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.
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.
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.
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
----
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 read about some terrible experiences with Wayland and I've just never had any of these problems in nearly a decade of using it almost every day (sway was a little rough around the edges in the first year it came out, but even then it fixed screen tearing, which I was never able to entirely eliminate with Xorg). The two things I've always stayed away from though is KDE, and nVidia.
I'm just trying to figure out why there's such a discrepancy between my experiences and what I read online from time to time.
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
In what way? If there’s a delay for the task switching menu to close after alt-tabbing (~500ms) this might be due to a kde animation default (it really tripped me up, I’m a rapid window switcher). I can share the fix once I get on my kde machine.
....uh, why not use Cinnamon or MATE or Gnome or XFCE?
Conflating KDE with desktop Linux is strange
I say this as someone who suffered the same problems trying to use KDE (frequent windowing freezing requiring logout) and just swapped to Cinnamon. It's two mousebutton clicks at the login.
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.
I believe that a project decides what they do. If Gnome decides to move to Wayland, someone could fork and start XGnome. That's how FOSS works, and I accept it for what it is.
I feel like too many people believe that FOSS means "people around me should build my dream system just for me, and for free". If Gnome gets more traction than XGnome, it sounds like the Gnome users are generally fine with its choices. And those who are not can switch to an alternative.
I don't use Gnome, I don't use systemd, I don't use ext4, I don't use NetworkManager. The beauty of Linux is that I can choose. And yes, most of the time I am in the minority.
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.
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?
Let's imagine this: some company makes an operating system based on Linux, in an efficient manner, by systematically choosing one way to solve a problem (one window manager, one init system, one file system, ...) and trying to meet the requirements of the mass to the detriment of freedom. It exists: it's called Android! Android is great, and it will eventually come to the Desktop for people who don't want Windows or macOS.
But fundamentally, what I call "Linux distributions" is not that. The whole point of Linux distributions, to me, is that even saying "GNU/Linux" doesn't work, because there are other userlands like "busybox/Linux"! Other init systems, other file systems, other windows managers, etc.
The cost of having a powerful core choosing "sane defaults" for the users (Windows, macOS, or similarly Android) is that it is very difficult to modify the system or even contribute to it. Look at e.g. GrapheneOS, an Android alternative (and which I use and love): it relies a lot on Google. Linux distributions are not like that: I can create my own Linux distribution as a weekend project.
I can no longer use GNOME on X11, and the decision to remove support was a deliberate one. Users are definitely being forced.
You can't legally get old versions of Windows or Photoshop, and you can't legally fix them if you find problems. GNOME gives you that freedom.
This isn't just a theoretical possibility: both MATE and Cinnamon are GNOME forks.
You can argue that maintaining and developing a desktop environment is an huge project and you can't expect someone to take that on - I completely agree, which is why I think we should be thankful of the developers instead of complaining about being "forced" to use new versions of their software.
Having technical discussions about the merits is fine, but in the end in the free/open source software model the people that make the technical decisions are the ones that make the technology possible. And if so many of those people are moving to Wayland, maybe there is a reason for that.
Recent versions of gnome session are compiled only with wayland support in archlinux. To change DE or distribution or use custom package is quite a stretch to call it's not forced.
I don't like systemd and the fact that mainstream distros push for it, but as a result I use a distro that gives me the choice (Gentoo). Who am I to tell the distro maintainer what they should do for free?
Yeah, we're talking about completely different threat models here.
The last time a distro tried to sell me on it, it left me unable to drag/drop browser tabs to reorder them (a fundamental part of my daily workflow). Thankfully, Mint still has the option to use X11 so reverting was trivial. That won't always be the case because...
> Who is forced to use it? Just use X11, as you said (many times) you do already.
Which, like avoiding systemd, is becoming increasingly difficult as distributions prematurely switch. Like when some Linux distros made KDE4 the default (~20 years ago) before most graphics cards could actually handle KDE4's requirements. Switching distros after years, even decades, of use is not as trivial as distro-hoppers who swap out their distro every three weeks might like to think. Lots of know-how and muscle memory gets lost in the transition, both of which have to be rebuilt.
https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support...
