Then it should be proven that proposed alternative to Wayland is not mediocre or worse in issues Wayland is solving. Overall the post looks very shortsighted in looking at these issues from very narrow perspective, seemingly not realizing problems that need solving are much wider and not limited to one use case.
Wayland surely is not perfect and needs development (which lately seems to be moving at better pace), but I'm not convinced at all proposed alternative is better.
Ironically, this is the complaint many of us have about the development of Wayland.
In the past there were some problems with protocols not being accepted fast enough, those issues were more organizational than technical. But that seems to have been finally resolved not so long ago and a bunch of really useful protocols were accepted recently.
I feel for people who are bitten by Wayland, but there's a really vocal negative group on here that I suspect are very much in the minority. Much like the switch from init to system, most people are fine with it.
Wayland works for the vast majority of people, and it's improving steadily. One of the main differences that leads people to complain is that in X, there wasn't any security between applications, and anyone could write a quick hack that makes things work for them (e.g. watch the keyboard for a key globally, or mirror the display remotely). In Wayland, there's no escape hatch: either the desktop environment needs to handle something, or you need to add a protocol for it. People experiment with new protocols all the time, but the Wayland project itself is (by design) slow and careful about adopting extensions.
It is understandable to wish for simpler times. But retrocomputing isn't a path forward here.
And the remote application/desktop story is terrible.
I won't consider it until remote is at least as good or better than Xorg, and I don't foresee that happening in my lifetime (literally,) so Wayland will remain a bugbear I'll continue ignoring. I don't know and can't imagine how a recently promulgated desktop GUI platform that doesn't have remote as top priority came to be, but they weren't interested in anything I care about.
I welcome Xlibre. It's not the first X fork, and the previous ones turned out great, as far as I'm concerned.
You may wish to check the current status. (If you are not a GNOME fan, try KDE; if you are not a GNOME and KDE fan, I'd still suggest checking the quality of their features for the things you care about, to confirm what a Wayland-based environment is capable of; don't judge the quality of X11 by trying an equivalent of twm.)
I think that's simply false. Wayland is a protocol. What's slow or fast is compositors implementation. And there are good ones that aren't slow / less responsive etc.
And I don’t imply the quality of code is good or not, I have no idea.
source comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44200000
Well it's the code that matters. Not what their beliefs are.
code is also garbage
Well it's the thought that's important.
Guess "you can't have one without the other".
But it’s just a supposition at this stage, let’s see on the next’s month if it a complete mess or if it’s the XFree86 to Xorg transition
The code of conduct: https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/blob/master/CODE_OF_COND...
Update - We are investigating reports of issues with many services impacting segments of customers. We will continue to keep users updated on progress towards mitigation. Jun 17, 2025 - 19:53 UTC
I have been around long enough (enduring the big swinging dicks) to understand why they are required.
The statements of inclusion in the README when the principal author campaigns against it indicates a dire lack of social skills. What hope is there for this?
I mostly agree with the critisisms of Wayland, I too have had to uninstall it to get what I need, but this all seems worse
Good luck to them, but I have no confidence
For reasons I've never understood politics started invading open source about 10 years ago. What's weird is that these political ideas all seem to be highly aligned and this is the first major project that breaks that alignment.
Personally I'd prefer to see the politics, on both sides, disappear forever. It only pollutes the engineering and it fails to be convincing or meaningful in any other context.
> doesn't inspire confidence in longevity.
There are forces trying to kill X11 for their own internal reasons. I think as long as there is a project that is trying to maintain it, it will be successful, political warts and all.
It's particularly the reactionary stuff that concerns me when it comes to projects like this. When someone's motivation is tied to short-lived movements of social energy like that, I don't trust them to have a long term vision or investment in a project.
It's hard to imagine an energy that's apparently existed for 12 years and still going being described as "short-lived." Perhaps it's really just unfamiliar and that's why it seems so concerning?
No, you're thinking of “Free Software” — “Open Source” was explicitly pro-corporate from the moment the term was coined. OSI themselves will tell you that “open source” as we know it was a product of AOL's desire to get people to work for them for free: https://opensource.org/history
“The [February 3rd, 1998] conferees believed the pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape to release their code illustrated a valuable way to engage with potential software users and developers, and convince them to create and improve source code by participating in an engaged community. The conferees also believed that it would be useful to have a single label that identified this approach and distinguished it from the philosophically- and politically-focused label ‘free software.’”
