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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?

#61

Post by mitchell209 »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #48
ryandrake wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 "Because it's modern" and "Because it's outdated" just aren't compelling reasons for anyone besides software developers.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 d…

Sometimes gnome developers out-apple apple in their attitudes, fwiw.

That was the first thing I noticed when I recently went back to messing with Linux distros after 15 years. Booting into Ubuntu and having to use Gnome Tweaks or whatever it’s called for basic customizations was incredibly confusing considering Linux is touted as being the customizable and personal OS. I doubt I’ll ever give Gnome another try after that.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#62

Post by ur-whale »

I must say:

1) Hugely enjoyable content - as usual - by Michael Stapelberg: relevant, detailed, organized, well written.

2) I am also an X11 + i3 user (and huge thanks to Michael for writing i3, I'm soooo fast with it), I also keep trying wayland on a regular basis because I don't want to get stuck using deprecated software.

I am very, very happy to read this article, if only because it proves I'm not the only one and probably not crazy.

Same experience he has: everytime I try wayland ... unending succession of weird glitches and things that plain old don't work.

Verdict: UNUSABLE.

I am going to re-iterate something I've said on HN many times: the fact that X11 has designs flaws is a well understood and acknowledged fact.

So is the fact that a new solution is needed.

BUT, because Wayland is calling themselves the new shite supposed to be that solution DOES NOT AUTOMATICALLY MEAN they actually managed to solve the problem.

As a matter of fact, in my book, after so many years, they completely and utterly failed, and they should rethink the whole thing from scratch.

And certainly not claim they're the replacement until they have reached feature and ease of use parity.

Which they haven't as Michael's article clearly points out.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#63

Post by mindcrash »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #39
mindcrash wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The fact that we need the entire xdg-desktop-portal stack for screen sharing on browsers is a major annoyance. We now have a standardised extension for screencasting and screencopy (formerly it was not standard, but had been around for years), but browsers only support the Flatpak stack, which has a lot of moving parts and IPC. Doing out-of-band IPC for this is kind of pointless when the client and the server already…

> but browsers only support the Flatpak stack

Well, I think you should blame Google and Mozilla for that.

KDE (through Discover, https://apps.kde.org/discover/) and GNOME (through Software, https://apps.gnome.org/Software/) both have innate support for Flatpak.

So, given that the majority of normie Linux users will use Flatpak to install a browser, they will just use and support that in the browser (because the underlying DE wil more than likely have Flatpak support integrated too) and go on with their day to day.

Means that people who don't want to deal with Flatpak have to deal with Flatpak (or at least parts of it) too unfortunately.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#64

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

mitchell209 wrote: post #61
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes gnome developers out-apple apple in their attitudes, fwiw.

That was the first thing I noticed when I recently went back to messing with Linux distros after 15 years. Booting into Ubuntu and having to use Gnome Tweaks or whatever it’s called for basic customizations was incredibly confusing considering Linux is touted as being the customizable and personal OS. I doubt I’ll ever give Gnome another try after that.

I get the impression gnome3 is loosely a clone of osx, I much prefer a windows-esc desktop. I’ve never tried kde but feel pretty at home with xfce or openbox. YMMV, but if you have the time they’re worth trying if you’re a recent windows refugee.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#65

Post by ErroneousBosh »

officialchicken wrote: post #32

2026 is starting with half-baked NVidia drivers and missing functionality on linux? I am so surprised... did you try 17 different previous versions to get it running in true NV-Linux fashion? This stuff has been flawless on AMD systems for a while a couple of years now, with the exception of the occasional archaic app that only runs on X11 (thus shoved in a container).

Does AMD support CUDA yet? Because otherwise you can't use it for video editing.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#66

Post by mystifyingpoi »

zeta0134 wrote: post #55

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…

> Mostly simplescreenrecorder, which seems to be entirely unmaintained at this point

I use it extensively, it's easy to use, UI is compact but clear, works perfectly all the time. I honestly don't care that it is unmaintained at this point.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#67

Post by cogman10 »

t_mahmood wrote: post #23
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 happe…

This is the real reason to make the wayland switch.

It doesn't really matter if you like or dislike wayland, the major DE have decided they don't like X11 and they are making the switch to wayland. X11 code is actively being removed from these desktop environments.

If you want to use X11, you can either stay on an old unmaintained DE or switch to a smaller one that supports X11. But you should realize that with wayland being the thing major DEs are targeting, your experience with X11 will likely degrade with time.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#68

Post by exe34 »

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, this was a major point of discussion right at the start. They chose to ignore it.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#69

Post by altern8 »

Might be a stupid question, but what's wrong with Xorg?

I know that it wasn't originally conceived to do what it does today, but I've never had any problem using it, and when I tried Wayland I didn't notice any difference whatsoever.

Is it just that it's a pain to write apps for it..?

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#70

Post by GCUMstlyHarmls »

safety1st wrote: post #57
Hendrikto wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 proje…

Taking the proposition as true, what goal does Redhat have in "forcing wayland on users"? I am asking this in good faith, I literally naively do not understand what the "bad" bit is.

Like, ok, its 2030 and X11 is dead, no one works on it anymore and 90% of Linux users use Wayland, what did they gain? I know they did employ Pottering but not anymore, and AFAIK they contribute a non-trivial amount of code up stream to, Linux, Gnome? KDE? If more users are on wayland they can pressure Gnome to ... what?

I sort of get an argument around systemd and this, in that they can push I guess their target feature sets into systemd and force the rest of the eco-system to follow them, but, well I guess I don't get that argument either, cause they can already put any special sauce they want in Redhat's shipped systemd implementation and if its good it will be picked up, if its bad it wont be?

I guess, if Redhat maintains systemd & wayland, then they could choke out community contributions by ignoring them or whatever, but wouldn't we just see forks? Arch would just ship with cooler-systemd or whatever?

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