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).
Exactly. Ubuntu LTS 24 and Intel integrated GPU + Wayland is zero problems even when running 4k120 and 150% scaled resolution. Chrome / vscode / zed / Rstudio / Youtube 4k60, it just works.
Edit this is running a 32" 2160p120 (4k) monitor alongside a 24" 1080p144 monitor.
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)
I suspect part of that is the Xorg maintainers (who are also behind Wayland efforts) are actively trying to kill it and make it as unbearable as possible
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.
And yet, Cities Skylines still (last tried: about 2 months ago) crashes for me when I try to load it in Wayland on Fedora, which has removed Xorg from its updates.
As someone who uses my steam deck as a workstation too, I really really wish this were fully true. The desktop is still X based, and that suuuccckkksss.
Funy that you mention multi-monitor since it's one of the reasons I eventually moved to Wayland. The only way to support different DPI monitors in X was to do janky scaling or even jankier multiple X servers.
I don't use KDE (or GNOME anymore) but while I had to deal with a lot of initial speedbumps a couple years ago, these days instead of a full DE, I'm using a Niri setup and it's worked out great for me.
For my laptop, I have my own monitor-detection/wl-mirror script for example that is faster and more reliable for plugging into projectors/meeting room HDMI than even my old Macs.
Comments like this make me feel like we are living in different worlds, I have KDE/Wayland on multi head machines with different DPIs and laptops.
KDE has been the smoothest most reasonable desktops for a long time, I play games they just work, I can make zoom calls, they implemented device recovery.
How are you experiencing this, are you rendering in software?
> Even something as simple as alt-tabbing lagged for seconds on an overpowered machine.
This may not be KDE's fault; I tracked these kinds of issues down to some bad tunable defaults.
I came up with this:
----
cat /etc/sysctl.d/50-usb-responsiveness.conf
#
# Attempt to keep large USB transfers from locking the system (kswapd0)
#
vm.swappiness = 1
vm.dirty_background_ratio = 5
vm.dirty_ratio = 5
vm.extfrag_threshold = 1000
vm.compaction_proactiveness = 0
vm.vfs_cache_pressure = 200
# FIXME? 64K too big?
vm.page-cluster = 16
----
I have fast everything, NVMe SSD onboard and others in Thunderbolt 4 enclosures and 32GB of RAM on my 12th-Gen i7 with 20 (6+14) cores; there should have been no reason for any stuttering and/or Alt-Tab slowness while doing large file copies and finally got fed up, did some research and experimentation and use the above and it's not happened since.
YMMV, but it's worth a try.
(Oh, and on-topic, I've had to try Wayland (vs. X11) on my KDE desktop 'cause it seems to handle switching monitors when I go from home to work better; jury's still out if I'm keeping it)
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.
> at least windows works and it works for games and graphics
It doesn't, actually. I vividly remember trying and failing to play some old games on Windows. GTA San Andreas, I think. Didn't even launch due to missing DirectX libraries or whatever. I hunted down and installed all the redistributables and DLLs. Still didn't run.
So much for the fabled backwards compatibility of Windows. Microsoft clearly does not give a shit anymore. Wouldn't be surprised if Linux with Proton becomes better at running games than Windows one day.
In 2008, I remember playing starcraft over LAN with my roommate. It played better on Wine/Ubuntu than it did on his Vista machine (and unrelatedly but hilariously, in the middle of the game his computer gave him a countdown to reboot with no option to cancel it)
for me it's just utilities that don't work workrave, activity watch, flameshot, polybar. (waybar is not as polished) automating stuff with xdotool. There is no way to get the current window focused. Even on windows there is a simple api to get that
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.
I don't know what's the difference between x11, wayland, gnome, kde and all the others.
The fact that people always debate over which one is best is one of the reason why I don't switch to Linux desktop.
Theres always the sane debate of Macos VS Windows VS Linux. That's a good one for me because there are many pros and cons for each of them.
But then, when you try to really look into Linux, it's an unstoppable flow of "systemd=bad", "snap is bad", “only the distro xyz is the real one because it respects principle abc".
Even the emacs VS vim debate seems saner than this.
I know the underlying spirit of Linux is the liberty to choose whatever you want, but this perpetual debate over which is the best only tricks me into believing that whichever distro I'd choose, it will be the wrong one.
Even for my old media server, there are 3 differents Linux mint : Cinnamon, Xfce and MATE.
What am I supposed to do? Spend a few hours to try each one and find the best for my 13 years old i5 with a Nvidia gt440 that's used 3 hours per month?
>What am I supposed to do? Spend a few hours to try each one and find the best for my 13 years old i5 with a Nvidia gt440 that's used 3 hours per month?
The performance difference will be minimal. It's an aesthetic choice, pick the one you like the look of or give a few of them a try.
It's like cars. Some people have extreme opinions on matters, some would be fine picking almost any car, and most test drive a few before picking their favorite.
Yeah, I think the answer if you aren't sure which car to get is "any of the popular ones are probably fine for you" and that's probably true for Linux distributions and software choices too.
If you just want something to use: install one of the most mainstream distros like Ubuntu or Fedora, accept the defaults, and move on with your life. There are compromises in all of the options, even my Mac has a handful of irritating problems.
If you have a spare usb stick, the cost to trying them is only the download time. Each is capable of the same things, the differences are purely aesthetic. So try them out and see which you like best. Or install all three and switch each time you login.
You actually don't know the true cost until you learn the quirks of the UI, how it handles proprietary drivers, upgrades, the packaging system, how up-to-date and complete its packages are, etc.
> 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.
