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.
> 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.
Anecdotally, my experience with Wayland has been a lot better than with X11. I have been on Wayland for years, I can't remember the last time I had an issue (running Sway).
Same here, there are some pain points with swaywm (notably screen sharing is only per display, DisplayLink support and screen mirroring is a pain). Most of these points however are IME a worthwhile tradeoff. Sway has also been astoundingly stable (compared to gnome or KDE)
Additionally, the Steam Deck ships with Wayland by default. Hundreds of thousands of gamers are stress-testing it without any complaint that I'm aware of.
I've had an interesting experience with creating a wayland compatability layer with Bitwig. Especially as I used Niri as the tiling window manager, it is even harder to use as a base as it less supportive of X11 compared to other WMs like hyprland.
This may be Niche, but DAWs are very rare to support linux, especially this stack. I would say it might be a stretch to say the company behind Bitwig is punishing Wayland users, I am sure they don't have the personnel for it, but it is a legitimate issue that companies will most likely be 10 years late to the new modernization into Wayland.
Anyways, I was able to configure it with a specific flake configuration. I had issues with third party windows, which was more of an issue with the floating nature of Niri, since Gnome with Wayland displayed external VSTs fine.
You can find my repository here if interested. It consists of a few files, and I made it easier to use with justfiles. https://github.com/ArikRahman/Nixwig
as much as i dislike m$, at least windows works and it works for games and graphics. when i need text or computation without a ui, i use linux. similar to the argument in the article about use what works, i use what works.
Options that are equivalent enough for most end users just cause confusion. There are also too many distros, and the Gnome vs. KDE competition set desktop Linux back another 10 years. That's three dimensions of big, important choices with not much downside if you pick the happy path and a whole lot of downside if you don't.
> 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".
Yeah, we're talking about completely different threat models here.
Yeap, it sounds like a big rant with multiple exclamation marks. Having both is a way to go. Recently I purchased a new laptop and thought should I go full Wayland? No way. I started with X11 and then added Wayland. Things break on Linux. You need a stable display server where you can still open a browser, and that is X11. Most of the time, I stay on Wayland until it breaks.
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).
Yes! Per-monitor fractional scaling on Fedora/Wayland finally allowed me to switch my default OS on my laptop from Windows 11 to Linux.
I had to give up on my previous attempt a couple years ago with Linux Mint/X11 because it was an exercise in futility trying to make my various apps look acceptable on my mixed DPI monitor setup.
Linux Mint with Wayland clearly was not getting a lot of attention at the time, and the general attitude when I looked up bugs seemed to be "just don't use Wayland", but maybe the situation has improved by now. It was also kinda off-putting reading Reddit/forum comments whose attitude towards per-monitor DPI scaling on Linux in general was basically "why would anyone need that" when it's been a basic Windows feature for a decade+.
Fedora on the other hand was literally just plug-and-play and has been very enjoyable to use as my daily driver.
I moved away from desktop Linux a few years back after getting a new development laptop with a hiDPI screen and running into fractional scaling issues. Windows wsl2 was just getting real good at the time, so I moved over on my desktop and laptop.
Nice to here fractional scaling situation is better now. Tempted to try it out but.. Man Windows(Pro) is just such a nice desktop and host now, and I can still develop in "linux"..
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.
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.
I already have stuff that works out of box (based on 24.04 as it happens), and from what I've seen of GNOME Desktop I really just don't like the design — and its maintainers generally just impress me as insufferable people any time a story comes up.
Overall I think it's much better that options exist. I'm even willing to tolerate GUI inconsistency across the Linux ecosystem in exchange.
My experience lately has been similar. Most things work well now.
But, I think the article has some valid points about how long it's taken to get even this far. And it just kinda sucks that some things are still broken or don't have alternatives (the #1 thing I miss right now is Barrier (Synergy) for using my macbook from my linux desktop). HDR gaming on linux is possible thanks to Valve but it's still nowhere near as simple as plugging in your HDR display and toggling one switch.
And it's been rough getting here, and it seems like there are still some things that are slow and hard to get right. I'm not a display protocol dev, so I don't really have educated opinions about the protocol. But I know it's been a rough transition relative to other projects I've adopted even when there was major pushback (systemd springs to mind).
No I do get that, it's definitely been a slow and painful migration. But just having a very insecure X11 "forever" with no fractional font scaling wasn't a long term plan either imo.
