These “Wayland will never come” articles completely ignore the fact that Wayland is here and has already won.
There are lots of issues with Wayland. They will be fixed, but if this was simply a list of things still needing to be improved, it would be useful.
But most Linux desktop users use Wayland already. It will be 90% in 2-3 years. With the exception of Mint, the big Linux distros already install to Linux by default. So almost every new Linux user starts on Wayland. Few will ever try X11. And if they did, the list of broken and impaired experiences on X11 will bring most back to Wayland.
It really does not matter if every x11 user switches to Wayland. The ecosystem does not need them.
But very few of even the hard core adherents will use an X server 5 years from now. Most normal users will not even use Xwayland. And the simple reason is applications.
Everyday there are more and more apps that are Wayland only. Before 2030, that list will include all GNOME and most GTK apps. Are people really going to give up all these applications because of some obscure advantage they perceive in X11?
Most the the faults the article cites are exaggerated or historical. But it is not worth arguing over the details. Wayland is the future. But it is already the present. It is sad really that the people writing these articles do not realize that they are already in the minority and have already been left behind.
This is a “Linux will never be ready for all UNIX users” article written in 1998. It is both true and irrelevant.
There are lots of issues with Wayland. They will be fixed
Remind me 2030 if these issues I have get fixed:
https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/8000
https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/8001
https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/8002
https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/8191 I later learned the reason sway is using capabilities is to fix performance issues, which yeah still has several…
One issue the wayland proponents fail to notice is that the ecosystem itself is fragmented, you have several DEs/WM with their own implementations and bugs that will likely never be fixed.
I’m an i3wm user, my only option to switch to is sway, doesn’t matter if some of the issues I have are fixed in kwin or mutter, it has to be fixed in sway.
But most Linux desktop users use Wayland already.
Most desktop users use windows, and they are happy with that, why don’t you stop using linux and move to windows?
Everyday there are more and more apps that are Wayland only. Before 2030, that list will include all GNOME and most GTK apps. Are people really going to give up all these applications because of some obscure advantage they perceive in X11?
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/12to11-git
people writing these articles do not realize that they are already in the minority and have already been left behind.
Doesn’t remove the fact that wayland still sucks 😆
Remind me 2030 if these issues I have get fixed:
You want me to track the progress of 4 bugs in Sway? Such a powerful argument. How about don’t use Sway?
One issue the wayland proponents fail to notice is that the ecosystem itself is fragmented
I did not fail to notice. I have another post here comparing compositors to web browsers. There is more than one by design. Long term, it is absolutely one of Wayland’s strengths. But ya, your experience is only going to be as good as the browser you choose.
For tiler lovers, Niri and Hyprland are both great. COSMIC is looking good but still Alpha. Plasma 6 is perhaps the best Wayland compositor at the moment.
why don’t you stop using linux and move to windows?
Hilarious. Linux has been my primary desktop since the 90’s. You probably need to get off my lawn.
Even more hilarious. Looks like you found an even crappier Wayland compositor than Sway.
Amongst the long list of broken things in 12to11, my favourite is this: “has not been tested on window (and compositing) managers other than GNOME Shell”. GNOME is a Wayland first and soon to be Wayland only project. A project clinging to Wayland on X on GNOME is a perfect metaphor for the point I am making. Thank you for making my point so well.
By 2030, Xorg will be in the AUR and the only x server in the core Arch repos will be Wayback (Xwayland on Wayland).
Sounds like you will be using 12to11 to run Wayland apps on i3 on XWayland on Wayback (Wayland on X on Wayland). Good times.
You seem to think I am telling you to use Wayland though.I don’t care what you use. My point is that everybody else is happy leaving you behind. Keep using X. You can switch to the Dillo browser too if you want. LMAO.
Very subtle “Arch, BTW”, BTW. Nice.
For everybody else, here is the project you linked to. It is a fun little project.
You want me to track the progress of 4 bugs in Sway? Such a powerful argument.
4 bugs discovered in less than 48 hours of use.
How about don’t use Sway?
I don’t, I’m on i3wm as result.
For tiler lovers, Niri and Hyprland are both great.
Tried hyprland as well, it is useless.
