I've been using Wayland for 3 years now. First through Hyprland, now since August 2025 through Niri. Zero fundamental issues. Some developers don't want add Wayland support in their apps or can't because the app is using some framework and their devs don't want to support Wayland. But honestly ditching apps that don't support Wayland was one of the best decisions in my dev life (along with ditching MacOS and later Ubuntu). That's how I ended up using Neovim since Jetbrains needed ages to add Wayland support. 2.5 years into using Neovim Jetbrains finally added Wayland support. So I've accepted their offer to use Intelliji for free for 6 months. I barely opened it in 6 months, despite having been Jetbrains Evangelist for 7 years before switching to Neovim.
That being said you can still use most of x11 apps through xwayland with a few limitations (primarily no fractional scaling) or in worst case through qemu.
Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
251–260 of 335 posts
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#252Earlier 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…
Taking the proposition as true, what goal does Redhat have in "forcing wayland on users"? I am asking this in good faith, I literally naively do not understand what the "bad" bit is. Like, ok, its 2030 and X11 is dead, no one works on it anymore and 90% of Linux users use Wayland, what did they gain? I know they did employ Pottering but not anymore, and AFAIK they contribute a non-trivial amount of code up stream to,…
Redhat gains at least a few things...
- Maintaining X requires a lot of time, expertise and cost, it's a hard codebase to work with, deprecating X saves them money
- Wayland is simpler and achieves greater security by eliminating features of the desktop that most users value, but perhaps Redhat's clients in security-conscious fields like healthcare, finance and government are willing to live without
So I suspect it comes down to saving money and delivering something they have more control of which is more tailored to their most lucrative enterprise scenarios; whereas X is an old mess of cranky unix guys and their belligerent libre cruft.
There are some parallels to systemd I guess, in that its design rejected the Unix philosophy, and this was a source of concern for a lot of people. Moreover at the time systemd was under development, my impression of Poettering was that he was as incompetent as he was misguided and belligerent - he was also advocating for abandoning POSIX compatibility, and PulseAudio was the glitchiest shit on my desktop back then. But in the end systemd simply appeared on my computer one day and nothing got worse, and that is the ultimate standard. If they forced wayland on me tomorrow something on my machine would break (this is the main point of the OP), and they've had almost 20 years to fix that but it may arguably never get fixed due to Wayland's design. So Wayland can go the way of the dodo as far as I'm concerned.
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
Taking the proposition as true, what goal does Redhat have in "forcing wayland on users"? I am asking this in good faith, I literally naively do not understand what the "bad" bit is. Like, ok, its 2030 and X11 is dead, no one works on it anymore and 90% of Linux users use Wayland, what did they gain? I know they did employ Pottering but not anymore, and AFAIK they contribute a non-trivial amount of code up stream to,…
Cant Edit: I mention Pottering above because I remember similar arguments against his stuff (that I also never really fully understood in terms of "end game"), not because I have personal animosity against him or his projects or want to hold him up as "example of what can go wrong".
There is a massive class of things in open source you can look at from the perspective of "Suppose a megacorp or private equity owns this entity and wants to cut costs as much as possible while contributing as little back to the community/ecosystem as possible... what happens next?" And boom you can suddenly see the Matrix. So in the case of Redhat it's likely just IBM being IBM at the financial level and all these little decisions trend a certain way in the long run because of that
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#254I often see comments of "everything works perfect in wayland" which makes me wonder how many features some people use. I've tried wayland a few times now and have always noticed small quirks. A few current examples: shading a window actually leaves an invisible section that can't be clicked where the window was, shading and other window activities being inconsistent across various window types (terminal, file manager, etc.), picture-in-picture mode of browsers doesn't maintain aspect ratio, picture-in-picture doesn't maintain "always on top" or position when enabling it (I've managed to fix the "always on top" by writing a rule to apply to windows with "Picture in picture" as the title, at least)
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#255A rather big problem is that Wayland is just a protocol, not an implementation. There are many competing implementations, like Gnome, KDE and wlroots. The problems you have with one of them might not appear in another. The reference compositor, Weston, is not really usable as a daily driver. So while with Xorg you have a solid base, and desktops are implemented on top of that, with Wayland the each desktop is reinven…
X.org picked the right level of abstraction (even if implementation could use a rewrite). No WM should care about handling raw inputs or forced to be proxy between driver and the app for the output (it could be, if it needed/wanted, but there is no reason to add another layer of abstraction and cycle-wasting for most use cases). And it shows in complexity and even in power use. Wayland basically failed to learn the l…
The blanket statement "right level of abstraction" betrays a pretty narrow minded view. Right abstraction for what?
The big thing to me is, Wayland servers have way way less responsibility than X. X had a huge Herculean task, of doing everything the video card needed. It was a big honking display server because it took up a huge chunk of the stack to run a desktop.
