Please Don't Promote Wayland

42 PKop 45 8/13/2025, 1:06:22 AM stoppromotingwayland.netlify.app ↗

Comments (45)

kstrauser · 2h ago
I’m not a fan of Wayland or a detractor of X. I’m not personally invested in either of them. I couldn’t care less what’s pushing pixels at my screen as long as it works.

That said, what you need to know about Wayland is that the X.org devs mostly migrated to it en masse because they said X had hit an evolutionary dead end and couldn’t be dragged into the present, by the design of it. These were the people who were already maintaining X and presumably liked it. I doubt there were a lot of haters in that crowd.

It’s not like someone invented Wayland and shoved the X devs out of the way. The X devs largely became Wayland devs because they believe it’s the better path forward. I don’t really know how I could argue against them.

ants_everywhere · 2h ago
In case anyone is unaware, X and Wayland are developed by the same group (freedesktop.org)

- https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver

- https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland

It's not just that developers migrated to a new project. Wayland is essentially the successor to X and is developed by the same group.

(That doesn't mean there aren't still lots of bugs and sharp corners.)

II2II · 2h ago
> I couldn’t care less what’s pushing pixels at my screen as long as it works.

I didn't know or care what was pushing the pixels on my Debian install, since it works. Being Debian, it could go either way: some of the desktop environments are committed to Wayland while other desktop configurations only work under X. (Incidentally, I checked. My setup uses Wayland.)

> It’s not like someone invented Wayland and shoved the X devs out of the way.

They sure make it sound as though X application developers are being shoved out of the way. I don't understand their argument though. Most modern software is built upon libraries that support either Wayland or X (assuming it has a GUI), so they should be blissfully ignorant of whether their application is running under Wayland or X. Most of the outliers are older programs that are built on top of libraries that haven't been updated for Wayland, but most of those programs will work under Wayland assuming that xwayland is installed. Again, there is no reason for the developer to concern themselves with the distinction between Wayland and X. That only applies to a relatively small subset of outliers that are interacting with X or the compositor directly. But you're not going to escape that problem, because you're either doing something unique or you are doing something you shouldn't be doing.

No comments yet

msgodel · 2h ago
It looks to me like there are quite a few more basic features fundamentally incompatible with Wayland's architecture than X's. Maybe X has issues but Wayland is still a regression.
kstrauser · 2h ago
That seems at odds with what the people who wrote both of them believe.
comex · 2h ago
This reads as significantly AI-assisted and repetitive.

And some of the points are really questionable, like claiming “Color management becomes inconsistent” when X11 doesn’t even support HDR, claiming that Linux containers and namespaces somehow mitigate X11’s security issues (that’s not how it works!), and talking about some outdated issues like NVIDIA support and SSH forwarding (both of which shouldn’t be an issue anymore from what I’ve heard).

SpecialistK · 2h ago
The website layout also looks a lot like what I've seen Claude 4 generate via VS Code.
queenkjuul · 2h ago
If SSH isn't an issue anymore, I've yet to find the solution
rtpg · 2h ago
I am very open to Wayland in theory but I legit worry because it's been in the air for years and years and it still feels so far away. And some of the Wayland-y points around things like security just never felt relevant to me.

Though the real pain points for me have been around the various containerization things that just cause things like my IME to barely function.

At least Python 3 if you started your project on Python 3 you mostly could just get where you wanted to be.

eurleif · 2h ago
X11 session support is being removed from the default install of Ubuntu with the upcoming 25.10 release. Gnome and KDE Plasma plan to remove X11 session support entirely within the next few years. Ready or not, Wayland is here.
throw0101c · 2h ago
> X11 session support is being removed from the default install of Ubuntu with the upcoming 25.10 release.

Currently I can SSH from my MacBook/XQuartz onto an Ubuntu/Linux system and run xterm (or whatever). How does that work in the future?

bmandale · 2h ago
apt install xorg
xtracto · 2h ago
All engineers implementing Wayland should read Joel Spolsky's seminal article on software rewrite https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

And Martin Fowler article on Strangle Fig pattern.

It's been a waste of resources to have yet another biffurcation on the Linux Desktop ecosystem.

It's pretty sad.

stingraycharles · 2h ago
It’s mostly application support that’s lagging, right?

And of course window managers like i3 needing complete replacement, but those seem to be mostly down already.

rtpg · 2h ago
I guess? I mean like 2 years ago I couldn't even use Wayland on my machine with an Nvidia card (I didn't try that hard, though).

Like this feels super bleeding edge and in that case I really don't get how this didn't _start_ in x11 land and then take over things from there.

