I’m glad Wayland is maturing and taking over. Even most of the X11 devs hated X11 which tells you something.
You know Wayland will be ready when these threads don’t get 100 comments
I think Wayland just attracts trolls in the same way as systemd does.
Yeah. Over on
MoronixPhoronix, every article about Rust, systemd, Wayland or –to a lesser extent– GNOME is a troll fest.SystemD is really bloated tho
I’m not saying we should all be using runit, but with systemD making more and more services only work through their init system just creates more vendor lock in
Like, who needs a cronjob alternative that only works if you use SystemD, limiting your software to people using it and locking out everyone needing a less bloated init system like runit? And who needs a systemD calendar?
Systemd won’t be done until they port libre office to it dammit!
Depends what you mean by bloat. It has a very large repo, but it compiles into little commands with least privilege execution. A lot of those commands are specifically there so someone doesn’t have to pull in other repos with a larger attack surface. e.g. there is a time sync daemon to replace having to pull in ntp which is a lot more complex and fraught and the one thing most desktops need of NTP which is to set the clock.
Wayland is already ready and majority of linux desktop users are using it without issue.
to the unavoidable “it’s been 15 years” comments: 15-year-old x11 was a piece of shit. the difference is that we had no alternative so we had to put up with it
I finally switched when I moved from Arch to Fedora and it’s worked fantastically for me. This is where the Linux desktop is heading now for sure.
I might switch to wayland when xfce starts to have decent support for it. I’m not a ride or die Xorg fan, I just want to keep using the DE I’m used to.
Yeah AFAIK the only two DEs that fully support Wayland are the big two - Gnome and KDE. and a few tiling window managers like Sway and Hyprland.
I look forward to a world where all modern DEs are fully supportive of Wayland like Cinnamon and Budgie and I know people love their xfce.
Yeah, i can’t explain why I love xfce so much. It’s very much like a windows 9x style desktop with some QOL improvements (press alt to click drag a window is such a great feature)
Same currently using xfce with opensuse (prob going back to Cachyos + Cinnamon)
As an average desktop user, I’ve run into very little pushback on Wayland. Its made huge leaps in a short amount of time.
Yes it’s been stable for some time with a couple of caveats - you need a decent graphics driver and not be using apps with edge cases.
Here is a simple example of an edge case and it’s not hard to find people blaming Wayland even though with some thought this was a security issue - apps like Zoom, Discord, MS Teams want to do screen sharing which is easy in X11 because it has non existent security - just steal the screen bitmap. That’s a problem.
Wayland (the protocol) provides no means for one app to grab the screen, or other apps. This is by design for security. Instead the app must be a good citizen and send a “i want to screen cast” message to the xdg-desktop-portal (a service provider implemented by GNOME, KDE etc.), the desktop asks for user consent and then the app gets a video stream. So it’s a lot more secure but it requires the app and the WM do things properly.
Desktops and apps have matured and these issues are thankfully going away. I think the biggest hurdle left is proper graphics drivers, especially the problem of getting NVidia drivers working.
Thankfully I haven’t run into any problems with Nvidia drivers. My main rig is running a RTX 3080 with proprietary drivers and my side-project NixOS laptop uses a GTX 970m with nouveau drivers no problem.
It gets me curious about the possibility of specific GPU manufacturers having more of a problem than some. There has to be some discrepancy, because I do see that some users have issues right out the gate, with some being seasoned Linux vets. Whereas I’m mediocre at best and its all been plug and play for me.
I do like the idea of added security, as much as the permission popups annoy the hell out of me. The more Linux becomes popular, the more we’ll need extra security down the road. I hope we can simply whitelist packages at some point, though. Then things become less of a Wayland security issue and more of a user choice thing. If a user chooses a bad package to whitelist, then that’s on them at that point.
I don’t know the details, so it more than likely isn’t as easy as that, however.
yeah i think it was a couple of gnomes ago, i never noticed the chageover
Same. I booted up NixOS with Gnome around 5 months ago and it took a second for me to realize it was defaulting to Wayland. I was running it on an ancient Asus gaming laptop with nouveau drivers and the experience was overall smooth. Had it multi screened with my TV, too.
until you start using it and screenrecords dont work, multimonitor setups work once and then fail forever… systemd,wayland, unity, ubuntuOne and all that stupid shit can right f off.
