I understand complaints about systemd, I don't understand the complaints about Wayland. This whole article sounds like a big rant and doesn't seem to bring much information.

> I also don't care for the "security" argument when parts of the core reference implementation are written in a memory-unsafe language.

Doesn't sound like a super informed way to look at security (not even mentioning that Wayland was started in 2008, and Rust was not a thing). One can also say that "as long as you run X11, there is no need to think about security because X11 just defeats it all".

> In fact, you can find examples showing roughly a 40% slowdown when using Wayland over X11! I'm sure there are similar benchmarks claiming Wayland wins and vice versa (happy to link them as well if provided).

"I am gonna make a bad argument and follow it by saying that you could make the same bad argument to say the opposite". Doesn't sound like a super informed way to look at performance.

> Anecdotal experience is not enough to say this is a broad issue, but my point is that when an average user encounters graphical issues within 60 seconds of using it, maybe it's not ready to be made the default!

So the whole article is built around ranting while saying "I don't have anything meaningful to say, I'll just share an anecdote and directly say it's not worth much because it's an anecdote"?

> But the second actual users are forced to use it expect them to be frustrated!

Who is forced to use it? Just use X11, as you said (many times) you do already.

wl-copy works fine, askpass works, copy and paste works, screen sharing with Google Meet works, drag and drop works. Using an iphone as a webcam works as does recording my screen.

Most importantly using multiple monitors with fractional scaling works perfectly. AFIAK this is not possible to do well (at all?) on X11, which is a complete show stopper for me.

If anyone's reading this and sitting on the fence, I would really give Fedora a go. I've found it so much more polished than Ubuntu, and loads of things which didn't work on it work out of the box on Fedora (at least compared to 24.04 LTS).

The post frames Wayland security as “you can’t do anything,” but that’s a misunderstanding. Even under X11, any app can log keystrokes, read window contents, and inject input into other apps. Wayland flips this to isolation-by-default: explicit portals/APIs for screen capture, input, etc.

Moreover, the performance argument is weak and somewhat contradictory. The author claims there is no clear performance win, and that it's sometimes slower and hardware improvements make it irrelevant. But Wayland reduces copies and avoids X11 roundtrips (architectural win). Actual performance depends heavily on compositor + drivers, and I've found that modern hardware has HUGE performance improvements (especially Intel, AMD, and Apple Silicon via the Asahi driver).

The NVIDIA argument is also dated. Sure, support was historically bad due to EGLStreams vs GBM, but this has improved significantly in recent driver releases.

Many cited issues are outdated too. OBS, clipboard, and screen sharing issues are now mostly (if not entirely) solved in the latest GNOME/KDE.

I've been using Wayland exclusively on Fedora and Fedora Asahi Remix systems for many years alongside Sway (and occasionally GNOME and KDE). Adoption has accelerated in many distros, and XWayland for legacy apps is excellent (although I believe using the word "legacy" here would be a trigger word for the author ;-).

There's no stagnation here... what we're looking at is a slow migration of a foundational layer, which historically always takes a decade or more in the Linux world.

Regardless of how you feel about Wayland, its creation set off _massive_ improvements across the entire Linux graphics stack.

For those of us who were using Linux on the desktop in decades past, remember when you couldn't use a GPU without X running? Remember the days when you needed an X session running in order to use CUDA or OpenCL? Remember the days when the entire graphics driver lived inside of X? When display server issues caused kernel panics? Remember the days when you couldn't share a hardware graphics surface between processes? When it was impossible to get hardware acceleration to work offscreen?

Wayland's aggressive stance on "it doesn't work on platforms that don't fix all of that" is one of the only things that pushed the stability and flexibility of the graphics stack on Linux forward.

I don't really think anything less than saying "We the X developers are going to stop X development and X is going away" would have been enough to push graphics card vendors to actually rework the drivers.

Were they just supposed to keep working on the massive pile of hacks they felt needed abandoning?

They did what they thought was best. You hate it. Fine.

Do you think things would be better if they kept working on the unfixable mess?

I trust them to know what was going on better than random commenters.

And using X is a noticeably worse experience.

I'am excited to follow the still very early development of xfwl to see how a classic DE works in wayland.

But man, with a few million bucks, a couple years development time, and a small, dedicated team, maybe somebody out there could make their own little slice of heaven.

> I can't copy-paste, and I can't see window previews unless everything implements a specific extension to the core protocol

Sentences like this make me wonder how frequently the author has tried Wayland and what his specific setup is. I mean I understand experiences may vary, but I have such a different experience then him. I've had issues with Wayland, but I've also had issues with X.

> But the second actual users are forced to use it expect them to be frustrated!

Canonical and Red-Hat are not "forcing" you to use Wayland anymore than X only apps "forcing" me to use X (via-XWayland). They are switching to Wayland because they feel like they can provide a better experience to their users for easier with it. You're more than welcome to continue using X, and even throw a few commits its way sometime.

24.04 uses Wayland, and while some people have had no problems migrating, many people are having serious problems. From what I can tell, it’s not a good choice for me yet. This article tells me that it may not be a good choice ever.