Some people choose to make open source political and that's their right, but it isn't inherently political. That is a choice one makes.
You may not have political opinions but you took political action....
For example, the removal of Jerry Pournelle's free account at MIT because he kept mentioning ARPANET in his column in Byte magazine. Then he accused MIT's sysadmins of being communists who wanted to destroy America's military...
That was 1985. The X project started the year before that.
Definitely don't see this project having legs or at the very least not advancing very far.
I occasionally write native GUI apps (not electron-based), and for the current automation application I am working on Wayland is an absolute non-starter[1].
Like the other poster, every few years I would give Wayland a try, but as of today, 17-June-2025, Wayland is still lacking features that I want.
I have no objection to using it, I just need it to be a replacement for X.
[1] My application uses X11 FakeEvent. Did not find a similar thing for Wayland.
But yes, there are use cases it doesn't cover. Example. My elderly mom uses Linux laptops that I've rigged to (1) always have an SSH connection open to my server machine, with reverse tunnels, and (2) run x0vncserver.
Modern security people would cringe, but this is the real world. I can open her desktop any time, from 700km away, and fix serious disasters like: She accidentally double-clicked an email and it opened up in a tab that obscures her message list (Thunderbird). This has worked very well to keep her online and happily emailing.
Where is the equivalent for Wayland? I get the impression that "it shouldn't exist because security" and therefore won't. Luckily, the show's not over yet. I run Fedora. The main spin won't do it any more, but the MATE spin is perfect. It comes up in MATE and it uses X! Still happy. Other laptop installations I have running probably use Wayland and as long as nothing breaks, I don't care.
I periodically retry Wayland, and it does seem to be improving, albeit slowly. There are a few significant things that just aren't there, but mostly it feels like death by a thousand paper-cuts. I can't dock toolbars; I can't use xdotools; screenshares are flaky; I can't click and drag to upload to browsers.
I could live with Wayland, but the experience is still superior (for my use-cases) with X11.
For wlroots systems there's wayvnc.
But why stop there, and cope with a multi-user environment? Just boot into single user mode and "chmod a+rwx / -R". A lot of other /problems/ solved too.
/S
The correct response to "All applications can spoof keypresses or act as a keylogger" is "Okay, force user to grant permission before an application does this".
The Wayland response is "No application should be allowed to do this".
Whether you like it or not, sometimes users actually want functionality that you deem is insecure, and you gotta find a way to deliver what Windows, MacOS and X11 all deliver.
Also it's not like global hotkeys don't exist in Wayland.
That's the point - applications that need to perform malicious looking (but not actually) activity like intercepting or injecting keyboard inputs already work on X! What we are talking about is them not working on Wayland!
> Also it's not like global hotkeys don't exist in Wayland.
There are more features than simply mapping hotkeys, remapping keyboards, etc which already work on consumer computers, such as Windows, MacOS and X. What we are asking for when we complain about Wayland is the same functionality that already exists on Windows, MacOS and X.
Whether the Waylan devs think that the requests are unreasonable or not is, frankly, irrelevant. When everyone but Wayland supports something, the Wayland developers have to justify their decision to go against the norm.
The people asking for the norm typically don't need to justify why they want the norm.
> Wayland cannot do (or do well) tons of things:
> VNC server
> remote desktop
I don't regularly use either of these so I cannot attest to whether they work on wayland.
> SSH X forwarding
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe
> custom keyboard bindings
I currently have caps lock bound to esc
> numerous accessibility options
This is likely true
> legacy software
xwayland
> absolute desktop positioning
Once again, I'm running absolute desktop positioning right now
> screen sharing and recording
I just installed and ran obs, told it to use screen capture as a source, it recorded fine
> CAD/EDA tools
CAD software only runs on windows anyway. For KiCad, it's seemingly blocked on a window positioning protocol, which wayland will hopefully adopt soon
That all being said, I actually found the remote desktop situation to be /okay/ on wayland. `gnome-remote-desktop` is decent; though it uses quite a lot of bandwidth, it appeared to be smoother than xrdp when that bandwidth is available. And the sunshine/moonlight pair, while intended for game streaming, worked fine as a usual remote desktop server/client under wayland.