The people forcing Wayland are also the people who own and are trying to kill Xorg (stated explicitly) and also trying to cancel people who fork or implement their own X11. So yes, they are actively trying to prevent people from using X11
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.
I won't accept that "nobody was forced." Major mainstream desktops either already have or are very shortly dropping X11 entirely.
Microsoft is correctly being called out for forcing people onto Windows 11, even though it's entirely possible for users to remain on 10 with workarounds.
Gnome is forcing people onto Wayland, that you can stop using Gnome or choose to use an outdated OS doesn't really change that for me. I guess if you don't want to say they're being forced onto Wayland, they are definitely being forced to change their display setup: use Wayland, or don't use Gnome, starting with Ubuntu 26.04 next month.
"Who is forced to use it" is an extremely dated argument strategy that has absolutely no place whatsoever in modern computing. Linux is far too ubiquitous for such a notion to be taken seriously. It's not far from "who is forced to use Macs instead of Windows."
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.
What a pox that such an old slow moving distro as Mint somehow is people's first port of call. I don't know how this happened, how Mint rooted itself so well (in 2006 it was fresh!), but this perception that you should use the slowest moving oldest possible dustiest Linux is the best possible thing Microsoft and Apple could spread to convince the world to believe.
If you are going to jump into Linux, dont sell yourself the weird delusion that using ancient ass systems is somehow going to be better for you.
In my experience Mint still has the smoothest process for Nvidia drivers, making it the first suggestion for gamers.
And Snap causes some embarrassing bugs in Firefox in the Ubuntu family, so people thinking "I want an Ubuntu-like OS but without Canonical's mistakes" still gravitate to Mint.
Sorry if I sold myself a delusion about the Linux distro I casually tried but I've been jumping on and off Linux for 20 years at this point and didn't get the memo it was outdated until later on. The significant change here was being able to daily drive it on my laptop instead of living in a VM or secondary dual boot.
In the past Ubuntu was always my go-to but the snap thing was irritating, and I'd always used some kind of Debian variant, so after cycling through all the X-buntus said hey, why not this Linux Mint I keep hearing about? Plus, Cinnamon looked decent in screenshots but turned out Gnome with a few tweaks ended up being much closer to my ideal than even heavily customized Cinnamon.
That's basically what I heard ten years ago from individuals (and even universities) for why they switched to Mint.. but even now, if you ask Perplexity for a "debian-based distro thats not ubuntu" Mint is the second option.
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.
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.
I miss the simplicity of how I remember XFree86 running on the alt-f7 terminal, and having alt-f1 through alt-f6 for my own needs... a second X on alt-f8 when I got 64MB of ram. ctrl-alt-backspace to quickly kill X and restart it (within a few seconds on a 486).
Then, gradually, these things disappeared from Linux, for no good reason; you can still configure them but someone decided in their infinite wisdom that some of the most compelling features just weren't really needed anymore, in favour of rewriting the XDM again and again until now there's too many of them and none of them are really any better than what we had in the 90s.
I had to put that in my .xinitrc, because like you I really missed that feature. I also made a .Xresources file and had to remember that xrdb was a thing. Good times, good memories. I also remember the jump to 64MiB of memory, it was a big deal! I think I got a Gravis UltraSound right around then too.
I stopped my nostalgia journey short of pimping out my console (sadly now only fbcon works, and the old vga modes are a legacy BIOS thing I think) with fonts and higher resolution, and enabling in the kernel the Alt+SysReq+g key for dropping into the kernel debugger, but there is always tomorrow!
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 hear 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"..
Just gonna jump in with the alternate view, if you like Windows desktop but not Windows, KDE is just amazing now. I didn’t enjoy it much in be KDE3 and 4 days but I’m loving Plasma 6.
It's really simple, then I have to use GNOME or KDE or any other thing that is on Wayland which I don't use. AwesomeWM, Xmonad, Fluxbox, OpenBox and many other interfaces just aren't on Wayland and have no intention to be because it just doesn't really do well what they want to and they don't feel like maintaining two versions.
The real issue with Wayland and “setting back” isn't what the article says, but just that like 15 years was taken just to get Wayland on semi-decent feature-parity with X11 during which time development on X11 came to a standstill. That time could've been used to improve X11 and it's still not real feature parity.
And part of it was just the devs refusing to believe that people needed those features. I talked with them around 2010-ish and about some of the things they cut out claiming that no one ever used them. These were things related to mouse acceleration that is pretty essential to video games and image editing, certain forms of screen capture, various things with fonts and color management that are essential to many professionals and they actually believed that no one used those things. Eventually they came around and added many of those things back in, in doing so basically making many of the initial security promises complete void again but so much time has been put in what isn't much of an improvement to justify the time spent on it.
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
The amount of time it’s taken to get here I think is THE fair criticism.
They had an absolute ton of work to do to design it and get it all running. It was never going to be fast. And it’s not like they could order any of the desktop environments to do what they want.
There have always seemed to have been commenters who were annoyed it didn’t come practically done with every feature from X plus 30 more from the day of announcements.
If the Python 2 to 3 migration took a decade, isn’t it reasonable for a display server migration to take even more time to stabilize?
Especially given:
(1) The (relatively) fragmented reality of Linux distros and desktop managers. I am sure that such a migration could have been executed faster had the Linux desktop world been more centralized like Windows or macOS.
The python 2 to 3 situation was a similar colossal mistake of honestly incompetent developers who really enjoy programming in their free time who don't understand that time is money for most people.
By comparison, Rust with its edition system understands this.
