4 months ago

I moved away from desktop Linux a few years back after getting a new development laptop with a hiDPI screen and running into fractional scaling issues. Windows wsl2 was just getting real good at the time, so I moved over on my desktop and laptop.

Nice to hear fractional scaling situation is better now. Tempted to try it out but.. Man Windows(Pro) is just such a nice desktop and host now, and I can still develop in "linux"..

queenkjuul5• 4 months ago

Same. It's sad but W11+WSL2 is just a straight up better experience than Linux native on my laptop.

drnick1• 4 months ago

Man Windows(Pro) is just such a nice desktop and host now

Windows is terrible relative to a recent version of GNOME on Wayland, slow, bloated, full of spyware and AI.

ewoodrich2• 4 months ago

Yes! Per-monitor fractional scaling on Fedora/Wayland finally allowed me to switch my default OS on my laptop from Windows 11 to Linux.

I had to give up on my previous attempt a couple years ago with Linux Mint/X11 because it was an exercise in futility trying to make my various apps look acceptable on my mixed DPI monitor setup.

Linux Mint with Wayland clearly was not getting a lot of attention at the time, and the general attitude when I looked up bugs seemed to be "just don't use Wayland", but maybe the situation has improved by now. It was also kinda off-putting reading Reddit/forum comments whose attitude towards per-monitor DPI scaling on Linux in general was basically "why would anyone need that" when it's been a basic Windows feature for a decade+.

Fedora on the other hand was literally just plug-and-play and has been very enjoyable to use as my daily driver.

jauntywundrkind3• 4 months ago

What a pox that such an old slow moving distro as Mint somehow is people's first port of call. I don't know how this happened, how Mint rooted itself so well (in 2006 it was fresh!), but this perception that you should use the slowest moving oldest possible dustiest Linux is the best possible thing Microsoft and Apple could spread to convince the world to believe.

If you are going to jump into Linux, dont sell yourself the weird delusion that using ancient ass systems is somehow going to be better for you.

queenkjuul5• 4 months ago

I'll never understand it but Fedora just doesn't work ootb on my Asus laptop or Asus desktop.

Gnome 50 on Ubuntu 26.04 beta has served me okay in testing so far.

Blikkentrekker8• 4 months ago

It's really simple, then I have to use GNOME or KDE or any other thing that is on Wayland which I don't use. AwesomeWM, Xmonad, Fluxbox, OpenBox and many other interfaces just aren't on Wayland and have no intention to be because it just doesn't really do well what they want to and they don't feel like maintaining two versions.

The real issue with Wayland and “setting back” isn't what the article says, but just that like 15 years was taken just to get Wayland on semi-decent feature-parity with X11 during which time development on X11 came to a standstill. That time could've been used to improve X11 and it's still not real feature parity.

And part of it was just the devs refusing to believe that people needed those features. I talked with them around 2010-ish and about some of the things they cut out claiming that no one ever used them. These were things related to mouse acceleration that is pretty essential to video games and image editing, certain forms of screen capture, various things with fonts and color management that are essential to many professionals and they actually believed that no one used those things. Eventually they came around and added many of those things back in, in doing so basically making many of the initial security promises complete void again but so much time has been put in what isn't much of an improvement to justify the time spent on it.

simonask8• 4 months ago

You're lamenting the use of time by people, but you are not those people's boss.

People work on what they want to work on. There is no rule that people who worked on Wayland (and I happen to think they did a great job) would have worked on Xorg instead, or that the original motivations for building Wayland are invalid.

dgan• 4 months ago

I am on latest Fedora Gnome, and tab switching between windows randomly stucks. It's so annoying, i had to go back to X11, even if handles badly high dpi laptop; the alternative being to reboot randomoy in the middle of the work

WhoCaresAboutIt• 4 months ago

It's pretty funny to see "copy/paste works" and "drag and drop works" presented like some kind of win. That's the absolute baseline for a desktop OS.. since at least Windows 3.x. Windows, bloated and ad-riddled as it is now, never had to be defended on the basis that basic GUI behavior still functioned. But this year surely will be the year of the Linux desktop!

stemlord• 4 months ago

I have constant issues with drag and drop on my windows pc. It'll stop working and I have to reboot to get it back

righthand4• 4 months ago

Wayland was designed exclusively i3 style compositors and has been stuck there ever since not a “simple desktop”. It is incredibly pathetic that you can’t even open a window in that same place you closed it on Wayland. No one involved seems interested in solving any of the usage problems and if you look at various threads it’s finger pointing at other software.

The rule should be if Wayland isn’t going to supply a timely answer, software developers should target an implementation of whatever missing feature as implemented in X11. That is the only way to move forward if the threat of X11 coming back exists.

weaksauce• 4 months ago

they just agreed to move forward on the protocol to do that thing.

righthand4• 4 months ago

Okay. It still took them 17 years to agree on it. And regardless of moving forward on it they’ve demonstrated no concern with timely delivery.

wutbrodo2• 4 months ago

Wayland was designed exclusively i3 style compositors

I'm a dyed-in-the-wool i3 (now sway) user. I don't even use floating windows. Wayland has still been an awful experience, broke a bunch of workflows for me

jdougan• 4 months ago

I'm still of the opinion that the right direction is something architectEd more like NeWS with better underlying language support. If you're going to break stuff make it a real improvement.

tliltocatl4• 4 months ago

We basically have it, it's called Blink (and it's a dumpster fire for unrelated reasons).

aussieguy1234• 4 months ago

I switched to wayland mainly because screen lock on X11 is not possible to do securely. If some way is found to crash the big screen lock window in X11, the attacker gets access.

PunchyHamster2• 4 months ago

well if some way is found to crash wayland the attacker also gets access...

hparadiz2• 4 months ago

You'll get thrown to a tty login prompt.

queuebert2• 4 months ago

Why not use a third-party locker, like the suckless one?

https://tools.suckless.org/slock/

kykat2• 4 months ago

Again, we may live in a parallel universe. Because I am using KDE and wayland and NVIDIA, and it works beautifully. Although NVIDIA really started to work great only fairly recently (last couple of years).

And using X is a noticeably worse experience.

I'am excited to follow the still very early development of xfwl to see how a classic DE works in wayland.

arunc• 4 months ago

Same setup here, minus Nvidia. Love KDE with Wayland. Super stable. Tried Gnome, but switched back. Gnome felt like it was 20 years ago in terms of functions tho UX was still posh.

cogman10• 4 months ago

Ditto, same setup.

When I first grabbed my current setup about 2 years ago, the nvidia drivers had all sorts of annoying and painful bugs to work around. However, there were workarounds.

Now, everything mostly just works. The only thing I struggle with is sleep which seems to be permanently broke in the latest nvidia drivers.

Cyph0n6• 4 months ago

I have been thoroughly enjoying Wayland with Niri. It is snappy, looks beautiful on my 4K monitor, and handles X11 emulation perfectly (via xwayland-satellite). I have not seen any major issues with OBS, clipboard handling, or any application I have had to run.

So as an end user, I don’t get all the hubbub. Reminds me a bit of the whole systemd craze from some time ago.

palata14• 4 months ago

Disclaimer: I don't have any skin in this game, I was fine with X11 and I am fine with Wayland, and I actually think it's nice to have both (and more, like Xlibre I think?).

I understand complaints about systemd, I don't understand the complaints about Wayland. This whole article sounds like a big rant and doesn't seem to bring much information.

I also don't care for the "security" argument when parts of the core reference implementation are written in a memory-unsafe language.

Doesn't sound like a super informed way to look at security (not even mentioning that Wayland was started in 2008, and Rust was not a thing). One can also say that "as long as you run X11, there is no need to think about security because X11 just defeats it all".

In fact, you can find examples showing roughly a 40% slowdown when using Wayland over X11! I'm sure there are similar benchmarks claiming Wayland wins and vice versa (happy to link them as well if provided).

"I am gonna make a bad argument and follow it by saying that you could make the same bad argument to say the opposite". Doesn't sound like a super informed way to look at performance.

Anecdotal experience is not enough to say this is a broad issue, but my point is that when an average user encounters graphical issues within 60 seconds of using it, maybe it's not ready to be made the default!

So the whole article is built around ranting while saying "I don't have anything meaningful to say, I'll just share an anecdote and directly say it's not worth much because it's an anecdote"?

But the second actual users are forced to use it expect them to be frustrated!

Who is forced to use it? Just use X11, as you said (many times) you do already.

BowBun6• 4 months ago

Who is forced to use it? Just use X11, as you said (many times) you do already.

This is my understanding of his actual concern - Linux corps are pushing Wayland as a replacement for X11 when it is full of issues.

Anecdotally my experience was the same. I'm a dev so I'm fine in a terminal, but trying to switch to KDE actually sent me BACK to Windows. Basic windowing stuff just does not work, and like the OP says, tons of stutters and crashes for a simple 2-monitor setup. Even something as simple as alt-tabbing lagged for seconds on an overpowered machine. Just does not feel like polished software which is a huge reputational risk for Linux right now.

palata14• 4 months ago

Anecdotally, my experience with Wayland has been a lot better than with X11. I have been on Wayland for years, I can't remember the last time I had an issue (running Sway).

simonask8• 4 months ago

I assume you, a technical person, made sure to help the people giving you the software for free to diagnose what is obviously one or more bugs?

arikrahman• 4 months ago

I've had an interesting experience with creating a wayland compatability layer with Bitwig. Especially as I used Niri as the tiling window manager, it is even harder to use as a base as it less supportive of X11 compared to other WMs like hyprland.

