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Why does Wayland "feel like the future?" It feels like a regression to me and a lot of other people who have run into serious usability problems. At best, it s

Why does Wayland "feel like the future?" It feels like a regression to me and a lot of other people who have run into serious usability problems. At best, it seems like a huge diversion of time and resources, given that we already had a working GUI. (Maybe that was the intention.) The arguments for it have boiled down to "yuck code older than me" from supposed professionals employed by commercial Linux vendors to support the system, and it doesn't have Android-like separation — a feature no one really wants. The mantra of "it's a protocol" isn't very comforting when it lacks so many features that necessitate workarounds, leading to fragmentation and general incompatibility. There are plenty of complicated, bad protocols. The ones that survive are inherently "simple" (e.g., SMTP) or "trivial" (e.g., TFTP). Maybe there will be a successor to Wayland that will be the SMTP to its X400, but to me, Wayland seems like a past compromise (almost 16 years of development) rather than a future.

justin66 9mo ago
It's a downgrade that we have no choice but to accept in order to continue using our machines. Anyone familiar with Microsoft or Apple already knows that's the future.
- simoncion 9mo ago
  > It's a downgrade that we have no choice but to accept in order to continue using our machines. Odd. Xorg still works fine [0], and we'll see how XLibre pans out. [0] I'm using it right now, and it's still getting updates.
  - ok123456 9mo ago
    They're trying to "nudge" everyone. Major desktop environments and entire distributions are removing X11 support to varying degrees. A lot of this is because they can't get their adoption rates above about half due to various broken workflows or simply user preference. They intentionally don't want you to keep using X11, and they'll keep turning up the heat on the pot until we're all boiling. Gnome just removed the middle-click paste option. Is that because they fixed the clipboard situation on Linux, and there's a universal, unambiguous way of cut and paste that works across every application? No. It's because middle-click to paste is an "X-ism." This is just demagoguery and unserious.
    - simoncion 9mo ago
      > They're trying to "nudge" everyone. Once again, Gentoo Linux proves (somewhat regrettably) to be one of the best Linux distros out there. OpenRC and Xorg as defaults, with SystemD and Wayland as supported options is quite a lovely way to do things. > Gnome just removed the middle-click paste option. Gnome removes useful things all the time. "The Gnome folks do something user-hostile just because they feel like it" isn't news; that's been going on for decades. This habit of theirs is a big reason why I've been using KDE for a very long time.
      - account42 9mo ago
        Unfortunately I don't think Gentoo will keep X11 support in e.g. KDE once its dropped upstream (which is already announced), they don't have the manpower for that. And KDE itself is also not the bastion of user choice it once was, even if they haven't yet gone quite as hostile as Gnome.
        simoncion 9mo ago
        > Unfortunately I don't think Gentoo will keep X11 support in e.g. KDE once its dropped upstream... IIRC, the only part that's dropping X11 support is Plasma. From [0]: There are currently no plans to drop X11 support in KDE applications outside of Plasma. This change only concerns Plasma’s X11 login session, which is what’s going away. I don't really care about Plasma; a taskbar to house a system tray and clock is nice, as is desktop wallpaper, but I don't particularly care about that stuff. I use very little of KDE: kwin, krunner, kmix, kcalc, okular, dolphin (rarely), and whatever handles the global keyboard shortcuts. Hell, on my ~twenty-year-old computer I don't use Plasma because it's a resource hog, but I still use KDE. [0] <https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-future/ https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-f...>
        account42 9mo ago
        That's fair, but I would also read it as a sign of things to come for the rest. If you can't run full KDE on X11 there will not be many KDE developers caring about X11 support. KWin for example has already gained many bugs on X11 that I expect to never be fixed. And now KWin for X11 is split into a separate project which will hopefully mean fewer further regressions but probably also not much further development which means bitrot as things around it change.
bee_rider 9mo ago
Because X is not getting much development at this point (personally I still use i3, haven’t switched to Sway, the present works fine for me).
- deleted 9mo ago
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- torstenvl 9mo ago
  Hmm? Seems to be getting plenty of development. https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/activity https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/activity
  - bee_rider 9mo ago
    That’s a fork, which is fine. But for example, users from most mainstream distros will have to compile it themselves. I guess we’ll see if that development is ever applied to the main branch, or if it supplants the main X branch. At the moment, though… if that’s the future of X, then it is fair to be a little bit unsure if it is going to stick, right?
  - theamk 9mo ago
    the kind that introduces regressions? there is a reason lead developer of X11Libre left Xorg project, they did not like broken code: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1760 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1760 (and many more if you search)
