I’ve been using Wayland exclusively for about 2 years.
It’s great.
And when it’s not it gets fixed.
X11 isn’t a project anymore, it’s a nightmare of empty meetings and discussions, no coders.
Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
121–130 of 335 posts
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Why not give up on high DPI? Save money on the monitor, save money on the gpu (because it's pushing fewer pixels, you don't need as much oomph), save frustration with software.
4K monitors aren't a significant expense at this point, and text rendering is a lot nicer at 150% scale. The GPU load can be a concern if you're gaming but most newer games have upscalers which decouple the render resolution from the display resolution anyway.
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#123Note 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.
Anecdotally, everything works flawlessly on my work machine: Optiplex Micro, Intel iGPU, Fedora KDE 43, 4K 32" primary monitor at 125% scale, 1440p 27" secondary monitor at 100%. No issues with Wayland or with anything else.
Everything actually feels significantly more solid/stable/reliable than modern Windows does. I can install updates at my own pace and without worrying that they'll add an advert for Candy Crush to my start menu.
I also run Bazzite-deck on an old AMD APU minipc as a light gaming HTPC. Again, it's a much better experience than my past attempts to run Windows on an HTPC.
As with everything, the people having issues will naturally be heard louder than the people who just use it daily without issues.
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would venture to say that there is little overlap between X11 users and people with high-DPI screens.
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.
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, I'm not. Explore and Dock are responsible for more than just that.
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.
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#126Wayland smells like IPv6 to me. No need to switch, and it hurts when you try.
> 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 don’t believe every device on a private network should be publicly addressable/routable. To me that’s a bug, not a feature, and again does not serve the consumer, only the producer.
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#127Glad 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 worked over the network for me.
I, too, suffer from the pgtk is slow issue (only a 4k monitor though it's mitigable and manageable for me)
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#128I've been trying to switch to Wayland and KDE plasma for some time but it's just so glitchy. Graphics bugs such as the tasks switcher showing black or flickery preview thumbnails or Firefox bringing down the whole system when opening a single 4k PNG indicate that it's still unfortunately very much an alpha. Maybe in another decade or so.
Interesting, I had these issues around 2 years ago with my Nvidia GPU, making Wayland unusable (especially the honestly probably epilepsy-inducing flicker).
After an Nvidia graphics driver release everything cleared up to be very usable (though occasionally stuff still crashed, like once or twice a week). I heavily dislike Nvidia and went with AMD just around a month ago, zero issues.
I'm curious to hear about what hardware you have.
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#1292026 is starting with half-baked NVidia drivers and missing functionality on linux? I am so surprised... did you try 17 different previous versions to get it running in true NV-Linux fashion? This stuff has been flawless on AMD systems for a while a couple of years now, with the exception of the occasional archaic app that only runs on X11 (thus shoved in a container).
Flawless on AMD? Absolutely not. 2-3 years ago there used to be a amdgpu bug that froze my entire laptop randomly with no recourse beyond the 4 second power button press. After that was fixed, it sometimes got stuck on shutdown. Now it doesn't do that randomly anymore, but yet all it takes to break it, is to turn off the power to my external monitor (or the monitor powering off by itself to save energy) or unplugging it, after which it can no longer be used without rebooting and then sometimes it gets stuck on shutdown.
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#130I’ve been using Wayland on Debian 12 since 2023. On an Apple Studio Display (5K) over thunderbolt (the built-in camera, speakers, etc work fine)
I screen share and video call with Slack and Google Meet.
I use alacritty/zsh/tmux as my terminal. I use chromium as my browser, vscode and sublime text as code editors.
Slack, Spotify, my studio mic, my Scarlett 2i2, 10gbe networking, thunderbolt, Logitech unifying receiver…. Literally everything “just works” and has been a joy to use.
Only issues I’ve ever faced have been forcing an app to run native Wayland not xwayland (varies from app to app but usually a cli flag needed) and Bluetooth pairing with my Sony noise canceling which is unrelated to Wayland. Periodically I get into a dance where it won’t pair, but most of the time it pairs fine.