8 ms·

Please Don't Promote Wayland

60 points by PKop 1y ago

kaonwarb 1y ago
Missed opportunity for the (anonymous!) authors to demonstrate understanding about why some are promoting Wayland.
viknesh 1y ago
Only a casual user of Linux desktop computing but my experience with ui stability seems to have gotten much worse after switching to Wayland.
rtpg 1y ago
I am very open to Wayland in theory but I legit worry because it's been in the air for years and years and it still feels so far away. And some of the Wayland-y points around things like security just never felt relevant to me. Though the real pain points for me have been around the various containerization things that just cause things like my IME to barely function. At least Python 3 if you started your project on Python 3 you mostly could just get where you wanted to be.
- sleepy_keita 1y ago
  The IME problem was the only thing keeping me on "legacy" X11 a couple years ago. Is it still the same today?
  - rtpg 1y ago
    My IME issues were so dire I went back to a Mac (well also work giving me a Mac). But my IME issues linked to snaps and the like, not Wayland.
- stingraycharles 1y ago
  It’s mostly application support that’s lagging, right? And of course window managers like i3 needing complete replacement, but those seem to be mostly down already.
  - rtpg 1y ago
    I guess? I mean like 2 years ago I couldn't even use Wayland on my machine with an Nvidia card (I didn't try that hard, though). Like this feels super bleeding edge and in that case I really don't get how this didn't _start_ in x11 land and then take over things from there. My only hope is that money from people who "need" linux graphics to work solves this.
  - queenkjuul 1y ago
    Some stuff like global hotkeys and remote desktop are Wayland problems inherently
    - yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
      I don't think inherently; Wayland could have included optional hotkey and screen sharing APIs a decade ago. It didn't, but it doesn't seem like a problem that must exist, just a failure to execute.
    - A907 1y ago
      Remote desktop isnt a problem just remote desktop as part of wayland itself, i run sunshine on wayland just fine
  - puffybuf 1y ago
    i3 has pretty much been replaced by sway for me. Works great I have no problems with wayland as a regular user
- eurleif 1y ago
  X11 session support is being removed from the default install of Ubuntu with the upcoming 25.10 release. Gnome and KDE Plasma plan to remove X11 session support entirely within the next few years. Ready or not, Wayland is here.
  - throw0101c 1y ago
    > X11 session support is being removed from the default install of Ubuntu with the upcoming 25.10 release. Currently I can SSH from my MacBook/XQuartz onto an Ubuntu/Linux system and run xterm (or whatever). How does that work in the future?
    - bmandale 1y ago
      apt install xorg
    - A907 1y ago
      You cant that has never been a feature that wayland had planned but there are other tools that can do aimilar like waypipe or rdp or something like sunshine or something like VNC but there is nothing as a part of wayland and doesnt need to be wayland isnt complete reimplementation of X
- xtracto 1y ago
  All engineers implementing Wayland should read Joel Spolsky's seminal article on software rewrite https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... And Martin Fowler article on Strangle Fig pattern. It's been a waste of resources to have yet another biffurcation on the Linux Desktop ecosystem. It's pretty sad.
  - A907 1y ago
    Joel spolsky article isnt that good and kinda has survivorship bias written over it. Focus is on few cases where rewrites werent successful without trully looking into why. Also it predicates on idea that Xorg and x11 would have stayed and wouldnt have been rewritten which btw was always the plan as it was riddled with temporary hacks, insecure and had lot of legacy code/legacy protocols, things that would require loads of rewrites so the talk always was X12 wouldnt be backwards compatible and a new from scratch version of X11 protocols(with xorg being written from scratch to supprot x12 protocols) but instead of doing that they went with wayland as it already existed
- cratermoon 1y ago
  > it's been in the air for years and years and it still feels so far away Wayland is the Project Xanadu of UI software.
kstrauser 1y ago
I’m not a fan of Wayland or a detractor of X. I’m not personally invested in either of them. I couldn’t care less what’s pushing pixels at my screen as long as it works. That said, what you need to know about Wayland is that the X.org devs mostly migrated to it en masse because they said X had hit an evolutionary dead end and couldn’t be dragged into the present, by the design of it. These were the people who were already maintaining X and presumably liked it. I doubt there were a lot of haters in that crowd. It’s not like someone invented Wayland and shoved the X devs out of the way. The X devs largely became Wayland devs because they believe it’s the better path forward. I don’t really know how I could argue against them.
- msgodel 1y ago
  It looks to me like there are quite a few more basic features fundamentally incompatible with Wayland's architecture than X's. Maybe X has issues but Wayland is still a regression.
  - kstrauser 1y ago
    That seems at odds with what the people who wrote both of them believe.
    - wink 1y ago
      But that doesn't make it necessarily untrue for the person you replied to. People have different requirements and I heard tons of stories of "this doesn't work, that doesn't work". It's been slowly improving, but many people also just got burnt because of early hype. I don't remember any specific wayland problem in my personal recent history, but it took years to get there.
      - msgodel 1y ago
