Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

michael.stapelberg.ch

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 335 posts

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#21

Post by przmk »

pshirshov wrote: post #9
ryandrake wrote: post #7

I 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

I would venture to say that there is little overlap between X11 users and people with high-DPI screens.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#22

Post by jchw »

ryandrake wrote: post #7

I 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…

There's no obvious reason for an end used to switch to Wayland if there isn't any particular problems with their current setup, the main improvements come down to things X11 never supported particularly well and are unlikely to be used in many existing X11 setups. My big use case that Wayland enabled was being able to dock my laptop and seamlessly switching apps between displays with different scale factors. And as an added bonus my experience has been that apps, even proprietary ones like Zoom, tend to handle switching scale factors completely seamlessly. It's not that high of importance, but I do like polish like this. (Admittedly, this article outlines that foot on Sway apparently doesn't handle this as gracefully. The protocols enable seamless switching, but of course, they can't really guarantee apps will always render perfect frames.)

OTOH though, there are a lot of reasons for projects like GNOME and KDE to want to switch to Wayland, and especially why they want to drop X11 support versus maintaining it indefinitely forever, so it is beneficial if we at least can get a hold on what issues are still holding things up, which is why efforts like the ones outlined in this blog post are so important: it's hard to fix bugs that are never reported, and I especially doubt NVIDIA has been particularly going out of their way to find such bugs, so I can only imagine the reports are pretty crucial for them.

So basically, this year the "only downsides" users need to at least move into "no downsides". The impetus for Wayland itself is mainly hinged on features that simply can be done better in a compositor-centric world, but the impetus for the great switchover is trying to reduce the maintenance burden of having to maintain both X11 and Wayland support forever everywhere. (Support for X11 apps via XWayland, though, should basically exist forever, of course.)

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#23

Post by t_mahmood »

ryandrake wrote: post #7

I 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…

I prefer Wayland, as I feel Wayland's performance is much smoother than Xorg. Though, I have no use for VRR, and I hate the slight lag that is introduced due to font scaling, so I do not use it either.

But, I am stuck on Xorg only because of one app that I have to use to work.

> 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.

This is already happening. in my knowledge, Archlinux, Ubuntu already switched to Gnome 49, which do not support X without recompilation. So most likely, any distro using Gnome 49 upwards will not provide Xorg by default. KDE also going to do it soon.

Xorg is going away pretty soon

I believe its step to the right direction, only issue is some annoying app holding us back

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#24

Post by secure »

przmk wrote: post #21
pshirshov wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working fractional scaling

I would venture to say that there is little overlap between X11 users and people with high-DPI screens.

I’ve been using X11 with high-DPI screens since 2013, but with integer scaling (200% or 300%), never fractional scaling.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#25

Post by RealStickman_ »

przmk wrote: post #21
pshirshov wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working fractional scaling

I would venture to say that there is little overlap between X11 users and people with high-DPI screens.

Nobody's going to buy monitors where they need fractional scaling or multiple monitors with mixed DPI if they know it's broken.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#26

Post by safety1st »

benrutter wrote: post #8
jgb1984 wrote: post #4

For 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.

There's actually a very active fork of Xorg called Xlibre, started by a former Xorg contributor, which seeks to "revitalize and modernize" X: https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver?tab=readme-ov-file

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#27

Post by terribleperson »

jgb1984 wrote: post #4

For 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.

Moving complexity from the layer you only have one of, to the layers where there are many, many competing pieces of software, was an absolutely bonkers decision.

There's just no way to make that make sense.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#28

Post by mindcrash »

gsliepen wrote: post #2

A 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…

> The problems you have with one of them might not appear in another.

Because both have their own portal implementation/compositor with their own issues and service spec implementations. KDE has xdg-desktop-portal-kde, and GNOME has xdg-desktop-portal-gnome. On top of that each (still) has their own display server; KDE has KWin, and GNOME has Mutter.

> The reference compositor, Weston, is not really usable as a daily driver.

Weston is probably good for two things: Running things in Kiosk mode and showcasing how to build a compositor.

That's why you should at least use xdg-desktop-portal if you are not running KDE or GNOME. But this is a vanilla compositor (without implementations of any freedesktop desktop protocols), and as-is has no knowledge of things like screenshots or screensharing.

If you run any wlroots based compositor except Hyprland you should run xdg-desktop-portal-wlr which does implement the desktop protocols org.freedesktop.impl.portal.Screenshot and org.freedesktop.impl.portal.ScreenCast.

If you use Hyprland you should run its fork xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland instead which additionaly has things like file picking built in. Additionally you can/should run xdg-desktop-portal-gtk and/or xdg-desktop-portal-kde to respectively get GTK ("GNOME") and QT ("KDE") specific implementations for desktop protocols. And you absolutely should use xdg-desktop-portal-gtk instead of xdg-desktop-portal-gnome, because xdg-desktop-portal-gnome really doesn't like to share with others.

> With Wayland the each desktop is reinventing the wheel

Not really true, as I mentioned earlier there's still a DE specific display server running in the background (like Mutter and KWin-X11 for X11), and graphics in each compositor is driven directly by the graphics driver in the kernel (through KMS/DRM).

In fact, on paper and in theory, the architecture looks really good: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html. However, in practice, some pretty big chunks of functionality on the protocol level is missing but the freedesktop contributors, and the GNOME and KDE teams will get there eventually.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#29

Post by lpcvoid »

I've been using Wayland (wlroots/swaywm) for a few years now and it's been flawless, even with an eGPU.

But I'm also running all AMD hardware, that may be a factor. Life is too short for nvidia bullshit on Linux.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#30

Post by ryandrake »

jchw wrote: post #22
ryandrake wrote: post #7

I 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…

There's no obvious reason for an end used to switch to Wayland if there isn't any particular problems with their current setup, the main improvements come down to things X11 never supported particularly well and are unlikely to be used in many existing X11 setups. My big use case that Wayland enabled was being able to dock my laptop and seamlessly switching apps between displays with different scale factors. And as a…

> having to maintain both X11 and Wayland support forever everywhere

I don't get why X11 shouldn't work forever. It works today. As you said, there's no obvious reason for an end user to switch to Wayland if there isn't any particular problems with their current setup. "Because it's modern" and "Because it's outdated" just aren't compelling reasons for anyone besides software developers. And "because we're going to drop support so you have to switch eventually" is an attitude I'd expect out of Apple, not Linux distributions.

Post reply on HN