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
Care to elaborate on that accusation? I have a suspicion you're referring to Xlibre.
> 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".
I think the argument is not that X11 defeats it all - but that for 99.9999% of users its security theater when deployed in the real world. Most commonly, as long as processes can read each other's memory/configuration/etc.
I'm sure there is a use-case for untrusted sharing of Wayland enabled GPU rendering or something - though AFAIK none of the enterprise remote desktop use it, and they have the resources to implement it themselves anyway.
I've been running Wayland for two years now. I still hit weird bugs with desktop sharing / obs tinkering; It's just not a critical use for me.
So it's fair to question the design wisdom of adding the complexity and UX pain points if it seems to be worth so little.
But maybe i'm overlooking some large group of people dependent on Wayland security boundaries?
And there is no point is working on the Desktop security as long as X11 defeats it all.
> if it seems to be worth so little
I, for one, value the security standpoint.
Instead of bundling forces to improve a single implementation like it was the case with X11, now everybody and their mother writes their own incomplete implementation of the Wayland protocol, and badly. I don't understand how anybody thinks that this mess is a good thing. At least for X11 on Linux there was a single implementation that contributors could focus on, now the bugs are spread over dozens of projects. If I'd like to sabotage the entire desktop-Linux idea, this is exactly how I would do it ;(
I like freedom and diversity. I don't want Linux to be like Windows or macOS with one window manager, one init system, etc. I like that people (and I) can experiment.
Is it less efficient than paying for Windows and macOS? Probably. Is it less polished? Certainly. But that's exactly what I want. If I wanted Windows or macOS, I would use Windows or macOS.
Anyone who wants to continue using a modern, actively-developed desktop environment. GNOME has dropped X11; KDE has announced the transition. I would consider being told "use Wayland, or find a different desktop environment" being forced, even though nobody has actually put a gun to my head.
I have managed to make Wayland work for me, but only by patching away the hardcoded gestures. I also developed a means to start and stop XScreenSaver, although that is thankfully now obsolete thanks to some work by JWZ. Just yesterday I still had issues with an entire window of text gibbering up and down in VSCode at a certain scaling level (used to have that in Firefox, as well, but it was evidently fixed).
To put a positive conspiratorial spin on the recent Wayland push: maybe they think that taking away the option to fall back to X11 will finally get enough eyes on Wayland to fix its remaining issues.
The changes are being done by small steps and I'd say this removal of fallback to X11 option counts as such.
Yes, and I also think it's important to focus on that part in particular: X11 is not a feature, it's not a user story, it's an implementation detail of the desktop environment / window manager.
There are certainly historical architectural choices that imply many aspects of what X11 can or can't do for the user, likewise with desktops' implementation of the Wayland protocol. The differences between these approaches is real, and substantial.
But in the end, X11 is not a cause unto its own. It's a component in service of the user experience at large. People criticize the removal of X11 support either because their use cases have been affected in some inconvenient way, or because they're afraid of future consequences one way or another.
It's important that desktop environments work on providing the features/UX/quality that users need and expect. It's also important that users tell their DE developers what their needs are, in terms of what problems they are trying to solve, not in terms of which components to use underneath. Choice of component stack is a developer issue and should remain this way.
In the end, the DEs/WMs that solve their users' problems to a high degree of satisfaction are the ones who will retain and gain the most users. Approaches will differ across the Linux desktop space regarding what problems to solve specifically, which problems to prioritize, and how best to implement solutions for them. Dependencies like X11 shape the ultimate user experience one way or another, in terms of features, constraints, development effort, and continuity.
And so do many other implementation choices that need to be made or revised along the way. Ideally most users will end up with DEs/WMs whose development philosophy is aligned with their personal priorities. Friendly bug reporters can help out with the awareness part at least :)
Let's instead get excited by all the new linux users coming in thanks to SteamOS and Valve. If the trend continues, we might start seeing larger software companies releasing native linux versions of their software -- and then, the year of the linux desktop will start becoming an actual possibility!