        It's not just the hype, it's the "you're holding it wrong" gaslighting. I have zero tolerance for that sort of thing these days. At this point I'll use kernel virtual terminals before I use Wayland.
do_not_redeem 1y ago
A lot of wild quotes here > Training Overhead > $5,000-$15,000 per IT staff member for multi-compositor environment training When's the last time your IT department gave you "multi-compositor training"? > Software Replacement > $500-$2000 in software replacement costs when tools don't work under Wayland > Multi-Monitor > X11: Reliable, consistent behavior > Wayland: Compositor-dependent, often buggy > Distro wars intensified: Choice of display server becomes a major differentiator Definitely written by AI
- superkuh 1y ago
  Well, most of the time applications don't work around the new problems wayland has introduced. Most applications on most wayland compositors cannot be used by people who need screen readers. These days in many places supporting the differently abled legally is on the way out, but I still think it's a good thing. And yeah, the dollar figures smell, but this is a real problem that the waylands introduced by not being a single wayland. One that has so far only been addressed by GNOME in their compositor by introducing two entirely new acccesibility protocols with no support for the last 30 years of accesibility. If you want to actually be following the guidelines of American's with Disabilities Act of 1990 this might matter to you.
viraptor 1y ago
They're way too late now. The question is not about promotion anymore, just about when will the alternative to away. This page kinda made sense 2 years ago.
lifthrasiir 1y ago
Without necessarily supporting or opposing the statements (because I have no opinion about Wayland after all), the first public mention of this website seems to be [1]. [1] https://x.com/probonopd/status/1955387873659850828 https://x.com/probonopd/status/1955387873659850828
- lproven 1y ago
  Interesting. It could be -- he maintains a Github gist: "Think twice before abandoning X11. Wayland breaks everything!" https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d1f2277 https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d... This could be a web-ified version. I have emailed with ProbonoPD, AKA Simon Peter. He is smart, motivated, and knows his stuff. He is the man behind Appimage (which I personally prefer to either Snap or Flatpak) as well as the "Hello System" FreeBSD distro.
jofer 1y ago
As much as X11 is an overly complex and dated protocol, this article hits its mark well. My current desktop is actually running Wayland, but I still need X11 for a variety of reasons. I see the development advantages of Wayland, but not the practical advantage as a user. And even as a developer, X11 is stable and well known (albeit definitely weird in places). At the end of the day, things worked perfectly on X11 and my audio and video and various apps still glitch a lot on Wayland even after all these years. Most of that is not exactly Wayland's fault, but it highlights the advantage of X11. It's the devil you know (and everyone has worked out a lot of edge cases for).
- A907 1y ago
  I ahve to disagree its far from hitting a mark, most of it is stuff that are solved for years and some that are just plain not true
ugh123 1y ago
>Signatories One guy.
lordofgibbons 1y ago
The primary argument is to avoid fragmentation sprinkled with some other not-well-thought-through points. Distros aren't rolling back to X11. That ship has sailed. You can either help move things along, or drag your feet and increase fragmentation - the thing being complained about.. Everything under the "security" section of this article is so unbelievably wrong, that I'm not sure if it's worth anybody's time to refute one by one.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- rtpg 1y ago
  I don't have a dog in this fight, I would be curious to know about the security stuff. Like is screen sharing a massive pain? Or is it "just" a prompt kind of like in the browser? Stuff like global hotkeys sounds unfun tho
  - queenkjuul 1y ago
    The problem with screen sharing is if you're trying to share a headless remote machine with nobody at the console to approve the request. I don't think there's a proper solution there yet (which worries me, that's exactly how I run one of my machines at home)
    - rtpg 1y ago
      Yeah seems like there should be _some_ mechanism in place, though I'll admit that it's not immediately obvious what that should be.
      - A907 1y ago
        Problem is that what is that mechanism that doesnt compromise security
    - A907 1y ago
      In my experiance you only have to do it once at least on gnome
ElectricalUnion 1y ago
> Hardware Support: Nvidia users face particular challenges, and many specialized hardware configurations simply don't work reliably. > The XLibre project continues this legacy with active community development. Guess what? Nvidia users also "face particular challenges", and many normal hardware configurations simply don't work reliably under XLibre either. I guess Linus was right, don't use Nvidia.
- goku12 1y ago
  The page describes it as if it was Wayland's mistake for causing Nvidia customers so much grief. It was Nvidia who insisted on basing Wayland on EGLStreams instead of on GBM like everybody else. Even the open source nouveau driver used GBM on Nvidia graphics. But even those problems are a few years in the past at this point after Nvidia decided to offer GBM support on their proprietary drivers. And consistent effort has been put into solving outstanding issues like screen glitches that were eventually resolved with explicit sync. These complaints remind me of how Linux was criticized more than a decade ago for not not being compatible with proprietary applications, while foss applications worked just fine on proprietary platforms. While technically correct, it misses the whole point, seemingly rather intentionally.
