After more than forty years, everyone knows that it’s time to retire the X Window System – X11 for short – on account of it being old and decrepit. Or at least that’s what the common narrative is, because if you dig into the chatter surrounding the ongoing transition there are some real issues that people have with the 16-year old spring chicken – called Wayland – that’s supposed to replace it.
Recently [Brodie Robertson] did some polling and soliciting commentary from the community, breaking down the results from over 1,150 comments to the YouTube community post alone.
The issues range from the expected, such as applications that haven’t been ported yet from X11 to Wayland, to compatibility issues – such as failing drag and drop – when running X11 and Wayland applications side by side. Things get worse when support for older hardware, like GeForce GT610 and GT710 GPUs, and increased resource usage by Wayland are considered.
From there it continues with the lack of global hotkeys in Wayland, graphics tablet support issues, OBS not supporting embedded browser windows, Japanese and other foreign as well as onscreen keyboard support issues that are somehow worse than on X11, no support for overscanning monitors or multiple mouse cursors, no multi-monitor fullscreen option, regressions with accessibility, inability of applications to set their (previously saved) window position, no real automation alternative for xdotool, lacking BSD support and worse input latency with gaming.
Some users also simply say that they do not care about Wayland either way as it offers no new features they want. Finally [Brodie] raises the issue of the Wayland developers not simply following standards set by the Windows and MacOS desktops, something which among other issues has been a point of hotly debated contention for years.
Even if Wayland does end up succeeding X11, the one point that many people seem to agree on is that just because X11 is pretty terrible right now, this doesn’t automatically make Wayland the better option. Maybe in hindsight Mir was the better choice we had before it pivoted to Wayland.
There’s definitely regressions that need to be fixed, but the way it is presented here is just misinformation, mixing things like project-specific bugs and misunderstandings in as Wayland problems.
*BSD is officially supported by Wayland and by several display servers (a better state than for X11 where the *BSD’s had to patch things quite extensively downstream), the graphics tablet thing is a KDE-specific bug, and global hotkeys is available in some display servers through XDG portals (albeit a bit slowly), and using multiple independent mouse cursors is very specifically a Wayland feature (wayland multi-seat). Restoring window state is also supported, it just works differently than X11, and sway at least supports global fullscreen the same way as i3.
Most Wayland protocol discussions also take extensive note of Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, and even smartTV UX behaviors and upcoming web standards to see how other platforms solved a particular issue, what restrictions they apply, and what apps are likely to both expect and need. This does not mean that one can simply copy these verbatim – some of these rely on signed entitlements handed out by a centralized entity for special behaviors, which I’m sure no one is interested in.
Nothing wrong with seeing issues with Wayland or even disagreeing with it entirely, but let’s not misrepresent the project and its issues when we discuss it.
I am having tons of issues with Wayland. The latest updates on my distro broke SDDM again on Wayland on my Framework laptop so only X11 works. Image capture on KDE is broken, causing the screen to go black. Numerous applications break, black screens, etc. X11 works. And KDE is supposed to have the best Wayland support. And HDR is unusable. It’s extremely buggy for me on every system I try it on.
Which distro? Which versions? KDE doesn’t need sddm for Wayland support at all, but there is no reason you can’t pin the last version that worked. Distros with sane dependency systems will prevent breaking changes or allow you to, for instance you can forbid the broken version on any Debian based system (Ubuntu, Mint, Pop, etc.).
Image capture is going to be a portal issue or a video driver issue, it’s likely All of your “black window” issue are driver related. HDR will only work on Wayland, and is a new addition to KDE, that could easily be another driver related issue. Make sure firmware isn’t missing on boot.
X, (XOrg is not X11 since the fork), might work for now, but an increasing number of applications and distros are dropping it. Chances are some applications on your machine don’t actually work, you just haven’t noticed yet.
Now, does this mean I think you have to use Wayland? No, not yet but that day IS coming. It would be a lot easier if Canonical was helping to work on critical Wayland extensions as they already default to it.
So true.
Wrong. You want people to use the new best thing? Then you need to make sure they can use the new best thing. That means support across the stack.
I think Wayland goes the completely wrong way. It follows this post-modern mobile OS idea of “your OS is a castle, and you’re just a tenant”, which completely goes against the hacker spirit of X11 and Windows (yes, seriously). I do not want a window system that lacks features in the name of security and that locks out tinkerers, telling them “no, you don’t need (global hotkeys/consistent save&restore of window positions/hooking/absolute coordinates/whatnot)”. Yes, I do need that. I want to hook and modify my windowing system.
Wayland could legally drink and drive in Germany next year. It’s old and yet still not a viable daily driver for me. And let’s face it: The whole governance setup with voices from more or less major compositor makers deciding on the protocol doesn’t help with feature depth or implementation speed.
Wayland is not only competing with X11, it’s competing with all desktop graphics backends. And against macOS and Windows, it still loses big time. Is the gap closing? I don’t see that.
Regardless of my critique, I really wanted to believe in Wayland. I made people switch to it, I switched to it – and all of us regretted the decision.
Seems you are conflating Wayland with failings of DEs and WMs.
You can do whatever you want with sway/wayfire/hype land as far as hooks and hotkeys.
Nothing is stopping you from implementing whatever you wish in Wayland – just instead of doing it in applications, you do it in the windowing system itself. Hacking on hooks or just overriding is a way worse way than doing it at the source. Fighting your windowing system doesn’t make sense, just improve it. Or I guess give up because touching that is scary for you.
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work.
-John Gall, Systemantics (1975)
That’s why x86 and the IBM PC platform used to be so interesting, by the way.
It was a natural evolution, built on various clever hacks, that grew over time.
But by the end, it still was astonishing reliable for the mess it was.
And future proof through the guaranteed backwards compatibility, which provided a thrustworthy foundation to built upon.
That’s why it’s sad that intel pushes simplifications, by introducing UEFI (rather than OpenFirmware)/by removing CSM (BIOS)/castr*ting x86 ISA (X86S was first try only)..
Same time, though, workarounds developed by committed individuals try to compensate. Such as CSMWrap.
To future historians, this surely will be interesting to study.
It’s because the “system” is never just the thing you’re talking about. A system like a CPU is also the ecosystem that has built around it.
If you design a new CPU now that has similar complexity, no matter how well thought-out, it would never be adopted because it lacks the “culture”.
That’s also why Wayland will not replace X11. No matter how bad X11 is, Wayland is still trying to build the whole pyramid at once, and upside down.
And also, because in any typical large scale FOSS project, at some point a significant portion of the development effort goes missing when people start having disagreements.
It’s like building a skyscraper. Except when it starts to be 80% complete and people are already buying apartments in it, 20% of the workers start complaining that they don’t like the floor plan. They pick up their tools and materials and go build another tower right next door. That leaves gaping holes in the first tower, and while the second tower rises as high as the original, it’ll only ever be a skeleton.
When people look at the situation they say “Well that tower has huge holes in it, they obviously didn’t build it right. That other tower is going to be much better once it’s done.” Except, it will never be done, because the same cycle repeats.