(I heard affinity suite is linux friendly now btw, and davinci resolve too -- not sure if proton is necessary or not, but either way, really cool)
I like the idea of course, but I don't believe it for one second. Unless software is open source, it never properly supports Linux. A company making a proprietary executable for Linux will generally just make an Ubuntu executable.
My biggest fear with something like "the year of the Linux Desktop" is that it may end up making Linux be like Android: open source on the paper, but there is practically really just one way to do things, and that's the one controlled by Google.
What I like with Linux is this big mess of alternatives that manage to somehow compete with each other. Sure, it's not as polished as Android or Windows or macOS. But it's free (as in freedom).
I may be on the "Wayland" side here, but I have the exact same reasoning when I am on the other side: I hate systemd, but I genuinely cannot say that "I am forced to use it". I have the freedom to choose a distro that supports alternatives, and that is what I do.
For Wayland it seems even easier: it's just something you install on top (unlike the init system or the libc).
I think it's fine to hate Wayland and to believe that it is the wrong direction, just like it is fine to hate systemd and believe it is the wrong direction. But I don't think I am forced to use any of those.
See, I'd argue that the "nobody is forcing you" rhetoric, spoken out loud and with a straight face while vendors drop support for decades-old, stable, and well-established standards in favour of immature, incompatible, broken new shininess, is an extremely dated argument strategy.
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).
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.
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.
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.
People work on what they want to work on. There is no rule that people who worked on Wayland (and I happen to think they did a great job) would have worked on Xorg instead, or that the original motivations for building Wayland are invalid.
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.
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.
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"..
Windows is terrible relative to a recent version of GNOME on Wayland, slow, bloated, full of spyware and AI.
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).
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.
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
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
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.
Gnome 50 on Ubuntu 26.04 beta has served me okay in testing so far.
Overall I think it's much better that options exist. I'm even willing to tolerate GUI inconsistency across the Linux ecosystem in exchange.
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.
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
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?
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.
Why?
You realize nvidia managed to ship proprietary drivers for linux, right? They really don't need the support
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.
Plan 9 and later Inferno, just had plain 2D rendering.
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.
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.
Wayland just fixed all that, making it at least usable for multimedia/gaming use with my GPU.
His pain is that it's been 17 years and some basic core functionality is either still broken or entirely missing. It's not my expertise so I don't know if it could have been planned any better, but 17 years and _basics_ still being broken doesn't sound great.
Sometimes it's worse to live in a mess that is being constantly fixed I guess.
It has been 17 years.
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.
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.
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.
Wayland is a protocol with multiple different implementations.
The problem is old (and even not so old) apps don't expose those APIs so interactions like UI automation on Wayland is limited, if not impossible. I'd love to grant a specific permission just for selected GUI apps, but I can't because they don't support it.
There's a reason why RPA software on Wayland is limited to web apps inside a browser. Or something extremely janky like taking screenshots of the entire desktop and doing OCR. But then you can't interact with unfocused apps.
> Wayland security
Okay, that's great, but why would I care? If you can implement those security wins transparently in the background, cool. Otherwise, what I care about is being able to take a screenshot, not about some theoretical "security threat" from already vetted programs I run on my machine.
> OBS, clipboard, and screen sharing issues are now mostly (if not entirely) solved in the latest GNOME/KDE.
Oh, the clipboard works mostly correctly now, after some 17 years of development? Could not have come up with a more damning statement. Complete misalignment of priorities.
> "no, that's all old news, you clearly haven't tried the new cutting edge model/build bro! it's all fixed now!"
> what I care about is being able to take a screenshot, not about some theoretical "security threat" from already vetted programs I run on my machine.
But strangely, in decades, I've never seen a single example of anyone taking advantage of this horrible security design and it becoming a widespread problem in the wild. I keep asking the wayland bros to give me an example of this happening in the wild and causing a problem that's even mildly widespread. Strangely when I ask that question they always seem to forget to respond to that part of my post and move on to their next piece of standard rhetoric.
