I occasionally write native GUI apps (not electron-based), and for the current automation application I am working on Wayland is an absolute non-starter[1].
Like the other poster, every few years I would give Wayland a try, but as of today, 17-June-2025, Wayland is still lacking features that I want.
I have no objection to using it, I just need it to be a replacement for X.
[1] My application uses X11 FakeEvent. Did not find a similar thing for Wayland.
MarkusWandel · 8h ago
I get it about Wayland. Most of X is legacy cruft and even isolating that into XWayland or whatever it's called for backwards compatibility is better than having it front and center.
But yes, there are use cases it doesn't cover. Example. My elderly mom uses Linux laptops that I've rigged to (1) always have an SSH connection open to my server machine, with reverse tunnels, and (2) run x0vncserver.
Modern security people would cringe, but this is the real world. I can open her desktop any time, from 700km away, and fix serious disasters like: She accidentally double-clicked an email and it opened up in a tab that obscures her message list (Thunderbird). This has worked very well to keep her online and happily emailing.
Where is the equivalent for Wayland? I get the impression that "it shouldn't exist because security" and therefore won't. Luckily, the show's not over yet. I run Fedora. The main spin won't do it any more, but the MATE spin is perfect. It comes up in MATE and it uses X! Still happy. Other laptop installations I have running probably use Wayland and as long as nothing breaks, I don't care.
yjftsjthsd-h · 42m ago
> But yes, there are use cases it doesn't cover. Example. My elderly mom uses Linux laptops that I've rigged to (1) always have an SSH connection open to my server machine, with reverse tunnels, and (2) run x0vncserver.
> Modern security people would cringe, but this is the real world. I can open her desktop any time, from 700km away, and fix serious disasters like: She accidentally double-clicked an email and it opened up in a tab that obscures her message list (Thunderbird). This has worked very well to keep her online and happily emailing.
I'm not sure why anyone would mind the security of that setup? Provided that your server isn't compromised, that arrangement should provide both confidentiality and integrity, and if SSH is compromised then we all have bigger problems.
sudobash1 · 8h ago
This is true with more "modern" setups. I tried rustdesk with Wayland. It somewhat works, but you have to be present at the "remote" PC to click a button allowing the sharing.
I periodically retry Wayland, and it does seem to be improving, albeit slowly. There are a few significant things that just aren't there, but mostly it feels like death by a thousand paper-cuts. I can't dock toolbars; I can't use xdotools; screenshares are flaky; I can't click and drag to upload to browsers.
I could live with Wayland, but the experience is still superior (for my use-cases) with X11.
If you already don't care about security, whats stopping you from running 10 year old software and never updating it? Its not like Wayland is going to ruin your older software and hardware.
I don't get why its such a big deal that software that:
1. no one wants to develop
2. is completely free
3. no longer being developed
is such a problem, its free. if its so important to you, why not contribute yourself? Should these people be forced to contribute to projects that they want to be free of against their will?
c-hendricks · 8h ago
KDE and Gnome each have their own Wayland compatible RDP servers. It's annoying it's not as convenient as older X vnc servers, but it's not impossible.
For wlroots systems there's wayvnc.
treve · 8h ago
Does Waypipe solve this problem?
yjftsjthsd-h · 41m ago
Unlikely; AFAIK waypipe solves "run this program on a remote machine but display it locally" (roughly like X forwarding), not "show me the remote display" (roughly like x11vnc) which is better covered by wayvnc or assorted per-DE solutions.
The main dev, apart from being a reactionary nutjob, created enough bugs and compatibility breaks that Xorg proper is now reverting a lot of their changes.[0] I guess we will see if this project survives for longer than a few months.
> The main dev, apart from being a reactionary nutjob
This is honestly an understatement. Posting antivax conspiracy theories on LKML? Reactionary. Writing anti-DEI rants in his REAMDE and COC files? Reactionary. But this long-winded rant [1] defending WW2 Germany? "Reactionary" doesn't even begin to describe it.
Whatever one's opinion on Wayland, his conduct [2] should be a huge red flag to anyone using his software.
> But this long-winded rant [1] defending WW2 Germany? "Reactionary" doesn't even begin to describe it.
Holy. Fucking. Crap.
I never thought that I would find someone in the modern day attempt to defend that Germany didn't start WW2, but here we are.
I had a low opinion of him before, but he found a new low to plumb.
senectus1 · 3h ago
Social media, AI etc has created a post reality world.
We DON'T all live in the same reality, the echo chambers and false narratives being fed to us and corralling us is completely messing with our heads.
back in the 60's and 70's we were worried that the CIA was micro dosing the population... what we've learned is that isn't even needed. just feed us attractive lies and we'll line up for brainworms via the internet and TV day and night.
throwaway63097 · 4h ago
Do you hold the same views that you used to hold six years ago?
jcranmer · 4h ago
For the most part, yes.
soraminazuki · 4h ago
Did he ever renounce his own views? Because publicly spouting Nazi propaganda isn't the kind of thing he can pretend never happened by just waiting a few years. I'm all for leniency, but he needs to show that he's changed. Especially when he has said things like:
- WW2 Germany was "peaceful" and that the war was "forced" upon them
- Churchill and Roosevelt "should have been the first to be prosecuted in the Nuremberg trials"
- The German AfD party is "(mis)labeled" by the mainstream media as Nazis
jcranmer · 4h ago
I'll go a step further and point out that someone who is not only willing to parrot these views but has a fairly detailed rationale for why they believe them are so devoted to those views that I'd find a disavowal of them somewhat suspicious.
Fortunately, it's also pretty clear from other contextual clues that he sees no reason to disavow those beliefs.
arp242 · 4h ago
On the topic that Nazis are bad and that the Holocaust happened? Yes.
For all his whinging and whining about "muh dresden bombings", he conveniently seems to "forget" that all that stopped one of the worst genocides in history, including planned genocides (such as those of the Slavic people). And then when he does bring up the Holocaust later it's in a way that seems an awful lot like Holocaust denial.
I'm a simple guy. Goose-steps like a Nazi and salutes like a Nazi? Probably a Nazi.
Lammy · 8h ago
> Xorg proper is now reverting a lot of their changes
They're returning to a previous state which they believe possessed positive characteristics absent from contemporary? Somebody should come up with a word for that.
user982 · 7h ago
They're repairing damage. What word did you have in mind?
bmacho · 8h ago
Can you explain how xorg developers removing a lot of their own code and calling it "bad" because they get mad at someone makes you think that xorg is professional and makes the fork look bad? I am only able to see it the opposite way, that is, xorg developers have no idea wtf are they doing.
I mean them deleting their own code only proves their own incompetence not Enrico's.
price · 7h ago
They're reverting this developer's previous changes, because those changes were bad.
Definitely some blame also belongs to the Xorg committer who reviewed and merged those changes (and it looks like that person understands that in retrospect). But the primary responsibility for getting a change right is the author's.
No comments yet
throwaway63097 · 8h ago
> The main dev, apart from being a reactionary nutjob
Irrelevant. Please stay on topic and refrain from personal attacks.
> created enough bugs and compatibility breaks that Xorg proper is now reverting a lot of their changes
You'd expect that the changes would've been reverted sooner if that was all there was to it, no? How come they're suddenly a problem?
jcranmer · 7h ago
The main repository's README has essentially a somewhat skeevy general undertone of "we accept all contributions from all kinds of people, but anyone who disagrees with me is clearly an evil paid corporate shill out to get me." At the time I read it, I didn't know or care who it was.
Then someone mentioned that this was the guy who got Torvalds to tell him GTFO off the kernel mailing lists, and when reading the article about it, I saw the name of the individual. Just seeing that name immediately reminded me of some interactions I've personally had with him a decade ago which eventually resulted (IIRC) in him being told to GTFO of that project. And the catalyst for this fork is being told to GTFO of Xorg thanks to his interactions with the rest of the people.
This is someone who is constantly grating on peoples' nerves to the point that they're kicked out of open source projects for being net negative contributors to the project. And given the repeat nature of it, they also lack the perspicacity to realize the commonality of these incidents. Now a thorough description of their behavior is perhaps superior to just calling them a "reactionary nutjob," but their reputation does proceed them and is justly earned.
em-bee · 8h ago
You'd expect that the changes would've been reverted sooner if that was all there was to it, no? How come they're suddenly a problem?
that was my first thought too. if these commits were a problem they should not have been accepted in the first place.
was there no review process in place? and if there was no review, isn't that a sign that the project is dead? and if the project is dead what's with the sudden activity?
none of this makes sense.
Tadpole9181 · 1h ago
AFAICT they were reviewed, but too leniently in light of his "improve the codebase" rhetoric. His recent drama and stirring has brought eyes from more senior members of the team, which realized his work was shotty and several changes being made were outright wrong or caused new bugs.
