12 ms·

KiCad and Wayland Support

170 points by xvilka 1y ago

magicalhippo 1y ago
These problems exist because Wayland’s design omits basic functionality that desktop applications for X11, Windows and macOS have relied on for decades—things like being able to position windows or warp the mouse cursor. This functionality was omitted by design, not oversight. We do not investigate or support bug reports related to Wayland-specific issues. For now, if you need to use KiCad on Linux, use X11. Can totally understand their position. I've developed cross-platform applications and it was enough work without the extra headache they describe Wayland brings. I've been thinking about ditching Windows as my primary OS for some years, but Wayland has been really detrimental to the Linux desktop. Over a decade later and it's still not production ready, at least in my tests. Yet X11 is dying it seems, with GNOME and KDE dropping support soon[1][2]. From where I stand, the intentional fragmentation of the ecosystem seems like an especially poor decision. [1]: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/05/gnome-dropping-x11-support-ubuntu-impact https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/05/gnome-dropping-x11-suppo... [2]: https://linuxiac.com/kde-x11-support-to-continue-until-plasma-7/ https://linuxiac.com/kde-x11-support-to-continue-until-plasm...
- toast0 1y ago
  > I've been thinking about ditching Windows as my primary OS for some years, but Wayland has been really detrimental to the Linux desktop. Over a decade later and it's still not production ready, at least in my tests. Yet X11 is dying it seems, with GNOME and KDE dropping support soon[1][2]. IMHO, Wayland will be dead before X11. There's too many things people want to do that Wayland designed out of their system. The future is likely a third system. Probably something designed to service Win32 windowing APIs, because Win32 is basically the stable application toolkit, for better or worse.
  - LorenDB 1y ago
    Not directly Wayland specific, but vaxry (Hyprland guy) is trying to get up a new standards body to replace Freedesktop.org. That could possibly accelerate the coming of a major shift around compositors.
    - inftech 1y ago
      Can you provide the source, please?
      - LorenDB 1y ago
        https://xcancel.com/vaxryy/status/1934931695498559631 https://xcancel.com/vaxryy/status/1934931695498559631 Also see this thread where Vaxry lays out his gripes with Freedesktop.org: https://xcancel.com/vaxryy/status/1934721645115224431 https://xcancel.com/vaxryy/status/1934721645115224431
    - DrillShopper 1y ago
      > vaxry (Hyprland guy) Too bad Hyprland's community sucks
      - ChocolateGod 1y ago
        It's the only wayland display server to have a community.
      - wpm 1y ago
        Then don’t hang out there?
        DrillShopper 1y ago
        I don't? That doesn't change the fact that it's awful.
      - rowanG077 1y ago
        Why does it suck? I run hyprland but I'm not really involves with the community. The times I did have contact they were helpful and super quick with solutions. Like literally the issue is fixed in a day.
        0points 1y ago
        Mainly because vaxry is a toxic political crusader bashing on rust and other topics, which brings in other toxic political crusaders to his community.
  - dsr_ 1y ago
    To draw a possibly inapt analogy: it was clear at a certain point that CVS, the king of versioning systems, was going to be replaced. It also seemed clear that any successful contender would seamlessly import from CVS, but not necessarily from any of the unsuccessful contenders, so it made sense to wait and let everyone else fight it out. (And the winner appeared to be subversion, for a couple of years, and then git came along and won decisively -- with support for importing from subversion.) I have been assuming that Wayland would pull itself together or else someone would build a competitor that does everything X11 can do, but also backwards and in heels and doing a creditable job at running X applications. Somehow neither of these has happened yet. I am fond of the idea of arcan -- arcan-fe.com -- being that winner, but there doesn't seem to be much traction.
    - ur-whale 1y ago
      Very apt analogy. Wayland is indeed the subversion of window systems, can't wait for it to die and be replaced by a window system equivalent of git.
      - ahartmetz 1y ago
        Wayland isn't bad or limited by design. It's just too little. If you just made all the necessary extensions for desktop use and made them mandatory (possibly in a single implementation like Xorg), you'd have a solution.
        ur-whale 1y ago
        > It's just too little. The X11 ecosystem might be very rich, but it's been 17 years since the Wayland project inception. Just saying.
        ahartmetz 1y ago
        Sure it's a problem, but more of a social one. Wayland's creator was weirdly opposed (that was the net effect anyway) to adding features, and the freedestop.org setup is better, but not good.
  - tannhaeuser 1y ago
    > Win32 My thoughts exactly given the progress wine/proton is making; pretty much the only success story for Linux on the mainstream "desktop" (handheld) for over ten years. Though I'm not sure about the underlying infrastructure of SteamOS (Arch-based) and/or Bazzite (fedora-based); could well be Wayland raising its ugly head there, and I just don't see a new generation of developers or sponsors willing to invest into it.
    - pjmlp 1y ago
      Which will only work as Windows XP Win32 is good enough for whatever people are doing, Valve is willing to sponsor the work, and Microsoft doesn't decide to do something that changes that. Like when then went down into netbooks, first blow was the cheap Windows XP licenses, followed by tablets wiping the remaining ones, as OEMs found a better deal selling tablets, keyboards and covers than keeping netbooks arounds, while pivoting such designs into the expensive ultra-light laptops segment. Microsoft only needs to use their weight as one of the biggest publishers in the market, one of the top three console vendors, and biggest gaming OS on desktop systems and game tournaments.
      - tannhaeuser 1y ago
        Yeah you've got a point. What's the lesser evil though when the alternative is overconfident over-motivated junior devs refactoring stuff for the sake of it while breaking apps, not realising their work should be to support the precious few FOSS desktop apps we have that won't come back with no new ones in sight either, leading us into know how monopolisation. That attitude is showing right here with Wayland apologists getting defensive as in nothing wrong with Wayland, it's just a new "platform" lol. Same thing with programming language fetishists which is just a means to an end. The problem is that the next generation of developers want to have their fun and educational experience reinventing stuff, too; and who wants to blame them when that's just what the previous gen did.
        gf000 1y ago
        This is just malicious, ignorant and plain falss towards the Wayland developers (which is by the way a very diverse group), whom are by all chance waay more experienced than you are. Also, fails to take into account that X has plenty of objective design failures, which is to be expected given GPUs didn't exist at the time of its invention.
  - zppln 1y ago
    > out of their system I spent some time last year digging around in Wayland and I've got to admit that I was surprised to learn that there really isn't anything really there. Like, there is no "system". I had read that "it's a protocol" but I hadn't fully internalized it. I'm honestly a bit surprised anyone has adopted it. It almost feels like a scam. :) When I checked you couldn't even get your window decorated without an extension (that Gnome decided to not support so you have to bring your own decorator there?).
    - IshKebab 1y ago
      Yeah I think the fundamental mistake they made was trying to standardise a display protocol without a display server. They changed it so that everyone who previously just wrote a window manager now had to write an entire display server. The open source community just doesn't have that much manpower.
      - jchw 1y ago
        > They changed it so that everyone who previously just wrote a window manager now had to write an entire display server. Not entirely true. Now if you want to share the "display server" bits you can plug in a library like wlroots or Smithay. The real issue, if any, is that most of those bits are not standardized; or at least, only the libwayland part. Of course, that's not even the entire story either. When X11 servers were basically entire operating systems that ran as root, implemented print servers and directly touched /dev/mem, only a lunatic would want to maintain multiple of them... but now on Linux and even some BSDs, you can fall back to GBM/DRM/KMS/libinput/etc. for most of your "hardware" needs, the OS is doing the OS things. Wayland is also just simpler than X11; The current day cleaned-up X.org is still around 5x larger by SLOC and much more complex than wlroots. So how come GNOME and KDE both built their own display server? Well really, they didn't; they took their existing compositors they had for X11 anyway and grew Wayland server limbs out of them. In practice retrofitting Wayland into existing compositors is still hard, but if you already have written a compositor and window manager it's still probably easier than writing a new one from scratch. And for KWin, I believe they're also making use of Qt's Wayland compositor infrastructure, too. Something that took me a long time to understand is that people are just unhappy no matter what. Not that all of their points are invalid, just, it's often not even really about that; the specific points are often just the obvious weak spots, like the classic "Wayland can't screen capture" meme (totally fair point, but persisted so long that some people still don't know it hasn't been an issue for years.) This right here is just another one of those. Notice that when many Linux distros unified towards a singular init system, systemd, people came out with pitchforks. Were they all spouting incorrect nonsense? Well, blah blah UNIX philosophy, but largely no, there were plenty of valid complaints about systemd and what it meant for the Linux ecosystem, but it wasn't really about that. Same with Wayland! Wayland did the exact opposite, and defined a set of protocols anyone could implement, allowing you to choose your compositor. Seeing as people hated what systemd did and wanted to preserve "choice" in the Linux world, you'd expect that people would like what Wayland did, but instead everyone is just pissed about fragmentation now. You can pick apart that argument and try to figure out why it's wrong or and invalid comparison and I'm not going to try to fight anyone on that. You can also say that the argument is made by different people and maybe that's true too (though personally I believe "people who hated systemd" and "people who hate Wayland" forms more of a circle than a venn diagram.) Even if it is, the outcome is the same: you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. What I do know is that desktops on X11 stagnated with the same sorts of problems they always had and with Wayland a lot of that got unblocked. X11 will probably be in the same crappy state it's in today and Wayland will continue iterating and improving over time. I'm sure there will be a lot of pain along the way, and I agree it isn't always pretty, but it is what it is. Software isn't a beauty contest, and there's a good reason why "elegant" stuff rarely wins in the long run.
  - const_cast 1y ago
    I disagree, features are added to Wayland constantly and we're getting more and more highly supported protocols by the day. We can already do 95% of what you can do on X on major implementations - screen sharing, global hotkeys, file pickers, etc. Yes, these things were designed out of Wayland, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't exist. It means the developers decided we probably shouldn't shove them into the display server. So we just put them somewhere else, and that seems to be working fine. The situation can only improve, truly.
    - hakfoo 1y ago
      The whole "95% support on major implementations" thing is still a hurdle. Wayland ends up railroading users into GNOME and KDE, with virtually everything else being in some way second-class. In X11, I can still use all the same core features whether I run a full KDE desktop, Window Maker and a few dockapps, or a stack of xterms that I manually position with --geometry. It does astonish me how Wayland missed obvious killer angles when they decided to reinvent X11. People would have been excited by "Here's a rich native toolkit so all the new software will look and work and theme consistently"-- a well-known and directly user-facing friction point, so how did they miss that?
      - const_cast 1y ago
