Wayland has a bright future ahead: The move from Xorg to Wayland had a rough start, but things have improved, and there is an exciting roadmap for the future.
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You can use Meta or Super for a more agnostic keycode
I thought "Meta" was AltGr and Super is the "windows key".
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Things like desktop automation, screen sharing, screen recording, remote desktop etc. are incredibly broken, with no hope in sight because the core design of Wayland simply didn't account for them(!?), apparently.
Add to that the decision to push everything downstream into compositors, which led to widespread feature fragmentation and duplicated effort.
Add to that antagonizing the largest graphics chipset manufacturer (by usage among Linux desktop users) for no good reason. Nvidia has never had an incentive to cater to the Linux desktop, so Linux desktop users sending them bad vibes is... neither here nor there. It certainly won't make them move faster.
Add to that the million little bugs that crop up when you try to use Wayland with any of the desktop apps whose developers aren't snorting the Koolaid and not dedicating oustanding effort to catching up to Wayland – which is most of them.
people dont like change
I cannot use Wayland.
I'm an average Linux desktop user, who has an Nvidia card, has no need for Wayland "security", doesn't have multiple monitors with different refresh rates, uses desktop automation, screen sharing, screen recording, remote desktop on a daily basis, and uses lots of apps which don't work perfectly with Wayland.
...how and why would I subject myself to it? I'd have to be a masochist.
Are you a Debian Stable user perhaps? It feels like you have been trapped on an island alone and are not aware that WWII is over.
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Now consider that most enterprises are about five years behind that. Takes a few years before what’s available in Fedora trickles down to RHEL, and a few more years before it’s rolled out to clients. Ubuntu is on a similar timeline.
The fixes you got two years ago might be rolled out in 3 years in these places. Oh, and these are the people forking up much of the money for the Wayland development efforts. The current state of Wayland if you pay for it is kinda meh.
RHEL 9 defaulted to Wayland in 2022. RHEL 10 will not even include Xorg.
I agree that businesses lag, often by years. So the fact that RHEL is so far along in the Wayland transition kind of shows how out-of-date the anti-Wayland rhetoric is.
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"rough start" is putting it mildly. 🤭
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Your point is that it is still rough and then you bring up a bunch of stuff that is no longer an issue.
NVIDIA in particular is basically a solved problem with both explicit sync and open source kernel modules as the default from NVIDIA themselves.
Rustdesk and Waypipe are probably going to eat into your billion dollars (and network transparency laments).
As stated in the article, opt-out vsync is already a thing (though not widely implemented yet).
I have not used GNOME in a while but KDE on Wayland is great. And the roadmap certainly looks a lot nicer than xorg’s.
I was on a video call in Wayland an hour ago. I shared my screen.
If that is your full list, I think you just made the case that Wayland is in good shape.
Yeah, the few thousand users I managed desktops for will remain on X for the next few years last I heard from my old colleagues.
Because of my points above
But good that your laptop works now and that I can help my grandma over teamviewer again.
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As an average desktop user, I've run into very little pushback on Wayland. Its made huge leaps in a short amount of time.
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RHEL 9 defaulted to Wayland in 2022. RHEL 10 will not even include Xorg.
I agree that businesses lag, often by years. So the fact that RHEL is so far along in the Wayland transition kind of shows how out-of-date the anti-Wayland rhetoric is.
Exactly my point. The issues people consider ”solved” with wayland today will be solved in production in 3-5 years.
People are still running RHEL 7, and Wayland in RHEL 9 isn’t that polished. In 4-5 years when RHEL 10 lands, it might start to be usable. Oh right, then we need another few years for vendors to port garbage software that’s absolutely mission critical and barely works on Xorg, sure as fuck won’t work in xwayland. I’m betting several large RHEL-clients will either remain on RHEL8 far past EOL or just switch to alternative distros.
Basically, Xorg might be dead, but in some (paying commercial) contexts, Wayland won’t be a viable option within the next 5-10 years.
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Rustdesk is an alright remote desktop option, although it definitely far from perfect. Wayland offers the support remote desktop needs, this is just up to someone wanting a solution enough to make it.
I agree that the "every frame being perfect" thing was dumb, but tearing support exists so its not really a complaint anymore.
Nvidia does work fine on every major Wayland implementation.
Screensharing works fine.
I understand the disappointment in how long Wayland is taking to be a perfect replacement to X11, but a proper replacement should absolutely not be rushed. X11 released 40 years ago, 15 years to make a replacement with better security and more features is fine.
Wayland has put a huge emphasis on improved security, which is also one of the biggest reasons some features have taken so long. This is a good thing, rushing insecure implementations of features is a horrible idea for modern software that will hopefully last a long time.
In its current state, Wayland is already good for the large majority of use cases.