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
- gmueckl 9mo ago
  This argument is actually backwards: one of the goals of the wayland project is to draw development away from X. If wayland didn't exist, people would have worked on X11 a lot more.
ninth_ant 9mo ago
Even if you dislike Wayland, forwards-going development is clearly centred around it. Development of X11 has largely ended and the major desktop environments and several mainstream Linux distributions are likewise ending support for it. There is one effort I know of to revive and modernize X11 but it’s both controversial and also highly niche. You don’t have to like the future for it to be the future.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- michaelmrose 9mo ago
  Actually multiple including Phoenix a re-implementation, running an x wm under Wayland via Wayback in addition to xlibre
Sharlin 9mo ago
We’re accustomed to "the future" connoting progress and improvement. Unfortunately, it isn’t always so (no matter how heavily implied). Just that it’s literally expected to be the future state if matters.
hurricanepootis 9mo ago
Wayland supports HDR, it's very easy to configure VRR, and it's fractional scaling (if implemented properly) is far superior to anything X11 can offer. Furthermore, all of these options can be enabled individually on multiple screens on the same system and still offer a good mix-used environment. As someone who has been using HiDPI displays on Linux for the past 7 years, wayland was such a game changer for how my system works.
- int0x29 9mo ago
  Fractional scaling for wayland is broken on a per app basis which feels strictly worse to me than it was before. Libre office currently is broken on wayland and works in x11
  - hurricanepootis 9mo ago
    LibreOffice works for me on wayland lol. I don't know why you would wanna do fractional scaling on a per app basis whenever you got one screen. But, for your libreoffice woes, try using a different backend? Libreoffice includes support for gtk3, gtk4, Qt6, and other backends: https://github.com/LibreOffice/core/blob/master/vcl/README.md https://github.com/LibreOffice/core/blob/master/vcl/README.m... Maybe you need to try wayland with an alternative backend?
    - ok123456 9mo ago
      > Maybe you need to try wayland with an alternative backend? And this is the inherent problem with Wayland. Now we have to deal with a combinatorial explosion of things to try to get something that "just works."
      - fragmede 9mo ago
        Which, because we're talking rendering and GPU and drivers, is incredibly frustrating, because if we're here, it's because the system doesn't have working GPU drivers, at which point, a misconfiguration is a crash and a power cycle and a "hope pstore managed to save something", and the hardware/software cursor settings getting lost somewhere-how.
PunchyHamster 9mo ago
It's mostly coz nobody really wants to improve X11. I don't think there is many wayland features that would be impossible to implement in X11 it's just nobody wants to dig into crusty codebase to do it. And sadly wayland decided to just not learn any lessons from X11 and it shows.
- diath 9mo ago
  What do you mean nobody wants to improve X11? There were developers with dozens of open merge requests with numerous improvements to X11 that were being actively ignored/held back by IBM/Red Hat because they wanted Wayland, their corporate project, to succeed instead.
  - gf000 9mo ago
    Reviewing PRs and merging them requires great effort, especially in case of a non-trivial behemoth like X. Surely if all these merge requests were of huge value, someone could have forked the project and be very happy with all the changes, right? Not having enough maintainers, and some design issues that can't be solved are both reasons why X was left largely unmaintained.
    - diath 9mo ago
      > Surely if all these merge requests were of huge value There were a lot of MRs with valuable changes however Red Hat wanted certain features to be exclusive to Wayland to make the alternative more appealing to people so they actively blocked these MRs from progressing. > someone could have forked the project and be very happy with all the changes, right? That's precisely what happened, one of the biggest contributors and maintainers got bullied by Red Hat from the project for trying to make X11 work and decided to create X11Libre (https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver) which is now getting all these fancy features that previously were not possible to get into X11 due to Red Hat actively sabotaging the project in their attempt to turn Linux into their own corporate equivalent of Windows/macOS.
      - 9mo ago
0x1ch 9mo ago
I've been on and off linux desktops since the advent of Wayland. Unsure of the actual issues people run into at this point outside of very niche workflows or applications, to which, there are X11 fallbacks for. Also, by "commercial linux vendors", you do realize Wayland is directly supported (afaik, correct me if wrong) by the largest commercial linux contributors, Red Hat, Canoncial. They're not simply 'vendors'.
- _fat_santa 9mo ago
  > Unsure of the actual issues people run into at this point outside of very niche workflows or applications, to which, there are X11 fallbacks for. I don't know if others have experienced this but the biggest bug I see in Wayland right now is sometimes on an external monitor after waking the computer, a full-screen electron window will crash the display (ie the display disconnects). I can usually fix this by switching to another desktop and then logging out and logging back in. Such a strange bug because it only affects my external monitor and only affects electron apps (I notice it with VSCode the most but that's just cause I have it running virtually 24/7) If anyone has encountered this issue and figured out a solution i am all ears.
