tbf to this thread, wayland wasn’t really viable until 2023.
I made an existing comment on this that people didn’t like because I pointed out that most of Wayland’s “modern upgrades” like VRR, HDR, etc were unimplemented or unfinished for years. Even HDR is still “beta” on KDE iirc.
People also like to pretend the triple buffer wasn’t a can of worms for many users for a very long time (and still is on low power devices).
What’s it with the Wayland hate?
X did a great job for decades but it’s old, it never was designed for modern day requirements, let it retire gracefully instead of dumping on it’s replacement, maybe?
I understand there are some apps that still require X, those at some point will be / should be / have to be updated, but I don’t see that as a reason not to want to move forward to something better
Wayland is 18 years old. From 2015 on people whose entire computer use was a browser and a terminal on their single screen laptop with intel integrated GPU were telling everyone else they needed to change over because X was already practically dead and wayland was ready for prime time.
Meanwhile even on the latest and greatest everything wayland still has at that point many problems, many limitations, and is from the perspective of many users not better in any way whatsoever and in many ways worse. Continue this for 11 years. By the time everything is ready for prime time you’ve already primed people to reject and dislike you.
The issue with wayland is that both the process and the base mechanisms had significqnt flaws, that made it take a long time to get things working. In all fairness, the core team uad a valiant effort for a dwcade, hampered by unresponsive complainers, and late-to-the-party suggestions.
Fyi: I am an early WL adopter, but not on any of the major DEs.
hampered by unresponsive complainer
How outside of your fantasies did people bitching actually slow down devs introducing features that people should have known were needed in 2008?
Some people just can’t find a better hill to die on it seems.
Maybe also some undead refugees from the “systemd hate” hill or something.
It’s not like anyone had legit critique which online weirdos reframe as irrational
Oh I’m sure there was valid critique, but at the time it was completely hidden under a pile of made-up conspiracy bullshit about red hat being the devil or so, or plain wrong assertions like “it’s monolithic” or “it forces you to use binary logging”.
If the debate would have been about technical merits, maybe one of the other init systems would have won by being slightly better, but systemd’s detractors prevented that really well by making the public “debate” a compete farce.
Wayland is overall just better. I know there are plenty of apps that keep people on X11 just because they don’t properly support/work on Wayland yet, but other than that I’m not sure why you would want to stay on X11.
The overwhelming majority of systems consist of one monitor. For the minority on two monitors the overwhelming majority have 2 low DPI monitors or 2 high DPI monitors.
For those with mixed DPI screens only recently has any system supported scaling xwayland apps appropriately on such setups meaning some apps look like garbage and they still do on gnome. xrandr --scale to scale per screen has worked since 2003 and per screen fractional scaling works on Cinanamon under X right now.
To revise
90% of everyone
Single screen: Wayland == X Multiple similar DPI Wayland == X
5%
Mixed DPI with a mix of Wayland on X apps on every desktop but KDE X > Wayland
5%
Mixed DPI with a mix of wayland and X apps on KDE Wayland > X Mixed DPI with only wayland apps Wayland > X
I wonder why something that is only better for 5% and worse for 5% and requires 100% to deal with bugs missing features and growing pains has negative feelings attached!
The software you use working correctly is kind of a big deal, though.
Wayland is like how windows people say Linux is.
It works and is Incredible, but on X11 things just work.
I have the opposite experience. Multi monitor setup for my was always a half broken hassle on X11 and just works on Wayland.
I’ve only ever really had issues with X11 to be fair. Since DEs started fully shooting Wayland I was able to finally switch over to Linux full time and it feel better than Windows in every regard
Window manager automation. I use hotkeys to resize and move windows based on their title, pin them to certain monitors, etc…
ydotoolis a step in the right direction, but AFAIK it can only simulate mouse and keyboard inputAre you looking for something like swhkd maybe?
Looks like a hotkey daemon. That helps, but the crux of my issue is that on X11, xdotool can read the window names, size, position, and move them between workspaces and monitors.
Windows rules on KDE?
i ran arch with 2 monitors with different refresh rates on a rtx2060, idk why everyone’s complaining. my screenshare issues were my fault or i didn’t update vesktop which i can’t fault due to it being like a “pirate” client for discord.
so what’s everyone’s issue with wayland?