nixosbestos 1y ago
I literally don't have the words to look down my nose at this. Former X11 contributor, compositor contributor, active distro maintainer. I just can't. I laughed. I scoffed. I incredulously looked at how much time someone with some braincells put into this. I don't care, I'm saying it. Fuck your fragmentation whining. USERS WANT THEIR SHIT TO WORK. They expect high refresh monitors to work. They expect to be able to use a fking external monitor alongside their hidpi laptop. They need to be able to use actual fractional scaling, again with varying dpi monitors. They want their shit to work reliably and not tear. Wayland delivers on this. Now. In a way X11 never EVER will. God Jesus fuck i cannot believe how much people's time has been wasted on this bullshit useless banal conversation.
- cratermoon 1y ago
  They expect screensavers to be able to lock the screen. https://web.archive.org/web/20250714073924/https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/man1.html#17 https://web.archive.org/web/20250714073924/https://www.jwz.o...
  - nixosbestos 1y ago
    Yeah I'm so, just so upset XScreensaver can't lock a Wayland session. Jfc, good company there with a jwz link. There's so much wrong with wanting or thinking an XScreensaver app would somehow work with a random Wayland compositor. But it does require ignorance of the exact security changes made to the model when moving from X11 to Wayland. I can't. I can't. I should never waste my time in these threads. Edit: i do also find it amusing how much of that manpage is dedicated to calling out how fragile and broken X11 is. You can't make this stuff up. Edit2; I actually can't get over the irony of linking an app that notoriously has had a storied history because of X11's architecture. I can't name the number of time X11 sessions were not locked properly. Whatever. Going to keep happily enjoying the basic features that every other desktop OS user expects that I get with KDE, gnome, cosmic, away, Niri, and more, in Wayland. Good luck unclutching y'all's pearls.
    - cratermoon 1y ago
comex 1y ago
This reads as significantly AI-assisted and repetitive. And some of the points are really questionable, like claiming “Color management becomes inconsistent” when X11 doesn’t even support HDR, claiming that Linux containers and namespaces somehow mitigate X11’s security issues (that’s not how it works!), and talking about some outdated issues like NVIDIA support and SSH forwarding (both of which shouldn’t be an issue anymore from what I’ve heard).
- SpecialistK 1y ago
  The website layout also looks a lot like what I've seen Claude 4 generate via VS Code.
- queenkjuul 1y ago
  If SSH isn't an issue anymore, I've yet to find the solution
  - wmf 1y ago
    The solution is waypipe but it's still not as easy as ssh -W.
- slowmovintarget 1y ago
  A lot of the complaints are about supposedly missing features when X11 and Wayland aren't the same things, IIRC. X11 is a big ball of mud with all kinds of features. Wayland is an attempt to do one thing, and only one thing. You must bring in the other features (like window management and remote networking) as adjacent components. "This Phillip's-head screwdriver can't cut cheese or open a wine bottle."
  - yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
    > Wayland is an attempt to do one thing, and only one thing. You must bring in the other features (like window management and remote networking) as adjacent components. It's fine to separate a small core protocol from extensions that flesh out the rest of the features. Wayland, however, did the small core and didn't bother to actually implement the rest, so 16 years on it still doesn't have feature parity. > "This Phillip's-head screwdriver can't cut cheese or open a wine bottle." Then stop handing me a screwdriver and telling me I should use it instead of my multitool.
throwabayhay 1y ago
They mention macOS as "one platform with consistent APIs and behavior". But macOS (or NeXTStep, as it started out as), an actual UNIX system (certified!), chose not to use X11 to achieve that, but to entirely roll their own.
- wmf 1y ago
  The point is that Quartz Compositor is mandatory on macOS. There aren't different incompatible APIs.
ben0x539 1y ago
Unfortunate that this page largely shills XLibre, the X fork by the guy who got ejected from contributing to Xorg when he landed a bunch of code that was blatantly untested, leading to tons of his commits getting reverted. Like, I am not a fan of Wayland, still using X on my machine, but from what I've seen of his posting, this guy isn't great PR for the "X is fine actually" camp.
- 000ooo000 1y ago
  Came here to say this. >What We're Losing >1987-2024: X11 Evolution >37 years of continuous development, bug fixes, and feature additions. Stable, predictable, and extensively documented. The XLibre project continues this legacy with active community development. This is a very charitable interpretation of the situation, and to suggest XLibre, which got forked 2 months ago, is the future is insane. Would be a different story if XLibre had been around a few years but 2 months is very young..
- queenkjuul 1y ago
  Yeah once i saw XLibre I decided this was a joke, then it became apparent everything after the first section is AI i stopped reading entirely. Wayback is the more promising project, if you can run an X11 display manager on Wayland you can still do XRDP and SSH, is my understanding. Those are the two features i really depend on
DiabloD3 1y ago
Wow, what a crackpot website. The ship sailed when Keith Packard, brilliant programmer and X.org project lead, decided that the era of X11 is over, and no further development will happen to the Xserver, and that the rootless Xserver for Wayland, in the near future, will be the only actually supported version. This lead to the weird fork of Xlibre that is more about politics than it is about technological solutions. Everyone has chosen to abandon the security nightmare that is X11, somehow it took 15 years instead of 5. But hey, we finally made it.
