Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years? | Hacker News Reader

Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?

omar.yt

328 pointsomarroth482 comments

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.

> 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.

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).

I second this. I had issues years ago, but those have mostly been fixed.

Same here. Wayland has been fine. (Hyprland)

Me too. I just swapped waybar etc for the dank shell etc and love the setup. It feels polished now

Same here, there are some pain points with swaywm (notably screen sharing is only per display, DisplayLink support and screen mirroring is a pain). Most of these points however are IME a worthwhile tradeoff. Sway has also been astoundingly stable (compared to gnome or KDE)

> I can't remember the last time I had an issue

Depending on your workflows the comment just described three issues

Kde has been stable too So much more than x11 kde

With the next release of sway (1.12) you should be able to share individual windows.

https://github.com/emersion/xdg-desktop-portal-wlr/issues/10...

https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/8170#issuecomment-3962...

Thank you for pointing that out, I'm looking forward to this release a lot then

Additionally, the Steam Deck ships with Wayland by default. Hundreds of thousands of gamers are stress-testing it without any complaint that I'm aware of.

As someone who uses my steam deck as a workstation too, I really really wish this were fully true. The desktop is still X based, and that suuuccckkksss.

The desktop sure, but the primary handheld mode uses Gamescope which is a Wayland-based session.

It's true that Gamescope is a Wayland compositor, but it does not support Wayland clients ("native Wayland programs" if you're unfamiliar with *nix terminology). In handheld mode, everything you see on your screen is an X11 client running under Xwayland. I have no interest in arguing over whether X11 or Wayland is better (I've used both and both work fine for me) but I would not use the Steam Deck to argue that Wayland is being stress tested by hundreds of thousands of gamers when none of their games are using Wayland.

Using Xwayland is using Wayland. It's entirely a moot point anyways, since Wine/Proton supports a native Wayland background these days anyhow.

There’s a gradient. For example, if I ran rootful Xwayland, ran an X11 DE inside that, and then solely used X11 software, it would technically be using Wayland but it would not be what most people are referring to when they are discussing the Wayland transition on the Linux desktop. Similarly, arguing that Wayland is being battle-tested by hundreds of thousands of gamers by citing a single-tasking gaming focused Wayland compositor that only supports X11 clients is not what most people are referring to discussing the Wayland transition either.

Wine/Proton may support a native Wayland backend but it’s not currently being used on the Steam Deck.

I've had bazzite on mine for a year and wayland by default

The next SteamOS release will use Wayland by default for desktop mode, too:

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1675200/announcements/detai...

Just guessing, are we?

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1445kc7/citie...

That post is 3 years old, so basically around 1 year into the Steam Deck's release.

And yet, Cities Skylines still (last tried: about 2 months ago) crashes for me when I try to load it in Wayland on Fedora, which has removed Xorg from its updates.

Wayland has broken dozens of my Steam games.

I just played Skylines last night via Proton-GE. AMD GPU. Fedora 43. Gnome.

CS1, right? If so, can you please detail what you might have done differently?Load options? Some package or another I might be missing? All I know is that with Xorg it worked perfectly, I upgraded Fedora, and now that I only have Wayland, whatever I was doing before no longer works. I'd be grateful for the help.

I am using a system-installed Steam, but sometimes a Steam Flatpak can help with troubleshooting, because it bundles components inside of the flatpak. Running games this way may give you a 5% performance penalty, but it's a good way to see if you have a packaging issue (other things needing installed, or misconfigured).

Also are you running th Linux native one or the proton version?

I run everything through Steam with the proton compatibility layer forced. It's a steam client option somewhere.

I think they're an app called ProtonQT or something like that. It will enable you to easily download the latest proton-ge version. Once downloaded and installed you will need to restart the steam client, then restart the steam client again after selecting the new proton-ge version as the default.

---

https://www.protondb.com/app/255710

I'll try again. I tried both native Linux and a dozen Proton builds, and none would load, even with no mods or DLC. I'll try again with the latest, and if that doesn't work, I'll try the flatpak instead of via RPM Fusion.

There is a note on protondb about needing the most recent proton-ge release. Use ProtonQT flatpak, should help you install / maintain proton-ge versions. Will get you the latest updates as they release.

The Steamdeck loads games into some kind of nested x11 renderer-in-a-window, I think. If for no other reason than to try to avoid Wayland’s extra input latency? Dunno. Maybe you lost some component it needs to work, if regular Steam also does that.

Regular steam does not do that. At this point on most hardware (minus SOME Nvidia, I think older stuff like 2XXX) you should have less latency in Wayland than x11.

I was under the impression that some of the anti-screen-tearing and other features in Wayland unavoidably set a higher (and, higher-enough to be noticeable in some contexts) floor on latency, though, because of how those features necessarily work. I don't mean drivers.

Variable Refresh Rate in Gnome. No screen tearing, no input latency hit for full screen games. To make this work correctly, I think regardless of OS, you need to cap the refresh rate to something just inside the max for the monitor. A lot of games these days have fps limiters. Let's say your monitor was 144hz. You'd want to cap fps to something like 140hz. That's going to prevent any screen jank or input latency.

It ships with Wayland, but it does almost everything with X(wayland)

Wine 9.22+ has the native Wayland backend by default. Now Xwayland is barely needed.

Games isn't exactly the best stress test for a windowing system. Most (if not all) run in full-screen mode and don't really use it much after the launch. And that's not what desktop computing is about. You want to run multiple programs, you want them to integrate with each other. But games don't need any of this.

There is a "Desktop mode" that I, at least, use more than the handheld mode. Not sure if it's running Wayland though.

Desktop mode on the Steam Deck uses X11. I think that's why the brightness control is fucked up (ever notice how the brightness is always 40% when you switch to desktop mode?). You can manually switch it to Wayland, but Steam input is broken under Wayland (or at least it was last time I checked, which is admittedly half a year ago or something).

> input is broken under Wayland

Drop the ‘Steam’, it's cleaner. Wayland's raison d'etre is to push frame buffers without tearing. Input is an afterthought.

That's odd, I'm using Wayland on my desktop and, for example, Japanese input works 問題ない. Then again, I haven't tried every possible input method/peripheral in existence, so I may just be the one in [some arbitrary large number] who lucked out.

> Input is an afterthought

This. You need more than graphics to have a windowing system. Wayland team threw out X11, did graphics and left the rest for the others to figure out.

> you want them to integrate with each other.

Do you? Not going to lie, I'm perfectly happy just using the apps I want to use and having none of them talk to each other. 90% of my use is covered by Vivaldi (browser stuff which is most stuff these days) and Kitty (Neovim, random TUIs and utilities). The few other apps I have are Steam, Krita and Blender, which are all worlds unto themselves and have no need to integrate with anything.

I don't disagree in principle, my workflow is pretty similar, most of the integration part goes thru kitty for me too. But I also need need screenshot and screencast - which need special permission in Wayland because reasons. Fine for me, but I can imagine some having their workflow around specific tools, that might or might not work with Wayland - and apparently, Wayland team thinks it's not their problem.

And I personally need kicad - it doesn't support Wayland at all because of some mouse-related stuff. Again, Wayland team thinks it's not their problem.

Then I had a lots of issues with a graphics tablet. Yes, it's a cheap chinesium knock-off, but it does work on X11. Wayland - no chance and it's obviously not their problem.

So I dropped Wayland altogether and went to X11/herbstluftwm. Was a few years ago, but I didn't bother to go back since - why should I? These aren't their problem, but now I don't use Wayland anymore, so these aren't my problem either.

What I'm trying to say, "hundreds of thousands of gamers stress-testing" have very little to say about usability. Yes the graphics part is excellent, nobody is denying that. There is more to a WM then graphics.

Running fullscreen games on a single fixed hardware configuration isn't exactly 'stress-testing', it just tells you that a single code path works.