This may be Niche, but DAWs are very rare to support linux, especially this stack. I would say it might be a stretch to say the company behind Bitwig is punishing Wayland users, I am sure they don't have the personnel for it, but it is a legitimate issue that companies will most likely be 10 years late to the new modernization into Wayland.

Anyways, I was able to configure it with a specific flake configuration. I had issues with third party windows, which was more of an issue with the floating nature of Niri, since Gnome with Wayland displayed external VSTs fine.

You can find my repository here if interested. It consists of a few files, and I made it easier to use with justfiles. https://github.com/ArikRahman/Nixwig

globalnode2• 4 months ago

as much as i dislike m$, at least windows works and it works for games and graphics. when i need text or computation without a ui, i use linux. similar to the argument in the article about use what works, i use what works.

lhl• 4 months ago

Funy that you mention multi-monitor since it's one of the reasons I eventually moved to Wayland. The only way to support different DPI monitors in X was to do janky scaling or even jankier multiple X servers.

I don't use KDE (or GNOME anymore) but while I had to deal with a lot of initial speedbumps a couple years ago, these days instead of a full DE, I'm using a Niri setup and it's worked out great for me.

For my laptop, I have my own monitor-detection/wl-mirror script for example that is faster and more reliable for plugging into projectors/meeting room HDMI than even my old Macs.

kennethrc2• 4 months ago

Even something as simple as alt-tabbing lagged for seconds on an overpowered machine.

This may not be KDE's fault; I tracked these kinds of issues down to some bad tunable defaults.

I came up with this:

    ----
    cat /etc/sysctl.d/50-usb-responsiveness.conf
    #
    # Attempt to keep large USB transfers from locking the system (kswapd0)
    #
    vm.swappiness = 1
    vm.dirty_background_ratio = 5
    vm.dirty_ratio = 5
    vm.extfrag_threshold = 1000
    vm.compaction_proactiveness = 0
    vm.vfs_cache_pressure = 200
    # FIXME? 64K too big?
    vm.page-cluster = 16
    ----

I have fast everything, NVMe SSD onboard and others in Thunderbolt 4 enclosures and 32GB of RAM on my 12th-Gen i7 with 20 (6+14) cores; there should have been no reason for any stuttering and/or Alt-Tab slowness while doing large file copies and finally got fed up, did some research and experimentation and use the above and it's not happened since.

YMMV, but it's worth a try.

(Oh, and on-topic, I've had to try Wayland (vs. X11) on my KDE desktop 'cause it seems to handle switching monitors when I go from home to work better; jury's still out if I'm keeping it)

hacker_homie2• 4 months ago

Comments like this make me feel like we are living in different worlds, I have KDE/Wayland on multi head machines with different DPIs and laptops. KDE has been the smoothest most reasonable desktops for a long time, I play games they just work, I can make zoom calls, they implemented device recovery. How are you experiencing this, are you rendering in software?

helterskelter2• 4 months ago

If you don't mind me asking...are you using nVidia by chance? Have you tried something besides KDE? How long ago was this?

I've read about some terrible experiences with Wayland and I've just never had any of these problems in nearly a decade of using it almost every day (sway was a little rough around the edges in the first year it came out, but even then it fixed screen tearing, which I was never able to entirely eliminate with Xorg). The two things I've always stayed away from though is KDE, and nVidia.

I'm just trying to figure out why there's such a discrepancy between my experiences and what I read online from time to time.

resonious• 4 months ago

This seems more like a KDE thing then a Wayland thing. At least for me on GNOME Wayland is strictly better. And the newer Wayland-only desktops like Niri are arguably better then that.

ghighi78782• 4 months ago

Wayland is so much better than x11. Sure there might be bugs in wayland which are not in x11, but in geberal wayland is better.

Kiboneu2• 4 months ago

Even something as simple as alt-tabbing lagged for seconds on an overpowered machine.

In what way? If there’s a delay for the task switching menu to close after alt-tabbing (~500ms) this might be due to a kde animation default (it really tripped me up, I’m a rapid window switcher). I can share the fix once I get on my kde machine.

xorbax• 4 months ago

trying to switch to KDE actually sent me BACK to Windows.

....uh, why not use Cinnamon or MATE or Gnome or XFCE?

Conflating KDE with desktop Linux is strange

I say this as someone who suffered the same problems trying to use KDE (frequent windowing freezing requiring logout) and just swapped to Cinnamon. It's two mousebutton clicks at the login.

sbinnee• 4 months ago

Yeap, it sounds like a big rant with multiple exclamation marks. Having both is a way to go. Recently I purchased a new laptop and thought should I go full Wayland? No way. I started with X11 and then added Wayland. Things break on Linux. You need a stable display server where you can still open a browser, and that is X11. Most of the time, I stay on Wayland until it breaks.

zahlman2• 4 months ago

Doesn't sound like a super informed way to look at security (not even mentioning that Wayland was started in 2008, and Rust was not a thing). One can also say that "as long as you run X11, there is no need to think about security because X11 just defeats it all".

Yeah, we're talking about completely different threat models here.

dehrmann3• 4 months ago

I actually think it's nice to have both

Options that are equivalent enough for most end users just cause confusion. There are also too many distros, and the Gnome vs. KDE competition set desktop Linux back another 10 years. That's three dimensions of big, important choices with not much downside if you pick the happy path and a whole lot of downside if you don't.

whynotmaybe2• 4 months ago

I don't know what's the difference between x11, wayland, gnome, kde and all the others.

The fact that people always debate over which one is best is one of the reason why I don't switch to Linux desktop.

Theres always the sane debate of Macos VS Windows VS Linux. That's a good one for me because there are many pros and cons for each of them.

But then, when you try to really look into Linux, it's an unstoppable flow of "systemd=bad", "snap is bad", “only the distro xyz is the real one because it respects principle abc".

Even the emacs VS vim debate seems saner than this.

I know the underlying spirit of Linux is the liberty to choose whatever you want, but this perpetual debate over which is the best only tricks me into believing that whichever distro I'd choose, it will be the wrong one.

Even for my old media server, there are 3 differents Linux mint : Cinnamon, Xfce and MATE.

What am I supposed to do? Spend a few hours to try each one and find the best for my 13 years old i5 with a Nvidia gt440 that's used 3 hours per month?

palata14• 4 months ago

The very reason I like Linux is for this diversity. I genuinely don't really get your point of view, which I actually see a lot, and which to me sounds like you want Windows or macOS, but somehow don't realise it.

Let's imagine this: some company makes an operating system based on Linux, in an efficient manner, by systematically choosing one way to solve a problem (one window manager, one init system, one file system, ...) and trying to meet the requirements of the mass to the detriment of freedom. It exists: it's called Android! Android is great, and it will eventually come to the Desktop for people who don't want Windows or macOS.

But fundamentally, what I call "Linux distributions" is not that. The whole point of Linux distributions, to me, is that even saying "GNU/Linux" doesn't work, because there are other userlands like "busybox/Linux"! Other init systems, other file systems, other windows managers, etc.

The cost of having a powerful core choosing "sane defaults" for the users (Windows, macOS, or similarly Android) is that it is very difficult to modify the system or even contribute to it. Look at e.g. GrapheneOS, an Android alternative (and which I use and love): it relies a lot on Google. Linux distributions are not like that: I can create my own Linux distribution as a weekend project.

jrm45• 4 months ago

"Who is forced to use it" is an extremely dated argument strategy that has absolutely no place whatsoever in modern computing. Linux is far too ubiquitous for such a notion to be taken seriously. It's not far from "who is forced to use Macs instead of Windows."

palata14• 4 months ago

To be fair, I am not the one bringing that point up. The author says "I am forced to use it", they bring it up.

I may be on the "Wayland" side here, but I have the exact same reasoning when I am on the other side: I hate systemd, but I genuinely cannot say that "I am forced to use it". I have the freedom to choose a distro that supports alternatives, and that is what I do.

For Wayland it seems even easier: it's just something you install on top (unlike the init system or the libc).

I think it's fine to hate Wayland and to believe that it is the wrong direction, just like it is fine to hate systemd and believe it is the wrong direction. But I don't think I am forced to use any of those.

antisol9• 4 months ago

Isn't it interesting how perspectives differ?

See, I'd argue that the "nobody is forcing you" rhetoric, spoken out loud and with a straight face while vendors drop support for decades-old, stable, and well-established standards in favour of immature, incompatible, broken new shininess, is an extremely dated argument strategy.

queenkjuul5• 4 months ago

I won't accept that "nobody was forced." Major mainstream desktops either already have or are very shortly dropping X11 entirely.

Microsoft is correctly being called out for forcing people onto Windows 11, even though it's entirely possible for users to remain on 10 with workarounds.

Gnome is forcing people onto Wayland, that you can stop using Gnome or choose to use an outdated OS doesn't really change that for me. I guess if you don't want to say they're being forced onto Wayland, they are definitely being forced to change their display setup: use Wayland, or don't use Gnome, starting with Ubuntu 26.04 next month.

palata14• 4 months ago

I am "forced" to use Windows or macOS for work. I do not have a choice, I am not allowed to install something else. Thus I "am forced". I am not forced to by Nike shoes, I can buy any other brand. Even if I have been buying Nike all my life and now they switch to a material I don't like, I am not forced to wear the new Nike shoes; I can switch to a different brand. I have the choice to switch.

I believe that a project decides what they do. If Gnome decides to move to Wayland, someone could fork and start XGnome. That's how FOSS works, and I accept it for what it is.

