As someone with 0 investment in this whole ecosystem, I saw and perused this article like a week ago, and my immediate impression was “Why is this guy constantly saying ‘Wayland breaks XXXXX’? Wayland isn’t breaking anything, it’s new tech. Wayland has certain features, or it doesn’t or doesn’t yet. The only folks breaking anything are those swapping use of X with Wayland, within various apps or tech stacks, potentially prematurely, where Wayland doesn’t yet have the full set of features needed.”
Whoever this is seems to have a really poor understanding of long-term software development, despite being way more invested in it than I am.
That is why I never switched to Linux. I mean, it is over 30 years now and it still doesn’t do everything. Sure it does some cool stuff—but not “everything” I could do before. What is taking them so long?
“Linux” is not an entity with well defined goals, it’s a community that mostly does whatever it wants. That has the fortunate side effect of producing labors of love in software, that prove really useful in the real world. But it also ignores things like user experience, which affect things like the desktop the most.
On Linux the user is a second-class citizen, because worth in the community is determined by how much a person contributes (in code, testing, artwork, documentation etc.)
The Linux mindset is best expressed by a quote from Simon Travaglia (which I paraphrase because I don’t remember it verbatim): “We’re tasked with the well-being of the servers, not the users. They’re lucky we even let them log in since users technically upset the smooth operation of the servers.”
You forgot the part where they don’t need Wayland and its reduced features, because everything works fine in Xorg.
Stop pushing people towards Wayland, let it happen naturally when it will be ready and better, and they’ll come. Trying to force adoption will just make people resent it.
You forgot the part where this is what is happening.
The Linux ecosystem is not the product of a giant corporation. It is highly distributed and both built and promoted by multiple players with many different goals and interests.
The people actually building the ecosystem have aligned almost completely on Wayland. The strong implication is that X was not working for them.
Distributions have been slower to move but that is happening now. You can look at this as forcing users to move. My guess is that it is more a case of pleasing some uses and frustrating others where more users want what Wayland provides than miss what it doesn’t.
It is always painful to be a laggard during a technology transition. There is usually a period where the new tech becomes common before it does what you want. That is just what technology transitions look like. When that happens, the problem is that the majority is perfectly happy and maybe happier than ever. That is why things happen when they do.
You forgot the part where this is what is happening.
All I see is a rift in the community over one side pushing software that’s beta-quality at best, and acting very arrogant and dismissive towards real adoption impediments.
Which is par for the course for Linux, naturally, but “it’s happening” is wishful thinking at this stage. At this rate and with this attitude it will take at least another 5 years.
As I like to stay evidence driven, I should say that I use XFCE mostly and, as such, am not typically a Wayland user on most of my machines. I will let other readers decide how that impacts the indictment “Wayland’s worst enemy is its fans”.
I am not sure what the “sides” are here either. If I was to try to draw that line, it seems to be between people providing software and those using it. Because the people writing the software are moving to Wayland.
Which leads us to “at this rate”. GNOME and KDE will both be Wayland only next year. What percentage of the Linux Desktop population do we think that represents right there? Enlightenment has already moved. Ubuntu uses Wayland. Red Hat uses Wayland. The Steam Deck uses Wayland. XFCE and Cinnamon will move next year. Wayland only window managers are appearing and gaining in popularity. What percentage of the Linux Desktop universe are you expecting will still be using X at the end of 2025?
Some people may wait 5 years. Then again, Ref Hat will have stopped contribute to X by then and, as I said, nobody is rushing in to dev X. How long is running X going to stay viable?
I would say that BSD may take a little longer but they are starting to move too.
Liking Wayland or not has nothing to do with any of these facts.
They aren’t facts, again, they’re wishful thinking. I’m a long time contributor and developer and I can assure you that with things as complex as X and Wayland things would move slowly even if everybody was of the same mind, let alone in the “herding cats” style of FOSS.
Wayland has been in development for 15 years and it’s still not ready – please, it’s not, and stomping our feet and claiming otherwise won’t make it so. Another 5 years will probably see it reach a more stable state.
What do I mean by ready? Well the desktop stack [on Linux and *NIX] is extremely complex. Whenever you’re dealing with something extremely complex in software, over the years, you amass a large amount of solutions that solve real world problems. That’s what I call “ready”. Most of those solutions will be dealing with quirks and use cases which do not affect everybody equally, but they’re each crucial in their own way to a varying slice of the userbase.
Whenever you rewrite something from scratch you throw away the bulk of those quirks. It’s a common fallacy for developers to look at the shiny new thing and think that it’s better. In reality it’s worthless without the quirks, and accumulating those quirks all over again takes a long time. X has been accumulating them for 40 years. Wayland is barely scratching the surface.