Screen records do work providing the app asks for a screen cast in the proper way (which BTW is not via Wayland but through a message to a DBus service). The service and the desktop then ask permission from the user if necessary. X11 didn’t give a damn about protecting the contents of your screen and any app whether it was beneficial or malicious could do it with impunity. So you should see this as a major security improvement - you can screen record but only if permission is granted.
maybe?! but from the votes here you can see that the wayland supporters can be nothing but shit people. and that is how nixos died. and this is how wayland is already dead.
nixos had a toxic insane community of ppl like this: other opionion = downvote. Or check mozilla…millions of request for improvement, but the idiots focus on telemetry, terrible guis and so on. Firefox is at 1% marketshare??
I have seen it too often by now. if criticism like that triggers the hardcore fans, you know you do not ever want to be part of that fan base.
furthermore, you are a disappointment.
Screen records do work providing the app asks for a screen cast in the proper way (which BTW is not via Wayland but through a message to a DBus service).
Why do you still exist? I try understanding what the purpose of your reply could be? Screenrecords do not work. For plenty of people. Google it. Yet you feel entitled to share you smalldick energy wisdom of “proper way”. That is exactly the vibe of the shit ppl. You do not help Wayland or x11 or anything, you just fap into your own mouth because nobody can ever love you like that. Go get help.
Why do you still exist? I try understanding what the purpose of your reply could be? Screenrecords do not work. For plenty of people. Google it. Yet you feel entitled to share you smalldick energy wisdom of “proper way”. That is exactly the vibe of the shit ppl. You do not help Wayland or x11 or anything, you just fap into your own mouth because nobody can ever love you like that. Go get help.
Wow, someone needs to grow up. You laid into Wayland when screen recording doesn’t even go through Wayland. The app asks the WM to screen record via DBus. A more constructive response would have been “thanks I didn’t know that”, or perhaps “oh it’s a driver issue”, or “it’s an issue with that WM/ffmpeg/pipewire or whatever”, or anything else likely to be the underlying cause. But it’s not Wayland. Have you got that? Not Wayland. There is no need to be sore and immature about it.
I’ve never had a problem with multi monitor (knock on wood). I had to get around screen recording in the past, but I thought that was ironed out. I’ll check that out today.
The only hiccups I’ve run into so far is that the KDE color picker (the dedicated widget and the screenshot tool) is off by one shade. I grab #222222 and it gets #212121. I got around that by using Flameshot. And that’s more on KDE’s end afaik.
The other hiccup is constant alerts asking for input permissions when I use something like an autohotkey or autoclicker.
I’m not saying its perfect yet. I’m saying they’ve busted ass getting it to where it is in such a short amount of time. Its incredibly usable to me for how young Wayland is.
I am saying the devs are the assholes I will spit on at any con. From google search anyone can see plenty ppl have problems with multimonitor and more. the community is just toxic like the other fail-communities. E.g. systemd…equally wrong and crap. And I am sure a majority of former windows users will yeet their brain into the arena to say that it is wrong to critize systemd. if systemd would be good, the adoption rate would not have been overtaken by alpine linux. and so wayland, electron and all the other stupid ideas are dead on arrival while ppl will still use and defend them like they are paid by redhat.
How can I fix the multi monitor thing?? Whenever I connect my TV screen everything freezes unless I unplug one of my desktop monitors.
I wish Nvidia agreed.
agreed, plenty of bug and issues with wayland in the past, but i can now comfortably use it for everything on amd/intel cards.
“rough start” is putting it mildly. 🤭
Yeah it’s at the point where i’m wondering if i still even need xorg. I’m still keeping it around just in case for now, but i could very easily purge it from my system anytime since i’m using nixos and all my xorg related settings are in a specific file. The main pet peeve i have with wayland is gaming related, and should hopefully improve when wine and proton go native wayland. I have a dual monitor setup and games always choose the wrong monitor by default, which means i can only use the resolution and refreshrate of the secondary monitor. I have a keybind to set the primary xwayland monitor with xrandr, which solves the problem, but it is a bit hacky. I also need to toggle vrr on and off with a keybind because it causes flickering on my monitor. It’s a bit annoying but atleast it works, on xorg you can’t even use vrr with multi monitor to begin with.
