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Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

michael.stapelberg.ch

91–100 of 335 posts

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#91
post #21

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.

We are under an article which tells you that you can have problems with Wayland and hiDPI screens. And for example I’m one of those people, who uses X11, because Wayland failed on many levels, like buggy video playing, crashing while changing monitors, or simply waking up my laptop with an external monitor, and I didn’t give more than a few days to fix these (cheers to the author to try this long), so I went back to X11. Which is still buggy, but on a “you can live with it level” buggy.

Btw, everybody who I know, and I too, changes the font size, and leaving the DPI scaling on 100%, or maybe 200% on X11.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#92

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.

[deleted]

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OK, leaving aside the fact that "proprietary" has a very well defined meaning in this context and using it makes your comment very charged, you're basically telling us that Nvidia was not willing to implement an API for their drivers, but tried to push for one designed by themselves (you're calling it "vendor neutral", but since Mesa is not an actual GPU vendor it's most likely another subtle mistake on your part that completely changes the meaning of your words) and all the other vendors (Intel and AMD at this point), which have already implemented GBM should switch too in the name of this ?

How can you call all of that a mischaracterization? In my humble opinion, and I am not anything more than a bystander in this with only superficial knowledge of the domain, it's you that is trying to mischaracterize the situation.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#94

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.

Funny that you mention this, because broadly GNOME is seen as Linux' MacOS, and KDE as Linux' Android. At least in terms of user customization.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are conflating Window Manager with Task Switcher programs.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#96
I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 25.10, and decided to give Wayland another go since X.org isn't installed by default anymore.

Good news: My laptop (Lenovo P53) can now suspend / resume successfully. With Ubuntu 25.04 / Wayland it wouldn't resume successfully, which was a deal breaker.

Annoying thing: I had a script that I used to organize workspaces using wmctrl, which doesn't work anymore so I had to write a gnome-shell extension. Which (as somebody who's never written a gnome-shell extension before) was quite annoying as I had to keep logging out and in to test it. I got it working eventually but am still grumpy about it.

Overall: From my point of view as a user, the switch to Wayland has wasted a lot of my time and I see no visible benefits. But, it seems to basically work now and it seems like it's probably the way things are headed.

Edit: Actually I've seen some gnome crashes that I think happen when I have mpv running, but I can't say for sure if that's down to Wayland.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#97
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 ru…

niri is based on smithay which is also used by COSMIC.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#98
The article already begins with a wrong claim:

"Wayland is the successor to the X server "

Wayland is primarily a protocol, but most definitely not a "success" to the xorg-server. This is why it does not have - and will never have - the same feature set. So trying to sell it as "the new shiny thing" after almost 20 (!!!!!) years, is simply wrong. One should instead point out that wayland is a separate way to handle a display server / graphics. There are different trade-offs.

> but for the last 18 years (!), Wayland was never usable on my computers

I can relate to this a bit, but last year or perhaps even the year before, I used wayland via plasma on manjaro. It had various issues, but it kind of worked, even on nvidia (using the proprietary component; for some reason the open-source variant nouveau works less-well on my current system). So I think wayland was already usable even before 2025, even on problematic computer systems.

> I don’t want to be stuck on deprecated software

I don't want to be stuck on software that insinuates it is the future when it really is not.

> With nVidia graphics cards, which are the only cards that support my 8K monitor, Wayland would either not work at all or exhibit heavy graphics glitches and crashes.

I have a similar problem. Not with regards to a 8K monitor, but my ultra-widescreen monitor also has tons of issues when it comes to nvidia. I am also getting kind of tired of nvidia refusing to fix issues. They are cheap, granted, but I'd love viable alternatives. It seems we have a virtual monopoly situation here. That's not good.

> So the pressure to switch to Wayland is mounting!

What pressure? I don't feel any pressure. Distributions that would only support wayland I would not use anyway; I am not depending on that, though, as I compile everything from source using a set of ruby scripts. And that actually works, too. (Bootstrapping via existing distributions is easier and faster though. As stated, trade-offs everywhere.)

> The reason behind this behavior is that wlroots does not support the TILE property (issue #1580 from 2019).

This has also been my impression. The wayland specific things such as wlroots, but also other things, just flat out suck. There are so many things that suck with this regard - and on top of that, barely any real choice on wayland. Wayland seems to have dumbed down the whole ecosystem. After 20 years, having such a situation is shameful. That's the future? I am terrified of that future.

> During 2025, I switched all my computers to NixOS. Its declarative approach is really nice for doing such tests, because you can reliably restore your system to an earlier version.

I don't use NixOS myself, but being able to have determined system states that work and are guaranteed to work, kind of extends the reproducible builds situation. It's quite cool. I think all systems should incorporate that approach. Imagine you'd no longer need StackOverflow because people in the NixOS sphere solved all those problems already and you could just jump from guaranteed snapshot to another one that is guaranteed to also work. That's kind of a cool idea.

The thing I dislike about NixOS the most is ... nix. But I guess that is hard to change now. Every good idea to be ruined via horrible jokes of an underperforming programming language ...

> So from my perspective, switching from this existing, flawlessly working stack (for me) to Sway only brings downsides.

I had a similar impression. I guess things will improve, but right now I feel as if I lose too much for "this is now the only future". And I don't trust the wayland-promo devs anymore either - too much promo, too few results. After 20 years guys ...

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#100
post #69

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..?

The real story behind Wayland and X, Linux.conf.au 2013

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWQh_DmDLKQ

https://people.freedesktop.org/~daniels/lca2013-wayland-x11....

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