If a new startup comes up, and someone points out "they've taken funding from Philip Morris / Altria", that is completely on topic, and will affect how some people evaluate the company. This is comparable.
throwaway63097 · 8h ago
Calling someone a "reactionary nutjob" isn't really informative. You can put someome's biases on display without insults, just as other commenters have done.
bmacho · 8h ago
The main devs, apart from being reactionary nutjobs, created enough bugs and compatibility breaks in Xorg proper by reverting a lot of X11Libre changes.[0] I guess we will see if this project survives for longer than a few months.
I've tried to switch a few times, and keep going back to X. It seems like simple stuff - the big one is that I like to remote into my system and look at the screen, and with wayland, there's no way to look at the side monitor like I can with X11 and x11vnc.
63 · 8h ago
I'll throw my hat in the anti-Wayland ring. I have a 5-year-old graphics card from the most popular graphics card company in the world. And yet, in 2025, I cannot run Sway/Wayland on my Nvidia 3070 for more than 20 minutes without a crash. i3/Xorg works fine.
Wayland just straight doesn't work and the push to move everyone to it looks ridiculous from my perspective.
jauntywundrkind · 7h ago
AMD has great open source drivers that work wonderfully everywhere. Even their old hardware keeps getting amazing upgrades & enhancements, a decade+ latter!
Word on the street is Nvidia is doing a much much better job, for a year or so now. But, like, you are using a GPU that sway used to make you type "--i-wont-buy-an-nvidia-gpu-again" and now makes you type --unsupported-gpu to use.
It's not Wayland's fault if your video card can't do the pretty same sensible reasonable kernel calls asked of it without crashing. I realize that you might not really care about the distinction, I sympathize highly that it just sucks, and no one in open source likes this (Google image search "Linus Torvalds Nvidia"; 2025 only a bit better than 2012 if your bug report here really true I guess). But fault & culpability matters, and Wayland does way way way less special magic & is way more straightforward with how it handles the display subsystem than X, which half ignores the kernel & has its own absurd driver subsystems and mountains of jank overlapping extensions to do what kernels and GPUs just do these days. GPUs have it easy under Wayland!
throwaway63097 · 4h ago
> Wayland does way way way less special magic & is way more straightforward with how it handles the display subsystem than X, which half ignores the kernel & has its own absurd driver subsystems and mountains of jank overlapping extensions to do what kernels and GPUs just do these days.
Users don't care about your beautiful code and architecture if your product doesn't even work. Making excuses doesn't help anyone - if X can work fine with Nvidia drivers, Wayland's failure to do so is a problem with Wayland.
jauntywundrkind · 16m ago
Ignorance is a beautiful shield Against rationality & understanding, little green grasshopper (8 hour old account).
The world has no ability to make Nvidia's drivers good. If Nvidia can't build drivers that work, there's nothing we can do about it. Defending a situation where hackers have no ability to improve or work a situation is unhackerly, dumb. Consumers are free to remain ignorant, but this situation of where we go and what we do has consequences & meaning to the hacker, and the facts and technics ought matter.
const_cast · 6h ago
I know this conversation keeps coming up again and again, but this is firmly nvidia's issue. Nvidia has been antagonistic to the Linux desktop for forever.
Before Wayland, it was not sunshine and rainbows. For a long time, a lot of shit just did not work and there was no way to make it work. Nvidia did not care. It took Linux Trovalds shitting on Nvidia to make them care a little. It took YEARS for Nvidia on the Linux desktop to be decent.
And, to this day, a lot of Nvidia features just do not work, even on X. You get a MUCH better experience on Windows.
Wayland cannot see the Nvidia source code because nobody can. They're trying their best, but they're not going to regress to old ass versions of stuff to get it to work and they're not gonna throw spaghetti at the wall. Nvidia needs to step up because they decided they're the only ones who can develop the driver. There's nothing anyone can do.
charcircuit · 4h ago
>Nvidia has been antagonistic to the Linux desktop for forever.
Have they? Or have others refused to work with them, refused to make compromises, and refused to offer stable interfaces for them to target. Don't pretend like none of this "antagonism" wasn't self inflicted.
const_cast · 3h ago
1. The kernel never provides stable interfaces in kernel space. That's just how it is.
2. Nobody can work with them anyway because their drivers are closed sourced. They decided they should be the only ones developing them, so be it. If they upstreamed them they would get thousands of contributor's worth of help.
charcircuit · 3h ago
1. It doesn't have to be that way. Windows provides a stable interface for drivers for example.
2. Directly contributing code is not the only way to work with someone.
mqus · 7h ago
At least in the past, this was an nvidia issue (not respecting the kernel). But I do understand the user issue here: X works, Wayland does not.
neurostimulant · 3h ago
Wayland and Nvidia seems to work better on bleeding edge distro that ships bleeding edge DE and latest stable kernel.
msgodel · 7h ago
I love the idea of coming up with something simpler than Xorg or even X11.
Unfortunately Wayland devs seem to have become user hostile in a way similar to the systemd devs (your use case being incompatible or unsuported is your problem, shut up and let us rearrange the OS etc) on top of the software just not being very good. Basic things like running video terminal emulators just doesn't work as well as it does on X (comparing Xterm on X to whatever on Sway always seemed to have much higher latency on my hardware, even moving the window around seems to lag a frame or two behind where it should be.)
At this point wayland itself has gotten pretty old, doesn't support what most desktop Linux users need day to day (at least enough to replace X) and is so unpleasant to deal with I don't think I'll be trying it again. It's a shame, the bar isn't that high. Then again maybe X11 is the oldest still in use graphics API for a reason.
treve · 8h ago
[project] is bad because it's missing [pet peeve feature] will never get old. Ultimately open source devs work on what they want to work on. Feature-wise Wayland may be worse in some ways than X11 and better in others, but it's winning because people work on it/with it.
But choice and competition is one of the best things about Linux, so if a small group is upset about losing X11 and self-organize to carry the torch, more power to them. Build a great alternative, and maybe present yourself as a choice rather than being so reactionary. You're not a rebel, you're just in a niche and that's OK.
They haven’t simply rewritten the existing implementations of X protocols. They threw away the X protocols and devised new ones that don’t cover all the cases.
exiguus · 7h ago
I understand that change can be challenging, but actively seeking reasons to avoid change is another matter entirely. The criticism of Wayland in this article seems unfounded. Transitioning to new tools can resolve many issues.
You have a choice: acknowledge that Wayland is faster, more user-friendly, and more secure, or remain tied to technologies from the 1990s.
Since Ubuntu has adopted Wayland exclusively for its new LTS release, I've noticed over the past few days that much of the criticism comes from Windows users who rely on RDP to configure Red Hat or CentOS with a GUI, or something similar. These users have become accustomed to the lack of security in Xorg to perform their tasks. Now, they must reconsider how they maintain their Linux machines.
In any case, I was unaware that Wayland was becoming the new systemd. Perhaps this is because I have been using it for more then four years, starting with bullseye (sid) / GNOME, and for about two years with FreeBSD / Sway. I use these systems daily at work without any major issues.
yjftsjthsd-h · 31m ago
> Since Ubuntu has adopted Wayland exclusively for its new LTS release, I've noticed over the past few days that much of the criticism comes from Windows users who rely on RDP to configure Red Hat or CentOS with a GUI, or something similar. These users have become accustomed to the lack of security in Xorg to perform their tasks. Now, they must reconsider how they maintain their Linux machines.
I don't follow? If folks are using RDP, they don't need Xorg's less-secure remote access options, they can just use RDP? And Wayland has VNC and RDP servers, including GNOME having built-in RDP, so if people are using that then it shouldn't matter whether GNOME happens to have replaced X with Wayland.
eadmund · 7h ago
> I understand that change can be challenging
It’s less about change and more about outright breakage. Wayland does not support me.
> You have a choice: acknowledge that Wayland is faster, more user-friendly, and more secure, or remain tied to technologies from the 1990s.
Wayland may be faster, it’s certainly more secure (in the same sense that a system embedded in a ton of concrete and dropped to the bottom of the ocean is more secure), but I’m not convinced that it’s more user friendly. It’s certainly not friendly to me, since it does not allow me to run my window manager of choice.
I’m not convinced that the technologies of the 1990s were necessarily all that bad, either. Yeah, there were some assumptions which turned out not to be the case in reality. And yeah, there is a ton of cruft. And yeah, no-one would design X11 the way it is today. But, you know what? X11, unlike Wayland, works for me.
I would love to use Wayland, honestly. That’s not a lie. But it doesn’t work. And from what I can see it doesn’t want to work.
exiguus · 6h ago
I understand your perspective and the challenges you're encountering with Wayland. It's evident that this transition can be difficult for many, particularly when it comes to maintaining compatibility with specific setups and personal preferences, such as your choice of window manager.
When selecting technology, I always consider my specific use case. For instance, at work, I need to manage multiple open windows simultaneously, so I rely on tiled windows across four monitors. To ensure stability and avoid OS issues, I use GNOME with Pop Shell on Debian. On my smaller laptop, where mobility and keyboard-only navigation are priorities, I've found Sway to be an excellent replacement for dwm.