And when I say correctly, I mean that if I am on a non 96 DPI display, e.g. a 168 DPI display (1.75x) and want things scaling properly, Xwayland gets told to pretend that the display size is some resolution in the vicinity of ~1097 by ~686 (not sure how this part works, and honestly I don't think it's relevant) and a DPI of 96. Then xwayland does the most idiotic thing imaginable, it takes the output of applications running under it and stretches it.
And now I have vaseline on my screen.
No thanks.
I may try hyprland at some point to see if there's actual value to using Wayland over X but so far every time I've tried to switch it has been random obstacle after random obstacle.
One of the most baffling has been arbitrary restrictions on the scaling factor.
The only thing that for some stupid reason can't be solved is that I can't turn off blurry interpolation on the low DPI applications. Come on! The low DPI layer is in integer multiples, make it nearest-neighbor pixelated but crisp! How hard is that!?
(same goes for QEMU. Argggh!)
But choice and competition is one of the best things about Linux, so if a small group is upset about losing X11 and self-organize to carry the torch, more power to them. Build a great alternative, and maybe present yourself as a choice rather than being so reactionary. You're not a rebel, you're just in a niche and that's OK.
[0] https://www.phoronix.com/news/X.Org-Server-Lots-Of-Reverts
Irrelevant. Please stay on topic and refrain from personal attacks.
> created enough bugs and compatibility breaks that Xorg proper is now reverting a lot of their changes
You'd expect that the changes would've been reverted sooner if that was all there was to it, no? How come they're suddenly a problem?
that was my first thought too. if these commits were a problem they should not have been accepted in the first place.
was there no review process in place? and if there was no review, isn't that a sign that the project is dead? and if the project is dead what's with the sudden activity?
none of this makes sense.
Then someone mentioned that this was the guy who got Torvalds to tell him GTFO off the kernel mailing lists, and when reading the article about it, I saw the name of the individual. Just seeing that name immediately reminded me of some interactions I've personally had with him a decade ago which eventually resulted (IIRC) in him being told to GTFO of that project. And the catalyst for this fork is being told to GTFO of Xorg thanks to his interactions with the rest of the people.
This is someone who is constantly grating on peoples' nerves to the point that they're kicked out of open source projects for being net negative contributors to the project. And given the repeat nature of it, they also lack the perspicacity to realize the commonality of these incidents. Now a thorough description of their behavior is perhaps superior to just calling them a "reactionary nutjob," but their reputation does proceed them and is justly earned.
They're returning to a previous state which they believe possessed positive characteristics absent from contemporary? Somebody should come up with a word for that.
[0] https://www.phoronix.com/news/X.Org-Server-Lots-Of-Reverts
I mean them deleting their own code only proves their own incompetence not Enrico's.
More on those previous changes here: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1797#no...
Definitely some blame also belongs to the Xorg committer who reviewed and merged those changes (and it looks like that person understands that in retrospect). But the primary responsibility for getting a change right is the author's.
This is honestly an understatement. Posting antivax conspiracy theories on LKML? Reactionary. Writing anti-DEI rants in his REAMDE and COC files? Reactionary. But this long-winded rant [1] defending WW2 Germany? "Reactionary" doesn't even begin to describe it.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190404153507/https://lists.dyn...
The README, their anti-vax rants, the "Make X great again!", the way they write... I'm getting Terry A. Davis (RIP) déjà vu.
I couldn't be not against Wayland when in half of the applications I used clipboard wasn't working properly.
I couldn't be not against Wayland when screen sharing would either use X11 or not work at all.
I couldn't be not against Wayland when most of the complexity shifted from X server to compositors and toolkits, and it both diluted responsibility for the gnarliest bugs (go guess if it's the compositor or the toolkit! Added fun when it's the boundary of both!) and made it possible to write GNOME-only, or KDE-only, or wlroots-only software that won't work on another compositor because it needs a private implementation of an obscure protocol.
I couldn't be not against Wayland when your window manager breaking would bring your whole session down, complete with the breakage happening a lot.
I hear that there are problems with input protocols like "your toolkit has to implement several versions of the same thing and they all are half-arsed anyway", but living in the happy land of the Unicode's Basic Multilingual Plane, I know too little of this problem to have a say about it. But I'm somehow not surprised.
