This is an interesting move, and I wonder what that means for accessibility in Plasma. Wayland simply isn't designed with accessibility in mind, so each compositor ends up having to implement their own non-standard APIs. I know virtual keyboards are lacking for example.
It is yes! It's great. What I like about FreeBSD is the decoupling of packages and OS. You can have a stable OS version but still have rolling packages. Somehow most Linux distros can't manage that.
I also like that I don't constantly have to learn new stuff like the new ip commands or systemd. It just works. Oh and ZFS on root as a first class citizen is amazing of course.
Yes, Wayland is broken by design, since a single crash takes down the whole desktop; unlike other Wayland complaints, this one fundamentally will never be fixed. This is unlike X11, where it was very common to recover from the inevitable single-component crashes.
On the Qt side, it looks like Qt clients are able to survive a compositor crash since Qt 6.6. I haven't personally tried this, as I don't recall experiencing any kwin crashes in the last few years.
As I understand it, in Wayland all the necessary state lives client side, so a client is free to wait around and connect to a new compositor. The compositor might not place the windows exactly where they were before, but there is nothing architecturally that forces clients to crash if the compositor crashes.
Wayland is missing one thing still for me. Perhaps someone can tell me there is a way to do this:
1. ssh into a machine with a running session
2. start (something) that lets me remotely connect to it
Right now I have two working solutions for X11 (x11vnc, freerdp-shadow) but zero for Wayland. I think this is intentional because the venn diagram of remote-access-tools and malware has a large intersection, but it's very useful too!
For RDP, you've got KRDP and gnome-remote-desktop.
That "with a running session" bit greatly helps here. While GDM allows you to have remote login and headless sessions [1], with SDDM you're locked out for the moment. There's plans to turn SDDM into a KDE-powered, more featured plasma-login-manager with KRDP integration, but no concrete development yet [2].
Last time I tried krdp, it didn't fit my needs. I needed to have already started krdp locally if I want to connect remotely. Neither x11vnc nor freerdp-shadow have that limitation.
I will build or buy an IP-based kvm that plugs into my hdmi port and has passthrough for the local monitor before I use GNOME.
I used GNOME for many years, but nearly every UX decision they have made in the past 20 years has been the polar opposite of my desires. I have come to the conclusion that the developers in the GNOME project don't want me using their software and I'm happy to oblige them.
Well, yes, the answer to basically any "can I do foo in Wayland" is "as long as you're on compositor bar or baz" because it was built in a way that guarantees fragmentation. There isn't a single way to take a screenshot, of course remote desktop is fragmented. But wayvnc is a good answer to the question, even including that caveat.
This is a real shame. I'm using X11 still because Discord doesn't work properly with Wayland, and the alternative (Vesktop) doesn't support keybinds when the window isn't focused. Since my distro (Arch) doesn't support holding back packages, I guess I'll have to switch distros entirely so that my Discord setup stays working. :/
What's not working for you? I have only used Discord a handful of times since switching to wayland and nothing egregious stood out. In fact, I had way no issues at all when I had tons back on X11 with Discord. Could very well be due to my low Discord usage until now though :)
I think it might be more of a Discord problem. I've experienced "a few weird crashes" on Windows, Mac, and Wayland GNOME. Windows being the most problematic in general.
idk how we can blame some JavaScript and html inside Firefox causing a Wayland crash as Discord’s fault. They’re like 9000 layers of abstraction away from whatever SIGSEGV caused the crash
Which distro supports partial upgrades? AFAIK no major distro supports it.
The only difference between Arch and any other regular distro is simply that in Arch there are no major upgrade versions, so any breaking changes you have to perform them manually. Period.
In the rest, they do it for you. But they update key components as well and/or stop getting updated at some point (same as not updating Arch).
For example, I am a happy Fedora user, but I don't get why they don't upgrade the Plasma or Gnome version in the same release but they do upgrade the kernel, when the kernel update may bring more breaking changes...
I'm on Kubuntu and use xpra, xdotool and a few other x-specific things fairly regularly. Wondering what this means for me as I'm very reluctant to lose my capabilities. I'd rather freeze my updating indefinitely.
This is interesting to me, because SteamOS, so Steam Deck uses KDE. I really wonder how they are going to tackle going from X to Wayland on 4 million machines, and what that will bring.
I thought it used Gamescope, with the option to boot to KDE.
So they won't have to do.much for Gamescope, and the current hardware should support Wayland. We shall see with the new hardware coming out next year though.
Wayland has still no way to set DPI of multiple monitors. The fonts look terrible on it. I had to move to KDE Plasma on X11 ever since GNOME started forcing Wayland on us.
If you haven't tried KDE on Wayland in a while, do try it. Fonts looking terrible on Wayland was a GNOME thing, and KDE/Kwin handles display scaling and mixed DPI fine, GNOME/Mutter didn't until very recently.
KDE had the setting to allow X11 apps to scale themselves (no more blurry XWayland apps) years ahead of GNOME.
> Fonts looking terrible seems to only be when using an x app on wayland
I suspect the original commenter had an issue with GNOME specifically, as I've noticed it too, on Wayland native apps. GNOME handled fractional scaling poorly, and fonts didn't align to the grid right and looked fuzzy at anything that's not 1x or 2x scale.
On KDE you can just type a number into the scale percentage field in the display configuration settings pane. I typed "73" and it snapped to 72.5 which is probably close enough.
I don't know whether GNOME supports anything similar, unlike KDE they really don't like giving users very many configuration options.
Weird, mine lets me go down to 50%: https://files.catbox.moe/gjuzl6.png . Out of curiosity, do you use an nVidia graphics card? I know in the past their drivers have had problems with scaling on Linux.
That whole dust up just ended up being some bugginess in their native EGL/Wayland backend, which was known, but it was amplified by some distros accidentally enabling the Wayland backend by default. A build setting triggered the default render path to use EGL, but if you just set GDK_BACKEND=x11 and force KiCad onto XWayland, everything works just fine. And those bugs have probably been sorted out in distros by now. See https://forum.kicad.info/t/not-the-selected-menu-under-wayla... for some details.
TL;DR their Wayland backend is incomplete, it accidentally got enabled for some users, run KiCad on XWayland instead until their EGL backend is ready.
At least XWayland will still be supported. Native Wayland windows don’t support controlling window position or living through transparent windows. This is important for apps that provide overlays.
Wayland+sway switch from x11+i3 is so simple and works so well.
Only minor annoying thing not working for me are right-click context menus on some applets like Blueman and Steam.
Nvidia's official drivers have supported Wayland quite well since the 550-series. If you haven't tried it in a few years, now is a great time to give it a spin.
My problems with Wayland are KDE specific. I tired it, but there where so many window management regressions and sometimes graphical glitches that I switched back. But that was under plasma 6.4. Have to try again now on 6.5 to see if these issues are fixed. If not I should write a bug report, I guess.
Also there needs to be an alternative for (or patch to) simplescreenrecorder that works under Wayland. I don't want use a complex thing like OBS to make a quick demo video to demonstrate something for a co-worker and stuff.
Didn't know Spectacle can do screen recordings now. Just tried it: The "New Recording" button seems to be broken. It does nothing. No error message on the terminal even. Maybe it only works under Wayland?
Personally I like Rust, but I'm against rewriting old well tested tools in Rust just because. There is this opinion out there that Rust devs rewrite everything for no good reason, but I only really saw that happening in coreutils and sudo. In the other cases that I heard of the rewrite wasn't from C/C++ (but e.g. from JavaScript and they need more speed) or they needed a rewrite anyway for different reasons (e.g. first working parallel style calculation in Firefox).
So I'm very skeptical of the coreutils rewrite. In the current state it's incomplete, slower (not optimized), and replacing all GPL code with MIT/BSD code also feels strange to me.
That's extremely disappointing. Wayland has gotten a lot better but there are still many, many instances where I have to switch into an X11 session in order to play certain games (especially older ones). I am a huge fan of KDE but this may actually force me to switch to something else :(
I have a modern one with a mouse-event bug specific to Wayland, that still presents in XWayland windows. Switched to KDE/X11 just to work around it (so, not exactly enthused to see this news item on HN).
Nope. Off the top of my head, I've had serious issues (crashing, visual glitching, extreme lag, etc) running OpenMW and Minecraft on XWayland, both of which were resolved entirely by switching to X11. There have been many others too, those are just at the front of my mind because they were the most recent.
