Wayland breaks the tools I use to make a living

14 junkblocker 1 9/13/2025, 10:05:17 PM rykarn.se โ†—

Comments (1)

3np ยท 2h ago
Wayland is great and ready for (idk) 95% of users/use-cases.

There is a long tail of more-or-less critical stuff that depend on X11 and do not have working Wayland substitutes. While the tail has been shrinking for every year, it will be decades if ever until all can be realistically migrated. Consider the Lindy Effect and that some of these systems have been running for >10y already. Consider shared but secured environments at universities and research institutes. Consider obscure hardware incompatibilities and hardware-specifix performance issues which might never be fixed.

On the software side, acessibility aside, there are a lot of VNC and other remote-X setups out there with no viable replacement in sight (yet).

Alsa, pulseaudio, pipewire and jack can all coexist and so can display servers.

I understand GNOME and RedHat will do things their way. I understand distro and GUI framework maintainers wanting to reduce their load. I understand people who like Wayland, want it to succeed, and want to evangelize. I do not appreciate when it turns into tribalism, forcing of monoculture and insisting "X11 is deprecated".

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OP is from 2023 but as they note in their update, the situation is fundamentally not that different 2y later. Are maintainers and decision-makers really sincerely imagining that a supposed deprecation and removal of X11 can be forced onto the wider community over a couple of years from now?