My only hope is that money from people who "need" linux graphics to work solves this.

puffybuf · 58m ago
i3 has pretty much been replaced by sway for me. Works great I have no problems with wayland as a regular user
queenkjuul · 2h ago
Some stuff like global hotkeys and remote desktop are Wayland problems inherently
sleepy_keita · 2h ago
The IME problem was the only thing keeping me on "legacy" X11 a couple years ago. Is it still the same today?
rtpg · 2h ago
My IME issues were so dire I went back to a Mac (well also work giving me a Mac). But my IME issues linked to snaps and the like, not Wayland.
cratermoon · 2h ago
> it's been in the air for years and years and it still feels so far away

Wayland is the Project Xanadu of UI software.

kaonwarb · 2h ago
Missed opportunity for the (anonymous!) authors to demonstrate understanding about why some are promoting Wayland.
goku12 · 1h ago
You could use most of those arguments verbatim and unironically create a page titled "Please don't promote X11". Meanwhile, some of the Wayland-specific complaints were solved a while ago and some weren't even Wayland's fault to begin with.

I get it that some people don't want give up the old systems in favor of the shiny new technologies. I'm also on that side for some software like systemd (not debating. Systemd does offer many compelling benefits). But this article feels like complaining for the sake of it, rather than making reasonable detractions that could perhaps be addressed in Wayland. Attacking a software for just existing isn't a good strategy in FOSS. It is fundamentally about having choices.

FloatArtifact · 2h ago
Accessibility is dead to me on Wayland... Until emulate key, mouse presses in other windows, registering global hotkeys that isn't a hack and Enumerating window title and executable.

Wayland fragmented development efforts on Linux. It's gotten a little better as some compositors consolidate, but still pretty awful to cobble together a stack that works for the features above.

jofer · 2h ago
As much as X11 is an overly complex and dated protocol, this article hits its mark well. My current desktop is actually running Wayland, but I still need X11 for a variety of reasons.

I see the development advantages of Wayland, but not the practical advantage as a user. And even as a developer, X11 is stable and well known (albeit definitely weird in places).

At the end of the day, things worked perfectly on X11 and my audio and video and various apps still glitch a lot on Wayland even after all these years. Most of that is not exactly Wayland's fault, but it highlights the advantage of X11. It's the devil you know (and everyone has worked out a lot of edge cases for).

lordofgibbons · 2h ago
The primary argument is to avoid fragmentation sprinkled with some other not-well-thought-through points. Distros aren't rolling back to X11. That ship has sailed. You can either help move things along, or drag your feet and increase fragmentation - the thing being complained about..

Everything under the "security" section of this article is so unbelievably wrong, that I'm not sure if it's worth anybody's time to refute one by one.

rtpg · 2h ago
I don't have a dog in this fight, I would be curious to know about the security stuff. Like is screen sharing a massive pain? Or is it "just" a prompt kind of like in the browser?

Stuff like global hotkeys sounds unfun tho

queenkjuul · 2h ago
The problem with screen sharing is if you're trying to share a headless remote machine with nobody at the console to approve the request. I don't think there's a proper solution there yet (which worries me, that's exactly how I run one of my machines at home)
viraptor · 2h ago
They're way too late now. The question is not about promotion anymore, just about when will the alternative to away. This page kinda made sense 2 years ago.
ElectricalUnion · 2h ago
> Hardware Support: Nvidia users face particular challenges, and many specialized hardware configurations simply don't work reliably.

> The XLibre project continues this legacy with active community development.

Guess what? Nvidia users also "face particular challenges", and many normal hardware configurations simply don't work reliably under XLibre either. I guess Linus was right, don't use Nvidia.

goku12 · 2h ago
The page describes it as if it was Wayland's mistake for causing Nvidia customers so much grief. It was Nvidia who insisted on basing Wayland on EGLStreams instead of on GBM like everybody else. Even the open source nouveau driver used GBM on Nvidia graphics. But even those problems are a few years in the past at this point after Nvidia decided to offer GBM support on their proprietary drivers. And consistent effort has been put into solving outstanding issues like screen glitches that were eventually resolved with explicit sync.

These complaints remind me of how Linux was criticized more than a decade ago for not not being compatible with proprietary applications, while foss applications worked just fine on proprietary platforms. While technically correct, it misses the whole point, seemingly rather intentionally.

lifthrasiir · 2h ago
Without necessarily supporting or opposing the statements (because I have no opinion about Wayland after all), the first public mention of this website seems to be [1].

