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Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
281–290 of 335 posts
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#282I must say: 1) Hugely enjoyable content - as usual - by Michael Stapelberg: relevant, detailed, organized, well written. 2) I am also an X11 + i3 user (and huge thanks to Michael for writing i3, I'm soooo fast with it), I also keep trying wayland on a regular basis because I don't want to get stuck using deprecated software. I am very, very happy to read this article, if only because it proves I'm not the only one an…
You are totally free to work on whatever you want to. You don't have to use the software that the Wayland devs (and other developers that like Wayland) produces. You can use and code whatever you want.
What a constructive comment. Are you a Wayland developer by any chance?
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
We are under an article which tells you that you can have problems with Wayland and hiDPI screens. And for example I’m one of those people, who uses X11, because Wayland failed on many levels, like buggy video playing, crashing while changing monitors, or simply waking up my laptop with an external monitor, and I didn’t give more than a few days to fix these (cheers to the author to try this long), so I went back to…
> Btw, everybody who I know, and I too, changes the font size, and leaving the DPI scaling on 100%, or maybe 200% on X11. Doesn't work if your screens are too different (e.g. 4k laptop screen and 32" desktop monitor).
You can scale down from a higher resolution to make the UI perceptively the same size. You can do this with xrandr --scale OR for example the GUI in Cinnamon on Mint after you check "fractional scaling" under X mind you.
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#284> Instead of my usual choice maim(1) , I tried grim(1) , but unfortunately grim’s -T flag to select the window to capture is rather cumbersome to use (and captures in 1x scale).
>Does anyone have any suggestions for a good alternative?
You might want to give wayshot a "shot"? https://github.com/waycrate/wayshot
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
That's easy to say in hindsight. It is only with the specific failures of Wayland that we see which lessons it could have learned from X11.
Disagree.
You need this amount of control to be able to properly filter and secure things. Wayland actually learnt that from X security extensions failure.
To me, Wayland failures are more on the organisational and change management part. In inside, it would probably have been better to provide a core library rather a reference implementation. Also, a lot of pieces needed to fall into place once the ball started rolling and some of them like PipeWire took quite some time to be ready.
The sorry fragmentation and complete unwillingness to work together of the various Linux DE also didn't help. I think Gnome constant NIH syndrome and overall capture of Freedesktop has a lot to do with where we are.
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
OTOH, the enthusiasm for breaking legitimate features that people were using has not helped Wayland adoption.
It is optional: if you want it you will need to select a compositor which does have this expensive feature. Don't forget, wayland is fully dynamic.
That's one of Wayland's other major faults IMO
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#287I 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…
There's no obvious reason for an end used to switch to Wayland if there isn't any particular problems with their current setup, the main improvements come down to things X11 never supported particularly well and are unlikely to be used in many existing X11 setups. My big use case that Wayland enabled was being able to dock my laptop and seamlessly switching apps between displays with different scale factors. And as a…
This was my motivation for switching too; better screen size management. Things don't scale weirdly when I plug a 4k laptop into a 1080p monitor. Otherwise I'm not sure I'd advise people switch
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#288A 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…
> all the quirks of the graphics drivers
This should ideally be solved at the kernel level - and I would argue it is solved there. Linux has the DRM abstraction for this very reason. Wayland actually builds on top of this abstraction, while Xorg was sitting in a strange position, not squarely in userspace.
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#289A 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…
> No WM should care about handling raw inputs or forced to be proxy between driver and the app for the output
But.. why? How many WM is feasible to have? Is it really an area where we want a "wide waist"? Should a WM be its own thing? Why not just make it an extension/plugin of a desktop environment, and have only a few of the latter? Being a library call is more efficient and easier to maintain, over maintaining an IPC API (especially that with X, X is just a dumb proxy to the compositor).
> And it shows in complexity and even in power use
You surely mean that X is more complex and has a higher power use, right?
Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wayland has a philosophy of "every frame is perfect", which means fixing every race condition. However, X11 doesn't have this philosophy. If the window manager is slow and doesn't respond to a notification that a window has been resized, drawing the new window content over the old borders is the correct thing to do . What sense does it make to freeze the whole display just for a window border? Similarly, tearing gets…
Reacting somehow to user input, even if not perfect, is more important for me... That's why we have HW cursors, and frame interpolation in games, etc...
HW cursor is an implementation detail, and are used by basically every wayland implementation.
And reacting is one thing, big black rectangles blinking on screen is another.