Wayland servers all use kernel mode setting kernel buffers, so much more. So much of the job is done. There is a huge shared code base that Wayland has that X never had, good Kernel's with actual drivers for GPUs.
If we wanted one stable platform that we could not innovate on, that was what it was and we all had to deal with it... We'd all just use Mac. punchyHamster is saying The Cathedral is the right model and The Bazaar is the bad model, of the famous Cathedral vs Bazaar.
But the model really does not enable fast iteration & broader exploration of problem spaces. The ask doesn't even make sense: there are incredibly good libraries for making Wayland servers (wlroots, smithay, more). And they're not always even huge, but do all the core protocols. Some people really want professional industrial direct software that they never have to think about that only works one way and will only evolve slowly and deliberately. I'm thankful as fuck Wayland developers aren't catering to these people, and I think that's the wrong abstraction for open source and the wrong excitement to allow timeless systems to be built grown and evolved. We should avoid critical core dependencies, so that we can send into the future, without being tied to particular code-bases. That seems obvious and proposing otherwise to consign ourselves to small limp fates.
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#256A rather big problem is that Wayland is just a protocol, not an implementation. There are many competing implementations, like Gnome, KDE and wlroots. The problems you have with one of them might not appear in another. The reference compositor, Weston, is not really usable as a daily driver. So while with Xorg you have a solid base, and desktops are implemented on top of that, with Wayland the each desktop is reinven…
I use it as my daily driver. I used Sway for a very long time, tried Hyprland for a bit and am now running niri as my daily driver. Sway and niri are wlroots based, Hyprland at some point rolled its own because they didn't want to wait for wlroots protocol extensions. Sometimes I have to switch to Gnome to do screen sharing. 2026 and you will still run into plenty of issues with random behaviour, especially if you ru…
There also isn't nearly as much choice for wms. My favorite WM is cwm, but the closest alternative on Wayland is Hikari which is abandoned.
I noticed it's far far more work to build a wm for Wayland than it is for Xorg.
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#257I 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…
I've had to dive into xorg.conf more than once. Switched to Wayland as soon as it became an (experimental) option in Ubuntu and never looked back. Probably helps that I've always had AMD cards when running Linux, but it has been smooth sailing nonetheless. I can vaguely remember something not working under Wayland in the early days.. Maybe something with Wine or Steam? Anyway, that has to be 10 years ago now.
That's always what's missing from these threads. Wayland is boring actually. It just works. KDE, Sway, Niri, whatever, are all good.
I don't know what to do. The outpouring of negative energies are so severe. But I think it's so incredibly un-representative, is so misleading. The silent majority problem is so real. Come to the better place.
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#258For me wayland offers only downsides, without any upsides. I feel the general idea behind it (pushing all complexity and work onto other layers) is broken. I'll stick to xorg and openbox for many years to come.
Moving complexity from the layer you only have one of, to the layers where there are many, many competing pieces of software, was an absolutely bonkers decision. There's just no way to make that make sense.
It's hard to imagine a statement that could fly more in the face of open source.
It's absolutely an essential characteristic for long term survival, for long term excellence. To not be married to one specific implementation forever.
Especially in open source! What is that organizational model for this Authoritarian path, how are you going to - as Wayland successfully has - get every display server person onboard? Who would had the say on what goes into The Wayland Server? What would the rules be?
Wayland is the only thing that makes any sense at all. A group of peers, fellow implementers, each striving for better, who come together to define protocols. This is what made the internet amazing what made the web the most successful media platform, is what creates the possibility for ongoing excellence. Not being bound to fixed decisions is an option most smart companies lust but somehow when Wayland vs X comes up, everyone super wants there to be one and only one path, set forth three decades ago that no one can ever really overhaul or redo.
It's so unclear to me how people can be so negative and so short and so mean on Wayland. There's no viable alternative organization model for Authoritarian display servers. And if somehow you did get people signed up, this fantasy, there's such a load of pretense that it would have cured all ills? I don't get it.
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
I prefer Wayland, as I feel Wayland's performance is much smoother than Xorg. Though, I have no use for VRR, and I hate the slight lag that is introduced due to font scaling, so I do not use it either. But, I am stuck on Xorg only because of one app that I have to use to work. > My guess is that we'll only start seeing Wayland adoption when distributions start forcing it or making it a strong default, like what happe…
> But, I am stuck on Xorg only because of one app that I have to use to work. Does XWayland help?
Unfortunately no. The app takes automatic screenshots, and the developers are simply not interested to fix it.
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#260Earlier 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.
That's a really odd thing to say.
I don't really care about this but here's an example:
I have 2 27" screens, usually connected to a windows box, but while working they're connected to a MBP.
Before the MBP they were connected to several ThinkPads where I don't remember what screen size or scaling, I don't even remember if I used X11 or Wayland. But the next ThinkPad that will be connected will probably be HiDPI and with Wayland. What will happen without buying a monitor? No one knows.