> Oh, the clipboard works mostly correctly now, after some 17 years of development? Could not have come up with a more damning statement. Complete misalignment of priorities
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.
Because many other DMs and WMs do not have issues with Wayland.
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
Making a new DE plus compositor is a lot of work, but I do hope it works well for the Pop_OS developers.
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.")
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.
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.
To create something like the GNU project, or OpenBSD, or Linux, takes serious levels of commitment. You really have to believe in it, and to a degree, you have to _will_ it into being. Along the way, you need to explain why your crazy idea is worth all the sacrifice, discourage those who would distract your team members, maintain your own and the team's focus through years of not actually having the thing you want in any useful form, etc, etc. You have to be an unreasonable person to take it on, and then continue it.
There are people who become "fans". They can be even more zealous than the project leader(s). Maintaining direction (aka control) of a horde of over-zealous fans takes aptitude and patience. It's easy, I think, for projects to devolve into vitriol, and denigration of those who think differently, even if it starts out from a good place.
All group endeavors are ultimately political. A group endeavor with a multi-year payoff period and no tangible rewards? It's bound to be very political.
That said, we all enjoy the fruits of their labors ...
Basically, to the degree I understand, the language was effectively forked into two.
I think Perl5 was originally planned to be replaced by Perl6. Then Perl6 took much longer than anyone expected, and kinda ended up in a different place. Perl5 was re-anointed as the once-and-future Perl, and what had been Perl6 became Raku.
If I remember correctly, somewhere in the middle of all that there was talk of running Python (and other languages) on the new Perl6 VM.
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.
It was plainly really poorly-architected, just looking at its resource use patterns made this obvious in a heartbeat.
The ALSA drivers for all the creative labs cards worked perfectly well. I never had any issues at all under ALSA, or under OSS before that.
I've had tons of issues with audio bugs once pulseaudio was introduced. To this day the most common solution to any audio issue I see is `pkill -9 pulseaudio`. And it solves the problem about 99% of the time.
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.
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.
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
Even if someone made something, are they really going to get buy in from all the major players?
It’s Wayland. It’s over.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Prophetic words were once spoken and mocked long ere.
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.
Now, there is a group of people who actively hate on XLibre sorely because it pretty much derailed such a plan.
These people (who are no doubt sick in their heads) should focus their energy on improving Wayland rather than running hate campaigns on XLibre and its developers.
Is there something I'm missing/something specific you're talking about?
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 like to have one way to do things when it comes to the OS. So everything is optimized to work together and I don't have to mix and match parts and to learn different stuff that do the same thing.
I just want my OS to get out of my way and let me run my software.
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.
I'm a dyed-in-the-wool i3 (now sway) user. I don't even use floating windows. Wayland has still been an awful experience, broke a bunch of workflows for me
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)
> 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.
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 :(
Should've stayed in the terminal where the distro wants you to be!
For me the Wayland story is a great example of https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
They started saying "let's rewrite from scratch, X is too complicated "; 17 years later, they have realized the reasons for all the complexity that was written during 25 years (1984 by MIT).
I guess in around 8 years we will have 2 implementations of X.
>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 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.
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.
Points on accessing a Linux(Fedora/KDE Plasma) machine via RDP:
- as I understand it, you cannot open a new session, you can only access an existing one -> forget about a headless machine, it will have to render its DE into to void if you want access it via RDP. The work-flow is more like VNC than RDP.
- X11 has problems, Wayland is definitely worse. Queue the people who will tell me/you that it works fine them. My last attempt on Fedora ended with a "working" setup. Working in quotes, since I had to accept/allow every incoming connection on the host machine (in a pop-up window which auto-hides after a few seconds and did work ~60% of the time), making it useless for the intended use case. You can workaround this by SSH'ing into the machine and accepting the connection somehow, but I gave up at this moment.
- there is also some fun to be had regarding display resolution and "session passwords", but compared to the fun with Wayland "security" and portals, its manageableThat stuff has literally been working fine for years...
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?