FloatArtifact 1y ago
Accessibility is dead to me on Wayland... Until emulate key, mouse presses in other windows, registering global hotkeys that isn't a hack and Enumerating window title and executable. Wayland fragmented development efforts on Linux. It's gotten a little better as some compositors consolidate, but still pretty awful to cobble together a stack that works for the features above.
FloatArtifact 1y ago
If Wayland would have simply provided the API, but not the underlying implementation (compositors Could have handled type implementation). They could have sidestepped this whole issue of fragmentation.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
al3rez 1y ago
i am using wayland on fedora 42 + kde, it's fine what are you talking about? if you stop running sway/hyrpland rices you'll be fine.
- lproven 1y ago
  What if someone doesn't want KDE or GNOME, or any tiling WM? What if we want some of the other desktops out there? Examples: I like Macs and macOS, with a global menu bar. I like Ubuntu's Unity desktop. It doesn't work on Wayland and won't. Unity8, AKA Lomiri, does but it is intended for handhelds with touch and is badly compromised. No global menu bar, for instance. What if we want something NeXT-like? I like GNUstep. Neither GSDE nor NEXTSPACE supports Wayland. I like Xfce. It has an experimental version but keyboard window management is broken. Xfce's compatibility with standard Windows keystrokes is one of the reasons I like it. It seems to me Wayland folks don't know these and I've yet to see a Wayland environment that supports them. E.g. Alt+Space, X to maximise. Alt+Space, N to minimise. I want full title bars, so I can use the scroll wheel on them to roll them up, as in Windowshade. E.g. https://www.windowmizer.com/ https://www.windowmizer.com/ I also want to be able to middle-click the title bar to send that window to the back of the stack. Once _every_ Linux desktop did this, but GNOME started software rot by getting rid of title bars in favour of "client side decorations" and the feature started to disappear. What if I want one of the lightweight Windows-alike desktops? MATE, Trinity, EDE, XPde? No Wayland support. What if I want a Chinese desktop with a bit of Win7 bling? DDE and UKUI both don't support Wayland. What if I want a different trad Unix environment? CDE, nsCDE, Maxx Interative, OLWM... none work on Wayland. Amiga style: amiwm doesn't work. Classic Mac style: mlvwm doesn't work.
goku12 1y ago
You could use most of those arguments verbatim and unironically create a page titled "Please don't promote X11". Meanwhile, some of the Wayland-specific complaints were solved a while ago and some weren't even Wayland's fault to begin with. I get it that some people don't want give up the old systems in favor of the shiny new technologies. I'm also on that side for some software like systemd (not debating. Systemd does offer many compelling benefits). But this article feels like complaining for the sake of it, rather than making reasonable detractions that could perhaps be addressed in Wayland. Attacking a software for just existing isn't a good strategy in FOSS. It is fundamentally about having choices.
- wmf 1y ago
  Yeah, I agree with the author that we should simplify Linux... by dropping X11 completely. While we're at it we could also drop sysvinit, RPM/DEB/Snap, ifconfig, wget, etc.
  - A907 1y ago
    I wouldnt say drop rpm deb ir ifconfig or wget but specially not snap But each of these tools should be in its proper space rpm and deb should remain in system composition not installting user installed packages for that you have snaps and flatpaks
Gud 1y ago
I run FreeBSD, virtualise OpenBSD using bhyve and run Arch using the Linuxulator. The ability to run X applications over the network is crucial to me.
- wakawaka28 1y ago
  BSD is not switching to Wayland. You might have to switch to a Linux distro that ships XLibre or something but you may also be able to switch to BSD. The real hazard is that you won't be able to get drivers for X11 and XLibre in the future, because only BSD would be using it.
  - Gud 1y ago
    I still wish to run Linux in the Linuxulator.
mnmalst 1y ago
I help (or administrate) a couple of elderly relatives with their Linux desktops. The systems use Fedora Kinoite (an older version which still runs X), a immutable distribution which updates itself without any necessary user action (flatpack and rpm-ostree). This setup is simply perfect. From time to time I log into those machines to check if everything is ok (updates ran through, backups were made and so on) or at times where the relative needs help with something. I use anydesk or rustdesk, both work pretty great with X but don't with wayland. rustdesk has an experimental wayland mode but it's unusable choppy and slow. Anydesk doesn't work with wayland at all. As mentioned above I run an older version of Fedora Kinoite because newer versions run with wayland only. What are my options in this case? I don't care if the system runs X or wayland, it just have to support this use case.
- doublepg23 1y ago
  I believe Chrome Remote Desktop worked for me in the past?
  - mnmalst 1y ago
    Thanks for the tip but only firefox is available on those systems. (And mine)
    - doublepg23 1y ago
      Is the issue with Wayland for sure or is it possible the Flatpak permissions are blocking access? I've used the app Flatseal to open up the sandbox to fix things before.
      - mnmalst 1y ago
        No it's definitely wayland. Anydesk shows a big notification that wayland is not supported and rustdesk shows a similar message informing you that wayland support is an alpha feature.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