Oh, also Godot has a lot of issues on Wayland at the moment, specifically the Godot editor. I spent a long time trying to figure those out, because if I'm developing I would really rather be in a Wayland session where my DPI stuff works much better, but ultimately I resigned to just running the Godot editor only under an X11 session.
Half of the software I use on a daily basis (lots of old SunOS-era custom data reduction software) doesn't work under Wayland. Guess I'll finally flip my daily driver over to *BSD.
I live in a cave and am not a system programmer -- what's so wrong with X11 so people need to replace it with something else instead of improving it?
Or, what's so wrong with anything so people need to replace it with something else instead of improving it?
Let's say I'm an old man favoring improving existing stuffs instead of starting from scratch. I like debugging and wish to work as a sys programmer specialized in debugging and fixing/improving legacy codebase. But again I'm not really a sys programmer so I'm probably on the wrong side.
Just one example: Around 2009 I met Thiago Vignatti. His master thesis was about improving X so it was easy to use in a multi-seat setup (2 monitors/keyboard/mouse) so a single computer could be simultaneously used by two people.
He later worked for Nokia, Intel and eventually his own startup related to VR.
During his time as a Google summer of code student, his project was to paralelize X code so it could run in multiple threads, making better use of modern hardware with many cores. His project failed. The reason: X code was so bad that paralelizing and making it thread-safe required so many locks that it ran slower! It was a better idea to start from scratch. I remember, at the time, taking a look at the source code and asking him why there was a X86 emulator built-in in X source code. His answer was that that was required to run some video BIOS on non-x86 computers, namely Sun workstations. That was the level of legacy code in X.
This is just an illustration of many problems X had. Vignatti was one of the X devs that migrated to wayland development. Many other core X devs did the same. People saying that X is fixable, that it can be improved or what else... These people may be right, but I trust X core developers more than these people when the subject is X development.
Thanks, looks like there is a shitload under the mountain. I agree it is very hard, or impossible to fix the issue, and fixing it might as well mean a lot of new code anyway.
> what's so wrong with X11 so people need to replace it
1. Security - Any program using X11 can read keystrokes, passwords, or the contents of any other window. Fixing this would break all existing X11 applications.
2. Performance - X11's client-server model doesn't work with hardware accelerated graphics, requiring hacks to get around. X11 is basically stuck with this legacy.
The ground-up re-design of X11 to fix those two issues is Wayland.
I 100% agree with the performance improvement goals, but I think the security claims are overblown, and overly cautious. I honestly don't understand the point of trying to implement the security boundary in the display manager. It solves one class of security issues, while breaking a lot of accessibility and automation. The display manager just shouldn't be enforcing rigid per processes security controls, that's better done further down the stack. Or at a minimum security controls should respect user freedom enough to let a user access normally restricted features, with out the all or nothing elevation to root. There's a middle ground here where we don't break the world, and they get their shiny security policies.
The fact that desktop Linux is all or nothing in terms of privilege escalation is a design issue, however arguably Wayland gives us the tools to be more granular. Android has a permission system that makes sense can it's display manager is definitely closer in design to Wayland than it is to x11.
I think The fact that people e.g. run the ydotool service as root is an example of this. It's like making a safe that is so hard to open that people just drill a hole in the bottom; you end up with something less secure than a safe that was easier to open.
Where in the stack should it be enforced that my cute desktop clock doesn't pull a Copilot and takes a screenshot of the entire desktop every 15 seconds to send to a remote service?
A security in depth approach obviously. Run less, use vetted sources, when running suspect software execute in a properly sandbox context. Seriously what's the point of securing screenshot and key loggers if a malicious process has full access to the users home directory, auido stack, webcam and network?
If you can't trust the process don't run it. If you have to run it, isolate all of it.
Wayland gives you neither the freedom to safely tailor your security policy, nor the security guarantees to warrant its inflexibility.
If your system is already running malware, why wouldn't the malware use a privilege escalation exploit (which are relatively numerous on linux) to access your data rather than some X11 flaw which depends on their code getting started by the user?
Because it's not an x11 "flaw" or exploit, it's just how X works. I also just don't buy the whole "well other stuff has exploits too" mentality.
I mean, yeah, it does, maybe. So why bother creating a password to a service if their database is probably running Linux anyway and the rdbms is probably compromised and yadda yadda yadda. It's the kind of argument you can make for anything.
Also no - privilege escalation is not "numerous" on Linux. It's very difficult to do in practice. It's only really a problem on systems built on old kernels which refuse to update. But those will always be insecure, just like running Windows 7 will be insecure.
So we don't get the security benefits or accessibility. I'm not sure what is being solved. I'm all for a modern display system, I'm just not convinced the security claims are in anyway justified.
On the other hand, #1 makes it extremely difficult (if not impossible at all) to have a decent UI automation on Wayland. Sure, you can still do it if you're not leaving the terminal or a web browser, but anything else (including Electron apps) is a no-go. All the existing tools are written for X11.
The last time I looked into it, I found out I would have to deal with each compositor separately. On top of that, the target apps would have to be written with the new API in mind.
> X11's client-server model doesn't work with hardware accelerated graphics
I really wish they would figure this out. It just feels like with Threadripper etc the time is perfect for a return of thin-clients/not-so-dummy terminals running X11-like applications over the network on a server. Especially for development where many of us are running under-powered laptops and could use the boost to compilation from a beefy machine.
There is nothing to figure out, unfortunately. The design of X11 precludes hardware acceleration; the hardware acceleration you see on a X11 desktop works by using extensions to entirely route around the X11 client-server model. To make it work they'd need to rethink the design. And they did -- that's how we got Wayland.
If you want thin client like behavior, you should look at stuff like Waypipe or just outright using RDP directly, both of which are much better at the job of "display remote graphical application on my computer" than X11's client-server design ever managed to accomplish.
If anything, the variety of alternative solutions for that today -- everything from single-app to high-res full-desktop game streaming -- are much more robust and viable on modern networks than the X approach ever was, even if it was a neat-o "freebie" thing that fell out of its design. You get what you pay for, I guess.
It's not really something to figure out, it's just X protocol design was made for when thin clients running over the network was assumed to be the future, it wasn't. Unfortunately though unlike Mac or Windows the migration to a better protocol has been ugly.
When you start to consider things such as HDR, hardware planes (important if you want energy efficient video decoding) etc, the protocol just doesn't make that kind of thing easy, compared to Wayland which does by it's use of surfaces etc.
Wayland was started primarily by those who were maintaining X11. There is almost nobody who is both capable of working on X11 and wants to work on it.
The redesign also reflects their priorities. The best analogy I can come up with is imagine a small group of people maintaining an old car frame and mechanical workings. They work hard to keep the engine running, but it's in a chassis with leaf springs and direct steering. It also has lots of vestigial things like a hand-crank even though most people have been using an electric starter for years. Other people use this as a platform to make complete cars with body &c. but this is both too much and too old for the small group to maintain themselves.
So they build a new, more modern engine and wait for other people to build a car around it, which is more sustainable amount of work for them. Lots of other people complain that the engine isn't a car, and when they use the engine with one brand of car, the brakes don't work and when they use it with another brand of car, the steering doesn't work. This makes sense, since previously the underlying platform implemented much of those, but now it doesn't and everyone is figuring out how to build those and couple them to the new engine.
Eventually you reach the point where each brand has created its own brakes, suspension &c. that mostly work about the same, but the only actual common component is the engine now. That's about where we are today.
>Wayland was started primarily by those who were maintaining X11. There is almost nobody who is both capable of working on X11 and wants to work on it.
Isn't wayland just soem protocol?
so did the ex X11 devs wrote soem specifications and then soem went to GNOME< some to KDE and others are just editing the specifications ?
I think the issue is that there is no wayland library that a DE can use so everyone is forced to implement it as part of the DE , so the end result is a lot of missing features and incompatibility.
I could be wrong, I still run Linux but I decided years ago to stop following the Linux drama, I will use Kubuntu LTS and hopefully when it drops X11 the Wayland implementation and the X11 fallback would be usable.
> The wayland protocol is essentially only about input handling and buffer management
So sending input to clients and managing the buffers needed is what wayland implements. Everything else is either done in the clients (e.g. rendering) or the compositor (pretty much everything else).