  - 0x1ch 9mo ago
    This is probably worth reporting. I don't think I've ever heard or ran into something like that before. Most issues I ran into during the early rollout of Wayland desktop environments was broken or missing functionality in existing apps.
  - gf000 9mo ago
    Is it gnome or kde or what? That's like saying "the website doesn't work", without saying what browser you are using.
    - _fat_santa 9mo ago
      Happens on any DE running Wayland. Ive gotten it to happen on both Gnome and KDE.
- 9mo ago
jchw 9mo ago
Here's my PoV: - Having a single X server that almost everyone used lead to ossification. Having Wayland explicitly be only a protocol is helping to avoid that, though it comes with its own growing pains. - Wayland-the-Protocol (sounds like a Sonic the Hedgehog character when you say it like that) is not free of cruft, but it has been forward-thinking. It's compositor-centric, unlike X11 which predates desktop compositing; that alone allows a lot of clean-up. It approaches features like DPI scaling, refresh rates, multi-head, and HDR from first principles. Native Wayland enables a much better laptop docking experience. - Linux desktop security and privacy absolutely sucks, and X.org is part of that. I don't think there is a meaningful future in running all applications in their own nested X servers, but I also believe that trying to refactor X.org to shoehorn in namespaces is not worth the effort. Wayland goes pretty radical in the direction of isolating clients, but I think it is a good start. I think a ton of the growing pains with Wayland come from just how radical the design really is. For example, there is deliberately no global coordinate space. Windows don't even know where they are on screen. When you drag a window, it doesn't know where it's going, how much it's moving, anything. There isn't even a coordinate space to express global positions, from a protocol PoV. This is crazy. Pretty much no other desktop windowing system works this way. I'm not even bothered that people are skeptical that this could even work; it would be weird to not be. But what's really crazy, is that it does work. I'm using it right now. It doesn't only work, but it works very well, for all of the applications I use. If anything, KDE has never felt less buggy than it does now, nor has it ever felt more integrated than it does now. I basically have no problems at all with the current status quo, and it has greatly improved my experience as someone who likes to dock my laptop. But you do raise a point: > It feels like a regression to me and a lot of other people who have run into serious usability problems. The real major downside of Wayland development is that it takes forever. It's design-by-committee. The results are actually pretty good (My go-to example is the color management protocol, which is probably one of the most solid color management APIs so far) but it really does take forever (My go-to example is the color management protocol, which took about 5 years from MR opening to merging.) The developers of software like KiCad don't want to deal with this, they would greatly prefer if software just continued to work how it always did. And to be fair, for the most part XWayland should give this to you. (In KDE, XWayland can do almost everything it always could, including screen capture and controlling the mouse if you allow it to.) XWayland is not deprecated and not planned to be. However, the Wayland developers have taken a stance of not just implementing raw tools that can be used to implement various UI features, but instead implement protocols for those specific UI features. An example is how dragging a window works in Wayland: when a user clicks or interacts with a draggable client area, all the client does is signal that they have, and the compositor takes over from there and initiates a drag. Another example would be how detachable tabs in Chrome work in Wayland: it uses a slightly augmented invocation of the drag'n'drop protocol that lets you attach a window drag to it as well. I think it's a pretty elegant solution. But that's definitely where things are stuck at. Some applications have UI features that they can't implement in Wayland. xdg-session-management for being able to save and restore window positions is still not merged, so there is no standard way to implement this in Wayland. ext-zones for positioning multi-window application windows relative to each-other is still not merged, so there is no standard way to implement this in Wayland. Older techniques like directly embedding windows from other applications have some potential approaches: embedding a small Wayland compositor into an application seems to be one of the main approaches in large UI toolkits (sounds crazy, but Wayland compositors can be pretty small, so it's not as bad as it seems) whereas there is xdg-foreign which is supported by many compositors (Supported by GNOME, KDE, Sway, but missing in Mir, Hyprland and Weston. Fragmentation!) but it doesn't support every possible thing you could do in X11 (like passing an xid to mpv to embed it in your application, for example.) I don't think it's unreasonable that people are frustrated, especially about how long the progress can take sometimes, but when I read these MRs and see the resulting protocols, I can't exactly blame the developers of the protocols. It's a long and hard process for a reason, and screwing up a protocol is not a cheap mistake for the entire ecosystem. But I don't think all of this time is wasted; I think Wayland will be easier to adapt and evolve into the future. Even if we wound up with a one-true-compositor situation, there'd be really no reason to entirely get rid of Wayland as a protocol for applications to speak. Wayland doesn't really need much to operate; as far as I know, pretty much just UNIX domain sockets and the driver infrastructure to implement a WSI for Vulkan/GL.