The key point I want to emphasize is the importance of identifying your unique use case. Once you understand your needs, you can choose the tools that best meet those requirements. The tool itself isn't the ultimate goal; it's about finding what works best for your specific situation. Typically, there are plenty of tools available that can solve your problem or fit your use case.
msgodel · 6h ago
The problem is it is not in fact faster and more user friendly. Maybe it works ok with your set up but that doesn't change reality and all the attempted gas lighting from devs and fans does is tick off the portion of the community that has legitimate problems with it.
palata · 8h ago
I don't get the Xorg vs Wayland fight. Feels like it mostly coming from people who don't contribute to either of them.
If you like Xorg, use Xorg. If you like Wayland, use Wayland. If you're not happy about an issue, contribute to it.
eadmund · 6h ago
That doesn’t really work. If there’s no longer a browser which supports X11, then I have to choose between browsing the web and having a usable desktop.
The problem is that the Wayland folks are trying to replace X11 rather than provide an easy upgrade path. They simply don’t care about anyone who uses a computer in any way outside of the ways they can be bothered to support. ‘It’s better!’ they cry, despite users telling them for well over a decade now that it’s not actually, because we cannot do the things we want.
And Wayland is being used as a form of lock-in. ‘GNOME uses Wayland now. Just drop support for that crufty old X11,’ they whisper. Never mind that plenty of folks don’t use GNOME and don’t want to use GNOME. Never mind that Wayland is still not fit for purpose.
It may be someday, and that would be great. I’d genuinely look forward to being able to move on from X11. But Wayland does not work for me, and as projects start to remove support for X11 they are removing support for me.
anon-3988 · 3h ago
> That doesn’t really work. If there’s no longer a browser which supports X11, then I have to choose between browsing the web and having a usable desktop.
You can keep using the older software? No one is forcing you to upgrade? Should these people be forced to work on projects they don't like?
em-bee · 6h ago
they are providing an upgrade path: XWayland. i have yet to come across an X11 application that does not run despite using wayland.
yjftsjthsd-h · 8m ago
> i have yet to come across an X11 application that does not run despite using wayland.
That is both the good thing and the bad thing. Application software can seamlessly work on Wayland via XWayland. Anything that needs to touch things outside its own window - notably, a11y and automation tools (which in fairness are functionally the same thing) don't have it so easy.
eadmund · 3h ago
Is it possible to run an X11 window manager in XWayland and have it manage Wayland windows and intercept keystrokes for all windows?
If not then it’s not really an upgrade path.
I do get it — no-one owes me anything. They don’t even, really, owe me the kindness of not breaking the software I use. In principle I could fork and maintain everything I want myself, or working with others. But …
It has been almost 20 years and Wayland JUST merged pointer warp support (literally like last week)--which is absolutely fundamental to both CAD and menu systems.
So, no, Wayland does not support some very important use cases.
If you've had 20 years and can't be better than what you claim you are replacing, what does that say about you as a programmer or organization?
hokumguru · 4h ago
At some point though shouldn’t we just push a new standard in order to increase adoption (and thus support/stability)? Thinking heavily of Apple and USB C.
charcircuit · 8h ago
The fight is because:
1. freedesktop based on xorg is outdated and needs to be modernized to keep up with competing operating systems.
2. The Wayland movement is and has been run extremely poorly.
Both xorg and wayland are bad so it's easy for either side to point that out.
palata · 7h ago
> so it's easy for either side to point that out.
Sure, it is. But does it matter? I don't think so.
I was happy with Xorg, and there were things it couldn't do that I didn't plan on contributing, so I didn't complain to them.
I am now happy with Wayland, and there are things it cannot do that I am not contributing, so I don't complain.
What I see is that Wayland is quite active and they actually added things I needed that didn't exist a few years ago. That's great. Many people seem to be very vocal about how they prefer Xorg because it works for them: that's great, they can use Xorg.
Someone wants to write another one? That's great, let them do it.
Linux is about diversity. Don't come to Linux and ask it to become Windows or macOS.
bsder · 7h ago
> If you like Xorg, use Xorg. If you like Wayland, use Wayland. If you're not happy about an issue, contribute to it.
The problem is that RedHat nee IBM are attempting to force everybody onto Wayland by dropping X11 support. They already tried once and the outcry was so huge that they had to back off saying they would try again next version.
This is kind of a rock and a hard place. The Wayland developers don't want to support X11 but neither does anybody else. Wayland is fundamentally broken in many ways down at the architectural level, but the sunk cost fallacy keeps them working on it.
Everybody forgets that Wayland predates Vulkan. A "real" replacement for X11/Wayland probably needs to restart from "Vulkan support is the base layer" and build up from there.
yjftsjthsd-h · 35m ago
> Wayland is fundamentally broken in many ways down at the architectural level, but the sunk cost fallacy keeps them working on it.
> Everybody forgets that Wayland predates Vulkan. A "real" replacement for X11/Wayland probably needs to restart from "Vulkan support is the base layer" and build up from there.
I wonder if you could point me in the right direction to learn more about this?
em-bee · 6h ago
Wayland predates Vulkan
and how is that waylands fault? what if vulkan gets replaced? should a new replacement be written from scratch every time that happens?
bsder · 2h ago
> and how is that waylands fault?
It is not. However, Wayland had to make certain decisions up front that later turned out to be significantly suboptimal in the context of a graphics world that converged to DX12/Vulkan/Metal and all look roughly the same from an abstraction level.
yongjik · 8h ago
Well, it's my understanding that Xorg still cannot do per-monitor fractional scaling these days, have they fixed it? That was the major selling point of Wayland for me, as an occasional linux desktop user.
Retina MacBook Pro was released in 2012, about 13 years ago. Personally, I don't think Xorg is in a position to sneer at its competitor for being "beta in quality" after "15 years into making."
orthecreedence · 8h ago
This is why I jumped to Wayland: laptop monitor and desktop monitor with different resolutions/scaling. Xorg choked, Wayland worked. That said, moving to Wayland broke a ton of other stuff in my otherwise peaceful workflow. I really do not like Wayland, but I need to be productive on my machine.
People have sworn up and down to me that the fractional scaling stuff is possible in X but I read probably 10 guides on how to do it and it never worked. Bummer.
WesolyKubeczek · 8h ago
XFCE solves this by using XRandR multipliers which can be applied per monitor, where the canvas is really big and is scaled however the target display needs it.
It's like macOS is doing it, by the way.
msgodel · 7h ago
I always thought I'd run into this issue when I got a machine with a hidpi monitor. Well I have one now and use it with a normal monitor and yeah I fixed it with a single xrandr command. It's not clear to me what exactly everyone's problem has been.
Izkata · 7h ago
xrandr exposes a lot of stuff that's not available in GUI configuration screens. At least for Gnome, this is one of them.
msgodel · 7h ago
Part of me really feels like 90% of people's complaints with X is really just complaints with gnome. Maybe we'll quit hearing them when gnome finally stops supporting it.
marcodiego · 8h ago
Having this specific guy becoming the lead/creator/maintainer of Xlibre, strengthens my argument about the kind of people who are against the Xorg->Wayland replacement.
nooope6 · 7h ago
People needing software that actually works?
arp242 · 6h ago
I'm sorry, but this is just complete nonsense. You can't just paint with a mega-broad brush just because there's one (or a few) unpleasant people in some demographic. You can do that for any demographic: Canadians, Vietnamese, people over 1.80m, people under 1.80m, people exactly 1.80m, etc.
I just got better things to do than rewrite code from one working display system to ... another working display system. That's all there is to it, and that's the case for many (probably most) people.
WesolyKubeczek · 8h ago
I couldn't be not against Wayland in those dark times when some distributions would make it as the default, at which time the flagship Wayland DE was using XWayland for its own panels. Which made a shitshow of a blurry mess on a HiDPI screen.
I couldn't be not against Wayland when in half of the applications I used clipboard wasn't working properly.
I couldn't be not against Wayland when screen sharing would either use X11 or not work at all.
I couldn't be not against Wayland when most of the complexity shifted from X server to compositors and toolkits, and it both diluted responsibility for the gnarliest bugs (go guess if it's the compositor or the toolkit! Added fun when it's the boundary of both!) and made it possible to write GNOME-only, or KDE-only, or wlroots-only software that won't work on another compositor because it needs a private implementation of an obscure protocol.
I couldn't be not against Wayland when your window manager breaking would bring your whole session down, complete with the breakage happening a lot.
I hear that there are problems with input protocols like "your toolkit has to implement several versions of the same thing and they all are half-arsed anyway", but living in the happy land of the Unicode's Basic Multilingual Plane, I know too little of this problem to have a say about it. But I'm somehow not surprised.
There is also this thing about Unix-like systems not being limited to Linux, and the story of Wayland elsewhere is way worse.
Most of the gnarliest points are now addressed, and Plasma got super stable around 5.26 onwards, however, I'm not really happy that we now have a triumvirate of Mutter, KWin, and wlroots, and that the bar for entry for new compositors is quite high. The fact that X11 allowed a proliferation of window managers is its advantage, not the other way around.
