I started linux with wayland and i have no clue why it’s such a controversy lmao.
That alt text is just TOO real
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.
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.
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.
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)
And X11 will never be ready for most modern users.
Most modern users don’t care either way so long as it works.
X11 works for most users.Respectfully, disagree. A lot of the new modern users are into gaming. Something which Wayland specifically does better. I’m not just speaking from personal experience. Yes you could game under X11 before. But it wasn’t as smooth or without issue. I 100% have seen performance increases and stability increases after switching to Wayland with regards to gaming workloads.
A lot of the new modern users are into gamin
I can’t use wayland for gaming because I do multi-monitor gaming, and something that was a very simple
xrandr --setmonitoris impossible in wayland…I 100% have seen performance increases and stability increases after switching to Wayland with regards to gaming workloads.
All I have seen so far is that I get half the fps I get on citron/eden on sway vs i3wm.
They are also fed up with the wayland bugs and decided to force xcb everywhere, one of the bugs is that the app just crashes on wayland gnome, it does not happen plasma, or sway, or any other place, just gnome.
Is that specific to Wayland or due to improvements in Vulcan, Lutris and alike?
I’m sure there’s a little column A and a little column b. The recent update to blender with Vulcan was amazing for instance. Though I don’t think under wine / proton Vulcan is the default yet. But one thing I know Wayland absolutely did help with was tearing under a few applications.
Those who don’t care, don’t have anything to say and should not the deciding factor. Why count voices who don’t care?
lack of global hotkeys in Wayland, graphics tablet support issues, OBS not supporting embedded browser windows, Japanese and other foreign as well as onscreen keyboard support issues that are somehow worse than on X11, no support for overscanning monitors or multiple mouse cursors, no multi-monitor fullscreen option, regressions with accessibility, inability of applications to set their (previously saved) window position, no real automation alternative for xdotool, lacking BSD support and worse input latency with gaming.
All things that don’t matter to modern users.
The top comment in the linked article pointed out how that chunk of text was less than truthful:
There’s definitely regressions that need to be fixed, but the way it is presented here is just misinformation, mixing things like project-specific bugs and misunderstandings in as Wayland problems.
*BSD is officially supported by Wayland and by several display servers (a better state than for X11 where the *BSD’s had to patch things quite extensively downstream), the graphics tablet thing is a KDE-specific bug, and global hotkeys is available in some display servers through XDG portals (albeit a bit slowly), and using multiple independent mouse cursors is very specifically a Wayland feature (wayland multi-seat). Restoring window state is also supported, it just works differently than X11, and sway at least supports global fullscreen the same way as i3. […]
The other comments pick out the other issues the top comment didn’t go through.
Yes for many it’s not. Lots of those issues, while actual issues. Are niche issues. Issues I’ve personally had brushes with in many cases. As someone who’s used Linux and BSD since the early 90s. I know I’m not the average user these days. And I know X had it’s own similar issues over the years. Still does. For the average person using a single screen who doesn’t steam Etc. Wayland provides a very good experience. All the edge issues will be addressed individually as they were with X.
While I would like to see BSD support as well. Part of that is on the BSD devs and community. Many who are against it. There’s lots of areas BSD is unfortunately falling behind in. But that’s not everyone else’s problem. I would love to be able to run a BSD desktop. But it simply doesn’t have the software or support I look for. And that’s okay
It doesn’t need to be. The goal is not to recreate and be compatible with X11, otherwise it would defeat the idea to create something new. Wayland is here, because it needs to do things differently. It’s the same as Linux operating systems will never be ready for every Microsoft user. And that’s okay.
I feel like this is just like systemd, those that want to stick to the old ways are very vocal but are a very small minority.
Edit - Sometimes I want to erase spell checks 1’s and 0’s.
100% a system D like issue. And I get it. People tend to hate change. The old init scripts work okay back in the day. And if you’re familiar with them I can see why you wouldn’t want it to change. But system D really has brought something to the game. It’s so much easier to enable disable services. No having to dig through init scripts trying to find the one you’re looking for which might be called through a script of a script of a script.
And while I hate to see fragmentation between the Linux and BSD space. Part of that is on the BSD space. Reluctance to do anything different than the way it was always done can and will hold you back. Not that BSD has ever been fragment free on its own.
The big reason I personally dislike Systemd is bloat. It takes me 6 seconds to boot a windows 11 VM, it takes 20+ with Systemd, and it takes 6 seconds with dinit. On real machines I frequently hit 40 seconds with systemd. Now is that enough of a problem that I am going to switch to Windows (ugh) or Chimera/Artix, probably no. I still find it very annoying.