But this is the major issue. They don't understand that even if Wayland had feature-parity with X11. The simple fact that it works differently means that if I am to migrate I would have to rewrite a tonne of scripts that hook into X11 that just organically grew over time that I've now become dependent on for my workflow. It has to be substantially better and have killer features for me to switch and yes, fractional scaling per-monitor is that killer feature for many, but not for me, and the simple fact that XMonad runs on X11 and not on Wayland is a killer feature for others.
> The python 2 to 3 situation was a similar colossal mistake of honestly incompetent developers who really enjoy programming in their free time who don't understand that time is money for most people.
It’s been years but even then, this sincerely cannot be repeated enough.
I’ve heard reports of issues on Windows were you often have to switch between HDR and non-HDR modes to get the colors or brightness to appear correctly. Something about tone mapping I think?
I don’t know if that’s fixed in newer versions or if it has to do with specific drivers or what. But it didn’t sound like it worked very well.
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.
Or just install Windows, install Deskflow, do my job, earn my money, pay my bills, go on vacation, take a sun bath and stop using an OS developed by people wearing thin foil aluminum hats.
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.
Wayland is why Steam Deck is a product. Gamescope, the compositor it uses for all the features that makes it compelling to buy, uses it and it's features heavily.
Desktop Linux was never going to go anywhere stuck on X. Wayland is happening, it's currently going through it's trial by fire and in the end (and for a lot of people, right now) it'll be better for it.
It's easy to say Wayland has been around forever and barely progressed, but for me it's pretty easy to see, based on the massive amount of fixed issues and new features being added to Wayland, that we're no longer on the horizontal part of the curve. It seems a lot of people have become blind to it's exponential growth. Also the growth of desktop Linux adoption, which is real and happening, in spite of 'Wayland setting Linux Desktop back by 10 years'.
The goal is to produce a stable workstation OS, because that's who pays the bills. That means Linux 'enthusiasts' who want the latest and greatest stuff have signed themselves up to be eternal betatesters. That part will never change because its largely intentional.
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.
Nope, I stopped using Apple devices in early 2019. I can't accept their attitude anymore, of deciding what I'm allowed to install on my hardware. macOS is a bit more open than iOS, but is every year shifting more and more into the same direction.
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.
When there's people taking the complaints as attacks rather than feedback on how to improve, it's no wonder we keep seeing the same complaints.
I just don't get it myself. When users complain about the software I've released, I look to see if there's reasonable changes I can make to alleviate their issues.
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.
> 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.
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.
Wayland is far more aligned with the Unix philosophy than Xorg ever was. Xorg was a giant, monolithic, do everything app.
The Unix philosophy is fragmentation into tiny pieces, each doing one thing and hoping everyone else conforms to the same interfaces. Piping commands between processes and hoping for the best. That's exactly how Wayland works, although not in plain text because that would be a step too far even for Wayland.
Some stuff should not follow the Unix philosophy, PID 1 and the compositor are chief examples of things that should not. It is better to have everything centralized for these processes.
This is same cop out people use to talk about "Linux."
"No, Linux isn't bad, your distro/DE is bad, if you used XYZ then you wouldn't have this problem." And then you waste your time switching to XYZ and you just find new problems in XYZ that you didn't have in your original distro.
I'm genuinely tired of this in the Linux community. You can't use the "Wayland" label only for the good stuff like "Wayland is good for security!" and "Wayland is the future" and then every time someone complains about Wayland, it is "no, that's not true Wayland, because Wayland isn't real."
But that's what we signed up for in the Linux wirld. Linux systems are smorgasbord of different components by design, and that means being specific. I'm using KDE Plasma 6, that's a different experience than someone using Cosmic or Sway.
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.
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.
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?
Which is exactly what they did, as I understand it.
For example Wayland supports far more than just “generic computer screen”. I’ve heard it was designed to be able to handle systems either multiple very different displays. Like maybe a normal screen and an e-paper display.
I remember reading an article that mentioned the mess of screens in current cars would actually fit Wayland well.
Anyway, turns out computers really didn’t do that. We’re all still using one or more monitors that are mostly the same, with a couple of common aspect ratios.
Maybe they’ll be proven right. Maybe it’ll just be some extra stuff in the code forever.
Of course one of the ways you find out that you did something wrong was by doing it. So many comments online seem to just assume that the developers should’ve had the foresight to know everything they did that people don’t like or care about was wrong.
I feel real sympathy for both the developers and people with serious accessibility issues it has been a problem for.
But “beat up on Wayland” is practically a meme. An easy way to score points without looking at the big picture of how we got here.
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.
Anecdotal evidence: when using X11 years ago I could never avoid screen tearing despite trying various options, except with one option that seemed to replace it with random frame drops. (to be fair that's probably related to my GPU, which is also the reason why I could not use wayland for so long)
Wayland just fixed all that, making it at least usable for multimedia/gaming use with my GPU.
I'm just lurking in the comments with popcorn, but if what you said is true and the maintainers of X decided it was a lost cause and unfixable, well that is the most informed opinion of them all. Nobody knows better then the maintainers. Sure, the replacement might have feature gaps initially but that is a transient issue.
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.
My problem with it is their proxy for "best" seemed to be "opposite of X11." This was not a solid engineering choice, and I think this post is trying to demonstrate, that had costs.
I'd probably be completely fine with Wayland if it didn't have this obsession with military style desktop security. If it was as open as extensible as X11 by default then we all would have switched. X11 isn't pretty to write code for, but when it works, it works exceptionally well. Wayland seems to have made the wrong sacrifices where it mattered most.
They were in a better position than anyone else to be able to make those calls.
To whatever degree the choices didn’t work out, which I think is likely overstated, they learned something. But if they just threw everything away again, people would be pissed. Again.