mcswell 9mo ago
> "yuck code older than me" You mean like the code that the Manchester Baby, ENIAC, the Manchester Mark 1, EDSAC and EDVAC ran? Or maybe Plankalkül...
jcgl 9mo ago
> it doesn't have Android-like separation — a feature no one really wants. It's certainly a feature I want. Pretty sure I'm not alone in wanting isolation between applications--even GUI ones. There's no reason that various applications from various vendors shouldn't be isolated into their own sandboxes (at least in the common case).
- account42 9mo ago
  There is a big reason: It impedes usability, extensibility and composability. If you sandbox GUI applications then the sandbox needs to add support for any interaction between them or they will just not be possible - and to fully support many advanced interactions like automation you will essentially have to punch huge holes in the sandbox anyway. Meanwhile the advantages of sandboxing are pretty much moot in an open source distro where individual applications are open and not developed by user hostile actors.
  - jcgl 9mo ago
    Yes, sandboxing impedes those things. But I assume you're not advocating against sandboxing in general, right? Starting with a sandbox and poking holes/whitelisting as-needed is a good way to go. Whitelisting access on a per-application basis is a pragmatic way to do this, and Flatpak with Wayland gives a way to actually implement this. It's imperfect, but it's a good start. Preventing keylogging is a good, concrete example here. There's no reason some random application should be able to see me type out the master password in my password manager. Likewise, there is no reason that some other application should be able to read ~/.bash_history or ~/.ssh/. The browser should limit itself to ~/Downloads. Etc. > Meanwhile the advantages of sandboxing are pretty much moot in an open source distro where individual applications are open and not developed by user hostile actors. Defense in depth. Belt and suspenders. I do trust the software I run to some degree, and take great care in choosing the software. But it's not perfect. Likewise, I take care to use sandboxing features whenever I can, acknowledging that they sometimes must have holes poked in them. But the Swiss cheese model is generally a good lens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model If we weren't concerned with belt and suspenders and could rely on applications being developed by non-hostile actors, then we could all run as root all the time! But we don't do that--we try to operate according to least-privilege and isolate separate tasks as much as is practical. Accordingly, technologies which allow improved isolation with zero or minimal impact to functionality are strictly a good thing, and should be embraced as such.
iberator 9mo ago
Amen brother
kiwijamo 9mo ago
Wayland was the first display system on Linux I've used that just worked perfectly right out of the box on a bog standard Intel iGPU across several machines. I think that is a big draw for a lot of people like myself who just want to get things done. For me X11 represents the past through experience I had when I had to tinker with the X11 config file to get basic stuff like video playback to work smoothly without tearing. My first Wayland install was literally a "wow this is the future of Linux" for me quite honestly when I realised everything just worked without even a single line of config. I would recommend a Wayland distro like Debian to the average computer user knowing Wayland just works -- prior to Wayland I'd be like "well Linux is great but if you like watching YouTube you'll need to add a line to your xorg config to trun on the thingy that smoothes out video playback on Intel iGPUs". Appreciate others have different perpectives -- I come from the POV of someone who likes to install a OS and have all the basic stuff working out of the box.
- ok123456 9mo ago
  Xorg.conf has worked out of the box with no or minimal configuration for the past 20 years or so. It's nowhere near the modline hell of XFree86.
- graemep 9mo ago
  It is many years, I guess close to a decade, since I needed to change X config manually. I still find the odd rough edge in Wayland (the most recent was failing screenshots with KDE).
  - fransje26 9mo ago
    > It is many years, I guess close to a decade, since I needed to change X config manually. Making manual changes in 2015+, for a protocol released in 1987, that's a long time having rough edges..
    - graemep 9mo ago
      Sorry, to clarify, I am not making making manual changes to Wayland config. I have stopped needing to make manual changes to X config. Until recently i just switched back to X whenI had problems with Wayland. The last time the issues fixed itself on the next update.
kllrnohj 9mo ago
> given that we already had a working GUI. (Maybe that was the intention.) Neither X11 nor Wayland provide a GUI. Your GUI is provided by GTK or QT or TCL or whatever. X11 had primitive rendering instructions that allowed those GUIs to delegate drawing to a central system service, but very few things do that anymore anyway. Meaning X11 is already just a dumb compositor in practice, except it's badly designed to be a dumb compositor because that wasn't its original purpose. As such, Wayland is really just aligning the protocol to what clients actually want & do.