Wayland is a dramatic simplification of X11. People insisting on keeping X11 are the ones holding out for the massively complicated system; it’s just the one they’re used to.
i used to assume this was true, and i wish it was true, but it doesn’t seem to be?
if wayland replaced one standard (X11) with another, we could ask whether the single new standard is simpler than the single old standard. but it looks like instead it replaced the standard with a haphazard collection of incompatible compositors. i wish a wayland fan would tell me i’m wrong about this, but instead, this vague fear i developed several years ago has been reinforced every time i look.
and the worst part is, this complication is user-facing. the first choice a user must make is which compositor they want to use. that choice will then influence every subsequent choice! to, apparently, a massive depth. throw in the fact that the wild overabundance of incompatible compositors is mostly built out of buggy abandonware and it becomes a practical nightmare
and it keeps going — there’s no single standard for remote display, no single standard for window management, no single standard for cut and paste???, even blitting has the same redundant rainbow of possibilities that X11 has tortured us with.
on the flipside, the complexity of X11 is mature. most things ‘just work’ these days, and it is mostly well-factored. as a user-developer, you can work on the part that interests you without getting tripped up by every side story. and since there’s really “only one X11” (xorg), every X11 user benefits from every improvement.
i think their intent was for wayland to be much simpler but they made it so simple that the necessarily complexity has to be handled ad hoc instead of as part of their standard. i think it’s an embarrassing sequence of mis-steps by people who learned the lesson of xorg’s weaknesses but somehow were blind to xorg’s successes.
You are confusing a problem with a significant step they should have communicated better, save that is a reference implementation with sane, usable defaults. Weston was instead designed as a bare minimum implementation for kiosk use.
As it stands, the KDE compositor and wlroots are the most complete and to me at least wlroots has become the main reference implementation to build on. It provides most extensions and is itself controllable and extensible in any way you need.
As for that choice? Only a developer has to care about that, users just pick a DE like they always have.
“Only a developer has to care about that”
sir, i am a developer.
and users use the product of developers. if developers are seeing a more complicated landscape then users will not get the benefit of developers facing a simpler landscape. in the end, users do benefit from choices that benefit developers. bug-free code is not merely a consequence of enthusiasm, popularity, or man-hours.
That would make it more of an “erosion of a complex system” than “evolved of a simple system that works”.
A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. If you take a subset of a complex system and treat it as a new system, and try to make it work, the theory predicts that you’ll still fail. You’re still building the pyramid upside down.
The important missing pieces will get filled in over time. Some of the people who were holding up the works when wayland was small will start to be outvoted. Some things will never be implemented, and the world will adapt after the screaming dies down.
Eventually people will wonder what all the fuss was about.
It was first released in 2008. This isn’t something new, and it still falls short in a lot of basic ways.
And X11 took how many decades to gain all these features and stood entirely still since Wayland first existed as a tech demo too? First releases are rarely going to instantly become the industry standard when something else already exists – heck if it was that easy to replace existing industry standards with some of M$’ crap ‘upgrades’ over the last few years….
Pelrun is quite correct Wayland is this generations systemd really, lots of noise around it, but in the end it works, solves many problems, is a better framework for the modern user/system’s needs etc – it is going to become the default you have to work rather hard to avoid it seems, and in a year or two now its been in that transition to being the default for a while the majority of the problems folks have with it are going to be fixed, either in Wayland patches, in the applications that are not playing nice, or in the fact that all applications are defaulting to wayland so no compatibility layer with X11 is needed.
Everyone seemingly begging the question that it works or solves any problems that needed to be solved. The point is, it’s being pushed/forced and it is currently deficient as a replacement for X11, even though it’s been almost 2 decades in the making. This isn’t this generation’s systemd either. They’re not comparable. This is an unbaked, unfinished product being forced to replace something it doesn’t actually replace.
Kinda like the year of Linux on the desktop?
No, the people claiming that Wayland doesn’t solve any problems (maybe including you, I dunno) are being disingenuous.
X11 is a absolute mess, and just because you happen to have a setup where it is working sufficiently doesn’t mean it’s not causing nightmares for the people maintaining it or the people building the binaries for your distribution or the people writing the widget libraries that applications are sitting on top of.
But hey, wayland mildly inconvenienced you once so it needs to die.
That sounds exactly like one of the many arguments against systemd when it started becoming the default… Not an entirely incorrect argument, but from the technical perspective there is a whole slew of reasons almost everyone moved to systemd, and almost everyone is moving to Wayland now.
They are quite comparable. The vast majority of features people complain about are not key to end users, but highly specific tasks.
Meanwhile X lost a lot of functionality before the XOrg fork and most complaints are cringy wishlists for 1999 when OpenGL over xdmcp still worked and compositing only existed inside applications with few exceptions. By the time desktop compositing became practical only software rendered applications could work remotely and not all of them would. Note I was one of the ones that actually used these things, do you really need a font server? do it with a file share instead.
The bottom line is that Wayland does not actually take much more resources, has already become the default despite missing important features because forcing it is the only way anyone will work on them (see Nvidia drivers), and fixes very serious growing problems with X. That ship has sailed, and the faster it is default the faster real issues will be fixed and features added.
I don’t like it, but X11 remains important for Unix.
It’s a relationship like with GDI on Windows..
Also: Terminals. X11 graphic servers exist for about any OS, making porting easy.
On Mac OS X, even good old Tiger, it’s possible to compile/run graphical Unix applications with X11 output.
Wayland is Linux specific, it will never make it to the countless niche platforms that got X11 support in the past 50 years.
It’s comparable basic and universal like ASCII, IBM Model M keyboard layout or say, OpenGL 1.1/1.2..
Sort of a graphical IPv6, with as much promise, and rate of success.
To be fair, I remember the days of using XFree86 in the 90s.. 😟
On a more positive note, early 90’s DESQView/X (for DOS) was a neat environment.
It allowed porting Unix applications and using an humble PC (386SX+) as an X11 terminal.
So I think it’s good if X11 remains available as a fallback.
Wayland is too graphics-card centric and not really intended for unaccelerated graphics over various network connections.
For the basic stuff, X11 thus is still valuable.
Which is a bit ironic, considering how complicated and difficuot to understand X11 is by itself.
I remember using it and it either corrupting or even completely wiping the EDID from my monitors.
How? Unless there is something totally wrong with the monitor? EDID eeprom isn’t supposed to be writable
Apparently it’s quite common to have corrupted EDID flash by e.g. hot-plugging the cable, so there’s utilities to re-flash it. Most graphics card can both read and write to the I2C bus, so unless the chip is write protected, you can re-flash it.
That’s why xwayland exists, but note that most of those standalone X servers only support slices of compatibility which are increasingly incompatible with modern applications. For terminals you don’t need a graphical display, almost nobody needs that. Ages ago I used to run remote X for a bunch of things because it was cool, usually monitoring processes on a couple dozen machines, but this is much simpler in a tty, faster, and lower overhead.