> the #1 thing I miss right now is Barrier (Synergy) for using my macbook from my linux desktop)
It's admittedly tough to keep up with all of the forks that have happened, but the current iteration, Input Leap, has worked for this for me for years now
Yeah? Then try to drag out a tab of firefox or GNOME files to the upper direction, good luck. Then check how "awful" Blender 5.1 titlebar and window frame integrates to GNOME. Have fun trying to make Deskflow/Synergy working on GDM.
Here it just works to the left or right, tried multiple distributions Fedora, Arch, CashyOS, NixOS, no way. Perhaps an issue with NVIDIA drivers, running a 5090 here.
It's just some of the so many reasons why the "Year of the Linux Desktop" will never see the light. Linux is doomed to run mainly headless on a dark chamber hardware. As always when the Linux Desktop is just starting to take off, somebody comes up with a new great self destructive idea(wayland), it always has been like that and probably will never change.
I am skeptical of the "Year of the Linux Desktop" as well, but saying that it won't come because of problems like that is crazy. Windows has plenty of bugs of much higher severity, and they don't seem to stop people from using it. People just use what they're used to.
Decades of using Linux desktops and nothing has ever changed hahaha. Users still complain things don’t work. Fans still say “oh what a first world problem”.
Like a little 2004 era time loop. People still installing Dapper Drake. Haha.
In the time that people have been talking about the Wayland future to today where they’re still talking about it I have lived in 3 continents, met my wife and had a child, and experienced a few huge technology shifts. Truly amazing. I get this blast of nostalgia every time this discussion happens. Like looking through a bubble and seeing my teenage self.
Fully agree, same here. It's just sad to keep watching this, because now just after approx. 15 years i started to evaluate the Linux Desktop again and it failed again.
Many professional software like Maya, Houdini, Unreal, etc. that used to run great on Linux/X11, now sucks on wayland. Some are hyping Linux for the subpar gaming compatibility, while for GameDev Windows is still required. In 15 years I'll try again, but then I'm probably to old for this.
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.
> 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.
It reads like a user that tried Wayland again last week, found the same issues and wrote a piece that tried to summarize why they remain sad after 17 years of waiting for Wayland to address its issues.
In X11, the problem was Xserver. Now, X11's design philosophy was hopelessly broken and needed to be replaced, but it wasn't replaced. As you correctly point out, there is no "Wayland", Wayland is a methodology, a description, of how one might implement the technologies necessary to replace X11.
This has led to hopeless fracturing and replication of effort. Every WM is forced to become an entire compositor and partial desktop environment, which they inevitably fail at. In turn application developers cannot rely on protocol extensions which represent necessary desktop program behavior being available or working consistently.
This manifests in users feeling the ecosystem is forever broken, because for them, on their machine, some part of it is.
There is no longer one central broken component to be fixed. There are hundreds of scattered, slightly broken components.
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.
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
> But they also failed to learn any lessons from X
Why do you believe that the developers of X failed to learn lessons from X when developing the replacement of X? Perhaps they learned lessons from X and decided to build it differently as a result?
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.
This is true, and it is also true that the maintainers of Wayland have done a terrible job of developing the replacement. It is mostly good enough now to replace X11, but based on what I've seen reported about different features, they frequently let "perfect be the enemy of done" when it comes to implementing critical features. I mean, just look at the drama around remembering the position of a window, its absolutely ridiculous that after years they haven't picked a "good enough" direction and implemented it.
The people behind Plan 9 did a much better job than was done with X11 and that was completely ignored as a path forward from what I can tell.
It’s tiny, secure, graphics subsystem independent (it’ll work on just about anything with or without a GPU, I would expect, given the API is so damn simple) and already designed.
I believe most of the original committers and maintainers of X are long gone, if still around they could very well be in their late 70s and 80s.
I would agree if you said many of the Wayland Developers people started with Xfee86. But I think the 'complexity' of X has to do with the fact no one of this generation fully understand why X11 did things the way they did, so Wayland was started. That is OK, but here we are.
I think the main issue is proprietary video companies did not to release their specs. I think if the Wayland people told the GPU Companies (like Nvidia) they will not support your hardware unless you release full specs, they would be further along.
OpenBSD is getting along fine without companies like Nvidia, I wish Linux and Wayland would tell these companies their GPUs will never be supported until full documentation is provided.
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.
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.
I stated no conclusions. I have not tried COSMIC, and I said that it’s COSMIC and Wayland seem to be problematic for people who have tried Pop_OS 24.04. (The one fact I do know is that Synergy, which I rely on, is still working on Wayland support.)