        GNOME and KDE are the most complete implementations, yes, but that's just a function of developer time. Keep in mind that's better than what we had with X - which had 1 implementation, that couldn't be touched with a ten foot pole because of how fragile said implementation was. > "Here's a rich native toolkit so all the new software will look and work and theme consistently"-- a well-known and directly user-facing friction point, so how did they miss that? The problem is that application toolkits are a step above window managers and compositors. That's really an application developers choice, not a desktop's choice. Developers want to use Electron, and there's nothing we can do about that. We can get consistently themed apps... if everyone hops on Qt. Which they won't because C++ is evil. People want to shove HTML and CSS into their music player and theme it like they do a website, so here we are. This isn't a solved problem on any platform, even really really locked down ones like iOS. Half my iOS apps are web views which don't follow the look and feel of iOS and have inconsistent behavior as compared to the system. And iOS is the best about this honestly - it's, like, way worse on Windows which has half a dozen competing toolkits from Microsoft alone.
  - gf000 1y ago
    There is nothing Wayland "designed out" of their system. It's a fully extendible design which has a very minimal core, instead of bundling a printer and whatnot into the display server. This makes it feasible for car entertainment systems that only want to display bitmaps, but is easily extended to any future use case. There are a bunch of actually standard extensions now, implemented across all desktop Wayland servers, so many of these criticisms are moot.
    - jenadine 1y ago
      Maybe Wayland is extensible, but if the main desktop compositor (i.e. Gnome) don't implement these, it is as much as useless. And it seems that Gnome very much "designed out" some features such as window positioning, window icon, and so on. (We're talking about user's desktop, not custom car entertainment compositor)
    - rcxdude 1y ago
      The main issue is GNOME, really. They are keen to pare down the functionality offered to users and app developers, and so will block standardization of extensions that try to bring wayland up to feature parity, and even if they do get standardised, they will refuse to implement it. Which basically means many developers and users don't want to play ball with wayland at all, and the network effects are fairly strong (devs will not bother with the effort of making something work as best it can on wayland if users still happy to use X11, and users won't switch to wayland if their apps don't work or work less well). (Why does GNOME still matter? They've got the most developer resources of basically any group in the linux desktop space, and a large part of the market share because they're the default on a few of the larger distros)
  - lotharcable 1y ago
    Wayland devs and Xorg X11 devs are by and large the same group of people. So nothing you said really makes a lot of sense. There are lots of display technologies out there for Linux besides X11 and Wayland. There was Mir from Canoncial, which is now dead. The project moved to using Wayland. There was Freon from Google's ChromeOS that was announced in 2015 to replace X11 for ChromeOS, but it is dead. They are moving to using Wayland. There was DirectFB, which has been supplanted by DirectFB2. They have been plugging away doing their own thing since time immemorial. Directfb2 even has Vulkan support now. Good luck getting KiCAD working on that. And there is Surfaceflinger from Android. Which is actively developed and widely used. None of these things would allow to do what people are complaining about what they are not allowed to do in Wayland . > There's too many things people want to do that Wayland designed out of their system. eye rolls
  - happymellon 1y ago
    Its similar to the CVS analogy given below, however I would liken it to Pulse Audio. We know we have needed to "fix" the audio subsystems for a while, and Pulse fixed a lot of problems but by the time it came along what were problems had moved on. Pulse ended up with other issues, and not actually doing everything we actually needed so it was eventually replaced with Pipewire. I'm not sure if Systemd falls enough into the same pattern, but I'm sure something better will emerge in the next few years.
    - s1gsegv 1y ago
      The more I dig into systemd the more I like how it works. Are there still problems popping up with systemd? Anecdotally, I had a couple user-facing problems that were caused by PulseAudio but never systemd actually being broken.
      - happymellon 1y ago
        No I've never had any issues with it. It is so much faster and better for me and my usecases that I don't grasp any of the arguments. But I also never had any issues with Pulse so I don't ever want to discount other peoples experiences.
    - ahartmetz 1y ago
      Systemd seems fine as an init system at this point, most of its gratuitous replacements for other system services are still garbage.
  - michaelmrose 1y ago
    It won't be win32 because it just isn't on Linux and there is no reason for it to be. Wheres game compatibility is great with proton in between apps are not with installation sucking, mostly replicating better native apps, and updated versions which are common and continuous in apps as it isn't in games usually leading to breakage.
  - phendrenad2 1y ago
    > The future is likely a third system I don't know about that. I've always been skeptical of the "X11 can't be fixed" claims, nobody has ever been able to explain that one technically, it's always "I read it somewhere" or "Trust me bro the code is bad (and I read that somewhere)". With XLibre, maybe there's life left in X11.
- superkuh 1y ago
  It's a poor decision. Unless you're IBM/Red Hat/GNOME. Then it's clearly the correct decision for increasing profit. Since GNOME desktop (and mutter) is the only wayland desktop of the dozen incompatible implementations that supports accessibility (they invented two new protocols for it; disregarding existing solutions) it's basically a take-over of the entire linux desktop business space. No other wayland DE is ADA compliant and the Gtk treadmill will make X11 and it's very solid accesibility less likely to work with any application. Sort of a combination gish gallop and CADT so that they're the only linux desktop left that fits business use cases.
  - senkora 1y ago
    I had to look up some terms, so for anyone else: Gish gallop = “a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by presenting an excessive number of arguments, without regard for their accuracy or strength, with a rapidity that makes it impossible for the opponent to address them in the time available.”, coined about a particular creationist’s debate strategy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop CADT = “Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers”, describing a situation where software is re-written so often that filing bugs against it is useless, coined by jwz here about GNOME’s development approach: https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
- jhoechtl 1y ago
  We have to investigate if Windows and or Apple had their fingers init. At hindsight it seems such a stupid decision to fragment a small comminity by designing such a small protocol instead of revamping the existing X protocol to sane security stamdards
  - justinrubek 1y ago
    People were and are free to do so. They've chosen not to, though, so far.
  - ezst 1y ago
    X11 was an unmaintainable pile of legacy mess, Wayland was its exhausted developers starting from a blank slate with tons of lessons learned the hard way. It's not a cabal or a conspiracy, just a sensible evolution.
    - immibis 1y ago
      The insane part is their explicit rejection of a bunch of things people actually want - like window coordinates and icons. Xorg has security module hooks btw
      - ezst 1y ago
        I don't have a horse in this race, but I also can't blame the Wayland designers for not rushing to implement something like that. Encouraging application developers to manipulate windows themselves essentially means turning them into window-manager developers, but with a hand tied in their back and probably little interest in doing it thoroughly. I think the practical results speak for themselves: I cannot count a single application that does it extensively and that isn't broken in the typical multi-monitor cases you find in the wild.
        immibis 1y ago
        Well, in Wayland, the same apps just don't work at all. The developer basically has to rewrite them and turn them into different apps to make them work in Wayland. Is that good or bad? Maybe if you hate a certain type of app it's good, but this is the open source world and if something doesn't hurt anyone then you should probably be allowed to do it. It's not the display server's job to rule by fiat. It might be the window manager's job, but only if the application-provided coordinates don't work, or you're using something strict like a tiling WM.
- MegaDeKay 1y ago
  Wayland messes up Visual Pinball as well [0]. VP depends on being able to place the main playfield window, the backglass window, and the Dot Matrix Display window in specific locations on specific monitors mounted in the cabinet. [0] https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball
  - 0points 1y ago
    I'd place those windows exactly where I want with a sway config in about 2 minutes effort. Not a wayland issue.
    - delfinom 1y ago
      The fact you have to edit a config file means it's missing the boat by mile. A user should not have to learn config file formats in a graphical GUI interface.
      - 0points 1y ago
        > The fact you have to edit a config file means it's missing the boat by mile. No. That's how i3 and sway works, on purpose, by design. I use sway, hence I claim to know how to do it in less than 2 minutes. i3 precedes wayland, so again, not a wayland issue. > A user should not have to learn config file formats in a graphical GUI interface. If <app> requires user to <insert skill>, then user will need to <insert skill> in order to use <app>. Well said, anon!
        MegaDeKay 1y ago
        <app> should not require user to <insert skill>. <app> should be permitted to do reasonable things without requiring user to come up with workarounds for missing functionality.
        0points 1y ago
        If that's your pet peeve, consider using another <app> with said guard rails and fluff. Meanwhile, maybe stfu with your opinions about my work flow.
- jeroenhd 1y ago
  I've been using Wayland for years and most applications will just work, either under XWayland or natively. The only problematic ones are the ones with incomplete Wayland implementations and the ones relying on the complete lack of security design on systems like X11 of Win32. The biggest blocker for me has always been Nvidia, and that problem was solved years ago. Meanwhile, whenever I drop back to X11, I'm reminded that things like multi-touch gestures are plainly broken on X11 mode in ever DE I've tried. To be honest, I've never seen a Linux desktop that most people would call "production ready". Even in the best days, X11 and Wayland have glitches, hardware issues, and stability problems that no other platform seems to suffer from. It took until Pipewire for audio to actually work well out of the box. As for X11, KDE and probably others will run X11 for years to come, mostly because companies like Canonical and Red Hat ship LTS versions. Whether applications will keep supporting old configurations is another question (what software still runs on Ubuntu 16.04? I wouldn't know and I bet neither do most third party vendors), but the protocol itself isn't dying any time soon. It's not allowed to by corporate contracts. What is dying, is corporate investment into X.org and X11 targets for some desktop environments. Developers and companies that favor X11 can come together and fork those projects, or join the dev team, to ensure their desktops work like they used to. Just because IBM doesn't want to pay developers to maintain such configurations doesn't mean they suddenly stop working, just that someone else will need to apply bugfixes from then on out. The only serious attempt I've seen from people who want to keep X11 alive was that fork from that antivax anti-DEI weirdo.
  - ciupicri 1y ago
    > xorg-x11-server is removed from RHEL 10 > The X.Org server, an implementation of the X Window System, was previously deprecated and is removed from RHEL 10. Note that the X11 protocol is not removed, which means that most applications will remain compatible through the Xwayland compositor. For more information, see Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 plans for Wayland and Xorg server (Red Hat Blog). (https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_linux/10/html/10.0_release_notes/removed-features#removed-features-graphics-infrastructures https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_...)
  - mid-kid 1y ago
    > things like multi-touch gestures are plainly broken on X11 mode in ever DE I've tried The main reason for this is that neither major DE has implemented multi touch gestures on X11. Not that they can't be. There's several tools you can use for things like touchpad gestures on X11 and they work well, but aren't as nice as native integration into a DE.