I feel like too many people believe that FOSS means "people around me should build my dream system just for me, and for free". If Gnome gets more traction than XGnome, it sounds like the Gnome users are generally fine with its choices. And those who are not can switch to an alternative.

I don't use Gnome, I don't use systemd, I don't use ext4, I don't use NetworkManager. The beauty of Linux is that I can choose. And yes, most of the time I am in the minority.

Ferret74464• 4 months ago

Who is forced to use it?

The people forcing Wayland are also the people who own and are trying to kill Xorg (stated explicitly) and also trying to cancel people who fork or implement their own X11. So yes, they are actively trying to prevent people from using X11

messe• 4 months ago

also trying to cancel people who fork

Care to elaborate on that accusation? I have a suspicion you're referring to Xlibre.

kelvinjps10• 4 months ago

for me it's just utilities that don't work workrave, activity watch, flameshot, polybar. (waybar is not as polished) automating stuff with xdotool. There is no way to get the current window focused. Even on windows there is a simple api to get that

darthoctopus• 4 months ago

Who is forced to use it? Just use X11, as you said (many times) you do already.

I can no longer use GNOME on X11, and the decision to remove support was a deliberate one. Users are definitely being forced.

simonask8• 4 months ago

And who is forcing you to use GNOME?

elsjaako3• 4 months ago

You can use an old version of Gnome and accept older software, or you can organize some fellow GNOME enthusiasts to maintain it, possibly with paid developers.

You can't legally get old versions of Windows or Photoshop, and you can't legally fix them if you find problems. GNOME gives you that freedom.

This isn't just a theoretical possibility: both MATE and Cinnamon are GNOME forks.

You can argue that maintaining and developing a desktop environment is an huge project and you can't expect someone to take that on - I completely agree, which is why I think we should be thankful of the developers instead of complaining about being "forced" to use new versions of their software.

Having technical discussions about the merits is fine, but in the end in the free/open source software model the people that make the technical decisions are the ones that make the technology possible. And if so many of those people are moving to Wayland, maybe there is a reason for that.

dismalaf6• 4 months ago

You're not forced to use Gnome. The Gnome devs have the freedom to decide they don't want to spend their own time maintaining an X11 version.

gentleman11• 4 months ago

I've used linux desktop environments using Wayland and others using x11. No real problems with either.

Let's instead get excited by all the new linux users coming in thanks to SteamOS and Valve. If the trend continues, we might start seeing larger software companies releasing native linux versions of their software -- and then, the year of the linux desktop will start becoming an actual possibility!

(I heard affinity suite is linux friendly now btw, and davinci resolve too -- not sure if proton is necessary or not, but either way, really cool)

palata14• 4 months ago

we might start seeing larger software companies releasing native linux versions of their software

I like the idea of course, but I don't believe it for one second. Unless software is open source, it never properly supports Linux. A company making a proprietary executable for Linux will generally just make an Ubuntu executable.

My biggest fear with something like "the year of the Linux Desktop" is that it may end up making Linux be like Android: open source on the paper, but there is practically really just one way to do things, and that's the one controlled by Google.

What I like with Linux is this big mess of alternatives that manage to somehow compete with each other. Sure, it's not as polished as Android or Windows or macOS. But it's free (as in freedom).

antisol9• 4 months ago

Davinci resolve has had native Linux support for like a decade now.

jgilias• 4 months ago

This page linked in the bottom explains a lot:

https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support...

bvrmn• 4 months ago

Who is forced to use it? Just use X11, as you said (many times) you do already.

Recent versions of gnome session are compiled only with wayland support in archlinux. To change DE or distribution or use custom package is quite a stretch to call it's not forced.

palata14• 4 months ago

But then it's not Wayland's fault: Gnome decided to move to it and stop supporting X.

I don't like systemd and the fact that mainstream distros push for it, but as a result I use a distro that gives me the choice (Gentoo). Who am I to tell the distro maintainer what they should do for free?

athrowaway3z• 4 months ago

> I also don't care for the "security" argument when parts of the core reference implementation are written in a memory-unsafe language.
Doesn't sound like a super informed way to look at security (not even mentioning that Wayland was started in 2008, and Rust was not a thing). One can also say that "as long as you run X11, there is no need to think about security because X11 just defeats it all".

I think the argument is not that X11 defeats it all - but that for 99.9999% of users its security theater when deployed in the real world. Most commonly, as long as processes can read each other's memory/configuration/etc.

I'm sure there is a use-case for untrusted sharing of Wayland enabled GPU rendering or something - though AFAIK none of the enterprise remote desktop use it, and they have the resources to implement it themselves anyway.

I've been running Wayland for two years now. I still hit weird bugs with desktop sharing / obs tinkering; It's just not a critical use for me.

So it's fair to question the design wisdom of adding the complexity and UX pain points if it seems to be worth so little.

But maybe i'm overlooking some large group of people dependent on Wayland security boundaries?

palata14• 4 months ago

Most commonly, as long as processes can read each other's memory/configuration/etc.

And there is no point is working on the Desktop security as long as X11 defeats it all.

if it seems to be worth so little

I, for one, value the security standpoint.

flohofwoe2• 4 months ago

The main problem of Wayland is fragmentation, technical problems could be solved by throwing work at it, but not as long as Wayland is "just a protocol". Designing it as a protocol (and with optional extensions on top!), instead of a traditional centralized implementation was a pretty stupid decision (and not just in hindsight).

Instead of bundling forces to improve a single implementation like it was the case with X11, now everybody and their mother writes their own incomplete implementation of the Wayland protocol, and badly. I don't understand how anybody thinks that this mess is a good thing. At least for X11 on Linux there was a single implementation that contributors could focus on, now the bugs are spread over dozens of projects. If I'd like to sabotage the entire desktop-Linux idea, this is exactly how I would do it ;(

palata14• 4 months ago

I feel like it's a philosophical question.

I like freedom and diversity. I don't want Linux to be like Windows or macOS with one window manager, one init system, etc. I like that people (and I) can experiment.

Is it less efficient than paying for Windows and macOS? Probably. Is it less polished? Certainly. But that's exactly what I want. If I wanted Windows or macOS, I would use Windows or macOS.

theodric2• 4 months ago

Who is forced to use it?

Anyone who wants to continue using a modern, actively-developed desktop environment. GNOME has dropped X11; KDE has announced the transition. I would consider being told "use Wayland, or find a different desktop environment" being forced, even though nobody has actually put a gun to my head.

I have managed to make Wayland work for me, but only by patching away the hardcoded gestures. I also developed a means to start and stop XScreenSaver, although that is thankfully now obsolete thanks to some work by JWZ. Just yesterday I still had issues with an entire window of text gibbering up and down in VSCode at a certain scaling level (used to have that in Firefox, as well, but it was evidently fixed).

To put a positive conspiratorial spin on the recent Wayland push: maybe they think that taking away the option to fall back to X11 will finally get enough eyes on Wayland to fix its remaining issues.

jpetso2• 4 months ago

To put a positive conspiratorial spin on the recent Wayland push: maybe they think that taking away the option to fall back to X11 will finally get enough eyes on Wayland to fix its remaining issues.

Yes, and I also think it's important to focus on that part in particular: X11 is not a feature, it's not a user story, it's an implementation detail of the desktop environment / window manager.

There are certainly historical architectural choices that imply many aspects of what X11 can or can't do for the user, likewise with desktops' implementation of the Wayland protocol. The differences between these approaches is real, and substantial.

But in the end, X11 is not a cause unto its own. It's a component in service of the user experience at large. People criticize the removal of X11 support either because their use cases have been affected in some inconvenient way, or because they're afraid of future consequences one way or another.

It's important that desktop environments work on providing the features/UX/quality that users need and expect. It's also important that users tell their DE developers what their needs are, in terms of what problems they are trying to solve, not in terms of which components to use underneath. Choice of component stack is a developer issue and should remain this way.

In the end, the DEs/WMs that solve their users' problems to a high degree of satisfaction are the ones who will retain and gain the most users. Approaches will differ across the Linux desktop space regarding what problems to solve specifically, which problems to prioritize, and how best to implement solutions for them. Dependencies like X11 shape the ultimate user experience one way or another, in terms of features, constraints, development effort, and continuity.

And so do many other implementation choices that need to be made or revised along the way. Ideally most users will end up with DEs/WMs whose development philosophy is aligned with their personal priorities. Friendly bug reporters can help out with the awareness part at least :)

pndy• 4 months ago

Paint me crazy but for last ~10 years I'm having this weird feeling that FOSS embraces corporate-style of management, development for projects too much. The ethos of having a choices is slowly and steadily being replaced by "comply, adapt or begone" tactic. And if you try to voice your opinion or heavens forbid - criticize, you are committing a crime against the coding humanity.

The changes are being done by small steps and I'd say this removal of fallback to X11 option counts as such.

sgbeal• 4 months ago

I don't understand the complaints about Wayland.

The last time a distro tried to sell me on it, it left me unable to drag/drop browser tabs to reorder them (a fundamental part of my daily workflow). Thankfully, Mint still has the option to use X11 so reverting was trivial. That won't always be the case because...

Who is forced to use it? Just use X11, as you said (many times) you do already.

Which, like avoiding systemd, is becoming increasingly difficult as distributions prematurely switch. Like when some Linux distros made KDE4 the default (~20 years ago) before most graphics cards could actually handle KDE4's requirements. Switching distros after years, even decades, of use is not as trivial as distro-hoppers who swap out their distro every three weeks might like to think. Lots of know-how and muscle memory gets lost in the transition, both of which have to be rebuilt.