60 points by PKop 1y ago

Missed opportunity for the (anonymous!) authors to demonstrate understanding about why some are promoting Wayland.

Only a casual user of Linux desktop computing but my experience with ui stability seems to have gotten much worse after switching to Wayland.

rtpg 1y ago

I am very open to Wayland in theory but I legit worry because it's been in the air for years and years and it still feels so far away. And some of the Wayland-y points around things like security just never felt relevant to me. Though the real pain points for me have been around the various containerization things that just cause things like my IME to barely function. At least Python 3 if you started your project on Python 3 you mostly could just get where you wanted to be.

sleepy_keita 1y ago
The IME problem was the only thing keeping me on "legacy" X11 a couple years ago. Is it still the same today?
- rtpg 1y ago
  My IME issues were so dire I went back to a Mac (well also work giving me a Mac). But my IME issues linked to snaps and the like, not Wayland.
stingraycharles 1y ago
It’s mostly application support that’s lagging, right? And of course window managers like i3 needing complete replacement, but those seem to be mostly down already.
- rtpg 1y ago
  I guess? I mean like 2 years ago I couldn't even use Wayland on my machine with an Nvidia card (I didn't try that hard, though). Like this feels super bleeding edge and in that case I really don't get how this didn't _start_ in x11 land and then take over things from there. My only hope is that money from people who "need" linux graphics to work solves this.
- queenkjuul 1y ago
  Some stuff like global hotkeys and remote desktop are Wayland problems inherently
  - yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
    I don't think inherently; Wayland could have included optional hotkey and screen sharing APIs a decade ago. It didn't, but it doesn't seem like a problem that must exist, just a failure to execute.
  - A907 1y ago
    Remote desktop isnt a problem just remote desktop as part of wayland itself, i run sunshine on wayland just fine
- puffybuf 1y ago
  i3 has pretty much been replaced by sway for me. Works great I have no problems with wayland as a regular user
eurleif 1y ago
X11 session support is being removed from the default install of Ubuntu with the upcoming 25.10 release. Gnome and KDE Plasma plan to remove X11 session support entirely within the next few years. Ready or not, Wayland is here.
- throw0101c 1y ago
  > X11 session support is being removed from the default install of Ubuntu with the upcoming 25.10 release. Currently I can SSH from my MacBook/XQuartz onto an Ubuntu/Linux system and run xterm (or whatever). How does that work in the future?
  - bmandale 1y ago
    apt install xorg
  - A907 1y ago
    You cant that has never been a feature that wayland had planned but there are other tools that can do aimilar like waypipe or rdp or something like sunshine or something like VNC but there is nothing as a part of wayland and doesnt need to be wayland isnt complete reimplementation of X
xtracto 1y ago
All engineers implementing Wayland should read Joel Spolsky's seminal article on software rewrite https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... And Martin Fowler article on Strangle Fig pattern. It's been a waste of resources to have yet another biffurcation on the Linux Desktop ecosystem. It's pretty sad.
- A907 1y ago
  Joel spolsky article isnt that good and kinda has survivorship bias written over it. Focus is on few cases where rewrites werent successful without trully looking into why. Also it predicates on idea that Xorg and x11 would have stayed and wouldnt have been rewritten which btw was always the plan as it was riddled with temporary hacks, insecure and had lot of legacy code/legacy protocols, things that would require loads of rewrites so the talk always was X12 wouldnt be backwards compatible and a new from scratch version of X11 protocols(with xorg being written from scratch to supprot x12 protocols) but instead of doing that they went with wayland as it already existed
cratermoon 1y ago
> it's been in the air for years and years and it still feels so far away Wayland is the Project Xanadu of UI software.

kstrauser 1y ago

I’m not a fan of Wayland or a detractor of X. I’m not personally invested in either of them. I couldn’t care less what’s pushing pixels at my screen as long as it works. That said, what you need to know about Wayland is that the X.org devs mostly migrated to it en masse because they said X had hit an evolutionary dead end and couldn’t be dragged into the present, by the design of it. These were the people who were already maintaining X and presumably liked it. I doubt there were a lot of haters in that crowd. It’s not like someone invented Wayland and shoved the X devs out of the way. The X devs largely became Wayland devs because they believe it’s the better path forward. I don’t really know how I could argue against them.

msgodel 1y ago
It looks to me like there are quite a few more basic features fundamentally incompatible with Wayland's architecture than X's. Maybe X has issues but Wayland is still a regression.
- kstrauser 1y ago
  That seems at odds with what the people who wrote both of them believe.
  - wink 1y ago
    But that doesn't make it necessarily untrue for the person you replied to. People have different requirements and I heard tons of stories of "this doesn't work, that doesn't work". It's been slowly improving, but many people also just got burnt because of early hype. I don't remember any specific wayland problem in my personal recent history, but it took years to get there.
    - msgodel 1y ago
      It's not just the hype, it's the "you're holding it wrong" gaslighting. I have zero tolerance for that sort of thing these days. At this point I'll use kernel virtual terminals before I use Wayland.