Note that this is a subset of what X11 did (though rendering had pretty much already moved to the client for modern applications). X11, of course, handled input, and it also provided an IPC mechanism (which is how clients e.g. communicated things to the WM). Wayland, at its core, is just those two things.
X11 is not really fixable, architecturally. This wasn't some authority saying "X11 is over, stop working on it." It was the X11 developers and DE and WM developers who work directly with the protocol deciding that it's untenable to fix, and something new is actually the right call. That's the important thing that many people are missing: the X11 developers ARE the Wayland developers, and they actually have good reasons.
Nobody is stopping you from pulling together a group and working on all this free software, forging forth on Xorg, and forking or maintaining the DEs to work with X11 as long as you want to maintain it. I think the group of people who wants to do that will be quite small, because I've really only seen the sentiment from people who have never actually hacked on an X11 codebase and worked with the protocols themselves. You can want X11 to stay alive, but you can't really demand the people who don't want to work on it anymore to keep working on it.
OSS is an intersection of commercial and hobbyist programmers and agendas. If youre a hobbyist you may prefer to spend time working on green field rather than the existing. This eventually culminates in some new stuff replacing the old.
Not saying that is what happened here, but sometimes the answer is because the old one is just not fun to work on anymore.
"the people who did the work, did this" is basically the answer to most things, and I think here you're right - ultimately, working on X sucked and more people were willing to rewrite a whole new windowing system than to keep working on X.
There is some interesting reasoning behind that (which I will let more learned people expand on) but since I'm not doing the work I'm pretty zen about just accepting the decisions of the people who did.
1) it would really be nice to renovate that old house in the city center of an old Italian town! Oh but hold and behold: you'd have to spend hours, days, months, even years (I am not kidding) just waiting for approval and agreeing on what you can and cannot do with the house. And it would cost twice as much as building a new one. And the new one would have better insulation and a modern layout, and be exactly like you want. That's why it's not always the case to fix and improve an existing thing.
2) it would really be nice to fix that car from the '60ies. Oh but hold and behold: the design doesn't really allow you to have all the safety measures of modern cars. And the maximum speed is going go be 65mph on a good day. And it's going to cost you twice as much as a new car, OR you'd have to learn tons of mechanical stuff to be able to fix it yourself. That's why it's not always the case to fix and improve existing things.
3) it's just more fun to build new things (at least for some people). It's open source. People do this for free, to learn and enjoy their time. They can do whatever they want, and they decided to go with the shiny new thing. Is it better than fixing and improving an existing technology? I don't know. But apparently it's more fun! :)
> you'd have to spend hours, days, months, even years (I am not kidding) just waiting for approval and agreeing on what you can and cannot do with the house.
Ah you mean like in the wayland-protocols repo? :)
> I live in a cave and am not a system programmer -- what's so wrong with X11 so people need to replace it with something else instead of improving it?
This 12 years old video explains it better than anything I ever seen:
> I live in a cave and am not a system programmer -- what's so wrong with X11 so people need to replace it with something else instead of improving it?
Tech debt. The X11 dev have thrown the towel and have prefered working on something they deemed more maintainable.
Thanks. This alone could be enough validation. I worked only in smaller codebases but I get sometimes it is impossible to untangle a tech debt -- much easier to just ask for a new copy of the requirements and start over, which also has the benefit of triggering things such as "Oh we actually don't need A,B and C, don't bother with them".
> Or, what's so wrong with anything so people need to replace it with something else instead of improving it?
not claiming that it applies here, but I wrote some small programs where writing my own library from scratch too less time than I spend on trying to understand existing one
In another case I was unaware that existing solution exists and I tried writing my own one (then migrated when I realized that surely this kind of thing was done and people on local hackerspace chat pointed out that it sounds like Ansible).
For that matter running joke on hackerspace chat is about spending 500 PLN and 20 hours on building a chair to save 400 PLN. Because in this case hobby playing with a wood was actual point, not maximum effectiveness.
Similarly, this year I planted basil - and fixed costs for pots etc are large enough that it will never make economic sense. But looking at plants growing from seed (and then eaten prematurely by some caterpillars) was really cool. LARPing a farmer and seeing how plant grows from tiny seed to about 50 cm plant was really cool and I recommend it.
I find your comment a bit funny on multiple levels. "Linux" does not force anything on you right? It's the community that has by and large decided to move to maintaining other solutions. If you still want to use fvwm you can still run it on arch with x11 until x11 is not maintained and the kernel breaks it somehow
>It's the community that has by and large decided to move to maintaining other solutions. If you still want to use fvwm you can still run it on arch with x11 until x11 is not maintained and the kernel breaks it somehow
well you just framed it perfectly; it's still forced on the end-user regardless of whether or not you want to call it 'linux' or 'the community that controls and steers linux" .
It's not forced if you were getting it all for free anyway and can walk away at any time. "They've stopped giving away old thing for free and are now only doing new thing" doesn't put you in the position of a captive who has no freedom. You can complain, you can develop your own solutions, you can leave, but I find it over the line the number of people in the X11/Wayland conversation whose position amounts to looking at people who are working for free, and demanding that they do a specific kind of free work without compensation or help. It's all people working on their free time, or companies sponsoring the developments they need. It's hard to make demands as an end user who isn't paying or even helping.
Oh sure there's absolutely places where this is true. But there's so many many counter examples. Sway, Niri, Hyprland desktops... Top tier incredible experiences begat as small personal passions. So many incredible tools that have become must-have-daily-drivers for folks, alike this modern shell tools thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41292835
The narrative that everything is corporate and greed is, imo, a deep deep dis-service. Incredible things are happening on the edge, and there's nothing else on the planet remotely resembling the conjunctive discollaboration here. Folks have incredible leverage from existing open source works, & add their own sparkle, time and time again. (Nearly never does this box us in.)
For sure there are big projects too, with huge corporate influence and millions of users.
But it is a deeply rotten proposition to me to try selling some corrupt world case, that this land here is just as rotten and poisoned as the application/apppliance-ized rest of world. That there's coersion. There's some being left behind the pack, some, but so little. "Linux" is still the best freest most augment-intelligemce computing out there by a light year, and it's trends are healthy.
(Wayland in fact has improved & strengthened that stance, freed us from a nasty monolith that everyone had to use, and given us actual freedom of implementation. Wayland is part of the liberation, the addition of choice & liberty. It's wild to me that people seek those old chains.)
For users of older window managers on newer distros where X is likely to be removed "soon-ish" (vs LTS distros), the answer is to just use Wayback. It is a different X11 server implementation that uses Wayland under the hood, and is enough to run your WM. There are already people who use it to run AwesomeWM, IceWM, etc: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayback/wayback
That said, you cannot run Wayland apps this way, it is purely for X11 only. If applications/rendering toolkits remove X11 support, you're out of luck. But Wayback may actually be a reason for some of them to keep maintaining X11 backends a bit longer, anyway.
There's a new fdo project called Wayback, which is a stub Wayland compositor that runs a rootful Xwayland that then acts as a full X server to host your X11 window manager/DE. Long-term, this will allow people who rely on X11 sessions to continue to run them indefinitely, while also providing better support for modern display hardware than Xorg's native KMS backend. https://wayback.freedesktop.org/
1. Applications or toolkits only supporting Wayland. An example of this is Waydroid, though thankfully that's the only example I'm currently aware of.
2. Desktop Environments only supporting Wayland. Examples now include GNOME and KDE.
3. Drivers only supporting Wayland. I think this may be the case of some "exotic" systems; I believe there are some postmarketos systems that don't have graphics with anything else. Thankfully, the existence of Wayback means this is probably a non-concern.
Exactly, so this will create a lot of criticism for no reason.
Should have happened with Plasma 7 with QT 7, or at least in the release after next debian freeze (unless they freeze it with v6.7).
If the switch will happen early 2027 that means upcoming Debian will already be wayland only.
Well, it's been a nice run. I've loved KDE since 2008 because it provided a lot of useful features (though its advantage over GNOME 2 was minimal at the time; it only became the obvious choice with the self-inflicted fall of GNOME 3).
But if KDE is no longer willing to provide the single most important feature of all - actually working in the first place, rather than just denying that bugs exist - I guess I'll have to hunt for a new DE.
It looks like the only serious possibilities are:
Cinnamon - my gut says this might have the most users? Often cited as the reason to use Linux Mint by people who don't know the difference between a distro and a desktop environment.