I'm wondering if someone gets to write a compositor that will be "engine, not policy" for Wayland, on top of which different desktop environments could be built. Like wlroots, but some steps further. It will probably have a year of glory, and then Wayland will be declared obsolete, crufty, insecure, legacy, and in dire need of being replaced with something lean and simple, and maybe written by an LLM. Good thing I'm going to be too old or too dead to give a shit by the time it happens.
Thoreandan · 9h ago
I'm waiting for BoringX or OpenX or, well, any other fork. Search for 'xorg drama'.
JdeBP · 8h ago
The name that you might be reaching for unknowingly is Xenocara.
MrArthegor · 9h ago
I agree completely with this post. It’s the eternal issue in the GNU\Linux side, reinvent the wheel instead of enhance the existing, and submit half backed solutions and claim it’s the full replacement to the previous solutions
jmkr · 8h ago
A few weeks ago I was looking into `XReparentWindow` because certain things use it
(DAW Plugins). I don't think Wayland can do something similar (but I guess XWayland works), GTK and Qt both seem to have their own version.
Looking more into plugin libraries, a lot of it is based specifically on X,
I don't think that's going to be rewritten anytime soon.
I've felt for a while stuck between X and Wayland. Same with Pipewire and Jack/Pulse.
StillBored · 8h ago
Wayland is architecturally garbage. Not for technical reasons, but social ones. Although social isn't the right word to describe a technology that encourages toolkit/DM/etc fragmentation which in turn breaks core functionality in the wider application ecosystem. Some of this isn't the fault of wayland directly, but it makes it worse. AKA by design there isn't a standard way to iterate windows and detect buttons/lists/various control types/etc which massively complicates if not outright breaks screen readers, while at the same time continues to fragment simple things like theming (and copy/paste is even worse than it was 10 years ago) if an application isn't using the blessed GUI toolkit. And in say fedora, the gnome folks seem to be designing to a device type that doesn't exist, its terrible out of the box with multiple monitors/etc while at the same time being terrible on touchscreen devices. I don't run it that much, but was showing my daughter who is perfectly competent in windows and macos (she carries both around all day!), how to navigate gnome, and jut shocked how absolutely none of it is intuitive to someone who has 'expert' level knowledge of all the common OS/phone UI's. Sure it looks slick, because its not cluttered with 'garbage' like you know, maximize buttons, scroll bars, and other things one might click on with a mouse. All the while doing cool things like reflowing the terminal text whenever the scrollbar appears/disappears. Its this complete lack of supervision/understanding. Sure on a phone touchscreen scroll bars might get in the way, but on a large screen laptop with two 30"+ 4K monitors?
And frankly, as someone who works closely with some of these distro's, I think there is a silent majority who have the same opinion but aren't willing to pay the political tax in their ecosystem for standing up and pointing out the emperor is naked for fear of sounding like a Luddite and being sidelined.
cardiffspaceman · 7h ago
Change-averse people have no valid opinions/s
MarkusWandel · 8h ago
I should add, we also have a use case for X at work. Run gigantic EDA tool by submitting it to a compute server via LSF. It all works, just like magic; the right cookie is passed, X is remoted, it opens up, no fuss. What's the Wayland way?
ysofunny · 7h ago
Wayland has always smelled to me like a corporate grab... but I'm known to be a bit paranoid (understatement)
em-bee · 6h ago
by the same corporations that managed Xorg, so i don't see the difference.
inftech · 6h ago
But Wayland is a corporate grab, no paranoid here
daft_pink · 7h ago
I’m really curious what distros will offer this?
msgodel · 7h ago
Probably Artix. They tend to like these kinds of things.
anglesideangle · 8h ago
As someone who actively uses a wayland compositor and has done so since switching to linux ~4 years ago, I often feel like I live in a different world from the authors of articles discussing its usability. Just to discuss a few points made about wayland's supposed inferiority:
> Wayland cannot do (or do well) tons of things:
> VNC server
> remote desktop
I don't regularly use either of these so I cannot attest to whether they work on wayland.
Once again, I'm running absolute desktop positioning right now
> screen sharing and recording
I just installed and ran obs, told it to use screen capture as a source, it recorded fine
> CAD/EDA tools
CAD software only runs on windows anyway. For KiCad, it's seemingly blocked on a window positioning protocol, which wayland will hopefully adopt soon
yjftsjthsd-h · 20m ago
> Once again, I'm running absolute desktop positioning right now
How?
robotnikman · 8h ago
The remote desktop is one of the reasons I haven't switched to wayland on a few machines. I used Anydesk to manage them, and Anydesk says they are unable to support Wayland.
markasoftware · 8h ago
the remote desktop stuff is important for some. Waypipe was very slow last time I tried it.
That all being said, I actually found the remote desktop situation to be /okay/ on wayland. `gnome-remote-desktop` is decent; though it uses quite a lot of bandwidth, it appeared to be smoother than xrdp when that bandwidth is available. And the sunshine/moonlight pair, while intended for game streaming, worked fine as a usual remote desktop server/client under wayland.
Arch-TK · 8h ago
The only wayland compositor that I know of that handles XWayland correctly is hyprland.
And when I say correctly, I mean that if I am on a non 96 DPI display, e.g. a 168 DPI display (1.75x) and want things scaling properly, Xwayland gets told to pretend that the display size is some resolution in the vicinity of ~1097 by ~686 (not sure how this part works, and honestly I don't think it's relevant) and a DPI of 96. Then xwayland does the most idiotic thing imaginable, it takes the output of applications running under it and stretches it.
And now I have vaseline on my screen.
No thanks.
I may try hyprland at some point to see if there's actual value to using Wayland over X but so far every time I've tried to switch it has been random obstacle after random obstacle.
One of the most baffling has been arbitrary restrictions on the scaling factor.
WesolyKubeczek · 8h ago
KWin/Plasma have a switch in the settings where you can toggle vaseline on or off. If you run modern X11 applications that are HiDPI-aware, or you can crank the size of fonts and controls however you want, you may turn it off. If you have that Athena widget application that is tiny otherwise, you turn it on (alas, there is no possibility to have two sets of X display and putting apps on the one you need).
The only thing that for some stupid reason can't be solved is that I can't turn off blurry interpolation on the low DPI applications. Come on! The low DPI layer is in integer multiples, make it nearest-neighbor pixelated but crisp! How hard is that!?
(same goes for QEMU. Argggh!)
Arch-TK · 8h ago
Okay, so there's _two_ options now which handle this properly. One conventional desktop environment, and one tiling window manager.
shmerl · 9h ago
> What I don't like is ANY, I repeat ANY software solution that champions mediocrity.
Then it should be proven that proposed alternative to Wayland is not mediocre or worse in issues Wayland is solving. Overall the post looks very shortsighted in looking at these issues from very narrow perspective, seemingly not realizing problems that need solving are much wider and not limited to one use case.
Wayland surely is not perfect and needs development (which lately seems to be moving at better pace), but I'm not convinced at all proposed alternative is better.
moomin · 9h ago
I mean, I’m a Windows user so I have no dog in this fight, but it seems like the principal implants are that it’s slower, less responsive and less stable than the alternative. This seems like a primary use case. I’m not sure what the wider use cases you’re thinking of that justify the switch.
topspin · 8h ago
> it’s slower, less responsive and less stable
And the remote application/desktop story is terrible.
I won't consider it until remote is at least as good or better than Xorg, and I don't foresee that happening in my lifetime (literally,) so Wayland will remain a bugbear I'll continue ignoring. I don't know and can't imagine how a recently promulgated desktop GUI platform that doesn't have remote as top priority came to be, but they weren't interested in anything I care about.
I welcome Xlibre. It's not the first X fork, and the previous ones turned out great, as far as I'm concerned.
JoshTriplett · 8h ago
The remote application/desktop story works wonderfully with Wayland. Pipewire is the first time that screen sharing has Just Worked for me. GNOME's remote desktop seems to work fine as well, and reportedly so does KDE's.
You may wish to check the current status. (If you are not a GNOME fan, try KDE; if you are not a GNOME and KDE fan, I'd still suggest checking the quality of their features for the things you care about, to confirm what a Wayland-based environment is capable of; don't judge the quality of X11 by trying an equivalent of twm.)
shmerl · 7h ago
> but it seems like the principal implants are that it’s slower, less responsive and less stable than the alternative
I think that's simply false. Wayland is a protocol. What's slow or fast is compositors implementation. And there are good ones that aren't slow / less responsive etc.
zdragnar · 8h ago
I used daily drive Wayland. It's fine; for most of what I do I'm happier with it than I am macos or windows. I frequently ran into screen tearing on X, something that I've not struggled with at all on Wayland.
I feel for people who are bitten by Wayland, but there's a really vocal negative group on here that I suspect are very much in the minority. Much like the switch from init to system, most people are fine with it.
JoshTriplett · 8h ago
It's understandable that people who aren't having problems aren't vocal; people don't usually go out of their way to say "everything's working fine, no issues".
