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Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

michael.stapelberg.ch

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Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#51

Post by embedding-shape »

OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #13

Can anyone recommend an autoclicker they actively use on Wayland? I've been using ydotool but the daemon service is janky (fails to startup/shutdown frequently, also had issues where half my inputs don't work while it's running)

> I've been using ydotool but the daemon service is janky (fails to startup/shutdown frequently,

I'd be investigating that issue instead, should have errors in systemd/journalctl or whatever you use for managing daemons. I'm using ydotool on Arch, pretty much all defaults, together with a homegrown voice dictation thing, and it's working 100% of the times.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#52

Post by embedding-shape »

joelthelion wrote: post #50

I've been using wayland with Gnome for years without a single issue. Arguably my hardware is a lot simpler and I don't use Nvidia. But I just want to point out that, for all the flak wayland receives, it can work quite well.

I've maybe used Wayland on Gnome for 1-2 years at this point, always with nvidia hardware. Works OK now, but didn't 2 years ago, and before that, used to be very janky, today is smoother than Xorg. But at this point, I don't think there is a single blocker left for me. Took some time to rewrite some programs that I have to control their own window position and wants to see what other applications are running, but was easy to work around with a Gnome Shell Extension in the end, as the design of Wayland doesn't really "allow" those sort of things.

I'm having more issues with games/websites/programs that didn't take high display refresh rate into account, than Wayland, at this point.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#53

Post by pimeys »

joelthelion wrote: post #50

I've been using wayland with Gnome for years without a single issue. Arguably my hardware is a lot simpler and I don't use Nvidia. But I just want to point out that, for all the flak wayland receives, it can work quite well.

Me too. But first with Sway in 2016, then with KDE Plasma 6. Everything works flawless, everything runs in native Wayland except Steam games. I prefer AMD or Intel hardware over NVIDIA since forever.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#54

Post by mavamaarten »

fabian2k wrote: post #19

I just recently switched to Linux since I had some weird Windows issues I couldn't fix. I've tried to switch a few times before, but the main problem at some point was that I didn't have proper fractional scaling on Linux. And that alone pretty much made Linux unusable for me on my specific hardware. Wayland fixes that, so that part is a huge improvement to me. Unfortunately this also limited my choice of Distros as…

Yeah, fractional scaling is absolutely the one thing that I miss on Linux. On X11 it's too slow and laggy. On Wayland I have... Wayland issues.

I don't entirely love MacOS (mostly because I can't run it on my desktop, lol). But it does fractional scaling so well, I always choose the "looks like 1440p" scaling on 4K resolution, and literally every app looks perfect and consistent and I don't notice any performance impact.

On windows the same thing, except some things are blurry.

On Linux yeah I just have to bear huge UI (x2 scaling) or tiny UI (X1) or live with a noticeable performance delay that's just too painful to work with.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#55

Post by zeta0134 »

KDE Plasma switched to Wayland by default sometime last year, and so far the main issue I run into is that a few screen recording tools I like stopped working. (Mostly simplescreenrecorder, which seems to be entirely unmaintained at this point.) Other than some initial instability with accelerated rendering on my GPU, which was quickly addressed, it kinda just works. I mostly don't notice.

Actually, GPU acceleration was why I initially switched. For whatever reason, this GPU (Radeon VII) crashes regularly under X11 nearly every time I open a new window, but is perfectly stable under wayland. Really frustrating! So, I had some encouragement, and I was waiting for plasma-wayland to stabilize enough to try it properly. I still have the X11 environment installed as a fallback, just in case, but I haven't needed to actually use it for months.

Minor pain points so far mostly include mouse acceleration curves being different and screen capture being slightly more annoying. Most programs do this OS-level popup and then so many follow that up with their own rectangle select tool after I already did that. I had some issues with sdl2-compat as well, but I'm not sure that was strictly wayland's fault, and it cleared up on its own after a round of updates. (I develop an SDL2 game that needs pretty low latency audio sync to run smoothly)

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#56

Post by secure »

dotancohen wrote: post #31
PunchyHamster wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

That's easy to say in hindsight. It is only with the specific failures of Wayland that we see which lessons it could have learned from X11.

No, the lesson of “separate display server from window manager” was very clear when Wayland was started. People have been discussing this over the years ever since. (See also “client-side decorations” for another part of this issue that was heavily discussed.)

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#57

Post by safety1st »

Hendrikto wrote: post #36
safety1st wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This guy started that Xlibre fork over throwing a fit because he was told not to break Xorg with his contributions, and he ranted that he just wants to be able to merge whatever he wants. I would not trust the stability of that fork at all.

Looks to me like he's a belligerent personality, but probably not wrong when he says Redhat has an agenda that involves suppressing progress on Xorg and forcing Wayland on users instead.

I was open minded toward Wayland when the project was started... in 2008. We are 18 years down the road now. It has failed to deliver a usable piece of software for the desktop. That's long enough for me to consider it a failed project. If it still exists, it's probably for the wrong reasons (or at the least, reasons unrelated to any version of desktop Linux I want to run, like perhaps it has use in the embedded space).

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#58

Post by jsheard »

physicles wrote: post #42
RealStickman_ wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Everyone’s so excited about the wave if windows users coming to Linux. Those people already have monitors. I switched in 2018 and was surprised I couldn’t use fractional scaling on one monitor like I’d been doing for years on windows.

Not to mention that fractional scaling is practically required in order to use the majority of higher DPI monitors on the market today. Manufacturers have settled on 4K at 27" or 32" as the new standard, which lends itself to running at around 150% scale, so to avoid fractional scaling you either need to give up on high DPI or pay at least twice as much for a niche 5K monitor which only does 60hz.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#59

Post by the_why_of_y »

charcircuit wrote: post #49
dotancohen wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's easy to say in hindsight. It is only with the specific failures of Wayland that we see which lessons it could have learned from X11.

>That's easy to say in hindsight That's an easy way to excuse bad design. Look at the designs of other operating systems designed by professionals and you won't see windows managers having to handle raw inputs or being in the same process as the compositor.

Examples of other operating systems allegedly not designed by professionals:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_Window_Manager

The Desktop Window Manager is a compositing window manager, meaning that each program has a buffer that it writes data to; DWM then composites each program's buffer into a final image.

https://web.archive.org/web/20040925095929/http://developer....

The Quartz Compositor layer of Mac OS X comprises the window server and the (private) system programming interfaces (SPI) implemented by the window server. In this layer are the facilities responsible for rudimentary screen displays, window compositing and management, event routing, and cursor management.

The window server is a single system-wide process that coordinates low-level windowing behavior and enforces a fundamental uniformity in what appears on the screen. It is a lightweight server in that it does not do any rendering itself, but instead communicates with the client graphics libraries layered on top of it. It is “agnostic” in terms of a drawing model.

The window server has few dependencies on other system services and libraries. It relies on the kernel environment’s I/O Kit (specifically, device drivers built with the I/O Kit) in order to communicate with the frame buffer, the input infrastructure, and input and output devices.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#60

Post by the_why_of_y »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #45
dotancohen wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's easy to say in hindsight. It is only with the specific failures of Wayland that we see which lessons it could have learned from X11.

I think the lack of base abstraction layer was pretty obvious from the start.

Since this is a Wayland thread, obviously the problem is a lack of a common implementation, which deviates from UNIX tradition.

For those who want to complain how lack of choice between multiple implementations is an obvious problem and deviates from UNIX tradition, please wait until the next systemd thread.

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