34 ms·

Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?

• unit149 6mo ago
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• superkuh 6mo ago
  And it's worse than this because there is no wayland. Without a strong reference implementation and with the very minimal wayland core protocol, each desktop environment picks and chooses and implements their own incompatible extensions for what should be wayland core features. This means you don't develop for linux, or even linux wayland. You develop for linux wayland mutter. Or linux wayland plasma. Or linux wayland hyprland. Because those three waylands are going to be doing things which you need every day on an average desktop in their own incompatible ways: https://wayland.app/protocols/ https://wayland.app/protocols/ Developers have to decide which DE they'll have their applications run in rather than having your application be able to function across all linux desktops. This is different than how it was the last 20 years. No matter what else you say, this is a change from how it was. It's massive fragmentation of the userspace. Literally the only wayland DE that supports screen readers right now is GNOME's mutter and that's mostly just for GNOME's software because of course they invented something new to work around the problems of the wayland architecture.
  • simonask 6mo ago
    What is this “massive fragmentation” you speak of? Anecdotally, I’m using Plasma, and every Gnome or Gtk app I’ve tried appears to be working perfectly, and vice versa when I occasionally try out Gnome. Much less so for DIY/BYOB desktops like Hyprland, but I feel like that’s what you sign up for there.
    • nickelpro 6mo ago
      https://wayland.app/protocols/ https://wayland.app/protocols/ Click any protocol, very few outside the core and absolute essential extensions have universal support.
    • hakfoo 6mo ago
      That's one of the things that freak me out about Wayland. The DIY/BYOB experience is perfectly viable in the X11 world. I don't think I've ever had a piece of software balk at me because I used FVWM instead of kwin. I don't want to be railroaded into a desktop environment with strong opinions and mediocre tools when there's a sprawling flea maret worth of software to explore.
      • simonask 6mo ago
        And surely that isn't happening either, though? Hyprland, Sway, Niri... I hear people are loving them. Enjoy!
  • Blikkentrekker 6mo ago
    “I guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or an XFCE app unfortunately. I'm sorry that this is the case but it wasn't GNOME's fault that Ubuntu has started this fork. And I have no idea what XFCE is or does sorry.” Prophetic words were once spoken and mocked long ere.
• lofties 6mo ago
  You could make this same post and replace any component with Wayland. At the end of the day the Linux community will continuously set the Linux Desktop back by N years. The most obvious case of this is Linus Tech Tips trying Linux to replace Windows for gaming, getting lost in what distro to pick, and then being flamed online for choosing the "wrong" distro. It's impossible for anyone without the time and curiosity to choose a Linux distro, and then to stick with it. My only "hope" for the year of The Linux Desktop is SteamOS, since that will have a commercial force driving adoption and removing the need for consumers to make a choice entirely.
  • Waterluvian 6mo ago
    I think your hope touches on what I think the issue partly is: a lack of empathy for any type of user that doesn’t resemble themselves. I think the deeper into tech you go, the more you find it. And Linux devs/fans are very deep into tech. The commercial force behind SteamOS is largely the financial motivation to deeply care about the user who doesn’t get an apt about the technical details. They’re not there to do computers, they’re there to play a game or watch a movie or whatever. And the Linux community may benefit from the result of that goal, despite likely being salty about not being the audience.
    • charcircuit 6mo ago
      Not just the user, but Valve also has a financial incentive to care about developers too. Especially developers of apps who may never be updated ever again. Developers do not want to waste time trying to fight the desktop Linux software stack.
  • kykat 6mo ago
    He clearly doesn't care about using Linux, he should just ignore it. It's fine.
  • simonask 6mo ago
    To be fair, it’s pretty dumb that seemingly every article and LLM suggested using Pop!\_OS, which uses the Cosmic Desktop by default. At the time of writing, it is nowhere near ready for prime time. Whether that’s LTT’s fault or the community’s lack of self-awareness, I couldn’t tell you.
• jmclnx 6mo ago
  people may remember 'Y' from many years ago, AFAIK it was suppose to replace X, but never got to the point were Wayland is now. >The original conceit behind Wayland is to only implement what is needed for a simple Linux desktop And this is my biggest issue with Wayland. If it started out with portability in mind maybe I would give it a try. But I am sticking with X because it is fully usable on the BSDs.
  • MBCook 6mo ago
    I don’t blame the developers. I do wonder what the BSDs will do. The Wayland developers were the X developers. The problems with X all still exist. How big a share of the desktop market do the BSDs have compared to Linux? I imagine it’s quite small, unfortunately.
    • jcranmer 6mo ago
      > How big a share of the desktop market do the BSDs have compared to Linux? I imagine it’s quite small, unfortunately. Good stats are hard to come by, but the Linux : BSD ratio is probably no larger than the Windows : Linux ratio (which is actually running relatively low these days--Linux seems to be closing in on ~3% desktop share). That puts the BSD overall in the 0.01% range, which is really too little market share to accurately measure.
• MBCook 6mo ago
  The major comitters and maintainers of X decided it was a lost cause and unfixable. Were they just supposed to keep working on the massive pile of hacks they felt needed abandoning? They did what they thought was best. You hate it. Fine. Do you think things would be better if they kept working on the unfixable mess? I trust them to know what was going on better than random commenters.
  • PunchyHamster 6mo ago
    That is fine. X11 needed fresh start. But they also failed to learn any lessons from X, just assuming "if X11 did it it must've been a bad idea, let's do it differently". X11 did chalk many lines of abstractions in absolutely the right places, it's just the implementation was crufty in places, and just not designed for modern hardware in some other places, while wayland just tried to kick as much as possible to the WM side, making it so instead one place where those things need a bunch of code (the display system/its plugins), now every WM have to repeat that work and (more importantly) add incompatibilities because of that
    • 000ooo000 6mo ago
      >now every WM have to repeat that work wlroots?
      • hakfoo 6mo ago
        wlroots is self-described as "about 60,000 lines of code you were going to write anyway." It's also a moving target and you'll probably have to retool when wlroots updates. That seems like a huge burden to carry around, considering that a minimal X11 window manager can be a few thousand lines of code and probably still compiles after 15 years.
      • wmf 6mo ago
        wlroots came pretty late so there was a lot of code duplication between Weston/GNOME/KDE before that.
• martinald 6mo ago
  FWIW I recently switched full time to Linux and have had absolutely 0 problems with GNOME, Wayland and Fedora, though I am using an AMD GPU. wl-copy works fine, askpass works, copy and paste works, screen sharing with Google Meet works, drag and drop works. Using an iphone as a webcam works as does recording my screen. Most importantly using multiple monitors with fractional scaling works perfectly. AFIAK this is not possible to do well (at all?) on X11, which is a complete show stopper for me. If anyone's reading this and sitting on the fence, I would really give Fedora a go. I've found it so much more polished than Ubuntu, and loads of things which didn't work on it work out of the box on Fedora (at least compared to 24.04 LTS).