LXQt - apparently has stabilized enough to obsolete LXDE (hopefully it isn't being developed by headless chickens like GNOME and now KDE)
MATE - why must there be so many GNOME forks? (I know why) ... does this one even have anything to distinguish it?
Xfce - the longest stable history as its own thing
(all other DEs are known to lack some combination of widespread support and essential features; there are a handful for which it is possible that support will arrive but it is not the case yet, and they will still lose on the "weight of history" stability criterion)
That's like saying "my car has most of its components working", when it has no engine, only 12V battery power.
For me personally, the first dealbreaker I keep hitting is the fact that input-method-adjacent keyboard logic is quite broken (necessary if you ever want to use a language other than English, even temporarily).
There are also, of course, the innumerable minor bugs that will be fixed from one release to the next (but also replaced by other bugs). The number of these decay exponentially and it will probably be a decade or so before Wayland sessions becomes as stable as X11 in this regard.
There are quite a few cases where applications auto-detect that Wayland is running and as a result run in degraded mode, intentionally or unintentionally. I remember some bug with menus not working properly ...
And scaling, often touted as one of Wayland's features, often works better under X11!
X11 has never been 'stable', in my experience. It's janky as all fuck. Constant stuttering and tearing, and looks slightly different on every piece of hardware, even from the same manufacturer.
Yea, it is quite disappointing. Lots of apps still don't work with wayland properly, even a lot of enterprise apps like VPNs have issues. Hopefully they will be ironed out after Ubuntu 26.04 comes out.
These apps do have GUI, don't you know? Xwayland doesn't solve their issues.
Imagine you have Cisco VPN and you want to connect - you connect and then close the dialog. It is just gone. Why? On wayland no tray icon is shown.
Now imagine you have Fortigate VPN and you want to connect - you enter the IP address and click connect but nothing really happens. Why? No confirmation dialog was ever displayed in wayland.
Now imagine you have palo alto vpn and you try to connect ... good luck.
Can you work around that by using CLI? Yes, but this is THE issue with wayland. Until critical business apps work, x11 version must be supported, otherwise plasma is only useful for gamers and those that do not have to use their pc for work.
I am not against switching to wayland, I just want a reasonable roadmap, not something like - we are going to break your major apps next time you upgrade.
edit: I just mentioned VPNs because they are the first in line when it comes to work from home. Don't let me start on remote support or remote control apps.
If you can use the cli, it is at best mildly annoying but not critical.
Having said that, deprecating x11 completely is the one motivation for dev to fix bugs and/or find ways. Wayland really started to catch up with missing features when some distros like Fedora started using it by default.
If you want to stay on legacy stuff such as x11 while the remaining stuff is fixed, there are plenty of long term support distros out there anyway. You aren't forced to use the latest bleeding edge kde version available.
It would be critical if I were to move any non-IT employees from windows to linux.
As said in one of my comments - this could very well mean that the next version of Debian will have KDE Wayland only which would already mean <5years of support today.
I am not saying wayland is not catching up, I am saying enterprise apps are the issue.
Almalinux 10 will receive security updates until 2035, Ubuntu 24.04 until april 2039, 25.04 would go until april 2041 by that logic, many of us will be considering retirement at that point. Enterprise malware will have plenty of time to adapt and many will have disappeared before reaching the 2040's.
The KDE blog has more details: https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-f...
This is an interesting move, and I wonder what that means for accessibility in Plasma. Wayland simply isn't designed with accessibility in mind, so each compositor ends up having to implement their own non-standard APIs. I know virtual keyboards are lacking for example.
I'm not arguing that accessibility is good, but they did very briefly address a11y in the FAQ: https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-f...
Related (re: Gnome)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45925950 GNOME 50 completes the migration to Wayland, dropping X11 backend code (linuxiac.com)
12 days ago | 185 comments
I'm glad not to use gnome, it really rubs me the wrong way. So few settings and options, and the way it works is totally how I don't want it to work.
I'm not 100% aligned with default KDE either but that doesn't matter because it has options to configure it just the way I want.
Is there a way to make a screen video recording on Wayland? Nothing works for me. Debian testing.
Does OBS not work for you?
I tried Wayland earlier today on my home lab with Plasma and FreeBSD. It seemed pretty great for a bit and ran my monitor at 120Hz.
Until it hard crashed my machine after I opened discord in firefox. Konqueror crashed on opening.
KDE on Linux is the way. Extremely Stable.
Plasma is KDE. What are you trying to say?
Edit: oh, I guess swapping FreeBSD for Linux? Yeah nah, I don't know GP, but I suspect this isn't a reason for them to switch OS just to solve this.
And KDE on X11 on FreeBSD seems pretty stable so far. Feels super snappy so far.
It is yes! It's great. What I like about FreeBSD is the decoupling of packages and OS. You can have a stable OS version but still have rolling packages. Somehow most Linux distros can't manage that.
I also like that I don't constantly have to learn new stuff like the new ip commands or systemd. It just works. Oh and ZFS on root as a first class citizen is amazing of course.
Yes, Wayland is broken by design, since a single crash takes down the whole desktop; unlike other Wayland complaints, this one fundamentally will never be fixed. This is unlike X11, where it was very common to recover from the inevitable single-component crashes.
On the Qt side, it looks like Qt clients are able to survive a compositor crash since Qt 6.6. I haven't personally tried this, as I don't recall experiencing any kwin crashes in the last few years.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Qt-Wayland-Compositor-Restart
As I understand it, in Wayland all the necessary state lives client side, so a client is free to wait around and connect to a new compositor. The compositor might not place the windows exactly where they were before, but there is nothing architecturally that forces clients to crash if the compositor crashes.
Ouch I didn’t know that.
Wayland is missing one thing still for me. Perhaps someone can tell me there is a way to do this:
1. ssh into a machine with a running session
2. start (something) that lets me remotely connect to it
Right now I have two working solutions for X11 (x11vnc, freerdp-shadow) but zero for Wayland. I think this is intentional because the venn diagram of remote-access-tools and malware has a large intersection, but it's very useful too!
For RDP, you've got KRDP and gnome-remote-desktop.
That "with a running session" bit greatly helps here. While GDM allows you to have remote login and headless sessions [1], with SDDM you're locked out for the moment. There's plans to turn SDDM into a KDE-powered, more featured plasma-login-manager with KRDP integration, but no concrete development yet [2].
[1]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-remote-desktop
[2]: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-login-manager
Last time I tried krdp, it didn't fit my needs. I needed to have already started krdp locally if I want to connect remotely. Neither x11vnc nor freerdp-shadow have that limitation.
Since Plasma 6.1 (june 2024) you get a system settings module where you can enable KRDP to run at login.
https://quantumproductions.info/articles/2024-06/krdp-plasma...
(I assumed being logged in is what you meant by having "a running session".)
I've had good luck with Ubuntu 25.10's builtin remote desktop RDP server. I think it's gnome remote desktop, but I'm not certain.
https://github.com/GNOME/gnome-remote-desktop
I will build or buy an IP-based kvm that plugs into my hdmi port and has passthrough for the local monitor before I use GNOME.
I used GNOME for many years, but nearly every UX decision they have made in the past 20 years has been the polar opposite of my desires. I have come to the conclusion that the developers in the GNOME project don't want me using their software and I'm happy to oblige them.
There is VNC server for wayland like wayvnc.
RustDesk might do the job, but I haven't used it on Linux, so I can't tell you for sure.
Isn't that wayvnc?
If that really meets my needs, that will pull me away from KDE to a wlroots based compositor. I'll try it later, thanks.
KRDP: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/krdp
But it needs a logged-in session, you can't get access to the login manager.
I want to connect to a logged-in session; I can't get krdp to let me do it without me locally granting permissions though.
They fixed that. I can definitely connect remotely in an unattended way as long as I'm logged in locally.
These might have something to do with it:
https://develop.kde.org/docs/administration/portal-permissio...
https://invent.kde.org/plasma/krdp/-/merge_requests/102
wayvnc works for wlroots-based Wayland compositors, sadly not all Wayland compositors are wlroots-based
Well, yes, the answer to basically any "can I do foo in Wayland" is "as long as you're on compositor bar or baz" because it was built in a way that guarantees fragmentation. There isn't a single way to take a screenshot, of course remote desktop is fragmented. But wayvnc is a good answer to the question, even including that caveat.
This what we want, as more systems go Wayland only it means more pressure to actually fix Wayland bugs instead of falling back to X11.
there's no wayland bugs, there's design decisions
Maybe they should get it to work well on Wayland first.