[1] https://x.com/probonopd/status/1955387873659850828

throwabayhay · 2h ago
They mention macOS as "one platform with consistent APIs and behavior". But macOS (or NeXTStep, as it started out as), an actual UNIX system (certified!), chose not to use X11 to achieve that, but to entirely roll their own.
FloatArtifact · 2h ago
If Wayland would have simply provided the API, but not the underlying implementation (compositors Could have handled type implementation). They could have sidestepped this whole issue of fragmentation.
viknesh · 2h ago
Only a casual user of Linux desktop computing but my experience with ui stability seems to have gotten much worse after switching to Wayland.
ben0x539 · 2h ago
Unfortunate that this page largely shills XLibre, the X fork by the guy who got ejected from contributing to Xorg when he landed a bunch of code that was blatantly untested, leading to tons of his commits getting reverted. Like, I am not a fan of Wayland, still using X on my machine, but from what I've seen of his posting, this guy isn't great PR for the "X is fine actually" camp.
000ooo000 · 2h ago
Came here to say this.

>What We're Losing

>1987-2024: X11 Evolution

>37 years of continuous development, bug fixes, and feature additions. Stable, predictable, and extensively documented. The XLibre project continues this legacy with active community development.

This is a very charitable interpretation of the situation, and to suggest XLibre, which got forked 2 months ago, is the future is insane. Would be a different story if XLibre had been around a few years but 2 months is very young..

queenkjuul · 2h ago
Yeah once i saw XLibre I decided this was a joke, then it became apparent everything after the first section is AI i stopped reading entirely.

Wayback is the more promising project, if you can run an X11 display manager on Wayland you can still do XRDP and SSH, is my understanding. Those are the two features i really depend on

ugh123 · 2h ago
>Signatories

One guy.

do_not_redeem · 2h ago
A lot of wild quotes here

> Training Overhead

> $5,000-$15,000 per IT staff member for multi-compositor environment training

When's the last time your IT department gave you "multi-compositor training"?

> Software Replacement

> $500-$2000 in software replacement costs when tools don't work under Wayland

> Multi-Monitor

> X11: Reliable, consistent behavior

> Wayland: Compositor-dependent, often buggy

> Distro wars intensified: Choice of display server becomes a major differentiator

Definitely written by AI

superkuh · 2h ago
Well, most of the time applications don't work around the new problems wayland has introduced. Most applications on most wayland compositors cannot be used by people who need screen readers.

These days in many places supporting the differently abled legally is on the way out, but I still think it's a good thing. And yeah, the dollar figures smell, but this is a real problem that the waylands introduced by not being a single wayland. One that has so far only been addressed by GNOME in their compositor by introducing two entirely new acccesibility protocols with no support for the last 30 years of accesibility.

If you want to actually be following the guidelines of American's with Disabilities Act of 1990 this might matter to you.

DiabloD3 · 2h ago
Wow, what a crackpot website.

The ship sailed when Keith Packard, brilliant programmer and X.org project lead, decided that the era of X11 is over, and no further development will happen to the Xserver, and that the rootless Xserver for Wayland, in the near future, will be the only actually supported version.

This lead to the weird fork of Xlibre that is more about politics than it is about technological solutions.

Everyone has chosen to abandon the security nightmare that is X11, somehow it took 15 years instead of 5. But hey, we finally made it.

al3rez · 2h ago
i am using wayland on fedora 42 + kde, it's fine what are you talking about? if you stop running sway/hyrpland rices you'll be fine.
nixosbestos · 2h ago
I literally don't have the words to look down my nose at this. Former X11 contributor, compositor contributor, active distro maintainer. I just can't. I laughed. I scoffed. I incredulously looked at how much time someone with some braincells put into this.

I don't care, I'm saying it. Fuck your fragmentation whining. USERS WANT THEIR SHIT TO WORK. They expect high refresh monitors to work. They expect to be able to use a fking external monitor alongside their hidpi laptop. They need to be able to use actual fractional scaling, again with varying dpi monitors.

They want their shit to work reliably and not tear. Wayland delivers on this. Now. In a way X11 never EVER will.

God Jesus fuck i cannot believe how much people's time has been wasted on this bullshit useless banal conversation.

cratermoon · 2h ago
They expect screensavers to be able to lock the screen. https://web.archive.org/web/20250714073924/https://www.jwz.o...
nixosbestos · 1h ago
Yeah I'm so, just so upset XScreensaver can't lock a Wayland session. Jfc, good company there with a jwz link.

There's so much wrong with wanting or thinking an XScreensaver app would somehow work with a random Wayland compositor. But it does require ignorance of the exact security changes made to the model when moving from X11 to Wayland.

I can't. I can't. I should never waste my time in these threads.

Edit: i do also find it amusing how much of that manpage is dedicated to calling out how fragile and broken X11 is. You can't make this stuff up.

Edit2; I actually can't get over the irony of linking an app that notoriously has had a storied history because of X11's architecture. I can't name the number of time X11 sessions were not locked properly.

Whatever. Going to keep happily enjoying the basic features that every other desktop OS user expects that I get with KDE, gnome, cosmic, away, Niri, and more, in Wayland. Good luck unclutching y'all's pearls.