My only “conclusion” is that Pop_OS 24.04 seems to be incompatible with having a desktop that just works.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
I mean, the obvious point here is that none of these people are selling linux (or wayland or whatever). You could argue some of these projects over promise in terms of features and so forth, but again, it's not like people are paying for it.
You can certainly be unhappy with a piece of software regardless of if you paid for it, and there's an argument to be made that linux users benefit from it becoming more popular, but we're still mostly talking about volunteers creating software for themselves and then choosing to share it with others.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
> 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, ubuntu, it goes on and on - https://www.youtube.com/bryanlunduke
Meanwhile X11 is still coasting on Windows 95-level security with the joke that is XScreensaver (it draws a window over the others so you can kill it remotely) masquerading as a proper screen lock.
No secure attention key, no secure desktops, Windows has had this solved for over 33 years while Linux has been busy solving problems with Codes of Conduct.
It makes me angry because imagine what could have been if open source community members quit with the petty arguments and drama and devoted 100% of their efforts to solving real problems.
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.
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.
> 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.
Anecdotally, my experience with Wayland has been a lot better than with X11. I have been on Wayland for years, I can't remember the last time I had an issue (running Sway).
Same here, there are some pain points with swaywm (notably screen sharing is only per display, DisplayLink support and screen mirroring is a pain). Most of these points however are IME a worthwhile tradeoff. Sway has also been astoundingly stable (compared to gnome or KDE)
Additionally, the Steam Deck ships with Wayland by default. Hundreds of thousands of gamers are stress-testing it without any complaint that I'm aware of.
Same here. Wayland has been fine. (Hyprland)
I second this. I had issues years ago, but those have mostly been fixed.
I've had an interesting experience with creating a wayland compatability layer with Bitwig. Especially as I used Niri as the tiling window manager, it is even harder to use as a base as it less supportive of X11 compared to other WMs like hyprland.
This may be Niche, but DAWs are very rare to support linux, especially this stack. I would say it might be a stretch to say the company behind Bitwig is punishing Wayland users, I am sure they don't have the personnel for it, but it is a legitimate issue that companies will most likely be 10 years late to the new modernization into Wayland.
Anyways, I was able to configure it with a specific flake configuration. I had issues with third party windows, which was more of an issue with the floating nature of Niri, since Gnome with Wayland displayed external VSTs fine.
You can find my repository here if interested. It consists of a few files, and I made it easier to use with justfiles. https://github.com/ArikRahman/Nixwig
as much as i dislike m$, at least windows works and it works for games and graphics. when i need text or computation without a ui, i use linux. similar to the argument in the article about use what works, i use what works.
I assume you, a technical person, made sure to help the people giving you the software for free to diagnose what is obviously one or more bugs?
> I actually think it's nice to have both
Options that are equivalent enough for most end users just cause confusion. There are also too many distros, and the Gnome vs. KDE competition set desktop Linux back another 10 years. That's three dimensions of big, important choices with not much downside if you pick the happy path and a whole lot of downside if you don't.
> 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".
Yeah, we're talking about completely different threat models here.
Yeap, it sounds like a big rant with multiple exclamation marks. Having both is a way to go. Recently I purchased a new laptop and thought should I go full Wayland? No way. I started with X11 and then added Wayland. Things break on Linux. You need a stable display server where you can still open a browser, and that is X11. Most of the time, I stay on Wayland until it breaks.
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).
Yes! Per-monitor fractional scaling on Fedora/Wayland finally allowed me to switch my default OS on my laptop from Windows 11 to Linux.
I had to give up on my previous attempt a couple years ago with Linux Mint/X11 because it was an exercise in futility trying to make my various apps look acceptable on my mixed DPI monitor setup.
Linux Mint with Wayland clearly was not getting a lot of attention at the time, and the general attitude when I looked up bugs seemed to be "just don't use Wayland", but maybe the situation has improved by now. It was also kinda off-putting reading Reddit/forum comments whose attitude towards per-monitor DPI scaling on Linux in general was basically "why would anyone need that" when it's been a basic Windows feature for a decade+.
Fedora on the other hand was literally just plug-and-play and has been very enjoyable to use as my daily driver.
I moved away from desktop Linux a few years back after getting a new development laptop with a hiDPI screen and running into fractional scaling issues. Windows wsl2 was just getting real good at the time, so I moved over on my desktop and laptop.
Nice to here fractional scaling situation is better now. Tempted to try it out but.. Man Windows(Pro) is just such a nice desktop and host now, and I can still develop in "linux"..