  • seabrookmx 6mo ago
    That's probably just due to the older kernel. I go back and forth between Fedora and Ubuntu a lot, and once you get past the snap/flatpak and the apt/dnf differences everything feels the same. I usually format my Fedora disk ext4, add flatpak to my Ubuntu installs, manually override the fonts, add dash-to-panel.. the resulting experience ends up identical.
  • tmtvl 6mo ago
    Separate scaling fractions on separate monitors doesn't work under X. Well, I lie: it does work under zaphod mode, but no applications other than Emacs support that.
    • spudlyo 6mo ago
      Heh. Just today I started fooling around with a new X11 setup on a barebones Ubuntu Server VM with just xorg, xinit, xterm, Emacs and i3. It's pretty neat learning about iommu groups and doing NVMe passthrough with KVM/Qemu, and also messing around with the new (to me) Spice/virgl 3D acceleration. I was impressed I was able to play YT videos in the Ubuntu Virtual Machine Manager with hand-built mpv/ffmpeg + yt-dlp setup without dropping too many frames or serious glitches. Huzzah for libgl1-mesa-dri. After that, I rebooted the host OS, jumped into the UEFI boot menu and booted the "guest" NVMe disk directly with my actual GPU, and it still worked. It's quite a trip down memory lane, typing 'startx' and having a both a :0.0 and :0.1 displays. That muscle memory from the 1990s is still going strong.
• wetpaws 6mo ago
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• righthand 6mo ago
  Wayland was designed exclusively i3 style compositors and has been stuck there ever since not a “simple desktop”. It is incredibly pathetic that you can’t even open a window in that same place you closed it on Wayland. No one involved seems interested in solving any of the usage problems and if you look at various threads it’s finger pointing at other software. The rule should be if Wayland isn’t going to supply a timely answer, software developers should target an implementation of whatever missing feature as implemented in X11. That is the only way to move forward if the threat of X11 coming back exists.
  • weaksauce 6mo ago
    they just agreed to move forward on the protocol to do that thing.
    • righthand 6mo ago
      Okay. It still took them 17 years to agree on it. And regardless of moving forward on it they’ve demonstrated no concern with timely delivery.
      • scheeseman486 6mo ago
        "OK I was wrong, so I'm going to make another assumption because maybe this time whatever garbage I write might be right"
        • righthand 6mo ago
          I wasnt wrong. It took them 17 years to come to an agreement. Just because they “just decided” this year or last year or whatever doesn’t make me wrong. And my point about them not caring about timely decisions was in my original comment so I didn’t write some garbage hopping from one idea to another. Seek help over your anger issues.
          • scheeseman486 6mo ago
• chmorgan_ 6mo ago
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• jdougan 6mo ago
  I'm still of the opinion that the right direction is something architectEd more like NeWS with better underlying language support. If you're going to break stuff make it a real improvement.
  • tliltocatl 6mo ago
    We basically have it, it's called Blink (and it's a dumpster fire for unrelated reasons).
• aussieguy1234 6mo ago
  I switched to wayland mainly because screen lock on X11 is not possible to do securely. If some way is found to crash the big screen lock window in X11, the attacker gets access.
  • PunchyHamster 6mo ago
    well if some way is found to crash wayland the attacker also gets access...
    • hparadiz 6mo ago
      You'll get thrown to a tty login prompt.
      • temptemptemp111 6mo ago
        [dead]
  • queuebert 6mo ago
    Why not use a third-party locker, like the suckless one? https://tools.suckless.org/slock/ https://tools.suckless.org/slock/
• kykat 6mo ago
  Again, we may live in a parallel universe. Because I am using KDE and wayland and NVIDIA, and it works beautifully. Although NVIDIA really started to work great only fairly recently (last couple of years). And using X is a noticeably worse experience. I'am excited to follow the still very early development of xfwl to see how a classic DE works in wayland.
  • arunc 6mo ago
    Same setup here, minus Nvidia. Love KDE with Wayland. Super stable. Tried Gnome, but switched back. Gnome felt like it was 20 years ago in terms of functions tho UX was still posh.
  • cogman10 6mo ago
    Ditto, same setup. When I first grabbed my current setup about 2 years ago, the nvidia drivers had all sorts of annoying and painful bugs to work around. However, there were workarounds. Now, everything mostly just works. The only thing I struggle with is sleep which seems to be permanently broke in the latest nvidia drivers.
• lokimoon 6mo ago
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• Cyph0n 6mo ago
  I have been thoroughly enjoying Wayland with Niri. It is snappy, looks beautiful on my 4K monitor, and handles X11 emulation perfectly (via xwayland-satellite). I have not seen any major issues with OBS, clipboard handling, or any application I have had to run. So as an end user, I don’t get all the hubbub. Reminds me a bit of the whole systemd craze from some time ago.
• palata 6mo ago
  Disclaimer: I don't have any skin in this game, I was fine with X11 and I am fine with Wayland, and I actually think it's nice to have both (and more, like Xlibre I think?). I understand complaints about systemd, I don't understand the complaints about Wayland. This whole article sounds like a big rant and doesn't seem to bring much information. > I also don't care for the "security" argument when parts of the core reference implementation are written in a memory-unsafe language. Doesn't sound like a super informed way to look at security (not even mentioning that Wayland was started in 2008, and Rust was not a thing). One can also say that "as long as you run X11, there is no need to think about security because X11 just defeats it all". > In fact, you can find examples showing roughly a 40% slowdown when using Wayland over X11! I'm sure there are similar benchmarks claiming Wayland wins and vice versa (happy to link them as well if provided). "I am gonna make a bad argument and follow it by saying that you could make the same bad argument to say the opposite". Doesn't sound like a super informed way to look at performance. > Anecdotal experience is not enough to say this is a broad issue, but my point is that when an average user encounters graphical issues within 60 seconds of using it, maybe it's not ready to be made the default! So the whole article is built around ranting while saying "I don't have anything meaningful to say, I'll just share an anecdote and directly say it's not worth much because it's an anecdote"? > But the second actual users are forced to use it expect them to be frustrated! Who is forced to use it? Just use X11, as you said (many times) you do already.
  • BowBun 6mo ago
    > Who is forced to use it? Just use X11, as you said (many times) you do already. This is my understanding of his actual concern - Linux corps are pushing Wayland as a replacement for X11 when it is full of issues. Anecdotally my experience was the same. I'm a dev so I'm fine in a terminal, but trying to switch to KDE actually sent me BACK to Windows. Basic windowing stuff just does not work, and like the OP says, tons of stutters and crashes for a simple 2-monitor setup. Even something as simple as alt-tabbing lagged for seconds on an overpowered machine. Just does not feel like polished software which is a huge reputational risk for Linux right now.