Suppafly• 4 months ago

I think the argument is that Linux as a whole doesn't progress much because new projects constantly replace old projects without actually improving the underlying issues. X11 is old and has a bunch of issues, but those issues have largely been addresses, whereas Wayland is new and neat, but has a lot of issues that won't be addressed for years to come.

phendrenad2• 4 months ago

X only exists because it pre-dates Linux and Open-Source in general. It was developed at Stanford and spread to MIT and became a de-facto standard in academic computer labs. It came from the need for a graphics stack. Wayland, conversely, is what you get when the Linux community tries to create their own thing from scratch. True to Conway's Law, it's a loose confederacy of mini-projects that are all equally "wayland". Just look at hyprland, which the community tried to eject, yet people still use it.

scheeseman4869• 4 months ago

There are multiple cases of this: OBS can't screen record (it segfaults instead), I can't copy-paste, and I can't see window previews unless everything implements a specific extension to the core protocol.

Yeah. And? They did that. On my Wayland desktop, copy and paste works fine, window previews work fine, OBS screen capture works fine.

The actual "threat model" here is baffling and doesn't seem to reflect a need for users. Applications are not able to see each other's windows, but they're not able to interact in any other way that could potentially cause problems?

In any other way? The last paragraph just explained the other way.

That's when I stopped reading. If they can't even make a coherent, reasonable argument from the start and instead just blast out a bunch of bullshit, no one should be listening.

queuebert2• 4 months ago

I was going to ask, why hasn't anyone ported NeXTSTEP to modern architectures? It was a pretty decent windowing system. Then I realized duh that's what Apple did with OS X. Too bad they ruined it.

neoCrimeLabs2• 4 months ago

Also, https://www.gnustep.org/

That reminds me, I should pull out my NeXT Cube and play with it. That machine is 33mhz of pure power. :-D None the less I still love it.

linguae• 4 months ago

I remember when I first learned about GNUstep in 2004 when I was in high school. It's a shame GNUstep never took off; we could have had an ecosystem of applications that could run on both macOS and Linux using native GUIs.

With that said, the dream is not dead. There's a project named Gershwin (https://github.com/gershwin-desktop/gershwin-desktop), which is a Mac-like desktop environment built on top of GNUstep. Gershwin appears to be heavily inspired by Apple Rhapsody (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhapsody_(operating_system)) with some modern touches.

pjmlp14• 4 months ago

My graduation thesis was to port visualisation software from NeXT into Windows, obviously rewriting it in the process.

My supervisor used to have a Cube, and every time I visited his office for demos or questions, there it was left in the corner, with the expectation that everything related to NeXT was going to be away.

Thus this project, and others, as means to keep the research going.

This was before Jobs coming back to Apple, and OpenStep not really going as well as hoped for.

h4ch1• 4 months ago

I wasn't alive at the time NeXTSTEP was a thing, but I did look at a demo[0] to figure out what you were talking about (i love building/tinkering with window managers); it just looks like a regular old window manager?

Is there something I'm missing/something specific you're talking about?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf5o5liZxnA

neoCrimeLabs2• 4 months ago

NeXTSTEP was everything from the OS to the user experience and everything inbetween.

I'd say there were 3 distinct abstractions within NextSTEP: - The microkernel / OS (Mach / BSD) (for the hardware) - The Objective C based SDK - The User experience (not just window manager, but largely the window manager)

The SDK is what is still arguably the most highly regarded part of NeXTSTEP even today. That aside, at the time nothing else was so well polished and integrated on almost every level.

pjmlp14• 4 months ago

Besides the sibling comment, it was a full stack experience, just like most operating systems outside UNIX land.

NeXTSTEP (carried on with OS X), NeWS, Irix are kind the exception on UNIX land.

There is a vertical integration from kernel to application programming and user desktop, alongside its hardware, to provide an unique experience.

In what hardware can do, what programming languages are the official one, THE framework to do XYZ.

Not a mismatch of pieces that often we need to break a corner so that they barely fit with each other.

cardanome• 4 months ago

Wayland is what you get when you give corporations like Red Hat power over Linux.

Everything coming from them is corporate slop. Systemd is another mess coming from them.

hparadiz2• 4 months ago

X11 is not secure and I guess some folks in the open source community are so lazy to implement a dialog box that asks for permission to take a screenshot that they will literally write blog posts about it for 10 years instead of just writing some code.

fhn• 4 months ago

"Regardless, I simply don’t give a shit about you anymore." 100% he still don't give a shit about you.

Liftyee• 4 months ago

Honestly as someone who mostly operates my computer instead of tinkering I don't care whether X or Wayland or something else, I just want something non-opinionated that works reliably. X doesn't support palm rejection so I can't use my stylus/touchscreen for note taking. Wayland doesn't pass through the pen properly (??) leading to glitches and full screen disabling the pen until I restart the wacom kernel module.

Apparently this bug has been fixed in Ubuntu 26.04 and it's to do with Mutter actually. We'll see when I upgrade.

yyyk• 4 months ago

Look, it's a done deal. Some of the choices Wayland made are not to my liking, there will be a long term cost (even static linking won't save you from differing protocol implementations). But it's done and there's no point in complaining.

(Running X11 right now, I'll switch when the distro forces me to, in hope I'll get a bug free experience after everyone else runs it)

jasoneckert• 4 months ago

In short, this reads like a mix of valid historical pain points and outdated assumptions.

The post frames Wayland security as “you can’t do anything,” but that’s a misunderstanding. Even under X11, any app can log keystrokes, read window contents, and inject input into other apps. Wayland flips this to isolation-by-default: explicit portals/APIs for screen capture, input, etc.

Moreover, the performance argument is weak and somewhat contradictory. The author claims there is no clear performance win, and that it's sometimes slower and hardware improvements make it irrelevant. But Wayland reduces copies and avoids X11 roundtrips (architectural win). Actual performance depends heavily on compositor + drivers, and I've found that modern hardware has HUGE performance improvements (especially Intel, AMD, and Apple Silicon via the Asahi driver).

The NVIDIA argument is also dated. Sure, support was historically bad due to EGLStreams vs GBM, but this has improved significantly in recent driver releases.

Many cited issues are outdated too. OBS, clipboard, and screen sharing issues are now mostly (if not entirely) solved in the latest GNOME/KDE.

I've been using Wayland exclusively on Fedora and Fedora Asahi Remix systems for many years alongside Sway (and occasionally GNOME and KDE). Adoption has accelerated in many distros, and XWayland for legacy apps is excellent (although I believe using the word "legacy" here would be a trigger word for the author ;-).

There's no stagnation here... what we're looking at is a slow migration of a foundational layer, which historically always takes a decade or more in the Linux world.

JumpCrisscross• 4 months ago

Actual performance depends heavily on compositor + drivers, and I've found that modern hardware has HUGE performance improvements (especially Intel, AMD, and Apple Silicon via the Asahi driver)

Author’s argument is those hardware improvements could have been had for free with X11 upgrades. I’m not saying it’s a complete argument. But talking about architectural wins sounds like conceding the argument.

joecool1029• 4 months ago

Author’s argument is those hardware improvements could have been had for free with X11 upgrades.

I do NOT miss having tearing all the time with X11. There were always kludgy workarounds. Even if you stopped and said ok, lets not run nvidia, let's do intel they have great FOSS driver support, we look back at X11 2D acceleration history. EXA, SNA, UMA, XAA? Oh right all replaced with GLAMOR, OK run modesetting driver, right need a compositor on top of our window manager still because we don't vsync without it.

Do you have monitors with a different refresh rate? Do you have muxes with different cards driving different outputs? All this stuff X11 sucks at. Ok the turd has been polished well now after decades, it doesn't need to run as root/suid anymore, doesn't listen for connections on your network, but the security model still sucks compared to wayland, and once you mix multiple video cards all bets are off.

But yeah, clipboard works reliably, big W for X11.

xbar• 4 months ago

It reads like a user that tried Wayland again last week, found the same issues and wrote a piece that tried to summarize why they remain sad after 17 years of waiting for Wayland to address its issues.

tapoxi2• 4 months ago

There is no "Wayland" to address these issues. It's like asking "web" to address its issues.

Wayland is a protocol with multiple different implementations.

Mawr2• 4 months ago

This reads like AI/FSD-bro speak: "no, that's all old news, you clearly haven't tried the new cutting edge model/build bro! it's all fixed now!".

Wayland security

Okay, that's great, but why would I care? If you can implement those security wins transparently in the background, cool. Otherwise, what I care about is being able to take a screenshot, not about some theoretical "security threat" from already vetted programs I run on my machine.

OBS, clipboard, and screen sharing issues are now mostly (if not entirely) solved in the latest GNOME/KDE.

Oh, the clipboard works mostly correctly now, after some 17 years of development? Could not have come up with a more damning statement. Complete misalignment of priorities.

antisol9• 4 months ago

  > "no, that's all old news, you clearly haven't tried the new cutting edge model/build bro! it's all fixed now!"

Exactly. And it's standard rhetoric for the wayland fanboys. "The fix for this was committed 15 minutes ago! You just need to check out the unstable branch and recompile!"

  > what I care about is being able to take a screenshot, not about some theoretical "security threat" from already vetted programs I run on my machine.

Yeah, the security theatre thing is also part of their standard rhetoric. It's a good bit of rhetoric because it scares people who don't know better. They all love to talk about how it's just so insecure to allow us to do things that every desktop environment has been able to do for 30+ years.