- msgodel 1y ago
  Just install mate or similar and ignore the drama.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  This kind of stuff is why I evolved from an FOSS zealot that back in the early Linux adoptions days would have email signatures with M$ stuff on it, most likely still in some Usenet archives, back to Windows land as main desktop on Windows 7. UNIX was designed as CLI OS, the only companies that did great things in terms of desktop experience were Sun, SGI, and NeXT, so that leaves macOS when I feel like using a UNIX workstation, instead of running a GNU/Linux VM. Even X11 was the outcome of UNIX wars, were X itself was made open, but CDE systems not, Keith Packard has a few talks on the matter, as he was there as it happened.
- dadoum 1y ago
  > I've developed cross-platform applications and it was enough work without the extra headache they describe Wayland brings. Have you tried wayland-client? When I made my custom application framework, since I had no previous experience I decided to start with wayland-client library, and then figure out what to use for X11. My experience with it is that it is painfully sensible. Things fail when misused, which happens a lot (probably also because only few people actually wrote code with it so I was on my own to understand how to do stuff), but at the end they were fixable, and the only gripes I had were the protocols that GNOME didn't implement at the time. But I guess, if they are not implementing it right now, it means that they think it's okay if it does not work. (and actually I could also defend a lot of missing things in Wayland protocols, like the fact you can't position windows yourself) On the other side, X11 just looks like a mess. When you start it feels like you have 2 options, XCB and Xlib. Old posts say that XCB is the modern one, but nobody uses XCB so in fact you may encounter bugs. Error handling is really poor, most of the errors are small messages written in stdout. You ask for things called "Atoms", and you send them/attach them to the X window. No feedback on whether it works or not, they mostly have weird names with prefixes like _NET_WM or _MOTIF. If you want to make an OpenGL window, for a long time it was not possible if you used XCB because GLX requires you to give Xlib handles, then came EGL-XCB which was supported by almost no driver because for some reason it seems that you need driver support for each X library you may want to use. When you start you're reminded of a slew of somewhat niche concepts today, like Visuals, Seat, Back pixel, Front pixel, which you are probably not expected to use today (in detail, I know, visuals may be useful in some small use cases, I don't know why the app is in charge of selecting the seat though, and pixel stuff is probably a dead thing). At the end the only thing that makes X11 bearable in my opinion is the fact that people wrote a lot of code with it so you can search on the Internet for the most part and find a snippet of code that should work for your use case.
  - immibis 1y ago
    To get past this, you have to learn that X11 is a protocol, not a library, and learn the protocol and then use the library to send protocol messages, instead of learning the library, which is how it's unfortunately taught and also how Xlib was unfortunately conceived of being used. Xlib was designed so you'd use it similarly to say Win32; that idea was a colossal failure. xcb is more closely aligned with the idea that it just helps you format network packets.
- bjoli 1y ago
  I am holding on to xorg until i can shade Windows and use something with half the power of xinput to configure my trackball. Oh, and I also want to be able to have many different keyboard layouts for sddm. Most themes fail to display a layout selection menu that isn't blank for me. Otherwise I don't really mind wayland.
Vilian 1y ago
Xwayland isn't going to die in 10 years, it's fine to keep using that, thise bugs happens with KiCad running as Wayland or in xwayland?
- dvdkon 1y ago
  KiCad seems to work fine under XWayland in my experience, with some severe bugs under Wayland (and not just window management & cursor warping-related, though that's a problem too).
duped 1y ago
Can anyone explain succinctly why basic window management and pointer warping is absent on Wayland, what it would take to fix, and how to get involved fixing it? I've been hearing about these problems for years and if all that's missing is someone to own up to fixing it, it's worth finding out. edit: looks like pointer warping was added to the protocol last week: https://lore.freedesktop.org/wayland-devel/aEw0AP7h6T8l11ug@gmail.com/T/#u https://lore.freedesktop.org/wayland-devel/aEw0AP7h6T8l11ug@...
- arghwhat 1y ago
  The historic reason is that all inputs and window manager state outside your very own window is kept secret, and "stealing" input strictly disallowed. The idea is to avoid clickjacking, eavesdropping, phishing-esque windows, you name it, all which only works when an application has freedom to find other windows, place itself and steal focus and input. Even just stealing a cursor at a bad time might lead an in-progress password input to end up somewhere unintended. It was a good intention, and it's hard to figure out where to draw the line between convenience and capability and secure design. It's absolutely impossible to ask, as everyone will demand everything, claiming even the smallest feature is the foundation of all modern computing. Some of these things are now coming in ways that still aim to keep explicit behavior and decent control, but enable the needed usecases. Cursor warp, session restoration, picture-in-picture, etc.
  - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
    The balance doesn’t necessarily require that much thought or deliberation. It could be as simple as putting things like cursor control behind a permission dialog, with it being mandatory to provide a reason why the capability is needed to present in the dialog to help users make an informed decision.
    - jeroenhd 1y ago
      Web browsers tried that. Then spam sites started saying "press allow to prove you're not a robot". Android showed a whole list of permissions for years whenever you installed an app. Nobody ever read them, phones were full of malware, and Google started nuking APIs and replacing pre-install permission prompts with real-time permission prompts. If letting the application ask nicely is a good enough security measure, then you never needed to ask in the first place. When a user wants to use an application (or, what they think an application does), and the application just says "for the app to work" when the OS queries it for a reason why it needs permissions, the user is going to click permit every time. From a practical security standpoint, the application could just as easily say "I'm going to take control of your mouse OK/cancel". Which is what happens on X11, except applications just take control of your mouse whether you want to or not.
workethics 1y ago
This reminds me that I was recently using tracy to profile a program and found their own list of valid grievances, altough it's a bit more GNOME inflicted: https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy/issues/505#issuecomment-1365429443 https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy/issues/505#issuecomment-136...
- smj-edison 1y ago
  It think this one is interesting since it highlights that Wayland is not meant to be an exclusively window manager API. It includes things like kiosks, car screens, etc, where the concept of a window doesn't even exist. EDIT: on further thought though, it's really odd that they still haven't added in optional APIs for a lot of basic window operations...
  - simcop2387 1y ago
    > EDIT: on further thought though, it's really odd that they still haven't added in optional APIs for a lot of basic window operations... That's because like you mention, wayland doesn't look at things as "windows" like X11 used to. It's got surfaces and compositors so it's a really rather different design than the previous systems which is why there's been such an issue with transitioning some kinds of applications and why it's been so hard to get some of the window related protocols to be agreed upon. There's been a decent number of attempts at the positioning protocols that have been kiboshed because there were effective security issues because the protocol would imply that a client could take over the screen from the intended application that the user was using, if the compositor fully follows the protocol or worked the same way that X11 did. Supporting all the different use-cases like this has definitely made progress slower and harder to keep up but personally I think it's going to end up with a more comprehensive and future proofed system once it is finally getting those last couple of things that take it from an 85% solution to a 99% solution.
- bjoli 1y ago
  I have a feeling gnome has struggled more with wayland than kde. For a while i could not drag and drop across screens or to applications i switched to with alt+tab. I dont know if those are fixed. One that isn't fixed that I had happen just yesterday: menus locking focus to one app. If I open the file transfer popup in nautilus I have to first close by clicking somewhere else in nautilus, or else I can't click anywhere. I don't think I ever had that issue under x. The only bugs I have seen in KDE are in sddm, but I managed to find a theme where they don't exhibit.
arghwhat 1y ago
A significant portion of the problems listed, e.g. performance, "unpredictable focus", glitches, freezes, etc., will generally be purely KiCad bugs. Others are feature requests that there were recently released protocols for e.g. window restoration and cursor warping, but with adoption needing to pick up. Nothing negative towards KiCad team as they and the community sort things out, but it's easy for others to read this and conflate "problems with application's Wayland support" as "problems with Wayland". It's a new platform for them, and support for a new platform will always have some growing pains. Xwayland is also under continued development, and these distribution are not dropping X11 support through Xwayland, just native X11 sessions.
- superkuh 1y ago
  >it's easy for others to read this and conflate "problems with application's Wayland support" as "problems with Wayland". Yes, it's easy because that's explicitly what they say. >The following problems are known issues in Wayland protocols or their implementation in desktop compositors, window managers or other layers in the display stack that are beyond our ability to resolve: So we have two opposite claims. One from the developers of kicad in this write-up with examples and one from you above.
  - arghwhat 1y ago
    > So we have two opposite claims. One from the developers of kicad in this write-up with examples and one from you above. You have the organizations maintaining entire Linux distributions with countless applications they support giving their vote of confidence based on their experiences. You have the organizations backing and developing Wayland. You have all the developers of Xorg ditching it and working on Wayland instead (the person vocally claiming to pick up the slack recently had almost all their work reverted when it was found to have been completely broken). That's a lot of people voting with their time (and in some cases, money) on Wayland and its capabilities. So no it's not my claim that Wayland works vs. KiCad devs, it's the claim of everyone that actually have skin in the display server game. (They will also agree that some features are missing, but things like focus, graphical glitches and performance are not Wayland issues, just application bugs.)
DominoTree 1y ago
I've been using KiCad on Wayland for years and didn't even know I was missing out
znpy 1y ago
And again, in the year of the lord 2025, the year of linux on the desktop is next year.
poulpy123 1y ago
I don't have the knowledge to judge these specific issues, but the transition from X11 to Wayland was the worse I've ever seen. Worse than the python 2 to 3 debacle, and it seems even worse than the Perl 5 to 6 transition (that was resolved by not doing the transition)
- mariusor 1y ago
  What am I missing? For 99.9% of existing Xorg applications the transition should have been transparent due to the existence of XWayland. In which way was this transition the worst for you?
  - DrillShopper 1y ago
    The article talks about the many open issues with Wayland that do not exist in X, if you want some examples.
    - mariusor 1y ago
      Which seem to be self inflicted, if I'm not mistaken.
    - const_cast 1y ago
      Sure, which are completely solved by Xwayland. If your app doesn't work under Wayland, then fine. Lots of apps don't because they're old and volatile to develop. But X11 apps work completely seamlessly under Wayland. Every major desktop right now is running many X11 apps under Wayland.
      - el_memorioso 1y ago