    • ghighi7878 6mo ago
• phendrenad2 6mo ago
  X only exists because it pre-dates Linux and Open-Source in general. It was developed at Stanford and spread to MIT and became a de-facto standard in academic computer labs. It came from the need for a graphics stack. Wayland, conversely, is what you get when the Linux community tries to create their own thing from scratch. True to Conway's Law, it's a loose confederacy of mini-projects that are all equally "wayland". Just look at hyprland, which the community tried to eject, yet people still use it.
• scheeseman486 6mo ago
  > There are multiple cases of this: OBS can't screen record (it segfaults instead), I can't copy-paste, and I can't see window previews unless everything implements a specific extension to the core protocol. Yeah. And? They did that. On my Wayland desktop, copy and paste works fine, window previews work fine, OBS screen capture works fine. > The actual "threat model" here is baffling and doesn't seem to reflect a need for users. Applications are not able to see each other's windows, but they're not able to interact in any other way that could potentially cause problems? In any other way? The last paragraph just explained the other way. That's when I stopped reading. If they can't even make a coherent, reasonable argument from the start and instead just blast out a bunch of bullshit, no one should be listening.
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• queuebert 6mo ago
  I was going to ask, why hasn't anyone ported NeXTSTEP to modern architectures? It was a pretty decent windowing system. Then I realized duh that's what Apple did with OS X. Too bad they ruined it.
  • neoCrimeLabs 6mo ago
    Also, https://www.gnustep.org/ https://www.gnustep.org/ That reminds me, I should pull out my NeXT Cube and play with it. That machine is 33mhz of pure power. :-D None the less I still love it.
    • linguae 6mo ago
      I remember when I first learned about GNUstep in 2004 when I was in high school. It's a shame GNUstep never took off; we could have had an ecosystem of applications that could run on both macOS and Linux using native GUIs. With that said, the dream is not dead. There's a project named Gershwin (https://github.com/gershwin-desktop/gershwin-desktop https://github.com/gershwin-desktop/gershwin-desktop), which is a Mac-like desktop environment built on top of GNUstep. Gershwin appears to be heavily inspired by Apple Rhapsody (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhapsody_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhapsody_(operating_system)) with some modern touches.
    • pjmlp 6mo ago
      My graduation thesis was to port visualisation software from NeXT into Windows, obviously rewriting it in the process. My supervisor used to have a Cube, and every time I visited his office for demos or questions, there it was left in the corner, with the expectation that everything related to NeXT was going to be away. Thus this project, and others, as means to keep the research going. This was before Jobs coming back to Apple, and OpenStep not really going as well as hoped for.
  • h4ch1 6mo ago
    I wasn't alive at the time NeXTSTEP was a thing, but I did look at a demo[0] to figure out what you were talking about (i love building/tinkering with window managers); it just looks like a regular old window manager? Is there something I'm missing/something specific you're talking about? [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf5o5liZxnA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf5o5liZxnA
• cardanome 6mo ago
  Wayland is what you get when you give corporations like Red Hat power over Linux. Everything coming from them is corporate slop. Systemd is another mess coming from them.
• hparadiz 6mo ago
  X11 is not secure and I guess some folks in the open source community are so lazy to implement a dialog box that asks for permission to take a screenshot that they will literally write blog posts about it for 10 years instead of just writing some code.
• fhn 6mo ago
  "Regardless, I simply don’t give a shit about you anymore." 100% he still don't give a shit about you.
• Liftyee 6mo ago
  Honestly as someone who mostly operates my computer instead of tinkering I don't care whether X or Wayland or something else, I just want something non-opinionated that works reliably. X doesn't support palm rejection so I can't use my stylus/touchscreen for note taking. Wayland doesn't pass through the pen properly (??) leading to glitches and full screen disabling the pen until I restart the wacom kernel module. Apparently this bug has been fixed in Ubuntu 26.04 and it's to do with Mutter actually. We'll see when I upgrade.
• yyyk 6mo ago
  Look, it's a done deal. Some of the choices Wayland made are not to my liking, there will be a long term cost (even static linking won't save you from differing protocol implementations). But it's done and there's no point in complaining. (Running X11 right now, I'll switch when the distro forces me to, in hope I'll get a bug free experience after everyone else runs it)
• deleted 6mo ago
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• jasoneckert 6mo ago
  In short, this reads like a mix of valid historical pain points and outdated assumptions. The post frames Wayland security as “you can’t do anything,” but that’s a misunderstanding. Even under X11, any app can log keystrokes, read window contents, and inject input into other apps. Wayland flips this to isolation-by-default: explicit portals/APIs for screen capture, input, etc. Moreover, the performance argument is weak and somewhat contradictory. The author claims there is no clear performance win, and that it's sometimes slower and hardware improvements make it irrelevant. But Wayland reduces copies and avoids X11 roundtrips (architectural win). Actual performance depends heavily on compositor + drivers, and I've found that modern hardware has HUGE performance improvements (especially Intel, AMD, and Apple Silicon via the Asahi driver). The NVIDIA argument is also dated. Sure, support was historically bad due to EGLStreams vs GBM, but this has improved significantly in recent driver releases. Many cited issues are outdated too. OBS, clipboard, and screen sharing issues are now mostly (if not entirely) solved in the latest GNOME/KDE. I've been using Wayland exclusively on Fedora and Fedora Asahi Remix systems for many years alongside Sway (and occasionally GNOME and KDE). Adoption has accelerated in many distros, and XWayland for legacy apps is excellent (although I believe using the word "legacy" here would be a trigger word for the author ;-). There's no stagnation here... what we're looking at is a slow migration of a foundational layer, which historically always takes a decade or more in the Linux world.
  • JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
    > Actual performance depends heavily on compositor + drivers, and I've found that modern hardware has HUGE performance improvements (especially Intel, AMD, and Apple Silicon via the Asahi driver) Author’s argument is those hardware improvements could have been had for free with X11 upgrades. I’m not saying it’s a complete argument. But talking about architectural wins sounds like conceding the argument.
    • joecool1029 6mo ago
      > Author’s argument is those hardware improvements could have been had for free with X11 upgrades. I do NOT miss having tearing all the time with X11. There were always kludgy workarounds. Even if you stopped and said ok, lets not run nvidia, let's do intel they have great FOSS driver support, we look back at X11 2D acceleration history. EXA, SNA, UMA, XAA? Oh right all replaced with GLAMOR, OK run modesetting driver, right need a compositor on top of our window manager still because we don't vsync without it. Do you have monitors with a different refresh rate? Do you have muxes with different cards driving different outputs? All this stuff X11 sucks at. Ok the turd has been polished well now after decades, it doesn't need to run as root/suid anymore, doesn't listen for connections on your network, but the security model still sucks compared to wayland, and once you mix multiple video cards all bets are off. But yeah, clipboard works reliably, big W for X11.