Hyprland is such a meme, that the config file doesn’t allow chaining multiple actions to a single keybind, you have to instead repeat the same keybind several times in the config lmao.
Also in hyprland you cannot move a floating window between displays using the move left and right commands, this is because the action does not move the window in that direction but rather to the left or right side of the display, meaning the window gets stuck at the border between the two displays and does not move anymore 😹
Also this whole disaster that I was a victim of, the documentation was insanely outdated and someone had to repeat the dev about the issue: https://github.com/hyprwm/hyprland-wiki/issues/242
Even more hilarious. Looks like you found an even crappier Wayland compositor than Sway.
It works lol
My issue is not if an app works on X11 or wayland, but the terrible implementations that wayland that lack even the most basic features.
My point is that everybody else is happy leaving you behind
And once again doesn’t remove the fact that wayland still sucks 😆
Here is an argument that some of the grumpy old men clinging to Xorg may understand.
It is 2003 and all the cool kids are moving to this new web browser called Firefox. But every time you try your favourite websites in it, you find stuff that breaks. So back to trusty old Internet Explorer 6 you go. Call me when it works you say.
Wayland is like HTML. Wayland compositors are web browsers. And yes, all these “modern” web standards are all implemented a little differently or maybe not at all in some browsers. And, annoyingly, a lot of real world websites still work better in Internet Explorer 6 than in any of these supposedly “modern” browsers.
But, as with the web, it will not be long until all websites (Linux desktop applications) will be written to use the modern standards and will work well, and pretty much the same, in all browsers (Wayland compositors).
And, while there will still be websites (Linux desktop apps) that work better in IE6 (Xorg), most people will consider those sites broken and will probably not use them. Alternatively, you can run your browser (compositor) in compatibility mode (Xwayland) for those sites.
You can keep using Internet Explorer if you want. Many people held on for a long time. Just know what your advocacy sounds like to people that have moved on to Firefox and Chrome. Pointing at your corporate website that looks wrong in Firefox will not impress them. And understand that you will not be able to hang on forever. Well, unless you want to be stuck in a tiny corner of the web that still works on your browser. Most websites will stop working on Internet Explorer at some point.
My big complaint with Wayland is that the ecosystem has not really developed an effective standardization process.
With web browsers, you would get browsers doing their own thing; then copying each other’s thing, then writing down a standard for that thing, then all switch to the standard.
With Wayland, you get: https://wayland.app/protocols/ For as old as Wayland is, there are 5 standard protocol extensions (plus some updates to the core protocol). A bunch sitting in the standardization pipeline. Then a whole bunch of redundant protocols because each compositor is just doing their own thing without even attempting to standardize.
It doesn’t help that one of the major compositor (Gnome/Mutter) has essentially abandoned Wayland for everything beyond the core capabilities in favor of offering additional functionality over a separate DBus interface.
Let me be clear, I am not here to defend the Wayland standards process. The GNOME guys in particular are a nightmare and heavily resist everything they do not themselves need. If what you want to complain about are some of the people “in Wayland”, I am on your side.
That said, xdg-desktop-portal and DBUS are part of the Wayland world as they are part of then freedesktop.org standard. Red Hat has a vision for the Linux platform. This is it.
But this is like saying the web is not just HTML anymore because it also requires JavaScript. Everybody is on board with dbus. It is how you do IPC to sandboxed Flatpak apps too…
I’m not super informed on Wayland, and this analogy really helped, thanks!
I am a Mint fan, so one of the minority still running X11. As long as I can do what I need to on my PC, though, I am content to wait until the distro maintainers do the upgrade.
I guess using Mint in the first place means I don’t prioritize running all the cutting edge versions of everything, lol.
Mint is awesome. There is absolutely nothing wrong with using Mint on Xorg today. I converted somebody to Linux recently and I put them on Mint (X11). There are not that many Wayland only apps yet. And if you don’t use them yet, you won’t miss them.
Please just don’t post “Wayland is not ready” articles because Cinnamon is not ready (does not fully support Wayland yet).
Cinnamon will go Wayland though. When they are ready, they will switch you over. At some point, they will drop support for Xorg.
X11 users love to cling to broken / abandoned apps.
If your app doesn’t work on Wayland it’s just bad or abandoned at this point.
