Wayland being contemporary with the financial crisis makes sense in my head but
I'll probably spend the rest of today processing that it's 18 years ago.
Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
151–160 of 335 posts
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#152I 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…
The main reason I could imagine is security.
Right now with X11, IIRC, if one application has access to your display they can read what is going on in other applications running on the same display.
If browser tabs were able to do that, all hell would break loose. So why do we accept it from applications?
Anyway, despite this, I still use X11 instead of Wayland because of all the shortcomings.
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry but you’re just wrong. Explore.exe and Dock.app are nere user interfaces and are not involved in the render pipeline of other apps.
I am talking about window management. Window management is about controling windows, windows managers should not care about how windows are rendered.
1. Nobody else is talking about managing windows as a user. They’re talking about the system that manages windows for drawing and interaction.
2. You’re provably wrong even if someone followed your description because you can kill the dock or explorer process and still be able to switch between windows and move them around. Killing explorer is a little more heavy handed than killing the dock but it doesn’t take down the window manager.
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#154The 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…
> 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 ...
I don’t get the hate for Nix, honestly. (I don’t get the complaints that it’s difficult, either, but I’m guessing you’re not making one here. I do get the complaint that the standard library is a joke, but you’re not making that one either that I can see.) The derivation and flake stuff excepted, Nix is essentially the minimal way to add lazy functions to JSON, plus a couple of syntax tweaks. The only performance-related thing you could vary here is the laziness, and it’s essential to the design of Nixpkgs and especially NixOS (the only config generator I know that doesn’t suck).
I’ll grant that the application of Nix to Nixpkgs is not in any reasonable sense fast, but it looks like a large part of that is fairly inherent to the problem: you’ve got a humongous blob of code that you’re going to (lazily and in part) evaluate once. That’s not really something typical dynamic-language optimization techniques excels at, whatever the language.
There’s still probably at least an order of magnitude to be had compared to mainline Nix the implementation, like in every codebase that hasn’t undergone a concerted effort to not lose performance for stupid reasons, but there isn’t much I can find to blame Nix the language for.
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#155Might 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....
All the major arguments in that decades old talk are invalidated with the introduction of DRI3.
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good question. It makes sand-boxing security impossible. The moment a process has access to the Xorg socket, it has access to everything. It is weird that this oftentimes misses from the discussion though.
Can't this aspect be improved, vs. switching to something else?
It is already possible today. There are access control hooks provided via XACE. Nobody uses them because the attack scenario is basically non-existent. If you run untrusted malicious apps having full access to your home directory you have big problems anyways. Not giving them access to e.g. the screen coordinates of their windows won't help you much then.
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#157I'm not switching to Wayland until my window manager supports it. It doesn't look like anybody has time to do the work, so I'll probably switch, grudgingly, to XWayland whenever X gets removed from Debian.
I feel like the biggest issue for Wayland is the long tail of people using alternative WMs. A lot of those projects don't have manpower to do what amounts to a complete rewrite.
I honestly don't have a preference between Wayland and X, but I feel very strongly about keeping my current WM. XWayland supposedly works, but I'm not in any hurry to add an extra piece of software and extra layer of configuration for something I already have working exactly the way I want. If Wayland offered some amazing advantages over X, it might be different, but I haven't seen anything to win me over.
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
I seem to remember reading in an old paper (1990s?) that the asynchronous nature of the connection between the X server and the window manager results in essentially unfixable protocol-level races.
Wayland has a philosophy of "every frame is perfect", which means fixing every race condition. However, X11 doesn't have this philosophy. If the window manager is slow and doesn't respond to a notification that a window has been resized, drawing the new window content over the old borders is the correct thing to do . What sense does it make to freeze the whole display just for a window border? Similarly, tearing gets…
Perfect frames is what Mac and Windows provide and what Linux should also aim for. Border tearing is a display bug, correctness should come first, Wayland's approach is right. X was designed for CPU and IO constraints that no longer apply. _Graceful_ degradation of slow UI should lower the frame rate, not compromise rendering of individual frames.
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#159For me a no-go for wayland is no support in LXDE and Xfce, which are very good lightweight out of the box user friendly DEs. There is LXQt and Xfce initiated the migration but until then it doesn't worth. Other hurdles are less important like multiscreen, multi-seat, Nvidia.
Its amazing that Xfce still manages to fool people into believing its lightweight. It uses the same resources as Gnome.
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#160I'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.
> Life is too short for nvidia bullshit on Linux.
So much NVidia hate, but in 23 years the only problems I've had with NVidia on Linux were when they dropped support for old GPUs. Even on proprietary hardware like iMacs and MacBooks.
But to each their own.