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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?

#271

Post by hulitu »

redeeman wrote: post #212
safety1st wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> wayland all in all provides a far better experience than X11,

if all your programs are KDE or GNOME programs. BTW, can you run GNOME programs in KDE in Wayland or do you have to switch to GNOME ?

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#272

Post by hulitu »

jeltz wrote: post #173
safety1st wrote: post #26

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

There is also Phoenix: https://git.dec05eba.com/phoenix/about/

Current state Phoenix is not ready to be used yet.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#273

Post by Maledictus »

fabian2k wrote: post #19

I just recently switched to Linux since I had some weird Windows issues I couldn't fix. I've tried to switch a few times before, but the main problem at some point was that I didn't have proper fractional scaling on Linux. And that alone pretty much made Linux unusable for me on my specific hardware. Wayland fixes that, so that part is a huge improvement to me. Unfortunately this also limited my choice of Distros as…

If you switch the Firefox Snap to the latest/candidate/core24 channel, hardware acceleration should work.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#274

Post by hulitu »

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.

> Windows and Mac Os, for all their faults, are unquestionably ready to use in 2026.

Windows uses _you_.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#275

Post by sylware »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #226
sylware wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

:) This is a feature of a wayland compositor: I don't want it able to do remote.

OTOH, the enthusiasm for breaking legitimate features that people were using has not helped Wayland adoption.

It is optional: if you want it you will need to select a compositor which does have this expensive feature.

Don't forget, wayland is fully dynamic.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#276

Post by vladvasiliu »

michaelmrose wrote: post #243
vladvasiliu wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because although I don't care much about the chrome, I sometimes have to use it. For example, the address bar in firefox is ridiculously small. Also, some apps, like firefox (again) have a weird adaptation of the scroll to the zoom. So if you zoom at 300%, it will scroll by a lot at a time, whereas 200% is still usable. Also, 200% on an FHD 14" laptop means 960x540 px equivalent. That's too big to the point of render…

14 fhd is 157 ppi 24 4k is 184 ppi This really isn't this far off. If we imagined the screens overlayed semi-transparently an 16 pixel letter would be over a 14 pixel one. If one imagines an ideal font size for a given user's preference for physical height of letterform one one could imagine a idealized size of 12 on another and 14 on the other and setting it to 13 and being extremely close to ideal. >So if you zoom…

Right, and 27" 5k is 218 ppi, which isn't that much more than the 24". But don't forget that viewing distance plays a big role in this, and my 14" laptop is much closer than a 27" monitor. Bonus points for our specific model having an absolutely ridiculous viewing angle, so if it's too close the outer border are noticeably dark.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#277

Post by zeendo »

MarsIronPI wrote: post #220
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.

Embarrassingly, I don't really understand Hyper. I have a Moonlander and AFAICT the firmware (or at least the Oryx configurator tool they provide) says Hyper is just a combination of the basic 4 - Alt+Shift+Ctrl+Meta. I'm pretty sure that's at least not historically true... but I don't have a whole lot of use for it so I haven't tried to wrap my head around what's going on there.

I imagine there's a "real" hyper modifier but I haven't attempted to use it. For my sake, since I use GUI Emacs I find that I have enough mappings without it (I'm also a dirty evil user). A friend makes extensive use of it because he primarily uses Emacs via a terminal and Hyper avoids all other terminal keybind conflicts he might otherwise run into. But, he uses X11, too so no PGTK Emacs even if/when he does run GUI Emacs.

I'll try to dig into this some though and see if I can (a) determine a way to map a "true" hyper to my keyboard and (b) use it in PGTK Emacs and follow up with you.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#278

Post by MarsIronPI »

zeendo wrote: post #277
MarsIronPI wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Embarrassingly, I don't really understand Hyper. I have a Moonlander and AFAICT the firmware (or at least the Oryx configurator tool they provide) says Hyper is just a combination of the basic 4 - Alt+Shift+Ctrl+Meta. I'm pretty sure that's at least not historically true... but I don't have a whole lot of use for it so I haven't tried to wrap my head around what's going on there. I imagine there's a "real" hyper modi…

X11's XKB (which, funnily enough, is also the standard keyboard layout system on Wayland) has support for Control, plus another 5 modifiers. Specifically, I believe Hyper is typically mod3. If you run xmodmap in a terminal under X, you'll see which keys are assigned to which modifiers. I have a custom XKB layout that assigns some keys to Hyper, and then adds Hyper to mod3. With X11 Emacs I didn't have to do anything to get it to work. But I don't think I've ever seen a pure GTK program recognize Hyper, so it may be a GTK limitation.

For learning XKB, I recommend the Unreliable Guide to XKB[0]. XKB is sorely underdocumented, so guides like these are the best way to learn it.

[0]: https://www.charvolant.org/doug/xkb/html/xkb.html

Please don't feel like you have to look into it, though. I was just wondering, since you mentioned that you used PGTK.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#279

Post by pamcake »

tokai wrote: post #159
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.

Its amazing that Xfce still manages to fool people into believing its lightweight. It uses the same resources as Gnome.

I don't believe this is true. It certaintly uses less memory out of the box and unlike Gnome, most of the optional extras are easy to disable or uninstall.

https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/linux-des-resource-usage-com...

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#280

Post by Oxodao »

tuna74 wrote: post #245
naikrovek wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 in…

The beauty with Free Software and Linux distros is that "they" don't have to do it, anyone who wants to (including you!) can do it.

In theory. In practice, every app is designed for X11 or Wayland, building your own means you need to follow what most people use anyway if you want to have any working app on your system, or rewrite every app yourself
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