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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?

#41

Post by WhyNotHugo »

forgotpwd16 wrote: post #5

Heh, interesting seeing we use pretty much the same things, i3+NixOS+urxvt+zsh+Emacs+rofi+maim+xdotool, only differentiating in browser choice (it's Firefox for me) and (me) not using any term multiplexer. >So from my perspective, switching from this existing, flawlessly working stack (for me) to Sway only brings downsides. Kudos to Michael for even attempting it. Personally nowadays unless my working stack stops, we…

> Kudos to Michael for even attempting it.

And for taking the time to thoroughly document real issues.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#42

Post by physicles »

RealStickman_ wrote: post #25
przmk wrote: post #21

Earlier 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.

Everyone’s so excited about the wave if windows users coming to Linux. Those people already have monitors.

I switched in 2018 and was surprised I couldn’t use fractional scaling on one monitor like I’d been doing for years on windows.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#43

Post by franga2000 »

benrutter wrote: post #8
jgb1984 wrote: post #4

For 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.

I think then big part is maintenance, xorg doesn't look likely to be maintained long into the future in the way Wayland will be. And a lot of the Xorg maintainers are now working in Wayland. So good or bad idea, Wayland is slowly shifting to being the default in virtue of being the most maintained up to date compositor.

Wayland is not a compositor. Being more maintaned than Xorg doesn't mean anything because wayland doesn't do a tenth of the things Xorg did.

What used to be maintained in one codebase by Xorg devs is now duplicated in at least three major compositors, each with their own portal implementation and who knows what else. And those are primarily maintaned by desktop environment devs who also have the whole rest of the DE to worry about.

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#45

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

dotancohen wrote: post #31
PunchyHamster wrote: post #10

Earlier 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.

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

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#46

Post by [deleted] »

jchw wrote: post #22
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…

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…

[deleted]

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#47

Post by Phelinofist »

thanatos519 wrote: post #34
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…

I have essential workflows using x2x, xev, and xdotool. Apparently this kind of stuff is contrary to Wayland's security model, so I'm stuck on Xorg, and I'm ok with that.

Out of curiosity, what are these workflows?

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#48

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

ryandrake wrote: post #30
jchw wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> having to maintain both X11 and Wayland support forever everywhere I don't get why X11 shouldn't work forever. It works today. As you said, there's no obvious reason for an end user to switch to Wayland if there isn't any particular problems with their current setup. "Because it's modern" and "Because it's outdated" just aren't compelling reasons for anyone besides software developers. And "because we're going to d…

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

Re: Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

#49

Post by charcircuit »

dotancohen wrote: post #31
PunchyHamster wrote: post #10

Earlier 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.

>That's easy to say in hindsight

That's an easy way to excuse bad design. Look at the designs of other operating systems designed by professionals and you won't see windows managers having to handle raw inputs or being in the same process as the compositor.

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