This all feels like so much Monday morning quarterbacking.
> They were in a better position than anyone else to be able to make those calls.
I don't trust blind appeals to authority.
> But if they just threw everything away again
No one suggested that.
> This all feels like so much Monday morning quarterbacking.
I don't like the system. I don't know what to tell you. I write a lot of X11 software. I don't really want to switch to writing Wayland software. The developers missed this point of view.
The adoption rate is unusual. I'm offering an explanation. I understand people consider it hostile to Wayland but I can't understand why. If you want to solve the fundamental problem, then I have to admit, I'm part of that problem, for the reasons stated. You can ignore them, but you'll have to live with an exceedingly slow adoption, which as the article points out, may be so long that it is replaced nearly the time it is finished. Which would not be ironic considering that's exactly what is happening to X11.
Again, I have nothing against leaving X11, but it should clearly be a hard sell to anyone who likes X11 to go to a platform that is actively hostile to some of it's well regarded core features.
Open source has become fractious. It feels intentional. I say all these things because I honestly wish it was not. If none of this had happened we'd have a genuine alternative to the commercial offerings, and given some of their choices lately, we could have greatly capitalized on that. Que bono?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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".
Sure one of the companies paying for Linux desktop development is influencing what software gets development. Doesn't sound very nefarious to me.
Red Hat, Canonical, etc. want a working and friendly Linux desktop as much as you do. They've decided that Wayland is the best way forward for their companies and their users. It's not some massive conspiracy.
And they're not stopping you from using X, which is open source and still works fine for a lot of people.
I don't really understand what people who vocally object to Wayland are looking to change about the world. Do they want Wayland to be better? Do they want the developers working on Wayland to start working on X instead? The first desire seems reasonable by I don't get why it would inspire such ire toward Wayland. The second desire is unreasonable.
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.
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.
Not only that, the situation with Wayland also made me kind of afraid of the future of open source because it dawned on me that many of the figureheads in open source are actually simply put mentally unstable and extremely zealous and lack nuance. It didn't occur to me before but look at all the figureheads in free software: Theo de Raadt, Richard Stallman, Ulrich Drepper, Lennart Poettering, Linus Torvalds, Drew Devault. They are all kind of extremely uncompromising people who refuse to listen to reason with many of them even being known for vitriolic Twitter rants.
The issue is that free software is fundamentally a political thing and it seems to attract very political people who treat software like an ideology rather than a product who are out to wage war.
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.
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
I recently upgraded to Pop_OS 24.04 because I was sick and tired of being stuck with an outdated base.
But after trying the new Cosmic desktop, I basically ran screaming back to Gnome/X11 (with a couple of extensions to give me the old desktop experience from 22.04).
Once 26.04 drops, along with Cosmic Epoch 2, I may give it another serious try. Or I'll just go to KDE6/Wayland and see how that goes. (I do use KiCad from time to time, so I wonder how usable it'll be on Wayland down the line.)
(For reference, my biggest gripe with Cosmic right now is how it can't seem to figure out how to manage window focus. Modal dialogs can lose focus to their base window, and sometimes become covered by that base window. And focus-follows-mouse hasn't been done right ever. Both have issues written up, I just hope they get attention. Meanwhile, throngs of people seem to "swear" it "works fine for them.")
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.
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?
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:
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 :(
> 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?
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.
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 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?
NeXTSTEP was everything from the OS to the user experience and everything inbetween.
I'd say there were 3 distinct abstractions within NextSTEP:
- The microkernel / OS (Mach / BSD) (for the hardware)
- The Objective C based SDK
- The User experience (not just window manager, but largely the window manager)
The SDK is what is still arguably the most highly regarded part of NeXTSTEP even today. That aside, at the time nothing else was so well polished and integrated on almost every level.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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, wayland, ubuntu, it goes on and on - 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.
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).
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).
Exactly. Ubuntu LTS 24 and Intel integrated GPU + Wayland is zero problems even when running 4k120 and 150% scaled resolution. Chrome / vscode / zed / Rstudio / Youtube 4k60, it just works.
Edit this is running a 32" 2160p120 (4k) monitor alongside a 24" 1080p144 monitor.
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)
I suspect part of that is the Xorg maintainers (who are also behind Wayland efforts) are actively trying to kill it and make it as unbearable as possible
It's all open-source. If you think the maintainers are trying to sabotage the codebase, you have the freedom to fork it.
I don’t get all of what’s going on but from the outside it seems like the xLibre guys got a lot of negative attention for doing that.
Same here. Wayland has been fine. (Hyprland)
I second this. I had issues years ago, but those have mostly been fixed.
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.
Just guessing, are we?
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1445kc7/citie...
That post is 3 years old, so basically around 1 year into the Steam Deck's release.
And yet, Cities Skylines still (last tried: about 2 months ago) crashes for me when I try to load it in Wayland on Fedora, which has removed Xorg from its updates.
Wayland has broken dozens of my Steam games.
It ships with Wayland, but it does almost everything with X(wayland)
Wine 9.22+ has the native Wayland backend by default. Now Xwayland is barely needed.
As someone who uses my steam deck as a workstation too, I really really wish this were fully true. The desktop is still X based, and that suuuccckkksss.
The next SteamOS release will use Wayland by default for desktop mode, too:
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1675200/announcements/detai...
I've had bazzite on mine for a year and wayland by default
The desktop sure, but the primary handheld mode uses Gamescope which is a Wayland-based session.
Funy that you mention multi-monitor since it's one of the reasons I eventually moved to Wayland. The only way to support different DPI monitors in X was to do janky scaling or even jankier multiple X servers.