This is a real shame. I'm using X11 still because Discord doesn't work properly with Wayland, and the alternative (Vesktop) doesn't support keybinds when the window isn't focused. Since my distro (Arch) doesn't support holding back packages, I guess I'll have to switch distros entirely so that my Discord setup stays working. :/
What's not working for you? I have only used Discord a handful of times since switching to wayland and nothing egregious stood out. In fact, I had way no issues at all when I had tons back on X11 with Discord. Could very well be due to my low Discord usage until now though :)
> Discord doesn't work properly with Wayland
Is this specifically to do with screen sharing or streaming? I use it purely as a chat client under Wayland and it has generally worked fine.
(Now that I think of it, I've had a few weird crashes, but nothing which made it unusable)
> a few weird crashes
To OP's point, assuming it's limited to Wayland, this seems reasonable to call out as "doesn't work properly".
I think it might be more of a Discord problem. I've experienced "a few weird crashes" on Windows, Mac, and Wayland GNOME. Windows being the most problematic in general.
idk how we can blame some JavaScript and html inside Firefox causing a Wayland crash as Discord’s fault. They’re like 9000 layers of abstraction away from whatever SIGSEGV caused the crash
> idk how we can blame some JavaScript and html inside Firefox causing a Wayland crash as Discord’s fault
I don't see anyone talking about a Wayland crash, it's about Discord crashing.
Whoops, I thought I was replying inside this thread tree: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46059256
> I tried Wayland earlier today on my home lab with Plasma and FreeBSD. It seemed pretty great for a bit and ran my monitor at 120Hz.
> Until it hard crashed my machine after I opened discord in firefox. Konqueror crashed on opening.
I lost track of the indentation on my phone
> inside Firefox
I assume others are talking about the standalone client. Which, to be fair, I assume is also an Electron app but that's Chromium, not Firefox.
Which distro supports partial upgrades? AFAIK no major distro supports it.
The only difference between Arch and any other regular distro is simply that in Arch there are no major upgrade versions, so any breaking changes you have to perform them manually. Period.
In the rest, they do it for you. But they update key components as well and/or stop getting updated at some point (same as not updating Arch).
For example, I am a happy Fedora user, but I don't get why they don't upgrade the Plasma or Gnome version in the same release but they do upgrade the kernel, when the kernel update may bring more breaking changes...
You can use IgnorePkg in pacman.conf. Things might break, but the feature exists.
I use Discord App on Arch on KDE on Wayland. What are the issues that you are facing?
I use Discord in-browser on my Arch setup. Seems to work OK.
I'm on Kubuntu and use xpra, xdotool and a few other x-specific things fairly regularly. Wondering what this means for me as I'm very reluctant to lose my capabilities. I'd rather freeze my updating indefinitely.
If you ask me it's still too early.
KeepassXC (a must-have application and dealbreaker) is still broken on Wayland.
The recommended "solution" is to edit the .desktop file to resemble the following:
QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland ECORE_EVAS_ENGINE=wayland_egl ELM_ENGINE=wayland_egl SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1 keepassxc
https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/2973
Huh. I use KeePassXC on Wayland and I had no idea about that, it works fine. Could be because I've set QT_QPA_PLATFORM user-wide.
QT6 port is still not ready https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/pull/11651
The main issue for me with keepassxc is the broken autotype on wayland
There are lots of Keepass clients you can use. My go-to on Wayland is Secrets: https://apps.gnome.org/Secrets/
TBH I thought they already did. Plasma's X support is a separate package now on Arch at least.
They moved X stuff to separate packages since they added support for Wayland
This is interesting to me, because SteamOS, so Steam Deck uses KDE. I really wonder how they are going to tackle going from X to Wayland on 4 million machines, and what that will bring.
I thought it used Gamescope, with the option to boot to KDE.
So they won't have to do.much for Gamescope, and the current hardware should support Wayland. We shall see with the new hardware coming out next year though.
Oh, that's right! They use KDE only for the Desktop Mode operation, not the normal one. So yes, not much is impacted.
Wayland has still no way to set DPI of multiple monitors. The fonts look terrible on it. I had to move to KDE Plasma on X11 ever since GNOME started forcing Wayland on us.
I guess I have to buy a 4K monitor in future.
If you haven't tried KDE on Wayland in a while, do try it. Fonts looking terrible on Wayland was a GNOME thing, and KDE/Kwin handles display scaling and mixed DPI fine, GNOME/Mutter didn't until very recently.
KDE had the setting to allow X11 apps to scale themselves (no more blurry XWayland apps) years ahead of GNOME.
I thought this problem was Wayland's reason for existing?
Nah mate, it's all about the Wayland Trust model. No keylogging, consent-based screen recording, and no window spying. Isolation.
Sure it does. I have that set right now... Fonts looking terrible seems to only be when using an x app on wayland
> Fonts looking terrible seems to only be when using an x app on wayland
I suspect the original commenter had an issue with GNOME specifically, as I've noticed it too, on Wayland native apps. GNOME handled fractional scaling poorly, and fonts didn't align to the grid right and looked fuzzy at anything that's not 1x or 2x scale.
KDE got this right from day 1.
How to do it? I am not talking about fractional scaling.
> Wayland has still no way to set DPI of multiple monitors.
It does, but not every DE expose that functionality. There is some command that should be DE-agnostic like wlr-randr that should allow you to do that.
You can. KDE Wayland allows you to even set fractional scaling. I had 125% on one monitor and 100% on three others. all work like a chgarm
How did you arrive at 125%? What is the formula? Just eyeballing?
I set DPI so that a 15pt font occupies 15pt physical space on screen. Not sure how to set DPI using fractional scaling.
The formula is DPI ÷ 96. 100% is 96 dpi, 125% is 120 dpi.
My monitor DPI is 70. 70/96 is 0.73, but there doesn't seem to be a way to set 73%?
You might be out of luck. I don't think it's possible to set the scaling lower than 100%. DPI scaling is primarily concerned with high-DPI.
That is why some of us still need X11 support.
I could set my screen to 75%, not really 73% but close may be?
How did you do it? It doesn't allow any value below 100%?
The other commentator is right. I have an AMD graphics card and I can do this as well. https://imgur.com/a/7mjm8O9
On KDE you can just type a number into the scale percentage field in the display configuration settings pane. I typed "73" and it snapped to 72.5 which is probably close enough.
I don't know whether GNOME supports anything similar, unlike KDE they really don't like giving users very many configuration options.
I tried it on KDE Plasma(6.5.3) just now and it resets to 100%.
Weird, mine lets me go down to 50%: https://files.catbox.moe/gjuzl6.png . Out of curiosity, do you use an nVidia graphics card? I know in the past their drivers have had problems with scaling on Linux.
In the domain of graphics, Linux's moto "freedom of choice" falls apart.
In a Qemu VM a testing installation of Plasma+Wayland is dog slow and crashes the whole system. Using the workaround for X it runs faster and stable.
>Linux's moto "freedom of choice" falls apart >Using the workaround for X it run faster and stable
I think your post proves opposite.
The latest Plasma version still includes the X session. This post concerns the upcoming version, which takes away your choice of using the X session.
Hm. Just a few months back, the KiCad team posted about their woes with Wayland: https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support...
That whole dust up just ended up being some bugginess in their native EGL/Wayland backend, which was known, but it was amplified by some distros accidentally enabling the Wayland backend by default. A build setting triggered the default render path to use EGL, but if you just set GDK_BACKEND=x11 and force KiCad onto XWayland, everything works just fine. And those bugs have probably been sorted out in distros by now. See https://forum.kicad.info/t/not-the-selected-menu-under-wayla... for some details.
TL;DR their Wayland backend is incomplete, it accidentally got enabled for some users, run KiCad on XWayland instead until their EGL backend is ready.
At least XWayland will still be supported. Native Wayland windows don’t support controlling window position or living through transparent windows. This is important for apps that provide overlays.
As an X11 holdout, my time seems nigh.
Devuan should hopefully keep it for quite some time
Wayland+sway switch from x11+i3 is so simple and works so well. Only minor annoying thing not working for me are right-click context menus on some applets like Blueman and Steam.
One’s minor annoyance is someone else’s dealbreaker.
With a tiny tiny caveat of wanting to run Nvidia drivers instead of nouveau.