But strangely, in decades, I've never seen a single example of anyone taking advantage of this horrible security design and it becoming a widespread problem in the wild. I keep asking the wayland bros to give me an example of this happening in the wild and causing a problem that's even mildly widespread. Strangely when I ask that question they always seem to forget to respond to that part of my post and move on to their next piece of standard rhetoric.

  > Oh, the clipboard works mostly correctly now, after some 17 years of development? Could not have come up with a more damning statement. Complete misalignment of priorities

Tsk tsk, now you're just being cynical. We should be celebrating that wayland has managed to kinda-sorta get a feature working which was working just fine in X11 by ~1998, and which worked just fine in Windows <3.1, and which worked just fine in Mac OS in the 1980s. And they've managed to do it in only ~3 years longer than it took to get Duke Nukem Forever into stores! Yay them!

hyperbolablabla• 4 months ago

In my experience I have found the xdg-desktop-portal for whatever reason to be completely non functional on Arch/Hyprland. It must be an issue with my config but on x11 I never had to think about this

duckmysick• 4 months ago

Wayland flips this to isolation-by-default: explicit portals/APIs for screen capture, input, etc.

The problem is old (and even not so old) apps don't expose those APIs so interactions like UI automation on Wayland is limited, if not impossible. I'd love to grant a specific permission just for selected GUI apps, but I can't because they don't support it.

There's a reason why RPA software on Wayland is limited to web apps inside a browser. Or something extremely janky like taking screenshots of the entire desktop and doing OCR. But then you can't interact with unfocused apps.

geophile3• 4 months ago

I have been using Pop_OS for many years, and I’m still on 22.04, which uses X11. I don’t understand the pros and cons of X11 vs. Wayland, I just want a working desktop.

24.04 uses Wayland, and while some people have had no problems migrating, many people are having serious problems. From what I can tell, it’s not a good choice for me yet. This article tells me that it may not be a good choice ever.

I am a huge fan of System76 and Pop_OS, and I am sorry to see how this migration has split the community and forced many people to make difficult choices. I suspect that I will have to leave Pop_OS once 22.04 is no longer supported, in a year.

To be fair, there are two issues. Pop_OS Is introducing a new DE, COSMIC, which is written in Rust. That new DE is another source of instability. I’m afraid that Syatem76 has bitten off far more than it can chew.

gdelfino01• 4 months ago

I'm on the same boat. I wish I could use COSMIC with X11. I am now looking into installing a different Linux distribution on my System76 laptop.

VHRanger• 4 months ago

Yeah I'm another pop os user.

Cosmic works great for a laptop. But it's a PITA for a desktop. It doesn't deal with multi monitor setups well. There's a recent new bug where the system hardlocks on monitor power state changes, which is unacceptable.

So: great for single screen laptop, not good for desktop or server

Cyph0n6• 4 months ago

Could the problem be COSMIC? Put differently, why do you assume that the issue is with Wayland rather than the work System76 did to support Wayland?

Because many other DMs and WMs do not have issues with Wayland.

geophile3• 4 months ago

Yes, I believe I said exactly that.

octorian2• 4 months ago

I recently upgraded to Pop_OS 24.04 because I was sick and tired of being stuck with an outdated base.

But after trying the new Cosmic desktop, I basically ran screaming back to Gnome/X11 (with a couple of extensions to give me the old desktop experience from 22.04).

Once 26.04 drops, along with Cosmic Epoch 2, I may give it another serious try. Or I'll just go to KDE6/Wayland and see how that goes. (I do use KiCad from time to time, so I wonder how usable it'll be on Wayland down the line.)

(For reference, my biggest gripe with Cosmic right now is how it can't seem to figure out how to manage window focus. Modal dialogs can lose focus to their base window, and sometimes become covered by that base window. And focus-follows-mouse hasn't been done right ever. Both have issues written up, I just hope they get attention. Meanwhile, throngs of people seem to "swear" it "works fine for them.")

danbolt• 4 months ago

I’ve been using COSMIC on a spare laptop, and enjoying it, but I’m stuck on 22.04 until their Iced rebase finishes and have IME working. [1]

Making a new DE plus compositor is a lot of work, but I do hope it works well for the Pop_OS developers.

[1] https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-epoch/issues/2174

yehat2• 4 months ago

I'm absolutely in exactly the same position (Pop_OS 22.04) and unwilling to upgrade to 24.04. Which I tried for many months on two spare machines - a laptop and a desktop. The difference is quite stark, there are positive things, but it doesn't feel "my" desktop for many reasons. On top the stability is not there yet. At the end of 22.04 road I hope to find something of similar quality, but really don't like to be forced to rely only on Wayland as dependency. One of my critical pieces of software (barrier/deskflow/input leap KVMs) is not working well with Wayland.

sourcegrift3• 4 months ago

Another we'll structured critique of wayland:

https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1pxectw/wayland_is_f...

xantronix• 4 months ago

Wayland can never be an adequate replacement for X11R6, despite its stated purpose, because its design fundamentally chases specifying a protocol for heterogeneous implementations of, what I suspect to be one thing: Apple's WindowServer. In specifying Wayland, focusing on compositing, while expecting major projects already committed to standards built atop the X Window System like XDND, ICCCM, et cetera, to band together to do the same for Wayland a priori, clearly hasn't worked out for reasons that seem self-evident to me. If there was one single dominant ecosystem of desktop environmens built on one dominant UI toolkit from which all others sprung, sure, this could work, but this is simply not the reality. On top of this, with the realities of the second-system problem, it seems clear to me the Wayland steering committee set out on an impossible task.

But man, with a few million bucks, a couple years development time, and a small, dedicated team, maybe somebody out there could make their own little slice of heaven.

bigyabai5• 4 months ago

clearly hasn't worked out for reasons that seem self-evident to me.

One reason is that Xwayland exist and works flawlessly for the majority of casual and professional applications. Better than native x11, in my anecdotal experience.

trenchgun• 4 months ago

Why is it better than native x11?

erelong• 4 months ago

is it possible to create another alternative to both x11 and wayland that might correct some of these issues? (especially now with ai assistance?)

I can see arguments for improving x11 but wayland still isn't there and I end up having to not use it for that reason

Cyph0n6• 4 months ago

Sure, let’s throw some monke- I mean agents in a room and see if they can make something better than X11 and Wayland - each of which has had 10s of thousands of man hours put into them.

MBCook12• 4 months ago

If all the developers behind X can’t do it in a decade, what makes you think anyone else can?

Even if someone made something, are they really going to get buy in from all the major players?

It’s Wayland. It’s over.

pabs3• 4 months ago

Take a look at Arcan, it supports both X11 and Wayland (and I think other protocols too).

https://arcan-fe.com/

sourcegrift3• 4 months ago

ITT: "it works fine on my desktop" or in other words, fuck you I got mine.

People the problem isn't whether you're able to run it, wayland does work fine for mainstream, the problems that anyone who's not mainstream cannot even take a fucking screenshot and that's bad for openness. Or open the window at the position of closed last time. That's bad for openness (and opening)

corndoge2• 4 months ago

You still have X11. Why are you crying?

People worked - for free - on what they wanted to work on, and that is wayland. Who are you upset at?

sourcegrift3• 4 months ago

I'm upset not at wayland contributors but at people like you who can't be civil and people in the thread who don't understand the problem

octorian2• 4 months ago

And this is a case where there's a long tail of "niche issues" that they end up becoming major issues when taken in aggregate.

dismalaf6• 4 months ago

The anti Wayland sentiment is tiring. Honestly all the hating on technology is tiring. Don't like something? Use the thing you like. Or make a thing you like.

As for the claim in the title, it's false, it's absurd, and this entire article is uninteresting and just an extension of the weird Linux conspiracy theories floating around these days.

lyu072824• 4 months ago

weird Linux conspiracy theories floating around these days

There is this MAGA Linux Youtuber that is something to be studied on this topic, especially the community around it (some overlap with HN too), its basically just hate posting about woke, rust, systemd, python, mozilla, wayland, ubuntu, it goes on and on - https://www.youtube.com/bryanlunduke

I don't know why some hackers turned so reactionary it's so strange, I used to associate hacker culture more with leftism/anarchism/punks not conservative authoritarians or ancaps/libertarians.

dismalaf6• 4 months ago

Dunno if I'd call the people whining about Wayland hackers. More like freeloaders. Hackers make stuff.

Also there's nothing about Linux or hacking culture that would be necessarily left or right wing. Maybe somewhat anti establishment with the desire for computing freedom (and in the west the left is firmly the "establishment", pushing the surveillance state forward).

a1o• 4 months ago

No one commented about Ubuntu team Mir approach. I wish it stayed in the running. :)

vova_hn23• 4 months ago

forced to make the switch
users that are now being forced to use unfinished software
frustration of being forced to use the new hotness
actual users are forced to use it

Can confirm, Kristian Høgsberg and Drew DeVault personally came to my house and and installed Wayland on every computer I own. They made me watch it. It was horrible.

Jokes aside, I think that it is worth remembering that open source developers can't actually force you to do anything. If you are unhappy with what they provide you can always just use a different software, or make your own fork, or by a commercial product instead.

I know that I am stating the obvious that have already been stated countless times, but still. Using words such as "forced" in this context annoys me every time and I can't stop myself from saying it again.

Edit: it gives me flashbacks of all the Poettering-hate back in the days.

adrian_b• 4 months ago

The open source developers can definitely force you to do a lot of work.

Whenever they make changes to the program that they are maintaining, which break backwards compatibility, for which an example is replacing X11 with Wayland in the Linux distribution that you may have used for many years, then that forces the users affected by the changes to do potentially a lot of work, in order to find alternatives.