I don't use KDE (or GNOME anymore) but while I had to deal with a lot of initial speedbumps a couple years ago, these days instead of a full DE, I'm using a Niri setup and it's worked out great for me.
For my laptop, I have my own monitor-detection/wl-mirror script for example that is faster and more reliable for plugging into projectors/meeting room HDMI than even my old Macs.
Does anyone have links on how to set up multi monitor on Sway?
The default config file explains some common things you might want to do. E.g. left or right side and scaling factor.
Comments like this make me feel like we are living in different worlds, I have KDE/Wayland on multi head machines with different DPIs and laptops. KDE has been the smoothest most reasonable desktops for a long time, I play games they just work, I can make zoom calls, they implemented device recovery. How are you experiencing this, are you rendering in software?
> Even something as simple as alt-tabbing lagged for seconds on an overpowered machine.
This may not be KDE's fault; I tracked these kinds of issues down to some bad tunable defaults.
I came up with this:
I have fast everything, NVMe SSD onboard and others in Thunderbolt 4 enclosures and 32GB of RAM on my 12th-Gen i7 with 20 (6+14) cores; there should have been no reason for any stuttering and/or Alt-Tab slowness while doing large file copies and finally got fed up, did some research and experimentation and use the above and it's not happened since.YMMV, but it's worth a try.
(Oh, and on-topic, I've had to try Wayland (vs. X11) on my KDE desktop 'cause it seems to handle switching monitors when I go from home to work better; jury's still out if I'm keeping it)
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
Pretty much every vst, clap, etc plugin on Linux requires X calls because of how windows get created and then managed by the host.
I've moved to running Bitwig in an Ubuntu distrobox container. Hope you're enjoying 6, it seems they fixed a lot with the piano roll.
I had to set mouse warping off in my tiling manager for yabridge/wine plugins.
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?
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.
> at least windows works and it works for games and graphics
It doesn't, actually. I vividly remember trying and failing to play some old games on Windows. GTA San Andreas, I think. Didn't even launch due to missing DirectX libraries or whatever. I hunted down and installed all the redistributables and DLLs. Still didn't run.
So much for the fabled backwards compatibility of Windows. Microsoft clearly does not give a shit anymore. Wouldn't be surprised if Linux with Proton becomes better at running games than Windows one day.
In 2008, I remember playing starcraft over LAN with my roommate. It played better on Wine/Ubuntu than it did on his Vista machine (and unrelatedly but hilariously, in the middle of the game his computer gave him a countdown to reboot with no option to cancel it)
Yeah much as it sucks, i went back to Windows+WSL on my laptop. It just straight up works better. I really wish it didn't, but it's the reality.
for me it's just utilities that don't work workrave, activity watch, flameshot, polybar. (waybar is not as polished) automating stuff with xdotool. There is no way to get the current window focused. Even on windows there is a simple api to get that
> 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.
I don't know what's the difference between x11, wayland, gnome, kde and all the others.
The fact that people always debate over which one is best is one of the reason why I don't switch to Linux desktop.
Theres always the sane debate of Macos VS Windows VS Linux. That's a good one for me because there are many pros and cons for each of them.
But then, when you try to really look into Linux, it's an unstoppable flow of "systemd=bad", "snap is bad", “only the distro xyz is the real one because it respects principle abc".
Even the emacs VS vim debate seems saner than this.
I know the underlying spirit of Linux is the liberty to choose whatever you want, but this perpetual debate over which is the best only tricks me into believing that whichever distro I'd choose, it will be the wrong one.
Even for my old media server, there are 3 differents Linux mint : Cinnamon, Xfce and MATE.
What am I supposed to do? Spend a few hours to try each one and find the best for my 13 years old i5 with a Nvidia gt440 that's used 3 hours per month?
>What am I supposed to do? Spend a few hours to try each one and find the best for my 13 years old i5 with a Nvidia gt440 that's used 3 hours per month?
The performance difference will be minimal. It's an aesthetic choice, pick the one you like the look of or give a few of them a try.
It's like cars. Some people have extreme opinions on matters, some would be fine picking almost any car, and most test drive a few before picking their favorite.
Yeah, I think the answer if you aren't sure which car to get is "any of the popular ones are probably fine for you" and that's probably true for Linux distributions and software choices too.
If you just want something to use: install one of the most mainstream distros like Ubuntu or Fedora, accept the defaults, and move on with your life. There are compromises in all of the options, even my Mac has a handful of irritating problems.
If you have a spare usb stick, the cost to trying them is only the download time. Each is capable of the same things, the differences are purely aesthetic. So try them out and see which you like best. Or install all three and switch each time you login.
You actually don't know the true cost until you learn the quirks of the UI, how it handles proprietary drivers, upgrades, the packaging system, how up-to-date and complete its packages are, etc.
Spend a few hours having fun and then not think about it for years.
> 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.
> Who is forced to use it?
The people forcing Wayland are also the people who own and are trying to kill Xorg (stated explicitly) and also trying to cancel people who fork or implement their own X11. So yes, they are actively trying to prevent people from using X11
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.
I won't accept that "nobody was forced." Major mainstream desktops either already have or are very shortly dropping X11 entirely.
Microsoft is correctly being called out for forcing people onto Windows 11, even though it's entirely possible for users to remain on 10 with workarounds.
Gnome is forcing people onto Wayland, that you can stop using Gnome or choose to use an outdated OS doesn't really change that for me. I guess if you don't want to say they're being forced onto Wayland, they are definitely being forced to change their display setup: use Wayland, or don't use Gnome, starting with Ubuntu 26.04 next month.
