Wayland isn't going to save the Linux desktop | Hacker News Reader

Wayland isn't going to save the Linux desktop

dudemanguy.github.io

9 pointsfanf211 comments

I'm not sure the Linux desktop needs much saving anymore.

Even games released by Microsoft (like the new 2024 flight simulator) have excellent performance on Linux. And installing them through Steam and running em in Proton is easy and end-user-friendly. Thousands of gamers use a Steam Deck and never gave it a 2nd thought that all of the Windows games just work. The Linux desktop already works very well for a ton of use cases. And with Microsoft aggressively pushing features that their users hate, people are getting more willing to overlook little Linux hickups by the day. Because at least it's not invasive and obnoxious ads.

"Upstream Wayland basically fixed most of the technical things I complained about." in update linked right on top.

Wayland is necessary, but not sufficient, to save the Linux desktop. Support for many important modern display technologies (hiDPI, HDR) exists only in Wayland.

The article is outdated. Here ks the 2025 follow-up by the same author: https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/posts/2025-02-03-wayland-x...

(2022)

Starts with "This entire post is severely outdated much to my pleasant surprise. I've written up a follow-up post you can read here. The text is still here for historical reasons."

What's the point of posting this?

The point might be to show that Wayland is saving the GNU/Linux desktop, since most things has been fixed.

The author also linked a more recent review of Wayland at the top, which could be more interesting.

(I'm too incompetent to talk about anything technical but just to point it out)

The author talked about cursor latency being worse with Wayland, and claimed that it was likely a consequence of the major architectural differences between X11 and Wayland. Is this an inherent drawback of Wayland, or is it just something that's true for one implementation, e.g. GNOME?

It's a implementation issue(or a driver), Wayland don't dictate the mouse latency, and compositors are free todo whatever they want with it

I figured. I'm not sure if the author meant that it was an inherent drawback, but it does seem like he still has a bit of lingering bias towards X11 in his reassessment article.

Wayland is definitely going to save GNU/Linux smartphones. Using it on my Librem 5 right now.

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