Man, I really don’t understand what the issues with Wayland are. Granted, I’m new here and a pretty basic user so there’s some underlying issue that seems to be breaking people’s setups, I guess I just haven’t encountered it. I went from using Mint for like a month before I switched to Arch. And I only did that because my second screen was acting goofy on Mint and I figured in for a penny in for a pound, let’s see why people are so afraid of this distro and haven’t had any serious issues in the past two years.
I’ve been using it on my laptop, and it’s been doing weird things that my X11 never did. It’s like rescaling or antialiasing or doing something with the fonts in my terminal while I’m using it. But, enough works that I’m gonna stick with it for now.
Also, I’m not able to use my preferred window manager XMonad under Wayland so far. Maybe at some point there will be a way to combine Wayland, KDE Plasma, and real window manager simply. (But, KDE Plasma has been getting more and more hostile to alternative window managers even on X11; I can’t been able to cleanly close my user session in months.)
There are little pockets of such things with everything I find. The “init wars” of systemd vs init/initd, Wayland vs xorg, Android vs iOS, Linux vs Windows/macOS, Xbox vs Playstation, Nintendo vs Sega, Vinyl vs everything not vinyl, RCS vs iMessage more recently to name a few.
When I was new here, it was XFree86 vs Xorg. (Showing my age).
There will be new technologies yet. And not all of them will successfully supplant/obsolete the older. Some of the older may even come back, despite (/ because of) the efforts made to eliminate them.
what the issues with Wayland are.
LMLLMTFY…
Here’s a concise summary of the main issues people have with Wayland:
Compatibility: Many legacy X11 applications and workflows (e.g., screen recording, remote desktop, and some games) don’t work seamlessly under Wayland, requiring patches or workarounds.
Screen Sharing/Recording: Wayland’s security model restricts direct screen access, making tools like OBS, Discord, or Zoom less reliable for screen sharing or recording.
Multi-GPU/NVIDIA Support: Historically, NVIDIA’s proprietary drivers had poor Wayland support, though this has improved recently. Multi-GPU setups can still be problematic.
Customization: Wayland compositors (like Weston, Sway, or GNOME’s Mutter) are less flexible than X11 window managers, limiting advanced user customization.
Remote Desktop: X11’s network transparency (e.g., ssh -X) is missing in Wayland, requiring alternatives like RDP or VNC.
Input Handling: Some users report issues with input latency, touchpad gestures, or keyboard layouts, especially in niche setups.
Maturity: While Wayland is stable for most users, edge cases (e.g., hybrid graphics, VR, or professional audio/video tools) may still face bugs or missing features.
Why it matters: Wayland aims to modernize Linux graphics with better security and performance, but the transition has been slow due to these pain points. Most major distros now default to Wayland, but power users and professionals often still rely on X11 (or XWayland for compatibility).
*shrug*. I guess that’ll do.
I’m >9000% more enthused for XLibre, and I utterly disregard the gaslighting associations some insist we believe about it, like community developed XLibre’s the fascist one, not Wayland spearheaded by a monopolistic corporation with nazi roots. XD
Edit:
PS, then I asked...
wayland’s more bloaty, and complicated, right? what with its extra compositor layer atop the server layer before the window manager layer, or whatever it is, right? (I dont really understand it… the complicatedness is more than i’ve got my head around, since not all methods of using it seem to have the same ontos/topos).
Your frustration is understandable—Wayland’s architecture can feel more complex than X11’s, but the “bloat” and “complication” are often misunderstood. Let’s clarify the layers and why it feels this way:
X11 vs. Wayland: Layer Comparison
X11 (Simpler, but Monolithic)
Single Layer: X11 combines the display server, window management, input handling, and compositing into one monolithic system.
Pros: Easy to understand (one thing does everything).
Cons: Security risks, poor performance, and inflexibility (e.g., compositing was bolted on later).
Wayland (Modular, but Distributed)
Wayland splits these responsibilities:
Compositor (e.g., Weston, Mutter, KWin, Sway):
Replaces X11’s “server” role.
Handles rendering, input, and compositing directly.
Acts as the “display server” and the “window manager” in one.
Clients (Applications):
Talk directly to the compositor via the Wayland protocol (no middleman like X11’s server).
Protocols (e.g., wlroots, xdg-shell):
Define how clients/compositors communicate (e.g., for window management, screensharing).
Key Difference:
In X11, the “window manager” is a separate program (e.g., i3, Openbox) that talks to the X server.
In Wayland, the compositor is the window manager (e.g., Sway = compositor + window manager).
Why It Feels More Complicated
No Single “Wayland Server”:
Unlike X11’s Xorg, there’s no one “Wayland server.” Each compositor (Mutter, KWin, Sway) implements Wayland differently.
This can lead to inconsistencies (e.g., GNOME’s Wayland vs. Sway’s Wayland).
Protocols Everywhere:
Wayland uses protocols (like xdg-shell, viewporter, screencopy) for features X11 handled implicitly.
Example: Screen sharing requires explicit protocol support (e.g., pipewire), while X11 just “let apps grab the screen.”
Less “Magic”:
X11 allowed hacks (e.g., xrandr, xinput) to work around limitations.
Wayland enforces stricter rules (e.g., no direct GPU access for clients), which feels restrictive.
Transition Pain:
Tools like xrandr, xinput, or Xephyr don’t exist in Wayland. Replacements (e.g., wlr-randr, wayland-debug) are less standardized.
Is It More Bloaty?