What I’ve seen of rustdesk so far is that it’s absolutely not even close to the options available for X. It replaces TeamViewer, not thin clients.
You would need the following to get viability in my eyes:
- Multiple users per server (~50 users)
- Enterprise SSO authentication, working kerberos on desktop
- Good and easily deployable native clients for Windows, Linux and Mac, plus html5 client
- Performant headless software rendered desktops
- GPU acceleration possible but not required
- Clustering, HA control plane, load balancing
- Configuration management available
This isn’t even an edge case. Current and upcoming regulations on information security drags the entire industry this way. Medical, research, defence, banking, basically every regulated landscape gets easier to work in when going down this route. Close to zero worries about endpoint security. Microsoft is working hard on this. It’s easy to do with X. And the best thing on Wayland is RustDesk? As stated earlier, these issues were brought up and discarded as FUD in 2008, and here we are.
Wayland isn’t a better replacement, after 15 years it’s still not a replacement. The Wayland implementations certainly haven’t been rushed, but the architecture was. At this point, fucking Arcan will be viable before Wayland.
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The gnome implementation that I'm forced to use is god damn awful. This whole eventbus implementation is so bad, it misses events and doesn't always register key-up, when I'm switching workspaces. I do it a lot, and the key gets stuck spamming the same letter, because it didn't register key up!! Hell sometimes it doesn't register keydown, super annoying when writing passwords.
Random crashes of gnome happens more often than I would like to admit, and all that you've been working on is gone aswell. What a garbage design, why the fuck should the wm own the processes, I swear the wayland people live on a another planet.
And the whole permissions thing to ensure privacy, mf this is linux, stop making me do workarounds for shit that you won't allow, because you haven't implemented the correct support for it.
I'm running Ubuntu 24.04, thing fucking sucks, I'm forced by work. Dude x11, just worked, like Wayland solved anything at all.
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Whats rough?
Not sure if it was a kde issue or a wayland issue, but I tried it last year and had trouble with cursor locking.
Virtualbox had issues with the input being intermittent, and my mouse would move off the screen while gaming.
It might be fixed now, but I don't plan on trying it again for another few years, because what I'm using works for me.
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The gnome implementation that I'm forced to use is god damn awful. This whole eventbus implementation is so bad, it misses events and doesn't always register key-up, when I'm switching workspaces. I do it a lot, and the key gets stuck spamming the same letter, because it didn't register key up!! Hell sometimes it doesn't register keydown, super annoying when writing passwords.
Random crashes of gnome happens more often than I would like to admit, and all that you've been working on is gone aswell. What a garbage design, why the fuck should the wm own the processes, I swear the wayland people live on a another planet.
And the whole permissions thing to ensure privacy, mf this is linux, stop making me do workarounds for shit that you won't allow, because you haven't implemented the correct support for it.
I'm running Ubuntu 24.04, thing fucking sucks, I'm forced by work. Dude x11, just worked, like Wayland solved anything at all.
X11 absolutely didn't just work, hence Wayland's entire existence and rapid adoption once it was mature enough to function. Xorg's decades old cobbles together code ase of awkward fixes for obscure issues and random contributions that had to be repeatedly fixed in every other patch is infamous as an example of how not to do FOSS software over time, and serves as a fatal warning to all open source projects.
Wayland has issues, and those issues are being fixed. Slow updating distros, as always, suffer the most with new software and paradigms. But whining about it hardly helps. This is foss land, contribute or report, never complain.
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Exactly my point. The issues people consider ”solved” with wayland today will be solved in production in 3-5 years.
People are still running RHEL 7, and Wayland in RHEL 9 isn’t that polished. In 4-5 years when RHEL 10 lands, it might start to be usable. Oh right, then we need another few years for vendors to port garbage software that’s absolutely mission critical and barely works on Xorg, sure as fuck won’t work in xwayland. I’m betting several large RHEL-clients will either remain on RHEL8 far past EOL or just switch to alternative distros.
Basically, Xorg might be dead, but in some (paying commercial) contexts, Wayland won’t be a viable option within the next 5-10 years.
What you're describing aren't issues with Wayland.
Your complaints are that you're using old versions and poorly designed software.
Those aren't Wayland issues they're poor management and lack of investment
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The gnome implementation that I'm forced to use is god damn awful. This whole eventbus implementation is so bad, it misses events and doesn't always register key-up, when I'm switching workspaces. I do it a lot, and the key gets stuck spamming the same letter, because it didn't register key up!! Hell sometimes it doesn't register keydown, super annoying when writing passwords.
Random crashes of gnome happens more often than I would like to admit, and all that you've been working on is gone aswell. What a garbage design, why the fuck should the wm own the processes, I swear the wayland people live on a another planet.
