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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?

#71

Post by rjzzleep »

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…

I use it as my daily driver. I used Sway for a very long time, tried Hyprland for a bit and am now running niri as my daily driver. Sway and niri are wlroots based, Hyprland at some point rolled its own because they didn't want to wait for wlroots protocol extensions. Sometimes I have to switch to Gnome to do screen sharing.

2026 and you will still run into plenty of issues with random behaviour, especially if you run anything based on wlroots. Wine apps will randomly have pointer location issues if you run multiple displays. Crashes, video sharing issues with random apps, 10 bit issues. Maybe in 2027 we'll finally make it. But I feel like these 20 years of development could have been better spent on something that doesn't end up with 4 or more implementations.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#72

Post by charcircuit »

the_why_of_y wrote: post #59
charcircuit wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 c…

Window management on Windows is done by Explore which talks to DWM where the underlying windows live.

Window management on MacOS is done by Dock which talks to Quartz Compositor where the underlying windows live.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#73

Post by mariusor »

charcircuit wrote: post #40

>nVidia refused to support the API that Wayland was using, insisting that their EGLStreams approach was superior This is a common mischaracterizarion of what happened. This API, GBM, was a proprietary API that was a part of Mesa. Nvidia couldn't add GBM to their own driver as it is a Mesa concept. So instead Nvidia tried to make a vendor neutral solution that any graphics drivers could use which is where you see EGLS…

Sorry, but how can an open source project like Mesa be reliant on a proprietary API?

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#74

Post by yosamino »

kallistisoft wrote: post #33

At this point the primary thing that's keeping me from switching to Wayland (KDE) is lack of support for remote desktop software, especially with multiple monitors... Hopefully AnyDesk and Remmina will address this issue before KDE ends it's mainline X11 support next year.

I've had a similar issue recently and I found that rustdesk[0] works pretty well for casual use despite wayland support being labelled experimental. I use it for pair programming with someone on multiple monitors while I'm on a laptop and all the switching and zooming required worked.

[0] https://rustdesk.com/

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#75

Post by t_mahmood »

cogman10 wrote: post #67
t_mahmood wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wayla…

Yes, and besides, developers not having to support two servers, can focus on improving the DE where it actually matters. And with that, fixing issues, adding features becomes much faster.

I see it as a win for both developers and users in the long run.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#76

Post by zouhair »

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…

For me mainly better HDR implementation.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#77

Post by TacticalCoder »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #10
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…

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…

> Wayland basically failed to learn the lessons from X11

To me the biggest issue of Wayland is that it aimed, on purpose, to imitate Windows or OS X or any GUI that is not built on the idea of a client/server protocol.

From TFA:

> I’ll also need a solution for running Emacs remotely.

If only there was something conceived from the start as a client/server display protocol...

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#78

Post by bjoli »

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…

I am still sad that shading windows stopped working with Wayland.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#79

Post by charcircuit »

mariusor wrote: post #73
charcircuit wrote: post #40

>nVidia refused to support the API that Wayland was using, insisting that their EGLStreams approach was superior This is a common mischaracterizarion of what happened. This API, GBM, was a proprietary API that was a part of Mesa. Nvidia couldn't add GBM to their own driver as it is a Mesa concept. So instead Nvidia tried to make a vendor neutral solution that any graphics drivers could use which is where you see EGLS…

Sorry, but how can an open source project like Mesa be reliant on a proprietary API?

I mean proprietary API in the sense that the API is solely owned and developed by Mesa. It is not a standardized API, but a custom one specific to their project.

Even today if you use the API your program has to link to Mesa's libgbm.so as opposed to linking to a library provided by the graphics driver like libEGL.so.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#80

Post by simonask »

ryandrake wrote: post #30
jchw wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

I mean, because maintaining software is hard and costly, and a lot of this is developed by enthusiasts in their spare time?

Supporting legacy stuff is universally difficult, and makes it significantly harder to implement new things.

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