On my old nvidia laptop with Endeavouros i have some minor lag from time to time, nothing too crazy. But there are a couple of things i can’t make work. For start i can’t lower the gamma with xrandr, wlr-randr should work but my nvidia give me the middle finger. Secondly i can’t, for the love of me, find a decent onscreen keyboard app to use. I can technically enable the touchscreen keyboard in my desktop adding
KWIN_IM_SHOW_ALWAYS=1but is just too bothersome to have it pop-out everywhere. Also, while most of the app-images works, last time i’ve tried running this one https://github.com/ryzendew/Linux-Affinity-Installer it crashed 9 times out of 10. All of this works just fine on x11.KDE on Wayland has only very recently started to become workable for me, before that it was utter crap as I switch between home and office with my laptop, with varying display setups. In that case you got stuff like screen positions not being remembered and applications consistently starting off screen, requiring gymnastics to coax them onto a display.
And regularly it would crap out and not show output to one of the displays, if you opened up display manager you’d see the displays not touching and a big red error telling you that gaps betweens displays aren’t supported. Well here’s a brilliant idea, how about not automatically putting a gap between them in that case?
As I said, last few months it works better (although I still encounter some issues from time to time that I never had on X11). But the whole Wayland protocol had such a rough start, with issues encountered often being downplayed by parts of the community because “it’s better and we don’t want to hear otherwise”, that I simply cannot feel any love for it anymore. There was too much basic stuff that took too long to support, while people were shouting “but HDR!”, “better code!”. I don’t fucking care, I just want to be able to work and for too long that required X11.
Edit: some typo’s and improved readability.
Let me guess… You have an Nvidia card.
Protip: People who have iGPU + nvidia can just set the iGPU as main GPU on the BIOS and offload 3D programs to the nvidia via prime-run like they would on a laptop.
That’s my setup.
Can you actually use the ports on your dedicated GPU in this case?
I used to do this, but literally just switched to discrete Nvidia yesterday.
Zero issues so far. TBH it actually fixed issues I had with HDR and video decoding on my AMD IGP.
Guilty as charged
So you are living in an illusion of choice, while your options are obviously determined by the big corpo that you relied on for getting that card
(Saying that, I got an NVIDIA card like a dumbass too)
…more like a gifted old laptop, but yeah.
So not your choice either XD
My 16G RTX-3080 Mobile works well with Niri
I’ve found it varies from compositor to compositor:
- Plasma? Mid on Nvidia
- Constantly I have issues and I can’t even solve them myself
- I have plasma working on Ubuntu Studio on a laptop I use for music making which has some Nvidia card, and that works fine, but not on my main Arch install
- GNOME? Works okay until you want to do something with portals like screen recording
- Even if I use a different portal, GNOME overrides it.
- Hyprland? Works amazing EXCEPT for random tiny issues
- Also I had to do a lot of tweaking
- Every now and then some program will not start or something
- But generally pretty good
- Sway? Garbo support
- Nvidia may not even boot. Lots of tweaking. Lots of issues
- Cosmic? For wayland - solid
- For everything else… it needs a little work still
- I also tried Cosmic Shell + Niri, and it just kinda didn’t work in some ways like theming, but Wayland worked great.
- Also performance with multi-displays is kinda poor, or at least it was when I tried it.
- But Niri? Perfect
- Absolutely FLAWLESS Wayland. EVERYTHING works
- And now that I have DMS there’s so much done for me. It’s really a great system
Since I love the scrolling aspect of Niri as well, it works out well that it has the best Wayland support. 10/10 project. I love it
When I was on X11 still I was primarily an i3 user, and the transition to Hyprland and Niri has been generally positive
But yeah, I’ve worked with Nvidia on Linux for several years now on multiple machines. I’m finally throwing in the towel whenever I buy a new PC. AMD all the way. It’s just better on Linux, even on X11
Maybe ill check niri next. Any good distro to test it with?
CachyOS has it out of the box in their installer.
my old rtx 2080 worked perfectly for video capture on gnome wayland portals but had stutter on the desktop on both x and wayland. plasma actually ran better.
truth is you never know what you are gonna get with nvidia drivers.
- Plasma? Mid on Nvidia
Didn’t they straighten out Wayland support? I thought this was a thing of the past as of 555, but I also haven’t run Nvidia myself in years and years.