• geophile 6mo ago
  I have been using Pop_OS for many years, and I’m still on 22.04, which uses X11. I don’t understand the pros and cons of X11 vs. Wayland, I just want a working desktop. 24.04 uses Wayland, and while some people have had no problems migrating, many people are having serious problems. From what I can tell, it’s not a good choice for me yet. This article tells me that it may not be a good choice ever. I am a huge fan of System76 and Pop_OS, and I am sorry to see how this migration has split the community and forced many people to make difficult choices. I suspect that I will have to leave Pop_OS once 22.04 is no longer supported, in a year. To be fair, there are two issues. Pop_OS Is introducing a new DE, COSMIC, which is written in Rust. That new DE is another source of instability. I’m afraid that Syatem76 has bitten off far more than it can chew.
  • gdelfino01 6mo ago
    I'm on the same boat. I wish I could use COSMIC with X11. I am now looking into installing a different Linux distribution on my System76 laptop.
  • VHRanger 6mo ago
    Yeah I'm another pop os user. Cosmic works great for a laptop. But it's a PITA for a desktop. It doesn't deal with multi monitor setups well. There's a recent new bug where the system hardlocks on monitor power state changes, which is unacceptable. So: great for single screen laptop, not good for desktop or server
  • Cyph0n 6mo ago
    Could the problem be COSMIC? Put differently, why do you assume that the issue is with Wayland rather than the work System76 did to support Wayland? Because many other DMs and WMs do not have issues with Wayland.
    • geophile 6mo ago
      Yes, I believe I said exactly that.
      • 6mo ago
• sourcegrift 6mo ago
  Another we'll structured critique of wayland: https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1pxectw/wayland_is_flawed_at_its_core_and_the_community/ https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1pxectw/wayland_is_f...
• xantronix 6mo ago
  Wayland can never be an adequate replacement for X11R6, despite its stated purpose, because its design fundamentally chases specifying a protocol for heterogeneous implementations of, what I suspect to be one thing: Apple's WindowServer. In specifying Wayland, focusing on compositing, while expecting major projects already committed to standards built atop the X Window System like XDND, ICCCM, et cetera, to band together to do the same for Wayland a priori, clearly hasn't worked out for reasons that seem self-evident to me. If there was one single dominant ecosystem of desktop environmens built on one dominant UI toolkit from which all others sprung, sure, this could work, but this is simply not the reality. On top of this, with the realities of the second-system problem, it seems clear to me the Wayland steering committee set out on an impossible task. But man, with a few million bucks, a couple years development time, and a small, dedicated team, maybe somebody out there could make their own little slice of heaven.
  • bigyabai 6mo ago
    > clearly hasn't worked out for reasons that seem self-evident to me. One reason is that Xwayland exist and works flawlessly for the majority of casual and professional applications. Better than native x11, in my anecdotal experience.
    • trenchgun 6mo ago
      Why is it better than native x11?
• longislandguido 6mo ago
  [flagged]
• erelong 6mo ago
  is it possible to create another alternative to both x11 and wayland that might correct some of these issues? (especially now with ai assistance?) I can see arguments for improving x11 but wayland still isn't there and I end up having to not use it for that reason
  • Cyph0n 6mo ago
    Sure, let’s throw some monke- I mean agents in a room and see if they can make something better than X11 and Wayland - each of which has had 10s of thousands of man hours put into them.
  • MBCook 6mo ago
    If all the developers behind X can’t do it in a decade, what makes you think anyone else can? Even if someone made something, are they really going to get buy in from all the major players? It’s Wayland. It’s over.
  • pabs3 6mo ago
    Take a look at Arcan, it supports both X11 and Wayland (and I think other protocols too). https://arcan-fe.com/ https://arcan-fe.com/
• sourcegrift 6mo ago
  ITT: "it works fine on my desktop" or in other words, fuck you I got mine. People the problem isn't whether you're able to run it, wayland does work fine for mainstream, the problems that anyone who's not mainstream cannot even take a fucking screenshot and that's bad for openness. Or open the window at the position of closed last time. That's bad for openness (and opening)
  • corndoge 6mo ago
    You still have X11. Why are you crying? People worked - for free - on what they wanted to work on, and that is wayland. Who are you upset at?
    • sourcegrift 6mo ago
      I'm upset not at wayland contributors but at people like you who can't be civil and people in the thread who don't understand the problem
      • corndoge 6mo ago
        You are the one not being civil replying to people expressing their legitimate opinion with the text "Fuck you I got mine". I see you've since deleted your reply.
  • octorian 6mo ago
    And this is a case where there's a long tail of "niche issues" that they end up becoming major issues when taken in aggregate.
• dismalaf 6mo ago
  The anti Wayland sentiment is tiring. Honestly all the hating on technology is tiring. Don't like something? Use the thing you like. Or make a thing you like. As for the claim in the title, it's false, it's absurd, and this entire article is uninteresting and just an extension of the weird Linux conspiracy theories floating around these days.
  • lyu07282 6mo ago
    > weird Linux conspiracy theories floating around these days There is this MAGA Linux Youtuber that is something to be studied on this topic, especially the community around it (some overlap with HN too), its basically just hate posting about woke, rust, systemd, python, mozilla, wayland, ubuntu, it goes on and on - https://www.youtube.com/bryanlunduke https://www.youtube.com/bryanlunduke I don't know why some hackers turned so reactionary it's so strange, I used to associate hacker culture more with leftism/anarchism/punks not conservative authoritarians or ancaps/libertarians.
    • deleted 6mo ago
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    • dismalaf 6mo ago
      Dunno if I'd call the people whining about Wayland hackers. More like freeloaders. Hackers make stuff. Also there's nothing about Linux or hacking culture that would be necessarily left or right wing. Maybe somewhat anti establishment with the desire for computing freedom (and in the west the left is firmly the "establishment", pushing the surveillance state forward).
      • MBCook 6mo ago
        > Also there's nothing about Linux or hacking culture that would be necessarily left or right wing I agree. But if you pretend there is there’s a big audience on one side ready to lap it up and give you ad views.
      • lyu07282 6mo ago
• a1o 6mo ago
  No one commented about Ubuntu team Mir approach. I wish it stayed in the running. :)
• vova_hn2 6mo ago
  > forced to make the switch > users that are now being forced to use unfinished software > frustration of being forced to use the new hotness > actual users are forced to use it Can confirm, Kristian Høgsberg and Drew DeVault personally came to my house and and installed Wayland on every computer I own. They made me watch it. It was horrible. Jokes aside, I think that it is worth remembering that open source developers can't actually force you to do anything. If you are unhappy with what they provide you can always just use a different software, or make your own fork, or by a commercial product instead. I know that I am stating the obvious that have already been stated countless times, but still. Using words such as "forced" in this context annoys me every time and I can't stop myself from saying it again. Edit: it gives me flashbacks of all the Poettering-hate back in the days.