My biggest issue gaming under Wayland is the fact that certain games can’t capture the mouse when run full screen with multiple monitors. I’ve got a number of games that exhibit the issue, but the easiest way to experience it is to try and run CS2 as wayland native (so not under xwayland - As the performance overheads running xwayland are notable running CS2) - Within 10 mins you’ll be looking at the ground with the mouse pointer on your secondary monitor.
Furthermore, running gamescope doesn’t fix the problem - And yes, I’m running the correct commands under gamescope.
I mean - This is basic functionality that should be an integral part of any modern OS. Under X11 running the same dual matched monitors everything works perfectly with great FPS.
i deleted the x session files so they don’t show up in my greeter. They got annoying by now, for me. I used to shit on wayland, but it’s inching closer and closer to being usable. and i use an nvidia gtx 1080, so that’s saying something
Have you tried running your games with gamescope?
Edit: nevermind, I think gamescope doesn’t work with wayland
I think it does work, but from my understanding when nested inside another wayland session, thing like vrr don’t work, which brings me back to the xorg problem, but my current workaround works for me, so now it’s just a matter of hoping it will improve and become less tedious.
I dunno why but I can’t even log into KDE when I select wayland. The screen just turns black and unresponsive :(
Something similar happens to me on my desktop (debian 13) - it goes black then brings me back to the login screen. But in my case it’s probably the nvidia drivers (proprietary). Not certain, though. Still happy on X11 for the meantime.
I’m running Bazzite on KDE Wayland with the proprietary Nvidia drivers just fine. I think you’ve got another issue causing this.
That’s definitely possible. I’m not familiar with Bazzite. Did you get those drivers from Nvidia’s website? That’s my only issue with Debian 13 right now. Everything else is working as expected. Also the reason I had to get the drivers from the website is somehow I couldn’t enable some stuff (like amd-pstate) on the default Bookworm kernel and had to use a backported one (custom kernels don’t work with the drivers from apt).
I’d definitely recommend against using drivers downloaded from a website, on general principles.
custom kernels don’t work with the drivers from apt
Check if there’s a dkms version - I know that’s the way it’s set up on Arch, if using a non-standard kernel you install the kernel headers, and dkms lets you build just the module for your kernel.
Thank you for the tip. I will definitely look into this.
Edit: yeah, I wasn’t too happy with having to get the propriety drivers from nvidia myself.
I’m not sure if this is what you mean, but I do want to clarify - the drivers in the repository are still proprietary drivers from Nvidia, just tested and packaged by the distribution maintainers, dkms is just some magic that lets them work with arbitrary kernels with minimal compilation. Unless you’re using nouveau, which I don’t think is ready for most uses.
I understand that. What I meant was I was not happy with having to go out of my way to download other drivers. My apologies - I realized my previous comment was not very clear. Also, thank you for the dkms explanation. :)
I’ve been in linux for a short while already, but this is the first time I’ve used debian with an nvidia gpu. It’s…a bit different from what I’ve experienced with arch on my laptops (probably because they don’t have a discrete gpu).
No, they’re included with, and updated by, the OS. But they are the proprietary ones that are available on Nvidia’s website.
I’ll try again this weekend. But that’s the only thing I’ve changed before being unable to log in a wayland sessions. Hope it works though.
Rough start? It’s been over a decade and it’s still rough.
Whats rough?
I’ll bite. It’s getting better, but still a long way to go.
- No commercially viable remote desktop or thin client solutions. I’m not talking about just VNC, take a look at for example ThinLinc to see what I’m looking for - a complete solution. (Also, it took like ten rough years before basic unencrypted single user VNC was available at all.) Free multimillion dollar business idea right here folks!
- Related to the above point - software rendered wayland is painful. To experience this yourselves, install any distro in VirtualBox or VMWare or whatever and compare the usability between a Xorg DE (with compositing turned off) and the same Wayland DE. Just look at the click-to-photon latency and weep. I’ve seen X11 perform better with VNC over WAN.