I suspect part of that is the Xorg maintainers (who are also behind Wayland efforts) are actively trying to kill it and make it as unbearable as possible

It's all open-source. If you think the maintainers are trying to sabotage the codebase, you have the freedom to fork it.

I don’t get all of what’s going on but from the outside it seems like the xLibre guys got a lot of negative attention for doing that.

If you don't know what's going on, why comment?

A guy decided that after getting all his patches rejected because they cause tests to fail, doesn't compile, etc. that the problem is everyone else and decided to fork XOrg.

He then announced that the problem wasn't his code that didn't compile but DEI so based the entire forking around being a political conservative.

Everything I've seen written by him shows him to be insufferable, thats where the negative attention comes from.

There are a lot of distros that have xlibre packages for something that ostensibly doesn't compile.

I wouldn't trust the reason given by the people who have said that they're trying to kill Xorg for why they're rejecting patches from someone trying to improve Xorg

> There are a lot of distros that have xlibre packages for something that ostensibly doesn't compile.

No one says xlibre doesn't compile, but good attempt at a distraction. Have you considered invading a country as an alternative way to distract from terrible views?

> No one says xlibre doesn't compile

>> A guy decided that after getting all his patches rejected because they cause tests to fail, doesn't compile, etc. that the problem is everyone else and decided to fork XOrg.

Emphasis mine, words yours.

Yeah, some submitted patches failed to compile. Others compiled and failed tests.

Not the same as XLibre doesn't compile.

Wow here it shows who's politically motivated and like it or not Xlibre probably felt the same way. Some people cannot sleep or chill if it is not theirs world view.

"... generic human experiment ... creates a new humanoid race ... toxic spike protein ..." - Enrico Weigelt on LKML

"... insane and technically incorrect ... idiotic lies ... you don't know what you are talking about ... SHUT THE HELL UP ..." - Linus Torvalds

https://lkml.org/lkml/2021/6/10/957

It's not just his code.

The COVID conspiracy theories Enrico Weigelt pushes are riddled with bugs, logical errors, and security holes, and don't compile or pass tests either.

Linus already reviewed both the code and the reasoning, and rejected them for failing basic correctness.

This is indeed not at all about his code. I don't care what he thinks of vaccines and COVID - I just as much don't care what Linus Torvalds thinks about these things. They are damn programmers. Their business is to ship reliable, usable, secure software.

"If you don't like the direction of a multi-decade-long, hundreds of manyears, deeply esoteric project, you have the freedom to go in, fork it, and maintain it"

is the most technically true, practically meaningless argument in FOSS

But it happens successfully.

The code base is Xorg rather than Xfree86 because of one such fork.

Gcc went through the egcs fork.

OpenOffice became LibreOffice in a fork.

When leadership of a project fails to keep the volunteers behind them such forks happen.

And? I'm tired of thoughtless drive-by comments pointing out problems with a given solution without proposing any alternatives, which tends to be a tacit admission that there is no better solution. If you think you have a better solution, let's hear it:

>I'm tired of thoughtless drive-by comments pointing out problems with a given solution

And? Fortunately, free speech and criticism doesn't stop when someone is tired of hearing it.

The alternative doesn't need to be some new solution. A course reversal or change on the existing ones is enough. In which case the criticism already highlights the solution. Besides, the first step of fixing a problem is identifying it.

> If you think the maintainers are trying to sabotage the codebase, you have the freedom to fork it.

But do you have the skill to actually maintain that fork? Do you have the time to keep it going?

We all need to decide where to spend our efforts. If you decide that maintaining a fork isn't worth your time, then that's a revelation of your own preferences.

Sucks for you, but you can't then turn around and expect someone else to invest these for you when they don't want to.

I'm still using Xorg after all these years, on a laptop with 150% scaling, which I occasionally plug into an external monitor with 100% scaling. Somewhat surprisingly, it works great. (Cinnamon desktop, Ryzen 7840u integrated graphics. And also a desktop machine with Radeon RX 6800XT, but it's not surprising that still works great.)

Exactly. Ubuntu LTS 24 and Intel integrated GPU + Wayland is zero problems even when running 4k120 and 150% scaled resolution. Chrome / vscode / zed / Rstudio / Youtube 4k60, it just works.

Edit this is running a 32" 2160p120 (4k) monitor alongside a 24" 1080p144 monitor.

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?

I did not. While I am open to switching to Linux desktop for my primary PC, I'm not open to troubleshooting that level of software in my free time. As a FOSS maintainer I have the utmost respect and admiration for the effort and work done so far. My anecdote was not meant to discount the work, but to highlight friction points which prevented me from switching over.

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

Pretty much every vst, clap, etc plugin on Linux requires X calls because of how windows get created and then managed by the host.

I've moved to running Bitwig in an Ubuntu distrobox container. Hope you're enjoying 6, it seems they fixed a lot with the piano roll.

I had to set mouse warping off in my tiling manager for yabridge/wine plugins.

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.

Yeah much as it sucks, i went back to Windows+WSL on my laptop. It just straight up works better. I really wish it didn't, but it's the reality.

> at least windows works and it works for games and graphics

It doesn't, actually. I vividly remember trying and failing to play some old games on Windows. GTA San Andreas, I think. Didn't even launch due to missing DirectX libraries or whatever. I hunted down and installed all the redistributables and DLLs. Still didn't run.

So much for the fabled backwards compatibility of Windows. Microsoft clearly does not give a shit anymore. Wouldn't be surprised if Linux with Proton becomes better at running games than Windows one day.

In 2008, I remember playing starcraft over LAN with my roommate. It played better on Wine/Ubuntu than it did on his Vista machine (and unrelatedly but hilariously, in the middle of the game his computer gave him a countdown to reboot with no option to cancel it)

I got a gaming computer during covid and initially ran Windows on it. It had so many problems with the audio and random crashes I eventually gave up and switched to Linux. Only loss was the newer Blizzard games, all the Steam games worked.

Idk - I’ve been trying out Linux gaming on Bazzite and everything seems to just work? It’s been a basically flawless experience.

I dual boot Linux + Windows (technically triple boot - I have a third drive with a different distro for dev work) and I haven’t needed to boot to windows a single time in the ~5 months I’ve been testing out Linux gaming. Not a single game has required any tweaking with proton settings either. My plan is to remove Windows entirely if I make it through the year without needing it.

No issues with drivers, no issues with peripherals (Wired speakers, Bluetooth headset, usb headset, webcam), with 3 displays at different resolutions/framerates/orientations. Running Ryzen 9800x3d and an RTX 4070ti.

Games I’ve played on Linux cover a pretty wide spectrum too.

- Arc Raiders

- Stalker 2

- Kingdom come deliverance 2

- Doom the dark ages

- Timberborn

- Pacific Drive

- Baulders Gate 3

- Disco Elysium

- Peak

- Alan Wake 2

- RV there yet

- Yapyap

- Pentinence

and probably others I’m forgetting.

I honestly wasn’t expecting the experience to be this smooth. Windows days as the gaming default feel numbered.

ok im going to try linux again lol, hopefully this time it sticks. just need to find an image program that resembles paint as closely as possible.

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.

Does anyone have links on how to set up multi monitor on Sway?

The default config file explains some common things you might want to do. E.g. left or right side and scaling factor.

I use a docked ThinkPad with the lid closed and two external monitors. Here are my config bits.

  set $laptop eDP-1
  set $landscape 'Hewlett Packard HP ZR24w CNT037144C'
  set $portrait 'Hewlett Packard HP ZR24w CNT03512JN'
  bindswitch --reload --locked lid:on output $laptop disable
  bindswitch --reload --locked lid:off output $laptop enable
  
  ### Output configuration
  output $laptop bg $HOME/pictures/wallpaper/1529004448340.jpg fill
  output $landscape bg $HOME/pictures/wallpaper/1529004448340.jpg fill
  output $portrait bg $HOME/pictures/wallpaper/portrait/DYabJ0FV4AACG69.jpg fill 
  # pos args are x coords and y coords, transform is degrees of rotation counter-clockwise
  # set $portrait as left monitor and rotate it counterclockwise
  output $portrait pos 0 1200 transform 270

The funny thing about this myth is that wayland does not even try to support Mixed DPI setups, the only thing it supports is, as you put it, janky scaling. Not that X is any better in the end but at least it has the data available if any application wants to try to do correct Mixed dpi (nobody does)

http://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/mixed-dpi-x11/

So in yet another case of worse is better, wayland has the reputation of supporting mixed DPI environments, but not because it has any support for actual mixed DPI but because it is better at faking it (fractional scaling).