The same goes for nearly everything you might want to do remotely, which is why even Windows has largely switched to CLI for server administration. Want to code on the same machine everywhere? Just configure tmux on a VPS and jump in remotely. Want more responsiveness or local graphical dev tools? Pull the git repo and sync, compile and run remotely without having more than a minimum local setup.
As for comparing it with GDI, you are probably thinking of Motif on X with Athena graphics. Which, by the way, used to be library requirements for Maya on X across Irix, Linux and Windows. The X server on OSX didn’t ship with that and other things, so Maya took years to port over. Shake/Tremor used it’s own, so you could make the argument… Except it’s graphics Never worked remotely, so much for that.
You know what’s really missing that covers nearly all of the important sub-functions Wayland can’t quite do? Accessibility. It’s critical, complex and broken. Everything OBS can’t do on Wayland is also an issue for screen readers, etc. Why did it work on X? Because there’s no security at all. Btw, remote graphics already, the clients are much simpler, and it’s possible to use a browser as a client, but there’s no automatic setup, no sane defaults, yet.
So there you have it. What you should actually be complaining about is Acessibility. Working that out will pull in all of the portal support necessary, and simultaneously fix most important issues. Remote just needs tweaking and it should be better than it ever was on X when it’s ready.
KiCad mostly sticks to X11 for now because wayland has too many unresolved issues.
https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support/
KiCAD. Sigh. I don’t like KiCAD too much, it looks like bloatware to me. Like some Symantec or Windows printer suite software.
And the guys dropped Windows XP support way too soon at the time, IMHO.
I know, I know. XP is ancient and so it was back then. But it had a long tradition in engineering and CAD, also.
The KiCAD guys should try to get KiCAD going on more down-to-earth hardware, too, I think.
Like an old Unix-based SGI workstation, for example. IRIX GL support would be a challenge, for example.
Considering how humble the graphics of KiCAD look, they should try porting it to OS/2 or KolibriOS and OpenGL 1.x.
As a testbed, to learn how to write slick software. IMHO.
Why??
My interpretation of Joshua’s comment is that KiCAD is inefficient and it’s resource requirements are at odds with what it achieves graphically. The suggestion to target older hardware would force the developers to actually optimized the code.
But to make it run on 30 year old hardware?
Except it’s put in a way that belittles the enormity of such a project, and it wouldn’t fix anything anyway.
If you think that’s bad, try Altium. KiCad is anorexic by comparison.
I use Altium all day, I tried KiCad and it was so fast I almost had to slow the mouse down.
This is a ridiculous suggestion, also the reason KiCAD doesn’t work on Wayland is that they don’t have a gui backend that supports it yet!
Ok, so, why? Changing toolkits isn’t practical , it would be a complete rewrite. The underlying toolkit is wxwidgets, which will use GTK+ (nearly obsolete), Motif (obsolete), or qt (unfinished) as a backend. If finished, the qt backend would theoretically “just work”, and gtk+ can already… But it still has the following architectural incompatibilities with Wayland the developers state as showstoppers: All of it’s internal windows and panels are registered as separate windows! (GIMP switched from this modality a decade ago), but it wants to arrange those windows programmatically to restore their position (Wayland doesn’t allow this). It relies on mouse warping rather than relative positioning (which Blender uses) for infinite scroll, and OpenGL viewports run on the main UI thread (which is insane, don’t do that).
So it turns out the major performance issue is caused by an architectural problem in the toolkit, the mouse issue can be changed trivially, though Wayland is getting a mouse warp protocol, so it only needs to support that, and all of the windowing issues can be solved by only using registered windows for different monitors, maybe not even then if you use virtual desktops instead of workspaces.
So in the end most of this is on the KiCAD and wxwidgets team, not Wayland at all.
And yet it works fine on my wayland setup. There’s no need for Kicad to rush towards native support when XWayland bridges the gap successfully – they’ve got better things to do.
That doesn’t mean Wayland shouldn’t exist or X11 should remain forever.
People complain about X11 but it’s really not that bad.
Came here to say this. I haven’t had problems with X11 in decades. And even way back then, it was just challenges configuring it, but modern distros are so much better at that now that I don’t even think about it anymore. X11 does everything I need it to do (give me a nice graphical display). If Wayland were obviously superior, I’d switch to it. But it’s clearly not, so why bother?
The big problem with X11 is if you are trying to use it over a WAN connection. It is actually rather inefficient. Some tools are unusable if the server and client are separated by a few hundred miles. The fact that projects such as NoMachine and Exceed were able to overcome this and make a remote session snappy from a continent away proves this. I don’t know if Wayland is better in this regard, though.
Wayland doesn’t even support remote connections. The main reason I never switched.
Waypipe handles proxying wayland connections perfectly, there’s no need for it to be baked into wayland itself.
I’m on a Fedora 42 system, with a Wayland desktop session. In addition to waypipe, as pelrun mentioned, I can also literally run “ssh -X ferd@myserver” and execute a graphical command that will show up on my local display. The same Xwayland service that supports local X.org clients under Wayland will also handle tunneled X.org clients on remote systems.
It’s slightly LESS efficient than straight, no-security X11, of course, but it does work. VLC can even play a 1920×800 full-motion video… scaled down to 960×400… at about 10 frames / second.
If I run this command, tho:
waypipe ssh ferd@myserver vlc “/path/to/some/video/with\ an\ escaped\ path.mkv”
Then the video plays at the full 24fps rate. (Also scaled down to 960×400. At full-size I get maybe 15fps, which is still better than the tunneled X client.)
I should mention, also, that I have an absolute crap Nvidia GT 710 video card, so… in some ways it’s a miracle my system can display anything at all, even locally.
As @pelrun mentions, Waypipe is the way to do Wayland remote and it’s often better, though not quite as flexible yet. btw, xdmcp over high latency was awful decades ago, most applications don’t even work now.
Most of the problems were for the developers/maintainers of Xorg, not the users. Most of the paid development has stopped, so gradually it’s going to be worse on newer hardware.
Well, YMMV. Once you connect multiple screens with different pixel densities, you will understand why Wayland was invented: To bring to Unix what works out of the box on any other deskop OS, text will be the same size on every screen. That’s a shit show on X11 by design, because there’s a single global pixel density. Of course, you could query xrandr and adjust your internal pixel pitch by-screen in your UI framework, but eh, do you really want to do that?
This is interesting, because one of my biggest gripes about Wayland is that it doesn’t fix some of X11’s longstanding UI security problems… but, per this article, apparently it does fix the minor problem that an application can arbitrarily plonk itself anywhere it wants on the screen… and the article thinks that’s a bug. Same for “global hotkeys”, probably.
For the record, if you want anything like security, We Hold These Truths To Be Self-Evident:
An application should have no control over its window decorations (so that it can’t impersonate other applications). Apparently Wayland does the opposite of this. And 1a: an application shouldn’t be able to go full screen on its own initiative; the user should have to take an explicit action to tell the window manager to give the application the screen, and there should be some other action the user can take that will always force the application out of full screen mode.