There is also this thing about Unix-like systems not being limited to Linux, and the story of Wayland elsewhere is way worse.
Most of the gnarliest points are now addressed, and Plasma got super stable around 5.26 onwards, however, I'm not really happy that we now have a triumvirate of Mutter, KWin, and wlroots, and that the bar for entry for new compositors is quite high. The fact that X11 allowed a proliferation of window managers is its advantage, not the other way around.
I'm wondering if someone gets to write a compositor that will be "engine, not policy" for Wayland, on top of which different desktop environments could be built. Like wlroots, but some steps further. It will probably have a year of glory, and then Wayland will be declared obsolete, crufty, insecure, legacy, and in dire need of being replaced with something lean and simple, and maybe written by an LLM. Good thing I'm going to be too old or too dead to give a shit by the time it happens.
I just got better things to do than rewrite code from one working display system to ... another working display system. That's all there is to it, and that's the case for many (probably most) people.
Retina MacBook Pro was released in 2012, about 13 years ago. Personally, I don't think Xorg is in a position to sneer at its competitor for being "beta in quality" after "15 years into making."
People have sworn up and down to me that the fractional scaling stuff is possible in X but I read probably 10 guides on how to do it and it never worked. Bummer.
It's like macOS is doing it, by the way.
If you like Xorg, use Xorg. If you like Wayland, use Wayland. If you're not happy about an issue, contribute to it.
1. freedesktop based on xorg is outdated and needs to be modernized to keep up with competing operating systems.
2. The Wayland movement is and has been run extremely poorly.
Both xorg and wayland are bad so it's easy for either side to point that out.
Sure, it is. But does it matter? I don't think so.
I was happy with Xorg, and there were things it couldn't do that I didn't plan on contributing, so I didn't complain to them.
I am now happy with Wayland, and there are things it cannot do that I am not contributing, so I don't complain.
What I see is that Wayland is quite active and they actually added things I needed that didn't exist a few years ago. That's great. Many people seem to be very vocal about how they prefer Xorg because it works for them: that's great, they can use Xorg.
Someone wants to write another one? That's great, let them do it.
Linux is about diversity. Don't come to Linux and ask it to become Windows or macOS.
The problem is that RedHat nee IBM are attempting to force everybody onto Wayland by dropping X11 support. They already tried once and the outcry was so huge that they had to back off saying they would try again next version.
This is kind of a rock and a hard place. The Wayland developers don't want to support X11 but neither does anybody else. Wayland is fundamentally broken in many ways down at the architectural level, but the sunk cost fallacy keeps them working on it.
Everybody forgets that Wayland predates Vulkan. A "real" replacement for X11/Wayland probably needs to restart from "Vulkan support is the base layer" and build up from there.
and how is that waylands fault? what if vulkan gets replaced? should a new replacement be written from scratch every time that happens?
The problem is that the Wayland folks are trying to replace X11 rather than provide an easy upgrade path. They simply don’t care about anyone who uses a computer in any way outside of the ways they can be bothered to support. ‘It’s better!’ they cry, despite users telling them for well over a decade now that it’s not actually, because we cannot do the things we want.
And Wayland is being used as a form of lock-in. ‘GNOME uses Wayland now. Just drop support for that crufty old X11,’ they whisper. Never mind that plenty of folks don’t use GNOME and don’t want to use GNOME. Never mind that Wayland is still not fit for purpose.
It may be someday, and that would be great. I’d genuinely look forward to being able to move on from X11. But Wayland does not work for me, and as projects start to remove support for X11 they are removing support for me.
Wayland just straight doesn't work and the push to move everyone to it looks ridiculous from my perspective.
Word on the street is Nvidia is doing a much much better job, for a year or so now. But, like, you are using a GPU that sway used to make you type "--i-wont-buy-an-nvidia-gpu-again" and now makes you type --unsupported-gpu to use.
It's not Wayland's fault if your video card can't do the pretty same sensible reasonable kernel calls asked of it without crashing. I realize that you might not really care about the distinction, I sympathize highly that it just sucks, and no one in open source likes this (Google image search "Linus Torvalds Nvidia"; 2025 only a bit better than 2012 if your bug report here really true I guess). But fault & culpability matters, and Wayland does way way way less special magic & is way more straightforward with how it handles the display subsystem than X, which half ignores the kernel & has its own absurd driver subsystems and mountains of jank overlapping extensions to do what kernels and GPUs just do these days. GPUs have it easy under Wayland!
