Wayland

12 Articles

The Windows Interface You Didn’t Like, For Linux

January 20, 2026 by 52 Comments

If you were asked to pick the most annoying of the various Microsoft Windows interfaces that have appeared over the years, there’s a reasonable chance that Windows 8’s Metro start screen and interface design language would make it your choice. In 2012 the software company abandoned their tried-and-tested desktop whose roots extended back to Windows 95 in favor of the colorful blocks it had created for its line of music players and mobile phones.

Consumers weren’t impressed and it was quickly shelved in subsequent versions, but should you wish to revisit Metro you can now get the experience on Linux. [er-bharat] has created Win8DE, a shell for Wayland window managers that brings the Metro interface — or something very like it — to the open source operating system.

We have to admire his chutzpah in bringing the most Microsoft of things to Linux, and for doing so with such a universally despised interface. But once the jibes about Windows 8 have stopped, we can oddly see a point here. The trouble with Metro was that it wasn’t a bad interface for a computer at all, in fact it was a truly great one. Unfortunately the computers it was and is great for are handheld and touchscreen devices where its large and easy to click blocks are an asset. Microsoft’s mistake was to assume that also made it great for a desktop machine, where it was anything but.

We can see that this desktop environment for Linux could really come into its own where the original did, such as for tablets or other touch interfaces. Sadly we expect the Windows 8 connection to kill it before it has a chance to catch on. Perhaps someone will install it on a machine with the Linux version of .net installed, and make a better Windows 8 than Windows 8 itself.

Wayland’s Never-Ending Opposition To Multi-Window Positioning

November 11, 2025 by 131 Comments

There are many applications out there that use more than one window, with every modern-day platform and GUI toolkit offering the means for said application to position each of its windows exactly where it wants, and to restore these exactly in the configuration and location where the user saved it for that particular session. All toolkits but one, that is, for the Wayland project keeps shooting down proposals. Most recently merge request #264 for the ext-zones protocol by [Matthias Klumpp] as it descended into a 600+ comments spree.

This follows on an attempt two years prior with MR#247, which was rejected despite laying out sound reasons why the session protocol of Wayland does not cover many situations. In the breakdown video of the new ext-zones protocol discussion by [Brodie Robertson] the sheer absurdity of this whole situation becomes apparent, especially since KDE and others are already working around the Wayland project with their own extensions such as via KWin, which is being used commercially in e.g. the automotive world.

In a January 2024 blog post [Matthias] lays out many of his reasonings and views regarding the topic, with a focus on Linux desktop application usage from a scientific application perspective. When porting a Windows-, X11- or MacOS application to Wayland runs into compatibility issues that may necessitate a complete rewrite or dropping of features, the developer is more likely to stick to X11, to not port to Linux at all, or to use what eventually will amount to Wayland forks that patch around these missing API features.

Meanwhile X11 is definitely getting very long in the tooth, yet without it being a clean drop-in replacement it leaves many developers and end-users less than impressed. Perhaps the Wayland project should focus more on the needs of developers and end-users, and less about what it deems to be the One True Way?

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Everything In A Linux Terminal

September 10, 2025 by 49 Comments

Here at Hackaday Central, we fancy that we know a little something about Linux. But if you’d tasked us to run any GUI program inside a Linux terminal, we’d have said that wasn’t possible. But, it turns out, you should have asked [mmulet] who put together term.everything.

You might be thinking that of course, you can launch a GUI program from a terminal. Sure. That’s not what this is. Instead, it hijacks the Wayland protocol and renders the graphics as text. Or, if your terminal supports it, as an image. Performance is probably not your goal if you want to do this. As the old saying goes, “It’s not that the dog can sing well; it’s that the dog can sing at all.”

If, like us, you are more interested in how it works, there’s a write up explaining the nuances of the Wayland protocol. The article points out that Wayland doesn’t actually care what you do with the graphical output. In particular, “… you could print out the graphics and give them to a league of crochet grandmas to individually tie together every single pixel into the afghan of legend!” We expect to see this tested at an upcoming hacker conference. Maybe even Supercon.

We generally don’t like Wayland very much. We use a lot of hacks like xdotool and autokey that Wayland doesn’t like. We also think people didn’t understand X11’s network abilities until it was too late. If you think of it as only a video card driver, then you get what you deserve. But we have to admit, we are humbled by term.everything.

Wayland Will Never Be Ready For Every X11 User

July 28, 2025 by 140 Comments

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.

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Raspberry Pi OS’s Wayland Transition Completed With Switch To Labwc

October 28, 2024 by 88 Comments

With the latest release of Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian) the end of the X Window System has become reality, completing a years-long transition period. Although this change between display servers is not something which should be readily apparent to the casual user, the change from the client-server-based X11 protocol to the monolithic Wayland protocol has a number of implications. A major change is that with the display server and window manager no longer being separate units, features such as network transparency (e.g. remote X-sessions) are no longer a native feature, but have to be implemented separately by e.g. the Wayland compositor. Continue reading “Raspberry Pi OS’s Wayland Transition Completed With Switch To Labwc” →

FLOSS Weekly Episode 798: Building The Rust Desktop With COSMIC

August 28, 2024 by No comments

This week Jonathan Bennett and Rob Campbell chat with Carl Richell about System 76, COSMIC, Wayland, Rust and more! What was the “last straw” that convinced System 76 to write their own desktop environment (DE)? What’s the story with smithay, and why did that jump start the whole process? Listen to find out!
Continue reading “FLOSS Weekly Episode 798: Building The Rust Desktop With COSMIC” →