do_not_redeem 1y ago

A lot of wild quotes here > Training Overhead > $5,000-$15,000 per IT staff member for multi-compositor environment training When's the last time your IT department gave you "multi-compositor training"? > Software Replacement > $500-$2000 in software replacement costs when tools don't work under Wayland > Multi-Monitor > X11: Reliable, consistent behavior > Wayland: Compositor-dependent, often buggy > Distro wars intensified: Choice of display server becomes a major differentiator Definitely written by AI

superkuh 1y ago
Well, most of the time applications don't work around the new problems wayland has introduced. Most applications on most wayland compositors cannot be used by people who need screen readers. These days in many places supporting the differently abled legally is on the way out, but I still think it's a good thing. And yeah, the dollar figures smell, but this is a real problem that the waylands introduced by not being a single wayland. One that has so far only been addressed by GNOME in their compositor by introducing two entirely new acccesibility protocols with no support for the last 30 years of accesibility. If you want to actually be following the guidelines of American's with Disabilities Act of 1990 this might matter to you.

viraptor 1y ago

They're way too late now. The question is not about promotion anymore, just about when will the alternative to away. This page kinda made sense 2 years ago.

lifthrasiir 1y ago

Without necessarily supporting or opposing the statements (because I have no opinion about Wayland after all), the first public mention of this website seems to be [1]. [1] https://x.com/probonopd/status/1955387873659850828 https://x.com/probonopd/status/1955387873659850828

lproven 1y ago
Interesting. It could be -- he maintains a Github gist: "Think twice before abandoning X11. Wayland breaks everything!" https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d1f2277 https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d... This could be a web-ified version. I have emailed with ProbonoPD, AKA Simon Peter. He is smart, motivated, and knows his stuff. He is the man behind Appimage (which I personally prefer to either Snap or Flatpak) as well as the "Hello System" FreeBSD distro.

jofer 1y ago

As much as X11 is an overly complex and dated protocol, this article hits its mark well. My current desktop is actually running Wayland, but I still need X11 for a variety of reasons. I see the development advantages of Wayland, but not the practical advantage as a user. And even as a developer, X11 is stable and well known (albeit definitely weird in places). At the end of the day, things worked perfectly on X11 and my audio and video and various apps still glitch a lot on Wayland even after all these years. Most of that is not exactly Wayland's fault, but it highlights the advantage of X11. It's the devil you know (and everyone has worked out a lot of edge cases for).

A907 1y ago
I ahve to disagree its far from hitting a mark, most of it is stuff that are solved for years and some that are just plain not true

ugh123 1y ago

>Signatories One guy.

lordofgibbons 1y ago

The primary argument is to avoid fragmentation sprinkled with some other not-well-thought-through points. Distros aren't rolling back to X11. That ship has sailed. You can either help move things along, or drag your feet and increase fragmentation - the thing being complained about.. Everything under the "security" section of this article is so unbelievably wrong, that I'm not sure if it's worth anybody's time to refute one by one.

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rtpg 1y ago
I don't have a dog in this fight, I would be curious to know about the security stuff. Like is screen sharing a massive pain? Or is it "just" a prompt kind of like in the browser? Stuff like global hotkeys sounds unfun tho
- queenkjuul 1y ago
  The problem with screen sharing is if you're trying to share a headless remote machine with nobody at the console to approve the request. I don't think there's a proper solution there yet (which worries me, that's exactly how I run one of my machines at home)
  - rtpg 1y ago
    Yeah seems like there should be _some_ mechanism in place, though I'll admit that it's not immediately obvious what that should be.
    - A907 1y ago
      Problem is that what is that mechanism that doesnt compromise security
  - A907 1y ago
    In my experiance you only have to do it once at least on gnome

ElectricalUnion 1y ago

> Hardware Support: Nvidia users face particular challenges, and many specialized hardware configurations simply don't work reliably. > The XLibre project continues this legacy with active community development. Guess what? Nvidia users also "face particular challenges", and many normal hardware configurations simply don't work reliably under XLibre either. I guess Linus was right, don't use Nvidia.

goku12 1y ago
The page describes it as if it was Wayland's mistake for causing Nvidia customers so much grief. It was Nvidia who insisted on basing Wayland on EGLStreams instead of on GBM like everybody else. Even the open source nouveau driver used GBM on Nvidia graphics. But even those problems are a few years in the past at this point after Nvidia decided to offer GBM support on their proprietary drivers. And consistent effort has been put into solving outstanding issues like screen glitches that were eventually resolved with explicit sync. These complaints remind me of how Linux was criticized more than a decade ago for not not being compatible with proprietary applications, while foss applications worked just fine on proprietary platforms. While technically correct, it misses the whole point, seemingly rather intentionally.

