Wayland is the successor to the X server (X11, Xorg) to implement the graphics stack on Linux. The Wayland project was actually started in 2008, a year before I created the i3 tiling window manager for X11 in 2009 — but for the last 18 years (!), Wayland was never usable on my computers. I don’t want to be stuck on deprecated software, so I try to start using Wayland each year, and this articles outlines what keeps me from migrating to Wayland in 2026.
  • LeFantome@programming.dev
    44·
    2 days ago

    As soon as an article starts by telling you that Wayland is 18 years old, you know where it is going to go. Yes, the very beginning of the Wayland experiment started long ago but it was not something anybody was expected to use most of that time.

    The very first Wayland-only desktop environment ever, COSMIC, launched just last month. Should I write an article about how amazing Wayland is despite being so new?

    A more neutral view might be to use Sway itself as a benchmark as it was one of the earliest Wayland compositors. The Sway project is less than 10 years old. The most complete Wayland environment available today, KDE Plasma, started to experiment with Wayland around then as well.

    But Wayland has only really come into its own in the last 5 years with remaining edge cases regularly being addressed over the last two.

    And we are now in a place where Wayland works for most people. The edge cases that remain are largely more exotic, like this guys 8K monitor. It would be dishonest to pretend Wayland’s evolution has been rapid. It has largely been dysfunctional. And real gaps remain. But it is already superior to X11 in many ways and the list of remaining use cases not well addressed continues to drop.

    Yes, Wayland does a lot of stuff better than X11.

    A Linux desktop user that started in Wayland a couple of years ago would be able to write a similarly negative article about Xorg if they tried to switch to it. The two systems are different. Neither is absolutely better than the other today. But Wayland is improving and Xorg is not.

    And more than half of Linux desktop users run Wayland now. And 4 out of 5 new Linux desktop users start on Wayland and never switch. Linux is a Wayland first OS. So, when articles like this complain about how long it would take to reconfigure their systems for Wayland, they miss an important point. The Wayland way is the “correct” way now, or at least the most common way. The X11 config is the weird one.

    And one of the things Wayland does better is run Wayland apps. The foot terminal mentioned in this article cannot be run on X11 at all. It is Wayland only. All of the apps an X user tries on Wayland will at least run. Not so the other way around.

    When GNOME and KDE shed their X11 compatibility, they will be able to more freely innovate Wayland only features. As that starts to happen, it will become more normal to create Wayland only applications. This won’t be a problem as 80 percent or more of Linux desktop uses will be using Wayland-only desktop environments.

    And that is what will ultimately doom X11. It will become impractical to run and X server instead of Wayland due to the important Wayland apps that cannot run on such a desktop.

    Anyway, it was a well written article and mostly fair. It will be very interesting to see how the set of requirements fares 1 - 2 years from now. GNOME and KDE will be Wayland only. COSMIC will have matured. Wayland compositors will have standardized a bit.

    I suspect that things will be looking very nice.

  • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.worldEnglish
    22·
    1 day ago

    I’ve been using Wayland for years (2019), and I’ve not had any problems aside from Discord screen sharing, which was fixed a while back.

    That’s on AMD hardware, mind.

    Whenever I’ve used X11 since, it’s felt janky and not smooth. Random bugs, tearing, issues with multi monitor, issues with trackpads, etc.

  • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
    26·
    2 days ago

    I’ve installed wayland based DEs on all sorts of cheap-shit, 2013 era hardware and never have a problem. IDK what sort of janky crap it takes to have to run X11 still. A 90s SpeakNSpell?

    • Ŝan • 𐑖ƨɤ@piefed.zipEnglish
      1·
      23 hours ago

      I run X11 on every computer I own which isn’t headless. Þe most recent is a new AMD Ryzen from early þis year, to þe oldest I have, an ODroid I bought back in 2014. I haven’t had X not work in 20 years.

  • ThomasWilliams@lemmy.world
    1·
    21 hours ago

    Before giving my verdict on this Wayland/sway experiment, let me explain that my experience on X11/i3 is really good. I don’t see any tearing or other artifacts or glitches in my day-to-day computer usage. I don’t use a compositor, so my input latency is really good

    But I thought X11 didn’t have compositors ? Just a window manager.

  • just_another_person@lemmy.world
    139·
    2 days ago

    Author sounds like the problem. Simple obstacles to making it work just fine in the way that you refuse to address, so this is on you.

    • sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      161·
      2 days ago

      Seemed like he outlined everything he did and had decent points. I dislike articles that say “Here’s what you’re doing wrong” or “This GPL app is better than that GPL app”. But this one seems much more of a “This is what I do and how I do it”. I enjoy those. He’s not saying it for everyone, just his use cases and results.

      • just_another_person@lemmy.world
        43·
        1 day ago

        2nd paragraph:

        Unfortunately, the driver support situation remained poor for many years. With nVidia graphics cards, which are the only cards that support my 8K monitor, Wayland would either not work at all or exhibit heavy graphics glitches and crashes.

        So answering the headline question: it would work if you just stopped using the 8k monitor

        • kartoffelsaft@programming.dev
          4·
          1 day ago

          If your argument for Wayland is “stop using thousands of dollars in hardware to get it working”, then that’s not going to convince anyone. He doesn’t address that as a solution because that’s obviously a last resort.

          • just_another_person@lemmy.world
            14·
            1 day ago

            No, it’s actually the opposite. He has an 8k monitor. Get rid of that, and then he has no blockers to using things the way he wants. Pretty simple solution.

            If you buy hardware that is wildly incompatible with almost everything, then there’s your problem. You don’t buy things knowing it’s incompatible, and then wait for compatibility to come around whilst complaining about it UNLESS you intend to buy it to put some effort into making it work on your own.

            That’s the entire point of this ecosystem and being able to upstream fixes.

            • Magiilaro@feddit.org
              3·
              1 day ago

              It is not wildly incompatible with almost everything, it works perfectly fine his current X11 setup, and any system or setup that has the goal to replace X11 should at least should support all physical displays that X11 supports. And a modern replacement should have no issues with modern hardware.

                • Magiilaro@feddit.org
                  31·
                  1 day ago

                  Not sure what you mean but:

                  With the nVidia driver now working per se with Wayland, unfortunately that’s still not good enough to use Wayland in my setup: my Dell UP3218K monitor requires two DisplayPort 1.4 connections with MST (Multi Stream Transport) and TILE support. This combination worked just fine under X11 for the last 8+ years.

                  As he said, it worked in X11 but not in Wayland.

    • y0kai [he/him]@anarchist.nexusEnglish
      62·
      2 days ago

      for real. Been using wayland on NixOS with nvidia gpu for several months now without issue. The only problem’s I’ve had are with sway, because their devs hate nvidia and refuse to support it, and i refuse to use nouveau. Solution: don’t use sway.