"Who is forced to use it" is an extremely dated argument strategy that has absolutely no place whatsoever in modern computing. Linux is far too ubiquitous for such a notion to be taken seriously. It's not far from "who is forced to use Macs instead of Windows."
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.
What a pox that such an old slow moving distro as Mint somehow is people's first port of call. I don't know how this happened, how Mint rooted itself so well (in 2006 it was fresh!), but this perception that you should use the slowest moving oldest possible dustiest Linux is the best possible thing Microsoft and Apple could spread to convince the world to believe.
If you are going to jump into Linux, dont sell yourself the weird delusion that using ancient ass systems is somehow going to be better for you.
>I don't know how this happened, how Mint rooted itself so well
I'm pretty sure it was due to nonfree codecs and drivers not being in other distros by default. The mainstream distros only have themselves to blame.
In my experience Mint still has the smoothest process for Nvidia drivers, making it the first suggestion for gamers.
And Snap causes some embarrassing bugs in Firefox in the Ubuntu family, so people thinking "I want an Ubuntu-like OS but without Canonical's mistakes" still gravitate to Mint.
Sorry if I sold myself a delusion about the Linux distro I casually tried but I've been jumping on and off Linux for 20 years at this point and didn't get the memo it was outdated until later on. The significant change here was being able to daily drive it on my laptop instead of living in a VM or secondary dual boot.
In the past Ubuntu was always my go-to but the snap thing was irritating, and I'd always used some kind of Debian variant, so after cycling through all the X-buntus said hey, why not this Linux Mint I keep hearing about? Plus, Cinnamon looked decent in screenshots but turned out Gnome with a few tweaks ended up being much closer to my ideal than even heavily customized Cinnamon.
That's basically what I heard ten years ago from individuals (and even universities) for why they switched to Mint.. but even now, if you ask Perplexity for a "debian-based distro thats not ubuntu" Mint is the second option.
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.
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.
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.
I miss the simplicity of how I remember XFree86 running on the alt-f7 terminal, and having alt-f1 through alt-f6 for my own needs... a second X on alt-f8 when I got 64MB of ram. ctrl-alt-backspace to quickly kill X and restart it (within a few seconds on a 486).
Then, gradually, these things disappeared from Linux, for no good reason; you can still configure them but someone decided in their infinite wisdom that some of the most compelling features just weren't really needed anymore, in favour of rewriting the XDM again and again until now there's too many of them and none of them are really any better than what we had in the 90s.
I stopped my nostalgia journey short of pimping out my console (sadly now only fbcon works, and the old vga modes are a legacy BIOS thing I think) with fonts and higher resolution, and enabling in the kernel the Alt+SysReq+g key for dropping into the kernel debugger, but there is always tomorrow!
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 hear 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"..
> Man Windows(Pro) is just such a nice desktop and host now
Windows is terrible relative to a recent version of GNOME on Wayland, slow, bloated, full of spyware and AI.
Just gonna jump in with the alternate view, if you like Windows desktop but not Windows, KDE is just amazing now. I didn’t enjoy it much in be KDE3 and 4 days but I’m loving Plasma 6.
Same. It's sad but W11+WSL2 is just a straight up better experience than Linux native on my laptop.
You don't even need fedora - clean arch install, install vim gnome and Firefox, and boom your computer now just works.
It's really simple, then I have to use GNOME or KDE or any other thing that is on Wayland which I don't use. AwesomeWM, Xmonad, Fluxbox, OpenBox and many other interfaces just aren't on Wayland and have no intention to be because it just doesn't really do well what they want to and they don't feel like maintaining two versions.
The real issue with Wayland and “setting back” isn't what the article says, but just that like 15 years was taken just to get Wayland on semi-decent feature-parity with X11 during which time development on X11 came to a standstill. That time could've been used to improve X11 and it's still not real feature parity.
And part of it was just the devs refusing to believe that people needed those features. I talked with them around 2010-ish and about some of the things they cut out claiming that no one ever used them. These were things related to mouse acceleration that is pretty essential to video games and image editing, certain forms of screen capture, various things with fonts and color management that are essential to many professionals and they actually believed that no one used those things. Eventually they came around and added many of those things back in, in doing so basically making many of the initial security promises complete void again but so much time has been put in what isn't much of an improvement to justify the time spent on it.
I recently had to go through several remote desktop apps before I found one that would work.
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'll never understand it but Fedora just doesn't work ootb on my Asus laptop or Asus desktop.
Gnome 50 on Ubuntu 26.04 beta has served me okay in testing so far.
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
The amount of time it’s taken to get here I think is THE fair criticism.
They had an absolute ton of work to do to design it and get it all running. It was never going to be fast. And it’s not like they could order any of the desktop environments to do what they want.
There have always seemed to have been commenters who were annoyed it didn’t come practically done with every feature from X plus 30 more from the day of announcements.
But, we’re here now.
If the Python 2 to 3 migration took a decade, isn’t it reasonable for a display server migration to take even more time to stabilize?
Especially given:
(1) The (relatively) fragmented reality of Linux distros and desktop managers. I am sure that such a migration could have been executed faster had the Linux desktop world been more centralized like Windows or macOS.
(2) The age and maturity of X11
The python 2 to 3 situation was a similar colossal mistake of honestly incompetent developers who really enjoy programming in their free time who don't understand that time is money for most people.
By comparison, Rust with its edition system understands this.
But this is the major issue. They don't understand that even if Wayland had feature-parity with X11. The simple fact that it works differently means that if I am to migrate I would have to rewrite a tonne of scripts that hook into X11 that just organically grew over time that I've now become dependent on for my workflow. It has to be substantially better and have killer features for me to switch and yes, fractional scaling per-monitor is that killer feature for many, but not for me, and the simple fact that XMonad runs on X11 and not on Wayland is a killer feature for others.