> Regardless, I simply don’t give a shit about you anymore. > > We’ve sacrificed our spare time to build this for you for free. If you turn around and harass us based on some utterly nonsensical conspiracy theories, then you’re a fucking asshole.
You haven't sacrificed your spare time. You've done a thing you wanted to do, and had a tantrum when it turned out it had consequences.
You want to do a thing, fine, but the moment it's forced on people you have taken on responsibility, whether that was what you wanted or not. Grow up.
> At this point I consider Wayland to be a fun toy built entirely to pacify developers tired of working on a finished legacy project
Pretty much this.
insert xkcd dependency comic
Dave Plummer said the other day on Twitter: Linux is great, but on the desktop it's terrible.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That being said, I think that they are ignoring the most important element of Wayland that may be kinda the cause of its gripes: Wayland is better designed and focuses on doing window management, aka, allowing applications to display their windows.
It is not trying to be a general IPC protocol, it is not a permission system, it is not a video framework, it is not an accessibility framework; just a protocol for apps to create windows and set their properties.
And at window management, it tries really hard to be better. For example presenting a window (getting it on top of the others) is an action requiring a token now, meaning that the compositor now gets tools to identify wrong presentation attempts. It handles the case of window-docking on the window management side, which allows more flexibility about how to handle it on the compositor side.
Don't get me wrong, it is not perfect (for example I don't like the assumption in the API that there should be at most one seat, and that it would have at most one pointer), but it really tries to be better, it is not a waste of time imo.
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.
- 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.
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.
Wayland is where development happens, so for better or worse, that is what you'll have to use. If you don't like it, go maintain Xorg, if you can't, you're in no position to complain.
I sense a lot of conservative "they took away our X11 freedom" and I have no understanding for it.
people ask why do you need it. I have a 3440x1440 physical monitor on the server, I need to remove login with a 1920x1200 laptop. I want full screen at laptop's native resolution. Windows can do this decade ago.
Which ultimately is fine, this reflects the focus of the people who have the skills and opportunities to contribute and is unlikely to change any time soon.
That is somewhat unfortunate for some but ultimately if you’re asking people to work for free you can’t be too picky on what they choose to work on.
For me the graphics server is tied to my favourite environments for lightweight use: Xfce and Lxde both use only X11. Also, I still cannot understand why a server has to depend on the installed graphics card as the driver stays in between and should abstract and make the software hardware-agnostic.
(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)
Apparently this bug has been fixed in Ubuntu 26.04 and it's to do with Mutter actually. We'll see when I upgrade.
Slack screen sharing works when I share my screen twice, and then Slack sometimes crashes. Google Meet and Zoom screen sharing has always worked well in Wayland, so I imagine they will fix this. I’ve also been able to use OBS to do screen recordings, but the easier default application does not work.
It’s definitely becoming better, and forcing it as the default is what was needed. It took 17 years because nobody used it by default.
I recently revived a decade-old PC with a dual-boot setup: Windows 10 and Ubuntu 24.04. While Windows ran fine, Ubuntu was a nightmare—constant freezes, random logouts, and daily crashes.
After hitting my limit, I wiped Ubuntu and installed Debian. What a difference! It’s been months without a single crash. If you're struggling with stability on older hardware, Debian might be the "boring" (in a good way) solution you need.
The only pain I've encountered is not being able to get RustDesk going, but that's not been a show-stopper for me.
From an end user perspective I struggle to reconcile that with „set Linux back 10 years“
I think that is incredibly likely to happen.
I think that the switch to Wayland has hindered the Linux destop in some ways, and mistakes have definitely been made. But at this point wayland is generally good enough and switching back to X11 won't really accomplish anything helpful.
People complained about pipewire and wireplumber too, but they're fantastic. It's great in the DAW. It just takes a long time to get everything compatible.
no one has taken X11 away. and its not like X11 was making great leaps forward like Wayland has.
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.
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1pxectw/wayland_is_f...
That's were I stopped reading.
Everything coming from them is corporate slop. Systemd is another mess coming from them.