Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
michael.stapelberg.ch
Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
1–10 of 335 posts
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#2A rather big problem is that Wayland is just a protocol, not an implementation. There are many competing implementations, like Gnome, KDE and wlroots. The problems you have with one of them might not appear in another. The reference compositor, Weston, is not really usable as a daily driver. So while with Xorg you have a solid base, and desktops are implemented on top of that, with Wayland the each desktop is reinventing the wheel, and each of them has to deal with all the quirks of the graphics drivers. I think this is a big problem with the architecture of Wayland. There really should be a standard library that all desktops use. Wlroots aims to be one, but I don't see Gnome and KDE moving to it anytime soon.
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#3If I could in 2020.... Maybe?
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#4For me wayland offers only downsides, without any upsides. I feel the general idea behind it (pushing all complexity and work onto other layers) is broken.
I'll stick to xorg and openbox for many years to come.
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#5Heh, interesting seeing we use pretty much the same things, i3+NixOS+urxvt+zsh+Emacs+rofi+maim+xdotool, only differentiating in browser choice (it's Firefox for me) and (me) not using any term multiplexer.
>So from my perspective, switching from this existing, flawlessly working stack (for me) to Sway only brings downsides.
Kudos to Michael for even attempting it. Personally nowadays unless my working stack stops, well, working, or there're significant benefits to be found, don't really feel even putting the effort to try the shiny new things out.
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#6Was expecting some real unproductive and entitled whining based on the title, but was pleasantly surprised - someone actually investigating and debugging their wayland issues rather than putting their head in the sand and screaming “X11 FOREVER!!!”
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#7I still don't know why I would want to use it. The benefits don't seem to outweigh the costs yet, and xorg is tried and true. So many Linux articles and forum posts about fixing problems with your desktop graphics start with "If you're using Wayland, go back to xorg, it'll probably fix the problem you're seeing."
You don't always have to replace something that works with something that doesn't but is "modern."
My guess is that we'll only start seeing Wayland adoption when distributions start forcing it or making it a strong default, like what happened with systemd.
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#8For me wayland offers only downsides, without any upsides. I feel the general idea behind it (pushing all complexity and work onto other layers) is broken. I'll stick to xorg and openbox for many years to come.
I think then big part is maintenance, xorg doesn't look likely to be maintained long into the future in the way Wayland will be. And a lot of the Xorg maintainers are now working in Wayland.
So good or bad idea, Wayland is slowly shifting to being the default in virtue of being the most maintained up to date compositor.
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#9I still don't know why I would want to use it. The benefits don't seem to outweigh the costs yet, and xorg is tried and true. So many Linux articles and forum posts about fixing problems with your desktop graphics start with "If you're using Wayland, go back to xorg, it'll probably fix the problem you're seeing." You don't always have to replace something that works with something that doesn't but is "modern." My gue…
Working fractional scaling
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#10A rather big problem is that Wayland is just a protocol, not an implementation. There are many competing implementations, like Gnome, KDE and wlroots. The problems you have with one of them might not appear in another. The reference compositor, Weston, is not really usable as a daily driver. So while with Xorg you have a solid base, and desktops are implemented on top of that, with Wayland the each desktop is reinven…
X.org picked the right level of abstraction (even if implementation could use a rewrite). No WM should care about handling raw inputs or forced to be proxy between driver and the app for the output (it could be, if it needed/wanted, but there is no reason to add another layer of abstraction and cycle-wasting for most use cases). And it shows in complexity and even in power use. Wayland basically failed to learn the lessons from X11