Comment by mikeweiss
2 days ago
I haven't used Linux desktop in 6 years but I remember when Wayland was new and started replacing X about 15 years ago and these were common complaints... I hope this is a joke and still isn't the case!
2 days ago
I haven't used Linux desktop in 6 years but I remember when Wayland was new and started replacing X about 15 years ago and these were common complaints... I hope this is a joke and still isn't the case!
I've been using Wayland for some years (at least since Debian switched to it as their default) and not had any issues with it. I think complaints were more common about X, and Wayland has resolved a lot of it for the average user. For example my switch to Wayland was the first time I had 100% working video playback on Intel iGPUs without tinkering with conf files. I appreciate there are still some edge cases where X11 is still better -- but I think for 95-99% of users Wayland has just worked.
Is is a regular occurrence that students in my lab that use or switch to Wayland still run into problems. Switching back to X11 reliably works as a fix. The sad thing is that there is also no apparent advantage to Wayland, it is just pushed down to us via distributions.
I've been using Wayland for a while now on Debian as of 13, and the advantage is that it just works so much better.
Animations are much smoother, frames are dropped much less, and there's very little artifacts. It's almost uncanny how good desktop compositing looks right now.
Naturally, some people don't care or don't notice. I notice because I run everything at 240hz and I'm a freak. But, for me, so far everything has worked in wayland. I have not had to boot up an x11 session on Debian 13 with KDE. And, mind you, this is Debian - not bleeding edge. But, screen sharing works, audio works, everything.
I guess things like HDR support, high bitdepth, per-screen refreshrate/scaling, and all those things are just "no apparant advantage" to you.
Thats okay, just understand that it DOES matter to some people.
what also matters is the actual developers doing the work, which GREATLY prefer wayland
17 replies →
I imagine the 5% of issues are more likely to be related to Linux itself; then they hop back to a BSOD on Windows with forced updates or a buggy "stable" OS update on Mac.
Significantly less so than before, but it's unfortunately still the case. It's also just now getting features that people have been asking for for over a decade, and of course due to the nature of Wayland the implementations of these features are sporadic and inconsistent.
I think the main difference is that there aren't really any deal-breaker kind of bugs any more, and as far as features there are none missing that users care about compared to X11. It's mostly just annoying bugs and the usual "third party" (including KDE) apps looking off in GNOME because the devs can't reach an agreement on some things, users be dammed.
It's not. Wayland has really gotten its shit together in the last 5-ish years. A lot of the desktop ecosystem has matured in the last few years, actually.
I maintain that the Linux desktop in 2021 was actually less usable than it was in 2016. But things have really turned around since then.
I'm not particularly fond of X11 but barely working in 2026 is hardly an endorsement of the whole project.
A good replacement of X11 would have had a well designed local mode that abstracted modern hardware in all configurations and an actually good network protocol.
We're left with a barely-working local mode with awful X11 stuck on top.
And we've moved to it for purely political reasons.
The "purely political" reasons is that nobody wants to work on X.org implementation. Which, I guess, is technically political? Maybe? But it has real world consequences.
Like okay yeah we could all just stick to X. But in order to do that we need X to be developed, which it's not.
1 reply →
I'd say Wayland was "barely" working in 2021. When I say it works, I mean it works. Screen sharing (finally) works, remote desktop works, ICC profiles, etc etc.
I, for one, like Wayland's design. The problem was that it was incomplete and the implementations were buggy. Well, now the protocol is feature-complete and the implementations are solid.
Wayland is a bunch of amateurs trying to be strict and secure and the end result is everyone opening their own security holes to make it usable. It's working now, mostly.
KDE got some kind of video bridge recently which is an insane workaround for something that should've just worked.
I'm not sure I get your complaint?
You're worried that capturing Wayland screens from X11 applications requires additional software?
How is that a real complaint? The only way this would be possible without additional software is if Wayland itself was just another X11 Version, if Wayland was X12 which is X11 but with protocol changes that break backwards compatibility, you would run into exactly the same problem.
Your standard for something being insane is that it is not 100% identical to X11.