17 ms·

Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

• gsliepen 9mo ago
  A rather big problem is that Wayland is just a protocol, not an implementation. There are many competing implementations, like Gnome, KDE and wlroots. The problems you have with one of them might not appear in another. The reference compositor, Weston, is not really usable as a daily driver. So while with Xorg you have a solid base, and desktops are implemented on top of that, with Wayland the each desktop is reinventing the wheel, and each of them has to deal with all the quirks of the graphics drivers. I think this is a big problem with the architecture of Wayland. There really should be a standard library that all desktops use. Wlroots aims to be one, but I don't see Gnome and KDE moving to it anytime soon.
  • PunchyHamster 9mo ago
    X.org picked the right level of abstraction (even if implementation could use a rewrite). No WM should care about handling raw inputs or forced to be proxy between driver and the app for the output (it could be, if it needed/wanted, but there is no reason to add another layer of abstraction and cycle-wasting for most use cases). And it shows in complexity and even in power use. Wayland basically failed to learn the lessons from X11
    • dotancohen 9mo ago
      That's easy to say in hindsight. It is only with the specific failures of Wayland that we see which lessons it could have learned from X11.
      • hsbauauvhabzb 9mo ago
        I think the lack of base abstraction layer was pretty obvious from the start.
        • the_why_of_y 9mo ago
          Since this is a Wayland thread, obviously the problem is a lack of a common implementation, which deviates from UNIX tradition. For those who want to complain how lack of choice between multiple implementations is an obvious problem and deviates from UNIX tradition, please wait until the next systemd thread.
          • hsbauauvhabzb 9mo ago
            Weird strawman, but you do you.
      • charcircuit 9mo ago
        >That's easy to say in hindsight That's an easy way to excuse bad design. Look at the designs of other operating systems designed by professionals and you won't see windows managers having to handle raw inputs or being in the same process as the compositor.
        • the_why_of_y 9mo ago
          Examples of other operating systems allegedly not designed by professionals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_Window_Manager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_Window_Manager The Desktop Window Manager is a compositing window manager, meaning that each program has a buffer that it writes data to; DWM then composites each program's buffer into a final image. https://web.archive.org/web/20040925095929/http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/COnceptual/SystemOverview/SystemArchitecture/chapter_3_section_4.html https://web.archive.org/web/20040925095929/http://developer.... The Quartz Compositor layer of Mac OS X comprises the window server and the (private) system programming interfaces (SPI) implemented by the window server. In this layer are the facilities responsible for rudimentary screen displays, window compositing and management, event routing, and cursor management. The window server is a single system-wide process that coordinates low-level windowing behavior and enforces a fundamental uniformity in what appears on the screen. It is a lightweight server in that it does not do any rendering itself, but instead communicates with the client graphics libraries layered on top of it. It is “agnostic” in terms of a drawing model. The window server has few dependencies on other system services and libraries. It relies on the kernel environment’s I/O Kit (specifically, device drivers built with the I/O Kit) in order to communicate with the frame buffer, the input infrastructure, and input and output devices.
          • charcircuit 9mo ago
            Window management on Windows is done by Explore which talks to DWM where the underlying windows live. Window management on MacOS is done by Dock which talks to Quartz Compositor where the underlying windows live.
            • abhinavk 9mo ago
      • secure 9mo ago
        No, the lesson of “separate display server from window manager” was very clear when Wayland was started. People have been discussing this over the years ever since. (See also “client-side decorations” for another part of this issue that was heavily discussed.)
        • mananaysiempre 9mo ago
          I seem to remember reading in an old paper (1990s?) that the asynchronous nature of the connection between the X server and the window manager results in essentially unfixable protocol-level races.
          • immibis 9mo ago
            Wayland has a philosophy of "every frame is perfect", which means fixing every race condition. However, X11 doesn't have this philosophy. If the window manager is slow and doesn't respond to a notification that a window has been resized, drawing the new window content over the old borders is the correct thing to do. What sense does it make to freeze the whole display just for a window border? Similarly, tearing gets pixels to the screen faster.
            • silon42 9mo ago
              Reacting somehow to user input, even if not perfect, is more important for me... That's why we have HW cursors, and frame interpolation in games, etc...
              • gf000 9mo ago
                HW cursor is an implementation detail, and are used by basically every wayland implementation. And reacting is one thing, big black rectangles blinking on screen is another.
            • mananaysiempre 9mo ago
              The races I recall being described were substantially worse, but that’s largely beside my point. My point is that, now that bare fillrate and framebuffer memory haven’t been a limiting factor for 15 to 20 years, it is a reasonable choice to build a desktop graphics system with the invariant of every frame being perfect—not even because of the user experience, but because that allows the developer to unequivocally classify every imperfect frame as a bug. Invariants are nice like that. And once that decision has been made, you cannot have asynchronous out-of-process window management. (I’m not convinced that out-of-process but synchronous is useful.) A reasonable choice is not necessarily the right choice, but neither is it moronic, and I’ve yet to see a discussion of that choice that doesn’t start with calling (formerly-X11) Wayland designers morons for not doing the thing that X11 did (if in not so many words). To be clear, I’m still low-key pissed that a crash in my desktop shell, which was deliberately designed as a dynamic-language extensibility free-for-all in the vein of Emacs or TeX, crashes my entire graphical session, also as a result of deliberate design. The combination of those two reasonable decisions is, in fact, moronic. But it didn’t need to be done that way even on Wayland.
      • exe34 9mo ago
        No, this was a major point of discussion right at the start. They chose to ignore it.
        • naikrovek 9mo ago
          They should have looked at Plan9 and the Rio window manager there. I don’t know how GPU acceleration would have fit in, but I bet it would have been trivial provided the drivers were sufficient. All of Rio in Plan9 is 6K lines of code and it’s a more powerful display protocol and window manager (all of the fundamentals are there but none of the niceties) than anything else I’ve ever seen. The defacto way to remote into a Plan9 system from any OS even today is to use a client side program which implements it all the same way Plan9 does.
          • tuna74 9mo ago
            The beauty with Free Software and Linux distros is that "they" don't have to do it, anyone who wants to (including you!) can do it.
            • Oxodao 9mo ago
              In theory. In practice, every app is designed for X11 or Wayland, building your own means you need to follow what most people use anyway if you want to have any working app on your system, or rewrite every app yourself
              • tuna74 9mo ago
                5-10 years ago there were no apps designed for Wayland. If you build it they (app developers) might actually come!
            • exe34 9mo ago
              yep, that's why I stuck with x11, as it still does everything I need it to do. it's actually never crashed since they stopped fixing it.
      • DonHopkins 9mo ago
        It also failed to learn the lessons it should have learned from NeWS.
      • StopDisinfo910 9mo ago
        Disagree. You need this amount of control to be able to properly filter and secure things. Wayland actually learnt that from X security extensions failure. To me, Wayland failures are more on the organisational and change management part. In inside, it would probably have been better to provide a core library rather a reference implementation. Also, a lot of pieces needed to fall into place once the ball started rolling and some of them like PipeWire took quite some time to be ready. The sorry fragmentation and complete unwillingness to work together of the various Linux DE also didn't help. I think Gnome constant NIH syndrome and overall capture of Freedesktop has a lot to do with where we are.
      • hakfoo 9mo ago
        Wayland should have been been a research project rather than a full replacement for X11. Build it as a proof of concept implementation with just enough functionality that enthusiasts can get it up and running and add to the conversation early on. Then when you build the real X11 killer you can say "we know people want media keys and screen sharing/capture to Just Work so they're table stakes" and "the hardware-support side of a compositor is a big lift, so maybe we delegate that away from the code that positions windows and draws menus on the screen"
    • TacticalCoder 9mo ago
      > Wayland basically failed to learn the lessons from X11 To me the biggest issue of Wayland is that it aimed, on purpose, to imitate Windows or OS X or any GUI that is not built on the idea of a client/server protocol. From TFA: > I’ll also need a solution for running Emacs remotely. If only there was something conceived from the start as a client/server display protocol...