  • adrian_b 6mo ago
    The open source developers can definitely force you to do a lot of work. Whenever they make changes to the program that they are maintaining, which break backwards compatibility, for which an example is replacing X11 with Wayland in the Linux distribution that you may have used for many years, then that forces the users affected by the changes to do potentially a lot of work, in order to find alternatives. For some special application that you use from time to time, finding an alternative and switching to it may be simple, but when the incompatible changes affect a fundamental system component, which must be used all the time and without which nothing works, e.g. Wayland or systemd, then you must change not some single application, but the entire Linux distribution, and that can be time-consuming, because you may have to learn to do a lot of things in a different way than you are accustomed to. So obviously, users are not happy about such changes that push work on them without any benefits. The better Linux distributions may offer their users choices even for such important components like X11 vs. Wayland or OpenRC vs. systemd, for example Gentoo, but the most popular Linux distributions tend to not offer choices for this kind of system components, so when they replace such a component, the users must either accept the change or stop using that Linux distribution, and both choices are bad, because they must adapt their workflow.
    • vova_hn2 6mo ago
• tim-tday 6mo ago
  Meh
• __d 6mo ago
  So, compare this with say the Python2 to Python3 migration. Similar motivations: the developers had some legacy decisions that were unfixable without breakage. But they were sick of it, and decided to just go for it. Most end users didn’t care about those issues. The few that did were happy to pay the cost of switching. Everyone else clung to Python2 for years because migrating was high cost and low value. It took about 15 years to complete the migration for most, and there are a small number of users who will never make it over. Perl5 to Perl6 is another useful historical example. FOSS development is managed by the developers, and so, compared to a commercial software project, the implementation issues get more weight. This sort of thing is very likely to happen again and again.
  • lostapathy 6mo ago
    Did perl5 to perl6 actually happen? I feel like perl mostly fell out of favor along the way.
    • Polizeiposaune 6mo ago
      It's a good example of a migration that mostly didn't happen.
      • __d 6mo ago
        From one perspective, the XLibre folks seem to be taking the Perl5 path, and hoping Wayland is Raku.
    • MBCook 6mo ago
      No. Perl 6 was renamed Raku (?) so people wouldn’t be confused that the 5 line was continuing development. Basically, to the degree I understand, the language was effectively forked into two.
    • __d 6mo ago
      Disclosure: I'm not intimately familiar with all this. I think Perl5 was originally planned to be replaced by Perl6. Then Perl6 took much longer than anyone expected, and kinda ended up in a different place. Perl5 was re-anointed as the once-and-future Perl, and what had been Perl6 became Raku. If I remember correctly, somewhere in the middle of all that there was talk of running Python (and other languages) on the new Perl6 VM.
• nvllsvm 6mo ago
  I've been pretty happy with Wayland for the past ~2 years of using it. - No annoying "X11 stutter" - FreeSync works reliably; no more fucking around with different compositors. - applications aren't allowed permanently alter the display settings. That was particularly problematic with older Windows games and wine. Depending on the game, exiting a game could leave the display server in a very low resolution on exit. Even worse, a few games would result in the X11 gamma settings being altered outside of the game (Deus Ex was one, but there were a few others). - display-specific scaling factors - I could use Waydroid on my 2-in-1 finally. - HDR support. As an added bonus beyond HDR content, SDR content looks better on my PG42UQ monitor due to the monitor suffering from severe black crush in SDR mode. That said, there are annoyances. I recently started work on a rewrite of the Jellyfin Desktop client (https://github.com/jellyfin-labs/jellyfin-desktop-cef https://github.com/jellyfin-labs/jellyfin-desktop-cef) and of course targeted Wayland first: Pros: - HDR via an Wayland subsurface works great! Cons: - Running CEF (Chromium) in Wayland mode does NOT respect the system scale factor. The workaround is to run it X11 mode. Not too big of a deal since I'm using CEF in offscreen-rendering mode with a Wayland SDL surface, but annoying. - Picture-in-Picture isn't widely supported yet. It is one of those things that Wayland is building _towards_ rather than X11 just working. - Minor, but not being able to position the window centered on startup is kinda annoying. So yeah - tradeoffs, but currently good enough for me and it continues to get better. I'm optimistic.
• JSR_FDED 6mo ago
  LLMs didn’t exist when Wayland was started. Now that we have them, would it be feasible to use LLMs to go after the historical crud that X11 accumulated due to age? I don’t like vibe coding, but using LLMs to dig into a huge legacy code base like X11 could be very useful.
  • nickelpro 6mo ago
    No. X11's problems were rooted in the abstractions presented by the X11 core protocol and its extension mechanisms. The interface, not merely the implementation. Wayland was correct in first focusing on replacing this interface. The problem is the effort stopped there and left the ecosystem to figure out the implementation part.
    • uecker 6mo ago
      What exactly do you think are the problems in X11 core protocol and extension mechanism that required to start from scratch?
      • nickelpro 6mo ago
        Don't take it from me, Daniel Stone has a whole talk on the motivation for Wayland: https://youtu.be/RIctzAQOe44 https://youtu.be/RIctzAQOe44 Broadly, the X Server has a bunch of capabilities which are irrelevant. The modern model is really Window <-> Compositor based, and the X Server protocol is just a pointless middle man in that exchange.
        • uecker 6mo ago
          Sorry, I know this nonsense from Daniel Stone I am interested why you believe it. "compatibilities which are irrelevant" do exist, such as old drawing primitives but those are not really an issue. They can be maintained for backwards compatibility and eventually deprecated and removed, but they are not anything which holds back modern clients. The X server protocol is not anymore a "pointless middle man in that exchange" than the Wayland protocol is a "pointless middle man". A protocol is obviously needed so can not be pointless.
• Teknoman117 6mo ago
  I strongly disagree with the premise. Regardless of how you feel about Wayland, its creation set off _massive_ improvements across the entire Linux graphics stack. For those of us who were using Linux on the desktop in decades past, remember when you couldn't use a GPU without X running? Remember the days when you needed an X session running in order to use CUDA or OpenCL? Remember the days when the entire graphics driver lived inside of X? When display server issues caused kernel panics? Remember the days when you couldn't share a hardware graphics surface between processes? When it was impossible to get hardware acceleration to work offscreen? Wayland's aggressive stance on "it doesn't work on platforms that don't fix all of that" is one of the only things that pushed the stability and flexibility of the graphics stack on Linux forward. I don't really think anything less than saying "We the X developers are going to stop X development and X is going away" would have been enough to push graphics card vendors to actually rework the drivers.
  • dralley 6mo ago
    Same thing with Pulse Audio People cursed the name for years, because it exposed all of the terrible, glitchy audio hardware drivers and refused on general principle to work around the issues to the degree that previous audio solutions had. And the result was that while the experience was inconsistent and buggy for years, it did eventually drag the Linux audio stack into a better place.