- ”We don’t need network transparency, VNC will save us”. See points above.
- ”Every frame is perfect” went just as well as can be expected, there is a reason VSYNC is an option in games and professional graphics applications. Thanks Valve.
- I’m assuming wlroots still won’t work on Nvidia, and that the Gnome/KDE implementations are still a hodgepodge, and that Nvidia will still ask me to install the supported Xorg drivers. If I’m wrong, it only took a decade or so to get a desktop working on hardware from the dominant GPU vendor. (Tangentially related - historically the only vendor with product lines specifically for serving GPU-accelerated desktops to thin clients)
- After over a decade of struggles, we can finally (mostly) share out screens in Zoom. Or so I’m told.
But what do I know, I’ve only deployed and managed desktop linux for a few thousand people. People were screaming about these design flaws back in 2008 when this all started. The criticisms above were known and dismissed as FUD, and here we are. A few architectural changes back then, and we could have done this migration a decade faster. Just imagine, screen sharing during the pandemic!
As an example, see Arcan, a small research project with an impressively large subset of features from both X11 and Wayland (including working screen sharing, network transparency and a functioning security model). I wouldn’t use it in production, but if it was more than one guy in a basement working on it, it would probably be very usable fairly fast, compared to the decade and half that RedHat and friends have poured into Wayland thus far. Using a good architecture from the start would have done wonders. And Wayland isn’t even close to a good architecture. It’s just what we have to work with now.
Hopefully Xorg can die at some point, a decade or so from now. I’m just glad I don’t work with desktops anymore, the swap to Wayland will be painful for a lot of organisations.
Rustdesk is an alright remote desktop option, although it definitely far from perfect. Wayland offers the support remote desktop needs, this is just up to someone wanting a solution enough to make it.
I agree that the “every frame being perfect” thing was dumb, but tearing support exists so its not really a complaint anymore.
Nvidia does work fine on every major Wayland implementation.
Screensharing works fine.
I understand the disappointment in how long Wayland is taking to be a perfect replacement to X11, but a proper replacement should absolutely not be rushed. X11 released 40 years ago, 15 years to make a replacement with better security and more features is fine.
Wayland has put a huge emphasis on improved security, which is also one of the biggest reasons some features have taken so long. This is a good thing, rushing insecure implementations of features is a horrible idea for modern software that will hopefully last a long time.
In its current state, Wayland is already good for the large majority of use cases.
What I’ve seen of rustdesk so far is that it’s absolutely not even close to the options available for X. It replaces TeamViewer, not thin clients.
You would need the following to get viability in my eyes:
- Multiple users per server (~50 users)
- Enterprise SSO authentication, working kerberos on desktop
- Good and easily deployable native clients for Windows, Linux and Mac, plus html5 client
- Performant headless software rendered desktops
- GPU acceleration possible but not required
- Clustering, HA control plane, load balancing
- Configuration management available
This isn’t even an edge case. Current and upcoming regulations on information security drags the entire industry this way. Medical, research, defence, banking, basically every regulated landscape gets easier to work in when going down this route. Close to zero worries about endpoint security. Microsoft is working hard on this. It’s easy to do with X. And the best thing on Wayland is RustDesk? As stated earlier, these issues were brought up and discarded as FUD in 2008, and here we are.
Wayland isn’t a better replacement, after 15 years it’s still not a replacement. The Wayland implementations certainly haven’t been rushed, but the architecture was. At this point, fucking Arcan will be viable before Wayland.
Fair enough, I haven’t worked in an industry with requirements like that. Can you share an example of software you would use for a setup like that? I’m interested in learning more about it. I wonder how many companies are currently using a solution like that with Linux.
Wayland itself isn’t doing anything to prevent those solutions from working, but nobody has chosen to create a solution like that supporting Wayland. If the companies working on and funding Wayland need a solution like that, then they can make or fund it.
Right now, Wayland is good enough to be used on employee workstations for most peoples day to day work, because most people dont work at a company using a solution like you described.