justin66 9mo ago

It's a downgrade that we have no choice but to accept in order to continue using our machines. Anyone familiar with Microsoft or Apple already knows that's the future.

simoncion 9mo ago
> It's a downgrade that we have no choice but to accept in order to continue using our machines. Odd. Xorg still works fine [0], and we'll see how XLibre pans out. [0] I'm using it right now, and it's still getting updates.
- ok123456 9mo ago
  They're trying to "nudge" everyone. Major desktop environments and entire distributions are removing X11 support to varying degrees. A lot of this is because they can't get their adoption rates above about half due to various broken workflows or simply user preference. They intentionally don't want you to keep using X11, and they'll keep turning up the heat on the pot until we're all boiling. Gnome just removed the middle-click paste option. Is that because they fixed the clipboard situation on Linux, and there's a universal, unambiguous way of cut and paste that works across every application? No. It's because middle-click to paste is an "X-ism." This is just demagoguery and unserious.
  - simoncion 9mo ago
    > They're trying to "nudge" everyone. Once again, Gentoo Linux proves (somewhat regrettably) to be one of the best Linux distros out there. OpenRC and Xorg as defaults, with SystemD and Wayland as supported options is quite a lovely way to do things. > Gnome just removed the middle-click paste option. Gnome removes useful things all the time. "The Gnome folks do something user-hostile just because they feel like it" isn't news; that's been going on for decades. This habit of theirs is a big reason why I've been using KDE for a very long time.
    - account42 9mo ago
      Unfortunately I don't think Gentoo will keep X11 support in e.g. KDE once its dropped upstream (which is already announced), they don't have the manpower for that. And KDE itself is also not the bastion of user choice it once was, even if they haven't yet gone quite as hostile as Gnome.
      - simoncion 9mo ago
        > Unfortunately I don't think Gentoo will keep X11 support in e.g. KDE once its dropped upstream... IIRC, the only part that's dropping X11 support is Plasma. From [0]: There are currently no plans to drop X11 support in KDE applications outside of Plasma. This change only concerns Plasma’s X11 login session, which is what’s going away. I don't really care about Plasma; a taskbar to house a system tray and clock is nice, as is desktop wallpaper, but I don't particularly care about that stuff. I use very little of KDE: kwin, krunner, kmix, kcalc, okular, dolphin (rarely), and whatever handles the global keyboard shortcuts. Hell, on my ~twenty-year-old computer I don't use Plasma because it's a resource hog, but I still use KDE. [0] <https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-future/ https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-f...>
        account42 9mo ago
        That's fair, but I would also read it as a sign of things to come for the rest. If you can't run full KDE on X11 there will not be many KDE developers caring about X11 support. KWin for example has already gained many bugs on X11 that I expect to never be fixed. And now KWin for X11 is split into a separate project which will hopefully mean fewer further regressions but probably also not much further development which means bitrot as things around it change.

bee_rider 9mo ago

Because X is not getting much development at this point (personally I still use i3, haven’t switched to Sway, the present works fine for me).

deleted 9mo ago
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torstenvl 9mo ago
Hmm? Seems to be getting plenty of development. https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/activity https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/activity
- bee_rider 9mo ago
  That’s a fork, which is fine. But for example, users from most mainstream distros will have to compile it themselves. I guess we’ll see if that development is ever applied to the main branch, or if it supplants the main X branch. At the moment, though… if that’s the future of X, then it is fair to be a little bit unsure if it is going to stick, right?
- theamk 9mo ago
  the kind that introduces regressions? there is a reason lead developer of X11Libre left Xorg project, they did not like broken code: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1760 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1760 (and many more if you search)
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
gmueckl 9mo ago
This argument is actually backwards: one of the goals of the wayland project is to draw development away from X. If wayland didn't exist, people would have worked on X11 a lot more.

ninth_ant 9mo ago

Even if you dislike Wayland, forwards-going development is clearly centred around it. Development of X11 has largely ended and the major desktop environments and several mainstream Linux distributions are likewise ending support for it. There is one effort I know of to revive and modernize X11 but it’s both controversial and also highly niche. You don’t have to like the future for it to be the future.