For some special application that you use from time to time, finding an alternative and switching to it may be simple, but when the incompatible changes affect a fundamental system component, which must be used all the time and without which nothing works, e.g. Wayland or systemd, then you must change not some single application, but the entire Linux distribution, and that can be time-consuming, because you may have to learn to do a lot of things in a different way than you are accustomed to.

So obviously, users are not happy about such changes that push work on them without any benefits.

The better Linux distributions may offer their users choices even for such important components like X11 vs. Wayland or OpenRC vs. systemd, for example Gentoo, but the most popular Linux distributions tend to not offer choices for this kind of system components, so when they replace such a component, the users must either accept the change or stop using that Linux distribution, and both choices are bad, because they must adapt their workflow.

vova_hn23• 4 months ago

No one "forced" you to make some code that you downloaded from the Internet "a fundamental component" of your system. You made this decision yourself. They even warned you about the lack "warranties ... of fitness for a particular purpose".

Why are you now trying to blame someone else for this decision?

Honestly, this attitude is so irresponsible and childish.

flomo2• 4 months ago

There certainly is a paranoid style in Linux politics (where "they" are out to get you.)

compiler1410• 4 months ago

take meds and stop gaslighting people

tim-tday• 4 months ago

Meh

__d4• 4 months ago

So, compare this with say the Python2 to Python3 migration.

Similar motivations: the developers had some legacy decisions that were unfixable without breakage. But they were sick of it, and decided to just go for it.

Most end users didn’t care about those issues. The few that did were happy to pay the cost of switching. Everyone else clung to Python2 for years because migrating was high cost and low value.

It took about 15 years to complete the migration for most, and there are a small number of users who will never make it over.

Perl5 to Perl6 is another useful historical example.

FOSS development is managed by the developers, and so, compared to a commercial software project, the implementation issues get more weight. This sort of thing is very likely to happen again and again.

lostapathy• 4 months ago

Did perl5 to perl6 actually happen? I feel like perl mostly fell out of favor along the way.

Polizeiposaune• 4 months ago

It's a good example of a migration that mostly didn't happen.

MBCook12• 4 months ago

No. Perl 6 was renamed Raku (?) so people wouldn’t be confused that the 5 line was continuing development.

Basically, to the degree I understand, the language was effectively forked into two.

__d4• 4 months ago

Disclosure: I'm not intimately familiar with all this.

I think Perl5 was originally planned to be replaced by Perl6. Then Perl6 took much longer than anyone expected, and kinda ended up in a different place. Perl5 was re-anointed as the once-and-future Perl, and what had been Perl6 became Raku.

If I remember correctly, somewhere in the middle of all that there was talk of running Python (and other languages) on the new Perl6 VM.

Blikkentrekker8• 4 months ago

Not only that, the situation with Wayland also made me kind of afraid of the future of open source because it dawned on me that many of the figureheads in open source are actually simply put mentally unstable and extremely zealous and lack nuance. It didn't occur to me before but look at all the figureheads in free software: Theo de Raadt, Richard Stallman, Ulrich Drepper, Lennart Poettering, Linus Torvalds, Drew Devault. They are all kind of extremely uncompromising people who refuse to listen to reason with many of them even being known for vitriolic Twitter rants.

The issue is that free software is fundamentally a political thing and it seems to attract very political people who treat software like an ideology rather than a product who are out to wage war.

__d4• 4 months ago

I wouldn't say "mentally unstable", but zealous is probably fair.

To create something like the GNU project, or OpenBSD, or Linux, takes serious levels of commitment. You really have to believe in it, and to a degree, you have to _will_ it into being. Along the way, you need to explain why your crazy idea is worth all the sacrifice, discourage those who would distract your team members, maintain your own and the team's focus through years of not actually having the thing you want in any useful form, etc, etc. You have to be an unreasonable person to take it on, and then continue it.

There are people who become "fans". They can be even more zealous than the project leader(s). Maintaining direction (aka control) of a horde of over-zealous fans takes aptitude and patience. It's easy, I think, for projects to devolve into vitriol, and denigration of those who think differently, even if it starts out from a good place.

All group endeavors are ultimately political. A group endeavor with a multi-year payoff period and no tangible rewards? It's bound to be very political.

That said, we all enjoy the fruits of their labors ...

nvllsvm• 4 months ago

I've been pretty happy with Wayland for the past ~2 years of using it.

- No annoying "X11 stutter"

- FreeSync works reliably; no more fucking around with different compositors.

- applications aren't allowed permanently alter the display settings. That was particularly problematic with older Windows games and wine. Depending on the game, exiting a game could leave the display server in a very low resolution on exit. Even worse, a few games would result in the X11 gamma settings being altered outside of the game (Deus Ex was one, but there were a few others).

- display-specific scaling factors

- I could use Waydroid on my 2-in-1 finally.

- HDR support. As an added bonus beyond HDR content, SDR content looks better on my PG42UQ monitor due to the monitor suffering from severe black crush in SDR mode.

That said, there are annoyances. I recently started work on a rewrite of the Jellyfin Desktop client (https://github.com/jellyfin-labs/jellyfin-desktop-cef) and of course targeted Wayland first:

Pros:

- HDR via an Wayland subsurface works great!

Cons:

- Running CEF (Chromium) in Wayland mode does NOT respect the system scale factor. The workaround is to run it X11 mode. Not too big of a deal since I'm using CEF in offscreen-rendering mode with a Wayland SDL surface, but annoying.

- Picture-in-Picture isn't widely supported yet. It is one of those things that Wayland is building _towards_ rather than X11 just working.

- Minor, but not being able to position the window centered on startup is kinda annoying.

So yeah - tradeoffs, but currently good enough for me and it continues to get better. I'm optimistic.

JSR_FDED• 4 months ago

LLMs didn’t exist when Wayland was started.

Now that we have them, would it be feasible to use LLMs to go after the historical crud that X11 accumulated due to age?

I don’t like vibe coding, but using LLMs to dig into a huge legacy code base like X11 could be very useful.

nickelpro6• 4 months ago

No.

X11's problems were rooted in the abstractions presented by the X11 core protocol and its extension mechanisms. The interface, not merely the implementation.

Wayland was correct in first focusing on replacing this interface. The problem is the effort stopped there and left the ecosystem to figure out the implementation part.

uecker3• 4 months ago

What exactly do you think are the problems in X11 core protocol and extension mechanism that required to start from scratch?

Teknoman1172• 4 months ago

I strongly disagree with the premise.

Regardless of how you feel about Wayland, its creation set off _massive_ improvements across the entire Linux graphics stack.

For those of us who were using Linux on the desktop in decades past, remember when you couldn't use a GPU without X running? Remember the days when you needed an X session running in order to use CUDA or OpenCL? Remember the days when the entire graphics driver lived inside of X? When display server issues caused kernel panics? Remember the days when you couldn't share a hardware graphics surface between processes? When it was impossible to get hardware acceleration to work offscreen?

Wayland's aggressive stance on "it doesn't work on platforms that don't fix all of that" is one of the only things that pushed the stability and flexibility of the graphics stack on Linux forward.

I don't really think anything less than saying "We the X developers are going to stop X development and X is going away" would have been enough to push graphics card vendors to actually rework the drivers.

dralley• 4 months ago

Same thing with Pulse Audio

People cursed the name for years, because it exposed all of the terrible, glitchy audio hardware drivers and refused on general principle to work around the issues to the degree that previous audio solutions had. And the result was that while the experience was inconsistent and buggy for years, it did eventually drag the Linux audio stack into a better place.

rasz• 4 months ago

PulseAudio dragged linux to replacing that stinkin pile of garbage with PipeWire.

genthree4• 4 months ago

It also used a large multiple more memory than Alsa + basically any existing plausible combo of mixer software on top of alsa. While doing nothing. For no clear reason. And chewed processor cycles, while doing nothing. Back when 50MB was a meaningful amount of memory, and most machines were still single-core.

It was plainly really poorly-architected, just looking at its resource use patterns made this obvious in a heartbeat.

antisol9• 4 months ago

Pulseaudio was, is, and always will be trash.

The ALSA drivers for all the creative labs cards worked perfectly well. I never had any issues at all under ALSA, or under OSS before that.

I've had tons of issues with audio bugs once pulseaudio was introduced. To this day the most common solution to any audio issue I see is `pkill -9 pulseaudio`. And it solves the problem about 99% of the time.

mmmore2• 4 months ago

I've used Wayland (via sway) for multiple years including on machines with a 1060 and 5080 (mainly for good fractional scaling support). The only major issues I've had with it have to do with XWayland apps. I think there are some issues with providing a consistent experience with things like screen recording, 3rd party proprietary apps, etc. across different DEs/distros, but that's more of something that comes with the territory of Linux.

I can't copy-paste, and I can't see window previews unless everything implements a specific extension to the core protocol

Sentences like this make me wonder how frequently the author has tried Wayland and what his specific setup is. I mean I understand experiences may vary, but I have such a different experience then him. I've had issues with Wayland, but I've also had issues with X.

But the second actual users are forced to use it expect them to be frustrated!

Canonical and Red-Hat are not "forcing" you to use Wayland anymore than X only apps "forcing" me to use X (via-XWayland). They are switching to Wayland because they feel like they can provide a better experience to their users for easier with it. You're more than welcome to continue using X, and even throw a few commits its way sometime.

wildredkraut8• 4 months ago

Of course redhat is indirectly enforcing it, by having people in key roles of the KDE, GNOME,systemd and wayland development, who are making decisions, accepting or blocking ideas and commits. It all goes hand in hand and is mainly driven by the key "Sponsors".