An application shouldn’t be able to grab the keyboard focus. In fact, it should never, never, see a keystroke unless the user has taken some action to direct the focus to that application. Popups especially shouldn’t get the focus. Nor should it be possible to keep the user from taking the focus away once granted. So no global hotkeys unless they’re provided by “the system” or by something to which the user has given special privileges. And 2a: an application shouldn’t be able to mislead the user about where the focus is. Which means, for example, that if focus follows mouse (which all sane normal people know is how it should work), the application shouldn’t be able to arbitrarily change the mouse pointer glyph.
An application should not know what’s going on outside of its own windows. Things like screenshots should again be special privileges, rarely granted. I will grudgingly allow the application to know whether its window is actually mapped at any given instant, but am not thrilled with letting it know which parts are obscured. 3a: An application should not know what the mouse pointer is doing outside of its own window. 3b: Information about whether the user is present or active should be on a need-to-know basis, and your application probably doesn’t need to know.
An application shouldn’t be able to synthesize keyboard or mouse events that will be seen by other applications.
For extra credit, also don’t give applications random information about the hardware.
Except for a few, very special cases, maybe.
Such as emulators or VMs, in which the keyboard must be exclusive to the guest in order for input to not to conflict with the host.
I don’t think this is meant. The application should never need to grab the focus by itself.
Of course a wayland compositor can give an emulator, a vm or a game exclusively the input focus.
This approach also properly allows centralized mapping specific input devices to specific applications by the compositor. instead of the application just grabbing the first device it finds or worse needing application specific logic where each app has it’s own quirks.
When you say that an application should not be allowed to position its windows on a screen or be allowed to go full screen on its own you are ruling out whole classes of automatic booting applications in machine control where the app must present itself as the only thing seen on possibly multiple touchscreens, since the operator neither understands more needs access to the underlying OS. For example, I build consoles for virtual pipe organs where there are typically two touchscreens where the player sees the virtual stopknobs used to control the organ. If the underlying windows don’t go full screen and appear on the proper monitor when the system is booted all is lost for this business. X11 makes all this possible
Any tiling WM will do this out of the box, and alternatively Weston was made for doing kiosks. There are many options, but none of them require X. I do suggest doing what you want on, let’s say Sway. Once you set up the config to allocate your startup applications and where to put them you should be done. If that doesn’t seem to work out there are others. Enlightenment also has a kiosk mode and supports both X and Wayland, Hyprland is another tiling WM. KDE might even do what you want.
Your points 2 and 2a contradict each other. If focus follows mouse then any popup that happens to open under the mouse cursor will steal focus.
That’s why focus follows mouse is such a bad idea. You should have to take an intentional action to give a window focus, and simply passing over a window because you have to in order to reach the window you actually want shouldn’t count.
“If focus follows mouse then any popup that happens to open under the mouse cursor will steal focus.”
Sorry, but false. The wonderful thing about having the window manager in charge of focus is that corner cases like that can be accounted for.
Even Mutter has two different mouse-focus modes. There’s the traditional “Focus follows Mouse” mode. (After a 2-year campaign, I finally succeeded in getting its name changed back to that, after it was accidentally changed to “Secondary-Click” during some design updates.) But there’s also “Focus on Hover” mode (what used to be called “sloppy” focus), which only changes focus upon the pointer entering a window’s boundaries. A window appearing under the pointer won’t change focus, because the pointer never entered it.
(Actually, I don’t think even “Focus follows Mouse” will allow a window that materializes under the pointer to steal focus. The window manager can easily account for that, and does.)
“You should have to take an intentional action to give a window focus, and simply passing over a window because you have to in order to reach the window you actually want shouldn’t count.”
shrug Entitled to opinions there; personally, I consider passing my pointer over a window to be sufficient intentional action. It’s not like I commonly have windows visible on my desktop that I don’t WANT to be there, or that giving focus would have some negative repercussions. I’m more than happy to accept the tradeoffs of focus being dictated solely by the location of my pointer, if it means I can hover a window and type into it even when it’s partially obscured by another. (Clicking would raise it, and I often don’t want to raise it.)
I want my programs to remember the size and position they were in when I last used them. It’s very easy to do that on X11, but Wayland completely breaks that.
There are some things that require global hotkeys such as push to talk in a voice chat program.
The ability to send keystrokes to other programs is necessary for macro and automation programs. Programs should require permission to do that though.
The argument, with Wayland, is that it shouldn’t be the application’s responsibility to manage its own window positions. (Size is not restricted; applications can easily retrieve and request window dimensions under Wayland. Just not absolute/”global” positioning.)
Window placement on the screen is the responsibility of the window manager. If persistent positioning is needed, the WM can provide it for EVERY application, instead of having to rely on each application implementing its own method — or not, or possibly incorrectly. (That’s what macOS has done for years, after all — the system provides functionality for saving and restoring ALL applications’ state, even across logouts or reboots. Individual applications aren’t expected to implement any of that. They merely export relevant state data to a system service, which feeds it back to them on next launch.)
As for global shortcuts, there’s now an XDG portal spec for that. So far, at least Chrome uses it on Linux, though only for mappable shortcuts exported by extensions. But Wayland does not in any way prevent the binding of global shortcuts.
Programs sending keystrokes to other programs, well, that’s a thorny issue. Though I can’t really say I consider it such an essential feature that it justifies X11’s complete free-for-all, where any application can do absolutely anything to any other, silently and undetected.
Security is not an end unto itself and no generalized system like this should be designed trying to focus on that. Security is a characteristic to be kept in mind while building the desired functionality.
If its completely secure but not functional its worthless, and function can’t be added. If its completely functional but not secure it has value and can be amended to be secure.
You can easily argue pretty much the exact opposite of that as well, as you absolutely can create functionality when starting with a framework that is as secure as computers can get. Along with the whole if its insecure then it is worthless in the modern connected world as you really rely on this thing to work and be secure…
IMO the best place to start is to have the skeleton designed with some pretty strict concepts of security, permission etc from the start, then you can bypass those checks for more functionality if you think it is worth it for that functionality in this use case and thus get overall the most reliable balance between the two. Patching in something resembling security later just never works right for long, with oh so many examples in the wild of the same problems recurring because the systematic fix wasn’t made just a bodged on lock, so the next new feature and that gaffa taped on lock is now stuck to the letterbox not the door, or falls off entirely.
That fundamental model is nice in theory but leads to most programs being exceptions from this norm and require special privileges.
E.g. you want to screenshare with Discord and suddenly the average user will give their Browser of choice special permissions.
Most programs being exceptions to the default extra restrictive methods, just in their own unique way is massively better than all programs having keys to every lock needed or not (or more accurately there being no locks at all).
To some extent you see that in Android app permission, though the granularity and underlying architecture is different the user has no trouble in giving each app only the permissions they are comfortable with or it actually does require.
Though this user is constantly annoyed by his watch not receiving notifications from the phone, because the system has yet again decided that the app doesn’t need the permissions to access or send notifications.
This can happen at any time, so the reason why I’m not answering your call is because neither my phone nor my watch makes any sort of noise to indicate it.
“An application should not know what’s going on outside of its own windows. Things like screenshots should again be special privileges, rarely granted.”
Interestingly enough, that is how Wayland already works by default, while X11 does not.