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
michaelmrose 9mo ago
Actually multiple including Phoenix a re-implementation, running an x wm under Wayland via Wayback in addition to xlibre

Sharlin 9mo ago

We’re accustomed to "the future" connoting progress and improvement. Unfortunately, it isn’t always so (no matter how heavily implied). Just that it’s literally expected to be the future state if matters.

hurricanepootis 9mo ago

Wayland supports HDR, it's very easy to configure VRR, and it's fractional scaling (if implemented properly) is far superior to anything X11 can offer. Furthermore, all of these options can be enabled individually on multiple screens on the same system and still offer a good mix-used environment. As someone who has been using HiDPI displays on Linux for the past 7 years, wayland was such a game changer for how my system works.

int0x29 9mo ago
Fractional scaling for wayland is broken on a per app basis which feels strictly worse to me than it was before. Libre office currently is broken on wayland and works in x11
- hurricanepootis 9mo ago
  LibreOffice works for me on wayland lol. I don't know why you would wanna do fractional scaling on a per app basis whenever you got one screen. But, for your libreoffice woes, try using a different backend? Libreoffice includes support for gtk3, gtk4, Qt6, and other backends: https://github.com/LibreOffice/core/blob/master/vcl/README.md https://github.com/LibreOffice/core/blob/master/vcl/README.m... Maybe you need to try wayland with an alternative backend?
  - ok123456 9mo ago
    > Maybe you need to try wayland with an alternative backend? And this is the inherent problem with Wayland. Now we have to deal with a combinatorial explosion of things to try to get something that "just works."
    - fragmede 9mo ago
      Which, because we're talking rendering and GPU and drivers, is incredibly frustrating, because if we're here, it's because the system doesn't have working GPU drivers, at which point, a misconfiguration is a crash and a power cycle and a "hope pstore managed to save something", and the hardware/software cursor settings getting lost somewhere-how.

PunchyHamster 9mo ago

It's mostly coz nobody really wants to improve X11. I don't think there is many wayland features that would be impossible to implement in X11 it's just nobody wants to dig into crusty codebase to do it. And sadly wayland decided to just not learn any lessons from X11 and it shows.

diath 9mo ago
What do you mean nobody wants to improve X11? There were developers with dozens of open merge requests with numerous improvements to X11 that were being actively ignored/held back by IBM/Red Hat because they wanted Wayland, their corporate project, to succeed instead.
- gf000 9mo ago
  Reviewing PRs and merging them requires great effort, especially in case of a non-trivial behemoth like X. Surely if all these merge requests were of huge value, someone could have forked the project and be very happy with all the changes, right? Not having enough maintainers, and some design issues that can't be solved are both reasons why X was left largely unmaintained.
  - diath 9mo ago
    > Surely if all these merge requests were of huge value There were a lot of MRs with valuable changes however Red Hat wanted certain features to be exclusive to Wayland to make the alternative more appealing to people so they actively blocked these MRs from progressing. > someone could have forked the project and be very happy with all the changes, right? That's precisely what happened, one of the biggest contributors and maintainers got bullied by Red Hat from the project for trying to make X11 work and decided to create X11Libre (https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver) which is now getting all these fancy features that previously were not possible to get into X11 due to Red Hat actively sabotaging the project in their attempt to turn Linux into their own corporate equivalent of Windows/macOS.
    - 9mo ago

0x1ch 9mo ago

I've been on and off linux desktops since the advent of Wayland. Unsure of the actual issues people run into at this point outside of very niche workflows or applications, to which, there are X11 fallbacks for. Also, by "commercial linux vendors", you do realize Wayland is directly supported (afaik, correct me if wrong) by the largest commercial linux contributors, Red Hat, Canoncial. They're not simply 'vendors'.