        I am a Kicad user, not just a random speculator. The problems are not solved by XWayland. For example, Kicad uses different windows to represent different views of the circuit and circuit board and warps the cursor according to the view you are looking at. XWayland doesn't solve this, because it only allows warping within a single window. I know there is new warping code coming out, but I don't know if it will ever get into the LTS OS we use at my work.
IshKebab 1y ago
> Cursor/pointer warping: Essential for many CAD operations Err no. I don't know why EDA guys have this weird idea that cursor warping is totally normal. DesignSpark PCB does this too - when you zoom it warps the cursor! Wtf is that? Kicad has pretty awful UX so I guess this crazy view isn't that surprising. > things like being able to position windows or warp the mouse cursor. This functionality was omitted by design, not oversight. Yeah again... I'll give you window positioning, but an app should never warp my cursor. It's mine. Get your stupid hands off it.
- phkahler 1y ago
  IMHO window positioning is the job of the DE, which will also mean a unified behavior for all apps. Unfortunately I've been waiting years for gnome to implement this.
- jeroenhd 1y ago
  It's a UI pattern that I thought died in the 90s. When it works well, you don't notice the pattern is even there. When it doesn't, it looks janky as hell. There are shortcomings to the current/recent state of Wayland (KDE hasn't had support for storing window positions until Plasma 6.4! HDR and VRR are missing from many compositors (and X11 DEs to be fair)! Fractional scaling doesn't even work right in many Linux applications!) but when it comes to design decisions, I'm mostly on Wayland's side.
  - IshKebab 1y ago
    It did die in the 90s! Apparently for everyone except Kicad (and DesignSpark PCB). I bet Eagle does it too; that's even more of a UX disaster than Kicad.
    - indrora 1y ago
      Most of the professional tier CAD suites do it as well. It's one of the Quirks^tm of that field. Newcomers to the field go "WTF??" but the old hats go "yeah and you'll learn to appreciate it." And you do learn to appreciate it. the cursor warping in KiCad is absolutely essential to high level operation because it means you don't think where you're zooomed to now, you point, you zoom, you've zoomed. Once you get used to some of the keyboard shortcuts to fly around the board, you get used to focusing on the center of the display rather than having to eye around looking for the component, which might be buried in a few layers of traces and vias on-screen.
amelius 1y ago
I installed kicad on an ubuntu system using flatpak (because snap was a nightmare). But now I'm running into a strange issue with X11 cookies. Anyone who's seen the same? (Using X11 of course)
walterbell 1y ago
June 2025, "The X.Org Server just got forked (announcing XLibre)", 190 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44199502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44199502
pomerange 1y ago
Distros are not dropping Xwayland, just say "run our app trough xwayland". Recommending X11 distros or compositors is not good advice. X11 on its own is dead, and things like KDE do very little development on their X11 version. Some if not most of these bugs are 100% application bugs, very few actually used wayland compositors have performance bugs for example (but your app running in wayland native might). With what a dumpster fire X11 has been lately its a bit weird to bet on it for your application.
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
  > Distros are not dropping Xwayland, just say "run our app trough xwayland". Yes, just saying "Wayland is only supported through XWayland" is usually a really easy solution that does in fact just work. > X11 on its own is dead, and things like KDE do very little development on their X11 version. Eeeeh... I think calling X "dead" is hyperbolic. It is less actively developed, and GNOME and KDE are migrating away from it. But it still works approximately as well as it ever has, and pretty much anything except GNOME and KDE is quite likely to continue working for the foreseeable future. - Sent from my laptop running Xorg
  - const_cast 1y ago
    X11 works as well as it ever did, but it's so stagnated that that doesn't mean a whole lot. I run new hardware, and I tried X. It's bad. HDR? No. Fractional scaling? Looks awful. Splitting, tearing, and artifacts? Believe it or not, still a problem on X. There's a film of jankiness that permeates X that I just don't get on Wayland. Animations don't drop frames. Things happen when they should. My text actually looks crisp. On Linux!
    - yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
      I dunno, I'd say it goes both ways. I'm still on X because last time I tried Wayland still had weird janky corners that I kept hitting. Granted, yes, X also has problems, so I'm stuck in an awkward intermediate spot.
shmerl 1y ago
> warp the mouse cursor Wasn't cursor warping protocol just merged? https://wayland.app/protocols/pointer-warp-v1 https://wayland.app/protocols/pointer-warp-v1
jchw 1y ago
Many of these limitations are in fact not Wayland issues and just limitations in KiCad (and probably more generally, wxWidgets) under native Wayland. For example, you can definitely do draggable widgets that dock and undock using xdg-toplevel-drag. What's changing with Wayland is that Wayland is no longer giving the developers the tools to implement features like session restore and docking/undocking entirely on their own, but instead forcing them to go through specific protocols. This is a point of contention that involves one's own ideals and unlikely to be resolved any time soon, but either way, this post is grossly misrepresenting the state of Wayland in general because of KiCad issues, that they are admitting they have no interest in triaging or working on anyways. That's fine, but it's still wrong. Furthermore, XWayland is not going away. If you are unwilling to support native Wayland, the way to go is somehow disable native Wayland, like by unsetting WAYLAND_DISPLAY early on in the code before initializing the toolkit or something. Krita does this and it works just fine, although it's not ideal since features like HDR or display scaling will suffer. (But does that even matter for KiCad?) Tl;dr: reads more like developers not happy about the direction of Wayland than an actual reasoned position. Seems confused about the implications of the Wayland session. I wouldn't worry about this. You're still going to prefer the Wayland session sooner rather than later.
reisse 1y ago
I have a harsh opinion - the real problem with Wayland is that its authors and/or maintainers are *nix geeks, who never used anything more complex than X11 on an IBM Thinkpad with a maybe second 4:3 monitor attached. And they daily drive a few dozen terminal windows, Firefox and maybe Thunderbird. I really have no other plausible explanation how they could miss so many potential usecases while rebuilding the display management ground-up: screen sharing, fractional scaling, different scaling factor for different screens, color profiles, HDR, toolbars and docking, window positions, and whatever else. In the Wayland GitLab, there are comments in the spirit of "who would ever want to use this?" for a feature requests of something present in literally any sane WM...
- ur-whale 1y ago
  > he real problem with Wayland is that its authors and/or maintainers are *nix geeks They also, in typical Unix geek style, don't give two fucks about what the market wants / needs.
- Paianni 1y ago
  At least some of them were people trying to hack X.Org to deliver an 'iPhone-like' experience on Nokia Maemo/MeeGo devices. The Jolla phone ended up being the first consumer device to ship with Wayland afaik.
- dvdkon 1y ago
  > I really have no other plausible explanation... I have a better one: They designed for embedded devices first, desktops second or not at all. The first users of Wayland were things like vehicle infotainment systems, which operate under a limited mobile-like "one app at a time" system. Back then Ubuntu Touch (using Canonical's Mir) also looked like a prospective usecase for a new display system. As far as I remember, the Wayland devs' approach to desktop support was "we made the basic protocol, now you desktop people either integrate functionality into the compositor (what GNOME did) or make your own extensions (what wlroots, KDE did), we don't care". With that kind of "leadership", no wonder it took years to reach even basic consensus.
  - 1y ago
ur-whale 1y ago
Over the many years Wayland has been promising to be a better toaster, I have tried to use it. Every single time, I had to go back to X11 because shit simply don't work. At this point, I am dead convinced that Wayland is simply broken by design. As a matter of fact, they justify their existence by systematically pointing out how broken the architecture of X11 is and how a "modern" replacement is severely needed. True, X11's architecture is indeed bad and creates lots of problems. However, unlike Wayland, it DOES WORK. Also, and very unfortunately for Wayland, the team working on it seem oblivious to the fact that trying to replace a badly designed system does not automatically make the replacement any better. At this point, I would call Wayland a complete failure. Worse, they've been at it for over 15 years and it is still fundamentally unusable. The fact that Ubuntu is planning to deprecate X11 is, at this point in time, a catastrophe as far as I'm concerned.
- skykooler 1y ago
  The only reason I use Wayland is display scaling - with a high DPI screen, many apps are blurry or inconsistently scaled under X11. Given the parade of other issues Wayland brings, I wish the development effort were instead spent on improving highDPI support in X11.
  - Ballas 1y ago
    In xfce, setting DPI in Appearance works perfectly (in my experience). Just don't try to scale with display settings...
  - igor47 1y ago
    O man I recently tried to use fractional scaling on Wayland, and it went very poorly. Electron apps like slack or signal do not support it, and flameshot also works very poorly. But I guess at least fractional scaling is to an option... (Which I had to enable in some secret setting somewhere)
LocalH 1y ago
Wayland was designed by people who didn't quite grok the X way and decided to forge a different path. That's fine, but people also shouldn't expect Wayland to be a drop-in replacement for X in all cases. Thus a mature X-based project like KiCad is doing the right thing by focusing their efforts. If you need KiCad? You need X. If not? Run free with Wayland.
- lotharcable 1y ago
  That is a odd statement since the people that designed Wayland are, by and large, the same people that maintained Xorg. In fact the Wayland devs are the primary group of people maintaining what is left of X11. The reality is that a lot of X11 design is simply a bad idea. Which is what one would naturally expect given its pioneering nature. By the mid 1990s it was already obsolete and didn't match up with how hardware worked nor how people were using computers. What has allowed it to persist to this day in Linux is more along the lines of: * we just that we had a really good open source implementation with a very dedicated developer base and some commercial support from companies like Redhat. * compatibility with X Servers other then XFree86/Xorg was no longer relevant since the rest of the world has long abandoned X11. So aside from a few nitch cases were people wanted X11 apps on their Windows desktops using properietary X Servers it no longer really mattered. * X11 allowed extensions (most of which didn't work with network transparency, btw) * Widget authors, mostly QT and GTK, went through great efforts to avoid using X11 and working around limitations. KiCAD is just a unfortunate case. They use a kinda odd toolkit, wxWidgets, and happen to depend on a lot of X11 specific behavior for some of their application's features. So it is less of a situation of Wayland devs not understanding X (they probably are some of the few people that actually understand it deeply). Wayland actually has really good X11 comptatibility through XWayland and for most applications it doesn't cause issues. But for KiCAD it does. And they are just being honest about it. Accomidations are being made for KiCAD type behavior and probably KiCAD will update and change things to meet them somewhere in the middle and in not too long it'll become a forgotten issue.
  - nullc 1y ago
    > That is a odd statement since the people that designed Wayland are, by and large, the same people that maintained Xorg. Which prominent wayland developers were maintainers of Xorg in 2004?
dmitrygr 1y ago
"We do not investigate or support bug reports related to Wayland-specific issues" Well put, guys! This is the way. It wasn't broken, nobody needed to "fix it". Now they "fixed it" & it IS broken, it is not your job to pick up the pieces! I tip my hat to you for having the balls to just plainly state so.
imtringued 1y ago
I have literally never had any issues with Wayland beyond the absence of screen sharing in the early days and I've been using it since 2016. I've also felt no need to use KiCAD whatsoever. There are better open source EDA tools out there.