Wayland can do all of the things you are mention, and does most by default, so what are you talking about? The compositor manages these functions, and more. It is intended to be an independent application that provides privilege portals as authorized for various functions. That you have the opposite idea tells me you haven’t really looked into it at all.
As I understand it, in practice all Wayland compositors have the application do the window decorations. The compositor may have the power to put an unmodifiable border around the application, but it doesn’t. Maybe I’m wrong, but I remember a pretty long discussion about it somewhere.
Being able to bring across remote GUI apps with “ssh -X”. I do it daily. My work laptop has a crap screen, and won’t drive two 4K displays.
This is a feature I have used every day for decades. Wayland just kind of threw that ability out like it was pointless. I don’t find Wayland as providing anything I care about, just removing features I use.
Waypipe does that for wayland, and has for some time now. It’s faster than ssh -X in my experience.
Wayland has already succeeded X11.
Windows didn’t die when XP rendering stack was replaced in Vista. Vista got a bad rap but then windows 7 was loved universally.
Some people are simply stuck in the Vista era with Wayland and fail to find ways forward and keep blaming the tools instead of their own lack of solutions.
This article existing in 2025 is a bigger problem than any point made in the article. Time to accept the path forward and adapt you solutions.
Your comparison isn’t even remotely close. It reads like someone whose use case it works for, who’s incapable of considering other people’s cases. Wayland would be fine if people only worked on their own personal devices, sure. It’s utter garbage in a multiuser headless environment.
You had a point, then lost it entirely by making a case that’s entirely false. Gnome is even integrating one solution to this but there are many available.
Counterclaim: all versions of Windows ever released have been worthless garbage.
“For various stupid reasons, we substituted something not meaningfully better for a central component of your working system, and now it’s your job to do a bunch of work to fix our screwups”.
Windows 2000 had been respected by Linux users, though.
That’s at leasthow I remember from about 20 years ago.
The common statement was lke “with Win 2k, Microsoft did it right for once”.
I remember re-starting explorer multiple times in Windows 95A, it was still capable of many more things than Win 3.11, Win 95C however worked much better, I only moved to 98 for dual-monitor support IIRC. Sometimes PEBCAK.
I’ve had enough hardware and used enough flavors of Linux and Windows to know if you stumble on an issue with your particular match-up of hardware you’ll have a bad time. Whether it’s wake/sleep bugs or your EDID or SCSI being unreadable.
The real problem sometimes lies in the UEFI, most BIOS don’t expose settings we would like to use. See above 4G encoding and turning off software RAID (I Looove slip-streaming specific RAID drivers into a system with a single NVMe drive, said no-one ever).
By and large Windows ‘just works’ for what I do. Meaning a hardware or software issue I have is generally solved in 1/10th the time, and is also 1/5 less likely to occur in the first place.
I do like SteamOS, have yet to try Bazzite. Kinda hope Windows goes to a Proton/Vulkan Compat/render backend too though. Seems like it might if Intel Arc drivers already emulate any render pipeline older than DX12/Vulkan.
In my opinion, Windows for Workgroups 3.11 (WFWG 3.11) was okay,
more stable than various Windows 95 builds maybe.
It had several improved system files, such as a new COM driver, HDD cache/VFAT/VSHARE and bug fixes.
Normal Windows 3.1x in Standard-Mode on an venerable 80286 PC was okay, too.
Since most stability issues were related to virtual drivers (VXDs, at the time *.386 files)..
That being said, web browsers were a different matter. Macs were a better experience here.
I vaguely remember that Internet Explorer 5 (16-Bit release) had an equivalent to Win32s built-in and was rather crashy.
Windows 98SE caused me some Kernel issues and blue screens,
but was most feature-complete at the time.
It had a big device driver library and was great for Frankenstein PCs that
had been built from scrap parts or parts of different generations (especially legacy ISA cards and DOS stuff).
That was mostly because many popular chipsets of that era were terrible and their drivers were buggy. Faulty RAM was also a common theme, especially with people who built their own computers and bought the cheapest of the cheap, and didn’t bother with the ESD straps. There were some chips that would outright corrupt data on the PATA bus when you tried to access the hard drive, randomly, which lead to system crashes and data corruption, which lead to further problems. Then at some point we got the capacitor plague issue that destabilized the power supplies and caused machines to bug out as they were physically failing.
Ordinary users resolved the issue by complaining and reinstalling windows.
Windows XP SP2 had its fans, too.
To many, it was their first real, non-DOS based Windows.
Or real OS, in general (not counting OS/2)..
It’s also notable that it had best audio support and no DRM yet.
You could capture StereoMix, have DirectMusic, DirectSound 3D, Aureal A3D, OpenAL, ASIO, a real MPU-401 interface etc.
Especially high-quality MIDI Software Synthesizer such as SYXG-100, Roland Virtual Sound Canvas (SC-55/SC-88) came as 32-Bit device drivers that ceased to work on Vista onwards, because DirectMusic became emulated.
And no VSTs are no replacement, except for a MIDI editor.
The driver-based softh synths could be used in games directly via DirectX. Like the Microsoft GM synth.
XP was also the OS of hacks and CD/DVD ripping..
Beginning with Vista, a lot of stuff nolonger worked.
2D GDI drawing was very slow, suddenly. WDDM 1.0 driver model was limited.
Windows 7 fixed these things (brought back GDI acceleration), but also looked rather dull in direct comparison.
Vista Ultimate with latest Service Packs and Platform Update was on par with Windows 7. Even got DirectX 11 (Tesselation!).
Now Vista basically got a lot of Windows 7 system files and software compatibility was about same.
Unfortunately, by that time, Windows 7 had replaced it largely.
Which is a shame, because Vista was the opposite to minimalism.
It was a generous, powerful OS for high-end PCs, with lots of animations, gadgets and such.
Unfortunately, it needed a Shader Model 2.0 capable GPU to offload graphics.
Which most users didn’t realize. They turned off Aero Glass for better performance, when in reality it was helping performance.
With Aero Glass, the desktop elements are drawn by the GPU.
So a cheap Nvidia FX 5200 would have been sufficient for an upgrade, already!
It even was mentioned in books about the RC1 (release candidate) of Vista.
Well, in principle that was helping.
Because of the limits of WDDM 1.0, the graphics memory had to be mirrored in PC RAM, too.
Which is next point. Lots of existing XP PCs were underpowered at the time Vista was out.
In fact, they were basically re-used, merely slightly upgraded Windows 98SE PCs that crawled on XP already.
It’s no wonder, that Vista experience was so bad.
1,5GB RAM would have been reasonable, but many existing XP PCs had 256 to 512MB, at best!
Some Windows 2000 PCs ran on 128MB of RAM, still! 😢
Anyway, just saying. There are indeed some similarities of Vista rendering and Wayland.
There are many oddities here, but I’ll just point out a couple. Let’s see, audio routing on any good card allows for capture of any audio stream, of course under Linux this is even easier. VSTs did and do a great job depending on what you use and your audio drivers. ASIO never stopped working, you just had to install it. Vista barely ran when it came out, and turning off the wasteful compositor saved valuable vram, which is why full screen mode also deactivated it for games. The gui performance was much better when you turned off the theming service entirely along with the other resident garbage. Intel really screwed customers with those transitions.