Nvidia's official drivers have supported Wayland quite well since the 550-series. If you haven't tried it in a few years, now is a great time to give it a spin.
You still have XFCE.
You're at a fork in the road. Do you chose Y11 or X12?
The future is now old man.
Why do you think it's acceptable to insult someone when they have a legitimate concern regarding a software defect?
For the record, it's a Malcolm in the Middle reference: https://youtube.com/watch?v=CzBi5tIfzK4
Oops...I dropped this /s
Just so I'm clear: I still think it's too early to drop X11 support (even though Wayland has been basically fine for me for a long time).
The future seems buggy and incomplete.
But it's coming anyway, whether people like it or not.
FWIW, it is my understanding that XWayland is still supported, so it's not like your apps will stop working.
My problems with Wayland are KDE specific. I tired it, but there where so many window management regressions and sometimes graphical glitches that I switched back. But that was under plasma 6.4. Have to try again now on 6.5 to see if these issues are fixed. If not I should write a bug report, I guess.
Also there needs to be an alternative for (or patch to) simplescreenrecorder that works under Wayland. I don't want use a complex thing like OBS to make a quick demo video to demonstrate something for a co-worker and stuff.
I'm not sure about SSR currently but Kooha and KDE's own Spectacle work on Wayland fine. I'm running Plasma 6.5 on Arch and very pleased with it.
Didn't know Spectacle can do screen recordings now. Just tried it: The "New Recording" button seems to be broken. It does nothing. No error message on the terminal even. Maybe it only works under Wayland?
> FWIW, it is my understanding that XWayland is still supported, so it's not like your apps will stop working.
Applications generally work through XWayland. Accessibility and automation tools do not.
That seems to be the mood du-jour - see also: rust coreutils in Ubuntu.
Personally I like Rust, but I'm against rewriting old well tested tools in Rust just because. There is this opinion out there that Rust devs rewrite everything for no good reason, but I only really saw that happening in coreutils and sudo. In the other cases that I heard of the rewrite wasn't from C/C++ (but e.g. from JavaScript and they need more speed) or they needed a rewrite anyway for different reasons (e.g. first working parallel style calculation in Firefox).
So I'm very skeptical of the coreutils rewrite. In the current state it's incomplete, slower (not optimized), and replacing all GPL code with MIT/BSD code also feels strange to me.
Wake me up when MATE drops X11 support. I don't see it happening any time soon.
That's extremely disappointing. Wayland has gotten a lot better but there are still many, many instances where I have to switch into an X11 session in order to play certain games (especially older ones). I am a huge fan of KDE but this may actually force me to switch to something else :(
These older games don't run fine with Xwayland?
I have a modern one with a mouse-event bug specific to Wayland, that still presents in XWayland windows. Switched to KDE/X11 just to work around it (so, not exactly enthused to see this news item on HN).
Nope. Off the top of my head, I've had serious issues (crashing, visual glitching, extreme lag, etc) running OpenMW and Minecraft on XWayland, both of which were resolved entirely by switching to X11. There have been many others too, those are just at the front of my mind because they were the most recent.
Oh, also Godot has a lot of issues on Wayland at the moment, specifically the Godot editor. I spent a long time trying to figure those out, because if I'm developing I would really rather be in a Wayland session where my DPI stuff works much better, but ultimately I resigned to just running the Godot editor only under an X11 session.
Half of the software I use on a daily basis (lots of old SunOS-era custom data reduction software) doesn't work under Wayland. Guess I'll finally flip my daily driver over to *BSD.
XWayland is not going away.
X11 is very well supported under FreeBSD, but the problem is with KDE.
FreeBSD does have Wayland but it's not ready for prime time
Too bad. FreeBSD isn't there yet with Wayland support. It boots now but has a lot of glitches and crashes.
And FreeBSD packages are rolling so I'm normally on the latest and greatest.
I live in a cave and am not a system programmer -- what's so wrong with X11 so people need to replace it with something else instead of improving it?
Or, what's so wrong with anything so people need to replace it with something else instead of improving it?
Let's say I'm an old man favoring improving existing stuffs instead of starting from scratch. I like debugging and wish to work as a sys programmer specialized in debugging and fixing/improving legacy codebase. But again I'm not really a sys programmer so I'm probably on the wrong side.
Just one example: Around 2009 I met Thiago Vignatti. His master thesis was about improving X so it was easy to use in a multi-seat setup (2 monitors/keyboard/mouse) so a single computer could be simultaneously used by two people.
He later worked for Nokia, Intel and eventually his own startup related to VR.
During his time as a Google summer of code student, his project was to paralelize X code so it could run in multiple threads, making better use of modern hardware with many cores. His project failed. The reason: X code was so bad that paralelizing and making it thread-safe required so many locks that it ran slower! It was a better idea to start from scratch. I remember, at the time, taking a look at the source code and asking him why there was a X86 emulator built-in in X source code. His answer was that that was required to run some video BIOS on non-x86 computers, namely Sun workstations. That was the level of legacy code in X.
This is just an illustration of many problems X had. Vignatti was one of the X devs that migrated to wayland development. Many other core X devs did the same. People saying that X is fixable, that it can be improved or what else... These people may be right, but I trust X core developers more than these people when the subject is X development.
Thanks, looks like there is a shitload under the mountain. I agree it is very hard, or impossible to fix the issue, and fixing it might as well mean a lot of new code anyway.
> what's so wrong with X11 so people need to replace it
1. Security - Any program using X11 can read keystrokes, passwords, or the contents of any other window. Fixing this would break all existing X11 applications.
2. Performance - X11's client-server model doesn't work with hardware accelerated graphics, requiring hacks to get around. X11 is basically stuck with this legacy.
The ground-up re-design of X11 to fix those two issues is Wayland.
I 100% agree with the performance improvement goals, but I think the security claims are overblown, and overly cautious. I honestly don't understand the point of trying to implement the security boundary in the display manager. It solves one class of security issues, while breaking a lot of accessibility and automation. The display manager just shouldn't be enforcing rigid per processes security controls, that's better done further down the stack. Or at a minimum security controls should respect user freedom enough to let a user access normally restricted features, with out the all or nothing elevation to root. There's a middle ground here where we don't break the world, and they get their shiny security policies.
The fact that desktop Linux is all or nothing in terms of privilege escalation is a design issue, however arguably Wayland gives us the tools to be more granular. Android has a permission system that makes sense can it's display manager is definitely closer in design to Wayland than it is to x11.
I think The fact that people e.g. run the ydotool service as root is an example of this. It's like making a safe that is so hard to open that people just drill a hole in the bottom; you end up with something less secure than a safe that was easier to open.
Where in the stack should it be enforced that my cute desktop clock doesn't pull a Copilot and takes a screenshot of the entire desktop every 15 seconds to send to a remote service?
A security in depth approach obviously. Run less, use vetted sources, when running suspect software execute in a properly sandbox context. Seriously what's the point of securing screenshot and key loggers if a malicious process has full access to the users home directory, auido stack, webcam and network?
If you can't trust the process don't run it. If you have to run it, isolate all of it.
Wayland gives you neither the freedom to safely tailor your security policy, nor the security guarantees to warrant its inflexibility.
If your system is already running malware, why wouldn't the malware use a privilege escalation exploit (which are relatively numerous on linux) to access your data rather than some X11 flaw which depends on their code getting started by the user?
Because it's not an x11 "flaw" or exploit, it's just how X works. I also just don't buy the whole "well other stuff has exploits too" mentality.
I mean, yeah, it does, maybe. So why bother creating a password to a service if their database is probably running Linux anyway and the rdbms is probably compromised and yadda yadda yadda. It's the kind of argument you can make for anything.
Also no - privilege escalation is not "numerous" on Linux. It's very difficult to do in practice. It's only really a problem on systems built on old kernels which refuse to update. But those will always be insecure, just like running Windows 7 will be insecure.
> that's better done further down the stack
If you do it further down the stack, you break accessibility and automation even more... this has been tried. Doesn't work.
The end goal is to have actually working Android-like sandboxing rather than some broken firejail crap.
So we don't get the security benefits or accessibility. I'm not sure what is being solved. I'm all for a modern display system, I'm just not convinced the security claims are in anyway justified.
On the other hand, #1 makes it extremely difficult (if not impossible at all) to have a decent UI automation on Wayland. Sure, you can still do it if you're not leaving the terminal or a web browser, but anything else (including Electron apps) is a no-go. All the existing tools are written for X11.