      • gspr 9mo ago
        For remote applications, Waypipe works fine for me at least.
      • hulitu 9mo ago
        > To me the biggest issue of Wayland is that it aimed, on purpose, to imitate Windows Freedesktop.org really looks like a Microsoft subsidiary. Only if they could learn from the past.
    • jauntywundrkind 9mo ago
      The blanket statement "right level of abstraction" betrays a pretty narrow minded view. Right abstraction for what? The big thing to me is, Wayland servers have way way less responsibility than X. X had a huge Herculean task, of doing everything the video card needed. It was a big honking display server because it took up a huge chunk of the stack to run a desktop. Wayland servers all use kernel mode setting kernel buffers, so much more. So much of the job is done. There is a huge shared code base that Wayland has that X never had, good Kernel's with actual drivers for GPUs. If we wanted one stable platform that we could not innovate on, that was what it was and we all had to deal with it... We'd all just use Mac. punchyHamster is saying The Cathedral is the right model and The Bazaar is the bad model, of the famous Cathedral vs Bazaar. But the model really does not enable fast iteration & broader exploration of problem spaces. The ask doesn't even make sense: there are incredibly good libraries for making Wayland servers (wlroots, smithay, more). And they're not always even huge, but do all the core protocols. Some people really want professional industrial direct software that they never have to think about that only works one way and will only evolve slowly and deliberately. I'm thankful as fuck Wayland developers aren't catering to these people, and I think that's the wrong abstraction for open source and the wrong excitement to allow timeless systems to be built grown and evolved. We should avoid critical core dependencies, so that we can send into the future, without being tied to particular code-bases. That seems obvious and proposing otherwise to consign ourselves to small limp fates.
    • gf000 9mo ago
      > No WM should care about handling raw inputs or forced to be proxy between driver and the app for the output But.. why? How many WM is feasible to have? Is it really an area where we want a "wide waist"? Should a WM be its own thing? Why not just make it an extension/plugin of a desktop environment, and have only a few of the latter? Being a library call is more efficient and easier to maintain, over maintaining an IPC API (especially that with X, X is just a dumb proxy to the compositor). > And it shows in complexity and even in power use You surely mean that X is more complex and has a higher power use, right?
  • mindcrash 9mo ago
    > The problems you have with one of them might not appear in another. Because both have their own portal implementation/compositor with their own issues and service spec implementations. KDE has xdg-desktop-portal-kde, and GNOME has xdg-desktop-portal-gnome. On top of that each (still) has their own display server; KDE has KWin, and GNOME has Mutter. > The reference compositor, Weston, is not really usable as a daily driver. Weston is probably good for two things: Running things in Kiosk mode and showcasing how to build a compositor. That's why you should at least use xdg-desktop-portal if you are not running KDE or GNOME. But this is a vanilla compositor (without implementations of any freedesktop desktop protocols), and as-is has no knowledge of things like screenshots or screensharing. If you run any wlroots based compositor except Hyprland you should run xdg-desktop-portal-wlr which does implement the desktop protocols org.freedesktop.impl.portal.Screenshot and org.freedesktop.impl.portal.ScreenCast. If you use Hyprland you should run its fork xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland instead which additionaly has things like file picking built in. Additionally you can/should run xdg-desktop-portal-gtk and/or xdg-desktop-portal-kde to respectively get GTK ("GNOME") and QT ("KDE") specific implementations for desktop protocols. And you absolutely should use xdg-desktop-portal-gtk instead of xdg-desktop-portal-gnome, because xdg-desktop-portal-gnome really doesn't like to share with others. > With Wayland the each desktop is reinventing the wheel Not really true, as I mentioned earlier there's still a DE specific display server running in the background (like Mutter and KWin-X11 for X11), and graphics in each compositor is driven directly by the graphics driver in the kernel (through KMS/DRM). In fact, on paper and in theory, the architecture looks really good: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html https://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html. However, in practice, some pretty big chunks of functionality on the protocol level is missing but the freedesktop contributors, and the GNOME and KDE teams will get there eventually.
    • WhyNotHugo 9mo ago
      The fact that we need the entire xdg-desktop-portal stack for screen sharing on browsers is a major annoyance. We now have a standardised extension for screencasting and screencopy (formerly it was not standard, but had been around for years), but browsers only support the Flatpak stack, which has a lot of moving parts and IPC. Doing out-of-band IPC for this is kind of pointless when the client and the server already have a Wayland connection to begin with. Outside of the domain of Firefox/Chromium, screencasting is much seamless. But 90% of the screen-sharing happens in browsers.
  • rjzzleep 9mo ago
    I use it as my daily driver. I used Sway for a very long time, tried Hyprland for a bit and am now running niri as my daily driver. Sway and niri are wlroots based, Hyprland at some point rolled its own because they didn't want to wait for wlroots protocol extensions. Sometimes I have to switch to Gnome to do screen sharing. 2026 and you will still run into plenty of issues with random behaviour, especially if you run anything based on wlroots. Wine apps will randomly have pointer location issues if you run multiple displays. Crashes, video sharing issues with random apps, 10 bit issues. Maybe in 2027 we'll finally make it. But I feel like these 20 years of development could have been better spent on something that doesn't end up with 4 or more implementations.
    • abhinavk 9mo ago
      niri is based on smithay which is also used by COSMIC.
      • rjzzleep 9mo ago
        I used rust for my sleep daemon, but personally I think rust is a suboptimal language for efficiently writing wayland code.
    • myaccountonhn 9mo ago
      There also isn't nearly as much choice for wms. My favorite WM is cwm, but the closest alternative on Wayland is Hikari which is abandoned. I noticed it's far far more work to build a wm for Wayland than it is for Xorg.
      • rjzzleep 9mo ago
        Every single one of them has to fix the same set of bugs in different ways even if they share a wm library like wlroots. So unless you manage to get a critical mass on your wm, there is no way you can maintain it on your own. If I believed in conspiracy theories, I would have said that Redhat designed it to make sure they can control the ecosystem, but I think it's just over designed in all the wrong ways.
  • imtringued 9mo ago
    The real problem with post X compositors is that the Wayland developers assumed that the compositor developers will develop additional working groups (an input protocol, a window management protocol, etc) on top of the working group that exclusively focuses on display aka Wayland. Wayland was supposed to be one protocol out of many, with the idea being that if Wayland ever turns out to be a problem it is small in scope and can be replaced easily. People who are thinking of a Wayland replacement at this stage, mostly because they don't like it, will waste their time reinventing the mature parts instead of thinking about how to solve the remaining problems. There is also a misunderstanding of the ideology the Wayland developers subscribe to. They want Wayland to be display only, but that doesn't mean they would oppose an input protocol or a window protocol. They just don't want everything to be under the Wayland umbrella like systemd.
    • michaelmrose 9mo ago
      If they thought this then they misunderstood the people and problem space basically everything of importance.
    • mrighele 9mo ago
      > People who are thinking of a Wayland replacement at this stage, mostly because they don't like it, will waste their time reinventing the mature parts instead of thinking about how to solve the remaining problems. Now, if only people deciding to replace X11 with Wayland heeded your suggestion...
    • tasuki 9mo ago
      A very insightful comment. I was a victim to exactly the misunderstanding you explained (as are many other commenters here). Thank you!
    • hulitu 9mo ago
      > Wayland developers assumed that the compositor developers will develop additional working groups so, as Douglas Adams put it: someone elses problem.
  • ezst 9mo ago
    Every major DE had its very own compositing implementation back in X11, so what was "easy" got to be more standardized, and what was hard remained so.
  • thayne 9mo ago
    Technically, X is also just a protocol. But there was just one main implementation of the server (X.org), and just a couple implementations of the client library (xlib and xcb). There isn't any technical reason we couldn't have a single standardized library, at the abstraction level of wlroots.