    • rasz 6mo ago
      PulseAudio dragged linux to replacing that stinkin pile of garbage with PipeWire.
      • Crespyl 6mo ago
        The argument that can be made is that we never would've gotten PipeWire without going through PulseAudio first.
        • snvzz 6mo ago
          We got the much superior jack two years before pulseaudio was even a thing. Pulseaudio was a derail of Linux audio. We could have skipped it entirely.
• mmmore 6mo ago
  I've used Wayland (via sway) for multiple years including on machines with a 1060 and 5080 (mainly for good fractional scaling support). The only major issues I've had with it have to do with XWayland apps. I think there are some issues with providing a consistent experience with things like screen recording, 3rd party proprietary apps, etc. across different DEs/distros, but that's more of something that comes with the territory of Linux. > I can't copy-paste, and I can't see window previews unless everything implements a specific extension to the core protocol Sentences like this make me wonder how frequently the author has tried Wayland and what his specific setup is. I mean I understand experiences may vary, but I have such a different experience then him. I've had issues with Wayland, but I've also had issues with X. > But the second actual users are forced to use it expect them to be frustrated! Canonical and Red-Hat are not "forcing" you to use Wayland anymore than X only apps "forcing" me to use X (via-XWayland). They are switching to Wayland because they feel like they can provide a better experience to their users for easier with it. You're more than welcome to continue using X, and even throw a few commits its way sometime.
  • wildredkraut 6mo ago
    Of course redhat is indirectly enforcing it, by having people in key roles of the KDE, GNOME,systemd and wayland development, who are making decisions, accepting or blocking ideas and commits. It all goes hand in hand and is mainly driven by the key "Sponsors".
    • MBCook 6mo ago
      So it’s a conspiracy because they’ve infiltrated the seats of power? It’s not that developers of those projects think this is the better path forward?
      • wildredkraut 6mo ago
        Nope, there has been tons of commits in regard of X11, code refractions, bug fixes and new features, in the past 17 years. Yes most of them blocked for the sake of ideology, not conspiracy, it's more like a religious thinking.
• WesBrownSQL 6mo ago
  Yeah, I'm stuck on X11 since Wayland and NVIDIA with two video cards for display is hot garbage. I have been a Linux user on the command line since the days of root and boot floppies. I don't think the desktop has felt this broken to me since the early days. I'm a tech veteran and don't have a problem working through issues, but when the issue is "you're running Wayland compositor," Then that's a problem I can't fix. I can't write a compositor. I'm running X11/KDE on Manjaro base, and it is stable after some cursing and poking things with a stick. Oh, and telling me "Tell NVIDIA to fix their drivers!" or some other thing, if I could effectively and efficiently use something else, I would. Again, lack of competition has hamstrung us. Oh well, I'll go back to yelling at kids to get off my lawn and coming out of my thick, luxurious neck beard.
  • MBCook 6mo ago
    There seem to be a lot of people in other places in these comments saying things work for them with Nvidia just fine. But it also sounds like whether things work is heavily dependent on how up-to-date the distribution is. I’m not sure if that’s tied in with Nvidia or not.
    • pjmlp 6mo ago
      The usual Linux discussion forums spirit for the last 30 years. :)
    • dadoum 6mo ago
      In my experience, there are a lot of problems with Optimus-like set-ups (laptop with an Nvidia graphics card which is not active all the time), so having different problems with multiple Nvidia graphics card is something I can believe even if my experience with a single main Nvidia GPU is great.
• hacker_homie 6mo ago
  Daniel Stone from linux.conf.au 2013, The Real Story Behind Wayland and X https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44 It was unmaintainable, I know your workflow is broken, you can keep using X11 the rest of the world isn't obligated to maintain it for you.
• canmi21 6mo ago
  [dead]
• shmerl 6mo ago
  What's the alternative, stay with X11? No, thanks.
• abram 6mo ago
  I've used Linux on desktops/laptops intermittently since the year 2000, but I've been using mostly MacOS in recent years. With Apple not inspiring confidence lately, I wanted to try using Linux as a daily OS again. So I installed Fedora on a laptop last month. After installation I noticed that the colors on my OLED display were very oversaturated. After some frustrating attempts to get ICC profiles working, I was dismayed to read this: https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/12-years-of-incubating-wayland-color-management.html https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/12-y... Sounds like Wayland color management is... almost done? But the lack of a complete implementation didn't stop my distro from making Wayland the default. So now I'm left having to choose between using the cool new Wayland compositors and having accurate colors in my photo editing apps :(
  • eviks 6mo ago
    > and having accurate colors in my photo editing apps Should've stayed in the terminal where the distro wants you to be!
• nubinetwork 6mo ago
  Same old complaints copy pasted from that one github rant... "my obs doesn't work, copy paste doesn't work..." That stuff has literally been working fine for years...
  • pavlus 6mo ago
    That rant is especially funny, because its author (probonopd) was responsible for some of the things he was ranting about, by ignoring pull requests to his projects, that would resolve them.
• Dwedit 6mo ago
  Blocking applications from interacting with each other when it already has full access to the other process's memory via /proc/<pid>/mem is just silly. Save the blocking for when it doesn't already have that level of access.
• eviks 6mo ago
  > Entitlement and bullying of open-source maintainers is not appropriate, and it's understandable that the developers lash out after feeling beaten down by entitled users. Is it not understandable that the users lash out after being beaten down by arrogant developers calling them assholes? At least their lashing out seems to be appropriately targeted at the source?
  • trekkie99 6mo ago
    It’s not appropriate. It’s the distro maintainers who force their users.
• kelipso 6mo ago
  X11 worked fine. Then Wayland came from somebody’s fever dream and forced everyone to use it, just for everyone to encounter some kind of bug every time they do anything slightly off the beaten path. For me literally every new install is some stupid Wayland BS I have to deal with, probably because I use Nvidia drivers, but X11 worked perfectly fine. Wayland should have stayed in the playground as the post says.
• dpc_01234 6mo ago
  TL;DR: Generic uninspired anti-Wayland rant.
• glzone1 6mo ago
  Does anyone know what is up with RDP support on linux? I'm trying to migrate to linux but I need to be able to RDP to a headless machine running my desktop from Windows machines. How is this not solved? Is wayland worse or better here?