I am a huge fan of System76 and Pop_OS, and I am sorry to see how this migration has split the community and forced many people to make difficult choices. I suspect that I will have to leave Pop_OS once 22.04 is no longer supported, in a year.

To be fair, there are two issues. Pop_OS Is introducing a new DE, COSMIC, which is written in Rust. That new DE is another source of instability. I’m afraid that Syatem76 has bitten off far more than it can chew.

Similar motivations: the developers had some legacy decisions that were unfixable without breakage. But they were sick of it, and decided to just go for it.

Most end users didn’t care about those issues. The few that did were happy to pay the cost of switching. Everyone else clung to Python2 for years because migrating was high cost and low value.

It took about 15 years to complete the migration for most, and there are a small number of users who will never make it over.

Perl5 to Perl6 is another useful historical example.

FOSS development is managed by the developers, and so, compared to a commercial software project, the implementation issues get more weight. This sort of thing is very likely to happen again and again.

So as an end user, I don’t get all the hubbub. Reminds me a bit of the whole systemd craze from some time ago.

That being said, I think that they are ignoring the most important element of Wayland that may be kinda the cause of its gripes: Wayland is better designed and focuses on doing window management, aka, allowing applications to display their windows.

It is not trying to be a general IPC protocol, it is not a permission system, it is not a video framework, it is not an accessibility framework; just a protocol for apps to create windows and set their properties.

And at window management, it tries really hard to be better. For example presenting a window (getting it on top of the others) is an action requiring a token now, meaning that the compositor now gets tools to identify wrong presentation attempts. It handles the case of window-docking on the window management side, which allows more flexibility about how to handle it on the compositor side.

Don't get me wrong, it is not perfect (for example I don't like the assumption in the API that there should be at most one seat, and that it would have at most one pointer), but it really tries to be better, it is not a waste of time imo.

Wayland is where development happens, so for better or worse, that is what you'll have to use. If you don't like it, go maintain Xorg, if you can't, you're in no position to complain.

I sense a lot of conservative "they took away our X11 freedom" and I have no understanding for it.

It was unmaintainable, I know your workflow is broken, you can keep using X11 the rest of the world isn't obligated to maintain it for you.

The only pain I've encountered is not being able to get RustDesk going, but that's not been a show-stopper for me.

For me the graphics server is tied to my favourite environments for lightweight use: Xfce and Lxde both use only X11. Also, I still cannot understand why a server has to depend on the installed graphics card as the driver stays in between and should abstract and make the software hardware-agnostic.

- No annoying "X11 stutter"

- FreeSync works reliably; no more fucking around with different compositors.

- applications aren't allowed permanently alter the display settings. That was particularly problematic with older Windows games and wine. Depending on the game, exiting a game could leave the display server in a very low resolution on exit. Even worse, a few games would result in the X11 gamma settings being altered outside of the game (Deus Ex was one, but there were a few others).

- display-specific scaling factors

- I could use Waydroid on my 2-in-1 finally.

- HDR support. As an added bonus beyond HDR content, SDR content looks better on my PG42UQ monitor due to the monitor suffering from severe black crush in SDR mode.

That said, there are annoyances. I recently started work on a rewrite of the Jellyfin Desktop client (https://github.com/jellyfin-labs/jellyfin-desktop-cef) and of course targeted Wayland first:

Pros:

- HDR via an Wayland subsurface works great!

Cons:

- Running CEF (Chromium) in Wayland mode does NOT respect the system scale factor. The workaround is to run it X11 mode. Not too big of a deal since I'm using CEF in offscreen-rendering mode with a Wayland SDL surface, but annoying.

- Picture-in-Picture isn't widely supported yet. It is one of those things that Wayland is building _towards_ rather than X11 just working.

- Minor, but not being able to position the window centered on startup is kinda annoying.

So yeah - tradeoffs, but currently good enough for me and it continues to get better. I'm optimistic.

https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/12-y...

Sounds like Wayland color management is... almost done? But the lack of a complete implementation didn't stop my distro from making Wayland the default. So now I'm left having to choose between using the cool new Wayland compositors and having accurate colors in my photo editing apps :(

People complained about pipewire and wireplumber too, but they're fantastic. It's great in the DAW. It just takes a long time to get everything compatible.

Slack screen sharing works when I share my screen twice, and then Slack sometimes crashes. Google Meet and Zoom screen sharing has always worked well in Wayland, so I imagine they will fix this. I’ve also been able to use OBS to do screen recordings, but the easier default application does not work.

It’s definitely becoming better, and forcing it as the default is what was needed. It took 17 years because nobody used it by default.

Which ultimately is fine, this reflects the focus of the people who have the skills and opportunities to contribute and is unlikely to change any time soon.

That is somewhat unfortunate for some but ultimately if you’re asking people to work for free you can’t be too picky on what they choose to work on.

From an end user perspective I struggle to reconcile that with „set Linux back 10 years“

    OBS can't screen record (it segfaults instead), I can't copy-paste, and I can't see window previews unless everything implements a specific extension to the core protocol.