My work PC has a 3080 and the latest
nvidia-dkmsin the Arch repo. I haven’t had a single display-related issue for probably a year.With the same setup I had constant issues with Variable Refresh Rate, monitor sleep and actual sleep…
Nvidia on Linux did not want to work well for me
I had an NVIDIA card when I switched to Linux about two and a half years ago and I’ve never had an issue AFAIK.
NVidia on wayland is fine now. I’ve been running Fedora 43 for about a month on my gaming PC, even the boot splash works at native resolution
I was on 580 and had issues on CachyOS and Bazzite and Garuda Linux KDE Lite with an RTX 4080.
The latest Nvidia drivers have broken composition in Xfce, so I’ve been raw-dogging basic X11. It’s like I’m using WinXP again.
I’m represented, but run AMD on desktop and Intel on laptop.
Wayland is a sports car - modern, tailor made for performance. X is like a '99 Civic that’s had the seatbelts stripped out and the airbags replaced with cameras that let all the other cars on the road see you naked.
It’s fine to prefer X, but the older it gets the more people are going to roll their eyes at you. XWayland is fine for random old stuff, but there is zero reason X should be running your whole display these days.
Inb4 someone mentions network transparency that gimps the rest of the system or some 5000 year old app that needs to sniff events sent to every other program.
And the network transparency argument is long gone. While you can indeed network windows over the wire, most toolkits use client side rendering/decorations. So you’re just sending bloated pixmaps across the wire when things like RDP , VNC, etc deal better with compression, damage to the window, etc. And anything relying or accelerated with DRI3 is just NOT network transparent.
Most modern toolkits have moved past X11 because the X protocol was severely lacking, and there wasn’t a good way as a committee to modify the protocol in an unified manner. I mean look at the entire moving Earth that it took for XFixes and Damage extensions. Toolkits wanted deep access to the underlying hardware and so they would go out of their way to work around X, because it just could not keep up.
Agreed. I was an early Wayland convert because once upon a time I started writing a WM and taking an interest in X internals… And then my face melted off like I’d opened the Ark of the Covenant.
Things are so much simpler now.
Tell me you never deployed remote linux desktop in an enterprise environment without telling me you never deployed remote desktop linux in an enterprise environment.
After these decades of Wayland prosperity, I still can’t get a commercially supported remote desktop solution that works properly for a few hundred users. Why? Because on X, you could highjack the display server itself and feed that into your nice TigerVNC-server, regardless of desktop environment. Nowadays, you need to implement this in each separate compositor to do it correctly (i.e. damage tracking). Also, unlike X, Wayland generally expects a GPU in your remote desktop servers, and have you seen the prices for those lately?
Plenty life in X11 yet.
Xlibre running around.
Pheonix on the horizon. (Zig!)
An anti-DEI fork by a wingnut and a project that isn’t even half way ready to use starting from scratch in a niche language. Neither of which are capable of dealing with the fundamental problem of X, the protocol itself, without becoming something entirely different.
… I’m not holding my breath.
If you deal with the fundamental problems of the protocol itself and also provide backwards compatibility… Congrats, you’ve just reinvented Wayland and XWayland.
Dealing with X11’s problems while still being X11, when X11 is the problem? Yeah, I wouldn’t hold my breath either.
The fundamental architectural issue with Wayland is expecting everyone to implement a compositor for a half baked, changing, protocol instead of implementing a common platform to develop on. Wayland doesn’t really exist, it’s just a few distinct developer teams playing catch-up, pretending to be compatible with each other.
Implementing the hard part once and allowing someone to write a window manager in 100 lines of C is what X did right. Plenty of other things that are bad with X, but not that.
xlibre is xorg with some half baked commits that had to be removed from xorg for breaking too much and a guy who is kind of a nutcase.
No KMag + KDE Connect remote input, no Wayland.
I use KDE Connect remote input on Wayland all the time…
KMag is broken (simply has not been updated, not like it couldn’t work) but you can zoom the entire screen in KDE with super +/- is that not good enough?
So I recently updated pop from 22.04 to 24.04. The only real headache I’ve had is running games through proton. Games now start in windows, which might not even show up at all until I super + F11 to full screen it. The mouse gets stuck in either a corner or the middle, sometimes the cursor works in the menus but stops working on the game itself. Gamescope can fix some of these issues, but alt-tabbing is always an adventure if it breaks the game or not.