With all the surface false analogies and general lack of solid knowledge in the comments here, I truly hope that at least half of them are LLM generated.
I think X11 is ideal at the state it is currently. Only getting real fixes, that don’t break anything. If you are a kind of user who needs X11, you probably don’t need any features Wayland offers anyway.
And X11 will never be ready for most modern users. They have different goals. But that’s the thing with open source. As long as someone somewhere needs it. Even if 90% of us don’t need X11 for legacy software. It will still be here.
Even if 90% of us don’t need X11 for legacy software. It will still be here.
I most agree with you. The Xlibre project may become popular and do something to make X11 popular again. Who knows?
And I just argued on a forum yesterday that Xorg will keep working for 20 years at least. But a lot of smart people claimed I was wrong about it being able to support new hardware. But I think Xorg is likely to build and run for decades yet.
But the X server implementation that is likely to last the longest is Xwayland. And with Wayback, the “stand-alone” X server that many distros will bundle will be Xwayland running on Wayback (Wayland) and not Xorg.
As I have said elsewhere though, few people will be daily driving an X server (Xorg, Xlibre, or Wayback) simply because many desirable applications will require Wayland.
And what will be the x11 only applications that will make people run an X server to use them? Xeyes? Xfig?
I think even running Xwayland will be pretty niche. X11 is going to be a software preservation project. You can boot up OpenLook, CDE, Trinity, or i3 for the memories (and then go back to Wayland for the apps you need).
I could be wrong. Time will tell. Within a couple of years after the release of GTK5 at the latest, we will know. By 2030 maybe.
They have different goals
I am not sure about that. They have different designs for sure. Mostly because one was designed 25 years later. I guess you mean they have different goals because Xorg did not incorporate some goals in its design (like security). But is it a goal of Xorg to be insecure? That feels like a stretch.
There are design goals in X11 that are not included in Wayland. Take asking the display server to draw primitive shapes for you as an example. But modern X11 apps do not do that either. That is not how things like Qt and GTK work. So, more of a “25 years later” thing than a true difference in goals. The “compositor” approach. The DDX layer. These are more of a reflection of “how things work today” on both systems than they are differences in goals.
Perhaps you mean things like “network transparency” as I hear that one a lot. Wayland’s design is to have a simple core that can be extended. But the same capabilities exist for Wayland. For example:
https://www.mankier.com/1/waypipe
or even better:
https://github.com/wayland-transpositor/wprs
What goal does Xorg have that Wayland does not? Again, other than poor security (not a goal).
The lack of security in Xorg makes many things easier. Wayland apps run in a sandbox which makes some things harder. Many complaints I see ultimately boil down to this difference. Flatpaks are also sandboxed and a lot of the solutions on Wayland are similar (eg. XDG desktop portal). But again, am not sure crap security was really a “goal” of Xorg. It is simply convenient.
Because of security, things have to be explicitly supported on Wayland while X11 apps can just do them. There is no official way to capture a screenshot on X11 even after 40 years. But any X11 app can do it pretty easily as all apps have access to the entire display (even contents of other windows). On Wayland, there is a protocol for screen capture. There has to be, or it would not be possible. The same is true for many other features. And, I fully admit, some protocols for Wayland to do things done by some x11 apps do not exist yet (or are not yet widely supported by compositors or apps).
But again, I do not really see “poor security” as an x11 design goal. It was simply born in an era where that did not matter as much. Projects that want to modernize X11, like Xlibre, will have to break things on X too. Time will tell what that looks like.
X11 is a display server. Wayland is a presentation layer. Different goals. I have run graphical multi-seat systems using x11. Something like that will never be possible in the same way for Wayland because it is out of the design scope
X11 and Wayland are both protocols.
Xorg is a display server. In Wayland, your compositor is the display server.
“I have run graphical multi-seat systems using x11. Something like that will never be possible in the same way for Wayland”
I have to give you this one. Wayland is not designed to be multi-seat. I do not know about “never” but you are right that multi-seat is a design difference.
My mind goes to this project again: https://github.com/wayland-transpositor/wprs
But wprs only runs one compositor so it does not inherently address multi-seat. Support for that would need to be added.