The fact the protocol places and splits the burden over the various DE and WM teams will NOT help. We will need libraries that solve the same problem once instead of over and over, and most DE/WM will come to depend on those libraries. The end result will be eerily similar to X. Ironically, by the time Wayland will be done it will have spent a comparable time in development to X, and will have accumulated the same amount of baggage that people dislike about X.
What percentage of the Linux Desktop universe are you expecting will still be using X at the end of 2025?
More or less the same that’s using X right now. GNOME, KDE and the various distros will get a bloody nose trying to force Wayland through but if that’s the only way they learn, so be it.
The Steam Deck actually has one of the few use cases where Wayland actually makes sense, it’s a turnkey, highly controlled stack (both software and hardware) where users don’t have any reasons to care about what’s under the hood. I expect them to switch ASAP.
Another place where Wayland can be used straightaway is the desktop graphical login screen (which is the original reason it was created for anyway). It’s a singular application with reduced requirements and simplistic interactions.
… for you. I got the honor to try to find the correct match of specific NVIDIA driver version, desktop environment and compositor to get anything even remotely usable back when NVIDIA only supported Xorg. I was greeted with either an entire crash, black screen, graphical glitches, and/or screen flickering if I forgot to pin package versions. Connecting displays from right to left crashed everything, so I was forced to change my display setup to left to right. Of course, waking up displays from sleep never worked either. So don’t pretend that Wayland is a broken mess while abandonware Xorg is our Lord and savior.
Stop pushing people towards Wayland, let it happen naturally when it will be ready and better, and they’ll come. Trying to force adoption will just make people resent it.
Software vendors drag their feet to adopt Wayland as nobody forces them to adopt Wayland. Again, Wayland works fine. X11 features don’t work in Wayland. But Wayland isn’t X11. Xwayland solves a lot of these problems. Software vendors back then didn’t port their Windows software to OS/2 due to OS/2’s Windows compatibility. Video game publishers today don’t port their games to Linux in part due to Steam Proton. Software vendors today don’t port their X11 software to Wayland due to Xwayland. So the ideal solution is to force a critical mass to adopt Wayland, drop Xwayland, and let software vendors suffer from the consequences of ignoring 16 years of Linux desktop protocol innovation.
If people give up on maintainable solutions like Wayland, then there’s no way in hell anyone picks up Xorg ever again. My Xorg issues remain wontfix. Wayland issues are now wontfix. Nobody works on Wayland and Xorg. Linux desktop is officially dead. I either switch back to Windows or buy a MacBook. I won’t invest time into an ecosystem that’s destined to die a slow, but guaranteed death.
I’m sure a lot of people try to hold onto their beloved abandonware to keep their Linux desktop alive, but why should AMD, Intel and NVIDIA care about Linux desktop now that the Linux community doesn’t have enough fucks to give to maintain Linux desktop? May as well save driver development costs and drop Wayland and Xorg support from future graphics cards.
I find that I prefer a graphical environment to understand what’s going on, then a keyboard-focused environment (usually text based) once I reach the point that I know what to do and want to increase speed and repeatability.
I don’t ruthlessly reduce mouse use, but I prefer to stick the keyboard for a handful of reasons: speed, comfort, reducing the likelihood of repetitive stress injury as I age, and flexibility. If my trackpad fails and I can’t find a mouse, I can still do what I need to do.
If you do a lot with your keyboard, it is annoying to get your hand off it and switch to your mouse. And then to switch back. If a task can also be done with the keyboard, you can just stay there and that is quite comfy.
I’ve been using a Tex yoda ii for years and I love it. If you want to avoid leaving “home row” nothing beats a 60% keyboard with a trackpoint! I just bought a Tex Shura but haven’t tried it out yet.
Sadly, this is going to be preaching to the choir. Wayland has its faults but if it truly was an inferior approach compared to X then someone would’ve forked X or spawned a totally new project. Turns out it takes time, money, and developer power that simply isn’t coming into X or any competing standard. Wayland is “good enough” to be the next standard and that’s how it’ll be for the foreseeable future.
If a BSD fan really thinks X is pivotal to BSD’s future, then maybe BSD will need to consider forking it and fixing it, but I’m sure the real solution will just be supporting Wayland on BSD too.
For most of its 15 year history implementations have been woefully and obviously insufficient. Nobody forked X because nobody needed to. Its feature complete and has been for a long time and there was nothing wrong with using X while Wayland implementations see progressive improvement.
Not only is nobody forking X but many people are building Wayland compositors.
Listening to the detractors, you get the impression that Wayland is a failure and / or that X may still be the better choice.
Then you realize the only people still working on X are paid by enterprise distros with long-term support obligations. All the toolkit people have moved to Wayland. The major desktop environments have shifted to Wayland. All the “new” window managers are for Wayland.
Wayland is already supported on BSD ( FreeBSD at least ).
The actual developers have spoken and Wayland has won.
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