Myth or not - it is absolutely much better on wayland. I really don't care or know how to tweak linux so i've been using straight install Fedora for years. I also have 4 screens. When Fedora switched to wayland it got much better and it keeps getting better.

> 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)

You really only need dirty_ratio/bytes and dirty_background_ratio/bytes set to something lower than default. It also makes your progress bars show values closer to reality, especially when copying from fast to slow media.

Some distros already do set lower defaults, e.g. pop os:

https://github.com/pop-os/default-settings/blob/master_noble...

Bazzite: https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/blob/main/system_files/d...

> You really only need dirty_ratio/bytes and dirty_background_ratio/bytes set to something lower than default.

The vm.swappiness=1 was very necessary for me as well, and made as much difference as the dirties you'd mentioned.

I usually run Linus' master kernels (as I look for regressions in certain subsystems) and I know there's been some recent changes to the MM subsystem so this may explain some of the necessity for me.

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?

Honestly I'm a regular user on my home PC which is what I was talking about in my comment. Discord, music player, games through GeForce Now/Steam, some coding. I went through a default install, didn't really tweak much and was hoping KDE would just do its thing.

I'm on a Radeon card, 2 monitors of different resolutions, 1xDP 1xHDMI. I check my AMD drivers and upgrade those regularly (as well as BIOS/chip firmware).

I did try to do all the basic troubleshooting steps and making sure all my software was up-to-date. Just felt like the default state without tuning did not meet what Windows' defaults give me.

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.

Happy to share more info, I truly want Linux to be as good as the competition! I had no true technical complaints, only UX ones.

Copying from another reply: > I'm on a Radeon card, 2 monitors of different resolutions, 1xDP 1xHDMI. I check my AMD drivers and upgrade those regularly (as well as BIOS/chip firmware).

This experience was about 3 months ago, and I only tried KDE this time around. I'm not a huge Linux person, so I did some searching and it seemed that (despite some very spicy discussions), KDE was agreed to be pretty bleeding-edge for window management and all the nice features Windows users expect.

I've also noticed vastly different anecdotes, which sucks for maintainers and users alike! Maybe KDE needs a telemetry push since the desktop env specifically targets users who are less willing to troubleshoot at such a low level.

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.

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.

> 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.

The specific thing I noticed was that, when pressing alt-tab the very first time, there was a noticeable, variable delay for the actual window previews to appear. I don't care as much about the window previews, but the delay in feedback to know which window I was potentially focusing on was painful. I also alt-tab like a madman, for better or for worse. Testing this now on Windows, after I press tab there is an _immediate_ rendering of the previews, 0 (noticeable) delay. On KDE, I'm not exaggerating, I could count 1-2 seconds until I saw something on screen, even when my machine was mostly idle (Discord+music player running).

Does disabling “fade popups in and out” help? Settings -> Animations

> 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.

As someone who was trying to switch to Linux desktop for the first time, I didn't research all the many options available and didn't try multiple ones. I read that KDE was kind of 'bleeding edge' (I know this is a hot topic) and so that's the one I decided to give a try. I tried to get used to the quirks for a few weeks rather than switch to something else.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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?

If you have a spare usb stick, the cost to trying them is only the download time. Each is capable of the same things, the differences are purely aesthetic. So try them out and see which you like best. Or install all three and switch each time you login.

You actually don't know the true cost until you learn the quirks of the UI, how it handles proprietary drivers, upgrades, the packaging system, how up-to-date and complete its packages are, etc.

Spend a few hours having fun and then not think about it for years.

>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?

The performance difference will be minimal. It's an aesthetic choice, pick the one you like the look of or give a few of them a try.

It's like cars. Some people have extreme opinions on matters, some would be fine picking almost any car, and most test drive a few before picking their favorite.

Yeah, I think the answer if you aren't sure which car to get is "any of the popular ones are probably fine for you" and that's probably true for Linux distributions and software choices too.

Very good, I'll see it that way now.

If you just want something to use: install one of the most mainstream distros like Ubuntu or Fedora, accept the defaults, and move on with your life. There are compromises in all of the options, even my Mac has a handful of irritating problems.

> 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.

What a bizarre conclusion to draw! Why don't you believe that whichever distro you choose, it will be way better than what you have now?

There was a book on this called "The Paradox of Choice." Its argument is that too many choices stress people out over the fear of choosing wrong.

Yeah, uniformity of opinions is way better. Or not.

Well it is fine if Linux is not for you, I want to say.

But in the macOS vs Windows vs Linux debate, obviously one has to say what Linux does differently: and that's exactly what you seem to dislike. I.e. the freedom of choice.

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.

Some people just want to get work done and fine tuning or customizing their OS is not that.

And the market is full of OSes for them. Why are you unhappy this one isn't?

Sure, I have nothing against that. They should just not tell me that I cannot be different.

"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."

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.

No, double down -- You personally are not forced to use it, but today this is a terrible argument that, perhaps subconsciously, reinforces the falsehood that "you don't have to use it" is an okay and reasonable response, when it's really merely a selfish one.

Again, Linux is everywhere and the better thing to do is to consider how the bad rollout of Wayland affects everyone -- especially, e.g. that rising 2 or 3 percent who are going for it on the desktop. It is FAR more important to raise that marketshare -- or at least to consider the possibility of it -- than it is to preserve some notion of "well it works for me."

> It is FAR more important to raise that marketshare

I don't see why. Most users of OSes couldn't care less about their OS. The vast majority of humans are happy with Windows, macOS, iOS or Android. To the point where those who aren't are a rounding error.

I don't want to make Linux look like Windows, such that those people can finally use Linux and I can proudly look at a marketshare. If a Linux distro ever gets a "decent" marketshare, if won't be Linux: it will be a specific distro that managed to look like Windows or macOS. I most certainly won't be using that distro.

eh, look up Richard Stallman et al. This isn't about "user preference," it's about preserving freedom in computing.

  > I don't see why

I'll take a stab at this, setting aside all the arguments I could make about software freedom, etc etc (and there's lots of those).

Regardless of which distro you use or how into free software you are, there's a very simple truth: the more Linux users there are, the more people will develop software for Linux. More software supporting Linux == better.

This applies both to proprietary software that people might want (e.g I'd kill for a Linux-native version of FL studio, the only thing I use wine for these days), and also for FLOSS software (more Linux users -> more exposure to FLOSS ideals -> more converts -> more FLOSS software).

Having the ecosystem grow is a good thing.

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.

Are we disagreeing? It sounds like we agree.

No, we're not. Sorry, my bad.

It would seem I didn't read your post properly, I think I must have just been tired or something. I took "who is forced to use it" as a statement (i.e "I'm a user who is forced to use it") rather than a question. Reading it again now when I'm awake it makes a lot more sense!

Hehe, I was confused like -- no yes this what I think too!

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.

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.

> 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

> also trying to cancel people who fork

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

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

> 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.

And who is forcing you to use GNOME?

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.

You can legally get old versions of Windows, but it isn’t recommended.

Technically you can get second-hand keys, but good luck verifying that it's actually a legal resale. Also good luck getting the latest, most up to date version of Vista.

You still aren't allowed to start a group to collectively patch bugs in the old version.

Unless security patches are still developed and released for older versions, I'd strongly discourage it.

Yes, and the developers of Gnome are strongly encouraging you to move to Wayland. You are free to ignore that suggestion.