  • gf000 9mo ago
    > all the quirks of the graphics drivers This should ideally be solved at the kernel level - and I would argue it is solved there. Linux has the DRM abstraction for this very reason. Wayland actually builds on top of this abstraction, while Xorg was sitting in a strange position, not squarely in userspace.
• OtomotO 9mo ago
  If I could in 2020.... Maybe?
• jgb1984 9mo ago
  For me wayland offers only downsides, without any upsides. I feel the general idea behind it (pushing all complexity and work onto other layers) is broken. I'll stick to xorg and openbox for many years to come.
  • benrutter 9mo ago
    I think then big part is maintenance, xorg doesn't look likely to be maintained long into the future in the way Wayland will be. And a lot of the Xorg maintainers are now working in Wayland. So good or bad idea, Wayland is slowly shifting to being the default in virtue of being the most maintained up to date compositor.
    • safety1st 9mo ago
      There's actually a very active fork of Xorg called Xlibre, started by a former Xorg contributor, which seeks to "revitalize and modernize" X: https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver?tab=readme-ov-file https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver?tab=readme-ov-file
      • Hendrikto 9mo ago
        This guy started that Xlibre fork over throwing a fit because he was told not to break Xorg with his contributions, and he ranted that he just wants to be able to merge whatever he wants. I would not trust the stability of that fork at all.
        • safety1st 9mo ago
          Looks to me like he's a belligerent personality, but probably not wrong when he says Redhat has an agenda that involves suppressing progress on Xorg and forcing Wayland on users instead. I was open minded toward Wayland when the project was started... in 2008. We are 18 years down the road now. It has failed to deliver a usable piece of software for the desktop. That's long enough for me to consider it a failed project. If it still exists, it's probably for the wrong reasons (or at the least, reasons unrelated to any version of desktop Linux I want to run, like perhaps it has use in the embedded space).
• forgotpwd16 9mo ago
  Heh, interesting seeing we use pretty much the same things, i3+NixOS+urxvt+zsh+Emacs+rofi+maim+xdotool, only differentiating in browser choice (it's Firefox for me) and (me) not using any term multiplexer. >So from my perspective, switching from this existing, flawlessly working stack (for me) to Sway only brings downsides. Kudos to Michael for even attempting it. Personally nowadays unless my working stack stops, well, working, or there're significant benefits to be found, don't really feel even putting the effort to try the shiny new things out.
  • WhyNotHugo 9mo ago
    > Kudos to Michael for even attempting it. And for taking the time to thoroughly document real issues.
• xerxes901 9mo ago
  Was expecting some real unproductive and entitled whining based on the title, but was pleasantly surprised - someone actually investigating and debugging their wayland issues rather than putting their head in the sand and screaming “X11 FOREVER!!!”
  • tdemin 9mo ago
    [dead]
• ryandrake 9mo ago
  I still don't know why I would want to use it. The benefits don't seem to outweigh the costs yet, and xorg is tried and true. So many Linux articles and forum posts about fixing problems with your desktop graphics start with "If you're using Wayland, go back to xorg, it'll probably fix the problem you're seeing." You don't always have to replace something that works with something that doesn't but is "modern." My guess is that we'll only start seeing Wayland adoption when distributions start forcing it or making it a strong default, like what happened with systemd.
  • pshirshov 9mo ago
    Working fractional scaling
    • przmk 9mo ago
      I would venture to say that there is little overlap between X11 users and people with high-DPI screens.
      • secure 9mo ago
        I’ve been using X11 with high-DPI screens since 2013, but with integer scaling (200% or 300%), never fractional scaling.
      • RealStickman_ 9mo ago
        Nobody's going to buy monitors where they need fractional scaling or multiple monitors with mixed DPI if they know it's broken.
        • physicles 9mo ago
          Everyone’s so excited about the wave if windows users coming to Linux. Those people already have monitors. I switched in 2018 and was surprised I couldn’t use fractional scaling on one monitor like I’d been doing for years on windows.
• edent 9mo ago
  I've been running Wayland on a Framework laptop and it just works. Droves my 4K external monitor, quickly switches to single screen, does fractional scaling well, runs all my apps without complaint. I had an old Chromebook which had Lubuntu on it - screen tearing was driving me crazy so I switched to Wayland and it is buttery smooth. No mean feat given the decrepit hardware. I'm sure someone will be along to tell me that I'm wrong - but I've yet to experience any downsides, other than people telling me I'm wrong.
  • ablob 9mo ago
    Do downsides not exist if you are lucky enough to not experience them?
  • yjftsjthsd-h 9mo ago
    > I'm sure someone will be along to tell me that I'm wrong - but I've yet to experience any downsides, other than people telling me I'm wrong. That's fine as long as it goes both ways. If Wayland works for you, great. Equally, for some of us it doesn't work.
• everdrive 9mo ago
  I'm not very familiar with Wayland, and the fact that XWayland exists means that I don't really have much sense for whether a given app is using Wayland or not. I also don't do anything very fancy. I have a single, sub-4k monitor and don't use HDR or other things. Am I using Wayland? Sometimes? Most of the time? I'm really not 100% sure.
• OsrsNeedsf2P 9mo ago
  Can anyone recommend an autoclicker they actively use on Wayland? I've been using ydotool but the daemon service is janky (fails to startup/shutdown frequently, also had issues where half my inputs don't work while it's running)
  • embedding-shape 9mo ago
    > I've been using ydotool but the daemon service is janky (fails to startup/shutdown frequently, I'd be investigating that issue instead, should have errors in systemd/journalctl or whatever you use for managing daemons. I'm using ydotool on Arch, pretty much all defaults, together with a homegrown voice dictation thing, and it's working 100% of the times.
  • loyalcinnamon 9mo ago
    I use theclicker(https://crates.io/crates/theclicker https://crates.io/crates/theclicker), it wraps your mouse as a new mouse (you will need to set sentivity in settings for the new mouse). I can get 40CPS and mainly use it in idle games It works nicely for me but as it uses /dev/input/eventX i don't know if it's consistent across reboots for hardcoded scripts (although so far it worked without issues)
• samiv 9mo ago
  I've been trying to switch to Wayland and KDE plasma for some time but it's just so glitchy. Graphics bugs such as the tasks switcher showing black or flickery preview thumbnails or Firefox bringing down the whole system when opening a single 4k PNG indicate that it's still unfortunately very much an alpha. Maybe in another decade or so.
  • suddenlybananas 9mo ago
    Hmm, I use KDE Plasma with Wayland and have had zero issues. What GPU are you using?
  • Melonai 9mo ago
    Interesting, I had these issues around 2 years ago with my Nvidia GPU, making Wayland unusable (especially the honestly probably epilepsy-inducing flicker). After an Nvidia graphics driver release everything cleared up to be very usable (though occasionally stuff still crashed, like once or twice a week). I heavily dislike Nvidia and went with AMD just around a month ago, zero issues. I'm curious to hear about what hardware you have.
  • tracker1 9mo ago
    Since Linux Kernel 6.16 w/ Cosmic it's been really stable for me... but that's just my own experience. Though it really depends on your hardware... TFA mentions a rather exotic 8k display, for example.
• renewiltord 9mo ago
  This reminds me of when pulseaudio came on the scene. Bizarrely there was a short period when PA was superior to everything else. I could set per source and per sink volumes. It was bonkers. The perfect mixer. Then something else happened. Don’t know what the deal is with Linux desktop experience. I have encountered various forms of perfection and had them taken away. Once on my XPS M1330 I clicked to lift a window and then three finger swiped to switch workspace and the workspace switched and I dropped the window. It was beautiful. I didn’t even notice until after I’d done it what an intuitive thing it felt like. Then a few years later I tried with that fond memory and it didn’t work. Where did the magic go? Probably some accidental confluence of features broken in some change.