nixosbestos 1y ago

I literally don't have the words to look down my nose at this. Former X11 contributor, compositor contributor, active distro maintainer. I just can't. I laughed. I scoffed. I incredulously looked at how much time someone with some braincells put into this. I don't care, I'm saying it. Fuck your fragmentation whining. USERS WANT THEIR SHIT TO WORK. They expect high refresh monitors to work. They expect to be able to use a fking external monitor alongside their hidpi laptop. They need to be able to use actual fractional scaling, again with varying dpi monitors. They want their shit to work reliably and not tear. Wayland delivers on this. Now. In a way X11 never EVER will. God Jesus fuck i cannot believe how much people's time has been wasted on this bullshit useless banal conversation.

cratermoon 1y ago
They expect screensavers to be able to lock the screen. https://web.archive.org/web/20250714073924/https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/man1.html#17 https://web.archive.org/web/20250714073924/https://www.jwz.o...
- nixosbestos 1y ago
  Yeah I'm so, just so upset XScreensaver can't lock a Wayland session. Jfc, good company there with a jwz link. There's so much wrong with wanting or thinking an XScreensaver app would somehow work with a random Wayland compositor. But it does require ignorance of the exact security changes made to the model when moving from X11 to Wayland. I can't. I can't. I should never waste my time in these threads. Edit: i do also find it amusing how much of that manpage is dedicated to calling out how fragile and broken X11 is. You can't make this stuff up. Edit2; I actually can't get over the irony of linking an app that notoriously has had a storied history because of X11's architecture. I can't name the number of time X11 sessions were not locked properly. Whatever. Going to keep happily enjoying the basic features that every other desktop OS user expects that I get with KDE, gnome, cosmic, away, Niri, and more, in Wayland. Good luck unclutching y'all's pearls.
  - cratermoon 1y ago

comex 1y ago

This reads as significantly AI-assisted and repetitive. And some of the points are really questionable, like claiming “Color management becomes inconsistent” when X11 doesn’t even support HDR, claiming that Linux containers and namespaces somehow mitigate X11’s security issues (that’s not how it works!), and talking about some outdated issues like NVIDIA support and SSH forwarding (both of which shouldn’t be an issue anymore from what I’ve heard).

SpecialistK 1y ago
The website layout also looks a lot like what I've seen Claude 4 generate via VS Code.
queenkjuul 1y ago
If SSH isn't an issue anymore, I've yet to find the solution
- wmf 1y ago
  The solution is waypipe but it's still not as easy as ssh -W.
slowmovintarget 1y ago
A lot of the complaints are about supposedly missing features when X11 and Wayland aren't the same things, IIRC. X11 is a big ball of mud with all kinds of features. Wayland is an attempt to do one thing, and only one thing. You must bring in the other features (like window management and remote networking) as adjacent components. "This Phillip's-head screwdriver can't cut cheese or open a wine bottle."
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y ago
  > Wayland is an attempt to do one thing, and only one thing. You must bring in the other features (like window management and remote networking) as adjacent components. It's fine to separate a small core protocol from extensions that flesh out the rest of the features. Wayland, however, did the small core and didn't bother to actually implement the rest, so 16 years on it still doesn't have feature parity. > "This Phillip's-head screwdriver can't cut cheese or open a wine bottle." Then stop handing me a screwdriver and telling me I should use it instead of my multitool.

throwabayhay 1y ago

They mention macOS as "one platform with consistent APIs and behavior". But macOS (or NeXTStep, as it started out as), an actual UNIX system (certified!), chose not to use X11 to achieve that, but to entirely roll their own.

wmf 1y ago
The point is that Quartz Compositor is mandatory on macOS. There aren't different incompatible APIs.

ben0x539 1y ago

Unfortunate that this page largely shills XLibre, the X fork by the guy who got ejected from contributing to Xorg when he landed a bunch of code that was blatantly untested, leading to tons of his commits getting reverted. Like, I am not a fan of Wayland, still using X on my machine, but from what I've seen of his posting, this guy isn't great PR for the "X is fine actually" camp.

000ooo000 1y ago
Came here to say this. >What We're Losing >1987-2024: X11 Evolution >37 years of continuous development, bug fixes, and feature additions. Stable, predictable, and extensively documented. The XLibre project continues this legacy with active community development. This is a very charitable interpretation of the situation, and to suggest XLibre, which got forked 2 months ago, is the future is insane. Would be a different story if XLibre had been around a few years but 2 months is very young..
queenkjuul 1y ago
Yeah once i saw XLibre I decided this was a joke, then it became apparent everything after the first section is AI i stopped reading entirely. Wayback is the more promising project, if you can run an X11 display manager on Wayland you can still do XRDP and SSH, is my understanding. Those are the two features i really depend on

DiabloD3 1y ago

Wow, what a crackpot website. The ship sailed when Keith Packard, brilliant programmer and X.org project lead, decided that the era of X11 is over, and no further development will happen to the Xserver, and that the rootless Xserver for Wayland, in the near future, will be the only actually supported version. This lead to the weird fork of Xlibre that is more about politics than it is about technological solutions. Everyone has chosen to abandon the security nightmare that is X11, somehow it took 15 years instead of 5. But hey, we finally made it.