If you delete the first 13 words from my previous comment it may be a more suitable comment for you.

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.

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)

> 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).

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

This page linked in the bottom explains a lot:

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

> 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.

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?

Just because it’s free doesn’t mean you shouldn’t call them out on their stupidity.

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

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?

> 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.

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 ;(

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.

But that attitude means that “the year of the Linux desktop” will never actually arrive because the vast majority don’t want less polished, hard to choose, undocumented testing.

Sure. I don't want the year of the Linux desktop. Why would I care, really? I want Linux to be the Linux I like.

I sometimes feel that people try to explain to Linux people how they should modify their distro in order to make it look more like Windows, such that they would get more newcomers who like Windows. I don't want that! People who like Windows should use Windows, and we should make Linux look like a system I left for Linux!

> 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.

> 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 :)

> It's also important that users tell their DE developers what their needs are

It's further important that relevant developers actually listen rather than ignoring, dismissing, or saying (and I quote!) "...Regardless, I simply don’t give a shit about you anymore."

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.

It definitely feels like there's a dedicated core of people insisting on removing choice from the Linux ecosystem. RedHat, Gnome, fredesktop.org ... they have an ideology and a strategy to make it dominant in the Linux world and it does not feel nice to many people.

> 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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

I miss the simplicity of how I remember XFree86 running on the alt-f7 terminal, and having alt-f1 through alt-f6 for my own needs... a second X on alt-f8 when I got 64MB of ram. ctrl-alt-backspace to quickly kill X and restart it (within a few seconds on a 486).

Then, gradually, these things disappeared from Linux, for no good reason; you can still configure them but someone decided in their infinite wisdom that some of the most compelling features just weren't really needed anymore, in favour of rewriting the XDM again and again until now there's too many of them and none of them are really any better than what we had in the 90s.

    setxkbmap -option terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp

I had to put that in my .xinitrc, because like you I really missed that feature. I also made a .Xresources file and had to remember that xrdb was a thing. Good times, good memories. I also remember the jump to 64MiB of memory, it was a big deal! I think I got a Gravis UltraSound right around then too.

I stopped my nostalgia journey short of pimping out my console (sadly now only fbcon works, and the old vga modes are a legacy BIOS thing I think) with fonts and higher resolution, and enabling in the kernel the Alt+SysReq+g key for dropping into the kernel debugger, but there is always tomorrow!

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...

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).

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.

> 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

That's not even the most recent iteration, there's also Deskflow now which is maintained by the main Synergy developer and a very active independent dev. Works fine on Wayland afaik. Also has a wiki page with the history of all the forks!

https://github.com/deskflow/deskflow

Unbelievable! Thank you, I guess I'll have to see if I should switch over to that one now

I tried that recently and it didn't seem to work with my particular setup (Sway window manager). Or at least, the tray app won't open any windows to see if it's enabled/disabled/configured properly.

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.

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.

Based on the article, here is still a decade in the future and that is the main complaint.

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

The python 2 to 3 situation was a similar colossal mistake of honestly incompetent developers who really enjoy programming in their free time who don't understand that time is money for most people.

By comparison, Rust with its edition system understands this.

But this is the major issue. They don't understand that even if Wayland had feature-parity with X11. The simple fact that it works differently means that if I am to migrate I would have to rewrite a tonne of scripts that hook into X11 that just organically grew over time that I've now become dependent on for my workflow. It has to be substantially better and have killer features for me to switch and yes, fractional scaling per-monitor is that killer feature for many, but not for me, and the simple fact that XMonad runs on X11 and not on Wayland is a killer feature for others.

> The python 2 to 3 situation was a similar colossal mistake of honestly incompetent developers who really enjoy programming in their free time who don't understand that time is money for most people.

It’s been years but even then, this sincerely cannot be repeated enough.

Not to mention that p3 on its own was prettymuch functional and p2 quite stable and the major issue was migrating/porting all the legacy over to p3 .Hence bridges like six and 2-to-3 that at least attempted to smooth the transition over by allowing bot to coexist for a time.

With wayland they seem not to be even entertaing this optionality - with wayland itself being not yet feature complete to standalone.And the attempts to bridge like xwayland coming way after the fact and pushing a oneway path with no coexisting situation.

As a result introducinga whole lot of friction and surprises in UI functionality. So yeah at a time when the presentation layer should be a boring afterthough, it is too timeconsuming in part of a Linux setup and daily usage.

Indeed. And what many seem to fail to notice is that at it's core it's exactly the same mistake being made all over again. A mistake that I've seen so many times over and over again, increasingly commonly in recent years, which can be summed up thusly:

"I want to make some incompatible changes in my thing that is being widely used by (say) thousands or millions of people. I could spend a bunch of time ensuring I'm backwards compatible as much as possible, or doing a compatibility layer which would make the transition seamless for most, but that's not sexy work, and it would be something I would have to maintain (also not sexy), and it would take me (let's say) 1000 hours to do. Instead, I'll just insist that each and every one of those thousands/millions of people put (say) 100 hours each into adapting to what I want to do"

It's disrespectful of your users. It devalues their time. It says that your (say) 1000 hours is more valuable than (say) a million people putting in (say) 100 hours each. And it's inefficient - wasting the time of many to save the time of a few.

It also undermines their trust in you: if you're willing to force them to spend a bunch of time re-writing something that already works just to suit your whims, what's to say you won't do it again next year when you have a newer and even shinier whim?

Now someone will jump in to argue about how "FOSS developers are volunteers, they do it for free, you can't expect them to do the boring stuff". Which is false, false, and false: You'll find that for a large number of these projects (like say gnome and wayland) the core developers are indeed professionals who are paid (by e.g redhat) to work on it, even if they started off as volunteers. And the boring stuff is part of the job, too, otherwise don't call yourself a software engineer.

If you're working on a widely-used piece of software, then the users should be your god.

  > They don't understand that even if Wayland had feature-parity with X11

See, I don't think you're giving them enough credit. Or is it too much credit? These are not stupid people. I say they do understand this, they just don't care about your time enough to do anything about it.

> Indeed. And what many seem to fail to notice is that at it's core it's exactly the same mistake being made all over again. A mistake that I've seen so many times over and over again, increasingly commonly in recent years, which can be summed up thusly:

Yes, just as the idea of “We will start anew because the codebase is a mess and this time we'll make it clean.”. 10 years ago, whenever I saw something like that I would've said that person has zero actual experience working as a programmer. I've seen teams go through this multiple times but at the end, the new codebase when all the features are added is just as much of a mess as the old, at best a slight improvement. People who say this just underestimate the scope. But these people have experience. They're just optimistic and full of wishful thinking maybe?

> See, I don't think you're giving them enough credit. Or is it too much credit? These are not stupid people. I say they do understand this, they just don't care about your time enough to do anything about it.

I disagree. I've talked with many of those people both online and in real life who don't understand that for most people time has value. They really just don't get it. They're not stupid; they just don't really think about it that way and don't have much to do in their lives aside from this one specific hobby.

  > 10 years ago, whenever I saw something like that I would've said that person has zero actual experience working as a programmer

That, or maybe they've just never really tried the whole "I'll start from scratch and get it right this time" thing and discovered for themselves how misguided it is.

It's also really easy to tell yourself "but this time I'll get it right!". I'm still guilty of believing it sometimes.

  > But these people have experience. They're just optimistic and full of wishful thinking maybe?

Or perhaps simple myopia and lack of long term planning? I don't know.

I feel like it's probably easy in a project like this to lose sight of what regular users want, or to feel like you know better and so should be able to dictate to them what they should want. And because you've had your head buried in the project for a decade, dealing only with team members who share all the same opinions, you're shocked when people don't find "but if you ever get a HDR monitor it might be marginally better" to be a compelling reason to have to re-write all the scripts they've been building and relying on for 20 years.