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.
You don't even need fedora - clean arch install, install vim gnome and Firefox, and boom your computer now just works.
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.
I already have stuff that works out of box (based on 24.04 as it happens), and from what I've seen of GNOME Desktop I really just don't like the design — and its maintainers generally just impress me as insufferable people any time a story comes up.
Overall I think it's much better that options exist. I'm even willing to tolerate GUI inconsistency across the Linux ecosystem in exchange.
I recently had to go through several remote desktop apps before I found one that would work.
My experience lately has been similar. Most things work well now.
But, I think the article has some valid points about how long it's taken to get even this far. And it just kinda sucks that some things are still broken or don't have alternatives (the #1 thing I miss right now is Barrier (Synergy) for using my macbook from my linux desktop). HDR gaming on linux is possible thanks to Valve but it's still nowhere near as simple as plugging in your HDR display and toggling one switch.
And it's been rough getting here, and it seems like there are still some things that are slow and hard to get right. I'm not a display protocol dev, so I don't really have educated opinions about the protocol. But I know it's been a rough transition relative to other projects I've adopted even when there was major pushback (systemd springs to mind).
No I do get that, it's definitely been a slow and painful migration. But just having a very insecure X11 "forever" with no fractional font scaling wasn't a long term plan either imo.
> the #1 thing I miss right now is Barrier (Synergy) for using my macbook from my linux desktop)
It's admittedly tough to keep up with all of the forks that have happened, but the current iteration, Input Leap, has worked for this for me for years now
https://github.com/input-leap/input-leap
Yeah? Then try to drag out a tab of firefox or GNOME files to the upper direction, good luck. Then check how "awful" Blender 5.1 titlebar and window frame integrates to GNOME. Have fun trying to make Deskflow/Synergy working on GDM.
Don't know about the last two, but I just tried dragging a GNOME Files tab up and it worked just fine?..
> Then try to drag out a tab of firefox
Works fine here?
Here it just works to the left or right, tried multiple distributions Fedora, Arch, CashyOS, NixOS, no way. Perhaps an issue with NVIDIA drivers, running a 5090 here.
Wow what a showstopper!
It's just some of the so many reasons why the "Year of the Linux Desktop" will never see the light. Linux is doomed to run mainly headless on a dark chamber hardware. As always when the Linux Desktop is just starting to take off, somebody comes up with a new great self destructive idea(wayland), it always has been like that and probably will never change.
I am skeptical of the "Year of the Linux Desktop" as well, but saying that it won't come because of problems like that is crazy. Windows has plenty of bugs of much higher severity, and they don't seem to stop people from using it. People just use what they're used to.
Except for AI. I can have Claude go dick around with gconf and .rc files and .input or whatever and have it set things up the way I want to work.
Decades of using Linux desktops and nothing has ever changed hahaha. Users still complain things don’t work. Fans still say “oh what a first world problem”.
Like a little 2004 era time loop. People still installing Dapper Drake. Haha.
In the time that people have been talking about the Wayland future to today where they’re still talking about it I have lived in 3 continents, met my wife and had a child, and experienced a few huge technology shifts. Truly amazing. I get this blast of nostalgia every time this discussion happens. Like looking through a bubble and seeing my teenage self.
Fully agree, same here. It's just sad to keep watching this, because now just after approx. 15 years i started to evaluate the Linux Desktop again and it failed again. Many professional software like Maya, Houdini, Unreal, etc. that used to run great on Linux/X11, now sucks on wayland. Some are hyping Linux for the subpar gaming compatibility, while for GameDev Windows is still required. In 15 years I'll try again, but then I'm probably to old for this.
Hey at least they finished Perl 6!
Wayland breaks my slashdot-themed e16 desktop!! /s
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.
> 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.
It reads like a user that tried Wayland again last week, found the same issues and wrote a piece that tried to summarize why they remain sad after 17 years of waiting for Wayland to address its issues.
There is no "Wayland" to address these issues. It's like asking "web" to address its issues.
Wayland is a protocol with multiple different implementations.
But this is sort of the nature of the problem?
In X11, the problem was Xserver. Now, X11's design philosophy was hopelessly broken and needed to be replaced, but it wasn't replaced. As you correctly point out, there is no "Wayland", Wayland is a methodology, a description, of how one might implement the technologies necessary to replace X11.