170 points by xvilka 1y ago

These problems exist because Wayland’s design omits basic functionality that desktop applications for X11, Windows and macOS have relied on for decades—things like being able to position windows or warp the mouse cursor. This functionality was omitted by design, not oversight. We do not investigate or support bug reports related to Wayland-specific issues. For now, if you need to use KiCad on Linux, use X11. Can totally understand their position. I've developed cross-platform applications and it was enough work without the extra headache they describe Wayland brings. I've been thinking about ditching Windows as my primary OS for some years, but Wayland has been really detrimental to the Linux desktop. Over a decade later and it's still not production ready, at least in my tests. Yet X11 is dying it seems, with GNOME and KDE dropping support soon[1][2]. From where I stand, the intentional fragmentation of the ecosystem seems like an especially poor decision. [1]: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/05/gnome-dropping-x11-support-ubuntu-impact https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/05/gnome-dropping-x11-suppo... [2]: https://linuxiac.com/kde-x11-support-to-continue-until-plasma-7/ https://linuxiac.com/kde-x11-support-to-continue-until-plasm...

toast0 1y ago
> I've been thinking about ditching Windows as my primary OS for some years, but Wayland has been really detrimental to the Linux desktop. Over a decade later and it's still not production ready, at least in my tests. Yet X11 is dying it seems, with GNOME and KDE dropping support soon[1][2]. IMHO, Wayland will be dead before X11. There's too many things people want to do that Wayland designed out of their system. The future is likely a third system. Probably something designed to service Win32 windowing APIs, because Win32 is basically the stable application toolkit, for better or worse.
- LorenDB 1y ago
  Not directly Wayland specific, but vaxry (Hyprland guy) is trying to get up a new standards body to replace Freedesktop.org. That could possibly accelerate the coming of a major shift around compositors.
  - inftech 1y ago
    Can you provide the source, please?
    - LorenDB 1y ago
      https://xcancel.com/vaxryy/status/1934931695498559631 https://xcancel.com/vaxryy/status/1934931695498559631 Also see this thread where Vaxry lays out his gripes with Freedesktop.org: https://xcancel.com/vaxryy/status/1934721645115224431 https://xcancel.com/vaxryy/status/1934721645115224431
  - DrillShopper 1y ago
    > vaxry (Hyprland guy) Too bad Hyprland's community sucks
    - ChocolateGod 1y ago
      It's the only wayland display server to have a community.
    - wpm 1y ago
      Then don’t hang out there?
      - DrillShopper 1y ago
        I don't? That doesn't change the fact that it's awful.
    - rowanG077 1y ago
      Why does it suck? I run hyprland but I'm not really involves with the community. The times I did have contact they were helpful and super quick with solutions. Like literally the issue is fixed in a day.
      - 0points 1y ago
        Mainly because vaxry is a toxic political crusader bashing on rust and other topics, which brings in other toxic political crusaders to his community.
- dsr_ 1y ago
  To draw a possibly inapt analogy: it was clear at a certain point that CVS, the king of versioning systems, was going to be replaced. It also seemed clear that any successful contender would seamlessly import from CVS, but not necessarily from any of the unsuccessful contenders, so it made sense to wait and let everyone else fight it out. (And the winner appeared to be subversion, for a couple of years, and then git came along and won decisively -- with support for importing from subversion.) I have been assuming that Wayland would pull itself together or else someone would build a competitor that does everything X11 can do, but also backwards and in heels and doing a creditable job at running X applications. Somehow neither of these has happened yet. I am fond of the idea of arcan -- arcan-fe.com -- being that winner, but there doesn't seem to be much traction.
  - ur-whale 1y ago
    Very apt analogy. Wayland is indeed the subversion of window systems, can't wait for it to die and be replaced by a window system equivalent of git.
    - ahartmetz 1y ago
      Wayland isn't bad or limited by design. It's just too little. If you just made all the necessary extensions for desktop use and made them mandatory (possibly in a single implementation like Xorg), you'd have a solution.
      - ur-whale 1y ago
        > It's just too little. The X11 ecosystem might be very rich, but it's been 17 years since the Wayland project inception. Just saying.
        ahartmetz 1y ago
        Sure it's a problem, but more of a social one. Wayland's creator was weirdly opposed (that was the net effect anyway) to adding features, and the freedestop.org setup is better, but not good.
- tannhaeuser 1y ago
  > Win32 My thoughts exactly given the progress wine/proton is making; pretty much the only success story for Linux on the mainstream "desktop" (handheld) for over ten years. Though I'm not sure about the underlying infrastructure of SteamOS (Arch-based) and/or Bazzite (fedora-based); could well be Wayland raising its ugly head there, and I just don't see a new generation of developers or sponsors willing to invest into it.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Which will only work as Windows XP Win32 is good enough for whatever people are doing, Valve is willing to sponsor the work, and Microsoft doesn't decide to do something that changes that. Like when then went down into netbooks, first blow was the cheap Windows XP licenses, followed by tablets wiping the remaining ones, as OEMs found a better deal selling tablets, keyboards and covers than keeping netbooks arounds, while pivoting such designs into the expensive ultra-light laptops segment. Microsoft only needs to use their weight as one of the biggest publishers in the market, one of the top three console vendors, and biggest gaming OS on desktop systems and game tournaments.
    - tannhaeuser 1y ago
      Yeah you've got a point. What's the lesser evil though when the alternative is overconfident over-motivated junior devs refactoring stuff for the sake of it while breaking apps, not realising their work should be to support the precious few FOSS desktop apps we have that won't come back with no new ones in sight either, leading us into know how monopolisation. That attitude is showing right here with Wayland apologists getting defensive as in nothing wrong with Wayland, it's just a new "platform" lol. Same thing with programming language fetishists which is just a means to an end. The problem is that the next generation of developers want to have their fun and educational experience reinventing stuff, too; and who wants to blame them when that's just what the previous gen did.
      - gf000 1y ago
        This is just malicious, ignorant and plain falss towards the Wayland developers (which is by the way a very diverse group), whom are by all chance waay more experienced than you are. Also, fails to take into account that X has plenty of objective design failures, which is to be expected given GPUs didn't exist at the time of its invention.
- zppln 1y ago
  > out of their system I spent some time last year digging around in Wayland and I've got to admit that I was surprised to learn that there really isn't anything really there. Like, there is no "system". I had read that "it's a protocol" but I hadn't fully internalized it. I'm honestly a bit surprised anyone has adopted it. It almost feels like a scam. :) When I checked you couldn't even get your window decorated without an extension (that Gnome decided to not support so you have to bring your own decorator there?).
  - IshKebab 1y ago
    Yeah I think the fundamental mistake they made was trying to standardise a display protocol without a display server. They changed it so that everyone who previously just wrote a window manager now had to write an entire display server. The open source community just doesn't have that much manpower.
    - jchw 1y ago
      > They changed it so that everyone who previously just wrote a window manager now had to write an entire display server. Not entirely true. Now if you want to share the "display server" bits you can plug in a library like wlroots or Smithay. The real issue, if any, is that most of those bits are not standardized; or at least, only the libwayland part. Of course, that's not even the entire story either. When X11 servers were basically entire operating systems that ran as root, implemented print servers and directly touched /dev/mem, only a lunatic would want to maintain multiple of them... but now on Linux and even some BSDs, you can fall back to GBM/DRM/KMS/libinput/etc. for most of your "hardware" needs, the OS is doing the OS things. Wayland is also just simpler than X11; The current day cleaned-up X.org is still around 5x larger by SLOC and much more complex than wlroots. So how come GNOME and KDE both built their own display server? Well really, they didn't; they took their existing compositors they had for X11 anyway and grew Wayland server limbs out of them. In practice retrofitting Wayland into existing compositors is still hard, but if you already have written a compositor and window manager it's still probably easier than writing a new one from scratch. And for KWin, I believe they're also making use of Qt's Wayland compositor infrastructure, too. Something that took me a long time to understand is that people are just unhappy no matter what. Not that all of their points are invalid, just, it's often not even really about that; the specific points are often just the obvious weak spots, like the classic "Wayland can't screen capture" meme (totally fair point, but persisted so long that some people still don't know it hasn't been an issue for years.) This right here is just another one of those. Notice that when many Linux distros unified towards a singular init system, systemd, people came out with pitchforks. Were they all spouting incorrect nonsense? Well, blah blah UNIX philosophy, but largely no, there were plenty of valid complaints about systemd and what it meant for the Linux ecosystem, but it wasn't really about that. Same with Wayland! Wayland did the exact opposite, and defined a set of protocols anyone could implement, allowing you to choose your compositor. Seeing as people hated what systemd did and wanted to preserve "choice" in the Linux world, you'd expect that people would like what Wayland did, but instead everyone is just pissed about fragmentation now. You can pick apart that argument and try to figure out why it's wrong or and invalid comparison and I'm not going to try to fight anyone on that. You can also say that the argument is made by different people and maybe that's true too (though personally I believe "people who hated systemd" and "people who hate Wayland" forms more of a circle than a venn diagram.) Even if it is, the outcome is the same: you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. What I do know is that desktops on X11 stagnated with the same sorts of problems they always had and with Wayland a lot of that got unblocked. X11 will probably be in the same crappy state it's in today and Wayland will continue iterating and improving over time. I'm sure there will be a lot of pain along the way, and I agree it isn't always pretty, but it is what it is. Software isn't a beauty contest, and there's a good reason why "elegant" stuff rarely wins in the long run.
- const_cast 1y ago
  I disagree, features are added to Wayland constantly and we're getting more and more highly supported protocols by the day. We can already do 95% of what you can do on X on major implementations - screen sharing, global hotkeys, file pickers, etc. Yes, these things were designed out of Wayland, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't exist. It means the developers decided we probably shouldn't shove them into the display server. So we just put them somewhere else, and that seems to be working fine. The situation can only improve, truly.
  - hakfoo 1y ago
    The whole "95% support on major implementations" thing is still a hurdle. Wayland ends up railroading users into GNOME and KDE, with virtually everything else being in some way second-class. In X11, I can still use all the same core features whether I run a full KDE desktop, Window Maker and a few dockapps, or a stack of xterms that I manually position with --geometry. It does astonish me how Wayland missed obvious killer angles when they decided to reinvent X11. People would have been excited by "Here's a rich native toolkit so all the new software will look and work and theme consistently"-- a well-known and directly user-facing friction point, so how did they miss that?
    - const_cast 1y ago
      GNOME and KDE are the most complete implementations, yes, but that's just a function of developer time. Keep in mind that's better than what we had with X - which had 1 implementation, that couldn't be touched with a ten foot pole because of how fragile said implementation was. > "Here's a rich native toolkit so all the new software will look and work and theme consistently"-- a well-known and directly user-facing friction point, so how did they miss that? The problem is that application toolkits are a step above window managers and compositors. That's really an application developers choice, not a desktop's choice. Developers want to use Electron, and there's nothing we can do about that. We can get consistently themed apps... if everyone hops on Qt. Which they won't because C++ is evil. People want to shove HTML and CSS into their music player and theme it like they do a website, so here we are. This isn't a solved problem on any platform, even really really locked down ones like iOS. Half my iOS apps are web views which don't follow the look and feel of iOS and have inconsistent behavior as compared to the system. And iOS is the best about this honestly - it's, like, way worse on Windows which has half a dozen competing toolkits from Microsoft alone.
- gf000 1y ago
  There is nothing Wayland "designed out" of their system. It's a fully extendible design which has a very minimal core, instead of bundling a printer and whatnot into the display server. This makes it feasible for car entertainment systems that only want to display bitmaps, but is easily extended to any future use case. There are a bunch of actually standard extensions now, implemented across all desktop Wayland servers, so many of these criticisms are moot.
  - jenadine 1y ago
    Maybe Wayland is extensible, but if the main desktop compositor (i.e. Gnome) don't implement these, it is as much as useless. And it seems that Gnome very much "designed out" some features such as window positioning, window icon, and so on. (We're talking about user's desktop, not custom car entertainment compositor)
  - rcxdude 1y ago