After 15 years, Wayland is lacking some things X11 has, but has also far surpassed it in many ways. Linux is now usable on HiDPI and has proper color management. Companies like Redhat aren’t picking features at random, they’re prioritizing what their biggest customers need, because thats what makes money. Again, just to reiterate, Wayland supports the usecases you’ve described, but companies haven’t made software for this usecases that works with Wayland.
Wayland may not be a better replacement for you, but is sure is for a ton of users and organizations.
Your point is that it is still rough and then you bring up a bunch of stuff that is no longer an issue.
NVIDIA in particular is a solved problem with both explicit sync and open source kernel modules as the default from NVIDIA themselves.
RDP, Rustdesk, and Waypipe are probably going to eat into your billion dollars (and network transparency laments).
As stated in the article, opt-out vsync is already a thing (though not widely implemented yet).
I have not used GNOME in a while but KDE on Wayland is great. And the roadmap certainly looks a lot nicer than xorg’s.
I was on a video call in Wayland an hour ago. I shared my screen. I did not think about it much at the time but, since you brought it up….
If that is your full list, I think you just made the case that Wayland is in good shape.
RHEL 9 defaulted to Wayland in 2022 and RHEL 10 will not even include Xorg as an option. Clearly the business world is transitioning to Wayland just fine.
GNOME and KDE both default to Wayland. So, most current Linux desktops do as well.
X11 will be with us a long time but most Linux users will not think about it much after this year. They will all be using Wayland.
Last I tried Rustdesk (two days ago) it was a buggy, glitchy mess and the shared screen was tearing immensely. Is that recent or did it use to be better?
Yeah, the few thousand users I managed desktops for will remain on X for the next few years last I heard from my old colleagues.
Because of my points above
But good that your laptop works now and that I can help my grandma over teamviewer again.
I will never understand what is rough. Ive been using fedora kde for what … 2-3 years now? More?
2 years ago there were some issues with nvidia, but that is fixed now mostly.
I use it for work, there is an ocasional hiccup, that gets fixed next reboot, something like a terminal not resizing just right but … thats it?
People dont like change man, in the day and age when tech changes at breakneck speed, people dont like change
Now consider that most enterprises are about five years behind that. Takes a few years before what’s available in Fedora trickles down to RHEL, and a few more years before it’s rolled out to clients. Ubuntu is on a similar timeline.
The fixes you got two years ago might be rolled out in 3 years in these places. Oh, and these are the people forking up much of the money for the Wayland development efforts. The current state of Wayland if you pay for it is kinda meh.
RHEL 9 defaulted to Wayland in 2022. RHEL 10 will not even include Xorg.
I agree that businesses lag, often by years. So the fact that RHEL is so far along in the Wayland transition kind of shows how out-of-date the anti-Wayland rhetoric is.
Exactly my point. The issues people consider ”solved” with wayland today will be solved in production in 3-5 years.
People are still running RHEL 7, and Wayland in RHEL 9 isn’t that polished. In 4-5 years when RHEL 10 lands, it might start to be usable. Oh right, then we need another few years for vendors to port garbage software that’s absolutely mission critical and barely works on Xorg, sure as fuck won’t work in xwayland. I’m betting several large RHEL-clients will either remain on RHEL8 far past EOL or just switch to alternative distros.
Basically, Xorg might be dead, but in some (paying commercial) contexts, Wayland won’t be a viable option within the next 5-10 years.
What you’re describing aren’t issues with Wayland.
Your complaints are that you’re using old versions and poorly designed software.
Those aren’t Wayland issues they’re poor management and lack of investment
Well, we’re currently in the process of porting apps away from Windows Server 2012 and CentOS 7.
What you’re describing is just how the industry works, not specific to Wayland.
Those are terribly run enterprises. I work for a giant multinational that is widely considered to be obsolete tech-wise … I’m on fedora 42 on my work laptop. The team responsible for vetting, security and customising the deployment was ready day one.
Its 3-4 people catering for the ~2-3000 users that use the os internally.
I get the need for stability and repeatability in enterprise. I’m a sysadmin for more than 20 years. That 3 year timeline could maybe move up a bit, even windows deployments are more or less up to date. Why would’t linux be?
Lastly, the more resistance to wayland, the longer it will take for it to reach a level of polish to where even you would aprove of.
