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.
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.
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.
2nd paragraph:
So answering the headline question: it would work if you just stopped using the 8k monitor
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.
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.
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.
Apparently you didn’t read his own referenced write-up on that: https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2017-12-11-dell-up3218k/
Exactly as I described.
Not sure what you mean but:
As he said, it worked in X11 but not in Wayland.
Then you didn’t read it. He linked it right at the top of the post.
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.
I bought an AMD gpu to use sway and it is still broken, don’t use sway.
Broken in what way? I only used it a short while years ago and didn’t notice anything.
Using Niri now on an AMD GPU with great success, it’s working great. Using it for work, gaming, everything I did with i3 and Hyprland before it.
Also using the yuzu works (eden and citron) performance is awful, like half the FPS I used to get on i3wm, this also happens in hyprland but not in plasma, apparently this is because the two window managers lack fifo v1 (hyprland did add it a few months ago, I need to check if it works better now).