Wayland works for the vast majority of people, and it's improving steadily. One of the main differences that leads people to complain is that in X, there wasn't any security between applications, and anyone could write a quick hack that makes things work for them (e.g. watch the keyboard for a key globally, or mirror the display remotely). In Wayland, there's no escape hatch: either the desktop environment needs to handle something, or you need to add a protocol for it. People experiment with new protocols all the time, but the Wayland project itself is (by design) slow and careful about adopting extensions.
It is understandable to wish for simpler times. But retrocomputing isn't a path forward here.
devmor · 9h ago
> very narrow perspective, seemingly not realizing problems are much wider and not limited to one use case
Ironically, this is the complaint many of us have about the development of Wayland.
shmerl · 7h ago
I'd say it's the result of the use cases being so broad, that some get more focus than others. There were obviously pain points that only gradually got better. But it doesn't mean Wayland isn't suitable for addressing those scopes. Someone has to do the work though rather than complain.
In the past there were some problems with protocols not being accepted fast enough, those issues were more organizational than technical. But that seems to have been finally resolved not so long ago and a bunch of really useful protocols were accepted recently.
devmor · 9h ago
I agree with the sentiment of this post in general (annoyance with Wayland being shoved down my throat, despite missing core features of Xorg) but I am rather concerned about Xlibre's future as a project. The README being stuffed with reactionary political dogwhistles is downright weird and doesn't inspire confidence in longevity.
Update - We are investigating reports of issues with many services impacting segments of customers. We will continue to keep users updated on progress towards mitigation.
Jun 17, 2025 - 19:53 UTC
worik · 8h ago
That code of conduct is a huge red flag that this is going nowhere
I have been around long enough (enduring the big swinging dicks) to understand why they are required.
The statements of inclusion in the README when the principal author campaigns against it indicates a dire lack of social skills. What hope is there for this?
I mostly agree with the critisisms of Wayland, I too have had to uninstall it to get what I need, but this all seems worse
Good luck to them, but I have no confidence
jajuuka · 8h ago
I disagree with the sentiment and welcome the future. But I do agree the way the author skips over the reason this exists and the problematic nature of their readme is a red flag. Either they agree with the dogwhistles or are being intentionally obtuse to proclaim that it's "only about the code".
Definitely don't see this project having legs or at the very least not advancing very far.
Honestly the belief of the developers don’t matter at the end of the day. The quality of code is the only thing who matters.
And I don’t imply the quality of code is good or not, I have no idea.
bryanlarsen · 8h ago
Projects of this size cannot be a one man show. So the ability of collaborators to cooperate matters greatly.
MrArthegor · 7h ago
Having a controversial reputation in leader is not always a bad thing, look at Theo De Raadt or Linus Totvald.
It’s seem to have already attracted contributors, but let’s see how all of this goes in the next’s months.
arp242 · 3h ago
There are different kinds of "controversial" and degrees of things. While you're correct that both Torvalds and de Raadt have a well-earned reputation for not always being the easiest person to get along with, most of their controversial behaviour centres around flaming people over technical matters, or sometimes organisational matters directly related to the project. Basically: it's not what they're saying, it's how they're saying it.
I've never seen either Torvalds or de Raadt go off on these mega-weird political rants completely unprompted, or inject that sort of thing in the project's README. Never mind going off on rants that smell an awful lot like Nazi apologetics. This is not just a matter of "how they're saying it", there are some real issues with what they're saying as well.
But you know, it's open source. He doesn't need mine or anyone else's permission. More power to him.
But it's really not the same as Torvalds or de Raadt. And it's also not so strange people want to steer clear of it.
vincnetas · 8h ago
From authors commits to x11 and discussions about that, looks like code was not great.
It’s more a criticism of breaking certain things, which is inevitable when your try to refactor something. The matter is in the end if the behavior remain the same when you finish.
But it’s just a supposition at this stage, let’s see on the next’s month if it a complete mess or if it’s the XFree86 to Xorg transition
WesolyKubeczek · 7h ago
And then I recall that experiment in which an LLM trained to spew out garbage insecure code started to behave like a garbage insecure edgelord personality too.
Guess "you can't have one without the other".
jajuuka · 8h ago
founders beliefs are garbage
Well it's the code that matters. Not what their beliefs are.
code is also garbage
Well it's the thought that's important.
dstnn · 8h ago
This is exactly the problem with xorg right now and why the woke crowed wants to kill it. You people new to the community have no idea how actually diverse it is. Yes odds are you haven't been involved since the 90s. Let people think what they want or you should go use Microsoft Google or Apple products and be told how to think and feel. Like the poster said below its about the code not what people believe. Funny how RiserFS wasnt an issue but this day in age it would be.
timewizard · 9h ago
> The README being stuffed with political dogwhistles is downright weird
For reasons I've never understood politics started invading open source about 10 years ago. What's weird is that these political ideas all seem to be highly aligned and this is the first major project that breaks that alignment.
Personally I'd prefer to see the politics, on both sides, disappear forever. It only pollutes the engineering and it fails to be convincing or meaningful in any other context.
> doesn't inspire confidence in longevity.
There are forces trying to kill X11 for their own internal reasons. I think as long as there is a project that is trying to maintain it, it will be successful, political warts and all.
dsr_ · 8h ago
I would guess that you started to be aware of politics about 10 years ago. You're off by at least 30 years or so...
For example, the removal of Jerry Pournelle's free account at MIT because he kept mentioning ARPANET in his column in Byte magazine. Then he accused MIT's sysadmins of being communists who wanted to destroy America's military...
That was 1985. The X project started the year before that.
panzi · 8h ago
Open source is inherently political. I think it's anti-capitalist and I remember how pro-capitalist people called it communist back in the 90s/00s. Saying open source isn't political is almost like saying Star Trek isn't political.
bigstrat2003 · 8h ago
No it isn't. I have contributed to, and used, many open source projects without it ever being political. All I did was share work I created because it might help someone out, or use a tool I found useful.
Some people choose to make open source political and that's their right, but it isn't inherently political. That is a choice one makes.
worik · 8h ago
> All I did was share work
You may not have political opinions but you took political action....
panzi · 3h ago
Yeah, it baffles me how people don't realize that.
kardianos · 8h ago
"everything is political" -> Communism
devmor · 9h ago
I think politics will always be a big part of open source, as the nature of open source development is inherently at odds with corporatism and control.
It's particularly the reactionary stuff that concerns me when it comes to projects like this. When someone's motivation is tied to short-lived movements of social energy like that, I don't trust them to have a long term vision or investment in a project.
Lammy · 7h ago
> the nature of open source development is inherently at odds with corporatism
No, you're thinking of “Free Software” — “Open Source” was explicitly pro-corporate from the moment the term was coined. OSI themselves will tell you that “open source” as we know it was a product of AOL's desire to get people to work for them for free: https://opensource.org/history
“The [February 3rd, 1998] conferees believed the pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape to release their code illustrated a valuable way to engage with potential software users and developers, and convince them to create and improve source code by participating in an engaged community. The conferees also believed that it would be useful to have a single label that identified this approach and distinguished it from the philosophically- and politically-focused label ‘free software.’”
timewizard · 8h ago
> short-lived movements of social energy
It's hard to imagine an energy that's apparently existed for 12 years and still going being described as "short-lived." Perhaps it's really just unfamiliar and that's why it seems so concerning?
devmor · 7h ago
I don’t recall anyone ranting about “DEI” 12 years ago. I do recall the same rants about 3 or 4 other terms that ultimately resolve to “people that aren’t me are allowed to do things”, though.
GuestFAUniverse · 8h ago
If you don't bother about any app being able to spoof on your pressed keys: go, use Xorg.
But why stop there, and cope with a multi-user environment?
Just boot into single user mode and "chmod a+rwx / -R".
A lot of other /problems/ solved too.
/S
lelanthran · 8h ago
> If you don't bother about any app being able to spoof on your pressed keys: go, use Xorg.
The correct response to "All applications can spoof keypresses or act as a keylogger" is "Okay, force user to grant permission before an application does this".
The Wayland response is "No application should be allowed to do this".
Whether you like it or not, sometimes users actually want functionality that you deem is insecure, and you gotta find a way to deliver what Windows, MacOS and X11 all deliver.
c-hendricks · 7h ago
How would that experience work on X? Wouldn't any app that accepts keyboard input throw up your suggested permission granting interface? That's pretty much all apps.
Also it's not like global hotkeys don't exist in Wayland.
lelanthran · 6h ago
> How would that experience work on X? Wouldn't any app that accepts keyboard input throw up your suggested permission granting interface? That's pretty much all apps.
That's the point - applications that need to perform malicious looking (but not actually) activity like intercepting or injecting keyboard inputs already work on X! What we are talking about is them not working on Wayland!
> Also it's not like global hotkeys don't exist in Wayland.
There are more features than simply mapping hotkeys, remapping keyboards, etc which already work on consumer computers, such as Windows, MacOS and X. What we are asking for when we complain about Wayland is the same functionality that already exists on Windows, MacOS and X.