I think you are only drawing a comparison with compositing, but it’s not at all handled the same way under Windows Vista. One thing you’re missing is that GDI acceleration was 2D, and quite efficient. Eccentricities in X made it’s acceleration inefficient and buggy and eventually the 2D rendering support was dropped under Linux entirely to adopt a more unified OpenGL off screen rendering pipeline… But this did mean that uncomposited desktops were even slower, which spurred the development of Compiz/etc. Wayland on the other hand expects not to have to fall back to software at all, pushing Mesa to refine it’s fallback. Notably the Enlightenment renderer was still quite good in software even better Mesa improved.
Microsoft has cribbed the Linux approach to compositing partially now, though the many things still suck and much of the UI are still theme overlays or full screen windows disguised as the desktop.
the only reason folks like windows 7 was that windows 8 was so awful.
I liked Windows XP. The versions of Windows that shipped after came with a different mindset. MS accepted fundamental architecture issues, silent fault. Windows had become unreliable by… choice.
Example, when you plug 100 different USB devices into Windows Vista, and newer, devices no longer register. You will get no error. One of the reasons factories kept running XP for years after support for it stopped.
As far as “love for win 7″… I hated the move away from task bars and borderless windows. MS followed the trend with a sledge hammer. It was either Google or the web, that introduced that UI design paradigm . “Everything must be frameless, everything is clickable, no more buttons.” Even today, on windows, “Think before you click!!!” just to drag a window. Widescreen TV displays, becoming monitors, killed the window taskbar. I got a few more pixels of window content, but have to hunt for one of the 2 spots on my browser window just to drag it around.
So yah, I like my OS with a clear UI language. Instead I get “apps”, each with their own interpretation.
“This is how it works in Netflix.” and “This is how it works in Hulu.”
It’s a mess that had been solved but “branding” needed to be creative and control the whole screen.
PS: MS tablet/windows hybrid experience, it’s a joke, look at that calculator, yikes. If it was possible Steve Jobs would have done it.
Speaking of, Windows XP was based on rock-solid Windows 2000.
And the beloved Windows Server 2003 in turn was essentially based on earlier Windows XP/2k codebase.
What’s good about Vista/7, though:
The graphics system was changed to run in user space again.
Like it did with Windows NT 3.51 (very stable),
before NT 4 had moved GDI/VGA driver into kernel space for better performance.
The downside was, however, that Vista/7 display drivers constantly must report back to Windows in short intervals.
Otherwise, the graphics system is resetted.
It was introduced because of DRM, to make grabbing of videos difficult or something.
Why can’t Linux developers simply buy a license to WinAPI? It’s been proven to work since at least 1990 and it’s used by developers all over the world, especially in India and China which both contain large amounts of human resources available for software development.
Best troll post I’ve read all year! Are you from 4chan? 😆
I’m just a ‘casual’ Linux desktop user, but that sounds like a mighty long and troubling list of issues with Wayland. Makes me not wanna touch it.
Luckily, 95% of these problems have nothing to do with Wayland.
Honestly for a casual user you should never need to know or care, and likely won’t notice.
I work with Raspbian which has gone to Wayland in recent versions and the desktop/user experience is basically unchanged.
This is mostly a classic nerd holy war of the sort that holds Linux adoption back and gives Linux users a bad name.
I’ve no objection to Wayland in principle, I just find that in practice I encounter many problems when using it – with a fairly bog standard AMD GPU from a couple of years ago and Gnome. I regularly see lots of people posting online claiming that the Wayland experience these days is pretty good, and I tried it again earlier in the month to see if that was true – I was back on X11 within days after encountering so many graphical glitches I could barely use the thing.
I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong – I thought I had what has long been considered the perfect setup for running on Wayland. My main concern is that with all the talk around disabling X11 support for various desktops, I’ll be forced onto something that doesn’t work. Over the last few years, Linux on the desktop finally became a near perfect experience for me, but I feel like I’m about to be thrown back to the fiddling and extremely careful hardware selection of the mid-2000s, even though my needs are modest (browser, terminal, IDE).
I agree. I’m on an modern all AMD system and Wayland is a mess. Constant hard-locking when gaming or sudden food to 5 fps on the desktop. This happens on the handful of distros and kernels I’ve tried and switching to X11 (or even Windows) fixes it to where I have a 100% stable system. At this point there are so many obvious flaws in Wayland that it ought to be scrapped and restarted. At least that way maybe we’ll have something workable in another 20 years.
Oh hey everybody! Stagnati0n’s PC has a bug running wayland, and since that machine is the single most important device in the entire world, we should abandon wayland entirely and never use it again. Sorry for mildly inconveniencing you, we’ll all just go back to the mines.
Their machine is the most important device in the world to them.
If you keep ignoring user complaints as flukes, all you’re doing is huffing your own farts.
I have no problem with someone complaining about the problems they’re having locally. I have a real problem when they blindly generalize their personal experience to the entire world.
No, I don’t feel the needs to replace X, especially if after 16 years–it still is not mature enough. I see it just like Flatpack. Apt and Debs work, yet I have already had 2 different problems with Flatpack on 2 different systesm.
There are people trying to make Linux better; there are trying to make Linux different, and there are people trying to sabotage Linux.
Sabotage Linux?! How? I’d like to know.. just asking for an, uh, friend. 😃
ask Lennart Poettering
Ah, yes.
Mr. feature creep and ego projects, people like him should never be the lead in any capacity of any projects.
“After more than forty years, everyone knows that it’s time to retire the X Window System”
Please, show me exactly where I can find the statistics.
Reading comprehension gone on holiday?
Everyone knows that anything the comes after ‘everyone knows’ will invariably be pure opinion pulled from a dark smelly place.
It’s a linguistic tell, like:
‘scientists believe’
‘may’
‘could’
‘settled’
These people are not honest.
“95% of scientists agree that (insert oversimplified and overgeneralized statement)”
“…4 out of 5 dentists surveyed reccomend…”
What happened to “The Blit”? :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwIAjB99ucw
“the one point that many people seem to agree on is that just because X11 is pretty terrible right now” I love how this entire article is filled with these type of statements. Where exactly do we all agree on this? It seems to be your personal opinion, presented as globally agreed fact. Xorg has been working just fine for me for the past 20 years, while Wayland is still a hot mess.
i like and use X11. xorg has improved quite a bit from when i first started using xfree86 30 years ago. for example, i appreciate how easy it is to build a xorg module — like a custom input driver — from source these days.
this article — and the comments here — paints a foggier picture of wayland than i expected.
but obviously, the biggest thing i don’t like about wayland is that i don’t know it. but i’m also concerned because when i do dig into it a little bit, it seems like there’s not only an uncomfortable relationship between the display server and the window manager, but also between the display server and the apps?? it seems like even from the perspective of an app writer who is gung ho for wayland, there are several incompatible waylands??? i assume that’s not as big a deal as it looks like but at first glance it seems like a dramatic step backwards.
but personally, i’m not worried about it, and i assume i’ll switch someday. 20 years ago, i was happily using a rootless X11 server on macos x. and today, for my remote X i have switched mostly to VNC instead of X11-over-TCP. so i don’t know what my solution will look like but i’m confident i’ll be able to find a combination of wayland features and compatibility wrappers that is comfortable enough for me. but the fact that it hasn’t happened yet is making me wonder if i won’t just use xorg until i die
“Some users also simply say that they do not care about Wayland either way as it offers no new features they want.”
