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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?

#201

Post by craftkiller »

jlarocco wrote: post #157

I'm not switching to Wayland until my window manager supports it. It doesn't look like anybody has time to do the work, so I'll probably switch, grudgingly, to XWayland whenever X gets removed from Debian. I feel like the biggest issue for Wayland is the long tail of people using alternative WMs. A lot of those projects don't have manpower to do what amounts to a complete rewrite. I honestly don't have a preference b…

> I'm not switching to Wayland until my window manager supports it.

Looking at your github, it seems you use StumpWM. It seems they are also working on a wayland version under the name Mahogany. Development seems pretty active: https://github.com/stumpwm/mahogany

> I'll probably switch, grudgingly, to XWayland whenever X gets removed from Debian.

FWIW I think "wayback" is the project for this. It seems to be trying to use XWayland to run full X11 desktop environments on top of Wayland: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayback/wayback

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#202

Post by jeffbee »

The way this article styles the name of the GPU company "nVidia" is really distracting! The company has always referred to itself in all capitals, as in NVIDIA, and only their logos have stylized a lowercase initial n, which leads to perhaps nVIDIA if you want, or nᴠɪᴅɪᴀ for those with skills or, for normal people, just nvidia. But "nVidia" is a mixture of mistakes.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#203

Post by newsoftheday »

mitchell209 wrote: post #61
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes gnome developers out-apple apple in their attitudes, fwiw.

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.

Same, so I switched to KDE and life has been good.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#204

Post by nickjj »

I don't think Wayland is fully ready, at least not with NVIDIA GPUs with limited GPU memory.

I have a 7,000 word blog post and demo videos coming out this Tuesday with the details but I think I uncovered a driver bug having switched to native Linux a week ago with a low GPU memory card (750 Ti).

Basically on Wayland, apps that request GPU memory will typically crash if there's no more GPU memory to allocate where as on X11 it will transparently offload those requests to system memory so you can open up as much as you want (within reason) and the system is completely usable.

In practice this means opening up a few hardware accelerated apps in Wayland like Firefox and most terminals will likely crash your compositor or at the very least crash those apps. It can crash or make your compositor unstable because if it in itself gets an error allocating GPU memory to spawn the window it can do whatever weird things it was programmed to do in that scenario.

I reported it here: https://github.com/NVIDIA/egl-wayland/issues/185

Some end users on the NVIDIA developer forums looked into it and determined it's likely a problem for everyone, it's just less noticeable if you have more GPU memory and it's especially less noticeable if you reboot daily since that clears all GPU memory leaks which is also apparent in a lot of Wayland compositors.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#205

Post by secure »

jeffbee wrote: post #202

The way this article styles the name of the GPU company "nVidia" is really distracting! The company has always referred to itself in all capitals, as in NVIDIA, and only their logos have stylized a lowercase initial n, which leads to perhaps nVIDIA if you want, or nᴠɪᴅɪᴀ for those with skills or, for normal people, just nvidia. But "nVidia" is a mixture of mistakes.

No, the company has not always referred to itself in all capitals.

https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/nvidias-name-change....

When I got to know their products, they were nVidia.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#206

Post by someguyiguess »

mananaysiempre wrote: post #120
secure wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the lesson of “separate display server from window manager” was very clear when Wayland was started. People have been discussing this over the years ever since. (See also “client-side decorations” for another part of this issue that was heavily discussed.)

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.

Your memory is insanely impressive to remember such an obscure article from so long ago.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#207

Post by secure »

edu4rdshl wrote: post #199

It's fun how most of the complaints are like "it works fine on Gnome but I will still blame Wayland because my tiling WM doesn't support it". So maybe try using a proper Wayland implementation The Chrome crashes when resizing a window doesn't makes any sense, apart from being a WM fault. The Xwayland scaling, again, has native scaling support on Gnome. Same for the monitor resolution problem (which he acknowledged).…

GNOME’s “proper wayland implementation” also does not work with my monitor, as I explained in the article:

> By the way, when I mentioned that GNOME successfully configures the native resolution, that doesn’t mean the monitor is usable with GNOME! While GNOME supports tiled displays, the updates of individual tiles are not synchronized, so you see heavy tearing in the middle of the screen, much worse than anything I have ever observed under X11. GNOME/mutter merge request !4822 should hopefully address this.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#208

Post by jeffbee »

secure wrote: post #205
jeffbee wrote: post #202

The way this article styles the name of the GPU company "nVidia" is really distracting! The company has always referred to itself in all capitals, as in NVIDIA, and only their logos have stylized a lowercase initial n, which leads to perhaps nVIDIA if you want, or nᴠɪᴅɪᴀ for those with skills or, for normal people, just nvidia. But "nVidia" is a mixture of mistakes.

No, the company has not always referred to itself in all capitals. https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/nvidias-name-change.... When I got to know their products, they were nVidia.

"Jen-Hsun Huang certifies that he is the president and secretary of NVidia Corporation, a California corporation." - ARTICLES OF INCORPORATION OF NVidia Corporation, 1993, filed with the California Secretary of State and available online.

"The name of this corporation is NVIDIA Corporation." - 1995 amendment.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#209

Post by mananaysiempre »

ptx wrote: post #179
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.

Maybe this one [1] from 1987? It says: > There are many race conditions that must be dealt with in input and window management because of the asynchronous nature of event handling. [...] However, not all race conditions have acceptable solutions within the current X design. For a general solution it must be possible for the manager to synchronize operations explicitly with event processing in the server. For example,…

I went and checked, and it was an SPE article from 1990[1]: “Why X is not our ideal window system” by Gajewska, Manasse, and McCormack. Section 3 has extensive diagrams of various races, including ones between clients and the window manager. Was even discussed here at one point[2], it turns out. Where I came across it I’m not sure (on X.org[3] possibly?).

[1] https://dx.doi.org/10.1002/spe.4380201409, https://people.freedesktop.org/~ajax/WhyX.pdf or http://os.4uj.org/WhyX.pdf

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15120308

[3] https://x.org/wiki/XorgDeveloperDocumentation/

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#210

Post by redeeman »

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…

it already is default in many places, and is used by a large percentage
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