An annoying thing is it is very hard to figure out where an issue lies. Is it wayland, is it Cosmic, is it gamescope, or proton? Any tips or tricks people might have would be appreciated.
It’s a shame, because I want to like Wayland. i don’t know what magic system 76 worked in x11 but the only issue I had before was some tearing when moving windows around. 2 monitors of different resolution and framerate with nvidia.
I honestly don’t know where people are getting these Wayland issues. I’m on EndeavorOS with an RTX 3080ti and multiple monitors and it has worked flawlessly for ~2 years now.
There’s probably a lot of people on ‘stable’ distros who are still running Wayland code from a couple of years ago and hitting bugs that have been fixed already.
Maybe, x still works better for me on all three systems. Idk I don’t get it. Everything says wayland should be better but it runs horribly for me. A stuttering mess.
Screen sharing of rustdesk on hyperfland/sway or others similars de are mess, things simply doesn’t work, drag and drop between virtual box and host system is mess once it works once it not
same
I honestly haven’t noticed a different except Wayland feeling a bit faster.
You’ll only see when you open your
xeyes.
Running Kubuntu 25.10 on a full wayland desktop and getting much better performance and stability.
Running i3 on CachyOS and getting much better performance and stability.
It all went downhill when they removed printer support.
Cinnamon user here. I wish I could use Wayland. ;_;
You can, its just a little unstable I’ll occasionally switch to Wayland and tinker
Until recently they didn’t have support for alternate keyboard layouts, but that seems to have been fixed in 6.6. Tried it again, and there’s a few missing theming features such as window decorations being adwaita-ey and my cursor theme not working.
I really want to like Wayland since it seems to be the future, but I can’t when my computer keeps crashing from just using it.
I’m still new to learning the difference between Wayland and x11. What are some of the features people like between the two of them?
People like x11 because Nvidia hasn’t fucked up support for it, and people like Wayland because it is the newer protocol that everything is gonna move to.
Wayland provides a simplified, streamlined pipeline for graphics. Lower latency, higher frame rates, less overhead. X is straight out of the late 80s and 90s. Modern X has been cobbled together to work surprisingly well. But that old architecture is what is holding it back today.
What are some of the features people like between the two of them?
The main feature of wayland is that it’s not abandoned.
X.org isn’t abandoned, stop spreading FUD. It’s maintained in a feature freeze state fixing bugs and security issues. Guess who does that? The same people who made Wayland.
Okay, very cool, have fun with your oldass desktop environment while the rest of us uses the thing that is actually future proof.
You’re a moron.
Someone who uses X11 in 2026 calls me a moron.
Made me giggle.
Wayland has an actual future. It is being actively developed. Issues are being fixed and new features are added at least somewhat frequently. X11 might survive past the heat death of the universe, but it will be a stale, fossilized codebase maintained entirely by a small group of opinionated people.
So what’s not working in wayland? Screenshots? Remote desktop? Screen recording? Display in general?
My window manager (Am using awesome rn)
all of these have been fixed years ago.
I can confirm that the default remote desktop on Ubuntu 25.1 doesn’t work at least.
huh yeah, i havent tested on 25.10 but i don’t think it works for me either.
video capture portals are working though, this seems specific to gnome remote desktop.
I feel like a lot of people tried Wayland in 2020, a bunch of things didn’t work and they’ve been permanently traumatised.
I switched my laptop years ago, but my desktop only fairly recently - multi screen, mixed DPI with variable refresh rates for gaming took longer to be ready than my laptop’s single screen, normal DPI, fixed refresh rate config.
It works sometimes, but when it doesn’t, it wastes way too much time. I just switch back to windows for 50% of the time for anything productive. I love configuring hyprland, but actually using it for anything that needs to do something sucks. Thank god for arch linux wiki. I can run some apps instead of going to windows. Can’t run vm either🫠
I wish Wayland would do basic shit like save my window positions for multi-screens. I hate having to set that up every time I reboot.
Wouldn’t that be a matter for your window manager?
KDE Plasma is what I’m running. Doesn’t do this with X11, does with Wayland. Same goes for virtual desktops.
It’s a known issue.
Generally, the KDE team is very aware of some Wayland issues. https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Known_Significant_Issues
Yep. And this is why I have gripes about it being fully adopted.
That said, it’s fine otherwise. Snappy.
