Three signs that Wayland is becoming the favored way to get a GUI on Linux

It's a pain because of how much legacy content is made to target Xorg and that there isn't just one central authority or toolkit. You have decades of applications and dozens of toolkits that speak to the X Window Server.

Unlike Windows and macOS, where you link agaisnt the system toolkits, so when Microsoft/Apple want to change their protocol, they update these toolkits.

Any protocol that wasn't X on Linux is always going to be a pain to replace, the biggest issue with Wayland adoption is that it isn't X, yet X is not appropriate for how modern graphics works (why Android does not use it, and uses a system similar to Wayland).

Edit: To add on, regarding things like emulated input etc, on other operating systems there are usually standardised protocols for doing this, where on X it just allowed anything (you don't want windows reading the input sent to other windows, think banking). So new protocols have to be invented here, and then support added for them, in many cases the protocol also works on X with an updated window manager/compositor.

Not a success? It's now the default on most biggest Linux distros like Ubuntu and Fedora.

The tiling WM ecosystem in particular is thriving on Wayland with sway and hyprland, and I personally haven't had any issues with screen recording with OBS (I use hyprland).

Most of the stuff said in the list you linked is "said-X11-only software is not compatible with Wayland" but nothing is said about alternatives : for example instead of redshift I use gammastep.

Exactly and the assertion that it's 'very well designed' needs examining - maybe there's a reason there's been such slow adoption.

Just because it's been 15 years and it hasn't reached 100% adoption/parity doesn't mean it's not a success. The feeling around it when it started was that it's going to many many years for it to reach that and I'd say it's en route.

I don't understand the criticism Wayland gets. If you don't like it just don't use it. X.org is fine. Wait for it to get the features/quality you expect.

Wayland people _are_ the X.org people. You can't force them to continue developing a technology they don't believe it and not moving forward.

I just disabled Wayland on Fedora 38 because of a bug where no videomode is set after login with GDM or switching TTYs. Basic Intel graphics, no proprietary drivers, all stock configs. I'll have to ssh in and purge/reinstall everything, I suppose.

Wayland has caused me no other issues, and while Xorg does hold a special place in my heart, it made me chuckle a bit when I realized I'd become the equivalent of the old-timer still skeptical that ext4 is ready for primetime.

They thought they could ignore Nvidia because open source and it turns out they couldn’t.

Lol not a success? Unhinged take.

> systemd

"It removes fragmentation, could be deadly for the ecosystem"

> wayland

"It adds fragmentation, could be deadly for the ecosystem"

Both are now the standard on the most of the biggest linux distributions, so maybe it's not that big of a deal?

It seems to me like this was Wayland's fatal mistake, honestly. They left window management as an "exercise for the reader" (so to speak) because they didn't think that window management was a "serious" domain, and didn't understand how issues could arise from fragmentation there. So we traded the decades of cruft and fragmentation within the X11 spec for baked-in fragmentation at the DE level. I expect that we'll never reach a Mac-like utopia where you can set global keyboard shortcuts for window management (such as next/previous tab) at the OS level, and have it work across Wayland apps, because of this.

Yeah, I’m sure desktop linux was looking so good before Wayland that it needed some expensive sabotage mission from an Apple-Microsoft-FBI collaboration.

Come on, literally noone outside the 3% cares at all about linux desktop.

What's your point, though? Seems nit-picky.

I can only offer anecdotal evidence, but here it goes. Used to have plenty of issues with scaling under Wayland, particular with my nvidia gpu. Now I am running an intel-only machine (yes I would prefer AMD) with a scaling factor of 1.5, and it runs very well. It's a very efficient machine, too, using only around 6W at idle, sometimes dipping below 5W.

The state of fractional scaling on Linux is abysymal.

That is KDE’s Wayland implementation. If you find safari slow, http is not at fault. Other browsers might be fast - or in this case: gnome, wlroots based ones like sway often improve performance.

For what it’s worth, KDE is quite behind in terms of wayland. It has gotten a lot better, but it is not a good fit for evaluating wayland itself.

I'm using Sway with my 3080 and nvidia drivers.

Why does the window manager require any type of GPU?

due to changes of how Nvidia handles things I think all maintained WM do so by now, through idk. if this applies to both Nvidia drivers or only one of them.