  • Sweepi 6mo ago
    Accessing a Linux machine from Linux/Windows via RDP is not fun. Accessing a Windows machine from Linux/Windows via RDP works excellent - I use Remmina on Linux, but there are ofc lots of alternatives, as usual. Points on accessing a Linux(Fedora/KDE Plasma) machine via RDP: - as I understand it, you cannot open a new session, you can only access an existing one -> forget about a headless machine, it will have to render its DE into to void if you want access it via RDP. The work-flow is more like VNC than RDP. - X11 has problems, Wayland is definitely worse. Queue the people who will tell me/you that it works fine them. My last attempt on Fedora ended with a "working" setup. Working in quotes, since I had to accept/allow every incoming connection on the host machine (in a pop-up window which auto-hides after a few seconds and did work ~60% of the time), making it useless for the intended use case. You can workaround this by SSH'ing into the machine and accepting the connection somehow, but I gave up at this moment. - there is also some fun to be had regarding display resolution and "session passwords", but compared to the fun with Wayland "security" and portals, its manageable
• ycui1986 6mo ago
  for all past years, I have been told wayland is the future. but the decade long dragged out rolling out did not made much sense to me. neither did I investigate why. until today, I found out how difficult to force a 1920x1200 resolution over remote desktop. it is plain feature degradation. people ask why do you need it. I have a 3440x1440 physical monitor on the server, I need to remove login with a 1920x1200 laptop. I want full screen at laptop's native resolution. Windows can do this decade ago.
• snvzz 6mo ago
  XLibre exists simply because you can't just "force X11 to die" (Xorg's strategy) for as long as someone is willing to work on it. Now, there is a group of people who actively hate on XLibre sorely because it pretty much derailed such a plan. These people (who are no doubt sick in their heads) should focus their energy on improving Wayland rather than running hate campaigns on XLibre and its developers.
  • kombine 6mo ago
    Majority of the community does not care about XLibre or its developers. They are free to work on whatever they want, but the ship has sailed and no one is coming back to X11 except some fringe groups which always exist.
  • fluffybucktsnek 6mo ago
    I have yet to see those hate campaigns. If anything, I see more hate campaigns from XLibre enthusiasts against Wayland on comment sections.
• DonHopkins 6mo ago
  X11 set Linux back 42 years, then Wayland set it back 10 years, and 2026 - 42 - 10 = 1974, the year Richard Nixon resigned because of the Watergate Scandal. It all makes so much sense now.
• thayne 6mo ago
  > Projects will drop Wayland support and go back to X11 I think that is incredibly likely to happen. I think that the switch to Wayland has hindered the Linux destop in some ways, and mistakes have definitely been made. But at this point wayland is generally good enough and switching back to X11 won't really accomplish anything helpful.
• kombine 6mo ago
  I've been running Plasma Desktop for years and had to put up with graphical glitches in its X11 iteration. I switched to Wayland to years ago when Plasma 6 was released and all the glitches were gone. Additionally, overall snappiness and responsiveness of the desktop and window management improved markedly, I felt like a got a new computer. Granted, I had to acquire an AMD GPU for this transition but it was well worth it.
• ikekkdcjkfke 6mo ago
  elementaryOS Luna was peak for me, 2014, on my 13’. Long battery life, smooth UI, smooth multi-desktop switching (which windows 11 now implements). Later versions of eOS became laggy after they upgraded the underlying ubuntu. Been on windows since that. What i wish for in a linux desktop is just pure efficiency, no background processes, not too much UI like ubuntu has,UI implemented efficiently and hw accelerated
• sgt 6mo ago
  Aka why Linux on the desktop still sucks in 2026, sadly. Dave Plummer said the other day on Twitter: Linux is great, but on the desktop it's terrible.
  • Hackbraten 6mo ago
    Another perspective, even though anecdata: I’ve been daily driving a Linux desktop using Sway for five years and I can’t really complain. I haven’t experienced any of the issues TFA mentioned.
• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• Avlin67 6mo ago
  just installed arch + hyprland. so reactive and so easy...
• DeathArrow 6mo ago
  For me the fragmentation in Linux world is puzzling. I like to have one way to do things when it comes to the OS. So everything is optimized to work together and I don't have to mix and match parts and to learn different stuff that do the same thing. I just want my OS to get out of my way and let me run my software.
  • yjftsjthsd-h 6mo ago
    It's actually very simple; it's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law in practice. There is no "Linux" operating system, only an endless assortment of independent people and sometimes companies, each of which builds whatever they want, and sometimes they assemble some of those pieces into a working operating system. Every time someone makes a distro, they have their own vision and they run with it. Every time someone doesn't like a component, they fork it or make their own thing. There is nobody who can impose a single order, because it's just a loose collection of separate groups, several of which are actively feuding at any given moment.
  • NetMageSCW 6mo ago
    macOS says “Hi!” (well, mostly).
• ZiiS 6mo ago
  If X11 is unpopular after 40 years and Wayland after 18 it seems odd to extrapolate that something similar will become popular in 5 years.
• senectus1 6mo ago
  thats just being overly dramatic. no one has taken X11 away. and its not like X11 was making great leaps forward like Wayland has.
• nnm 6mo ago
  I suspect some of the problems are not due to Wayland, but due to Ubuntu. I recently revived a decade-old PC with a dual-boot setup: Windows 10 and Ubuntu 24.04. While Windows ran fine, Ubuntu was a nightmare—constant freezes, random logouts, and daily crashes. After hitting my limit, I wiped Ubuntu and installed Debian. What a difference! It’s been months without a single crash. If you're struggling with stability on older hardware, Debian might be the "boring" (in a good way) solution you need.
• pregnenolone 6mo ago
  > I also don't care for the "security" argument when parts of the core reference implementation are written in a memory-unsafe language. That's were I stopped reading.
• fdghrtbrt 6mo ago
  If the author is reading, I appreciate reading these discussions in language that non-experts can understand, so thank you.
• dadoum 6mo ago
  Wayland is a protocol so it doesn't exactly is at the same place as X11. That being said, I think that they are ignoring the most important element of Wayland that may be kinda the cause of its gripes: Wayland is better designed and focuses on doing window management, aka, allowing applications to display their windows. It is not trying to be a general IPC protocol, it is not a permission system, it is not a video framework, it is not an accessibility framework; just a protocol for apps to create windows and set their properties. And at window management, it tries really hard to be better. For example presenting a window (getting it on top of the others) is an action requiring a token now, meaning that the compositor now gets tools to identify wrong presentation attempts. It handles the case of window-docking on the window management side, which allows more flexibility about how to handle it on the compositor side. Don't get me wrong, it is not perfect (for example I don't like the assumption in the API that there should be at most one seat, and that it would have at most one pointer), but it really tries to be better, it is not a waste of time imo.
• a2128 6mo ago
  OBS can't screen record (it segfaults instead), I can't copy-paste, and I can't see window previews unless everything implements a specific extension to the core protocol. I can't take articles like this seriously when they so confidently make such statements that so directly conflict with reality. I use Wayland exclusively everyday and I screen record with OBS on both KDE and GNOME on multiple machines with no issues, my KDE shows window previews, and copy pasting works fine. Maybe the author's problems aren't Wayland issues?
• icar 6mo ago
  Instead of spreading FUD about a protocol, one could stay in X11. If you don't need fractional scaling, HiDPI, real multi monitor support, mixed refresh rates, HDR, VRR, no tearing, and trust all your apps to not keylog everything, you can keep using any XOrg DE.