MBCook12• 4 months ago

So it’s a conspiracy because they’ve infiltrated the seats of power?

It’s not that developers of those projects think this is the better path forward?

mmmore2• 4 months ago

Sure one of the companies paying for Linux desktop development is influencing what software gets development. Doesn't sound very nefarious to me.

Red Hat, Canonical, etc. want a working and friendly Linux desktop as much as you do. They've decided that Wayland is the best way forward for their companies and their users. It's not some massive conspiracy.

And they're not stopping you from using X, which is open source and still works fine for a lot of people.

I don't really understand what people who vocally object to Wayland are looking to change about the world. Do they want Wayland to be better? Do they want the developers working on Wayland to start working on X instead? The first desire seems reasonable by I don't get why it would inspire such ire toward Wayland. The second desire is unreasonable.

WesBrownSQL• 4 months ago

Yeah, I'm stuck on X11 since Wayland and NVIDIA with two video cards for display is hot garbage. I have been a Linux user on the command line since the days of root and boot floppies. I don't think the desktop has felt this broken to me since the early days. I'm a tech veteran and don't have a problem working through issues, but when the issue is "you're running Wayland compositor," Then that's a problem I can't fix. I can't write a compositor. I'm running X11/KDE on Manjaro base, and it is stable after some cursing and poking things with a stick. Oh, and telling me "Tell NVIDIA to fix their drivers!" or some other thing, if I could effectively and efficiently use something else, I would. Again, lack of competition has hamstrung us. Oh well, I'll go back to yelling at kids to get off my lawn and coming out of my thick, luxurious neck beard.

MBCook12• 4 months ago

There seem to be a lot of people in other places in these comments saying things work for them with Nvidia just fine.

But it also sounds like whether things work is heavily dependent on how up-to-date the distribution is. I’m not sure if that’s tied in with Nvidia or not.

pjmlp14• 4 months ago

The usual Linux discussion forums spirit for the last 30 years. :)

dadoum2• 4 months ago

In my experience, there are a lot of problems with Optimus-like set-ups (laptop with an Nvidia graphics card which is not active all the time), so having different problems with multiple Nvidia graphics card is something I can believe even if my experience with a single main Nvidia GPU is great.

hacker_homie2• 4 months ago

Daniel Stone from linux.conf.au 2013, The Real Story Behind Wayland and X https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44

It was unmaintainable, I know your workflow is broken, you can keep using X11 the rest of the world isn't obligated to maintain it for you.

shmerl• 4 months ago

What's the alternative, stay with X11? No, thanks.

abram• 4 months ago

I've used Linux on desktops/laptops intermittently since the year 2000, but I've been using mostly MacOS in recent years. With Apple not inspiring confidence lately, I wanted to try using Linux as a daily OS again. So I installed Fedora on a laptop last month. After installation I noticed that the colors on my OLED display were very oversaturated. After some frustrating attempts to get ICC profiles working, I was dismayed to read this:

https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/12-y...

Sounds like Wayland color management is... almost done? But the lack of a complete implementation didn't stop my distro from making Wayland the default. So now I'm left having to choose between using the cool new Wayland compositors and having accurate colors in my photo editing apps :(

eviks2• 4 months ago

and having accurate colors in my photo editing apps

Should've stayed in the terminal where the distro wants you to be!

nubinetwork• 4 months ago

Same old complaints copy pasted from that one github rant... "my obs doesn't work, copy paste doesn't work..."

That stuff has literally been working fine for years...

pavlus• 4 months ago

That rant is especially funny, because its author (probonopd) was responsible for some of the things he was ranting about, by ignoring pull requests to his projects, that would resolve them.

Dwedit• 4 months ago

Blocking applications from interacting with each other when it already has full access to the other process's memory via /proc/<pid>/mem is just silly. Save the blocking for when it doesn't already have that level of access.

eviks2• 4 months ago

Entitlement and bullying of open-source maintainers is not appropriate, and it's understandable that the developers lash out after feeling beaten down by entitled users.

Is it not understandable that the users lash out after being beaten down by arrogant developers calling them assholes? At least their lashing out seems to be appropriately targeted at the source?

trekkie992• 4 months ago

It’s not appropriate. It’s the distro maintainers who force their users.

kelipso2• 4 months ago

X11 worked fine. Then Wayland came from somebody’s fever dream and forced everyone to use it, just for everyone to encounter some kind of bug every time they do anything slightly off the beaten path. For me literally every new install is some stupid Wayland BS I have to deal with, probably because I use Nvidia drivers, but X11 worked perfectly fine. Wayland should have stayed in the playground as the post says.

dpc_01234• 4 months ago

TL;DR: Generic uninspired anti-Wayland rant.

glzone1• 4 months ago

Does anyone know what is up with RDP support on linux? I'm trying to migrate to linux but I need to be able to RDP to a headless machine running my desktop from Windows machines. How is this not solved? Is wayland worse or better here?

Sweepi• 4 months ago

Accessing a Linux machine from Linux/Windows via RDP is not fun. Accessing a Windows machine from Linux/Windows via RDP works excellent - I use Remmina on Linux, but there are ofc lots of alternatives, as usual.

Points on accessing a Linux(Fedora/KDE Plasma) machine via RDP:

  - as I understand it, you cannot open a new session, you can only access an existing one -> forget about a headless machine, it will have to render its DE into to void if you want access it via RDP. The work-flow is more like VNC than RDP.
  - X11 has problems, Wayland is definitely worse. Queue the people who will tell me/you that it works fine them. My last attempt on Fedora ended with a "working" setup. Working in quotes, since I had to accept/allow every incoming connection on the host machine (in a pop-up window which auto-hides after a few seconds and did work ~60% of the time), making it useless for the intended use case. You can workaround this by SSH'ing into the machine and accepting the connection somehow, but I gave up at this moment.
  - there is also some fun to be had regarding display resolution and "session passwords", but compared to the fun with Wayland "security" and portals, its manageable

ycui1986• 4 months ago

for all past years, I have been told wayland is the future. but the decade long dragged out rolling out did not made much sense to me. neither did I investigate why. until today, I found out how difficult to force a 1920x1200 resolution over remote desktop. it is plain feature degradation.

people ask why do you need it. I have a 3440x1440 physical monitor on the server, I need to remove login with a 1920x1200 laptop. I want full screen at laptop's native resolution. Windows can do this decade ago.

snvzz2• 4 months ago

XLibre exists simply because you can't just "force X11 to die" (Xorg's strategy) for as long as someone is willing to work on it.

Now, there is a group of people who actively hate on XLibre sorely because it pretty much derailed such a plan.

These people (who are no doubt sick in their heads) should focus their energy on improving Wayland rather than running hate campaigns on XLibre and its developers.

kombine2• 4 months ago

Majority of the community does not care about XLibre or its developers. They are free to work on whatever they want, but the ship has sailed and no one is coming back to X11 except some fringe groups which always exist.

fluffybucktsnek3• 4 months ago

I have yet to see those hate campaigns. If anything, I see more hate campaigns from XLibre enthusiasts against Wayland on comment sections.

DonHopkins2• 4 months ago

X11 set Linux back 42 years, then Wayland set it back 10 years, and 2026 - 42 - 10 = 1974, the year Richard Nixon resigned because of the Watergate Scandal. It all makes so much sense now.

thayne• 4 months ago

Projects will drop Wayland support and go back to X11

I think that is incredibly likely to happen.

I think that the switch to Wayland has hindered the Linux destop in some ways, and mistakes have definitely been made. But at this point wayland is generally good enough and switching back to X11 won't really accomplish anything helpful.

kombine2• 4 months ago

I've been running Plasma Desktop for years and had to put up with graphical glitches in its X11 iteration. I switched to Wayland to years ago when Plasma 6 was released and all the glitches were gone. Additionally, overall snappiness and responsiveness of the desktop and window management improved markedly, I felt like a got a new computer. Granted, I had to acquire an AMD GPU for this transition but it was well worth it.

sgt• 4 months ago

Aka why Linux on the desktop still sucks in 2026, sadly.

Dave Plummer said the other day on Twitter: Linux is great, but on the desktop it's terrible.

Hackbraten• 4 months ago

Another perspective, even though anecdata: I’ve been daily driving a Linux desktop using Sway for five years and I can’t really complain. I haven’t experienced any of the issues TFA mentioned.

ikekkdcjkfke• 4 months ago

elementaryOS Luna was peak for me, 2014, on my 13’. Long battery life, smooth UI, smooth multi-desktop switching (which windows 11 now implements). Later versions of eOS became laggy after they upgraded the underlying ubuntu. Been on windows since that. What i wish for in a linux desktop is just pure efficiency, no background processes, not too much UI like ubuntu has,UI implemented efficiently and hw accelerated

Avlin67• 4 months ago

just installed arch + hyprland. so reactive and so easy...

DeathArrow• 4 months ago

For me the fragmentation in Linux world is puzzling.

I like to have one way to do things when it comes to the OS. So everything is optimized to work together and I don't have to mix and match parts and to learn different stuff that do the same thing.

I just want my OS to get out of my way and let me run my software.

yjftsjthsd-h6• 4 months ago

It's actually very simple; it's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law in practice. There is no "Linux" operating system, only an endless assortment of independent people and sometimes companies, each of which builds whatever they want, and sometimes they assemble some of those pieces into a working operating system. Every time someone makes a distro, they have their own vision and they run with it. Every time someone doesn't like a component, they fork it or make their own thing. There is nobody who can impose a single order, because it's just a loose collection of separate groups, several of which are actively feuding at any given moment.