• outreachCSOAI 9mo ago
  [flagged]
• fabian2k 9mo ago
  I just recently switched to Linux since I had some weird Windows issues I couldn't fix. I've tried to switch a few times before, but the main problem at some point was that I didn't have proper fractional scaling on Linux. And that alone pretty much made Linux unusable for me on my specific hardware. Wayland fixes that, so that part is a huge improvement to me. Unfortunately this also limited my choice of Distros as not all of them use Wayland. I landed on Ubuntu again, despite some issues I have with it. The most annoying initially was that the Snap version of Firefox didn't use hardware acceleration, which is just barely usable.
  • mavamaarten 9mo ago
    Yeah, fractional scaling is absolutely the one thing that I miss on Linux. On X11 it's too slow and laggy. On Wayland I have... Wayland issues. I don't entirely love MacOS (mostly because I can't run it on my desktop, lol). But it does fractional scaling so well, I always choose the "looks like 1440p" scaling on 4K resolution, and literally every app looks perfect and consistent and I don't notice any performance impact. On windows the same thing, except some things are blurry. On Linux yeah I just have to bear huge UI (x2 scaling) or tiny UI (X1) or live with a noticeable performance delay that's just too painful to work with.
    • sylware 9mo ago
      It seems wayland has fractional scaling, but it is recent, but the bottom of this is high DPI handling should be handled at the GUI toolkit level. Compositor scaling is just a dirty fix for legacy GUI apps.
    • rabf 9mo ago
      Try just setting the correct dpi for your monitor and use a hi-dpi theme. No scaling required. Pixel perfect graphics.
  • Maledictus 9mo ago
    If you switch the Firefox Snap to the latest/candidate/core24 channel, hardware acceleration should work.
• lpcvoid 9mo ago
  I've been using Wayland (wlroots/swaywm) for a few years now and it's been flawless, even with an eGPU. But I'm also running all AMD hardware, that may be a factor. Life is too short for nvidia bullshit on Linux.
  • badgersnake 9mo ago
    I am the same, now. But I did have it working previously on Nvidia and it was good enough. I’ve also used the TILE patch at work and that seemed pretty good on the 5k screens they have there. I switched to get support for different scaling on different outputs and I have gone back.
    • sylware 9mo ago
      The right way to handle high DPI is at the GUI toolkit level. Scaling in the compositor is just a dirty fix for legacy apps.
      • badgersnake 9mo ago
        Still waiting for that one, meanwhile in Wayland land, everything just works.
        • sylware 9mo ago
          Are your sure GTK+ or the EFL (enlightenment) or etc do not handle properly DPI based rendering?
  • jlarocco 9mo ago
    > Life is too short for nvidia bullshit on Linux. So much NVidia hate, but in 23 years the only problems I've had with NVidia on Linux were when they dropped support for old GPUs. Even on proprietary hardware like iMacs and MacBooks. But to each their own.
    • lpcvoid 9mo ago
• officialchicken 9mo ago
  2026 is starting with half-baked NVidia drivers and missing functionality on linux? I am so surprised... did you try 17 different previous versions to get it running in true NV-Linux fashion? This stuff has been flawless on AMD systems for a while a couple of years now, with the exception of the occasional archaic app that only runs on X11 (thus shoved in a container).
  • ErroneousBosh 9mo ago
    Does AMD support CUDA yet? Because otherwise you can't use it for video editing.
    • NekkoDroid 9mo ago
      Ask NV to open up CUDA and then maybe AMD can start even thinking about supporting it :)
      • rerdavies 9mo ago
        Or you could just not use Linux. lol
        • NekkoDroid 9mo ago
          I'd rather use Linux than NV
        • ErroneousBosh 9mo ago
          If you want to edit video, you need to use Linux, and NVidia.
  • popcornricecake 9mo ago
    Flawless on AMD? Absolutely not. 2-3 years ago there used to be a amdgpu bug that froze my entire laptop randomly with no recourse beyond the 4 second power button press. After that was fixed, it sometimes got stuck on shutdown. Now it doesn't do that randomly anymore, but yet all it takes to break it, is to turn off the power to my external monitor (or the monitor powering off by itself to save energy) or unplugging it, after which it can no longer be used without rebooting and then sometimes it gets stuck on shutdown.
• kallistisoft 9mo ago
  At this point the primary thing that's keeping me from switching to Wayland (KDE) is lack of support for remote desktop software, especially with multiple monitors... Hopefully AnyDesk and Remmina will address this issue before KDE ends it's mainline X11 support next year.
  • yosamino 9mo ago
    I've had a similar issue recently and I found that rustdesk[0] works pretty well for casual use despite wayland support being labelled experimental. I use it for pair programming with someone on multiple monitors while I'm on a laptop and all the switching and zooming required worked. [0] https://rustdesk.com/ https://rustdesk.com/
  • sylware 9mo ago
    :) This is a feature of a wayland compositor: I don't want it able to do remote.
    • nirvdrum 9mo ago
      It doesn’t have to be like X11. Presumably, it’d be something you could disable if you’d like. It’d be very handy if we had a performant remote desktop option for Linux. I could resume desktop sessions on my workstation from my laptop and I could pair program with remote colleagues more effectively. In the past I’d boot into Windows and then boot my Linux system as a raw disk VM just so I could use Windows’s Remote Desktop. Combined with VMware Workstation’s support for multiple monitors, I had a surprisingly smooth remote session. But, it was a lot of ceremony.
    • yjftsjthsd-h 9mo ago
      OTOH, the enthusiasm for breaking legitimate features that people were using has not helped Wayland adoption.
      • sylware 9mo ago
        It is optional: if you want it you will need to select a compositor which does have this expensive feature. Don't forget, wayland is fully dynamic.
• mithcs 9mo ago
  My experience is very similar. Just today, I was trying Wayland again but it didn't work out. One of the obstacle that I faced is wrong resolution. On Xorg I could just add new mode and get up and running quickly. On Wayland, I have to either do some EDID changes or go through even worse.
• charcircuit 9mo ago
  >nVidia refused to support the API that Wayland was using, insisting that their EGLStreams approach was superior This is a common mischaracterizarion of what happened. This API, GBM, was a proprietary API that was a part of Mesa. Nvidia couldn't add GBM to their own driver as it is a Mesa concept. So instead Nvidia tried to make a vendor neutral solution that any graphics drivers could use which is where you see EGLStreams come into the picture. Such an EGL API was also useful for other nonwayland embedded usecases. In regards to Nvidia's proprietary driver's GBM support, Nvidia themselves had to add support to the Mesa project to support dynamically loading new backends that weren't precompiled into Mesa. Then they were able to make their own backend. For some reason when this comes up people always phrase it in terms of Nvidia not supporting something instead of the freedesktop people not offering a way for the Nvidia driver to work, which is a prerequisite of Nvidia following such guidance.
  • mariusor 9mo ago
    Sorry, but how can an open source project like Mesa be reliant on a proprietary API?
    • charcircuit 9mo ago
      I mean proprietary API in the sense that the API is solely owned and developed by Mesa. It is not a standardized API, but a custom one specific to their project. Even today if you use the API your program has to link to Mesa's libgbm.so as opposed to linking to a library provided by the graphics driver like libEGL.so.
      • mariusor 9mo ago
        OK, leaving aside the fact that "proprietary" has a very well defined meaning in this context and using it makes your comment very charged, you're basically telling us that Nvidia was not willing to implement an API for their drivers, but tried to push for one designed by themselves (you're calling it "vendor neutral", but since Mesa is not an actual GPU vendor it's most likely another subtle mistake on your part that completely changes the meaning of your words) and all the other vendors (Intel and AMD at this point), which have already implemented GBM should switch too in the name of this ? How can you call all of that a mischaracterization? In my humble opinion, and I am not anything more than a bystander in this with only superficial knowledge of the domain, it's you that is trying to mischaracterize the situation.
• poulpy123 9mo ago
  Do we have any choice ?