_fat_santa 9mo ago
> Unsure of the actual issues people run into at this point outside of very niche workflows or applications, to which, there are X11 fallbacks for. I don't know if others have experienced this but the biggest bug I see in Wayland right now is sometimes on an external monitor after waking the computer, a full-screen electron window will crash the display (ie the display disconnects). I can usually fix this by switching to another desktop and then logging out and logging back in. Such a strange bug because it only affects my external monitor and only affects electron apps (I notice it with VSCode the most but that's just cause I have it running virtually 24/7) If anyone has encountered this issue and figured out a solution i am all ears.
- 0x1ch 9mo ago
  This is probably worth reporting. I don't think I've ever heard or ran into something like that before. Most issues I ran into during the early rollout of Wayland desktop environments was broken or missing functionality in existing apps.
- gf000 9mo ago
  Is it gnome or kde or what? That's like saying "the website doesn't work", without saying what browser you are using.
  - _fat_santa 9mo ago
    Happens on any DE running Wayland. Ive gotten it to happen on both Gnome and KDE.
9mo ago

jchw 9mo ago

Here's my PoV: - Having a single X server that almost everyone used lead to ossification. Having Wayland explicitly be only a protocol is helping to avoid that, though it comes with its own growing pains. - Wayland-the-Protocol (sounds like a Sonic the Hedgehog character when you say it like that) is not free of cruft, but it has been forward-thinking. It's compositor-centric, unlike X11 which predates desktop compositing; that alone allows a lot of clean-up. It approaches features like DPI scaling, refresh rates, multi-head, and HDR from first principles. Native Wayland enables a much better laptop docking experience. - Linux desktop security and privacy absolutely sucks, and X.org is part of that. I don't think there is a meaningful future in running all applications in their own nested X servers, but I also believe that trying to refactor X.org to shoehorn in namespaces is not worth the effort. Wayland goes pretty radical in the direction of isolating clients, but I think it is a good start. I think a ton of the growing pains with Wayland come from just how radical the design really is. For example, there is deliberately no global coordinate space. Windows don't even know where they are on screen. When you drag a window, it doesn't know where it's going, how much it's moving, anything. There isn't even a coordinate space to express global positions, from a protocol PoV. This is crazy. Pretty much no other desktop windowing system works this way. I'm not even bothered that people are skeptical that this could even work; it would be weird to not be. But what's really crazy, is that it does work. I'm using it right now. It doesn't only work, but it works very well, for all of the applications I use. If anything, KDE has never felt less buggy than it does now, nor has it ever felt more integrated than it does now. I basically have no problems at all with the current status quo, and it has greatly improved my experience as someone who likes to dock my laptop. But you do raise a point: > It feels like a regression to me and a lot of other people who have run into serious usability problems. The real major downside of Wayland development is that it takes forever. It's design-by-committee. The results are actually pretty good (My go-to example is the color management protocol, which is probably one of the most solid color management APIs so far) but it really does take forever (My go-to example is the color management protocol, which took about 5 years from MR opening to merging.) The developers of software like KiCad don't want to deal with this, they would greatly prefer if software just continued to work how it always did. And to be fair, for the most part XWayland should give this to you. (In KDE, XWayland can do almost everything it always could, including screen capture and controlling the mouse if you allow it to.) XWayland is not deprecated and not planned to be. However, the Wayland developers have taken a stance of not just implementing raw tools that can be used to implement various UI features, but instead implement protocols for those specific UI features. An example is how dragging a window works in Wayland: when a user clicks or interacts with a draggable client area, all the client does is signal that they have, and the compositor takes over from there and initiates a drag. Another example would be how detachable tabs in Chrome work in Wayland: it uses a slightly augmented invocation of the drag'n'drop protocol that lets you attach a window drag to it as well. I think it's a pretty elegant solution. But that's definitely where things are stuck at. Some applications have UI features that they can't implement in Wayland. xdg-session-management for being able to save and restore window positions is still not merged, so there is no standard way to implement this in Wayland. ext-zones for positioning multi-window application windows relative to each-other is still not merged, so there is no standard way to implement this in Wayland. Older techniques like directly embedding windows from other applications have some potential approaches: embedding a small Wayland compositor into an application seems to be one of the main approaches in large UI toolkits (sounds crazy, but Wayland compositors can be pretty small, so it's not as bad as it seems) whereas there is xdg-foreign which is supported by many compositors (Supported by GNOME, KDE, Sway, but missing in Mir, Hyprland and Weston. Fragmentation!) but it doesn't support every possible thing you could do in X11 (like passing an xid to mpv to embed it in your application, for example.) I don't think it's unreasonable that people are frustrated, especially about how long the progress can take sometimes, but when I read these MRs and see the resulting protocols, I can't exactly blame the developers of the protocols. It's a long and hard process for a reason, and screwing up a protocol is not a cheap mistake for the entire ecosystem. But I don't think all of this time is wasted; I think Wayland will be easier to adapt and evolve into the future. Even if we wound up with a one-true-compositor situation, there'd be really no reason to entirely get rid of Wayland as a protocol for applications to speak. Wayland doesn't really need much to operate; as far as I know, pretty much just UNIX domain sockets and the driver infrastructure to implement a WSI for Vulkan/GL.

