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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?

#211

Post by horsawlarway »

rabf wrote: post #194
lpcvoid wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even when it worked, it was more clunky than AMD at all times. It came in form of a huge driver bundle you had to install manually (or rely on a distro to do it for you), while AMD GPUs just worked due to `amdgpu` being part of the kernel since forever. Then is the EGLStreams debacle where nvidia lost a lot of goodwill in my opinion, including mine. And finally, nvidia has managed to opensource their driver on Linux…

AMD used to be terrible on Linux, perhaps before your time. Nvidia was always the choice if you needed functional hardware acceleration that worked on par with windows. The nvidia driver was/still is? the same driver accross platforms with a compatibility shim for each OS. This is how Nvidia managed to have best in class 3D acceleration accross Windows, FreeBSD, and Linux for decades now. OpenGL support historically…

Nvidia and intel on linux for near on 20 years now, and also agree - generally the ATI/AMD experience was markedly worse.

Currently dual 3090s in this box and nvidia is still as simple as just installing the distro package.

There was a period in the mid 2010s where trying to get better battery life on laptops by optionally using the discrete gpu vs the integrated was a real pain (bumblebee/optirun were not so solid), but generally speaking for desktop machines that need GPU support... Nvidia was the route.

Don't love their company politics so much, although I think they're finally getting on board now that so many companies want to run GPU accelerated workloads on linux hosts for LLMs.

But ATI sucked. They seem to have finally gotten there, but they were absolutely not the best choice for a long time.

Hell - I still have a machine in my basement running a GTX970 from 2015, and it also works fine on modern linux. It currently does the gpu accel for whisper speech to text for HA.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#212

Post by redeeman »

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…

ridiculous, wayland all in all provides a far better experience than X11, and wayland projects like plasma, hyprland, sway etc are very much not failed

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#213

Post by redeeman »

sprash wrote: post #156
altern8 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

which is exactly why you often dont give your sandboxed applications full access to your home directory :)

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#214

Post by redeeman »

thevinchi wrote: post #126
gspr wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wayland smells like IPv6 to me. No need to switch, and it hurts when you try. I'm very happy with Wayland, but what a strange comparison to make if you're not. IPv6 is objectively an enormous improvement over IPv4, and the only gripe with it is that it's still not ubiquitous.

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…

> without an obvious benefit for the end-user.

I guess HDR support, 10/12bit colors, displays with different dpi/refresh rate etc is just not really an obvious benefit to you?

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#215

Post by michaelmrose »

pshirshov wrote: post #185
michaelmrose wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no particular reason for this theory to be true. X supports high DPI screens well and has for ages.

Maybe it supports it sure, the problem is that it doesn't work at all.

It does work and has worked for over a decade. You can configure scaling under settings in Cinnamon or plasma for instance or via environmental variables in a simple environment like i3wm.

The post is from the Dev of i3wm an x11 window manager complaining among other things about how well his 8k monitor works under x11 and how poorly it works under Wayland.

You can also consult the arch wiki article on high DPI which is broadly applicable beyond arch

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#216

Post by michaelmrose »

joelthelion wrote: post #50

I've been using wayland with Gnome for years without a single issue. Arguably my hardware is a lot simpler and I don't use Nvidia. But I just want to point out that, for all the flak wayland receives, it can work quite well.

I remember having a gentleman over I think to fix something or other and when he walked into the living room he explained my crt monitor was misconfigured and to his perception had a visible flicker. We checked it and it was indeed misconfigured although I couldn't see it but it was such an aberration to him that he took time away from his actual job to make the flicker go away.

You will also note many items in the post above are papercuts that might go unnoted like input feeling a little worse or font issues.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#217

Post by redeeman »

tsoukase wrote: post #134

For 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.

multi seat works great with wayland, in fact slightly better than on X, where it also worked fine

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#218

Post by MarsIronPI »

amelius wrote: post #152
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…

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.

> If browser tabs were able to do that, all hell would break loose. So why do we accept it from applications?

Because I don't run random untrusted apps all the time. Whereas I do visit random untrusted websites all the time.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#219

Post by zamalek »

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…

At the end of the day these developers are almost entirely volunteers. Codebases that are a mess, ie X11, are not enjoyable to work on and therefore convincing people to use their discretionary time on it is more difficult. If there wasn't Wayland the current set of developers on Wayland might not have been doing DE work at all.

Attracting new contributors is an existential problem in OSS.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#220

Post by MarsIronPI »

zeendo wrote: post #127

Glad to see a good write-up of Wayland issues. My day-to-day doesn't run into the vast majority of these problems so when I see people melt down over a single trivial seeming Wayland choice about window coordinates then I have a really hard time relating. This post is a lot more relatable. As an aside, regarding remote Emacs - I can attest that Waypipe does indeed work fantastically for this. Better than X11 ever wor…

As an Emacs PGTK user, do you have any experience with modifiers beyond the basic 4? I recently tried to use PGTK Emacs and it seems to not support e.g. Hyper, which is a bummer, because I extensively use Hyper in my keybindings.
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