  > I disagree. I've talked with many of those people both online and in real life who don't understand that for most people time has value. They really just don't get it. They're not stupid; they just don't really think about it that way and don't have much to do in their lives aside from this one specific hobby.

Yeah you might be right. I don't have anything to back up my opinion, I was really just trying not to assume they're stupid. And I feel like I have run into people like this.

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.

Wow what a showstopper!

Decades of using Linux desktops and nothing has ever changed hahaha. Users still complain things don’t work. Fans still say “oh what a first world problem”.

Like a little 2004 era time loop. People still installing Dapper Drake. Haha.

In the time that people have been talking about the Wayland future to today where they’re still talking about it I have lived in 3 continents, met my wife and had a child, and experienced a few huge technology shifts. Truly amazing. I get this blast of nostalgia every time this discussion happens. Like looking through a bubble and seeing my teenage self.

Wayland breaks my slashdot-themed e16 desktop!! /s

Hey at least they finished Perl 6!

I think it’s more like they gave up on Perl 6, admitted it was a mistake, and renamed all that work like it wasn’t related to Perl. Where it languishes in mostly obscurity.

Fully agree, same here. It's just sad to keep watching this, because now just after approx. 15 years i started to evaluate the Linux Desktop again and it failed again. Many professional software like Maya, Houdini, Unreal, etc. that used to run great on Linux/X11, now sucks on wayland. Some are hyping Linux for the subpar gaming compatibility, while for GameDev Windows is still required. In 15 years I'll try again, but then I'm probably to old for this.

Or they say it isn't, but then from which OS are the games that make using Proton a requirement?

They aren't targeting Linux, they are targeting Windows Game Developers Kit, even when the engine is actually cross platform.

When there's people taking the complaints as attacks rather than feedback on how to improve, it's no wonder we keep seeing the same complaints.

I just don't get it myself. When users complain about the software I've released, I look to see if there's reasonable changes I can make to alleviate their issues.

It's just some of the so many reasons why the "Year of the Linux Desktop" will never see the light. Linux is doomed to run mainly headless on a dark chamber hardware. As always when the Linux Desktop is just starting to take off, somebody comes up with a new great self destructive idea(wayland), it always has been like that and probably will never change.

I am skeptical of the "Year of the Linux Desktop" as well, but saying that it won't come because of problems like that is crazy. Windows has plenty of bugs of much higher severity, and they don't seem to stop people from using it. People just use what they're used to.

Except for AI. I can have Claude go dick around with gconf and .rc files and .input or whatever and have it set things up the way I want to work.

The goal is to produce a stable workstation OS, because that's who pays the bills. That means Linux 'enthusiasts' who want the latest and greatest stuff have signed themselves up to be eternal betatesters. That part will never change because its largely intentional.

Have you USED macOS 26?

Nope, I stopped using Apple devices in early 2019. I can't accept their attitude anymore, of deciding what I'm allowed to install on my hardware. macOS is a bit more open than iOS, but is every year shifting more and more into the same direction.

Wayland is why Steam Deck is a product. Gamescope, the compositor it uses for all the features that makes it compelling to buy, uses it and it's features heavily.

Desktop Linux was never going to go anywhere stuck on X. Wayland is happening, it's currently going through it's trial by fire and in the end (and for a lot of people, right now) it'll be better for it.

It's easy to say Wayland has been around forever and barely progressed, but for me it's pretty easy to see, based on the massive amount of fixed issues and new features being added to Wayland, that we're no longer on the horizontal part of the curve. It seems a lot of people have become blind to it's exponential growth. Also the growth of desktop Linux adoption, which is real and happening, in spite of 'Wayland setting Linux Desktop back by 10 years'.

Steam Deck is a product thanks to Windows developers, that feed Proton with content.

Huh, didn't know that all the Windows developers at Microsoft made all the Windows games. Super cool.

Trying to be funny, I see.

Better than trying to make a point and failing to make it. And if I didn't, at least I tried to be funny as that counts for something, your comment is just noise.

My comment is a fact, without the Windows games ecosystem, by developers living and breathing on Windows, with Windows development tools, Proton has nothing to play, even if many of Windows games are developed on top of cross-platform engines.

Unfortunely Valve failed to make native Linux gaming a reality, not even game studios targeting Android NDK bother, which has the same 3D and audio APIs as GNU/Linux.

Audio APIs on Android are completely different than on GNU/Linux.

3D was also different (OpenGL ES vs OpenGL mess), only now it's starting to become kinda the same with Vulkan.

Nope, they are also available as they are Khronos standards for audio, and Mesa also does OpenGL ES.

Do you need a tutorial?

You mean OpenSL ES? Is anyone actually using that on desktop? On Android there's https://github.com/google/oboe.

While Mesa has OpenGL ES it wasn't always available (for example not all drivers are using Mesa).

> Unfortunely Valve failed to make native Linux gaming a reality

Who cares? What would that actually achieve and how would they have practically achieved it anyway? Use their store platform to force or coerce developers? Hold a gun to developers heads?

Valve don't owe anyone shit, neither did PC compatible BIOS manufacturers, nor anyone else who creates a clean room implementation of a pre-existing API. Getting Windows software working outside of Windows is a net good for consumers and developers.

Linux users will care when the fountain of Windows games needed to feed Proton dries out.

Do you think Valve and Gabe will be around forever?

Is anything around forever? What kind of argument is this?

Proton works by wrapping Windows calls to Linux equivalents, which have been improving and becoming more robust as a result of this work. If the Windows game ecosystem collapses (How? When? It's literally never been more popular) then those equivalent APIs can be targeted instead. Meanwhile, the absolutely massive PC back catalogue, the platform's greatest strength, remains playable.

Where's the downside?

Gamescope is custom sw built by Valve, and all the games run under X (via Xwayland). I'd suspect you could build similar functionality without Wayland (for example a custom X server talking to directly to the kernel DRM).

I'd wager in a alternate universe where Wayland didn't have all the mindshare, Steam Deck would still be a product (unless some butterfly effect nixed it).

Nah that’s irrelevant. The year of the GNU/linux desktop won’t materialize because it’s not a platform for apps, it’s balkanized, has no backward compat save for win32, and flatpak/snap are awful clutches. ChromeOS and Android will eat its lunch.

You're clearly being sarcastic but when your display manager can't let you type your password that is very literally a show stopper

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

> Then try to drag out a tab of firefox

Works fine here?

Here it just works to the left or right, tried multiple distributions Fedora, Arch, CashyOS, NixOS, no way. Perhaps an issue with NVIDIA drivers, running a 5090 here.

> 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.

Or just install Windows, install Deskflow, do my job, earn my money, pay my bills, go on vacation, take a sun bath and stop using an OS developed by people wearing thin foil aluminum hats.

Also not stopping you from that. =]

PS tinfoil is an antenna..?

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

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

Hyprlands been making waves

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.

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"..

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

> 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.

Just gonna jump in with the alternate view, if you like Windows desktop but not Windows, KDE is just amazing now. I didn’t enjoy it much in be KDE3 and 4 days but I’m loving Plasma 6.

Plasma 6 has worked flawlessly for me, even on NVIDIA graphics out of the box (Arch, btw).

KDE just feels like windows, and just as disjointed.

(To any devs that may read this: I acknowledge a LOT of development progress and features you all have added, it's just not my cup of tea!)

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.

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.

Sorry if I sold myself a delusion about the Linux distro I casually tried but I've been jumping on and off Linux for 20 years at this point and didn't get the memo it was outdated until later on. The significant change here was being able to daily drive it on my laptop instead of living in a VM or secondary dual boot.

In the past Ubuntu was always my go-to but the snap thing was irritating, and I'd always used some kind of Debian variant, so after cycling through all the X-buntus said hey, why not this Linux Mint I keep hearing about? Plus, Cinnamon looked decent in screenshots but turned out Gnome with a few tweaks ended up being much closer to my ideal than even heavily customized Cinnamon.

