Ask HN: When will Wayland eclipse X? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: When will Wayland eclipse X?

12 pointsRooster6126 comments

Right now, I'm seeing between 80% and 93% usage of X in favor of Wayland, depending on which source I'm reading. I'd like to see Wayland get more traction, but I'm also aware that many of the things that make it appealing directly cut into its usability due to the many tools and hacks that rely on X's inherent security holes. How long does HN think it will take Wayland to pass the 50% mark in terms of usage across the Linux ecosystem?

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For me, it's the default and, therefore, the one I use. I miss xkill, but that's about it. The other day I was a bit annoyed when I ssh'd into my other laptop downstairs and an app I started there (don't remember what) started there instead of forwarding the window to my desktop. This is the feature I miss the most, and I'm sure it'll eventually get there.

I have no idea. I continue to use X intentionally, because I use some features it has that Wayland doesn't replicate.

Stupid question (I'm a hobbyist Linux programmer): When do people use X and Wayland instead of an UI framework such as QT?

I guess it's obvious that people who create and maintain QT and other GUI libraries definitely use X/Wayland directly, is there anything else?

By "use", I mean it's the windowing subsystem on my desktops. I don't use it as a GUI library. I tend to use QT for that.

Oh I see, thanks. Guess I mixed up the concepts.

Qt*

QT == QuickTime.

I'd say when wayland decides to take users needs more seriously

I use XFCE[0] which doesn't have full Wayland support[1]...yet.

I'm not opposed to using Wayland, but I am a dedicated XFCE user. As such, I won't move to Wayland until XFCE fully supports it.

And once it does, I assume my preferred distro (Fedora[2]) will make Wayland the default for XFCE (as it already does for Gnome and KDE).

[0] https://xfce.org/

[1] https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap

[2] https://news.itsfoss.com/fedora-41-gnome-wayland/

Where is your source for 80-90% using X11?

My assumption would be that by now, it would be 80+% on Wayland.

Hardware survey shows more than 50% wayland usage a few months ago, it harder to have a correct survey, how much of those 80% is just legacy systems that don't update anymore, or don't matter?, like a car dashboard, it uses x11 but noone would count it, or make applications for it, the correctly measure is limiting it to desktop use, and places where update and new applications care about

the correctly measure is limiting it to desktop use

Or about 0.001% of Linux systems?

Do you regularly run X11/Wayland on your servers?

Ime it doesn't work well on old gpus. E.g., on my Quadro P400 desktop I still use xorg because it is much snappier. On my new laptop with Arc it is still slower, but I can live with it since the animations are smooth.

I'd like to see Wayland get more traction

That’s the problem with Wayland.

What you like, is not an engineering criterion.

Wayland breaks my working system.

That is a good definition of badly engineered.

If you want adoption, cowboy up and make it backward compatible.

Good luck.

This seems...oddly passive aggressive. I actually have no skin in the game. I simply posted out of curiosity. I do worry that as Linux becomes more popular due to Windows fuckery, there will be an increase in malware that preys on X11's security flaws, but I am perfectly happy using X11.

> That is a good definition of badly engineered.

One could argue that the hacks and whatnot that apps use to do what they do on X are based on poor engineering. Security certainly is an engineering criterion.

Look, X11's lack of security is real, but I'd bet that most users don't lock down debugging between applications on the system, so anything you could get out of X11, you can also get out of attaching to other processes as a debugger.

X11 allows you to have "network transparency" and run (authenticated) malware attached to your display on a different host and read your keypresses remotely; but Wayland's network scope is limited; waypipe exists, but nobody talks about it, does it work? can you do ssh -something to setup a tunnel and run things and have it just work (at least to the standard of tunneled X)? Taking care of networked malware by ignoring networking for a decade doesn't like not addressing the user needs and then you shouldn't be be surprised when adoption is slow.

Waylaid solves Redhat/IBM’s problems…security for desktop Linux in Enterprises where workers without the technical background to navigate the command line are forced to use Linux. [1]

In ordinary Linux Fu, the command line is the secure alternative to X.

[1] to be clear Wayland addresses the need to document compliance with best practices and other aspects of security theatre.

I had constant issues with Wayland in Plasma using KDE Neon. I tried again recently and it seems better now.

I guess I can blame my docking station and the DisplayLink drivers.

Now Wayland is my default session and no issues so far.

I’ve been using Wayland since it became the default in Fedora. These days it seems to be working great. I’m especially happy with how well KDE seems to work on Wayland now.

Ubuntu's default is Wayland, so I'm surprised that doesn't sway things more - I thought Ubuntu had about ⅓ of the market for Linux desktops.

Fedora's default is Wayland, too, and has been for at least 4 years. Ditto NixOS.

I think OP is mistaken and that most Linux installs use Wayland rather than an X server.

Possibly, but most every source on the matter that I find seems to think it's quite low, and I think that tracks. Folks start off on Wayland, hit a snag installing insert_your_application_here, google and find that Wayland doesn't support XYZ due to design, and switch over to X11. It's pretty trivial to switch for most distros

By "sources" do you mean comments on forums like this one?

Indeed. Most of them probably anecdotal and possibly flat out wrong. That said, I couldn't find a truly authoritative source and there does seem to be a preponderance of anecdotal posts across search results indicating that X11 does indeed have the bear share

I was under the impression, and my anecdata seems to support, that Wayland already had the majority.

Where are you seeing such high figures for X?

When it works. Last time I was on it kde was resetting screen brightness to 100% everytime they woke. The time before I crashed it by dragging a url between windows, not the source or destination programs but wayland itself dropping me back to the console.

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