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  • Look, the people over at Wayland made a solid protocol, sure. But for all the time and effort they've put into getting it to the state it's in today, it's going to take a long while for all the apps, DEs, and TWMs to be ready. It took so long for the Linux desktop to get to the state it is on X11, which, for all it's flaws, seems to be easier to develop for than Wayland.

    Wacom Drivers, Nvidia Drivers, DE-Agnostic screensharing, screenshot, eyedropper tools are all in various states of not working/sort of working/working on wayland. This simply isn't the case with X11. They all just work. That's kind of a big win for X11 over Wayland.

    It doesn't matter how light weight and more secure your protocol is if you can't use the tools you need to get the jobs you need done, whatever those jobs are. That is literally what computers are for at the end of the day, not to lord our superiority over others because our choice of tools are somehow better.

    Yes Wayland is the future, but to say "Wayland is ready" while also saying "many of the apps for Wayland are not ready" ends up meaning that wayland is NOT ready.

    Until the transition between X and Wayland is seamless (no adjusting environment variables), saying we should all just move to Wayland cuz ”is the future" are engaging in the same FOMO tactics that crytpo and AI bros have been doing for years. Fuck that noise.

    You are not somehow better because you use Wayland. And yeah yeah, shots fired, down votes incoming. Come at me tech daddy.

  • Screen sharing is still a pain in my experience. I'm a tiling window manager guy. I used i3 for years. Switched to sway, but have issues because xdg-desktop-portal-wlr can't do application sharing, only entire screen sharing. Well I have a ultra ultra wide screen, so people can't see shit on normal monitors when I try to share my screen. So at work, where I regularly have video conferences, I'm constantly changing my screen resolution so that I can screen share something that looks OK to others, but 1980x1024 looks ridiculous on my end on my ultrawide.

    Hyperland can share applications and even regions, which is awesome, and I tested it successfully on my home gentoo system, but it only worked on Firefox. Didn't work for my jitsi electron app and didn't work in qutebrowser. And hyperland isn't easily installable on Ubuntu which is what I run for work because my work computer needs to just werk (gentoo is probably even more stable but I can't mess with long complie upgrades at work and some corporate software is only available as .debs)

    So yea my life would honestly be easier if I just stuck with i3 everywhere but I'm stubbornly trying to use Wayland because I know it's the future but don't kid yourselves, it is a pain in the ass

  • Sometimes apps just don't work properly in Wayland, I have two development VMs with Ubuntu, and in both cases I had to switch to X11 because of UI issues with Wayland and eclipse plugins or crashes when I closed a terminal window.

    On the other hand I use Wayland on my own desktop and have not seen any problems.

  • Using a 3060 on Wayland, Ubuntu LTS. Some performance issues here and there, big problem I discovered is zoom screen sharing pretty much not working.

    I login with my x session when I know I'll need to present something.

  • I can't complain, installed Fedora 39 Kinoite and everything is working great. The only thing I have noticed is that drag and drop from dolphin into some flatpak applications is not working; But that is pretty much it and I am not even sure if Wayland is causing this. This is honestly the most usable Linux has ever been for me.

  • xdotool. I just spent a non zero amount of time building and setting up ydotool (a similar tool that works on Wayland) as a systemd service on my raspberry pi. Made me appreciate how nice it is to just install a thing and have it work flawlessly even after a reboot and all you ever did to set it up was a single installation command that completed in like 3 seconds.

  • I can't run console apps like jdupes through mtp protocol in wayland which is very troublesome for me since i using it alot, but i successfully can run it in xorg because it mounts as a folder not as protocol, and yes I've tried to use gui "open this folder in terminal" in wayland programs like jdupes still don't work through mtp but in xorg they do regardless of how i do it

  • I got one of those NUCs at work that has new Intel XE integrated graphics. X11 works amazing, but wayland operates like a slideshow when I move windows around. Never looked much into it, just went to X11 and never went back.

  • Xorg? Wayland? Seems like I lack context to understand that competition.

    My distro came wirh Cinnamon, and it died two times on my setup after updates - black screen after login - before I installed Xfce instead and still use it daily. I love that unlike Windows you can just jump ships and unsubscribe from what you dislike. This meme draws that freedom as something bad. It's not healthy to the community...

    ... but if there would be a DE war, Xpect frequent combat engagements, as the way to your land and ten of your HQs are marked with red Xs on my map.

    • This is a bit different to DEs. X11 and Wayland are display server protocols. For some time all DEs used X11, but it wasn't perfect and had some issues, so some folks came up with Wayland to replace it. I don't know a lot about the differences but one example I have is that you can't have two monitors with different resolution scaling on X11. Wayland solves that issue.

      X11 has been around for a long time, though, and does a lot of stuff, probably more stuff than a display server should. and so a lot of Linux programs have come to rely on those things. This means that the change to Wayland is not straight forward, it meant rewriting a whole bunch of X11 functionality that Wayland would never add.

      This will probably be a good thing in the long run, but as of now a lot of people are still not ready to change. And to mirror your sentiment, nor should they have to.

      Also: I probably don't know as much about this topic as some others, so correct me at will.

      • I learnt some things reading you, thank you. As a newbie to Linux I'm not the one to argue anything. But I had an urge to shitpost, and my last sentence comes from an abbreviature of XFCE and references both Wayland and X11. I'm an artist more than I'm a thinker.

    • Xorg and Wayland are two protocols every Desktop Environment use and is, from my limited knowledge on it, the thing that tells the DE how to behave and display windows on your screen. Since 1984, the Linux world uses Xorg (now at the 11 edition: X11) but now, there is a massive transition towards a protocol more secure and focused around privacy called Wayland because first, it's objectively better, and because X11 will soon be deprecated/abandoned. But due to its way of handling things (like for example, windows can't see each other: they think they're alone on the PC, preventing some programs from spying on each others but also preventing them to communicate with each other, like to share screen or screenshot. We have portals to solve that now though, so no worries), Wayland struggle to convince everybody and therefore is heavily criticized, mostly because it's sort of being forced due to the Xorg team letting the project die to develop Wayland, the successor, waiting for every distros and their DE to adopt it.

      But despite not directly mentioning those protocols, you're right by saying "you can just jump ships and unsubscribe from what you dislike" because honestly, nobody's preventing people from continuing to use Xorg and groups from continuing the development of DE based on Xorg or simply continuing the Xorg project, but if they want to progress and evolve with the rest of the world, they will have to switch to Wayland eventually.

244 comments