I spent 4 years with and external monitor on my desk that I couldn’t use because it was absolutely painful to find a consistent way to make the 2 different DPIs of the screens work in a way that made sense. Only now with proper Wayland can I enjoy and use it. Yeah there’s hacks, but I’d rather let it be dead in a corner than try to work around it. It was a bunch of black screen, inconsitencies between the order I’d plug the external screen, when i did it (before or after logging in), etc… I can’t even imagine all the other pain points about hdr, variable or high refresh rates, etc.
Wayland is great.
Had to wait a bunch of time and tried many times before and it wasn’t ready for my needs, but now it is and I’m happy. God knows how many rants I’ve done on fedi about it not working for a lot of time on plasma and weird bugs everwhere.
As a user of 3 monitors with different resolutions, different refresh rates, some HDR, different UI scaling, who games and wants to use VRR - Wayland is literally why I was able to effectively switch to Linux as my daily driver.
a consistent way to make the 2 different DPIs of the screens work in a way that made sense
What do you mean? I used multidisplay setups for 15 years, I never checked what’s the DPI of my monitors is and never had issues. I just plug in any external monitors I have around and it works. I did it on desktop machines and many different laptops. I’m always baffled when people say their monitors don’t work because of sync rates or DPI. What are they trying to do and what’s not working?
I need it to run like 3 things via its original use case of “log in to remote computer, run it on linux, see it on your local machine”. still works like a charm.
Yep absolutely. It’s been years since I’ve done that myself. But there’s lots of Legacy software out there. Especially on Legacy systems that are not being developed for at all anymore. That will continue to require X11. One of the other more Niche uses which Wayland doesn’t support I believe are multi graphical users on a single system. Again probably something I don’t think I’ve messed around much with in the last decade. But it was a fun feature. Wayland is much more focused on a single session.
The biggest problem is for new users. Once the dust has settled and Wayland is the default for everything (and there’s plenty of searchable threads for how to fix X problem) then it will be great. But currently if you’re a noob and you install a distro you don’t know what either is. If you have this problem do you fix it with X or Y? Choice is great for enthusiasts, but just another hurdle for new users.
We’ll get there. Honestly I think in the long run Wayland will be easier to troubleshoot and maintain. But then that may just be memories of troubleshooting XFree86 back in the 90s. I still have flashbacks.
Most new users won’t even know that there is a choice until they’re presented with it, and most will just stick with the default option anyway. (which most distros have/are switching to wayland)
Currently, X11 is not really being developed, just maintained, which is the real issue. In this piece they are questioning whether Wayland was a good choice or not. I am using Wayland, have for some time, and I do acknowledge it is still a work in progress, validating the articles list of ‘issues’ yet to be addressed, but unless you are running a really old system, I am guessing the complications affect a very minimal group of users. There are also workarounds, for example on KDE, the gtk apps don’t adhere to those using the global menu. However, there is a fix to get around it.
In reference to using a completely different solution, isn’t it a little late in the game (16 years in development?) I think we are stuck with Wayland, no?
X11 would have needed almost a complete rewrite. Wayland made sense. Eject the technical debt and focus on your use case. We aren’t time sharing on a large central mini computer/mainframe anymore. And even then they generally are full single user systems run in parallel under a hypervisor these days. As wasteful as that might be.
But there’s still occasions when you need to run a legacy application on old AIX, Irix, etc, or vax Hardware. And need a workstation. Which right now Wayland simply can’t do without x.
For me the only issue is that I don’t want to rewrite all my Awesome widgets. KDE has really nice widgets but it still doesn’t have independent virtual desktop per monitor so for me it’s completely incompatible with my workflow. Looks like waybar is most popular but I’m not going to write widgets in C++. AGS looks like it would do what I need but I’m not sure if anyone is actually using it. I could try it but I have 0 issues with Awesome WM so what would be the point of spending months moving everything to Wayland? I will probably do it one day but it simply doesn’t offer me anything right now.
The biggest issue for last ~8 years was that wayland was promoted as “superior” while lacking even most basic functions.
V-Sync control? Nope. Hidpi scaling? Nope. Only in 2024 it got to the point where it’s actually usable and these features were implemented.
Well in 120 years, all existing X11 users will be dead and then this stupid argument will finally stop including X11
U mad?