That's basically what I heard ten years ago from individuals (and even universities) for why they switched to Mint.. but even now, if you ask Perplexity for a "debian-based distro thats not ubuntu" Mint is the second option.

What other options are there?

SolydXK. There's others, like Siduction and whatnot, but Solyd is pretty solid.

I did a bunch of distro hopping in the 90's but locked onto Debian (mainly testing, now largely unstable) not long after. I'm still just not sure what compels people elsewhere. Especially now: the Debian installer was vicious if you were a newbie, but I hear it's pretty ok now.

This is largely a me problem! I don't understand what the value add is of other offerings. It's unclear what else would be good or why. Debian feels like it really has what's needed now. Things work. Hardware support is good. Especially in the systemd era, so much of what used to make distros unique is just no longer a factor; there's common means for most Linux 's operation. My gut tells me we are forking and flavoring for not much at all. Aside from learning some new commands, learning Arch has been such a recent non-event for me. It feels like we are having weird popularity contests over nothing. And that amplifies my sense of: why not just use Debian?

But I also have two and a half plus decades of Linux, and my inability to differentiate and assess from beginner's eyes is absolutely key to this all. I try to ask folks, but it's still all so unclear what real motivations, and more, what real differences there are.

The real differences are things that maintainers do. Like how... OBS I think? ...had a bunch of people come in with issues that only existed in the Debian version. Debian software has a bunch of patches, Arch software has far fewer and sticks closer to upstream, other distros will vary. Derivatives also made nonfree easier to set up, which was especially important when MP3 was still encumbered. Nowadays Debian still has the reputation of having old, outdated versions of software, which is going to be hard to shake, especially considering stability is meant to be their main draw.

In my experience Mint still has the smoothest process for Nvidia drivers, making it the first suggestion for gamers.

And Snap causes some embarrassing bugs in Firefox in the Ubuntu family, so people thinking "I want an Ubuntu-like OS but without Canonical's mistakes" still gravitate to Mint.

EndeavourOS works really well in this regard. It also smoothes out working with Arch without being too opinionated.

It was a GUI install, defaults to KDE Plasma, auto installs and manages the graphics drivers. Very smooth, better than Windows install in most ways.

I've always been stuck on the deb/apt system because it seems to have the best support but I probably need to move on at this point. It just doesn't work that well.

>I don't know how this happened, how Mint rooted itself so well

I'm pretty sure it was due to nonfree codecs and drivers not being in other distros by default. The mainstream distros only have themselves to blame.

They were one of the few distros at the time which had a sane out-of-the-box desktop experience for non-tech people, back when Ubuntu was pushing (the original) Unity and GNOME was still the the early days of 3.x. Drivers and codecs were easy to install as well, generally speaking, without having to hit the forums or ask your tech family member for help.

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.

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.

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.

Well that's the issue with free software isn't it. In properitary software people work on what their boss tells them to work on which is decided by market research based on what people want.

Others said in this thread that Wayland in many ways was more so trying to solve issues for developers than for users and that's true.

Market research is far more often used to measure what will make or save the most money that they can get away with. Nobody cares about what the plebs want.

> but you are not those people's boss.

You're right. Those people's boss is the freedesktop foundation. Just follow the money.

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

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!

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

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

But this is sort of the nature of the problem?

In X11, the problem was Xserver. Now, X11's design philosophy was hopelessly broken and needed to be replaced, but it wasn't replaced. As you correctly point out, there is no "Wayland", Wayland is a methodology, a description, of how one might implement the technologies necessary to replace X11.

This has led to hopeless fracturing and replication of effort. Every WM is forced to become an entire compositor and partial desktop environment, which they inevitably fail at. In turn application developers cannot rely on protocol extensions which represent necessary desktop program behavior being available or working consistently.

This manifests in users feeling the ecosystem is forever broken, because for them, on their machine, some part of it is.

There is no longer one central broken component to be fixed. There are hundreds of scattered, slightly broken components.

I miss the Unix philosophy

Wayland is far more aligned with the Unix philosophy than Xorg ever was. Xorg was a giant, monolithic, do everything app.

The Unix philosophy is fragmentation into tiny pieces, each doing one thing and hoping everyone else conforms to the same interfaces. Piping commands between processes and hoping for the best. That's exactly how Wayland works, although not in plain text because that would be a step too far even for Wayland.

Some stuff should not follow the Unix philosophy, PID 1 and the compositor are chief examples of things that should not. It is better to have everything centralized for these processes.

In X you have server, window manager, compositing manager, and clients and all is scoupled by a very flexible protocol. This seems nicely split and aligned with Unix philosophy to me. It also works very well, so I do not think this should be monolithic.

I maintain Red Hat backed it as part of a play to make it harder to develop competing distros that aren’t basically identical to Red Hat’s product.

Their actions on systemd, Wayland, plus gnome and associated tech, sure look like classic “fire and motion”. Everyone else has to play catch-up, and they steer enough incompatible-with-alternatives default choices that it’s a ton of work and may involve serious compromises to resist just doing whatever they do.

This is same cop out people use to talk about "Linux."

"No, Linux isn't bad, your distro/DE is bad, if you used XYZ then you wouldn't have this problem." And then you waste your time switching to XYZ and you just find new problems in XYZ that you didn't have in your original distro.

I'm genuinely tired of this in the Linux community. You can't use the "Wayland" label only for the good stuff like "Wayland is good for security!" and "Wayland is the future" and then every time someone complains about Wayland, it is "no, that's not true Wayland, because Wayland isn't real."

But that's what we signed up for in the Linux wirld. Linux systems are smorgasbord of different components by design, and that means being specific. I'm using KDE Plasma 6, that's a different experience than someone using Cosmic or Sway.

Furthermore, Wayland is, first and foremost, a protocol, not a standalone software like the Linux kernel. Wayland is no more than an API format transmitted over the Wire protocol. So properly criticizing Wayland is about criticizing the abstraction this API creates and the constraints introduced by it.

Could you briefly explain in simple terms, why I as a user would care about any of that? I want stuff to work. With Wayland, it largely doesn't. I don't terribly care about the semantics of it.

This is quite wrong? There are some features that get blocked from being implemented because Wayland refused to define a protocol for everyone to implement. Window positioning being a recent example of how progress can get blocked for many years due to Wayland.

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.

  > "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!

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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

The argument that can be made is that we never would've gotten PipeWire without going through PulseAudio first.

We got the much superior jack two years before pulseaudio was even a thing.

Pulseaudio was a derail of Linux audio. We could have skipped it entirely.

Comparing JACK and PulseAudio is like comparing apples and oranges. And honestly, JACK by itself is unsuitable as an audio server for general desktop usage.

JACK doesn’t support device hotplug (ya know, connecting and disconnecting a headset, something most of us do) and it also doesn’t support multiple applications generating audio without the user having to configure how audio is mixed.

JACK is designed for low latency in environments like Digital Audio Workstations (DAW) where you know 1) what audio hardware is present at all times, and 2) what applications are going to generate audio.

Many people who use/used JACK ran a PulseAudio bridge on top of it for every application that wasn’t the one or two applications that needed ultra low latency audio.

PulseAudio had some major warts, but JACK wasn’t some panacea that did everything better.

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.

It also introduced fun new audio bugs and indeterminate latency. Which still haven't gone away entirely in 2026. To such an extent that any time I have an audio issue, I reflexively `pkill -9 pulseaudio` and about 99% of the time the problem just vanishes.

On the first machine where I had pulseaudio foisted on me - an 800mhz single core Duron - pulseaudio used literally 20% of my CPU time...

...At idle. When no audio was playing...

...To do software audio mixing which my creative labs audio hardware was capable of doing better and for free.

When I filed an issue with the pulseaudio people, saying "hey, you're wasting 20% of my CPU time at idle when no audio is playing because you're ignoring the fact that I have superior hardware that can do audio mixing for free", they closed the issue saying that pulseaudio wasn't meant to be used in situations where you have dedicated hardware for audio mixing.