Whether the Waylan devs think that the requests are unreasonable or not is, frankly, irrelevant. When everyone but Wayland supports something, the Wayland developers have to justify their decision to go against the norm.
The people asking for the norm typically don't need to justify why they want the norm.
panzi · 8h ago
How do accessibility tools work with that? They need to examine and control other running processes.
stop50 · 7h ago
Fake inputs are done with uinput(kernel interface). Access to the screen is usually over pipewire.
panzi · 3h ago
Doesn't writing to /dev/uinput require you to be root? That's way worse security wise than faking X11 inputs. Also you can't direct the inputs to a specific window. That is bound to create problems where events go to the wrong process.
Also PipeWire is an audio interface. A replacement to PulseAudio. That has nothing to do with accessing screens.
yjftsjthsd-h · 14m ago
> Also PipeWire is an audio interface. A replacement to PulseAudio. That has nothing to do with accessing screens.
I occasionally write native GUI apps (not electron-based), and for the current automation application I am working on Wayland is an absolute non-starter[1].
Like the other poster, every few years I would give Wayland a try, but as of today, 17-June-2025, Wayland is still lacking features that I want.
I have no objection to using it, I just need it to be a replacement for X.
[1] My application uses X11 FakeEvent. Did not find a similar thing for Wayland.
But yes, there are use cases it doesn't cover. Example. My elderly mom uses Linux laptops that I've rigged to (1) always have an SSH connection open to my server machine, with reverse tunnels, and (2) run x0vncserver.
Modern security people would cringe, but this is the real world. I can open her desktop any time, from 700km away, and fix serious disasters like: She accidentally double-clicked an email and it opened up in a tab that obscures her message list (Thunderbird). This has worked very well to keep her online and happily emailing.
Where is the equivalent for Wayland? I get the impression that "it shouldn't exist because security" and therefore won't. Luckily, the show's not over yet. I run Fedora. The main spin won't do it any more, but the MATE spin is perfect. It comes up in MATE and it uses X! Still happy. Other laptop installations I have running probably use Wayland and as long as nothing breaks, I don't care.
> Modern security people would cringe, but this is the real world. I can open her desktop any time, from 700km away, and fix serious disasters like: She accidentally double-clicked an email and it opened up in a tab that obscures her message list (Thunderbird). This has worked very well to keep her online and happily emailing.
I'm not sure why anyone would mind the security of that setup? Provided that your server isn't compromised, that arrangement should provide both confidentiality and integrity, and if SSH is compromised then we all have bigger problems.
I periodically retry Wayland, and it does seem to be improving, albeit slowly. There are a few significant things that just aren't there, but mostly it feels like death by a thousand paper-cuts. I can't dock toolbars; I can't use xdotools; screenshares are flaky; I can't click and drag to upload to browsers.
I could live with Wayland, but the experience is still superior (for my use-cases) with X11.
I don't get why its such a big deal that software that:
1. no one wants to develop 2. is completely free 3. no longer being developed
is such a problem, its free. if its so important to you, why not contribute yourself? Should these people be forced to contribute to projects that they want to be free of against their will?
For wlroots systems there's wayvnc.
[0] https://www.phoronix.com/news/X.Org-Server-Lots-Of-Reverts
This is honestly an understatement. Posting antivax conspiracy theories on LKML? Reactionary. Writing anti-DEI rants in his REAMDE and COC files? Reactionary. But this long-winded rant [1] defending WW2 Germany? "Reactionary" doesn't even begin to describe it.
Whatever one's opinion on Wayland, his conduct [2] should be a huge red flag to anyone using his software.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190404153507/https://lists.dyn...
[2]: https://lkml.org/lkml/2024/10/24/1249
Holy. Fucking. Crap.
I never thought that I would find someone in the modern day attempt to defend that Germany didn't start WW2, but here we are.
I had a low opinion of him before, but he found a new low to plumb.
We DON'T all live in the same reality, the echo chambers and false narratives being fed to us and corralling us is completely messing with our heads.
back in the 60's and 70's we were worried that the CIA was micro dosing the population... what we've learned is that isn't even needed. just feed us attractive lies and we'll line up for brainworms via the internet and TV day and night.
- WW2 Germany was "peaceful" and that the war was "forced" upon them
- Churchill and Roosevelt "should have been the first to be prosecuted in the Nuremberg trials"
- The German AfD party is "(mis)labeled" by the mainstream media as Nazis
Fortunately, it's also pretty clear from other contextual clues that he sees no reason to disavow those beliefs.
For all his whinging and whining about "muh dresden bombings", he conveniently seems to "forget" that all that stopped one of the worst genocides in history, including planned genocides (such as those of the Slavic people). And then when he does bring up the Holocaust later it's in a way that seems an awful lot like Holocaust denial.
I'm a simple guy. Goose-steps like a Nazi and salutes like a Nazi? Probably a Nazi.
They're returning to a previous state which they believe possessed positive characteristics absent from contemporary? Somebody should come up with a word for that.
I mean them deleting their own code only proves their own incompetence not Enrico's.
More on those previous changes here: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1797#no...
Definitely some blame also belongs to the Xorg committer who reviewed and merged those changes (and it looks like that person understands that in retrospect). But the primary responsibility for getting a change right is the author's.
No comments yet
Irrelevant. Please stay on topic and refrain from personal attacks.
> created enough bugs and compatibility breaks that Xorg proper is now reverting a lot of their changes
You'd expect that the changes would've been reverted sooner if that was all there was to it, no? How come they're suddenly a problem?
Then someone mentioned that this was the guy who got Torvalds to tell him GTFO off the kernel mailing lists, and when reading the article about it, I saw the name of the individual. Just seeing that name immediately reminded me of some interactions I've personally had with him a decade ago which eventually resulted (IIRC) in him being told to GTFO of that project. And the catalyst for this fork is being told to GTFO of Xorg thanks to his interactions with the rest of the people.
This is someone who is constantly grating on peoples' nerves to the point that they're kicked out of open source projects for being net negative contributors to the project. And given the repeat nature of it, they also lack the perspicacity to realize the commonality of these incidents. Now a thorough description of their behavior is perhaps superior to just calling them a "reactionary nutjob," but their reputation does proceed them and is justly earned.
that was my first thought too. if these commits were a problem they should not have been accepted in the first place.
was there no review process in place? and if there was no review, isn't that a sign that the project is dead? and if the project is dead what's with the sudden activity?
none of this makes sense.
More info here: https://www.phoronix.com/news/X.Org-Server-Lots-Of-Reverts
[0] https://www.phoronix.com/news/X.Org-Server-Lots-Of-Reverts
Wayland just straight doesn't work and the push to move everyone to it looks ridiculous from my perspective.
Word on the street is Nvidia is doing a much much better job, for a year or so now. But, like, you are using a GPU that sway used to make you type "--i-wont-buy-an-nvidia-gpu-again" and now makes you type --unsupported-gpu to use.
It's not Wayland's fault if your video card can't do the pretty same sensible reasonable kernel calls asked of it without crashing. I realize that you might not really care about the distinction, I sympathize highly that it just sucks, and no one in open source likes this (Google image search "Linus Torvalds Nvidia"; 2025 only a bit better than 2012 if your bug report here really true I guess). But fault & culpability matters, and Wayland does way way way less special magic & is way more straightforward with how it handles the display subsystem than X, which half ignores the kernel & has its own absurd driver subsystems and mountains of jank overlapping extensions to do what kernels and GPUs just do these days. GPUs have it easy under Wayland!
Users don't care about your beautiful code and architecture if your product doesn't even work. Making excuses doesn't help anyone - if X can work fine with Nvidia drivers, Wayland's failure to do so is a problem with Wayland.
The world has no ability to make Nvidia's drivers good. If Nvidia can't build drivers that work, there's nothing we can do about it. Defending a situation where hackers have no ability to improve or work a situation is unhackerly, dumb. Consumers are free to remain ignorant, but this situation of where we go and what we do has consequences & meaning to the hacker, and the facts and technics ought matter.
Before Wayland, it was not sunshine and rainbows. For a long time, a lot of shit just did not work and there was no way to make it work. Nvidia did not care. It took Linux Trovalds shitting on Nvidia to make them care a little. It took YEARS for Nvidia on the Linux desktop to be decent.
And, to this day, a lot of Nvidia features just do not work, even on X. You get a MUCH better experience on Windows.
Wayland cannot see the Nvidia source code because nobody can. They're trying their best, but they're not going to regress to old ass versions of stuff to get it to work and they're not gonna throw spaghetti at the wall. Nvidia needs to step up because they decided they're the only ones who can develop the driver. There's nothing anyone can do.
Have they? Or have others refused to work with them, refused to make compromises, and refused to offer stable interfaces for them to target. Don't pretend like none of this "antagonism" wasn't self inflicted.
2. Nobody can work with them anyway because their drivers are closed sourced. They decided they should be the only ones developing them, so be it. If they upstreamed them they would get thousands of contributor's worth of help.