    The main issue is GNOME, really. They are keen to pare down the functionality offered to users and app developers, and so will block standardization of extensions that try to bring wayland up to feature parity, and even if they do get standardised, they will refuse to implement it. Which basically means many developers and users don't want to play ball with wayland at all, and the network effects are fairly strong (devs will not bother with the effort of making something work as best it can on wayland if users still happy to use X11, and users won't switch to wayland if their apps don't work or work less well). (Why does GNOME still matter? They've got the most developer resources of basically any group in the linux desktop space, and a large part of the market share because they're the default on a few of the larger distros)
- lotharcable 1y ago
  Wayland devs and Xorg X11 devs are by and large the same group of people. So nothing you said really makes a lot of sense. There are lots of display technologies out there for Linux besides X11 and Wayland. There was Mir from Canoncial, which is now dead. The project moved to using Wayland. There was Freon from Google's ChromeOS that was announced in 2015 to replace X11 for ChromeOS, but it is dead. They are moving to using Wayland. There was DirectFB, which has been supplanted by DirectFB2. They have been plugging away doing their own thing since time immemorial. Directfb2 even has Vulkan support now. Good luck getting KiCAD working on that. And there is Surfaceflinger from Android. Which is actively developed and widely used. None of these things would allow to do what people are complaining about what they are not allowed to do in Wayland . > There's too many things people want to do that Wayland designed out of their system. eye rolls
- happymellon 1y ago
  Its similar to the CVS analogy given below, however I would liken it to Pulse Audio. We know we have needed to "fix" the audio subsystems for a while, and Pulse fixed a lot of problems but by the time it came along what were problems had moved on. Pulse ended up with other issues, and not actually doing everything we actually needed so it was eventually replaced with Pipewire. I'm not sure if Systemd falls enough into the same pattern, but I'm sure something better will emerge in the next few years.
  - s1gsegv 1y ago
    The more I dig into systemd the more I like how it works. Are there still problems popping up with systemd? Anecdotally, I had a couple user-facing problems that were caused by PulseAudio but never systemd actually being broken.
    - happymellon 1y ago
      No I've never had any issues with it. It is so much faster and better for me and my usecases that I don't grasp any of the arguments. But I also never had any issues with Pulse so I don't ever want to discount other peoples experiences.
  - ahartmetz 1y ago
    Systemd seems fine as an init system at this point, most of its gratuitous replacements for other system services are still garbage.
- michaelmrose 1y ago
  It won't be win32 because it just isn't on Linux and there is no reason for it to be. Wheres game compatibility is great with proton in between apps are not with installation sucking, mostly replicating better native apps, and updated versions which are common and continuous in apps as it isn't in games usually leading to breakage.
- phendrenad2 1y ago
  > The future is likely a third system I don't know about that. I've always been skeptical of the "X11 can't be fixed" claims, nobody has ever been able to explain that one technically, it's always "I read it somewhere" or "Trust me bro the code is bad (and I read that somewhere)". With XLibre, maybe there's life left in X11.
superkuh 1y ago
It's a poor decision. Unless you're IBM/Red Hat/GNOME. Then it's clearly the correct decision for increasing profit. Since GNOME desktop (and mutter) is the only wayland desktop of the dozen incompatible implementations that supports accessibility (they invented two new protocols for it; disregarding existing solutions) it's basically a take-over of the entire linux desktop business space. No other wayland DE is ADA compliant and the Gtk treadmill will make X11 and it's very solid accesibility less likely to work with any application. Sort of a combination gish gallop and CADT so that they're the only linux desktop left that fits business use cases.
- senkora 1y ago
  I had to look up some terms, so for anyone else: Gish gallop = “a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by presenting an excessive number of arguments, without regard for their accuracy or strength, with a rapidity that makes it impossible for the opponent to address them in the time available.”, coined about a particular creationist’s debate strategy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop CADT = “Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers”, describing a situation where software is re-written so often that filing bugs against it is useless, coined by jwz here about GNOME’s development approach: https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
jhoechtl 1y ago
We have to investigate if Windows and or Apple had their fingers init. At hindsight it seems such a stupid decision to fragment a small comminity by designing such a small protocol instead of revamping the existing X protocol to sane security stamdards
- justinrubek 1y ago
  People were and are free to do so. They've chosen not to, though, so far.
- ezst 1y ago
  X11 was an unmaintainable pile of legacy mess, Wayland was its exhausted developers starting from a blank slate with tons of lessons learned the hard way. It's not a cabal or a conspiracy, just a sensible evolution.
  - immibis 1y ago
    The insane part is their explicit rejection of a bunch of things people actually want - like window coordinates and icons. Xorg has security module hooks btw
    - ezst 1y ago
      I don't have a horse in this race, but I also can't blame the Wayland designers for not rushing to implement something like that. Encouraging application developers to manipulate windows themselves essentially means turning them into window-manager developers, but with a hand tied in their back and probably little interest in doing it thoroughly. I think the practical results speak for themselves: I cannot count a single application that does it extensively and that isn't broken in the typical multi-monitor cases you find in the wild.
      - immibis 1y ago
        Well, in Wayland, the same apps just don't work at all. The developer basically has to rewrite them and turn them into different apps to make them work in Wayland. Is that good or bad? Maybe if you hate a certain type of app it's good, but this is the open source world and if something doesn't hurt anyone then you should probably be allowed to do it. It's not the display server's job to rule by fiat. It might be the window manager's job, but only if the application-provided coordinates don't work, or you're using something strict like a tiling WM.
MegaDeKay 1y ago
Wayland messes up Visual Pinball as well [0]. VP depends on being able to place the main playfield window, the backglass window, and the Dot Matrix Display window in specific locations on specific monitors mounted in the cabinet. [0] https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball
- 0points 1y ago
  I'd place those windows exactly where I want with a sway config in about 2 minutes effort. Not a wayland issue.
  - delfinom 1y ago
    The fact you have to edit a config file means it's missing the boat by mile. A user should not have to learn config file formats in a graphical GUI interface.
    - 0points 1y ago
      > The fact you have to edit a config file means it's missing the boat by mile. No. That's how i3 and sway works, on purpose, by design. I use sway, hence I claim to know how to do it in less than 2 minutes. i3 precedes wayland, so again, not a wayland issue. > A user should not have to learn config file formats in a graphical GUI interface. If <app> requires user to <insert skill>, then user will need to <insert skill> in order to use <app>. Well said, anon!
      - MegaDeKay 1y ago
        <app> should not require user to <insert skill>. <app> should be permitted to do reasonable things without requiring user to come up with workarounds for missing functionality.
        0points 1y ago
        If that's your pet peeve, consider using another <app> with said guard rails and fluff. Meanwhile, maybe stfu with your opinions about my work flow.
jeroenhd 1y ago
I've been using Wayland for years and most applications will just work, either under XWayland or natively. The only problematic ones are the ones with incomplete Wayland implementations and the ones relying on the complete lack of security design on systems like X11 of Win32. The biggest blocker for me has always been Nvidia, and that problem was solved years ago. Meanwhile, whenever I drop back to X11, I'm reminded that things like multi-touch gestures are plainly broken on X11 mode in ever DE I've tried. To be honest, I've never seen a Linux desktop that most people would call "production ready". Even in the best days, X11 and Wayland have glitches, hardware issues, and stability problems that no other platform seems to suffer from. It took until Pipewire for audio to actually work well out of the box. As for X11, KDE and probably others will run X11 for years to come, mostly because companies like Canonical and Red Hat ship LTS versions. Whether applications will keep supporting old configurations is another question (what software still runs on Ubuntu 16.04? I wouldn't know and I bet neither do most third party vendors), but the protocol itself isn't dying any time soon. It's not allowed to by corporate contracts. What is dying, is corporate investment into X.org and X11 targets for some desktop environments. Developers and companies that favor X11 can come together and fork those projects, or join the dev team, to ensure their desktops work like they used to. Just because IBM doesn't want to pay developers to maintain such configurations doesn't mean they suddenly stop working, just that someone else will need to apply bugfixes from then on out. The only serious attempt I've seen from people who want to keep X11 alive was that fork from that antivax anti-DEI weirdo.
- ciupicri 1y ago
  > xorg-x11-server is removed from RHEL 10 > The X.Org server, an implementation of the X Window System, was previously deprecated and is removed from RHEL 10. Note that the X11 protocol is not removed, which means that most applications will remain compatible through the Xwayland compositor. For more information, see Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 plans for Wayland and Xorg server (Red Hat Blog). (https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_linux/10/html/10.0_release_notes/removed-features#removed-features-graphics-infrastructures https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_...)
- mid-kid 1y ago
  > things like multi-touch gestures are plainly broken on X11 mode in ever DE I've tried The main reason for this is that neither major DE has implemented multi touch gestures on X11. Not that they can't be. There's several tools you can use for things like touchpad gestures on X11 and they work well, but aren't as nice as native integration into a DE.
msgodel 1y ago
Just install mate or similar and ignore the drama.
pjmlp 1y ago
This kind of stuff is why I evolved from an FOSS zealot that back in the early Linux adoptions days would have email signatures with M$ stuff on it, most likely still in some Usenet archives, back to Windows land as main desktop on Windows 7. UNIX was designed as CLI OS, the only companies that did great things in terms of desktop experience were Sun, SGI, and NeXT, so that leaves macOS when I feel like using a UNIX workstation, instead of running a GNU/Linux VM. Even X11 was the outcome of UNIX wars, were X itself was made open, but CDE systems not, Keith Packard has a few talks on the matter, as he was there as it happened.
dadoum 1y ago
> I've developed cross-platform applications and it was enough work without the extra headache they describe Wayland brings. Have you tried wayland-client? When I made my custom application framework, since I had no previous experience I decided to start with wayland-client library, and then figure out what to use for X11. My experience with it is that it is painfully sensible. Things fail when misused, which happens a lot (probably also because only few people actually wrote code with it so I was on my own to understand how to do stuff), but at the end they were fixable, and the only gripes I had were the protocols that GNOME didn't implement at the time. But I guess, if they are not implementing it right now, it means that they think it's okay if it does not work. (and actually I could also defend a lot of missing things in Wayland protocols, like the fact you can't position windows yourself) On the other side, X11 just looks like a mess. When you start it feels like you have 2 options, XCB and Xlib. Old posts say that XCB is the modern one, but nobody uses XCB so in fact you may encounter bugs. Error handling is really poor, most of the errors are small messages written in stdout. You ask for things called "Atoms", and you send them/attach them to the X window. No feedback on whether it works or not, they mostly have weird names with prefixes like _NET_WM or _MOTIF. If you want to make an OpenGL window, for a long time it was not possible if you used XCB because GLX requires you to give Xlib handles, then came EGL-XCB which was supported by almost no driver because for some reason it seems that you need driver support for each X library you may want to use. When you start you're reminded of a slew of somewhat niche concepts today, like Visuals, Seat, Back pixel, Front pixel, which you are probably not expected to use today (in detail, I know, visuals may be useful in some small use cases, I don't know why the app is in charge of selecting the seat though, and pixel stuff is probably a dead thing). At the end the only thing that makes X11 bearable in my opinion is the fact that people wrote a lot of code with it so you can search on the Internet for the most part and find a snippet of code that should work for your use case.
- immibis 1y ago
  To get past this, you have to learn that X11 is a protocol, not a library, and learn the protocol and then use the library to send protocol messages, instead of learning the library, which is how it's unfortunately taught and also how Xlib was unfortunately conceived of being used. Xlib was designed so you'd use it similarly to say Win32; that idea was a colossal failure. xcb is more closely aligned with the idea that it just helps you format network packets.
bjoli 1y ago
I am holding on to xorg until i can shade Windows and use something with half the power of xinput to configure my trackball. Oh, and I also want to be able to have many different keyboard layouts for sddm. Most themes fail to display a layout selection menu that isn't blank for me. Otherwise I don't really mind wayland.