• joelthelion 9mo ago
  I've been using wayland with Gnome for years without a single issue. Arguably my hardware is a lot simpler and I don't use Nvidia. But I just want to point out that, for all the flak wayland receives, it can work quite well.
  • embedding-shape 9mo ago
    I've maybe used Wayland on Gnome for 1-2 years at this point, always with nvidia hardware. Works OK now, but didn't 2 years ago, and before that, used to be very janky, today is smoother than Xorg. But at this point, I don't think there is a single blocker left for me. Took some time to rewrite some programs that I have to control their own window position and wants to see what other applications are running, but was easy to work around with a Gnome Shell Extension in the end, as the design of Wayland doesn't really "allow" those sort of things. I'm having more issues with games/websites/programs that didn't take high display refresh rate into account, than Wayland, at this point.
  • pimeys 9mo ago
    Me too. But first with Sway in 2016, then with KDE Plasma 6. Everything works flawless, everything runs in native Wayland except Steam games. I prefer AMD or Intel hardware over NVIDIA since forever.
  • michaelmrose 9mo ago
    I remember having a gentleman over I think to fix something or other and when he walked into the living room he explained my crt monitor was misconfigured and to his perception had a visible flicker. We checked it and it was indeed misconfigured although I couldn't see it but it was such an aberration to him that he took time away from his actual job to make the flicker go away. You will also note many items in the post above are papercuts that might go unnoted like input feeling a little worse or font issues.
• zeta0134 9mo ago
  KDE Plasma switched to Wayland by default sometime last year, and so far the main issue I run into is that a few screen recording tools I like stopped working. (Mostly simplescreenrecorder, which seems to be entirely unmaintained at this point.) Other than some initial instability with accelerated rendering on my GPU, which was quickly addressed, it kinda just works. I mostly don't notice. Actually, GPU acceleration was why I initially switched. For whatever reason, this GPU (Radeon VII) crashes regularly under X11 nearly every time I open a new window, but is perfectly stable under wayland. Really frustrating! So, I had some encouragement, and I was waiting for plasma-wayland to stabilize enough to try it properly. I still have the X11 environment installed as a fallback, just in case, but I haven't needed to actually use it for months. Minor pain points so far mostly include mouse acceleration curves being different and screen capture being slightly more annoying. Most programs do this OS-level popup and then so many follow that up with their own rectangle select tool after I already did that. I had some issues with sdl2-compat as well, but I'm not sure that was strictly wayland's fault, and it cleared up on its own after a round of updates. (I develop an SDL2 game that needs pretty low latency audio sync to run smoothly)
  • mystifyingpoi 9mo ago
    > Mostly simplescreenrecorder, which seems to be entirely unmaintained at this point I use it extensively, it's easy to use, UI is compact but clear, works perfectly all the time. I honestly don't care that it is unmaintained at this point.
  • bjoli 9mo ago
    I am still sad that shading windows stopped working with Wayland.
  • yjftsjthsd-h 9mo ago
    > KDE Plasma switched to Wayland by default sometime last year, and so far the main issue I run into is that a few screen recording tools I like stopped working. (Mostly simplescreenrecorder, which seems to be entirely unmaintained at this point.) Other than some initial instability with accelerated rendering on my GPU, which was quickly addressed, it kinda just works. I mostly don't notice. FWIW, I have a KDE Wayland box and OBS works for screen recording. Slightly more complex than simplescreenrecorder, but not bad.
• ur-whale 9mo ago
  I must say: 1) Hugely enjoyable content - as usual - by Michael Stapelberg: relevant, detailed, organized, well written. 2) I am also an X11 + i3 user (and huge thanks to Michael for writing i3, I'm soooo fast with it), I also keep trying wayland on a regular basis because I don't want to get stuck using deprecated software. I am very, very happy to read this article, if only because it proves I'm not the only one and probably not crazy. Same experience he has: everytime I try wayland ... unending succession of weird glitches and things that plain old don't work. Verdict: UNUSABLE. I am going to re-iterate something I've said on HN many times: the fact that X11 has designs flaws is a well understood and acknowledged fact. So is the fact that a new solution is needed. BUT, because Wayland is calling themselves the new shite supposed to be that solution DOES NOT AUTOMATICALLY MEAN they actually managed to solve the problem. As a matter of fact, in my book, after so many years, they completely and utterly failed, and they should rethink the whole thing from scratch. And certainly not claim they're the replacement until they have reached feature and ease of use parity. Which they haven't as Michael's article clearly points out.
  • tuna74 9mo ago
    You are totally free to work on whatever you want to. You don't have to use the software that the Wayland devs (and other developers that like Wayland) produces. You can use and code whatever you want.
    • braincat31415 9mo ago
      What a constructive comment. Are you a Wayland developer by any chance?
    • antisol 9mo ago
      Oh good! This is great news! So you've managed to get redhat to commit to continue to package an X server, then? I'm impressed by this achievement and send my thanks for your efforts - they've been trying to drop it for a while now, it's only wayland's continuing status as unusable vapourware that stops them.
      • 9mo ago
• altern8 9mo ago
  Might be a stupid question, but what's wrong with Xorg? I know that it wasn't originally conceived to do what it does today, but I've never had any problem using it, and when I tried Wayland I didn't notice any difference whatsoever. Is it just that it's a pain to write apps for it..?
  • the_why_of_y 9mo ago
    The real story behind Wayland and X, Linux.conf.au 2013 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ https://people.freedesktop.org/~daniels/lca2013-wayland-x11.pdf https://people.freedesktop.org/~daniels/lca2013-wayland-x11....
    • altern8 9mo ago
      Oh, nice--thank you!
    • sprash 9mo ago
      All the major arguments in that decades old talk are invalidated with the introduction of DRI3.
  • exceptione 9mo ago
    Good question. It makes sand-boxing security impossible. The moment a process has access to the Xorg socket, it has access to everything. It is weird that this oftentimes misses from the discussion though.
    • altern8 9mo ago
      Can't this aspect be improved, vs. switching to something else?
      • sprash 9mo ago
        It is already possible today. There are access control hooks provided via XACE. Nobody uses them because the attack scenario is basically non-existent. If you run untrusted malicious apps having full access to your home directory you have big problems anyways. Not giving them access to e.g. the screen coordinates of their windows won't help you much then.
• sylware 9mo ago
  Since there are many wayland compositors, wayland clients must be very conservative (don't be fancy) and most of all respect the dynamic discovery of the interfaces and features and must adjust (from core to stable interfaces). For instance, a compositor may not support a clipboard, and the "data" related interfaces must be queried for availability (those interface are stable in core) and the client must disable such functionality if not there (for instance, wterm terminal is faulty because it forces a compositor to have such interfaces... but havoc terminal is doing it right). I don't know yet if libSDL3 wayland support "behaves" properly. wterm fix is boring but should be easy. As wayland usage, it is probably almost everwhere (and Xwayland is there for some level of legacy compatibility). (I am currently writting my own compositor for AMD GPUs... in risc-v assembly running on x86_64 via an interpreter)
• enricotr 9mo ago
  About the beginning of the article: Wayland is an alternative, not a successor, of X11.
• glimshe 9mo ago
  Note to people on this thread: the impression the discussions give is that Linux isn't ready for prime time desktop use. I thought Wayland was the latest and greatest, but folks here report issues and even refuse to ever use it. Windows and Mac Os, for all their faults, are unquestionably ready to use in 2026. If you are a Linux on desktop advocate, read the comments and see why so many are still hesitating.
  • forgotpwd16 9mo ago
    >I thought Wayland was the latest and greatest, but folks here report issues and even refuse to ever use it. >Windows and Mac Os, for all their faults, are unquestionably ready to use in 2026. Quite ironically there're people refusing to leave Windows 7, which has been EOS since 2020, because they find modern Windows UI unbearable. Windows 11 being considered that bad that people are actually switching OSes due to it. Have seen similar comments about OSX/macOS. The big difference between those and Linux is that Linux users have a choice to reject forced "upgrades" and build very personalized environments. If had to live with Wayland could do it really, even if there're issues, but since my current environment is fine don't really need/care to. And it's having a personalized environment such a change is a chore. If was using a comprehensive desktop environment like GNOME (as many people do), maybe wouldn't even understand something changed underneath.
