Can I finally start using Wayland in 2026? : linux

[–] LeFantome@programming.dev 44 points 2 days ago

As soon as an article starts by telling you that Wayland is 18 years old, you know where it is going to go. Yes, the very beginning of the Wayland experiment started long ago but it was not something anybody was expected to use most of that time.

The very first Wayland-only desktop environment ever, COSMIC, launched just last month. Should I write an article about how amazing Wayland is despite being so new?

A more neutral view might be to use Sway itself as a benchmark as it was one of the earliest Wayland compositors. The Sway project is less than 10 years old. The most complete Wayland environment available today, KDE Plasma, started to experiment with Wayland around then as well.

But Wayland has only really come into its own in the last 5 years with remaining edge cases regularly being addressed over the last two.

And we are now in a place where Wayland works for most people. The edge cases that remain are largely more exotic, like this guys 8K monitor. It would be dishonest to pretend Wayland’s evolution has been rapid. It has largely been dysfunctional. And real gaps remain. But it is already superior to X11 in many ways and the list of remaining use cases not well addressed continues to drop.

Yes, Wayland does a lot of stuff better than X11.

A Linux desktop user that started in Wayland a couple of years ago would be able to write a similarly negative article about Xorg if they tried to switch to it. The two systems are different. Neither is absolutely better than the other today. But Wayland is improving and Xorg is not.

And more than half of Linux desktop users run Wayland now. And 4 out of 5 new Linux desktop users start on Wayland and never switch. Linux is a Wayland first OS. So, when articles like this complain about how long it would take to reconfigure their systems for Wayland, they miss an important point. The Wayland way is the “correct” way now, or at least the most common way. The X11 config is the weird one.

And one of the things Wayland does better is run Wayland apps. The foot terminal mentioned in this article cannot be run on X11 at all. It is Wayland only. All of the apps an X user tries on Wayland will at least run. Not so the other way around.

When GNOME and KDE shed their X11 compatibility, they will be able to more freely innovate Wayland only features. As that starts to happen, it will become more normal to create Wayland only applications. This won’t be a problem as 80 percent or more of Linux desktop uses will be using Wayland-only desktop environments.

And that is what will ultimately doom X11. It will become impractical to run and X server instead of Wayland due to the important Wayland apps that cannot run on such a desktop.

Anyway, it was a well written article and mostly fair. It will be very interesting to see how the set of requirements fares 1 - 2 years from now. GNOME and KDE will be Wayland only. COSMIC will have matured. Wayland compositors will have standardized a bit.

I suspect that things will be looking very nice.

[–] TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 22 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I've been using Wayland for years (2019), and I've not had any problems aside from Discord screen sharing, which was fixed a while back.

That's on AMD hardware, mind.

Whenever I've used X11 since, it's felt janky and not smooth. Random bugs, tearing, issues with multi monitor, issues with trackpads, etc.

[–] A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 3 points 2 days ago

That’s on AMD hardware, mind.

How is wayland on (older) intel CPUs/GPUs nowadays?

[–] ikidd@lemmy.world 26 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I've installed wayland based DEs on all sorts of cheap-shit, 2013 era hardware and never have a problem. IDK what sort of janky crap it takes to have to run X11 still. A 90s SpeakNSpell?

[–] Sxan@piefed.zip 0 points 1 day ago

I run X11 on every computer I own which isn't headless. Þe most recent is a new AMD Ryzen from early þis year, to þe oldest I have, an ODroid I bought back in 2014. I haven't had X not work in 20 years.

[–] ThomasWilliams@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Before giving my verdict on this Wayland/sway experiment, let me explain that my experience on X11/i3 is really good. I don’t see any tearing or other artifacts or glitches in my day-to-day computer usage. I don’t use a compositor, so my input latency is really good

But I thought X11 didn't have compositors ? Just a window manager.

[–] schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 21 hours ago

wot? I thought compiz was fairly well known but maybe I haven't kept up with what is or isn't well known nowadays, been using Linux for too long :D

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compositing_manager#X11_and_Wayland

[–] dr_robotBones@reddthat.com 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

You can get a third-party compositor such as picom or distros such as KDE Plasma will come with their own. They can cause problems in my experience, do not recommend using them.

[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Author sounds like the problem. Simple obstacles to making it work just fine in the way that you refuse to address, so this is on you.

[–] sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyz 15 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Seemed like he outlined everything he did and had decent points. I dislike articles that say "Here's what you're doing wrong" or "This GPL app is better than that GPL app". But this one seems much more of a "This is what I do and how I do it". I enjoy those. He's not saying it for everyone, just his use cases and results.

[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

2nd paragraph:

Unfortunately, the driver support situation remained poor for many years. With nVidia graphics cards, which are the only cards that support my 8K monitor, Wayland would either not work at all or exhibit heavy graphics glitches and crashes.

So answering the headline question: it would work if you just stopped using the 8k monitor

[–] kartoffelsaft@programming.dev 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

If your argument for Wayland is "stop using thousands of dollars in hardware to get it working", then that's not going to convince anyone. He doesn't address that as a solution because that's obviously a last resort.

[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world -3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

No, it's actually the opposite. He has an 8k monitor. Get rid of that, and then he has no blockers to using things the way he wants. Pretty simple solution.

If you buy hardware that is wildly incompatible with almost everything, then there's your problem. You don't buy things knowing it's incompatible, and then wait for compatibility to come around whilst complaining about it UNLESS you intend to buy it to put some effort into making it work on your own.

That's the entire point of this ecosystem and being able to upstream fixes.