Before Wayland, it was not sunshine and rainbows. For a long time, a lot of shit just did not work and there was no way to make it work. Nvidia did not care. It took Linux Trovalds shitting on Nvidia to make them care a little. It took YEARS for Nvidia on the Linux desktop to be decent.
And, to this day, a lot of Nvidia features just do not work, even on X. You get a MUCH better experience on Windows.
Wayland cannot see the Nvidia source code because nobody can. They're trying their best, but they're not going to regress to old ass versions of stuff to get it to work and they're not gonna throw spaghetti at the wall. Nvidia needs to step up because they decided they're the only ones who can develop the driver. There's nothing anyone can do.
Looking more into plugin libraries, a lot of it is based specifically on X, I don't think that's going to be rewritten anytime soon.
I've felt for a while stuck between X and Wayland. Same with Pipewire and Jack/Pulse.
And frankly, as someone who works closely with some of these distro's, I think there is a silent majority who have the same opinion but aren't willing to pay the political tax in their ecosystem for standing up and pointing out the emperor is naked for fear of sounding like a Luddite and being sidelined.
Unfortunately Wayland devs seem to have become user hostile in a way similar to the systemd devs (your use case being incompatible or unsuported is your problem, shut up and let us rearrange the OS etc) on top of the software just not being very good. Basic things like running video terminal emulators just doesn't work as well as it does on X (comparing Xterm on X to whatever on Sway always seemed to have much higher latency on my hardware, even moving the window around seems to lag a frame or two behind where it should be.)
At this point wayland itself has gotten pretty old, doesn't support what most desktop Linux users need day to day (at least enough to replace X) and is so unpleasant to deal with I don't think I'll be trying it again. It's a shame, the bar isn't that high. Then again maybe X11 is the oldest still in use graphics API for a reason.
You have a choice: acknowledge that Wayland is faster, more user-friendly, and more secure, or remain tied to technologies from the 1990s.
Since Ubuntu has adopted Wayland exclusively for its new LTS release, I've noticed over the past few days that much of the criticism comes from Windows users who rely on RDP to configure Red Hat or CentOS with a GUI, or something similar. These users have become accustomed to the lack of security in Xorg to perform their tasks. Now, they must reconsider how they maintain their Linux machines.
In any case, I was unaware that Wayland was becoming the new systemd. Perhaps this is because I have been using it for more then four years, starting with bullseye (sid) / GNOME, and for about two years with FreeBSD / Sway. I use these systems daily at work without any major issues.
It’s less about change and more about outright breakage. Wayland does not support me.
> You have a choice: acknowledge that Wayland is faster, more user-friendly, and more secure, or remain tied to technologies from the 1990s.
Wayland may be faster, it’s certainly more secure (in the same sense that a system embedded in a ton of concrete and dropped to the bottom of the ocean is more secure), but I’m not convinced that it’s more user friendly. It’s certainly not friendly to me, since it does not allow me to run my window manager of choice.
I’m not convinced that the technologies of the 1990s were necessarily all that bad, either. Yeah, there were some assumptions which turned out not to be the case in reality. And yeah, there is a ton of cruft. And yeah, no-one would design X11 the way it is today. But, you know what? X11, unlike Wayland, works for me.
I would love to use Wayland, honestly. That’s not a lie. But it doesn’t work. And from what I can see it doesn’t want to work.
When selecting technology, I always consider my specific use case. For instance, at work, I need to manage multiple open windows simultaneously, so I rely on tiled windows across four monitors. To ensure stability and avoid OS issues, I use GNOME with Pop Shell on Debian. On my smaller laptop, where mobility and keyboard-only navigation are priorities, I've found Sway to be an excellent replacement for dwm.
The key point I want to emphasize is the importance of identifying your unique use case. Once you understand your needs, you can choose the tools that best meet those requirements. The tool itself isn't the ultimate goal; it's about finding what works best for your specific situation. Typically, there are plenty of tools available that can solve your problem or fit your use case.
trothamel•4h ago