Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years? • Hacker News Board

Re: Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?

#151

Post by ewoodrich » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 2:51 AM UTC

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #130

ewoodrich wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! Per-monitor fractional scaling on Fedora/Wayland finally allowed me to switch my default OS on my laptop from Windows 11 to Linux. I had to give up on my previous attempt a couple years ago with Linux Mint/X11 because it was an exercise in futility trying to make my various apps look acceptable on my mixed DPI monitor setup. Linux Mint with Wayland clearly was not getting a lot of attention at the time, and the…

What a pox that such an old slow moving distro as Mint somehow is people's first port of call. I don't know how this happened, how Mint rooted itself so well (in 2006 it was fresh!), but this perception that you should use the slowest moving oldest possible dustiest Linux is the best possible thing Microsoft and Apple could spread to convince the world to believe. If you are going to jump into Linux, dont sell yourse…

Sorry if I sold myself a delusion about the Linux distro I casually tried but I've been jumping on and off Linux for 20 years at this point and didn't get the memo it was outdated until later on. The significant change here was being able to daily drive it on my laptop instead of living in a VM or secondary dual boot.

In the past Ubuntu was always my go-to but the snap thing was irritating, and I'd always used some kind of Debian variant, so after cycling through all the X-buntus said hey, why not this Linux Mint I keep hearing about? Plus, Cinnamon looked decent in screenshots but turned out Gnome with a few tweaks ended up being much closer to my ideal than even heavily customized Cinnamon.

Re: Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?

#152

Post by MBCook » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 2:52 AM UTC

themafia wrote: post #143

MBCook wrote: post #6

The major comitters and maintainers of X decided it was a lost cause and unfixable. Were they just supposed to keep working on the massive pile of hacks they felt needed abandoning? They did what they thought was best. You hate it. Fine. Do you think things would be better if they kept working on the unfixable mess? I trust them to know what was going on better than random commenters.

> They did what they thought was best. My problem with it is their proxy for "best" seemed to be "opposite of X11." This was not a solid engineering choice, and I think this post is trying to demonstrate, that had costs. I'd probably be completely fine with Wayland if it didn't have this obsession with military style desktop security. If it was as open as extensible as X11 by default then we all would have switched.…

They were in a better position than anyone else to be able to make those calls.

To whatever degree the choices didn’t work out, which I think is likely overstated, they learned something. But if they just threw everything away again, people would be pissed. Again.

This all feels like so much Monday morning quarterbacking.

Re: Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?

#153

Post by wildredkraut » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 2:54 AM UTC

DANmode wrote: post #139

wildredkraut wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah? Then try to drag out a tab of firefox or GNOME files to the upper direction, good luck. Then check how "awful" Blender 5.1 titlebar and window frame integrates to GNOME. Have fun trying to make Deskflow/Synergy working on GDM.

> Have fun trying to make Deskflow/Synergy working on GDM. Just install less secure packages, or an entire less secure OS, we’re not stopping you.

Or just install Windows, install Deskflow, do my job, earn my money, pay my bills, go on vacation, take a sun bath and stop using an OS developed by people wearing thin foil aluminum hats.

Re: Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?

#154

Post by MBCook » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 2:55 AM UTC

wildredkraut wrote: post #146

mmmore wrote: post #113

I've used Wayland (via sway) for multiple years including on machines with a 1060 and 5080 (mainly for good fractional scaling support). The only major issues I've had with it have to do with XWayland apps. I think there are some issues with providing a consistent experience with things like screen recording, 3rd party proprietary apps, etc. across different DEs/distros, but that's more of something that comes with t…

Of course redhat is indirectly enforcing it, by having people in key roles of the KDE, GNOME,systemd and wayland development, who are making decisions, accepting or blocking ideas and commits. It all goes hand in hand and is mainly driven by the key "Sponsors".

So it’s a conspiracy because they’ve infiltrated the seats of power?

It’s not that developers of those projects think this is the better path forward?

Re: Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?

#155

Post by neoCrimeLabs » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 2:56 AM UTC

h4ch1 wrote: post #41

queuebert wrote: post #24

I was going to ask, why hasn't anyone ported NeXTSTEP to modern architectures? It was a pretty decent windowing system. Then I realized duh that's what Apple did with OS X. Too bad they ruined it.