[–] DarkMetatron@feddit.org 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It is not wildly incompatible with almost everything, it works perfectly fine his current X11 setup, and any system or setup that has the goal to replace X11 should at least should support all physical displays that X11 supports. And a modern replacement should have no issues with modern hardware.

[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 0 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Apparently you didn't read his own referenced write-up on that: https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2017-12-11-dell-up3218k/

Exactly as I described.

[–] DarkMetatron@feddit.org 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Not sure what you mean but:

With the nVidia driver now working per se with Wayland, unfortunately that’s still not good enough to use Wayland in my setup: my Dell UP3218K monitor requires two DisplayPort 1.4 connections with MST (Multi Stream Transport) and TILE support. This combination worked just fine under X11 for the last 8+ years.

As he said, it worked in X11 but not in Wayland.

[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Then you didn't read it. He linked it right at the top of the post.

[–] DarkMetatron@feddit.org 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Oh i read both articles and I still have no clue why it would invalidate my point. Please enlighten my stupid little mind with some proper context and not only a link to a long document.

[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 0 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Your comment to me is that he was NOT buying hardware incompatible with anything but Wayland, and you were responding to my point that he most definitely was...because we quite literally wrote about it himself in 2017 when he got said hardware.

Not sure where your entitled sarcasm comes from when you're just not reading anything in the first place. His assertions, not even mine.

[–] tyler@programming.dev 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

he got hardware that worked with the default setup for the majority of linux DEs at the time... he literally followed your suggestion and has been waiting for support for it in wayland for a decade.

this has to be the dumbest argument I've seen in a few months on here. you're literally telling someone to sell their car because you want them to switch to a different kind of engine that currently isn't compatible with their car, even though they haven't wanted to switch to a new engine for a decade.

[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world -2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Wow, you must be really bad at everything then.

What I'm saying is you don't by a fucking car before they build the roads to the area you want to drive to. Using your analogy which even you can't make work 🤣

[–] tyler@programming.dev 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

He didn’t. He wanted to use x11. You are completely incapable of reading. My analogy makes more sense because it’s describing what he did.

[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 0 points 1 day ago

If you're too stupid to click a fucking link at the top of the article, then read my very simple comment detailing his history with this from 2017---not 2025---then it is you can't read, and are just flailing and pathetic here. Can't help you, kid.

[–] DarkMetatron@feddit.org 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Well and his current articel from 8 years later says that it worked with X11 for years, so what? Maybe your arguments are a bit out of date? Information can be obsolete after nearly a decade.

[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's literally part of the same article. Right there. Click above. Second paragraph. Link right there. Talking about buying the hardware I years ago. The framing of the entire article. The point of the thing. The point of my comment. Don't know how much more clear it could possibly be.

Are you trying to just ignore it? Revisionist history of a blog entry? Lololz. Sad, kid.

[–] DarkMetatron@feddit.org 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I am not more ignoring it then you are ignoring the fact that the hardware article is 8 years old and that the current article makes part of the old one obsolete.

[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 1 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

It's literally the framing of the article. It's in the setup of the article. You want to pick and choose the content of the writing to have your point come true, go ahead and be that pathetic. I won't even try and stop you. 🤣

[–] DarkMetatron@feddit.org 1 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

All I am saying is that his so ultra specific hardware works flawless under X11 and that a new solution that plans to replace the old one should support at least the same displays, that should be the MVP - don't be worse then the old cruft.

And I still don't see where the 8 years old article would say anything otherwise, at least nothing that was not replaced by info from the more recent article. And yes, he has linked his old article in the new one but that doesn't mean that every single sentence in it is still fully valid after all those years.

[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 2 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

And if you're new to this world, my point stands exactly as you're describing: you don't buy hardware that is wildly incompatible with everything, and then complain when it doesn't work. Which is what he's doing here.

Yes, I understand he's familiar with this world through his FOSS efforts, and yes, I get that it worked under X11 (only the display server and not most apps at the time, but I digress), but my point still stands.

The tone of the writing is an impatient "I'M STILL WAITING OVER HEEEERE", and the response should be "Valid, but you're going to continue waiting, so deal with it." because UNLESS you intend to help contribute and fix the problem yourself, you're at the whim of capacity of the project that is working on whatever features you need working. You're getting it for free, not contributing, and still complaining.

I find nothing more insufferable than people who do this exact same thing, and are extreme outliers to begin with. You know how many people have 8k monitors even to this day? Less than 1%, and I'll wager that the vast majority of them don't run in 8k resolution, because why? Literally nothing you're going to touch - even in video production - is going to use it.

[–] DarkMetatron@feddit.org 1 points 21 hours ago

There is a lot of valid points there yes, still don't see where the old article would be relevant for those though, and I think that I really can't say a lot against your arguments in general. All is clear now! Thank you for this longer clarifiation and have a nice day!

[–] y0kai@anarchist.nexus 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

for real. Been using wayland on NixOS with nvidia gpu for several months now without issue. The only problem's I've had are with sway, because their devs hate nvidia and refuse to support it, and i refuse to use nouveau. Solution: don't use sway.

[–] Samueru_sama@programming.dev 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I bought an AMD gpu to use sway and it is still broken, don't use sway.

[–] victorz@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Broken in what way? I only used it a short while years ago and didn't notice anything.

Using Niri now on an AMD GPU with great success, it's working great. Using it for work, gaming, everything I did with i3 and Hyprland before it.

[–] Samueru_sama@programming.dev 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Also using the yuzu works (eden and citron) performance is awful, like half the FPS I used to get on i3wm, this also happens in hyprland but not in plasma, apparently this is because the two window managers lack fifo v1 (hyprland did add it a few months ago, I need to check if it works better now).