Vilian 1y ago

Xwayland isn't going to die in 10 years, it's fine to keep using that, thise bugs happens with KiCad running as Wayland or in xwayland?

dvdkon 1y ago
KiCad seems to work fine under XWayland in my experience, with some severe bugs under Wayland (and not just window management & cursor warping-related, though that's a problem too).

duped 1y ago

Can anyone explain succinctly why basic window management and pointer warping is absent on Wayland, what it would take to fix, and how to get involved fixing it? I've been hearing about these problems for years and if all that's missing is someone to own up to fixing it, it's worth finding out. edit: looks like pointer warping was added to the protocol last week: https://lore.freedesktop.org/wayland-devel/aEw0AP7h6T8l11ug@gmail.com/T/#u https://lore.freedesktop.org/wayland-devel/aEw0AP7h6T8l11ug@...

arghwhat 1y ago
The historic reason is that all inputs and window manager state outside your very own window is kept secret, and "stealing" input strictly disallowed. The idea is to avoid clickjacking, eavesdropping, phishing-esque windows, you name it, all which only works when an application has freedom to find other windows, place itself and steal focus and input. Even just stealing a cursor at a bad time might lead an in-progress password input to end up somewhere unintended. It was a good intention, and it's hard to figure out where to draw the line between convenience and capability and secure design. It's absolutely impossible to ask, as everyone will demand everything, claiming even the smallest feature is the foundation of all modern computing. Some of these things are now coming in ways that still aim to keep explicit behavior and decent control, but enable the needed usecases. Cursor warp, session restoration, picture-in-picture, etc.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  The balance doesn’t necessarily require that much thought or deliberation. It could be as simple as putting things like cursor control behind a permission dialog, with it being mandatory to provide a reason why the capability is needed to present in the dialog to help users make an informed decision.
  - jeroenhd 1y ago
    Web browsers tried that. Then spam sites started saying "press allow to prove you're not a robot". Android showed a whole list of permissions for years whenever you installed an app. Nobody ever read them, phones were full of malware, and Google started nuking APIs and replacing pre-install permission prompts with real-time permission prompts. If letting the application ask nicely is a good enough security measure, then you never needed to ask in the first place. When a user wants to use an application (or, what they think an application does), and the application just says "for the app to work" when the OS queries it for a reason why it needs permissions, the user is going to click permit every time. From a practical security standpoint, the application could just as easily say "I'm going to take control of your mouse OK/cancel". Which is what happens on X11, except applications just take control of your mouse whether you want to or not.

workethics 1y ago

This reminds me that I was recently using tracy to profile a program and found their own list of valid grievances, altough it's a bit more GNOME inflicted: https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy/issues/505#issuecomment-1365429443 https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy/issues/505#issuecomment-136...

smj-edison 1y ago
It think this one is interesting since it highlights that Wayland is not meant to be an exclusively window manager API. It includes things like kiosks, car screens, etc, where the concept of a window doesn't even exist. EDIT: on further thought though, it's really odd that they still haven't added in optional APIs for a lot of basic window operations...
- simcop2387 1y ago
  > EDIT: on further thought though, it's really odd that they still haven't added in optional APIs for a lot of basic window operations... That's because like you mention, wayland doesn't look at things as "windows" like X11 used to. It's got surfaces and compositors so it's a really rather different design than the previous systems which is why there's been such an issue with transitioning some kinds of applications and why it's been so hard to get some of the window related protocols to be agreed upon. There's been a decent number of attempts at the positioning protocols that have been kiboshed because there were effective security issues because the protocol would imply that a client could take over the screen from the intended application that the user was using, if the compositor fully follows the protocol or worked the same way that X11 did. Supporting all the different use-cases like this has definitely made progress slower and harder to keep up but personally I think it's going to end up with a more comprehensive and future proofed system once it is finally getting those last couple of things that take it from an 85% solution to a 99% solution.
bjoli 1y ago
I have a feeling gnome has struggled more with wayland than kde. For a while i could not drag and drop across screens or to applications i switched to with alt+tab. I dont know if those are fixed. One that isn't fixed that I had happen just yesterday: menus locking focus to one app. If I open the file transfer popup in nautilus I have to first close by clicking somewhere else in nautilus, or else I can't click anywhere. I don't think I ever had that issue under x. The only bugs I have seen in KDE are in sddm, but I managed to find a theme where they don't exhibit.

arghwhat 1y ago

A significant portion of the problems listed, e.g. performance, "unpredictable focus", glitches, freezes, etc., will generally be purely KiCad bugs. Others are feature requests that there were recently released protocols for e.g. window restoration and cursor warping, but with adoption needing to pick up. Nothing negative towards KiCad team as they and the community sort things out, but it's easy for others to read this and conflate "problems with application's Wayland support" as "problems with Wayland". It's a new platform for them, and support for a new platform will always have some growing pains. Xwayland is also under continued development, and these distribution are not dropping X11 support through Xwayland, just native X11 sessions.

superkuh 1y ago
>it's easy for others to read this and conflate "problems with application's Wayland support" as "problems with Wayland". Yes, it's easy because that's explicitly what they say. >The following problems are known issues in Wayland protocols or their implementation in desktop compositors, window managers or other layers in the display stack that are beyond our ability to resolve: So we have two opposite claims. One from the developers of kicad in this write-up with examples and one from you above.
- arghwhat 1y ago
  > So we have two opposite claims. One from the developers of kicad in this write-up with examples and one from you above. You have the organizations maintaining entire Linux distributions with countless applications they support giving their vote of confidence based on their experiences. You have the organizations backing and developing Wayland. You have all the developers of Xorg ditching it and working on Wayland instead (the person vocally claiming to pick up the slack recently had almost all their work reverted when it was found to have been completely broken). That's a lot of people voting with their time (and in some cases, money) on Wayland and its capabilities. So no it's not my claim that Wayland works vs. KiCad devs, it's the claim of everyone that actually have skin in the display server game. (They will also agree that some features are missing, but things like focus, graphical glitches and performance are not Wayland issues, just application bugs.)

DominoTree 1y ago

I've been using KiCad on Wayland for years and didn't even know I was missing out

znpy 1y ago

And again, in the year of the lord 2025, the year of linux on the desktop is next year.

poulpy123 1y ago

I don't have the knowledge to judge these specific issues, but the transition from X11 to Wayland was the worse I've ever seen. Worse than the python 2 to 3 debacle, and it seems even worse than the Perl 5 to 6 transition (that was resolved by not doing the transition)

mariusor 1y ago
What am I missing? For 99.9% of existing Xorg applications the transition should have been transparent due to the existence of XWayland. In which way was this transition the worst for you?
- DrillShopper 1y ago
  The article talks about the many open issues with Wayland that do not exist in X, if you want some examples.
  - mariusor 1y ago
    Which seem to be self inflicted, if I'm not mistaken.
  - const_cast 1y ago
    Sure, which are completely solved by Xwayland. If your app doesn't work under Wayland, then fine. Lots of apps don't because they're old and volatile to develop. But X11 apps work completely seamlessly under Wayland. Every major desktop right now is running many X11 apps under Wayland.
    - el_memorioso 1y ago
      I am a Kicad user, not just a random speculator. The problems are not solved by XWayland. For example, Kicad uses different windows to represent different views of the circuit and circuit board and warps the cursor according to the view you are looking at. XWayland doesn't solve this, because it only allows warping within a single window. I know there is new warping code coming out, but I don't know if it will ever get into the LTS OS we use at my work.