> The python 2 to 3 situation was a similar colossal mistake of honestly incompetent developers who really enjoy programming in their free time who don't understand that time is money for most people.
It’s been years but even then, this sincerely cannot be repeated enough.
Does HDR work anywhere other than Mac?
I’ve heard reports of issues on Windows were you often have to switch between HDR and non-HDR modes to get the colors or brightness to appear correctly. Something about tone mapping I think?
I don’t know if that’s fixed in newer versions or if it has to do with specific drivers or what. But it didn’t sound like it worked very well.
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.
> Have fun trying to make Deskflow/Synergy working on GDM.
Just install less secure packages, or an entire less secure OS,
we’re not stopping you.
Or just install Windows, install Deskflow, do my job, earn my money, pay my bills, go on vacation, take a sun bath and stop using an OS developed by people wearing thin foil aluminum hats.
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.
Wayland is why Steam Deck is a product. Gamescope, the compositor it uses for all the features that makes it compelling to buy, uses it and it's features heavily.
Desktop Linux was never going to go anywhere stuck on X. Wayland is happening, it's currently going through it's trial by fire and in the end (and for a lot of people, right now) it'll be better for it.
It's easy to say Wayland has been around forever and barely progressed, but for me it's pretty easy to see, based on the massive amount of fixed issues and new features being added to Wayland, that we're no longer on the horizontal part of the curve. It seems a lot of people have become blind to it's exponential growth. Also the growth of desktop Linux adoption, which is real and happening, in spite of 'Wayland setting Linux Desktop back by 10 years'.
The goal is to produce a stable workstation OS, because that's who pays the bills. That means Linux 'enthusiasts' who want the latest and greatest stuff have signed themselves up to be eternal betatesters. That part will never change because its largely intentional.
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.
Have you USED macOS 26?
Nope, I stopped using Apple devices in early 2019. I can't accept their attitude anymore, of deciding what I'm allowed to install on my hardware. macOS is a bit more open than iOS, but is every year shifting more and more into the same direction.
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.
When there's people taking the complaints as attacks rather than feedback on how to improve, it's no wonder we keep seeing the same complaints.
I just don't get it myself. When users complain about the software I've released, I look to see if there's reasonable changes I can make to alleviate their issues.
Hey at least they finished Perl 6!
Wayland breaks my slashdot-themed e16 desktop!! /s
You're clearly being sarcastic but when your display manager can't let you type your password that is very literally a show stopper
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.
> 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.
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 miss the Unix philosophy
Wayland is far more aligned with the Unix philosophy than Xorg ever was. Xorg was a giant, monolithic, do everything app.
The Unix philosophy is fragmentation into tiny pieces, each doing one thing and hoping everyone else conforms to the same interfaces. Piping commands between processes and hoping for the best. That's exactly how Wayland works, although not in plain text because that would be a step too far even for Wayland.
Some stuff should not follow the Unix philosophy, PID 1 and the compositor are chief examples of things that should not. It is better to have everything centralized for these processes.
This is same cop out people use to talk about "Linux."
"No, Linux isn't bad, your distro/DE is bad, if you used XYZ then you wouldn't have this problem." And then you waste your time switching to XYZ and you just find new problems in XYZ that you didn't have in your original distro.
I'm genuinely tired of this in the Linux community. You can't use the "Wayland" label only for the good stuff like "Wayland is good for security!" and "Wayland is the future" and then every time someone complains about Wayland, it is "no, that's not true Wayland, because Wayland isn't real."
But that's what we signed up for in the Linux wirld. Linux systems are smorgasbord of different components by design, and that means being specific. I'm using KDE Plasma 6, that's a different experience than someone using Cosmic or Sway.
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.
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.
PulseAudio dragged linux to replacing that stinkin pile of garbage with PipeWire.
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.
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?
Which is exactly what they did, as I understand it.
For example Wayland supports far more than just “generic computer screen”. I’ve heard it was designed to be able to handle systems either multiple very different displays. Like maybe a normal screen and an e-paper display.
I remember reading an article that mentioned the mess of screens in current cars would actually fit Wayland well.
Anyway, turns out computers really didn’t do that. We’re all still using one or more monitors that are mostly the same, with a couple of common aspect ratios.
Maybe they’ll be proven right. Maybe it’ll just be some extra stuff in the code forever.
Of course one of the ways you find out that you did something wrong was by doing it. So many comments online seem to just assume that the developers should’ve had the foresight to know everything they did that people don’t like or care about was wrong.
I feel real sympathy for both the developers and people with serious accessibility issues it has been a problem for.
But “beat up on Wayland” is practically a meme. An easy way to score points without looking at the big picture of how we got here.
>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.
wlroots came pretty late so there was a lot of code duplication between Weston/GNOME/KDE before that.
Anecdotal evidence: when using X11 years ago I could never avoid screen tearing despite trying various options, except with one option that seemed to replace it with random frame drops. (to be fair that's probably related to my GPU, which is also the reason why I could not use wayland for so long)
Wayland just fixed all that, making it at least usable for multimedia/gaming use with my GPU.
I'm just lurking in the comments with popcorn, but if what you said is true and the maintainers of X decided it was a lost cause and unfixable, well that is the most informed opinion of them all. Nobody knows better then the maintainers. Sure, the replacement might have feature gaps initially but that is a transient issue.
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.
> They did what they thought was best.
My problem with it is their proxy for "best" seemed to be "opposite of X11." This was not a solid engineering choice, and I think this post is trying to demonstrate, that had costs.