• ruicraveiro 6mo ago
  I felt a lot of cognitive dissonance while reading this article, specifically where it focuses on the things that do no work on Wayland, yet are completely working on my vanilla Debian distro with KDE on Wayland. And, as we all know, Debian (not SID) slants more towards stability rather than being bleeding edge up to date. It's been a very long time, and releases, since I last had issues with copy-paste and screen recording, so I don't know what the author is talking about or maybe, when he's talking about.
• tsoukase 6mo ago
  Wayland is the IPv6 of graphics. New brilliant implementation, over a decade old but still struggling with user share. For me the graphics server is tied to my favourite environments for lightweight use: Xfce and Lxde both use only X11. Also, I still cannot understand why a server has to depend on the installed graphics card as the driver stays in between and should abstract and make the software hardware-agnostic.
• InfiniteRand 6mo ago
  I don’t mind using Wayland these days, but I do feel most of the security arguments are aimed at the government/corporate/big server audiences than the single user/developer. Which ultimately is fine, this reflects the focus of the people who have the skills and opportunities to contribute and is unlikely to change any time soon. That is somewhat unfortunate for some but ultimately if you’re asking people to work for free you can’t be too picky on what they choose to work on.
• ghusto 6mo ago
  The developer response is more what I would describe as entitled, rather than the user complaints: > Regardless, I simply don’t give a shit about you anymore. > > We’ve sacrificed our spare time to build this for you for free. If you turn around and harass us based on some utterly nonsensical conspiracy theories, then you’re a fucking asshole. You haven't sacrificed your spare time. You've done a thing you wanted to do, and had a tantrum when it turned out it had consequences. You want to do a thing, fine, but the moment it's forced on people you have taken on responsibility, whether that was what you wanted or not. Grow up. > At this point I consider Wayland to be a fun toy built entirely to pacify developers tired of working on a finished legacy project Pretty much this.
  • trekkie99 6mo ago
    Why is the burden being put on the developers and not the distro maintainers that (potentially/allegedly) prematurely implemented the new(?) thing? insert xkcd dependency comic
• RandomMarius 6mo ago
  Running a 3 monitor setup on both Wayland and X11, the displays are wildly different in DPI. In the past I’ve reverted to X11 simply to have Slack screen sharing work, but recently I’m staying on Wayland due to better DPI handling in our production app. Slack screen sharing works when I share my screen twice, and then Slack sometimes crashes. Google Meet and Zoom screen sharing has always worked well in Wayland, so I imagine they will fix this. I’ve also been able to use OBS to do screen recordings, but the easier default application does not work. It’s definitely becoming better, and forcing it as the default is what was needed. It took 17 years because nobody used it by default.
• drob518 6mo ago
  I use MacOS, so I don’t have a dog in this hunt, but it seems like the foremost issue is distributions making Wayland the default before it’s ready to accept that responsibility, not with Wayland itself. That said, 17 years is a long time to wait for it to mature, so another question would be about the Wayland developers’ goals, both short and long term. Do the Wayland developers actually want to replace X11 with Wayland in large distros? If so, they need a plan to get it mature enough to do that. If not, fine, then distros need to back off and continue with X11 as the default.
  • xtracto 6mo ago
    I also use MacOS, but have used Linux since 1997 (way too many distros), so i hold it close to my heart. For me the Wayland story is a great example of https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... They started saying "let's rewrite from scratch, X is too complicated "; 17 years later, they have realized the reasons for all the complexity that was written during 25 years (1984 by MIT). I guess in around 8 years we will have 2 implementations of X.
    • drob518 6mo ago
      Indeed. Clean sheets of paper don’t stay clean very long in the real world. That said, in the manner of “plan to throw one away,” we can learn from our mistakes and do better the next time around. Though perhaps X10 was the one that got thrown away before X11.
• Havoc 6mo ago
  To me as an end user this feels a lot like the systemd debate. Vague awareness that there are people that care deeply but to me it seems to work fine and X11 did seem to be carrying a lot of legacy baggage so a renew seems like a good idea. From an end user perspective I struggle to reconcile that with „set Linux back 10 years“
• ForHackernews 6mo ago
  Anecdotally, as a user, Wayland works much better than X11 ever did. I suppose I miss being able to forward a GUI app from a headless server over SSH, but it's a fair trade for being able to plug in two monitors.
• Yizahi 6mo ago
  Systemd and Wayland improved Linux by 10 years. See, works just as well in this direction too. (PS: I do believe this, but won't presume to apply it for everyone else with different experiences like author does).
• pgwalsh 6mo ago
  Wayland is the future and yes it took some time but I've been using it for a while. Sure there are annoyances but nothing terrible. People complained about pipewire and wireplumber too, but they're fantastic. It's great in the DAW. It just takes a long time to get everything compatible.
• Buxato 6mo ago
  It seems more that the cat with tinfoil is him. I have been using Linux partially since 1994 and exclusively since 2010 (aprox), never more things were so "just work" and smooth for me like right now. I began using Wayland since this last Kubuntu 25.10, because before even if some things were better I have few problems with my work software, now suspend its perfect, desktop grid with videogames is perfect, multi monitor is great ... even if I have to use a Nvidia GPU on a laptop!
• FatherOfCurses 6mo ago
  Arch + Wayland finally got me dailying Linux for non-business use instead of Windows or Mac about a year ago. I admittedly have riced out things a bit but it is the most pleasant computing experience I currently have access to. The only pain I've encountered is not being able to get RustDesk going, but that's not been a show-stopper for me.
• j0057 6mo ago
  No, lack of maintainers and maintenance on Xorg would have made Linux desktop unviable altogether. High DPI and fractional scaling are very badly supported on Xorg, and architecturally impossible to build. Wayland is where development happens, so for better or worse, that is what you'll have to use. If you don't like it, go maintain Xorg, if you can't, you're in no position to complain. I sense a lot of conservative "they took away our X11 freedom" and I have no understanding for it.
• catgirlinspace 6mo ago
  fwiw wayland (with niri) has been flawless for me on an integrated amd gpu (amd ryzen ai 9 370 hx).
• Lockal 6mo ago
  Not sure if this in line with HN guidelines (per "tangential annoyances" rule), but god, that "animation: drift 2s ease-in-out infinite alternate;" on body kills me, literally - it redraws the whole page with 120 fps, draining the battery, while nothing changes. I don't think it is even "too common to be interesting" - I rarely see this (or actually, I see such tech for the first time). It is specifically annoying because the article attempts to talk about modern software quality.
• w4rh4wk5 6mo ago
  Pretty much: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/file-roller/-/issues/4 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/file-roller/-/issues/4
• mahgnous 6mo ago
  [dead]
• thisisidiotic 6mo ago
  I'm not even a real developer, just a lazy generalist hacker, but Wayland continually breaks normal things for me.