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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?

#231

Post by theragra »

jcelerier wrote: post #184
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. LOL I installed a new windows 11 yesterday on a fairly powerful machine, everything lags so much on a brand new install it's unreal. Explorer takes ~2-3 seconds to be useable. Any app that opens in the blink of an eye under Linux on the same machine takes seconds to start. Start menu lags. It's just surrealistic. People who say these…

I am not sure how people get all these issues. I installed fresh windows recently, and I don't see noticable any slowdowns.

Linux is faster in some places, maybe. But still with many issues like some applications not being drawn properly or just some applications not available (nice GUI for monitor control over ddc)

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#232

Post by zeta0134 »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #225
zeta0134 wrote: post #55

KDE Plasma switched to Wayland by default sometime last year, and so far the main issue I run into is that a few screen recording tools I like stopped working. (Mostly simplescreenrecorder, which seems to be entirely unmaintained at this point.) Other than some initial instability with accelerated rendering on my GPU, which was quickly addressed, it kinda just works. I mostly don't notice. Actually, GPU acceleration…

> KDE Plasma switched to Wayland by default sometime last year, and so far the main issue I run into is that a few screen recording tools I like stopped working. (Mostly simplescreenrecorder, which seems to be entirely unmaintained at this point.) Other than some initial instability with accelerated rendering on my GPU, which was quickly addressed, it kinda just works. I mostly don't notice. FWIW, I have a KDE Waylan…

I've been using Kooha, but it's painful in a few ways, not least of which having aggressive compression that can't be disabled. SSR was nice because of the reduced time between "decide to record" to "draw a rectangle, done." OBS works, but is very clunky and cumbersome to reconfigure.

At some point I'll get irritated enough to seek out more alternatives and give them a whirl. Such is fate :)

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#233

Post by thayne »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #39
mindcrash wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problems you have with one of them might not appear in another. Because both have their own portal implementation/compositor with their own issues and service spec implementations. KDE has xdg-desktop-portal-kde, and GNOME has xdg-desktop-portal-gnome. On top of that each (still) has their own display server; KDE has KWin, and GNOME has Mutter. > The reference compositor, Weston, is not really usable as a daily…

The fact that we need the entire xdg-desktop-portal stack for screen sharing on browsers is a major annoyance. We now have a standardised extension for screencasting and screencopy (formerly it was not standard, but had been around for years), but browsers only support the Flatpak stack, which has a lot of moving parts and IPC. Doing out-of-band IPC for this is kind of pointless when the client and the server already…

> Outside of the domain of Firefox/Chromium, screencasting is much seamless

Not always. In my experience Zoom screencasting is much, much worse than on browsers in Wayland. But that isn't terribly surprising given how generally bad Zoom UX is on Linux.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#234

Post by michaelmrose »

pshirshov wrote: post #229
michaelmrose wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, I know all that. Except it doesn't work. At all. Ten years ago there were cursor clipping issues, cursor coordinates issues and crashes and I've been home-baking patches for that. Also it was impossible for one X session to span across two GPUs. Dunno if that was improved. Now it's bit better, but for sure your amdgpu will entertain you with little nice crashes when you run something heavy on a scaled display. I…

In that time I've had Hidpi work perfectly on first on Nvidia then recently on AMD GPUs on several different distros and desktops all running on X on several distros. They all worked out of the box and were able to scale correctly once configured.

The totality of my education on the topic was reading the arch wiki on hidpi once.

AFAIK one cannot span one x session across multiple GPUs although AMD had something that it once referred to as "eyefinity" for achieving this.

It is rarely needed discreet GPU often support 3 or even 4 outputs

One may wonder if you tried this a very long time ago back when AMD sucked and Nvidia worked well in 2005-2015

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#235

Post by rerdavies »

lpcvoid wrote: post #187
jlarocco wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Life is too short for nvidia bullshit on Linux. So much NVidia hate, but in 23 years the only problems I've had with NVidia on Linux were when they dropped support for old GPUs. Even on proprietary hardware like iMacs and MacBooks. But to each their own.

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…

.... and this is why Linux has only a 3% share of desktop user. Having to limit oneself to 2nd-rate GPU hardware is a pretty big ask.

Viewed from the Other Side, I'm far more inclined to think that NVidia actually knows what they are doing and the authors of Wayland do not.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#236

Post by rerdavies »

popcornricecake wrote: post #129
officialchicken wrote: post #32

2026 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…

Me too. I have the freezes-on-shutdown bug on my AMD video adapter.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#237

Post by rerdavies »

NekkoDroid wrote: post #144
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does AMD support CUDA yet? Because otherwise you can't use it for video editing.

Ask NV to open up CUDA and then maybe AMD can start even thinking about supporting it :)

Or you could just not use Linux. lol

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#238

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

the_why_of_y wrote: post #60
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the lack of base abstraction layer was pretty obvious from the start.

Since this is a Wayland thread, obviously the problem is a lack of a common implementation, which deviates from UNIX tradition. For those who want to complain how lack of choice between multiple implementations is an obvious problem and deviates from UNIX tradition, please wait until the next systemd thread.

Weird strawman, but you do you.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#239

Post by ElectroBuffoon »

altern8 wrote: post #142
exceptione wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question. It makes sand-boxing security impossible. The moment a process has access to the Xorg socket, it has access to everything. It is weird that this oftentimes misses from the discussion though.

Can't this aspect be improved, vs. switching to something else?

QubesOS and Xpra+Firejail demostrate security can be improved including the X11 side. Solaris had Trusted Extensions. X11Libre has a proposal for using different magic cookies to isolate clients and give dummy data to the untrusted. Keith Packard also proposed something in 2018.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#240

Post by mmwelt »

assbuttbuttass wrote: post #176
nitinreddy88 wrote: post #171

Try using Zoom client with screen sharing. Doesn't work and so on many applications limited by functionality. People say its year of Linux 2026 and xorg is dead. But its not even close to make it work for basic functionality. You can blame on vendors but as long as user functionality is not working, its never a working solution

Screen sharing works in Zoom now, you'll have to find a new cherry-picked example

Yes, it now works in Zoom, but not in Webex, unfortunately. That's been a big obstacle for me. I'd need to be able to share individual windows with audio.
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