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.

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.

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

>now every WM have to repeat that work

wlroots?

wlroots is self-described as "about 60,000 lines of code you were going to write anyway." It's also a moving target and you'll probably have to retool when wlroots updates.

That seems like a huge burden to carry around, considering that a minimal X11 window manager can be a few thousand lines of code and probably still compiles after 15 years.

wlroots came pretty late so there was a lot of code duplication between Weston/GNOME/KDE before that.

I think that's actually the biggest real criticism that can reasonably be made about Wayland: they ought to have produced something like wlroots from the start.

Weston was only ever intended to be an example, and its monolithic nature meant that it wasn't particularly useful as a platform on which others could build (and this was even more true early on, before libweston).

As a result, GNOME and KDE both did their own implementations - and from that seed grew a host of complaints about things not working in one or the other, when on xorg they had worked more or less the same. The lack of a common entry point for "plumbing" also hurt, and can probably take much of the blame for the initial pain that many faced when first moving to a wayland-based DE.

But, of course, that's only obvious in retrospect. I don't think it was at all clear at the time those decisions were being made originally - in other words, it was a mistake rather than malice.

That helps, but you still have to - at a bare minimum - wire up all the functionality. My pet example is trying out a new wlroots compositor and discovering that it has no way to change keyboard layout because it doesn't use that code from the library yet.

> 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?

Which is exactly what they did, as I understand it.

For example Wayland supports far more than just “generic computer screen”. I’ve heard it was designed to be able to handle systems either multiple very different displays. Like maybe a normal screen and an e-paper display.

I remember reading an article that mentioned the mess of screens in current cars would actually fit Wayland well.

Anyway, turns out computers really didn’t do that. We’re all still using one or more monitors that are mostly the same, with a couple of common aspect ratios.

Maybe they’ll be proven right. Maybe it’ll just be some extra stuff in the code forever.

Of course one of the ways you find out that you did something wrong was by doing it. So many comments online seem to just assume that the developers should’ve had the foresight to know everything they did that people don’t like or care about was wrong.

I feel real sympathy for both the developers and people with serious accessibility issues it has been a problem for.

But “beat up on Wayland” is practically a meme. An easy way to score points without looking at the big picture of how we got here.

> For example Wayland supports far more than just “generic computer screen”. I’ve heard it was designed to be able to handle systems either multiple very different displays. Like maybe a normal screen and an e-paper display.

The other common example is that wayland is well-suited to AR/VR 3D compositing, and X... isn't.

> I remember reading an article that mentioned the mess of screens in current cars would actually fit Wayland well.

It had better be well suited to cars, seeing as how it was significantly made for and by car companies. (I hear, at least; I'm told that it was significantly pushed forward precisely by companies developing automotive displays)

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.

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

> 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?

> 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

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

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.

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.

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.

the interface doesn't have to remain a file if that's not suitable.

rendering to a texture (an image) then displaying the image is what window compositors do, and what some games do. plan9 has a file you can write to which just dumps the image to the window/screen. there is no reason this could not work for Plan9. And if you don't want to open a file, write to it, then close it every frame, don't. implement a faster system. writing syscalls for plan9 is not difficult.

The first thing window compositors that care about performace do, is use shared memory, then there are a couple of other tricks that don't fit into everything is a file with a stream of bytes.

Try to imagine how a Vulkan driver could be done on top of a plain file system interface.

Not one that kind of works, one that can match the performance of existing implementations.

> The first thing window compositors that care about performace do, is use shared memory, then there are a couple of other tricks that don't fit into everything is a file with a stream of bytes.

Then don't use "everything is a file" to do it. I already said that. Use shared memory, I don't care. I'm not talking about implementing anything on Plan9, I'm talking about implementing something new on Linux, instead of implementing Wayland.

> one that can match the performance of existing implementations

pretty easy if we're not talking about Linux anymore. FreeBSD can run Linux programs faster than Linux can, and given Plan9's size, if we wanted to do it there, we could perform even better than that.

Sorry, I thought this was supposed to be how much better Plan 9 happens to be in operating system design for graphical interfaces.

Apparently not.

I was talking about taking what Plan9 and Rio had done, with virtual devices for every window and using that kind of a system in Linux as a starting point.

Wayland is certainly smaller than Plan9 but it is not smaller than Rio, and Rio is already designed and working. It might have been a great starting place and a real opportunity to rethink how Linux UIs work on a fundamental level. Putting syscalls in place of some of the files would not have been challenging. Changing how the mouse works would not have been challenging.

And if none of it worked, maybe we’d have a better idea about how to do the next thing. Software needs to change more. As software people, we get to define our own reality, and make reality benefit us rather than get in our way.

The people who wrote Plan9 knew that. Our industry has forgotten that. We keep working on old systems in old ways because that’s what we know. Because it’s easier than thinking about a new paradigm where the old rules don’t apply. I don’t care if it’s harder to do things in a smarter way. I care that things get better, and the only way to make things better is to do things in new ways. But we won’t do it and I don’t understand why we won’t.

Our industry certainly did not forgot that, people putting UNIX on a pedestal did.

It is no accident that many of the most successful graphical technologies that originated in UNIX world, came from UNIX vendors that went beyond being yet another UNIX clone, like NeXT and SGI.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

I don't trust blind appeals to authority.

> But if they just threw everything away again

No one suggested that.

> This all feels like so much Monday morning quarterbacking.

I don't like the system. I don't know what to tell you. I write a lot of X11 software. I don't really want to switch to writing Wayland software. The developers missed this point of view.

The adoption rate is unusual. I'm offering an explanation. I understand people consider it hostile to Wayland but I can't understand why. If you want to solve the fundamental problem, then I have to admit, I'm part of that problem, for the reasons stated. You can ignore them, but you'll have to live with an exceedingly slow adoption, which as the article points out, may be so long that it is replaced nearly the time it is finished. Which would not be ironic considering that's exactly what is happening to X11.

Again, I have nothing against leaving X11, but it should clearly be a hard sell to anyone who likes X11 to go to a platform that is actively hostile to some of it's well regarded core features.

Open source has become fractious. It feels intentional. I say all these things because I honestly wish it was not. If none of this had happened we'd have a genuine alternative to the commercial offerings, and given some of their choices lately, we could have greatly capitalized on that. Que bono?

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.

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

It has been 17 years.

X11 was started in 1984 in MIT. That means, when Wayland was first conceived in 2008, there had been 24 years of X development.

I guess Kristian grossly underestimated the effort required to write a full features Display manager.

FWIW, innmy career the times I've had to perform very impactful changes in software, I always start from the current codebase and remove/simplify stuff.

As an example, once I was in a company that had built a huge Ruby monolith which was not scaling at all. It had APIs for everything, including "high frequency trading" in the same codebase server, under a METAL aws instance (that's how they scaled).

What we did initially was simply copy the repo N times (sign up, compliance, risk, trading, etc), spin up an copies of the same server and use a balancer to route APIs to the different boxes.

Then we started removing unused stuff from each of the repository to specialize them. Fiinally we simplified complexity on each separate codebase.

I would have approached X11 codebase similarly.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Why is it better than native x11?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

From one perspective, the XLibre folks seem to be taking the Perl5 path, and hoping Wayland is Raku.

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.

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.

The Rakudo implementation of the Raku Programming Language uses the MoarVM, which is pretty much a generic VM. All you need to do(TM) is write a grammar and associated actions to build the right bytecode out of the given Python source.

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.

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 ...

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

Well, we also enjoy the issues. When you talk to them they are extremely uncompromising in practice and extremely tribalistic. I think “tribalistic” is maybe a better word for what I feel is an issue. “Not invented here syndrome” reigns supreme in open source and in general it's full of extreme fanboys who aren't willing to admit anything is wrong with “their tribe” and aren't willing to acknowledge any issue whatsoever and defend everything to the death.