It offers me less features. Either I run both Wayland and xorg or just xorg. And running both offers me nothing in advance. Last I checked, X forwarding was still not ported over directly to Wayland and until that is done, I see no point in running it as xorg has to run anyway to provide that feature. I have been using xorg for over 25 years now and never had any major issues. So yeah, I’m in the camp of ‘I don’t care’. Xorg is stable, it’s fast, it runs incredibly smooth on embedded devices, runs smooth on specialized computers running long term availability hardware. We still buy brand new computers with Intel Atom N2600 CPU’s (I blame Det Norske Veritas). You need to find ways to limit the power used by the CPU and Wayland provides nothing extra.
Exactly this. I use X forwarding extensively. It’s easier not to even mess with Wayland.
Wayland can be easily forwarded over the network, that’s what waypipe is for.
Just because someone claims “Wayland doesn’t do thing” doesn’t mean it’s true.
Newer, therefore better. SPIT…
That’s the motto now-a-days :) . “If newer … it’s GOT to be better.” Part of human nature I think…. Never mind that older is usually much more stable and bug free, kinks worked out, etc. See that with computer languages as well.
I’ve no axe to grind with x11 vs Wayland. As long I can get in remotely and locally (multi-user) and my GUI does what I want it to do. Golden.
Wayland still can’t support gpu power settings, fractional scaling, x forwarding. What does Wayland do that X11 can’t? Oh, some abstract security issues that have never been exploited in practice. What about modern stuff like HDR? Nope, Wayland can’t.
And the only reason X11 can’t HDR is because for the past 16 years it’s been abandoned for Wayland.
What? Wayland supports HDR just fine.
He’s saying that X does not support it because people who have the wherewithal to add such support to X did it for Wayland instead.
It’s confusing because X11 is still available under Wayland via XWayland compatiblity service. It is possible to run in X11 mode simply by setting an environment variable XDG_SESSION_TYPE=x11; I wouldn’t be surprised if some X11 proponents actually ran on Wayland just using X11 session type.
I am sure there are cases where native Xorg is different or maybe even better than XWayland, but clearly the development momentum is in favor of Wayland. There was recently an attempt to fork XOrg, but it seemed to peter out.
“but clearly the development momentum is in favor of Wayland.” there’s shades of this claim in many of the comments here and i think the details are interesting.
i’m reminded of kernel development…the vast majority of code is, i think, written by vendors who are contributing device drivers. and then there’s a very small group of people who work on larger questions, like restructuring whole subsystems, the glue that holds it all together. but then there’s a much much larger group of people (like me) who rarely contribute, and when we do contribute it’s generally a very small patch. all we’re doing is drive by patches to fix the specific bug we ran into. we’re the open source community.
and there’s some tension in that, for example i submitted a patch for the intel wifi driver and it was rejected…and i realized, it was rejected because the “volunteer” i interacted with wasn’t working for the kernel, he was working for intel! even though open source means i can hack the driver to work with knockoff hardware, his personal mission is to make sure my useful hack never gets distributed! a sticky problem, and i can’t answer it.
but my point is, xorg still gets plenty of drive-by patches. i can tell because everything i do, it ‘just works’. and sticking points (like support for specific models of touchpads) have consistently and dramatically improved each time i install a new version. so clearly people are running into and fixing the oddball problems before i do. the worst challenge i’ve run into in xorg in decades is working around garbage the systemd people added.
but i think i agree, i don’t see any evidence of new xorg features or re-architecting in the last decade or so. and in fact i think a lot of the specific people who did the re-architecting work 15-20 years ago that has been so valuable to the xorg community are the same people who started wayland.
i personally live and die by people fixing bugs. re-architecting is valuable too, but xorg is already/finally a decent architecture. new features are hard to get excited about. so yeah, i do imagine that wayland is receiving more ‘developer hours’, but i think between redundancy (multiple competing and incompatible?? compositors) and the fact that the majority of these contributors aren’t working for anything other than systemd/gnome integration, these hours aren’t providing much value to the users? or at least, not much value to me.
the kind of development matters and i’m just not convinced wayland actually has any compelling development. from my — admittedly unique — perspective, it’s just a lot of people toiling without benefit.
That’s the FOSS version of “crony capitalism”. You’ve got your inside man in the system, who makes sure the wrong people can’t contribute and therefore can’t get access to the platform.
See my analog of the open source skyscraper. Just as things are about to get done and finished, the developers leave over minor disagreements and start a new building, and then that’s left unfinished as the developers leave yet again over minor disagreements to start a new building….
It leaves the residents of the building themselves to finish the interior and putting the glasses on the windows so it doesn’t rain straight through, and it never gets any better than that.
I have tried Wayland on several systems and all I can say is it’s a hot broken mess. On my Framework 16 laptop, which is basically designed with Linux in mind, recent updates totally broke Wayland. I spent a few hours trying to track down what broken in Wayland yesterday and just gave up in frustration and switched to X11. The only way to get a GUI desktop is to disable Wayland and use X11. If I try and capture the screen, it turns black. I frequently see displays just go black for no reason, and HDR, to put it mildly, looks like absolute excrement. I also run into numerous applications that don’t work, and one of them, KiCad, has said there are so many bugs with Wayland that they will no longer attempt to work around all the bugs. As old as X11 is, it works reliably. I can even use GUI applications remotely, which I often do. Wayland isn’t new. It’s been 9 years and it’s still not ready for prime time. I’m also reminded of all the issues that have been brought up where Keith Packard just won’t listen to people on issues around synchronization or many other things.
Gnome forever!
X11 was killed by american corporations who decide which software goes in theig distro.
Use Xlibre now.
Use Xlibre? No.
w
I might be the only human left on earth who wants to use modern (ish) PCs with CRT monitors.
But since a couple of years, hooking a CRT to a Linux machine is just not really possible anymore unless you’re OK being stuck at 1024×768. It never queries the monitor’s EEPROM for what it can do. It just puts out 1024×768 whether your monitor can display it, can not display it or is capable of twice the resolution in both directions (which is what I have).