Is it not understandable that the users lash out after being beaten down by arrogant developers calling them assholes? At least their lashing out seems to be appropriately targeted at the source?

(Running X11 right now, I'll switch when the distro forces me to, in hope I'll get a bug free experience after everyone else runs it)

Apparently this bug has been fixed in Ubuntu 26.04 and it's to do with Mutter actually. We'll see when I upgrade.

I recently revived a decade-old PC with a dual-boot setup: Windows 10 and Ubuntu 24.04. While Windows ran fine, Ubuntu was a nightmare—constant freezes, random logouts, and daily crashes.

After hitting my limit, I wiped Ubuntu and installed Debian. What a difference! It’s been months without a single crash. If you're struggling with stability on older hardware, Debian might be the "boring" (in a good way) solution you need.

people ask why do you need it. I have a 3440x1440 physical monitor on the server, I need to remove login with a 1920x1200 laptop. I want full screen at laptop's native resolution. Windows can do this decade ago.

I think that is incredibly likely to happen.

I think that the switch to Wayland has hindered the Linux destop in some ways, and mistakes have definitely been made. But at this point wayland is generally good enough and switching back to X11 won't really accomplish anything helpful.

I can see arguments for improving x11 but wayland still isn't there and I end up having to not use it for that reason

> Regardless, I simply don’t give a shit about you anymore. > > We’ve sacrificed our spare time to build this for you for free. If you turn around and harass us based on some utterly nonsensical conspiracy theories, then you’re a fucking asshole.

You haven't sacrificed your spare time. You've done a thing you wanted to do, and had a tantrum when it turned out it had consequences.

You want to do a thing, fine, but the moment it's forced on people you have taken on responsibility, whether that was what you wanted or not. Grow up.

> At this point I consider Wayland to be a fun toy built entirely to pacify developers tired of working on a finished legacy project

Pretty much this.

Now, there is a group of people who actively hate on XLibre sorely because it pretty much derailed such a plan.

These people (who are no doubt sick in their heads) should focus their energy on improving Wayland rather than running hate campaigns on XLibre and its developers.

Developers have to decide which DE they'll have their applications run in rather than having your application be able to function across all linux desktops. This is different than how it was the last 20 years. No matter what else you say, this is a change from how it was. It's massive fragmentation of the userspace.

Literally the only wayland DE that supports screen readers right now is GNOME's mutter and that's mostly just for GNOME's software because of course they invented something new to work around the problems of the wayland architecture.

That stuff has literally been working fine for years...

Yeah. And? They did that. On my Wayland desktop, copy and paste works fine, window previews work fine, OBS screen capture works fine.

> The actual "threat model" here is baffling and doesn't seem to reflect a need for users. Applications are not able to see each other's windows, but they're not able to interact in any other way that could potentially cause problems?

In any other way? The last paragraph just explained the other way.

That's when I stopped reading. If they can't even make a coherent, reasonable argument from the start and instead just blast out a bunch of bullshit, no one should be listening.

>The original conceit behind Wayland is to only implement what is needed for a simple Linux desktop

And this is my biggest issue with Wayland. If it started out with portability in mind maybe I would give it a try. But I am sticking with X because it is fully usable on the BSDs.

That's were I stopped reading.

no one has taken X11 away. and its not like X11 was making great leaps forward like Wayland has.

I like to have one way to do things when it comes to the OS. So everything is optimized to work together and I don't have to mix and match parts and to learn different stuff that do the same thing.

I just want my OS to get out of my way and let me run my software.

> users that are now being forced to use unfinished software

> frustration of being forced to use the new hotness

> actual users are forced to use it

Can confirm, Kristian Høgsberg and Drew DeVault personally came to my house and and installed Wayland on every computer I own. They made me watch it. It was horrible.

Jokes aside, I think that it is worth remembering that open source developers can't actually force you to do anything. If you are unhappy with what they provide you can always just use a different software, or make your own fork, or by a commercial product instead.

I know that I am stating the obvious that have already been stated countless times, but still. Using words such as "forced" in this context annoys me every time and I can't stop myself from saying it again.

Edit: it gives me flashbacks of all the Poettering-hate back in the days.

Dave Plummer said the other day on Twitter: Linux is great, but on the desktop it's terrible.

https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1pxectw/wayland_is_f...

People the problem isn't whether you're able to run it, wayland does work fine for mainstream, the problems that anyone who's not mainstream cannot even take a fucking screenshot and that's bad for openness. Or open the window at the position of closed last time. That's bad for openness (and opening)

The rule should be if Wayland isn’t going to supply a timely answer, software developers should target an implementation of whatever missing feature as implemented in X11. That is the only way to move forward if the threat of X11 coming back exists.

As for the claim in the title, it's false, it's absurd, and this entire article is uninteresting and just an extension of the weird Linux conspiracy theories floating around these days.

Everything coming from them is corporate slop. Systemd is another mess coming from them.

Now that we have them, would it be feasible to use LLMs to go after the historical crud that X11 accumulated due to age?

I don’t like vibe coding, but using LLMs to dig into a huge legacy code base like X11 could be very useful.