The last time I looked into it, I found out I would have to deal with each compositor separately. On top of that, the target apps would have to be written with the new API in mind.
Thanks. I see both are very valid reasons to drop X11.
> X11's client-server model doesn't work with hardware accelerated graphics
I really wish they would figure this out. It just feels like with Threadripper etc the time is perfect for a return of thin-clients/not-so-dummy terminals running X11-like applications over the network on a server. Especially for development where many of us are running under-powered laptops and could use the boost to compilation from a beefy machine.
There is nothing to figure out, unfortunately. The design of X11 precludes hardware acceleration; the hardware acceleration you see on a X11 desktop works by using extensions to entirely route around the X11 client-server model. To make it work they'd need to rethink the design. And they did -- that's how we got Wayland.
> The design of X11 precludes hardware acceleration
I wasn't talking about X11, just that capability.
Never heard of Waypipe before, but it was mentioned in a sibling comment, and that might be exactly what I'm looking for.
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/
If you want thin client like behavior, you should look at stuff like Waypipe or just outright using RDP directly, both of which are much better at the job of "display remote graphical application on my computer" than X11's client-server design ever managed to accomplish.
If anything, the variety of alternative solutions for that today -- everything from single-app to high-res full-desktop game streaming -- are much more robust and viable on modern networks than the X approach ever was, even if it was a neat-o "freebie" thing that fell out of its design. You get what you pay for, I guess.
It's not really something to figure out, it's just X protocol design was made for when thin clients running over the network was assumed to be the future, it wasn't. Unfortunately though unlike Mac or Windows the migration to a better protocol has been ugly.
When you start to consider things such as HDR, hardware planes (important if you want energy efficient video decoding) etc, the protocol just doesn't make that kind of thing easy, compared to Wayland which does by it's use of surfaces etc.
Wayland was started primarily by those who were maintaining X11. There is almost nobody who is both capable of working on X11 and wants to work on it.
The redesign also reflects their priorities. The best analogy I can come up with is imagine a small group of people maintaining an old car frame and mechanical workings. They work hard to keep the engine running, but it's in a chassis with leaf springs and direct steering. It also has lots of vestigial things like a hand-crank even though most people have been using an electric starter for years. Other people use this as a platform to make complete cars with body &c. but this is both too much and too old for the small group to maintain themselves.
So they build a new, more modern engine and wait for other people to build a car around it, which is more sustainable amount of work for them. Lots of other people complain that the engine isn't a car, and when they use the engine with one brand of car, the brakes don't work and when they use it with another brand of car, the steering doesn't work. This makes sense, since previously the underlying platform implemented much of those, but now it doesn't and everyone is figuring out how to build those and couple them to the new engine.
Eventually you reach the point where each brand has created its own brakes, suspension &c. that mostly work about the same, but the only actual common component is the engine now. That's about where we are today.
>Wayland was started primarily by those who were maintaining X11. There is almost nobody who is both capable of working on X11 and wants to work on it.
Isn't wayland just soem protocol? so did the ex X11 devs wrote soem specifications and then soem went to GNOME< some to KDE and others are just editing the specifications ?
I think the issue is that there is no wayland library that a DE can use so everyone is forced to implement it as part of the DE , so the end result is a lot of missing features and incompatibility.
I could be wrong, I still run Linux but I decided years ago to stop following the Linux drama, I will use Kubuntu LTS and hopefully when it drops X11 the Wayland implementation and the X11 fallback would be usable.
From the wayland readme:
> The wayland protocol is essentially only about input handling and buffer management
So sending input to clients and managing the buffers needed is what wayland implements. Everything else is either done in the clients (e.g. rendering) or the compositor (pretty much everything else).
Note that this is a subset of what X11 did (though rendering had pretty much already moved to the client for modern applications). X11, of course, handled input, and it also provided an IPC mechanism (which is how clients e.g. communicated things to the WM). Wayland, at its core, is just those two things.
wlroots is one such library.
X11 is not really fixable, architecturally. This wasn't some authority saying "X11 is over, stop working on it." It was the X11 developers and DE and WM developers who work directly with the protocol deciding that it's untenable to fix, and something new is actually the right call. That's the important thing that many people are missing: the X11 developers ARE the Wayland developers, and they actually have good reasons.
Nobody is stopping you from pulling together a group and working on all this free software, forging forth on Xorg, and forking or maintaining the DEs to work with X11 as long as you want to maintain it. I think the group of people who wants to do that will be quite small, because I've really only seen the sentiment from people who have never actually hacked on an X11 codebase and worked with the protocols themselves. You can want X11 to stay alive, but you can't really demand the people who don't want to work on it anymore to keep working on it.
Thanks. This is pretty valid argument.
OSS is an intersection of commercial and hobbyist programmers and agendas. If youre a hobbyist you may prefer to spend time working on green field rather than the existing. This eventually culminates in some new stuff replacing the old.
Not saying that is what happened here, but sometimes the answer is because the old one is just not fun to work on anymore.
"the people who did the work, did this" is basically the answer to most things, and I think here you're right - ultimately, working on X sucked and more people were willing to rewrite a whole new windowing system than to keep working on X.
There is some interesting reasoning behind that (which I will let more learned people expand on) but since I'm not doing the work I'm pretty zen about just accepting the decisions of the people who did.
Isn't Wayland funded by Red hat though? And Mir was funded by Canonical iirc
I might try to explain with some examples.
1) it would really be nice to renovate that old house in the city center of an old Italian town! Oh but hold and behold: you'd have to spend hours, days, months, even years (I am not kidding) just waiting for approval and agreeing on what you can and cannot do with the house. And it would cost twice as much as building a new one. And the new one would have better insulation and a modern layout, and be exactly like you want. That's why it's not always the case to fix and improve an existing thing.
2) it would really be nice to fix that car from the '60ies. Oh but hold and behold: the design doesn't really allow you to have all the safety measures of modern cars. And the maximum speed is going go be 65mph on a good day. And it's going to cost you twice as much as a new car, OR you'd have to learn tons of mechanical stuff to be able to fix it yourself. That's why it's not always the case to fix and improve existing things.
3) it's just more fun to build new things (at least for some people). It's open source. People do this for free, to learn and enjoy their time. They can do whatever they want, and they decided to go with the shiny new thing. Is it better than fixing and improving an existing technology? I don't know. But apparently it's more fun! :)
> you'd have to spend hours, days, months, even years (I am not kidding) just waiting for approval and agreeing on what you can and cannot do with the house.
Ah you mean like in the wayland-protocols repo? :)
(not disagreeing with your actual point though)
Thanks! These are all valid points although I'm looking for more technical answers -- but these are good enough!
> I live in a cave and am not a system programmer -- what's so wrong with X11 so people need to replace it with something else instead of improving it?
This 12 years old video explains it better than anything I ever seen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44
> I live in a cave and am not a system programmer -- what's so wrong with X11 so people need to replace it with something else instead of improving it?
Tech debt. The X11 dev have thrown the towel and have prefered working on something they deemed more maintainable.
Thanks. This alone could be enough validation. I worked only in smaller codebases but I get sometimes it is impossible to untangle a tech debt -- much easier to just ask for a new copy of the requirements and start over, which also has the benefit of triggering things such as "Oh we actually don't need A,B and C, don't bother with them".
> Or, what's so wrong with anything so people need to replace it with something else instead of improving it?
not claiming that it applies here, but I wrote some small programs where writing my own library from scratch too less time than I spend on trying to understand existing one
In another case I was unaware that existing solution exists and I tried writing my own one (then migrated when I realized that surely this kind of thing was done and people on local hackerspace chat pointed out that it sounds like Ansible).
For that matter running joke on hackerspace chat is about spending 500 PLN and 20 hours on building a chair to save 400 PLN. Because in this case hobby playing with a wood was actual point, not maximum effectiveness.
Similarly, this year I planted basil - and fixed costs for pots etc are large enough that it will never make economic sense. But looking at plants growing from seed (and then eaten prematurely by some caterpillars) was really cool. LARPing a farmer and seeing how plant grows from tiny seed to about 50 cm plant was really cool and I recommend it.
As a fvwm user, if Linux forces Wayland on me, I guess my 30 year use of Linux may be coming to an end. Oh well.