And the whole permissions thing to ensure privacy, mf this is linux, stop making me do workarounds for shit that you won't allow, because you haven't implemented the correct support for it.
I'm running Ubuntu 24.04, thing fucking sucks, I'm forced by work. Dude x11, just worked, like Wayland solved anything at all.
I've been using Wayland for years and I have no idea of what you are talking about (regarding the key-up, key-down issue, but I also haven't noticed any crash attributable to Wayland, specifically). Did the same computer you are using work with X11, and stopped working properly after an update? Could it be a hardware or driver issue? Also, has Canonical removed the X session from Ubuntu 24.04, or using Wayland is a company policy?
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Now consider that most enterprises are about five years behind that. Takes a few years before what’s available in Fedora trickles down to RHEL, and a few more years before it’s rolled out to clients. Ubuntu is on a similar timeline.
The fixes you got two years ago might be rolled out in 3 years in these places. Oh, and these are the people forking up much of the money for the Wayland development efforts. The current state of Wayland if you pay for it is kinda meh.
Those are terribly run enterprises. I work for a giant multinational that is widely considered to be obsolete tech-wise ... I'm on fedora 42 on my work laptop. The team responsible for vetting, security and customising the deployment was ready day one.
Its 3-4 people catering for the ~2-3000 users that use the os internally.
I get the need for stability and repeatability in enterprise. I'm a sysadmin for more than 20 years.
That 3 year timeline could maybe move up a bit, even windows deployments are more or less up to date. Why would't linux be?Lastly, the more resistance to wayland, the longer it will take for it to reach a level of polish to where even you would aprove of.
When the switch became inevitable (distros defaulting, dropping x11), I installed it, lived with its crappy issues back then, reported said issues and moved on with my day.
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Yeah it's at the point where i'm wondering if i still even need xorg. I'm still keeping it around just in case for now, but i could very easily purge it from my system anytime since i'm using nixos and all my xorg related settings are in a specific file. The main pet peeve i have with wayland is gaming related, and should hopefully improve when wine and proton go native wayland. I have a dual monitor setup and games always choose the wrong monitor by default, which means i can only use the resolution and refreshrate of the secondary monitor. I have a keybind to set the primary xwayland monitor with xrandr, which solves the problem, but it is a bit hacky. I also need to toggle vrr on and off with a keybind because it causes flickering on my monitor. It's a bit annoying but atleast it works, on xorg you can't even use vrr with multi monitor to begin with.
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god i wish. half of my X11 apps don't work, some that used to keep breaking without reason.
Steam works through the XWayland compatibility layer
unless you use an environment that doesn't support XWayland, like niri. xwayland-sattelite used to be the easier route in that case but that seems to be broken now.
Issue is already closed though and might have more to do with xwayland itself it seems. Also fwiw, i just tested steam on niri with xwayland-satellite a few weeks ago and it worked just fine.
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I dunno why but I can't even log into KDE when I select wayland. The screen just turns black and unresponsive
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The gnome implementation that I'm forced to use is god damn awful. This whole eventbus implementation is so bad, it misses events and doesn't always register key-up, when I'm switching workspaces. I do it a lot, and the key gets stuck spamming the same letter, because it didn't register key up!! Hell sometimes it doesn't register keydown, super annoying when writing passwords.
Random crashes of gnome happens more often than I would like to admit, and all that you've been working on is gone aswell. What a garbage design, why the fuck should the wm own the processes, I swear the wayland people live on a another planet.
And the whole permissions thing to ensure privacy, mf this is linux, stop making me do workarounds for shit that you won't allow, because you haven't implemented the correct support for it.
I'm running Ubuntu 24.04, thing fucking sucks, I'm forced by work. Dude x11, just worked, like Wayland solved anything at all.
hard disagree about the permissions. If I want to run closed source programs like games, discord, zoom or whatever, I like knowing they can't log all my keys, take screenshots or even run their own version of windows recall without my explicit permission
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I dunno why but I can't even log into KDE when I select wayland. The screen just turns black and unresponsive
Something similar happens to me on my desktop (debian 13) - it goes black then brings me back to the login screen. But in my case it's probably the nvidia drivers (proprietary). Not certain, though. Still happy on X11 for the meantime.
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hard disagree about the permissions. If I want to run closed source programs like games, discord, zoom or whatever, I like knowing they can't log all my keys, take screenshots or even run their own version of windows recall without my explicit permission
yeah. the thing with the stuck keys and crashes is not normal. I've never experienced it (though I wanted to restart the window manager once), but also I'm using KDE
and you know what? if you still need x11 for some things, log in on a 2nd TTY to another user with an x11 session. you can then switch the active TTY to use the other. Though I admit, I have no idea how the 2 users' sound system work together