Earlier, I could cheat by adding modelines. The last thing I found that worked was some NVidia tool where I could enter the monitor’s maximum bandwidth and then I could get some more video modes that the driver thought convenient, but I couldn’t max out the framerate or resolution. Sure 1600×1200 looks a whole lot better than 1024×768, but that monitor can do 1920×1440 at 70Hz even. Nope, not in there. A 60Hz version is in there, but that does flicker quite noticeably. (btw… I ran that monitor at its absolute maximum of 2048×1536 at 67Hz while modelines still worked)
I remember absolutely blowing my friends’ minds showing Cartoons in 4k (downscaled to 1920 pixels horizontally) on that monitor. They were used to “that weirdo” showing them movies on CRT TVs in full Standard Definition with flicker, 15kHz squeal and all, but now here’s something that doesn’t just have absolutely amazing colors and contrast*, but is also crazy sharp AND not flickering much (70Hz) AND not squealing (at least not in a human perceptible range).
*) Black is black, I want my CRT back. It’s gray it’s gray, since I switched to LCD oh ho what can I do? ‘Cause I I I I I, I’m feeling blue. (many of you including myself might be too young to know that song. But I’ve got another massive mental disorder that makes me like the same music my parents love and disgust most modern music)
Now get off my lawn!
There is, of course, ydotool (for some of the various wayland compositors), but automation remains difficult and limited.
As someone who’s retinas are progressively tearing themselves apart being able to screen read everything is becoming more important to me. The wayland protocol itself, and every single wayland compositor, except gnome, has effectively no screenreader support. It’s been 15 years and there’s no accessibility except in one compositor.
And gnome’s accessibility is of course very gnome’ish: they’ve disregarded long standing standards and implemented not one, but two new accessibility for screen-reading standards that now all the other wayland compositors (and X11!) have to be roped into supporting like herding cats. GNOME always reinvents rather than fixing. And then when the bug tracker gets too long they reinvent again. That’s how they close bugs. We cannot count on GNOME for our worldwide linux accessibility standards. I simply can’t trust them enough to commit to learning GNOME standards as I go blind.
I’ve been frightened because I thought I was going to be stuck trying to run ancient Xorg software that may not even be able to compile modern browsers just because I want accessibility for when I go fully blind.
But now there’s the controversial XLibre fork and finally some hope Xorg and a decades tested reliable screen reader technology will continue to be available in the future.
Also, since I can still mostly see right now, the waylands don’t even reliably work for my mouse+keyboard over tcp/ip sharing needs. Each wayland compositor may or may not support extensions like libinput or libei (or nothing like weston) so you never know if some software will work on your DE’s particular wayland compositor.
Not the developed here syndrome…
So we create a new system that does not replace the old system for 100%, and end up with 2 systems.
Wayland has had multiple issues, like not supporting character composition which is a deal-breaker. Poor remote display support, and incomplete compatibility. While better for standing US centric game desktops, and a good competitor for graphical environments, as long as the feature parity with X11 has not been reached, we will stick with 2 imperfect systems.
This is a perfect example of why Linux has failed to impress many on the desktop. Way too much fragmentation and developers of these distorts not reaching an agreement on almost anything. Everyone does their own thing and it’s not good in advancing the OS platform. Every OS needs a base set of agreed upon technologies and especially when you have hundreds of distributions. It’s no wonder users hop from one distribution to another when the reality is nothing is providing what is a concise and proper experience.
Nah, there is no relation. A typical Windows user running a Linux desktop would probably never know or care if they were using X11 or Wayland. This conversation would never reach their world. A Mac user would still be too lost wondering how they can have a computer and still have money in their savings accounts.
This is not the reason for the lack of a year of the Linux desktop.
They would care if one works and the other doesn’t.
i think you’re right that it’s a big part of why ‘the masses’ don’t like GUI linux. but i don’t think “Every OS needs a base set of agreed upon technologies”.
when linux is hyper-standardized and least-common-denominatored, it can easily attract a large captive audience (android, chromeos). and when linux is wildly diverse, it can handle my usage cases with complete flexibility and i can get to the bottom of every bug or infelicity. this is the way.
though i mean the flipside is that a lot of the people contributing to gnome or KDE or systemd or wayland tell themselves the story that they are creating the next windows, and they might be constantly disappointed by their continuing failure. but that doesn’t bother me because i’m not them :)
From a user perspective the fragmentation is non-existent, being something that only matters to power-users and developers. As there is more than enough agreement on the basic standards so even if something was intended for gnome it works on KDE etc. Every desktop oriented distro these days offers a way more concise and proper experience than Windon’t that for some reason still has all the stuff that should just be in a single unified system settings/control panel structure or at least clustered by hardware it controls or something spread over the place seemingly at random, is now plastered is bloat, advert and active spyware…
Apple maybe can claim a more proper experience for those users than Linux distro can, as if you don’t ever need to push even slightly at the prison bars around the garden things are fine for Apple (once you get used to it anyway), but if you want to stray even slightly outside the intended Apple experience its going to be hell, probably leaving you needing to pay for extra apps to do what should be basic OS things if you can find a way to do it at all. Where the Linux experience likely has nothing more than a speedbump of asking your search engine of choice how to do it should you ever get stuck, and as long as you ask the question as one of the common distros or with a “SUSE tumbleweed” etc modifier for the distro you are using it will be the first result or two.
Not the developed here syndrome…
So we create a new system that does not replace the old system for 100%, and end up with 2 systems.
Wayland has had multiple issues, like not supporting character composition which is a deal-breaker. Poor remote display support, and incomplete compatibility. While better for standing US centric game desktops, and a good competitor for graphical environments, as long as the feature parity with X11 has not been reached, we will stick with 2 imperfect systems.
Not even close. Wayland was design by the people who were actively maintaining/fighting with XOrg for many years. The main developer is the one responsible for the XOrg fork on the first place, an attempt to patch it’s worst issues and refactor what could be without breaking important things.
It feels to me like Linux is moving in a direction of tools built for the desktop manager, not tools built for Linux. I don’t know, maybe it’s conformation bias but I when I read forum posts and the like it seems like there are people asking “What utility do I use to do X in Gnome”, or in whatever other desktop manager. Not “what’s the best utility to do this in Linux”.
I think that is a bad direction to move in.
And Wayland leaves a lot more functionality to be built into each separate desktop manager by scratch. I think this accelerates this bad direction.
Has Windows morphed into an expensive maintenance and legal
liability for Microsoft?
No AI overview response.
Where was the RANT tag in this “article”?
As a more recent (and younger) Linux user running Arch + Hyprland, I personally have never experienced any issues with wayland, but that’s cause I don’t need many of the features present in x11, I feel like for people who start off with wayland probably won’t realise many of the features that exist in x11. And if they do need those features, they can switch to an x11 DE. I feel like the point of waylaid was to really just integrate DE + window server + compositor into one and that does simplify stuff for some users. Like back when I was using i3, I had to install pico as a compositor to get rounded corners, but with Hyprland it’s all built in. With the window server being built into the DE it also simplifies installation, compared to also having to install xorg (but it’s been a while since I’ve installed xorg) + the DE + a compositor for visual effects.
But this is just my opinion, feel free to disagree.
I am just an end user. I don’t know anything about the issues that something like X, or Wayland, or whatever, has to deal with to interact with the graphics hardware and to deliver value to end users. I do know, however, the following: until Wayland can do EVERYTHING that X can currently do, and at least as efficiently and transparently to me as X can, Wayland will not be ready for me.