  • Joeboy 9mo ago
    As a long-time Linux user I've also felt an incongruity between my own experiences with Wayland and the recent rush of "year of the Linux desktop" posts. To be fair, I think the motivation is at least as much about modern Windows' unsuitability for prime time rather as Linux's suitability. I haven't used Windows for a long time so I can't say how fair that is, but I definitely see people questioning 2026 Windows' readiness for prime time. For me, Wayland seems to work OK right now, but only since the very latest Ubuntu release. I'm hoping at this point we can stop switching to exciting new audio / graphics / init systems for a while, but I might be naive. Edit: I guess replacing coreutils is Ubuntu's latest effort to keep things spicy, but I haven't seen any issues with that yet. Edit2: I just had the dispiriting thought that it's about twenty years since I first used Ubuntu. At that point it all seemed tantalizingly close to being "ready for primetime". You often had to edit config files to get stuff working, and there were frustrating deficits in the application space, but the "desktop" felt fine, with X11, Alsa, SysV etc. Two decades on we're on the cusp of having a reliable graphics stack.
• simonra 9mo ago
  My question is how long will it take for core necessities like push to talk in discord running in a background tab in my browser while I game with my 50+ closest friends to work under wayland. I hope I don’t develop a need for accessibility tooling the next couple of decades given the current progress.
  • tschumacher 9mo ago
    I looked into this lately - Discord needs to use the Global Shortcuts Portal to do it properly but how is unclear. Discord is based on Electron which is based on Chromium. Chromium has support and Electron kind of has support since https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/45171 https://github.com/electron/electron/pull/45171 but this seems to be rather unknown and unused. Although somewhere in this API chain keyup events are lost, meaning that only "normal" shortcuts would work but no push-to-talk. There are multiple options for Discord to implement this: implement Global Shortcuts Portal directly, go via Electron global shortcuts API, hook into Chromium shortcuts API, maybe others - with the caveat that some of those don't support keyup events. Vesktop devs are currently stuck in same dilemma: https://github.com/Vencord/Vesktop/issues/18 https://github.com/Vencord/Vesktop/issues/18
• Joeboy 9mo ago
  I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 25.10, and decided to give Wayland another go since X.org isn't installed by default anymore. Good news: My laptop (Lenovo P53) can now suspend / resume successfully. With Ubuntu 25.04 / Wayland it wouldn't resume successfully, which was a deal breaker. Annoying thing: I had a script that I used to organize workspaces using wmctrl, which doesn't work anymore so I had to write a gnome-shell extension. Which (as somebody who's never written a gnome-shell extension before) was quite annoying as I had to keep logging out and in to test it. I got it working eventually but am still grumpy about it. Overall: From my point of view as a user, the switch to Wayland has wasted a lot of my time and I see no visible benefits. But, it seems to basically work now and it seems like it's probably the way things are headed. Edit: Actually I've seen some gnome crashes that I think happen when I have mpv running, but I can't say for sure if that's down to Wayland.
• shevy-java 9mo ago
  The article already begins with a wrong claim: "Wayland is the successor to the X server " Wayland is primarily a protocol, but most definitely not a "success" to the xorg-server. This is why it does not have - and will never have - the same feature set. So trying to sell it as "the new shiny thing" after almost 20 (!!!!!) years, is simply wrong. One should instead point out that wayland is a separate way to handle a display server / graphics. There are different trade-offs. > but for the last 18 years (!), Wayland was never usable on my computers I can relate to this a bit, but last year or perhaps even the year before, I used wayland via plasma on manjaro. It had various issues, but it kind of worked, even on nvidia (using the proprietary component; for some reason the open-source variant nouveau works less-well on my current system). So I think wayland was already usable even before 2025, even on problematic computer systems. > I don’t want to be stuck on deprecated software I don't want to be stuck on software that insinuates it is the future when it really is not. > With nVidia graphics cards, which are the only cards that support my 8K monitor, Wayland would either not work at all or exhibit heavy graphics glitches and crashes. I have a similar problem. Not with regards to a 8K monitor, but my ultra-widescreen monitor also has tons of issues when it comes to nvidia. I am also getting kind of tired of nvidia refusing to fix issues. They are cheap, granted, but I'd love viable alternatives. It seems we have a virtual monopoly situation here. That's not good. > So the pressure to switch to Wayland is mounting! What pressure? I don't feel any pressure. Distributions that would only support wayland I would not use anyway; I am not depending on that, though, as I compile everything from source using a set of ruby scripts. And that actually works, too. (Bootstrapping via existing distributions is easier and faster though. As stated, trade-offs everywhere.) > The reason behind this behavior is that wlroots does not support the TILE property (issue #1580 from 2019). This has also been my impression. The wayland specific things such as wlroots, but also other things, just flat out suck. There are so many things that suck with this regard - and on top of that, barely any real choice on wayland. Wayland seems to have dumbed down the whole ecosystem. After 20 years, having such a situation is shameful. That's the future? I am terrified of that future. > During 2025, I switched all my computers to NixOS. Its declarative approach is really nice for doing such tests, because you can reliably restore your system to an earlier version. I don't use NixOS myself, but being able to have determined system states that work and are guaranteed to work, kind of extends the reproducible builds situation. It's quite cool. I think all systems should incorporate that approach. Imagine you'd no longer need StackOverflow because people in the NixOS sphere solved all those problems already and you could just jump from guaranteed snapshot to another one that is guaranteed to also work. That's kind of a cool idea. The thing I dislike about NixOS the most is ... nix. But I guess that is hard to change now. Every good idea to be ruined via horrible jokes of an underperforming programming language ... > So from my perspective, switching from this existing, flawlessly working stack (for me) to Sway only brings downsides. I had a similar impression. I guess things will improve, but right now I feel as if I lose too much for "this is now the only future". And I don't trust the wayland-promo devs anymore either - too much promo, too few results. After 20 years guys ...
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• throw0101c 9mo ago
  I'm on macOS, and I use XQuartz [1] occasionally for Linux/Unix GUI apps: if something is 'written for' (?) Wayland, can I send its GUI windows across the network (over SSH)? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XQuartz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XQuartz
• thevinchi 9mo ago
  Wayland smells like IPv6 to me. No need to switch, and it hurts when you try.
  • gspr 9mo ago
    > Wayland smells like IPv6 to me. No need to switch, and it hurts when you try. I'm very happy with Wayland, but what a strange comparison to make if you're not. IPv6 is objectively an enormous improvement over IPv4, and the only gripe with it is that it's still not ubiquitous.
    • thevinchi 9mo ago
      I’ll concede that IPv6 has usefulness on the public Internet, where adoption is actually gaining nicely. No issues there really. However, my comparison is end-user focused (ie. the Linux desktop experience). I should have been more clear about the scope perhaps. Both IPv6 and Wayland have increased complexity and surface area for pain (cost) without an obvious benefit for the end-user. Also: wrt IPv6 specifically, I don’t believe every device on a private network should be publicly addressable/routable. To me that’s a bug, not a feature, and again does not serve the consumer, only the producer.
      • gspr 9mo ago
        > Both IPv6 and Wayland have increased complexity and surface area for pain (cost) without an obvious benefit for the end-user. I'd argue the opposite: IPv6 has lowered complexity for the end user: SLAAC, endless addresses, no need for CIDR – these are all simplifications for the end user. > Also: wrt IPv6 specifically, I don’t believe every device on a private network should be publicly addressable/routable. To me that’s a bug, not a feature, Some would argue it's a feature. But let's say it's not useful. It's still surely not a bug. An address being publicly routeable doesn't mean you have to route traffic to it. Just don't, if you don't want to. > and again does not serve the consumer, only the producer. I'd argue that it simplifies some things for the consumer (see above), and also lets the consumer be a producer more easily. I'd argue that that's a good thing, more in the spirit of the internet. But even if the end user doesn't care, it's not a detriment.