mcswell 9mo ago

> "yuck code older than me" You mean like the code that the Manchester Baby, ENIAC, the Manchester Mark 1, EDSAC and EDVAC ran? Or maybe Plankalkül...

jcgl 9mo ago

> it doesn't have Android-like separation — a feature no one really wants. It's certainly a feature I want. Pretty sure I'm not alone in wanting isolation between applications--even GUI ones. There's no reason that various applications from various vendors shouldn't be isolated into their own sandboxes (at least in the common case).

account42 9mo ago
There is a big reason: It impedes usability, extensibility and composability. If you sandbox GUI applications then the sandbox needs to add support for any interaction between them or they will just not be possible - and to fully support many advanced interactions like automation you will essentially have to punch huge holes in the sandbox anyway. Meanwhile the advantages of sandboxing are pretty much moot in an open source distro where individual applications are open and not developed by user hostile actors.
- jcgl 9mo ago
  Yes, sandboxing impedes those things. But I assume you're not advocating against sandboxing in general, right? Starting with a sandbox and poking holes/whitelisting as-needed is a good way to go. Whitelisting access on a per-application basis is a pragmatic way to do this, and Flatpak with Wayland gives a way to actually implement this. It's imperfect, but it's a good start. Preventing keylogging is a good, concrete example here. There's no reason some random application should be able to see me type out the master password in my password manager. Likewise, there is no reason that some other application should be able to read ~/.bash_history or ~/.ssh/. The browser should limit itself to ~/Downloads. Etc. > Meanwhile the advantages of sandboxing are pretty much moot in an open source distro where individual applications are open and not developed by user hostile actors. Defense in depth. Belt and suspenders. I do trust the software I run to some degree, and take great care in choosing the software. But it's not perfect. Likewise, I take care to use sandboxing features whenever I can, acknowledging that they sometimes must have holes poked in them. But the Swiss cheese model is generally a good lens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model If we weren't concerned with belt and suspenders and could rely on applications being developed by non-hostile actors, then we could all run as root all the time! But we don't do that--we try to operate according to least-privilege and isolate separate tasks as much as is practical. Accordingly, technologies which allow improved isolation with zero or minimal impact to functionality are strictly a good thing, and should be embraced as such.

iberator 9mo ago

Amen brother

kiwijamo 9mo ago

Wayland was the first display system on Linux I've used that just worked perfectly right out of the box on a bog standard Intel iGPU across several machines. I think that is a big draw for a lot of people like myself who just want to get things done. For me X11 represents the past through experience I had when I had to tinker with the X11 config file to get basic stuff like video playback to work smoothly without tearing. My first Wayland install was literally a "wow this is the future of Linux" for me quite honestly when I realised everything just worked without even a single line of config. I would recommend a Wayland distro like Debian to the average computer user knowing Wayland just works -- prior to Wayland I'd be like "well Linux is great but if you like watching YouTube you'll need to add a line to your xorg config to trun on the thingy that smoothes out video playback on Intel iGPUs". Appreciate others have different perpectives -- I come from the POV of someone who likes to install a OS and have all the basic stuff working out of the box.

ok123456 9mo ago
Xorg.conf has worked out of the box with no or minimal configuration for the past 20 years or so. It's nowhere near the modline hell of XFree86.
graemep 9mo ago
It is many years, I guess close to a decade, since I needed to change X config manually. I still find the odd rough edge in Wayland (the most recent was failing screenshots with KDE).
- fransje26 9mo ago
  > It is many years, I guess close to a decade, since I needed to change X config manually. Making manual changes in 2015+, for a protocol released in 1987, that's a long time having rough edges..
  - graemep 9mo ago
    Sorry, to clarify, I am not making making manual changes to Wayland config. I have stopped needing to make manual changes to X config. Until recently i just switched back to X whenI had problems with Wayland. The last time the issues fixed itself on the next update.

kllrnohj 9mo ago

> given that we already had a working GUI. (Maybe that was the intention.) Neither X11 nor Wayland provide a GUI. Your GUI is provided by GTK or QT or TCL or whatever. X11 had primitive rendering instructions that allowed those GUIs to delegate drawing to a central system service, but very few things do that anymore anyway. Meaning X11 is already just a dumb compositor in practice, except it's badly designed to be a dumb compositor because that wasn't its original purpose. As such, Wayland is really just aligning the protocol to what clients actually want & do.