I wasn't alive at the time NeXTSTEP was a thing, but I did look at a demo[0] to figure out what you were talking about (i love building/tinkering with window managers); it just looks like a regular old window manager? Is there something I'm missing/something specific you're talking about? [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf5o5liZxnA

NeXTSTEP was everything from the OS to the user experience and everything inbetween.

I'd say there were 3 distinct abstractions within NextSTEP: - The microkernel / OS (Mach / BSD) (for the hardware) - The Objective C based SDK - The User experience (not just window manager, but largely the window manager)

The SDK is what is still arguably the most highly regarded part of NeXTSTEP even today. That aside, at the time nothing else was so well polished and integrated on almost every level.

Re: Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?

#156

Post by dismalaf » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 2:56 AM UTC

lyu07282 wrote: post #123

dismalaf wrote: post #72

The anti Wayland sentiment is tiring. Honestly all the hating on technology is tiring. Don't like something? Use the thing you like. Or make a thing you like. As for the claim in the title, it's false, it's absurd, and this entire article is uninteresting and just an extension of the weird Linux conspiracy theories floating around these days.

> weird Linux conspiracy theories floating around these days There is this MAGA Linux Youtuber that is something to be studied on this topic, especially the community around it (some overlap with HN too), its basically just hate posting about woke, rust, systemd, python, mozilla, wayland, ubuntu, it goes on and on - https://www.youtube.com/bryanlunduke I don't know why some hackers turned so reactionary it's so stran…

Dunno if I'd call the people whining about Wayland hackers. More like freeloaders. Hackers make stuff.

Also there's nothing about Linux or hacking culture that would be necessarily left or right wing. Maybe somewhat anti establishment with the desire for computing freedom (and in the west the left is firmly the "establishment", pushing the surveillance state forward).

Re: Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?

#157

Post by MBCook » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 2:57 AM UTC

lostapathy wrote: post #124

__d wrote: post #99

So, compare this with say the Python2 to Python3 migration. Similar motivations: the developers had some legacy decisions that were unfixable without breakage. But they were sick of it, and decided to just go for it. Most end users didn’t care about those issues. The few that did were happy to pay the cost of switching. Everyone else clung to Python2 for years because migrating was high cost and low value. It took ab…

Did perl5 to perl6 actually happen? I feel like perl mostly fell out of favor along the way.

No. Perl 6 was renamed Raku (?) so people wouldn’t be confused that the 5 line was continuing development.

Basically, to the degree I understand, the language was effectively forked into two.

Re: Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?

#158

Post by wmf » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 2:58 AM UTC

000ooo000 wrote: post #54

PunchyHamster wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is fine. X11 needed fresh start. But they also failed to learn any lessons from X, just assuming "if X11 did it it must've been a bad idea, let's do it differently". X11 did chalk many lines of abstractions in absolutely the right places, it's just the implementation was crufty in places, and just not designed for modern hardware in some other places, while wayland just tried to kick as much as possible to the W…

>now every WM have to repeat that work wlroots?

wlroots came pretty late so there was a lot of code duplication between Weston/GNOME/KDE before that.

Re: Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?

#159

Post by MBCook » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 2:59 AM UTC

WesBrownSQL wrote: post #115

Yeah, I'm stuck on X11 since Wayland and NVIDIA with two video cards for display is hot garbage. I have been a Linux user on the command line since the days of root and boot floppies. I don't think the desktop has felt this broken to me since the early days. I'm a tech veteran and don't have a problem working through issues, but when the issue is "you're running Wayland compositor," Then that's a problem I can't fix.…

There seem to be a lot of people in other places in these comments saying things work for them with Nvidia just fine.

But it also sounds like whether things work is heavily dependent on how up-to-date the distribution is. I’m not sure if that’s tied in with Nvidia or not.

Re: Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?

#160

Post by ThatMedicIsASpy » Fri, Mar 20, 2026, 3:01 AM UTC

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #128

bigyabai wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Additionally, the Steam Deck ships with Wayland by default. Hundreds of thousands of gamers are stress-testing it without any complaint that I'm aware of.

As someone who uses my steam deck as a workstation too, I really really wish this were fully true. The desktop is still X based, and that suuuccckkksss .

I've had bazzite on mine for a year and wayland by default