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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?

#161

Post by dagmx »

charcircuit wrote: post #141
mariusor wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For obvious reasons this was never going to happen. Well, I guess this is the crux of the problem, and for open-source enthusiasts like me this is not obvious at all. What we can surmise is that Nvidia refused to collaborate, therefore they were the party to blame for the status of their video cards not being supported as well as others' vendors on linux.

>What we can surmise is that Nvidia refused to collaborate I saw more effort on Nvidia's side trying to collaborate than on the Wayland side. I think it's unfair to not call out the people who had a hardline stance of only caring about open source drivers and didn't want to do the work to onboard Nvidia.

I think you’re significantly retconning what happened.

Mesa did discuss EGL but felt it wasn’t the right choice. https://mesa-dev.freedesktop.narkive.com/qq4iQ7RR/egl-stream...

In much the same way that NVIDIA may have felt that EGL was the better choice.

However none of your description of the way things are explains why NVIDIA couldn’t have made their own libgbm that matched the symbols of mesa and worked on standardizing the api by de facto.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#162

Post by Maskawanian »

immibis wrote: post #132
mananaysiempre wrote: post #120

Earlier 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…

Tearing and hidpi is why I left Linux for Windows between 2012 ans 2022. Once wayland was good enough I returned. Tearing is awful, and should be opt in (which wayland provides), not opt out.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#163

Post by dagmx »

Joeboy wrote: post #116
glimshe wrote: post #89

Note to people on this thread: the impression the discussions give is that Linux isn't ready for prime time desktop use. I thought Wayland was the latest and greatest, but folks here report issues and even refuse to ever use it. Windows and Mac Os, for all their faults, are unquestionably ready to use in 2026. If you are a Linux on desktop advocate, read the comments and see why so many are still hesitating.

As a long-time Linux user I've also felt an incongruity between my own experiences with Wayland and the recent rush of "year of the Linux desktop" posts. To be fair, I think the motivation is at least as much about modern Windows' unsuitability for prime time rather as Linux's suitability. I haven't used Windows for a long time so I can't say how fair that is, but I definitely see people questioning 2026 Windows' rea…

I too share your sense of incongruity .

But then I try and focus on what each author thinks is important to them and it’s often wildly different than what’s important to me.

But a lot of internet discussion turns into very ego-centric debate including on here, where a lot of folks who are very gung-ho on the adoption of something (let’s say Linux, but could be anything) don’t adequately try and understand that people have different needs and push the idea of adoption very hard in the hopes that once you’re over the hump you might not care about what you lost.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#164

Post by michaelmrose »

jsheard wrote: post #58
physicles wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The overwhelming majority of the low-DPI external displays at this point are 24-27 1080p

Most high-DPI displays are simply the same thing with exactly twice the density.

We settled on putting exactly twice as many pixels in the same panels because it facilitates integer scaling

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#165

Post by michaelmrose »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #124
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.

I used to be like this. I actually ran a 14" FHD laptop with a 24" 4k monitor, both at 100%. Using i3 and not caring about most interface chrome was great, it was enough for me to zoom the text on the 4k one. But then we got 27" 5k screens at work, and that had me move to wayland since 100% on that was ridiculously small.

Why not 200% and increase font size slightly in all 3 cases?

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#166

Post by diath »

> But rather quickly, after moving and resizing browser windows, the GPU process dies with messages like the following and, for example, WebGL is no longer hardware accelerated:

Is this specific to the WM he used or does HW acceleration straight up not work in browsers under Wayland? That to me seems like a complete deal breaker.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#167

Post by bergheim »

gspr wrote: post #136
thevinchi wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll concede that IPv6 has usefulness on the public Internet, where adoption is actually gaining nicely. No issues there really. However, my comparison is end-user focused (ie. the Linux desktop experience). I should have been more clear about the scope perhaps. Both IPv6 and Wayland have increased complexity and surface area for pain (cost) without an obvious benefit for the end-user. Also: wrt IPv6 specifically, I…

> Both IPv6 and Wayland have increased complexity and surface area for pain (cost) without an obvious benefit for the end-user. I'd argue the opposite: IPv6 has lowered complexity for the end user: SLAAC, endless addresses, no need for CIDR – these are all simplifications for the end user. > Also: wrt IPv6 specifically, I don’t believe every device on a private network should be publicly addressable/routable. To me t…

I agree with the parent comment. I have sway on my laptop, i3 on my desktop, I don't notice any difference. Well except sharing and annoying small sway things that works on i3.

Just as I am oblivious to whether this is posted over ipv4 or 6.

That they all have to implement the protocol seems like 20 years of wayland might actually have hurt Linux more than it fixed - without it something else would have happened. Think of how many man hours have been wasted doing the same thing for KDE, gnome, sway, hyprland, etc.

(also I agree about the publicly available thing, it's a bug for me as well. Companies will harvest everything they can and you better believe defaults matter - aka publicly available, for the producer, but they will say your security, of course)

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#168

Post by naikrovek »

exe34 wrote: post #68
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.

No, this was a major point of discussion right at the start. They chose to ignore it.

They should have looked at Plan9 and the Rio window manager there.

I don’t know how GPU acceleration would have fit in, but I bet it would have been trivial provided the drivers were sufficient.

All of Rio in Plan9 is 6K lines of code and it’s a more powerful display protocol and window manager (all of the fundamentals are there but none of the niceties) than anything else I’ve ever seen.

The defacto way to remote into a Plan9 system from any OS even today is to use a client side program which implements it all the same way Plan9 does.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#169

Post by secure »

diath wrote: post #166

> But rather quickly, after moving and resizing browser windows, the GPU process dies with messages like the following and, for example, WebGL is no longer hardware accelerated: Is this specific to the WM he used or does HW acceleration straight up not work in browsers under Wayland? That to me seems like a complete deal breaker.

Probably not specific to Sway, but specific to the nVidia driver.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#170

Post by cosmic_cheese »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #64
mitchell209 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

GNOME is a much closer match for iPadOS than it is macOS due to how far it goes with minimalism, as well as how it approaches power user functionality (where macOS might move it off to the side or put it behind a toggle, GNOME just won’t implement it at all). Extensions can alleviate that to a limited extent, but there are several aspects that can’t be improved upon without forking.
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