When the switch became inevitable (distros defaulting, dropping x11), I installed it, lived with its crappy issues back then, reported said issues and moved on with my day.
Edit: I will say, one thing I still hate about wayland is the sleep behaviour. The 2 x11 systems I still use work well for this, none of my wayland systems want to wake up from sleep nicely.
Things like desktop automation, screen sharing, screen recording, remote desktop etc. are incredibly broken, with no hope in sight because the core design of Wayland simply didn’t account for them(!?), apparently.
Add to that the decision to push everything downstream into compositors, which led to widespread feature fragmentation and duplicated effort.
Add to that antagonizing the largest graphics chipset manufacturer (by usage among Linux desktop users) for no good reason. Nvidia has never had an incentive to cater to the Linux desktop, so Linux desktop users sending them bad vibes is… neither here nor there. It certainly won’t make them move faster.
Add to that the million little bugs that crop up when you try to use Wayland with any of the desktop apps whose developers aren’t snorting the Koolaid and not dedicating oustanding effort to catching up to Wayland – which is most of them.
people dont like change
I cannot use Wayland.
I’m an average Linux desktop user, who has an Nvidia card, has no need for Wayland “security”, doesn’t have multiple monitors with different refresh rates, uses desktop automation, screen sharing, screen recording, remote desktop on a daily basis, and uses lots of apps which don’t work perfectly with Wayland.
…how and why would I subject myself to it? I’d have to be a masochist.
Are you a Debian Stable user perhaps? It feels like you have been trapped on an island alone and are not aware that WWII is over.
screen sharing, screen recording, remote desktop
ive used all three on wayland without issues.
Things like desktop automation, screen sharing, screen recording, remote desktop etc. are incredibly broken, with no hope in sight because the core design of Wayland simply didn’t account for them(!?), apparently.
All of those things function on Wayland using the right protocols. If they dont work for you, either the DE/WM you use has not implemented the protocols, or the app you’re using has chosen not to implement Wayland support yet.
For automation there is ydotool and wlrctl. Ive also seen a tool called Hawck which seems neat, but I haven’t tried it.
I’ve never seen an issue with screen recording, OBS has worked fine with Wayland for a long time. I use GPU Screen Recorder on Wayland everyday.
Screensharing portals have existed for a while now, I haven’t run into any apps that still haven’t implemented them. Ive used it just fine on Discord and through multiple browsers.
Remote desktop also has a portal that any remote desktop app could implement. Rustdesk has experimental Wayland support which has worked for me. GNOME and Plasma also have built in RDP.
Not sure if it was a plasma issue or a wayland issue, but I tried it last year and had trouble with cursor locking.
Virtualbox had issues with the input being intermittent, and my mouse would move off the screen while gaming.
It might be fixed now, but I don’t plan on trying it again for another few years, because what I’m using works for me.
the cursor locking still happens in a handful of games for me - most work perfectly fine but sometimes i do end up running something with gamescope with the --force-grab-cursor argument to fix it.
this is when running games with either steam or wine/bottles/lutris.
strange that it happens in virualbox, i would think it “virtualizing” an entire display would fix issues like that. does virtualbox itself “grab” the cursor, or allow it to go off the screen by default? sorry i don’t really know virtualbox, never used it much
Is fractional scaling functional?
It has been since like 2022 at least for me. I was on X11 and it looked blurry as hell. Same thing on wayland. One day, out of the blue a KDE update dropped and boom everything was crisp and clear. I thank the lords of wayland everyday 🛐. Since then, it has only gotten better
Awesome. I tried Wayland a year or two ago but it broke QT stuff back then so it was a no-go. I should really give it another try soon.
For me X11 just flat out doesn’t work, fucks up the icons and scaling. Unusable.
Xorg scaling has always been horrible. But Wayland broke stuff like OpenCV window showing in the past with QT.
It was for a long time.
I use that on Hyprland for a year or 2 now
I have a shitload of bug/weird behavior with Wayland, I hope it gets better but for me it is not there yet.
Like what? (Curious)
In this current state it’s currently only in a few des (kde and gnome and lxqt has it stable) and windows manager(wayfire and Sway and qtile has it stable) but maybe in the future it will be most des