I find your comment a bit funny on multiple levels. "Linux" does not force anything on you right? It's the community that has by and large decided to move to maintaining other solutions. If you still want to use fvwm you can still run it on arch with x11 until x11 is not maintained and the kernel breaks it somehow
>"Linux" does not force anything on you right?
>It's the community that has by and large decided to move to maintaining other solutions. If you still want to use fvwm you can still run it on arch with x11 until x11 is not maintained and the kernel breaks it somehow
well you just framed it perfectly; it's still forced on the end-user regardless of whether or not you want to call it 'linux' or 'the community that controls and steers linux" .
It's not forced if you were getting it all for free anyway and can walk away at any time. "They've stopped giving away old thing for free and are now only doing new thing" doesn't put you in the position of a captive who has no freedom. You can complain, you can develop your own solutions, you can leave, but I find it over the line the number of people in the X11/Wayland conversation whose position amounts to looking at people who are working for free, and demanding that they do a specific kind of free work without compensation or help. It's all people working on their free time, or companies sponsoring the developments they need. It's hard to make demands as an end user who isn't paying or even helping.
"Linux" is mostly controlled by a few corporations and their interests. It's been a loooooooooong time since it was a grass roots movement.
I don't know about you, but corporate dictates always leave a bad taste in my mouth.
"Linux" is a kernel, mostly controlled by one old curmudgeonly guy. Corporations can offer him code, but he can reject it.
The Linux software environment is more broadly controlled by corporations, but that goes for every single mainstream operating system.
Oh sure there's absolutely places where this is true. But there's so many many counter examples. Sway, Niri, Hyprland desktops... Top tier incredible experiences begat as small personal passions. So many incredible tools that have become must-have-daily-drivers for folks, alike this modern shell tools thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41292835
The narrative that everything is corporate and greed is, imo, a deep deep dis-service. Incredible things are happening on the edge, and there's nothing else on the planet remotely resembling the conjunctive discollaboration here. Folks have incredible leverage from existing open source works, & add their own sparkle, time and time again. (Nearly never does this box us in.)
For sure there are big projects too, with huge corporate influence and millions of users.
But it is a deeply rotten proposition to me to try selling some corrupt world case, that this land here is just as rotten and poisoned as the application/apppliance-ized rest of world. That there's coersion. There's some being left behind the pack, some, but so little. "Linux" is still the best freest most augment-intelligemce computing out there by a light year, and it's trends are healthy.
(Wayland in fact has improved & strengthened that stance, freed us from a nasty monolith that everyone had to use, and given us actual freedom of implementation. Wayland is part of the liberation, the addition of choice & liberty. It's wild to me that people seek those old chains.)
For users of older window managers on newer distros where X is likely to be removed "soon-ish" (vs LTS distros), the answer is to just use Wayback. It is a different X11 server implementation that uses Wayland under the hood, and is enough to run your WM. There are already people who use it to run AwesomeWM, IceWM, etc: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayback/wayback
That said, you cannot run Wayland apps this way, it is purely for X11 only. If applications/rendering toolkits remove X11 support, you're out of luck. But Wayback may actually be a reason for some of them to keep maintaining X11 backends a bit longer, anyway.
There's a new fdo project called Wayback, which is a stub Wayland compositor that runs a rootful Xwayland that then acts as a full X server to host your X11 window manager/DE. Long-term, this will allow people who rely on X11 sessions to continue to run them indefinitely, while also providing better support for modern display hardware than Xorg's native KMS backend. https://wayback.freedesktop.org/
As long as you're willing to stay on some old LTS distro, you'll be fine for at least another 10 years. X isn't going anywhere.
From your perspective, what would Linux forcing Wayland on you look like?
There are 3 ways I see it happening:
1. Applications or toolkits only supporting Wayland. An example of this is Waydroid, though thankfully that's the only example I'm currently aware of.
2. Desktop Environments only supporting Wayland. Examples now include GNOME and KDE.
3. Drivers only supporting Wayland. I think this may be the case of some "exotic" systems; I believe there are some postmarketos systems that don't have graphics with anything else. Thankfully, the existence of Wayback means this is probably a non-concern.
Wtf? This was supposed to happen with Plasma 7, or did I miss a memo?
This is the memo.
No https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasma-devel/2025-March/12365...
Notice how that was 6+ months ago, and this newest post is from today?
That’s how memos work.
Exactly, so this will create a lot of criticism for no reason. Should have happened with Plasma 7 with QT 7, or at least in the release after next debian freeze (unless they freeze it with v6.7). If the switch will happen early 2027 that means upcoming Debian will already be wayland only.
Well, it's been a nice run. I've loved KDE since 2008 because it provided a lot of useful features (though its advantage over GNOME 2 was minimal at the time; it only became the obvious choice with the self-inflicted fall of GNOME 3).
But if KDE is no longer willing to provide the single most important feature of all - actually working in the first place, rather than just denying that bugs exist - I guess I'll have to hunt for a new DE.
It looks like the only serious possibilities are:
(all other DEs are known to lack some combination of widespread support and essential features; there are a handful for which it is possible that support will arrive but it is not the case yet, and they will still lose on the "weight of history" stability criterion)What are they denying? You can continue using Xwayland for *most* X applications.
I think they explain your options quite well in this blog post: https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-f...
As they say, distro's like "AlmaLinux 9 includes the Plasma X11 session and will be supported until sometime in 2032".
That's like saying "my car has most of its components working", when it has no engine, only 12V battery power.
For me personally, the first dealbreaker I keep hitting is the fact that input-method-adjacent keyboard logic is quite broken (necessary if you ever want to use a language other than English, even temporarily).
There are also, of course, the innumerable minor bugs that will be fixed from one release to the next (but also replaced by other bugs). The number of these decay exponentially and it will probably be a decade or so before Wayland sessions becomes as stable as X11 in this regard.
There are quite a few cases where applications auto-detect that Wayland is running and as a result run in degraded mode, intentionally or unintentionally. I remember some bug with menus not working properly ...
And scaling, often touted as one of Wayland's features, often works better under X11!
X11 has never been 'stable', in my experience. It's janky as all fuck. Constant stuttering and tearing, and looks slightly different on every piece of hardware, even from the same manufacturer.
Tearing is 100% a matter of whether your video drivers are tuned for benchmarks or desktop use; just set an environment variable.
Yea, it is quite disappointing. Lots of apps still don't work with wayland properly, even a lot of enterprise apps like VPNs have issues. Hopefully they will be ironed out after Ubuntu 26.04 comes out.
Apps running in xwayland run the same way as on X11, xwayland being an xserver.
Also I don't understand your relation between a vpn and a graphic protocol.
These apps do have GUI, don't you know? Xwayland doesn't solve their issues.
Imagine you have Cisco VPN and you want to connect - you connect and then close the dialog. It is just gone. Why? On wayland no tray icon is shown.
Now imagine you have Fortigate VPN and you want to connect - you enter the IP address and click connect but nothing really happens. Why? No confirmation dialog was ever displayed in wayland.
Now imagine you have palo alto vpn and you try to connect ... good luck.
Can you work around that by using CLI? Yes, but this is THE issue with wayland. Until critical business apps work, x11 version must be supported, otherwise plasma is only useful for gamers and those that do not have to use their pc for work. I am not against switching to wayland, I just want a reasonable roadmap, not something like - we are going to break your major apps next time you upgrade.
edit: I just mentioned VPNs because they are the first in line when it comes to work from home. Don't let me start on remote support or remote control apps.
If you can use the cli, it is at best mildly annoying but not critical.
Having said that, deprecating x11 completely is the one motivation for dev to fix bugs and/or find ways. Wayland really started to catch up with missing features when some distros like Fedora started using it by default.
If you want to stay on legacy stuff such as x11 while the remaining stuff is fixed, there are plenty of long term support distros out there anyway. You aren't forced to use the latest bleeding edge kde version available.
It would be critical if I were to move any non-IT employees from windows to linux.
As said in one of my comments - this could very well mean that the next version of Debian will have KDE Wayland only which would already mean <5years of support today. I am not saying wayland is not catching up, I am saying enterprise apps are the issue.
Almalinux 10 will receive security updates until 2035, Ubuntu 24.04 until april 2039, 25.04 would go until april 2041 by that logic, many of us will be considering retirement at that point. Enterprise malware will have plenty of time to adapt and many will have disappeared before reaching the 2040's.
X is basically going away. The maintenance on it is going to drop off really hard once KDE moves away from it too.