The opposite is also just as true though. Many of the users and figureheads will believe everything is wrong with “other tribes” and refuse to acknowledge any of the merits and good ideas.

Proprietary developers have no allegiance but to money and there's something to be said for that. They just work for a company because it pays them and will switch to another company when they get a better contract there and in many ways that makes far less loyal and thus level headed about many things when talking to them.

For some reason this is reminding of the Gimp developers decision to default to saving in Gimp format, even if you opened a JPEG file, and there response to complaints was if you don’t like it, don’t use Gimp. So I don’t.

Yes, that, or the “Use case for <extremely useful and obvious thing>?” memes. Ebassi once got father angry at me after finding out that I did not run Polkit or a system dbus on my system and alledged that I must not know what they do because everyone would want that.

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.

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.

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

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.

Yes, I believe I said exactly that.

No, because you’re concluding from your experience and a single article that Wayland in general is bad.

I am saying that perhaps your experience has nothing to do with Wayland directly, so maybe you should still give Wayland a chance.

You can see many others in this thread contradicting the article’s complaints.

I stated no conclusions. I have not tried COSMIC, and I said that it’s COSMIC and Wayland seem to be problematic for people who have tried Pop_OS 24.04. (The one fact I do know is that Synergy, which I rely on, is still working on Wayland support.)

My only “conclusion” is that Pop_OS 24.04 seems to be incompatible with having a desktop that just works.

Ah, perhaps I misread your conclusion then. I hope COSMIC irons out the issues.

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.")

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

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.

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.

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".

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?

Nope, there has been tons of commits in regard of X11, code refractions, bug fixes and new features, in the past 17 years. Yes most of them blocked for the sake of ideology, not conspiracy, it's more like a religious thinking.

GPL, FSF are religious movements, in a certain way.

That is why they even have manifestos of their mission and such.

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://wayland.app/protocols/

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

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.

And surely that isn't happening either, though? Hyprland, Sway, Niri... I hear people are loving them. Enjoy!

“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.

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.

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.

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 :(

> and having accurate colors in my photo editing apps

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

    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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

You'll get thrown to a tty login prompt.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

macOS says “Hi!” (well, mostly).

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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“

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

https://arcan-fe.com/

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

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).

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.

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.

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...

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.

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

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

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

thats just being overly dramatic.

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

> 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?

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

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

> 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.

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.

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.

That attitude says no one should ever use Linux for anything - is that what the Linux community wants?

I don't know, I personally use Linux for almost everything (it has been my main OS for the last 10+ years), but I do not feel entitled to contributions that other people gift me for free.

Every time something works as intended on the first try without me having to manually configure it first, it always feels like magic.

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

take meds and stop gaslighting people

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Another we'll structured critique of wayland:

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

"OK I was wrong, so I'm going to make another assumption because maybe this time whatever garbage I write might be right"

I wasnt wrong. It took them 17 years to come to an agreement. Just because they “just decided” this year or last year or whatever doesn’t make me wrong. And my point about them not caring about timely decisions was in my original comment so I didn’t write some garbage hopping from one idea to another.

Seek help over your anger issues.

The cadence of decisions being made and problems being solved on Wayland has massively increased over the last 5 years and being ignorant to that and implying that the project is still spinning it's wheels is delusional.

Calling your posts garbage isn't an expression of anger. You should try being a little less sensitive when people mock you for saying dumb shit.

The cadence is still too slow and pathetic but clearly your dip shit brain is involved with Wayland as you’re getting defensive about it. These things should have been established 10 years ago at the very least, as the article says, computers and display servers aren’t a new puzzle to figure out. You should lay yourself down on some railroad tracks so you can remove your dumb shit self from this world.

The irony of telling someone they have anger issues because they were told something they said was garbage, then literally responding later in the thread with a "kill yourself". A reminder, doing this is a criminal offense in many jurisdictions, something you're liable to forget if you have anger issues that prevent you from thinking about what you say.

You're the one who needs help, bucko. That, or the people in your social circle (if there are any).

> 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

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)

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?

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

You are the one not being civil replying to people expressing their legitimate opinion with the text "Fuck you I got mine". I see you've since deleted your reply.

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.

Meh

TL;DR: Generic uninspired anti-Wayland rant.

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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).

> Also there's nothing about Linux or hacking culture that would be necessarily left or right wing

I agree. But if you pretend there is there’s a big audience on one side ready to lap it up and give you ad views.

> and in the west the left is firmly the "establishment"

When I think of the left i think of socialists and anarchists, the establishment you mean are liberals, meaning pro-market/privatization/etc. It always amazes me how the right was able to sell themselves as anti-establishment with the average politically uneducated person. The right also pushes the surveillance state forward, the most substantial surveillance legislation in US history, the Patriot act was bipartisan for instance.

You're being intentionally obtuse, shifting the goal posts.

It doesn't matter what you claim to think the left is, the left absolutely is the establishment. And if you think there's no authoritarian wing of the left you're either blind or lying. Leftist states are absolutely authoritarian, from the UK jailing people for social media posts to China to extreme examples like NK, Cuba and Venezuela.

> right also pushes the surveillance state forward

There's been recent news pieces here about stuff like age verification that is firmly coming from the left.

Both sides can be authoritarian or not. Libertarianism is a thing. And in many places in the world, Eastern Europe for example, anti-authoritarianism definitely has a "right-wing" lean due to a (hated) history of communism.

Linux definitely attracts those who don't like large corporations like Apple or Microsoft, but other than that there's a wide variety of beliefs (or even a lack of beliefs).

> There's been recent news pieces here about stuff like age verification that is firmly coming from the left.

California and New York are blue states that implement age verification, but Texas, Alabama and Utah for example also implemented similar laws, it IS bipartisan.

Its a pretty staggering how the right was able to brand themselves this way, the most ideologically authoritarian belief system and people think its 'muh freedom' they fight for. The most ironic thing to me is that in reality they are all just corrupt liberals paid for by the same oligarchy, the atrophied political discourse in the west exists solidly within the very narrow overton window of liberalism.

> NK, Cuba and Venezuela

Its like you think the democratic party or the UK Labor party is ideologically aligned with China, North Korea, Cuba or Venezuela? and your type gets upset that I call you politically illiterate. You will be very confused to learn the left hates Obama or Clinton as much as you do, just for very different reasons you will never understand. All that nonsense just makes you just a loyal soldier for fascists.

> Its like you think the democratic party or the UK Labor party is ideologically aligned with China, North Korea, Cuba or Venezuela?

Why not show my whole sentence in context? Address what I actually wrote? Instead of just making shit up...

I think this is actually the worst bad-faith comment I've seen on the internet, and that's saying something...

But what is your issue there? You said

> Leftist states are absolutely authoritarian, from the UK jailing people for social media posts to China to extreme examples like NK, Cuba and Venezuela.

So what is the issue you are having with the sentence you quoted? You clearly identified them all as "leftist states". If "Leftist states are absolutely authoritarian", are right-wing states not?

Also I think its an insult to China to compare them in any way to the UK, yet another thing you will never understand.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Don't take it from me, Daniel Stone has a whole talk on the motivation for Wayland: https://youtu.be/RIctzAQOe44

Broadly, the X Server has a bunch of capabilities which are irrelevant. The modern model is really Window <-> Compositor based, and the X Server protocol is just a pointless middle man in that exchange.

Sorry, I know this nonsense from Daniel Stone I am interested why you believe it.

"compatibilities which are irrelevant" do exist, such as old drawing primitives but those are not really an issue. They can be maintained for backwards compatibility and eventually deprecated and removed, but they are not anything which holds back modern clients. The X server protocol is not anymore a "pointless middle man in that exchange" than the Wayland protocol is a "pointless middle man". A protocol is obviously needed so can not be pointless.

I believe it for the reasons explained by Daniel Stone, there is no difference between my opinion and his on the topic of X's inefficiency as an IPC middleman.

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.

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