I'd probably be completely fine with Wayland if it didn't have this obsession with military style desktop security. If it was as open as extensible as X11 by default then we all would have switched. X11 isn't pretty to write code for, but when it works, it works exceptionally well. Wayland seems to have made the wrong sacrifices where it mattered most.
They were in a better position than anyone else to be able to make those calls.
To whatever degree the choices didn’t work out, which I think is likely overstated, they learned something. But if they just threw everything away again, people would be pissed. Again.
This all feels like so much Monday morning quarterbacking.
> They were in a better position than anyone else to be able to make those calls.
I don't trust blind appeals to authority.
> But if they just threw everything away again
No one suggested that.
> This all feels like so much Monday morning quarterbacking.
I don't like the system. I don't know what to tell you. I write a lot of X11 software. I don't really want to switch to writing Wayland software. The developers missed this point of view.
The adoption rate is unusual. I'm offering an explanation. I understand people consider it hostile to Wayland but I can't understand why. If you want to solve the fundamental problem, then I have to admit, I'm part of that problem, for the reasons stated. You can ignore them, but you'll have to live with an exceedingly slow adoption, which as the article points out, may be so long that it is replaced nearly the time it is finished. Which would not be ironic considering that's exactly what is happening to X11.
Again, I have nothing against leaving X11, but it should clearly be a hard sell to anyone who likes X11 to go to a platform that is actively hostile to some of it's well regarded core features.
Open source has become fractious. It feels intentional. I say all these things because I honestly wish it was not. If none of this had happened we'd have a genuine alternative to the commercial offerings, and given some of their choices lately, we could have greatly capitalized on that. Que bono?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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".
Sure one of the companies paying for Linux desktop development is influencing what software gets development. Doesn't sound very nefarious to me.
Red Hat, Canonical, etc. want a working and friendly Linux desktop as much as you do. They've decided that Wayland is the best way forward for their companies and their users. It's not some massive conspiracy.
And they're not stopping you from using X, which is open source and still works fine for a lot of people.
I don't really understand what people who vocally object to Wayland are looking to change about the world. Do they want Wayland to be better? Do they want the developers working on Wayland to start working on X instead? The first desire seems reasonable by I don't get why it would inspire such ire toward Wayland. The second desire is unreasonable.
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?
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.
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.
Did perl5 to perl6 actually happen? I feel like perl mostly fell out of favor along the way.
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.
It's a good example of a migration that mostly didn't happen.
Not only that, the situation with Wayland also made me kind of afraid of the future of open source because it dawned on me that many of the figureheads in open source are actually simply put mentally unstable and extremely zealous and lack nuance. It didn't occur to me before but look at all the figureheads in free software: Theo de Raadt, Richard Stallman, Ulrich Drepper, Lennart Poettering, Linus Torvalds, Drew Devault. They are all kind of extremely uncompromising people who refuse to listen to reason with many of them even being known for vitriolic Twitter rants.
The issue is that free software is fundamentally a political thing and it seems to attract very political people who treat software like an ideology rather than a product who are out to wage war.
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.
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’ve been using COSMIC on a spare laptop, and enjoying it, but I’m stuck on 22.04 until their Iced rebase finishes and have IME working. [1]
Making a new DE plus compositor is a lot of work, but I do hope it works well for the Pop_OS developers.
[1] https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-epoch/issues/2174
I recently upgraded to Pop_OS 24.04 because I was sick and tired of being stuck with an outdated base.
But after trying the new Cosmic desktop, I basically ran screaming back to Gnome/X11 (with a couple of extensions to give me the old desktop experience from 22.04).
Once 26.04 drops, along with Cosmic Epoch 2, I may give it another serious try. Or I'll just go to KDE6/Wayland and see how that goes. (I do use KiCad from time to time, so I wonder how usable it'll be on Wayland down the line.)
(For reference, my biggest gripe with Cosmic right now is how it can't seem to figure out how to manage window focus. Modal dialogs can lose focus to their base window, and sometimes become covered by that base window. And focus-follows-mouse hasn't been done right ever. Both have issues written up, I just hope they get attention. Meanwhile, throngs of people seem to "swear" it "works fine for them.")
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.
Daniel Stone from linux.conf.au 2013, The Real Story Behind Wayland and X 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.
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.
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?
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-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 :(
> and having accurate colors in my photo editing apps
Should've stayed in the terminal where the distro wants you to be!
> 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?
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.
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 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
NeXTSTEP was everything from the OS to the user experience and everything inbetween.
I'd say there were 3 distinct abstractions within NextSTEP: - The microkernel / OS (Mach / BSD) (for the hardware) - The Objective C based SDK - The User experience (not just window manager, but largely the window manager)
The SDK is what is still arguably the most highly regarded part of NeXTSTEP even today. That aside, at the time nothing else was so well polished and integrated on almost every level.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
No one commented about Ubuntu team Mir approach. I wish it stayed in the running. :)
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.
> 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.
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.
There certainly is a paranoid style in Linux politics (where "they" are out to get you.)
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.
What's the alternative, stay with X11? No, thanks.
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.
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.
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.
Clickbait channels like LTT can't get flamed enough.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
"OK I was wrong, so I'm going to make another assumption because maybe this time whatever garbage I write might be right"
Meh
Another we'll structured critique of wayland:
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1pxectw/wayland_is_f...
TL;DR: Generic uninspired anti-Wayland rant.
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)
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.
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.
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, wayland, ubuntu, it goes on and on - 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.
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).
> 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.
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.
"Regardless, I simply don’t give a shit about you anymore." 100% he still don't give a shit about you.
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.