• krautburglar 9mo ago
  [flagged]
• voodooEntity 9mo ago
  So im using linux desktops for decades now, and bout 2 years ago i finally ditched my for gaming only windows install to go onto linux only setups for gaming also. I mean, it works alot better than it did before, still i wouldn't recommend it for someone who isn't ready to tinker in order to make stuff work. The point why i mention this is, while most normal desktop/coding stuff works okay with wayland, as soon i try any gaming its just a sh*show. From stuff that doesn't even start (but works when i run on x) to heavyly increased performance demands from games that work a lot smoother on x. While i have no personal relation to any of both, and i couldn't technically care less which of them to use - if you are into gaming, at least in my experience, x is rn still the more stable solution.
• cramcgrab 9mo ago
  I’ve been using Wayland exclusively for about 2 years. It’s great. And when it’s not it gets fixed. X11 isn’t a project anymore, it’s a nightmare of empty meetings and discussions, no coders.
• zeendo 9mo ago
  Glad to see a good write-up of Wayland issues. My day-to-day doesn't run into the vast majority of these problems so when I see people melt down over a single trivial seeming Wayland choice about window coordinates then I have a really hard time relating. This post is a lot more relatable. As an aside, regarding remote Emacs - I can attest that Waypipe does indeed work fantastically for this. Better than X11 ever worked over the network for me. I, too, suffer from the pgtk is slow issue (only a 4k monitor though it's mitigable and manageable for me)
  • MarsIronPI 9mo ago
    As an Emacs PGTK user, do you have any experience with modifiers beyond the basic 4? I recently tried to use PGTK Emacs and it seems to not support e.g. Hyper, which is a bummer, because I extensively use Hyper in my keybindings.
    • zeendo 9mo ago
      Embarrassingly, I don't really understand Hyper. I have a Moonlander and AFAICT the firmware (or at least the Oryx configurator tool they provide) says Hyper is just a combination of the basic 4 - Alt+Shift+Ctrl+Meta. I'm pretty sure that's at least not historically true... but I don't have a whole lot of use for it so I haven't tried to wrap my head around what's going on there. I imagine there's a "real" hyper modifier but I haven't attempted to use it. For my sake, since I use GUI Emacs I find that I have enough mappings without it (I'm also a dirty evil user). A friend makes extensive use of it because he primarily uses Emacs via a terminal and Hyper avoids all other terminal keybind conflicts he might otherwise run into. But, he uses X11, too so no PGTK Emacs even if/when he does run GUI Emacs. I'll try to dig into this some though and see if I can (a) determine a way to map a "true" hyper to my keyboard and (b) use it in PGTK Emacs and follow up with you.
      • MarsIronPI 9mo ago
        X11's XKB (which, funnily enough, is also the standard keyboard layout system on Wayland) has support for Control, plus another 5 modifiers. Specifically, I believe Hyper is typically mod3. If you run xmodmap in a terminal under X, you'll see which keys are assigned to which modifiers. I have a custom XKB layout that assigns some keys to Hyper, and then adds Hyper to mod3. With X11 Emacs I didn't have to do anything to get it to work. But I don't think I've ever seen a pure GTK program recognize Hyper, so it may be a GTK limitation. For learning XKB, I recommend the Unreliable Guide to XKB[0]. XKB is sorely underdocumented, so guides like these are the best way to learn it. [0]: https://www.charvolant.org/doug/xkb/html/xkb.html https://www.charvolant.org/doug/xkb/html/xkb.html Please don't feel like you have to look into it, though. I was just wondering, since you mentioned that you used PGTK.
• whalesalad 9mo ago
  I’ve been using Wayland on Debian 12 since 2023. On an Apple Studio Display (5K) over thunderbolt (the built-in camera, speakers, etc work fine) I screen share and video call with Slack and Google Meet. I use alacritty/zsh/tmux as my terminal. I use chromium as my browser, vscode and sublime text as code editors. Slack, Spotify, my studio mic, my Scarlett 2i2, 10gbe networking, thunderbolt, Logitech unifying receiver…. Literally everything “just works” and has been a joy to use. Only issues I’ve ever faced have been forcing an app to run native Wayland not xwayland (varies from app to app but usually a cli flag needed) and Bluetooth pairing with my Sony noise canceling which is unrelated to Wayland. Periodically I get into a dance where it won’t pair, but most of the time it pairs fine.
• tsoukase 9mo ago
  For me a no-go for wayland is no support in LXDE and Xfce, which are very good lightweight out of the box user friendly DEs. There is LXQt and Xfce initiated the migration but until then it doesn't worth. Other hurdles are less important like multiscreen, multi-seat, Nvidia.
  • tokai 9mo ago
    Its amazing that Xfce still manages to fool people into believing its lightweight. It uses the same resources as Gnome.
    • pamcake 9mo ago
      I don't believe this is true. It certaintly uses less memory out of the box and unlike Gnome, most of the optional extras are easy to disable or uninstall. https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/linux-des-resource-usage-compared/70060 https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/linux-des-resource-usage-com...
  • redeeman 9mo ago
    multi seat works great with wayland, in fact slightly better than on X, where it also worked fine
• yxhuvud 9mo ago
  > Sometimes, keyboard shortcuts seem to be executed twice! Sounds like someone made a listener that listens on key events, but didn't bother to check the state of the event, meaning it hits releases as well. Should be easy to verify by keeping them pressed long enough to trigger the key repeat events. > I also noticed that font rendering is different between X11 and Wayland! The difference is visible in Chrome browser tab titles and the URL bar, for example: Tab title display is not owned by wayland unless you are running with the client side decor extension, which Gnome is not. So looking at the application or GUI framework (GTK in this case) are really the two only choices.
• hainkind 9mo ago
  Does anyone have a workaround to get i3 fullscreen behaviour in sway? And is it possible to get fullscreen but within a container (e.g. get rid of browser gui to see more in a small container)
• Kon5ole 9mo ago
  Wayland being contemporary with the financial crisis makes sense in my head but I'll probably spend the rest of today processing that it's 18 years ago.
• nijave 9mo ago
  Does hot plugging work right yet? Was quickly discouraged when KVM caused crashes and the open issue said "you're holding it wrong, buy edid emulators"
• jlarocco 9mo ago
  I'm not switching to Wayland until my window manager supports it. It doesn't look like anybody has time to do the work, so I'll probably switch, grudgingly, to XWayland whenever X gets removed from Debian. I feel like the biggest issue for Wayland is the long tail of people using alternative WMs. A lot of those projects don't have manpower to do what amounts to a complete rewrite. I honestly don't have a preference between Wayland and X, but I feel very strongly about keeping my current WM. XWayland supposedly works, but I'm not in any hurry to add an extra piece of software and extra layer of configuration for something I already have working exactly the way I want. If Wayland offered some amazing advantages over X, it might be different, but I haven't seen anything to win me over.
  • craftkiller 9mo ago
    > I'm not switching to Wayland until my window manager supports it. Looking at your github, it seems you use StumpWM. It seems they are also working on a wayland version under the name Mahogany. Development seems pretty active: https://github.com/stumpwm/mahogany https://github.com/stumpwm/mahogany > I'll probably switch, grudgingly, to XWayland whenever X gets removed from Debian. FWIW I think "wayback" is the project for this. It seems to be trying to use XWayland to run full X11 desktop environments on top of Wayland: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayback/wayback https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayback/wayback
• diath 9mo ago
  > But rather quickly, after moving and resizing browser windows, the GPU process dies with messages like the following and, for example, WebGL is no longer hardware accelerated: Is this specific to the WM he used or does HW acceleration straight up not work in browsers under Wayland? That to me seems like a complete deal breaker.