IshKebab 1y ago

> Cursor/pointer warping: Essential for many CAD operations Err no. I don't know why EDA guys have this weird idea that cursor warping is totally normal. DesignSpark PCB does this too - when you zoom it warps the cursor! Wtf is that? Kicad has pretty awful UX so I guess this crazy view isn't that surprising. > things like being able to position windows or warp the mouse cursor. This functionality was omitted by design, not oversight. Yeah again... I'll give you window positioning, but an app should never warp my cursor. It's mine. Get your stupid hands off it.

phkahler 1y ago
IMHO window positioning is the job of the DE, which will also mean a unified behavior for all apps. Unfortunately I've been waiting years for gnome to implement this.
jeroenhd 1y ago
It's a UI pattern that I thought died in the 90s. When it works well, you don't notice the pattern is even there. When it doesn't, it looks janky as hell. There are shortcomings to the current/recent state of Wayland (KDE hasn't had support for storing window positions until Plasma 6.4! HDR and VRR are missing from many compositors (and X11 DEs to be fair)! Fractional scaling doesn't even work right in many Linux applications!) but when it comes to design decisions, I'm mostly on Wayland's side.
- IshKebab 1y ago
  It did die in the 90s! Apparently for everyone except Kicad (and DesignSpark PCB). I bet Eagle does it too; that's even more of a UX disaster than Kicad.
  - indrora 1y ago
    Most of the professional tier CAD suites do it as well. It's one of the Quirks^tm of that field. Newcomers to the field go "WTF??" but the old hats go "yeah and you'll learn to appreciate it." And you do learn to appreciate it. the cursor warping in KiCad is absolutely essential to high level operation because it means you don't think where you're zooomed to now, you point, you zoom, you've zoomed. Once you get used to some of the keyboard shortcuts to fly around the board, you get used to focusing on the center of the display rather than having to eye around looking for the component, which might be buried in a few layers of traces and vias on-screen.

amelius 1y ago

I installed kicad on an ubuntu system using flatpak (because snap was a nightmare). But now I'm running into a strange issue with X11 cookies. Anyone who's seen the same? (Using X11 of course)

walterbell 1y ago

June 2025, "The X.Org Server just got forked (announcing XLibre)", 190 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44199502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44199502

pomerange 1y ago

Distros are not dropping Xwayland, just say "run our app trough xwayland". Recommending X11 distros or compositors is not good advice. X11 on its own is dead, and things like KDE do very little development on their X11 version. Some if not most of these bugs are 100% application bugs, very few actually used wayland compositors have performance bugs for example (but your app running in wayland native might). With what a dumpster fire X11 has been lately its a bit weird to bet on it for your application.

yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
> Distros are not dropping Xwayland, just say "run our app trough xwayland". Yes, just saying "Wayland is only supported through XWayland" is usually a really easy solution that does in fact just work. > X11 on its own is dead, and things like KDE do very little development on their X11 version. Eeeeh... I think calling X "dead" is hyperbolic. It is less actively developed, and GNOME and KDE are migrating away from it. But it still works approximately as well as it ever has, and pretty much anything except GNOME and KDE is quite likely to continue working for the foreseeable future. - Sent from my laptop running Xorg
- const_cast 1y ago
  X11 works as well as it ever did, but it's so stagnated that that doesn't mean a whole lot. I run new hardware, and I tried X. It's bad. HDR? No. Fractional scaling? Looks awful. Splitting, tearing, and artifacts? Believe it or not, still a problem on X. There's a film of jankiness that permeates X that I just don't get on Wayland. Animations don't drop frames. Things happen when they should. My text actually looks crisp. On Linux!
  - yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
    I dunno, I'd say it goes both ways. I'm still on X because last time I tried Wayland still had weird janky corners that I kept hitting. Granted, yes, X also has problems, so I'm stuck in an awkward intermediate spot.

shmerl 1y ago

> warp the mouse cursor Wasn't cursor warping protocol just merged? https://wayland.app/protocols/pointer-warp-v1 https://wayland.app/protocols/pointer-warp-v1

jchw 1y ago

Many of these limitations are in fact not Wayland issues and just limitations in KiCad (and probably more generally, wxWidgets) under native Wayland. For example, you can definitely do draggable widgets that dock and undock using xdg-toplevel-drag. What's changing with Wayland is that Wayland is no longer giving the developers the tools to implement features like session restore and docking/undocking entirely on their own, but instead forcing them to go through specific protocols. This is a point of contention that involves one's own ideals and unlikely to be resolved any time soon, but either way, this post is grossly misrepresenting the state of Wayland in general because of KiCad issues, that they are admitting they have no interest in triaging or working on anyways. That's fine, but it's still wrong. Furthermore, XWayland is not going away. If you are unwilling to support native Wayland, the way to go is somehow disable native Wayland, like by unsetting WAYLAND_DISPLAY early on in the code before initializing the toolkit or something. Krita does this and it works just fine, although it's not ideal since features like HDR or display scaling will suffer. (But does that even matter for KiCad?) Tl;dr: reads more like developers not happy about the direction of Wayland than an actual reasoned position. Seems confused about the implications of the Wayland session. I wouldn't worry about this. You're still going to prefer the Wayland session sooner rather than later.

reisse 1y ago

I have a harsh opinion - the real problem with Wayland is that its authors and/or maintainers are *nix geeks, who never used anything more complex than X11 on an IBM Thinkpad with a maybe second 4:3 monitor attached. And they daily drive a few dozen terminal windows, Firefox and maybe Thunderbird. I really have no other plausible explanation how they could miss so many potential usecases while rebuilding the display management ground-up: screen sharing, fractional scaling, different scaling factor for different screens, color profiles, HDR, toolbars and docking, window positions, and whatever else. In the Wayland GitLab, there are comments in the spirit of "who would ever want to use this?" for a feature requests of something present in literally any sane WM...

ur-whale 1y ago
> he real problem with Wayland is that its authors and/or maintainers are *nix geeks They also, in typical Unix geek style, don't give two fucks about what the market wants / needs.
Paianni 1y ago
At least some of them were people trying to hack X.Org to deliver an 'iPhone-like' experience on Nokia Maemo/MeeGo devices. The Jolla phone ended up being the first consumer device to ship with Wayland afaik.
dvdkon 1y ago
> I really have no other plausible explanation... I have a better one: They designed for embedded devices first, desktops second or not at all. The first users of Wayland were things like vehicle infotainment systems, which operate under a limited mobile-like "one app at a time" system. Back then Ubuntu Touch (using Canonical's Mir) also looked like a prospective usecase for a new display system. As far as I remember, the Wayland devs' approach to desktop support was "we made the basic protocol, now you desktop people either integrate functionality into the compositor (what GNOME did) or make your own extensions (what wlroots, KDE did), we don't care". With that kind of "leadership", no wonder it took years to reach even basic consensus.
- 1y ago

ur-whale 1y ago

Over the many years Wayland has been promising to be a better toaster, I have tried to use it. Every single time, I had to go back to X11 because shit simply don't work. At this point, I am dead convinced that Wayland is simply broken by design. As a matter of fact, they justify their existence by systematically pointing out how broken the architecture of X11 is and how a "modern" replacement is severely needed. True, X11's architecture is indeed bad and creates lots of problems. However, unlike Wayland, it DOES WORK. Also, and very unfortunately for Wayland, the team working on it seem oblivious to the fact that trying to replace a badly designed system does not automatically make the replacement any better. At this point, I would call Wayland a complete failure. Worse, they've been at it for over 15 years and it is still fundamentally unusable. The fact that Ubuntu is planning to deprecate X11 is, at this point in time, a catastrophe as far as I'm concerned.

skykooler 1y ago
The only reason I use Wayland is display scaling - with a high DPI screen, many apps are blurry or inconsistently scaled under X11. Given the parade of other issues Wayland brings, I wish the development effort were instead spent on improving highDPI support in X11.
- Ballas 1y ago
  In xfce, setting DPI in Appearance works perfectly (in my experience). Just don't try to scale with display settings...
- igor47 1y ago
  O man I recently tried to use fractional scaling on Wayland, and it went very poorly. Electron apps like slack or signal do not support it, and flameshot also works very poorly. But I guess at least fractional scaling is to an option... (Which I had to enable in some secret setting somewhere)

LocalH 1y ago

Wayland was designed by people who didn't quite grok the X way and decided to forge a different path. That's fine, but people also shouldn't expect Wayland to be a drop-in replacement for X in all cases. Thus a mature X-based project like KiCad is doing the right thing by focusing their efforts. If you need KiCad? You need X. If not? Run free with Wayland.

lotharcable 1y ago
That is a odd statement since the people that designed Wayland are, by and large, the same people that maintained Xorg. In fact the Wayland devs are the primary group of people maintaining what is left of X11. The reality is that a lot of X11 design is simply a bad idea. Which is what one would naturally expect given its pioneering nature. By the mid 1990s it was already obsolete and didn't match up with how hardware worked nor how people were using computers. What has allowed it to persist to this day in Linux is more along the lines of: * we just that we had a really good open source implementation with a very dedicated developer base and some commercial support from companies like Redhat. * compatibility with X Servers other then XFree86/Xorg was no longer relevant since the rest of the world has long abandoned X11. So aside from a few nitch cases were people wanted X11 apps on their Windows desktops using properietary X Servers it no longer really mattered. * X11 allowed extensions (most of which didn't work with network transparency, btw) * Widget authors, mostly QT and GTK, went through great efforts to avoid using X11 and working around limitations. KiCAD is just a unfortunate case. They use a kinda odd toolkit, wxWidgets, and happen to depend on a lot of X11 specific behavior for some of their application's features. So it is less of a situation of Wayland devs not understanding X (they probably are some of the few people that actually understand it deeply). Wayland actually has really good X11 comptatibility through XWayland and for most applications it doesn't cause issues. But for KiCAD it does. And they are just being honest about it. Accomidations are being made for KiCAD type behavior and probably KiCAD will update and change things to meet them somewhere in the middle and in not too long it'll become a forgotten issue.
- nullc 1y ago
  > That is a odd statement since the people that designed Wayland are, by and large, the same people that maintained Xorg. Which prominent wayland developers were maintainers of Xorg in 2004?

dmitrygr 1y ago

"We do not investigate or support bug reports related to Wayland-specific issues" Well put, guys! This is the way. It wasn't broken, nobody needed to "fix it". Now they "fixed it" & it IS broken, it is not your job to pick up the pieces! I tip my hat to you for having the balls to just plainly state so.

imtringued 1y ago

I have literally never had any issues with Wayland beyond the absence of screen sharing in the early days and I've been using it since 2016. I've also felt no need to use KiCAD whatsoever. There are better open source EDA tools out there.