2. Directly contributing code is not the only way to work with someone.
Unfortunately Wayland devs seem to have become user hostile in a way similar to the systemd devs (your use case being incompatible or unsuported is your problem, shut up and let us rearrange the OS etc) on top of the software just not being very good. Basic things like running video terminal emulators just doesn't work as well as it does on X (comparing Xterm on X to whatever on Sway always seemed to have much higher latency on my hardware, even moving the window around seems to lag a frame or two behind where it should be.)
At this point wayland itself has gotten pretty old, doesn't support what most desktop Linux users need day to day (at least enough to replace X) and is so unpleasant to deal with I don't think I'll be trying it again. It's a shame, the bar isn't that high. Then again maybe X11 is the oldest still in use graphics API for a reason.
But choice and competition is one of the best things about Linux, so if a small group is upset about losing X11 and self-organize to carry the torch, more power to them. Build a great alternative, and maybe present yourself as a choice rather than being so reactionary. You're not a rebel, you're just in a niche and that's OK.
You have a choice: acknowledge that Wayland is faster, more user-friendly, and more secure, or remain tied to technologies from the 1990s.
Since Ubuntu has adopted Wayland exclusively for its new LTS release, I've noticed over the past few days that much of the criticism comes from Windows users who rely on RDP to configure Red Hat or CentOS with a GUI, or something similar. These users have become accustomed to the lack of security in Xorg to perform their tasks. Now, they must reconsider how they maintain their Linux machines.
In any case, I was unaware that Wayland was becoming the new systemd. Perhaps this is because I have been using it for more then four years, starting with bullseye (sid) / GNOME, and for about two years with FreeBSD / Sway. I use these systems daily at work without any major issues.
I don't follow? If folks are using RDP, they don't need Xorg's less-secure remote access options, they can just use RDP? And Wayland has VNC and RDP servers, including GNOME having built-in RDP, so if people are using that then it shouldn't matter whether GNOME happens to have replaced X with Wayland.
It’s less about change and more about outright breakage. Wayland does not support me.
> You have a choice: acknowledge that Wayland is faster, more user-friendly, and more secure, or remain tied to technologies from the 1990s.
Wayland may be faster, it’s certainly more secure (in the same sense that a system embedded in a ton of concrete and dropped to the bottom of the ocean is more secure), but I’m not convinced that it’s more user friendly. It’s certainly not friendly to me, since it does not allow me to run my window manager of choice.
I’m not convinced that the technologies of the 1990s were necessarily all that bad, either. Yeah, there were some assumptions which turned out not to be the case in reality. And yeah, there is a ton of cruft. And yeah, no-one would design X11 the way it is today. But, you know what? X11, unlike Wayland, works for me.
I would love to use Wayland, honestly. That’s not a lie. But it doesn’t work. And from what I can see it doesn’t want to work.
When selecting technology, I always consider my specific use case. For instance, at work, I need to manage multiple open windows simultaneously, so I rely on tiled windows across four monitors. To ensure stability and avoid OS issues, I use GNOME with Pop Shell on Debian. On my smaller laptop, where mobility and keyboard-only navigation are priorities, I've found Sway to be an excellent replacement for dwm.
The key point I want to emphasize is the importance of identifying your unique use case. Once you understand your needs, you can choose the tools that best meet those requirements. The tool itself isn't the ultimate goal; it's about finding what works best for your specific situation. Typically, there are plenty of tools available that can solve your problem or fit your use case.
If you like Xorg, use Xorg. If you like Wayland, use Wayland. If you're not happy about an issue, contribute to it.
The problem is that the Wayland folks are trying to replace X11 rather than provide an easy upgrade path. They simply don’t care about anyone who uses a computer in any way outside of the ways they can be bothered to support. ‘It’s better!’ they cry, despite users telling them for well over a decade now that it’s not actually, because we cannot do the things we want.
And Wayland is being used as a form of lock-in. ‘GNOME uses Wayland now. Just drop support for that crufty old X11,’ they whisper. Never mind that plenty of folks don’t use GNOME and don’t want to use GNOME. Never mind that Wayland is still not fit for purpose.
It may be someday, and that would be great. I’d genuinely look forward to being able to move on from X11. But Wayland does not work for me, and as projects start to remove support for X11 they are removing support for me.
You can keep using the older software? No one is forcing you to upgrade? Should these people be forced to work on projects they don't like?
That is both the good thing and the bad thing. Application software can seamlessly work on Wayland via XWayland. Anything that needs to touch things outside its own window - notably, a11y and automation tools (which in fairness are functionally the same thing) don't have it so easy.
If not then it’s not really an upgrade path.
I do get it — no-one owes me anything. They don’t even, really, owe me the kindness of not breaking the software I use. In principle I could fork and maintain everything I want myself, or working with others. But …
It has been almost 20 years and Wayland JUST merged pointer warp support (literally like last week)--which is absolutely fundamental to both CAD and menu systems.
So, no, Wayland does not support some very important use cases.
If you've had 20 years and can't be better than what you claim you are replacing, what does that say about you as a programmer or organization?
1. freedesktop based on xorg is outdated and needs to be modernized to keep up with competing operating systems.
2. The Wayland movement is and has been run extremely poorly.
Both xorg and wayland are bad so it's easy for either side to point that out.
Sure, it is. But does it matter? I don't think so.
I was happy with Xorg, and there were things it couldn't do that I didn't plan on contributing, so I didn't complain to them.
I am now happy with Wayland, and there are things it cannot do that I am not contributing, so I don't complain.
What I see is that Wayland is quite active and they actually added things I needed that didn't exist a few years ago. That's great. Many people seem to be very vocal about how they prefer Xorg because it works for them: that's great, they can use Xorg.
Someone wants to write another one? That's great, let them do it.
Linux is about diversity. Don't come to Linux and ask it to become Windows or macOS.
The problem is that RedHat nee IBM are attempting to force everybody onto Wayland by dropping X11 support. They already tried once and the outcry was so huge that they had to back off saying they would try again next version.
This is kind of a rock and a hard place. The Wayland developers don't want to support X11 but neither does anybody else. Wayland is fundamentally broken in many ways down at the architectural level, but the sunk cost fallacy keeps them working on it.
Everybody forgets that Wayland predates Vulkan. A "real" replacement for X11/Wayland probably needs to restart from "Vulkan support is the base layer" and build up from there.
> Everybody forgets that Wayland predates Vulkan. A "real" replacement for X11/Wayland probably needs to restart from "Vulkan support is the base layer" and build up from there.
I wonder if you could point me in the right direction to learn more about this?
and how is that waylands fault? what if vulkan gets replaced? should a new replacement be written from scratch every time that happens?
It is not. However, Wayland had to make certain decisions up front that later turned out to be significantly suboptimal in the context of a graphics world that converged to DX12/Vulkan/Metal and all look roughly the same from an abstraction level.
Retina MacBook Pro was released in 2012, about 13 years ago. Personally, I don't think Xorg is in a position to sneer at its competitor for being "beta in quality" after "15 years into making."
People have sworn up and down to me that the fractional scaling stuff is possible in X but I read probably 10 guides on how to do it and it never worked. Bummer.
It's like macOS is doing it, by the way.
I just got better things to do than rewrite code from one working display system to ... another working display system. That's all there is to it, and that's the case for many (probably most) people.
I couldn't be not against Wayland when in half of the applications I used clipboard wasn't working properly.
I couldn't be not against Wayland when screen sharing would either use X11 or not work at all.
I couldn't be not against Wayland when most of the complexity shifted from X server to compositors and toolkits, and it both diluted responsibility for the gnarliest bugs (go guess if it's the compositor or the toolkit! Added fun when it's the boundary of both!) and made it possible to write GNOME-only, or KDE-only, or wlroots-only software that won't work on another compositor because it needs a private implementation of an obscure protocol.
I couldn't be not against Wayland when your window manager breaking would bring your whole session down, complete with the breakage happening a lot.
I hear that there are problems with input protocols like "your toolkit has to implement several versions of the same thing and they all are half-arsed anyway", but living in the happy land of the Unicode's Basic Multilingual Plane, I know too little of this problem to have a say about it. But I'm somehow not surprised.
There is also this thing about Unix-like systems not being limited to Linux, and the story of Wayland elsewhere is way worse.
Most of the gnarliest points are now addressed, and Plasma got super stable around 5.26 onwards, however, I'm not really happy that we now have a triumvirate of Mutter, KWin, and wlroots, and that the bar for entry for new compositors is quite high. The fact that X11 allowed a proliferation of window managers is its advantage, not the other way around.
I'm wondering if someone gets to write a compositor that will be "engine, not policy" for Wayland, on top of which different desktop environments could be built. Like wlroots, but some steps further. It will probably have a year of glory, and then Wayland will be declared obsolete, crufty, insecure, legacy, and in dire need of being replaced with something lean and simple, and maybe written by an LLM. Good thing I'm going to be too old or too dead to give a shit by the time it happens.
