Can I start using Wayland in 2026? • Hacker News Board

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#291

Post by gf000 » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 6:47 PM UTC

mananaysiempre wrote: post #148

immibis wrote: post #132

Earlier 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…

The races I recall being described were substantially worse, but that’s largely beside my point. My point is that, now that bare fillrate and framebuffer memory haven’t been a limiting factor for 15 to 20 years, it is a reasonable choice to build a desktop graphics system with the invariant of every frame being perfect—not even because of the user experience, but because that allows the developer to unequivocally cla…

> To be clear, I’m still low-key pissed that a crash in my desktop shell, which was deliberately designed as a dynamic-language extensibility free-for-all in the vein of Emacs or TeX, crashes my entire graphical session, also as a result of deliberate design. The combination of those two reasonable decisions is, in fact, moronic. But it didn’t need to be done that way even on Wayland.

This is not a given, though. It's entirely feasible to have a stable "display manager/server" with an extension/plugin system where your WM of choice would sit. Crashing the latter should not bring down the former.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#292

Post by tracker1 » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 6:58 PM UTC

samiv wrote: post #14

I'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.

Since Linux Kernel 6.16 w/ Cosmic it's been really stable for me... but that's just my own experience. Though it really depends on your hardware... TFA mentions a rather exotic 8k display, for example.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#293

Post by gf000 » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 7:10 PM UTC

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…

> "If you're using Wayland, go back to xorg, it'll probably fix the problem you're seeing."

Well, I will be honest, I have had enough "edit this xorg.conf files to boot to a black screen" for a lifetime, so that's not the rebuttal you think it is.

If anything, the (gnu/)linux desktop has certainly matured over the years and on well-selected hardware it more often than not "just works" nowadays, which was certainly not something you could tell before.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#294

Post by adastra22 » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 7:17 PM UTC

mindcrash wrote: post #94

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Funny that you mention this, because broadly GNOME is seen as Linux' MacOS, and KDE as Linux' Android. At least in terms of user customization.

Last time I ran Linux as a daily driver, it was the opposite. Maybe my graybeard is showing.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#295

Post by adastra22 » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 7:18 PM UTC

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #257

tormeh wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do I run a GUI application over ssh? This is what’s keeping me from switching.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#296

Post by com » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 7:34 PM UTC

charmicat wrote: post #244

com wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t use x2x but use xev and xdotool for automated regression testing of GUI tools. I can’t find a low-effort, high-portability, low-menory way to do it with Wayland. Local and also in CI pipelines.

wev+ydotool?

I might be in the wrong Wayland desktop environment; I couldn’t get it to work reliably. Headless Wayland was really complicated when I last tried it, and quite memory heavy.

I’ll try again this month!

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#297

Post by 2001zhaozhao » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 8:01 PM UTC

BoredPositron wrote: post #103

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…

Different refresh rates on different displays is just a killer feature for me.

Wayland just has the best multi display support hands down. (I am using Cosmic DE but KDE is similar)

Windows:

- Per-display scaling can be set to multiple of 25% (you can set more precise scaling ONLY if you apply it to all displays)

- Windows across monitors with different scaling look weird

- Mouse cursor movement across monitors based on screen pixels rather than scaled, which is inaccurate to physical distances when using monitors with different DPI

- Under the hood handles all monitors with one rectangular logical monitor, which renders a lot of unnecessary pixels in any multi monitor setups where the monitors don't form a perfect rectangle

- All monitors use the underlying refresh rate of the primary monitor for everything other than the mouse cursor (for example, if you have a secondary 60Hz monitor, timings on it will not be smooth unless your primary monitor refresh rate is a multiple of 60)

Wayland:

- Per-display scaling can be set to multiple of 5%

- Windows do not span across monitors. This can be a downside in case you want to span a window across multiple monitors with the same scaling, but is mostly an upside

- Mouse movements across screen boundaries based on actual scaled distance, so you can tune it perfectly to the physical screen distances

- Each monitor can have its own refresh rate, and windows in each monitor actually update at the refresh rate of that monitor

- Each monitor is logically separate, no unnecessary pixels rendered

MacOS:

- Similar to Wayland but per-display scaling is much more restrictive for external displays, sometimes there isn't any way to set a scale between 100% and 200% without blurring the screen

- Apple Silicon hardware also limits number of total monitors supported, so it is impossible to use big multi-monitor setups on all but the most expensive hardware

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#298

Post by ErroneousBosh » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 8:06 PM UTC

rerdavies wrote: post #237

NekkoDroid wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you want to edit video, you need to use Linux, and NVidia.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#299

Post by rand846633 » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 8:42 PM UTC

Recently had to reinstall my Linux (btw, Arch). Normally I’d just dd/mirror the NVMe, but this time I decided to stop putting off the switch to Wayland and just do it — moved from i3 to sway, etc. I’d been avoiding this for years.

Turns out: absolutely no problem. The tooling around Wayland and adjacent programs is way more modern and functional. Great experience. Can recommend switching in 2026.

For me, the unintuitive truth with Linux is: once you’re on a rolling release, most problems just vanish. I still love Debian for prod, but for experimenting and development, rolling release any day.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#300

Post by sylware » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 11:48 PM UTC

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #286

sylware wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It is a major improvement: many real life compositor implementations, discover dynamically the features of the compositor, some will have a remote desktop expensive feature.