  • secure 9mo ago
    Probably not specific to Sway, but specific to the nVidia driver.
• nitinreddy88 9mo ago
  Try using Zoom client with screen sharing. Doesn't work and so on many applications limited by functionality. People say its year of Linux 2026 and xorg is dead. But its not even close to make it work for basic functionality. You can blame on vendors but as long as user functionality is not working, its never a working solution
  • assbuttbuttass 9mo ago
    Screen sharing works in Zoom now, you'll have to find a new cherry-picked example
    • bdangubic 9mo ago
      not sure it is fair to call something that is a show-stopper a cherry-pick
    • mmwelt 9mo ago
      Yes, it now works in Zoom, but not in Webex, unfortunately. That's been a big obstacle for me. I'd need to be able to share individual windows with audio.
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• seqizz 9mo ago
  If somewm[1] continues to develop, why not? Otherwise I will not be sacrificing my decade-old work style with awesomewm. [1] https://github.com/trip-zip/somewm https://github.com/trip-zip/somewm
• vzaliva 9mo ago
  What a fantastic and timely post! Especially coming from i3 maintainer! Michael did such diligent analasys and saved me (and hopefully others) a lot of time. I was considering trying Wayland/sway and this post answered all my questions and showed me that it is not ready, at least for me, yet.
• edu4rdshl 9mo ago
  It's fun how most of the complaints are like "it works fine on Gnome but I will still blame Wayland because my tiling WM doesn't support it". So maybe try using a proper Wayland implementation The Chrome crashes when resizing a window doesn't makes any sense, apart from being a WM fault. The Xwayland scaling, again, has native scaling support on Gnome. Same for the monitor resolution problem (which he acknowledged). Same for font rendering. Idk.
  • secure 9mo ago
    GNOME’s “proper wayland implementation” also does not work with my monitor, as I explained in the article: > By the way, when I mentioned that GNOME successfully configures the native resolution, that doesn’t mean the monitor is usable with GNOME! While GNOME supports tiled displays, the updates of individual tiles are not synchronized, so you see heavy tearing in the middle of the screen, much worse than anything I have ever observed under X11. GNOME/mutter merge request !4822 should hopefully address this.
• jeffbee 9mo ago
  The way this article styles the name of the GPU company "nVidia" is really distracting! The company has always referred to itself in all capitals, as in NVIDIA, and only their logos have stylized a lowercase initial n, which leads to perhaps nVIDIA if you want, or nᴠɪᴅɪᴀ for those with skills or, for normal people, just nvidia. But "nVidia" is a mixture of mistakes.
  • secure 9mo ago
    No, the company has not always referred to itself in all capitals. https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/nvidias-name-change.3644596/ https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/nvidias-name-change.... When I got to know their products, they were nVidia.
    • jeffbee 9mo ago
      "Jen-Hsun Huang certifies that he is the president and secretary of NVidia Corporation, a California corporation." - ARTICLES OF INCORPORATION OF NVidia Corporation, 1993, filed with the California Secretary of State and available online. "The name of this corporation is NVIDIA Corporation." - 1995 amendment.
• nickjj 9mo ago
  I don't think Wayland is fully ready, at least not with NVIDIA GPUs with limited GPU memory. I have a 7,000 word blog post and demo videos coming out this Tuesday with the details but I think I uncovered a driver bug having switched to native Linux a week ago with a low GPU memory card (750 Ti). Basically on Wayland, apps that request GPU memory will typically crash if there's no more GPU memory to allocate where as on X11 it will transparently offload those requests to system memory so you can open up as much as you want (within reason) and the system is completely usable. In practice this means opening up a few hardware accelerated apps in Wayland like Firefox and most terminals will likely crash your compositor or at the very least crash those apps. It can crash or make your compositor unstable because if it in itself gets an error allocating GPU memory to spawn the window it can do whatever weird things it was programmed to do in that scenario. I reported it here: https://github.com/NVIDIA/egl-wayland/issues/185 https://github.com/NVIDIA/egl-wayland/issues/185 Some end users on the NVIDIA developer forums looked into it and determined it's likely a problem for everyone, it's just less noticeable if you have more GPU memory and it's especially less noticeable if you reboot daily since that clears all GPU memory leaks which is also apparent in a lot of Wayland compositors.
  • nickjj 9mo ago
    Here is that post with demo videos: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/gpu-memory-allocation-bugs-with-nvidia-on-linux-and-wayland-adventures https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/gpu-memory-allocation-bugs-wi...
• Sparkyte 9mo ago
  I have nothing to add other than I use bazzite for everything now. Windows gone.
• FoolsTech 9mo ago
  I've been using Wayland for 3 years now. First through Hyprland, now since August 2025 through Niri. Zero fundamental issues. Some developers don't want add Wayland support in their apps or can't because the app is using some framework and their devs don't want to support Wayland. But honestly ditching apps that don't support Wayland was one of the best decisions in my dev life (along with ditching MacOS and later Ubuntu). That's how I ended up using Neovim since Jetbrains needed ages to add Wayland support. 2.5 years into using Neovim Jetbrains finally added Wayland support. So I've accepted their offer to use Intelliji for free for 6 months. I barely opened it in 6 months, despite having been Jetbrains Evangelist for 7 years before switching to Neovim. That being said you can still use most of x11 apps through xwayland with a few limitations (primarily no fractional scaling) or in worst case through qemu.
• blackfawn 9mo ago
  I often see comments of "everything works perfect in wayland" which makes me wonder how many features some people use. I've tried wayland a few times now and have always noticed small quirks. A few current examples: shading a window actually leaves an invisible section that can't be clicked where the window was, shading and other window activities being inconsistent across various window types (terminal, file manager, etc.), picture-in-picture mode of browsers doesn't maintain aspect ratio, picture-in-picture doesn't maintain "always on top" or position when enabling it (I've managed to fix the "always on top" by writing a rule to apply to windows with "Picture in picture" as the title, at least)
• 0xedd 9mo ago
  [dead]
• AndreasBackx 9mo ago
  > Instead of my usual choice maim(1) , I tried grim(1) , but unfortunately grim’s -T flag to select the window to capture is rather cumbersome to use (and captures in 1x scale). >Does anyone have any suggestions for a good alternative? You might want to give wayshot a "shot"? https://github.com/waycrate/wayshot https://github.com/waycrate/wayshot
• rand846633 9mo ago
  Recently had to reinstall my Linux (btw, Arch). Normally I’d just dd/mirror the NVMe, but this time I decided to stop putting off the switch to Wayland and just do it — moved from i3 to sway, etc. I’d been avoiding this for years. Turns out: absolutely no problem. The tooling around Wayland and adjacent programs is way more modern and functional. Great experience. Can recommend switching in 2026. For me, the unintuitive truth with Linux is: once you’re on a rolling release, most problems just vanish. I still love Debian for prod, but for experimenting and development, rolling release any day.
• estimator7292 9mo ago
  I was incredibly disappointed when my KDE updated and force removed X11. I happened to be in the middle of a very delicate operation configuring X to do something that Wayland can't. Reboot and the entire system is fucked. Great, thanks. Now all my computers are worse, and there's absolutely nothing I can do. At least it's better than Windows I guess.
• antisol 9mo ago
  I just thought I'd summarise this article for anybody who doesn't have the time to read the whole thing: No. Wayland still has hilariously terrible bugs and can't adequately do very basic things we have been doing for ~30 years on X, even in 2026, and because it's not compatible with anything it requires ditching all your stable, well-tested, solid software that you've been using for decades to replace it with incompatible software that doesn't work half the time. To summarise the summary: it's in pretty much the same place as it was in 2025. And 2020. And 2016.
• deterministic 9mo ago
  Removing X from a distribution, and making it hard to switch from Wayland to X, makes things really difficult for developers such as myself who is maintaining 30+ year old X applications.