NetMageSCW9• 4 months ago

macOS says “Hi!” (well, mostly).

ZiiS• 4 months ago

If X11 is unpopular after 40 years and Wayland after 18 it seems odd to extrapolate that something similar will become popular in 5 years.

senectus1• 4 months ago

thats just being overly dramatic.

no one has taken X11 away. and its not like X11 was making great leaps forward like Wayland has.

nnm• 4 months ago

I suspect some of the problems are not due to Wayland, but due to Ubuntu.

I recently revived a decade-old PC with a dual-boot setup: Windows 10 and Ubuntu 24.04. While Windows ran fine, Ubuntu was a nightmare—constant freezes, random logouts, and daily crashes.

After hitting my limit, I wiped Ubuntu and installed Debian. What a difference! It’s been months without a single crash. If you're struggling with stability on older hardware, Debian might be the "boring" (in a good way) solution you need.

pregnenolone• 4 months ago

I also don't care for the "security" argument when parts of the core reference implementation are written in a memory-unsafe language.

That's were I stopped reading.

fdghrtbrt• 4 months ago

If the author is reading, I appreciate reading these discussions in language that non-experts can understand, so thank you.

dadoum2• 4 months ago

Wayland is a protocol so it doesn't exactly is at the same place as X11.

That being said, I think that they are ignoring the most important element of Wayland that may be kinda the cause of its gripes: Wayland is better designed and focuses on doing window management, aka, allowing applications to display their windows.

It is not trying to be a general IPC protocol, it is not a permission system, it is not a video framework, it is not an accessibility framework; just a protocol for apps to create windows and set their properties.

And at window management, it tries really hard to be better. For example presenting a window (getting it on top of the others) is an action requiring a token now, meaning that the compositor now gets tools to identify wrong presentation attempts. It handles the case of window-docking on the window management side, which allows more flexibility about how to handle it on the compositor side.

Don't get me wrong, it is not perfect (for example I don't like the assumption in the API that there should be at most one seat, and that it would have at most one pointer), but it really tries to be better, it is not a waste of time imo.

a2128• 4 months ago

    OBS can't screen record (it segfaults instead), I can't copy-paste, and I can't see window previews unless everything implements a specific extension to the core protocol.

I can't take articles like this seriously when they so confidently make such statements that so directly conflict with reality. I use Wayland exclusively everyday and I screen record with OBS on both KDE and GNOME on multiple machines with no issues, my KDE shows window previews, and copy pasting works fine. Maybe the author's problems aren't Wayland issues?

icar• 4 months ago

Instead of spreading FUD about a protocol, one could stay in X11. If you don't need fractional scaling, HiDPI, real multi monitor support, mixed refresh rates, HDR, VRR, no tearing, and trust all your apps to not keylog everything, you can keep using any XOrg DE.

ruicraveiro• 4 months ago

I felt a lot of cognitive dissonance while reading this article, specifically where it focuses on the things that do no work on Wayland, yet are completely working on my vanilla Debian distro with KDE on Wayland. And, as we all know, Debian (not SID) slants more towards stability rather than being bleeding edge up to date. It's been a very long time, and releases, since I last had issues with copy-paste and screen recording, so I don't know what the author is talking about or maybe, when he's talking about.

tsoukase• 4 months ago

Wayland is the IPv6 of graphics. New brilliant implementation, over a decade old but still struggling with user share.

For me the graphics server is tied to my favourite environments for lightweight use: Xfce and Lxde both use only X11. Also, I still cannot understand why a server has to depend on the installed graphics card as the driver stays in between and should abstract and make the software hardware-agnostic.

InfiniteRand• 4 months ago

I don’t mind using Wayland these days, but I do feel most of the security arguments are aimed at the government/corporate/big server audiences than the single user/developer.

Which ultimately is fine, this reflects the focus of the people who have the skills and opportunities to contribute and is unlikely to change any time soon.

That is somewhat unfortunate for some but ultimately if you’re asking people to work for free you can’t be too picky on what they choose to work on.

ghusto2• 4 months ago

The developer response is more what I would describe as entitled, rather than the user complaints:

Regardless, I simply don’t give a shit about you anymore. We’ve sacrificed our spare time to build this for you for free. If you turn around and harass us based on some utterly nonsensical conspiracy theories, then you’re a fucking asshole.

You haven't sacrificed your spare time. You've done a thing you wanted to do, and had a tantrum when it turned out it had consequences.

You want to do a thing, fine, but the moment it's forced on people you have taken on responsibility, whether that was what you wanted or not. Grow up.

At this point I consider Wayland to be a fun toy built entirely to pacify developers tired of working on a finished legacy project

Pretty much this.

trekkie992• 4 months ago

Why is the burden being put on the developers and not the distro maintainers that (potentially/allegedly) prematurely implemented the new(?) thing?

insert xkcd dependency comic

RandomMarius• 4 months ago

Running a 3 monitor setup on both Wayland and X11, the displays are wildly different in DPI. In the past I’ve reverted to X11 simply to have Slack screen sharing work, but recently I’m staying on Wayland due to better DPI handling in our production app.

Slack screen sharing works when I share my screen twice, and then Slack sometimes crashes. Google Meet and Zoom screen sharing has always worked well in Wayland, so I imagine they will fix this. I’ve also been able to use OBS to do screen recordings, but the easier default application does not work.

It’s definitely becoming better, and forcing it as the default is what was needed. It took 17 years because nobody used it by default.

drob5182• 4 months ago

I use MacOS, so I don’t have a dog in this hunt, but it seems like the foremost issue is distributions making Wayland the default before it’s ready to accept that responsibility, not with Wayland itself. That said, 17 years is a long time to wait for it to mature, so another question would be about the Wayland developers’ goals, both short and long term. Do the Wayland developers actually want to replace X11 with Wayland in large distros? If so, they need a plan to get it mature enough to do that. If not, fine, then distros need to back off and continue with X11 as the default.

xtracto2• 4 months ago

I also use MacOS, but have used Linux since 1997 (way too many distros), so i hold it close to my heart.

For me the Wayland story is a great example of https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

They started saying "let's rewrite from scratch, X is too complicated "; 17 years later, they have realized the reasons for all the complexity that was written during 25 years (1984 by MIT).

I guess in around 8 years we will have 2 implementations of X.

drob5182• 4 months ago

Indeed. Clean sheets of paper don’t stay clean very long in the real world. That said, in the manner of “plan to throw one away,” we can learn from our mistakes and do better the next time around. Though perhaps X10 was the one that got thrown away before X11.

Havoc• 4 months ago

To me as an end user this feels a lot like the systemd debate. Vague awareness that there are people that care deeply but to me it seems to work fine and X11 did seem to be carrying a lot of legacy baggage so a renew seems like a good idea.

From an end user perspective I struggle to reconcile that with „set Linux back 10 years“

ForHackernews• 4 months ago

Anecdotally, as a user, Wayland works much better than X11 ever did. I suppose I miss being able to forward a GUI app from a headless server over SSH, but it's a fair trade for being able to plug in two monitors.

Yizahi• 4 months ago

Systemd and Wayland improved Linux by 10 years. See, works just as well in this direction too. (PS: I do believe this, but won't presume to apply it for everyone else with different experiences like author does).

pgwalsh• 4 months ago

Wayland is the future and yes it took some time but I've been using it for a while. Sure there are annoyances but nothing terrible.

People complained about pipewire and wireplumber too, but they're fantastic. It's great in the DAW. It just takes a long time to get everything compatible.

Buxato• 4 months ago

It seems more that the cat with tinfoil is him. I have been using Linux partially since 1994 and exclusively since 2010 (aprox), never more things were so "just work" and smooth for me like right now. I began using Wayland since this last Kubuntu 25.10, because before even if some things were better I have few problems with my work software, now suspend its perfect, desktop grid with videogames is perfect, multi monitor is great ... even if I have to use a Nvidia GPU on a laptop!

FatherOfCurses• 4 months ago

Arch + Wayland finally got me dailying Linux for non-business use instead of Windows or Mac about a year ago. I admittedly have riced out things a bit but it is the most pleasant computing experience I currently have access to.

The only pain I've encountered is not being able to get RustDesk going, but that's not been a show-stopper for me.

j0057• 4 months ago

No, lack of maintainers and maintenance on Xorg would have made Linux desktop unviable altogether. High DPI and fractional scaling are very badly supported on Xorg, and architecturally impossible to build.

Wayland is where development happens, so for better or worse, that is what you'll have to use. If you don't like it, go maintain Xorg, if you can't, you're in no position to complain.

I sense a lot of conservative "they took away our X11 freedom" and I have no understanding for it.

catgirlinspace• 4 months ago

fwiw wayland (with niri) has been flawless for me on an integrated amd gpu (amd ryzen ai 9 370 hx).

Lockal• 4 months ago

Not sure if this in line with HN guidelines (per "tangential annoyances" rule), but god, that "animation: drift 2s ease-in-out infinite alternate;" on body kills me, literally - it redraws the whole page with 120 fps, draining the battery, while nothing changes. I don't think it is even "too common to be interesting" - I rarely see this (or actually, I see such tech for the first time). It is specifically annoying because the article attempts to talk about modern software quality.

w4rh4wk5• 4 months ago

Pretty much: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/file-roller/-/issues/4

thisisidiotic• 4 months ago

I'm not even a real developer, just a lazy generalist hacker, but Wayland continually breaks normal things for me.

Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?

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