This has led to hopeless fracturing and replication of effort. Every WM is forced to become an entire compositor and partial desktop environment, which they inevitably fail at. In turn application developers cannot rely on protocol extensions which represent necessary desktop program behavior being available or working consistently.
This manifests in users feeling the ecosystem is forever broken, because for them, on their machine, some part of it is.
There is no longer one central broken component to be fixed. There are hundreds of scattered, slightly broken components.
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.
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 hack 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.
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
> But they also failed to learn any lessons from X
Why do you believe that the developers of X failed to learn lessons from X when developing the replacement of X? Perhaps they learned lessons from X and decided to build it differently as a result?
>now every WM have to repeat that work
wlroots?
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.
This is true, and it is also true that the maintainers of Wayland have done a terrible job of developing the replacement. It is mostly good enough now to replace X11, but based on what I've seen reported about different features, they frequently let "perfect be the enemy of done" when it comes to implementing critical features. I mean, just look at the drama around remembering the position of a window, its absolutely ridiculous that after years they haven't picked a "good enough" direction and implemented it.
The people behind Plan 9 did a much better job than was done with X11 and that was completely ignored as a path forward from what I can tell.
It’s tiny, secure, graphics subsystem independent (it’ll work on just about anything with or without a GPU, I would expect, given the API is so damn simple) and already designed.
Maybe it wouldn’t work, but I bet it would have.
I believe most of the original committers and maintainers of X are long gone, if still around they could very well be in their late 70s and 80s.
I would agree if you said many of the Wayland Developers people started with Xfee86. But I think the 'complexity' of X has to do with the fact no one of this generation fully understand why X11 did things the way they did, so Wayland was started. That is OK, but here we are.
I think the main issue is proprietary video companies did not to release their specs. I think if the Wayland people told the GPU Companies (like Nvidia) they will not support your hardware unless you release full specs, they would be further along.
OpenBSD is getting along fine without companies like Nvidia, I wish Linux and Wayland would tell these companies their GPUs will never be supported until full documentation is provided.
I think you severely overestimate the amount of leverage the FOSS community has over companies like NVIDIA.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, I believe I said exactly that.
No, because you’re concluding from your experience and a single article that Wayland in general is bad.
I am saying that perhaps your experience has nothing to do with Wayland directly, so maybe you should still give Wayland a chance.
You can see many others in this thread contradicting the article’s complaints.
I stated no conclusions. I have not tried COSMIC, and I said that it’s COSMIC and Wayland seem to be problematic for people who have tried Pop_OS 24.04. (The one fact I do know is that Synergy, which I rely on, is still working on Wayland support.)
My only “conclusion” is that Pop_OS 24.04 seems to be incompatible with having a desktop that just works.
Ah, perhaps I misread your conclusion then. I hope COSMIC irons out the issues.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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) 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also, 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.
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), 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)) with some modern touches.
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
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.
> 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.
No one commented about Ubuntu team Mir approach. I wish it stayed in the running. :)
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
He clearly doesn't care about using Linux, he should just ignore it. It's fine.
Clickbait channels like LTT can't get flamed enough.
I mean, the obvious point here is that none of these people are selling linux (or wayland or whatever). You could argue some of these projects over promise in terms of features and so forth, but again, it's not like people are paying for it.
You can certainly be unhappy with a piece of software regardless of if you paid for it, and there's an argument to be made that linux users benefit from it becoming more popular, but we're still mostly talking about volunteers creating software for themselves and then choosing to share it with others.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
https://wayland.app/protocols/
Click any protocol, very few outside the core and absolute essential extensions have universal support.
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1pxectw/wayland_is_f...
> 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.
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.
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.
Why not use a third-party locker, like the suckless one?
https://tools.suckless.org/slock/
well if some way is found to crash wayland the attacker also gets access...
You'll get thrown to a tty login prompt.
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)
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?
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
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.
Meh
"Regardless, I simply don’t give a shit about you anymore." 100% he still don't give a shit about you.
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.
they just agreed to move forward on the protocol to do that thing.
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.
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.
> 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, ubuntu, it goes on and on - https://www.youtube.com/bryanlunduke
Meanwhile X11 is still coasting on Windows 95-level security with the joke that is XScreensaver (it draws a window over the others so you can kill it remotely) masquerading as a proper screen lock.
No secure attention key, no secure desktops, Windows has had this solved for over 33 years while Linux has been busy solving problems with Codes of Conduct.
It makes me angry because imagine what could have been if open source community members quit with the petty arguments and drama and devoted 100% of their efforts to solving real problems.
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.