That’s not normal. Unless you’re using an HDD, but then Windows wouldn’t boot that fast.
Check the output of
systemd-analyze blame.I have tried. Nothing worked. I also experience the same slow booting on every machine+systemd, with the same resulting slow boot up. Even friends have mentioned to me the slow boot times compared to Windows.
I boot to login in probably under 5 seconds, so 30+ seconds seems like something is not configured correctly. And every Windows machine I’ve ever interacted with boots slow and updates even slower.
Idk what is wrong but every fresh install on any Systemd distro (Arch, Fedora, Debian, openSUSE) has the same slow boot on every device I have tried. I have never seen a 5 second boot on anything else but dinit.
Oh, and my disk is a modern M.2 SSD for my workstation.
I did a fresh install of fedora in a VM given 4 cores, 16gb ram, and storage on an NVME SSD. Finally I am getting a reasonable boot time of 6.5 seconds. But on bare metal I can’t get anywhere close to that. Firmware alone takes 15 seconds. Either way, now I know that it isn’t a “Systemd problem”, just that only Systemd gives me this problem.
If you actually want to fuss with it you could always try some of the stuff from the Holy Wiki and see if it makes a difference. Sometimes it’s just “gremlins” though.
I ironically had a similar issue with moving to Wayland from X. I did everything I saw documented to make it work and it just either flat out didn’t, or performance was ass. Then I think when I had read about Gnome’s future plans to drop X I figured I needed to give it another go. In the end I’m not sure what made the difference (update/config/etc.), but I’m using Wayland now and performance seems the same/better and all is good. My install is also probably close to a decade old (or more - I have moved it between at least 3 disks) at this point so I also have cruft out the ass lol.
Edit - Got curious and decided to look and this install is dated 2013-02-24, so longer than I thought.
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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.
It depends on who you are
I switched in 2020
Who “promoted” it as superior to X11? Pretty much everyone I watch and read said that Wayland had their problems and they are working on it, but it is the future. There are ideas and concepts that are superior to X11, but it does not mean its fleshed out. I don’t think anyone said that Wayland is superior to X11 in every aspect. Not even the most die hard fan say it. :D
Canonical. They had that brilliant idea of wayland-by-default in 2017.
It was a great clusterfuck of frustration for me and other Ubuntu users
Fedora even switched to Wayland by default in 2016 (at least for the GNOME release). I don’t know what they were thinking. 8 to 9 years before they were already using Wayland… and it still have some “problems”. Can’t imagine what you were going through. :D
But compared to Fedora, Ubuntu only did change temporarily to Wayland right? I mean it was not an LTS version. I installed LTS 18.04 and don’t remember anything like that by default.
It was actually fine (ish)
The basics worked and you could switch back if you wanted to
Fedora 42 even eliminated X11 as an option (I think they’re reversing that stance now, though), which made it unusable on my (now dead) Nvidia laptop with dual monitors. I thought they really jumped the gun on that one.
I ended up jumping to AMD graphics so I wouldn’t have any problems with Wayland, but then discovered there’s a nasty bug that causes frequent system freezes on AMD systems. Thankfully I was on Debian, so I could easily switch back to X11. Things have been stable now, but I just feel like I can’t win with Wayland 😅
Wayland does seem to work well with Intel graphics, at least.
Wayland does seem to work well with Intel graphics, at least.
heh https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/13319
tbf this is not fault of wayland but gnome deciding to make GTK4 use vulkan by default on wayland.
Yes, they are reverting back. Fedora users always live on the edge. They are basically (but not quite right) “always” the first accepting a new technology. Not even Archlinux does that. Arch users obviously live on the edge too, but for other reasons. :D
But wasn’t Fedora not going to discontinue X11 support only for GNOME version? I thought other spins are still allowed to support it, but doesn’t matter anymore, because they reverting this idea back. I think. But why didn’t you switch to another distribution, instead buying new hardware, if that was the only problem?
From what I recall when trying it, I don’t think KDE had X11 as an option either, which is my preferred DE. The other spins did retain X11 though.
My laptop with Nvidia graphics became unstable due to faulty hardware, so I used the opportunity to switch to an AMD desktop to hopefully have longer term reliability. I would’ve stuck with the laptop and just used Linux Mint, had it not failed.
Yeah Ubuntu backed out with the next major release. Probably because of user complaints.
Well in 120 years, all existing X11 users will be dead and then this stupid argument will finally stop including X11
U mad?
I honestly can’t tell
The problem isn’t software. Never is. It’s not the 90s where you still distro-fighting for head space. Can wayland guarantees it will teach new users how to use or port things from it? That’s all every new engineers need to know.