FloatArtifact 1y ago

Accessibility is dead to me on Wayland... Until emulate key, mouse presses in other windows, registering global hotkeys that isn't a hack and Enumerating window title and executable. Wayland fragmented development efforts on Linux. It's gotten a little better as some compositors consolidate, but still pretty awful to cobble together a stack that works for the features above.

FloatArtifact 1y ago

If Wayland would have simply provided the API, but not the underlying implementation (compositors Could have handled type implementation). They could have sidestepped this whole issue of fragmentation.

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al3rez 1y ago

i am using wayland on fedora 42 + kde, it's fine what are you talking about? if you stop running sway/hyrpland rices you'll be fine.

lproven 1y ago
What if someone doesn't want KDE or GNOME, or any tiling WM? What if we want some of the other desktops out there? Examples: I like Macs and macOS, with a global menu bar. I like Ubuntu's Unity desktop. It doesn't work on Wayland and won't. Unity8, AKA Lomiri, does but it is intended for handhelds with touch and is badly compromised. No global menu bar, for instance. What if we want something NeXT-like? I like GNUstep. Neither GSDE nor NEXTSPACE supports Wayland. I like Xfce. It has an experimental version but keyboard window management is broken. Xfce's compatibility with standard Windows keystrokes is one of the reasons I like it. It seems to me Wayland folks don't know these and I've yet to see a Wayland environment that supports them. E.g. Alt+Space, X to maximise. Alt+Space, N to minimise. I want full title bars, so I can use the scroll wheel on them to roll them up, as in Windowshade. E.g. https://www.windowmizer.com/ https://www.windowmizer.com/ I also want to be able to middle-click the title bar to send that window to the back of the stack. Once _every_ Linux desktop did this, but GNOME started software rot by getting rid of title bars in favour of "client side decorations" and the feature started to disappear. What if I want one of the lightweight Windows-alike desktops? MATE, Trinity, EDE, XPde? No Wayland support. What if I want a Chinese desktop with a bit of Win7 bling? DDE and UKUI both don't support Wayland. What if I want a different trad Unix environment? CDE, nsCDE, Maxx Interative, OLWM... none work on Wayland. Amiga style: amiwm doesn't work. Classic Mac style: mlvwm doesn't work.

goku12 1y ago

You could use most of those arguments verbatim and unironically create a page titled "Please don't promote X11". Meanwhile, some of the Wayland-specific complaints were solved a while ago and some weren't even Wayland's fault to begin with. I get it that some people don't want give up the old systems in favor of the shiny new technologies. I'm also on that side for some software like systemd (not debating. Systemd does offer many compelling benefits). But this article feels like complaining for the sake of it, rather than making reasonable detractions that could perhaps be addressed in Wayland. Attacking a software for just existing isn't a good strategy in FOSS. It is fundamentally about having choices.

wmf 1y ago
Yeah, I agree with the author that we should simplify Linux... by dropping X11 completely. While we're at it we could also drop sysvinit, RPM/DEB/Snap, ifconfig, wget, etc.
- A907 1y ago
  I wouldnt say drop rpm deb ir ifconfig or wget but specially not snap But each of these tools should be in its proper space rpm and deb should remain in system composition not installting user installed packages for that you have snaps and flatpaks

Gud 1y ago

I run FreeBSD, virtualise OpenBSD using bhyve and run Arch using the Linuxulator. The ability to run X applications over the network is crucial to me.

wakawaka28 1y ago
BSD is not switching to Wayland. You might have to switch to a Linux distro that ships XLibre or something but you may also be able to switch to BSD. The real hazard is that you won't be able to get drivers for X11 and XLibre in the future, because only BSD would be using it.
- Gud 1y ago
  I still wish to run Linux in the Linuxulator.

mnmalst 1y ago

I help (or administrate) a couple of elderly relatives with their Linux desktops. The systems use Fedora Kinoite (an older version which still runs X), a immutable distribution which updates itself without any necessary user action (flatpack and rpm-ostree). This setup is simply perfect. From time to time I log into those machines to check if everything is ok (updates ran through, backups were made and so on) or at times where the relative needs help with something. I use anydesk or rustdesk, both work pretty great with X but don't with wayland. rustdesk has an experimental wayland mode but it's unusable choppy and slow. Anydesk doesn't work with wayland at all. As mentioned above I run an older version of Fedora Kinoite because newer versions run with wayland only. What are my options in this case? I don't care if the system runs X or wayland, it just have to support this use case.

doublepg23 1y ago
I believe Chrome Remote Desktop worked for me in the past?
- mnmalst 1y ago
  Thanks for the tip but only firefox is available on those systems. (And mine)
  - doublepg23 1y ago
    Is the issue with Wayland for sure or is it possible the Flatpak permissions are blocking access? I've used the app Flatseal to open up the sandbox to fix things before.
    - mnmalst 1y ago
      No it's definitely wayland. Anydesk shows a big notification that wayland is not supported and rustdesk shows a similar message informing you that wayland support is an alpha feature.

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