Looking more into plugin libraries, a lot of it is based specifically on X, I don't think that's going to be rewritten anytime soon.
I've felt for a while stuck between X and Wayland. Same with Pipewire and Jack/Pulse.
And frankly, as someone who works closely with some of these distro's, I think there is a silent majority who have the same opinion but aren't willing to pay the political tax in their ecosystem for standing up and pointing out the emperor is naked for fear of sounding like a Luddite and being sidelined.
> Wayland cannot do (or do well) tons of things:
> VNC server
> remote desktop
I don't regularly use either of these so I cannot attest to whether they work on wayland.
> SSH X forwarding
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe
> custom keyboard bindings
I currently have caps lock bound to esc
> numerous accessibility options
This is likely true
> legacy software
xwayland
> absolute desktop positioning
Once again, I'm running absolute desktop positioning right now
> screen sharing and recording
I just installed and ran obs, told it to use screen capture as a source, it recorded fine
> CAD/EDA tools
CAD software only runs on windows anyway. For KiCad, it's seemingly blocked on a window positioning protocol, which wayland will hopefully adopt soon
How?
That all being said, I actually found the remote desktop situation to be /okay/ on wayland. `gnome-remote-desktop` is decent; though it uses quite a lot of bandwidth, it appeared to be smoother than xrdp when that bandwidth is available. And the sunshine/moonlight pair, while intended for game streaming, worked fine as a usual remote desktop server/client under wayland.
And when I say correctly, I mean that if I am on a non 96 DPI display, e.g. a 168 DPI display (1.75x) and want things scaling properly, Xwayland gets told to pretend that the display size is some resolution in the vicinity of ~1097 by ~686 (not sure how this part works, and honestly I don't think it's relevant) and a DPI of 96. Then xwayland does the most idiotic thing imaginable, it takes the output of applications running under it and stretches it.
And now I have vaseline on my screen.
No thanks.
I may try hyprland at some point to see if there's actual value to using Wayland over X but so far every time I've tried to switch it has been random obstacle after random obstacle.
One of the most baffling has been arbitrary restrictions on the scaling factor.
The only thing that for some stupid reason can't be solved is that I can't turn off blurry interpolation on the low DPI applications. Come on! The low DPI layer is in integer multiples, make it nearest-neighbor pixelated but crisp! How hard is that!?
(same goes for QEMU. Argggh!)
Then it should be proven that proposed alternative to Wayland is not mediocre or worse in issues Wayland is solving. Overall the post looks very shortsighted in looking at these issues from very narrow perspective, seemingly not realizing problems that need solving are much wider and not limited to one use case.
Wayland surely is not perfect and needs development (which lately seems to be moving at better pace), but I'm not convinced at all proposed alternative is better.
And the remote application/desktop story is terrible.
I won't consider it until remote is at least as good or better than Xorg, and I don't foresee that happening in my lifetime (literally,) so Wayland will remain a bugbear I'll continue ignoring. I don't know and can't imagine how a recently promulgated desktop GUI platform that doesn't have remote as top priority came to be, but they weren't interested in anything I care about.
I welcome Xlibre. It's not the first X fork, and the previous ones turned out great, as far as I'm concerned.
You may wish to check the current status. (If you are not a GNOME fan, try KDE; if you are not a GNOME and KDE fan, I'd still suggest checking the quality of their features for the things you care about, to confirm what a Wayland-based environment is capable of; don't judge the quality of X11 by trying an equivalent of twm.)
I think that's simply false. Wayland is a protocol. What's slow or fast is compositors implementation. And there are good ones that aren't slow / less responsive etc.
I feel for people who are bitten by Wayland, but there's a really vocal negative group on here that I suspect are very much in the minority. Much like the switch from init to system, most people are fine with it.
Wayland works for the vast majority of people, and it's improving steadily. One of the main differences that leads people to complain is that in X, there wasn't any security between applications, and anyone could write a quick hack that makes things work for them (e.g. watch the keyboard for a key globally, or mirror the display remotely). In Wayland, there's no escape hatch: either the desktop environment needs to handle something, or you need to add a protocol for it. People experiment with new protocols all the time, but the Wayland project itself is (by design) slow and careful about adopting extensions.
It is understandable to wish for simpler times. But retrocomputing isn't a path forward here.
Ironically, this is the complaint many of us have about the development of Wayland.
In the past there were some problems with protocols not being accepted fast enough, those issues were more organizational than technical. But that seems to have been finally resolved not so long ago and a bunch of really useful protocols were accepted recently.
The code of conduct: https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/blob/master/CODE_OF_COND...
Update - We are investigating reports of issues with many services impacting segments of customers. We will continue to keep users updated on progress towards mitigation. Jun 17, 2025 - 19:53 UTC
I have been around long enough (enduring the big swinging dicks) to understand why they are required.
The statements of inclusion in the README when the principal author campaigns against it indicates a dire lack of social skills. What hope is there for this?
I mostly agree with the critisisms of Wayland, I too have had to uninstall it to get what I need, but this all seems worse
Good luck to them, but I have no confidence
Definitely don't see this project having legs or at the very least not advancing very far.
And I don’t imply the quality of code is good or not, I have no idea.
I've never seen either Torvalds or de Raadt go off on these mega-weird political rants completely unprompted, or inject that sort of thing in the project's README. Never mind going off on rants that smell an awful lot like Nazi apologetics. This is not just a matter of "how they're saying it", there are some real issues with what they're saying as well.
But you know, it's open source. He doesn't need mine or anyone else's permission. More power to him.
But it's really not the same as Torvalds or de Raadt. And it's also not so strange people want to steer clear of it.
source comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44200000
But it’s just a supposition at this stage, let’s see on the next’s month if it a complete mess or if it’s the XFree86 to Xorg transition
Guess "you can't have one without the other".
Well it's the code that matters. Not what their beliefs are.
code is also garbage
Well it's the thought that's important.
For reasons I've never understood politics started invading open source about 10 years ago. What's weird is that these political ideas all seem to be highly aligned and this is the first major project that breaks that alignment.
Personally I'd prefer to see the politics, on both sides, disappear forever. It only pollutes the engineering and it fails to be convincing or meaningful in any other context.
> doesn't inspire confidence in longevity.
There are forces trying to kill X11 for their own internal reasons. I think as long as there is a project that is trying to maintain it, it will be successful, political warts and all.
For example, the removal of Jerry Pournelle's free account at MIT because he kept mentioning ARPANET in his column in Byte magazine. Then he accused MIT's sysadmins of being communists who wanted to destroy America's military...
That was 1985. The X project started the year before that.
Some people choose to make open source political and that's their right, but it isn't inherently political. That is a choice one makes.
You may not have political opinions but you took political action....
It's particularly the reactionary stuff that concerns me when it comes to projects like this. When someone's motivation is tied to short-lived movements of social energy like that, I don't trust them to have a long term vision or investment in a project.
No, you're thinking of “Free Software” — “Open Source” was explicitly pro-corporate from the moment the term was coined. OSI themselves will tell you that “open source” as we know it was a product of AOL's desire to get people to work for them for free: https://opensource.org/history
“The [February 3rd, 1998] conferees believed the pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape to release their code illustrated a valuable way to engage with potential software users and developers, and convince them to create and improve source code by participating in an engaged community. The conferees also believed that it would be useful to have a single label that identified this approach and distinguished it from the philosophically- and politically-focused label ‘free software.’”
It's hard to imagine an energy that's apparently existed for 12 years and still going being described as "short-lived." Perhaps it's really just unfamiliar and that's why it seems so concerning?
But why stop there, and cope with a multi-user environment? Just boot into single user mode and "chmod a+rwx / -R". A lot of other /problems/ solved too.
/S
The correct response to "All applications can spoof keypresses or act as a keylogger" is "Okay, force user to grant permission before an application does this".
The Wayland response is "No application should be allowed to do this".
Whether you like it or not, sometimes users actually want functionality that you deem is insecure, and you gotta find a way to deliver what Windows, MacOS and X11 all deliver.
Also it's not like global hotkeys don't exist in Wayland.
That's the point - applications that need to perform malicious looking (but not actually) activity like intercepting or injecting keyboard inputs already work on X! What we are talking about is them not working on Wayland!
> Also it's not like global hotkeys don't exist in Wayland.
There are more features than simply mapping hotkeys, remapping keyboards, etc which already work on consumer computers, such as Windows, MacOS and X. What we are asking for when we complain about Wayland is the same functionality that already exists on Windows, MacOS and X.
Whether the Waylan devs think that the requests are unreasonable or not is, frankly, irrelevant. When everyone but Wayland supports something, the Wayland developers have to justify their decision to go against the norm.
The people asking for the norm typically don't need to justify why they want the norm.
Also PipeWire is an audio interface. A replacement to PulseAudio. That has nothing to do with accessing screens.
No, it's a general audio/video system, including video from cameras and virtual video streams from screen capture; see https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#WebRTC_screen_shar... for some discussion.