No, but it’s more modular:
Wayland itself is a protocol, not a program. The “bloat” comes from compositors adding features (e.g., GNOME’s Mutter vs. minimal Sway).
X11’s “simplicity” was deceptive—it was a single binary, but it did everything poorly. Wayland distributes responsibilities more cleanly.
Example:
X11: One process (Xorg) handles everything, often inefficiently.
Wayland: The compositor (e.g., weston) does rendering, while pipewire handles screensharing, and libinput handles input.
TL;DR
Wayland feels more complicated because:
It replaces X11’s “one big blob” with explicit, modular components.
The lack of a single “Wayland server” means behavior varies by compositor.
Protocols replace X11’s implicit behaviors, requiring more setup for edge cases.
But: This modularity is why Wayland is faster, more secure, and more maintainable long-term. The complexity is a tradeoff for fixing X11’s fundamental flaws.
___
I wonder how much of its training data was feeding on all the pro-wayland advertising spiel.
My issue with Wayland is just that not everything supports it. I tried switching to Wayland this year and immediately I ran into issues with software that weren’t compatible, like Steamlink would not stream over Wayland, but switching back to X11 it streamed just fine. At least in my experience, Wayland itself is not the problem, but developers not supporting Wayland is the problem. The moment I run into just one program that I want to use that doesn’t work with Wayland, I am going to permanently switch back to X11. I think most users think that way. Most don’t want to switch back and forth to use a program, if a single program doesn’t work they will just revert to X11 and stay within X11.
Understandable, though in the case of Steamlink, I just stopped using Steamlink. Though my thought process was, I’d rather get a $30 dock for my Steam Deck then switch to X11 but I’m stubborn ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’m the same with systemd. I’m aware it gets a lot of hate from people but I dunno, seems fine to me. It’s never given me any trouble that I can think of.
Avoiding systemd has never given me any trouble that I can think of either. [1]
Amen for choice.
Contrasts to the noise from those who insist we all have to use systemd, and that there’s something wrong with everything else so severe that systemd had to be made.
OpenRC or runit are my faves.
Still got half a dozen others to explore daily driving. Dinit and s66 next on my radar.
But runit’s too nice. ;)
[1: afterthought… oh, that’s not entirely true… the systemd infestation does make it harder to avoid entirely than it needs to be. Its butt-prints persist even in non-systemd distros. But thanks to other developers who favour retaining init-freedom, it can be done, without feeling any irritation or sting.]
For most ”laymen” Wayland works just fine. I prefer Wayland because it has proper support for fractional scaling, which is a must for monitors with higher resolution than 1080p.
I had two monitors at 1600x2560 and one at [(various resolutions, usually at)] 800x1280… for near a decade, with no wayland. What’s this “must” and “proper support for fractional scaling” I didnt have and thus was doing it wrong? :3
Every time I’ve tried ”fractional scaling” on X11 it’s just a blurry mess. Like as if it renders at a lower resolution and then scales it up by 125%. I don’t want all my text and icons to be tiny without having to configure every single application I’m using (with mixed results).
Or maybe I’m completely misunderstanding what you mean by “click on touch mouse pointer”.
I’m not understanding why X11’s not wanted with a thinkpad. I’ve had various thinkpads (penabled, multi-touch, and no-touchscreen), since (iirc) 2007ish, and had no troubles.
What’s wayland doing for you? What’s the problem with X11?
I only have experience with Plasma, but on X11 when I tap on the screen, it emulates a mouse click where I tap. And it also does when I swipe my finger, like holding a clicked mouse and moving the pointer. And gestures don’t work, though I think that one can be fixed.
Wayland just works. When I want to select text, press and hold like on a phone. When scrolling something, I just swipe it like on a phone (except for LibreOffice, that one is an absolute mess on Wayland). Especially nice with drawing programs. Stylus acts just like what I described with finger on X11 - it controls mouse pointer.
In effect this means that with fingers I can move around and zoom, while with stylus I can draw or select text.
And then GTK 4.20 breaks Rnote and I can only use it via Xwayland…
Anyway, for a touchscreen device, I had more luck with Wayland.
Wayland has been around for many many many many more years than Wayland has been good enough to use. I think that’s about it.
Arch is definitely the most stable and usable distro for me as well. Fedora and suse shit the bed constantly when I used them. I assume arch has the same image problem due to legacy. I know when I first tried Manjaro maybe 7-10 years ago because everyone said how great it was, doing a simple pacman update after install immediately bricked the computer. My experience with endeavor has been perfect, other than the poor spelling of the team.
Note all of the arch stuff above is for servers. I can’t stand Linux for laptop use, it’s not worth the effort.
As a counter example I installed void because it’s so well rated. They have a terminal only and UI build (xfce). I installed the UI build. On first boot, clean machine, clean drive, the UI wouldn’t load. I don’t like systemd much but it can load a window manager 🙄
For the curious, I did look for answers and basically the answer is debug runit scripts or try re-installing and see if that fixes it. Nothing concrete, but I’m also not alone in this bad experience.
Wayland has been around for many many many many more years than Wayland has been good enough to use. I think that’s about it.
I think that’s mostly it. When Wayland was first released, it was barely in an alpha state, with many major use cases not being supported at all. Since Wayland is a deep system component, it requires apps to adjust to them, and in the beginning this hadn’t happened at all so far, so really nothing worked.
And this didn’t change over night. That easily took a decade, and still today some use cases still don’t work well (e.g. accessibility/screen reader compatibility).
I’d been a windows user since the DOS / 3.1 days and converted to Linux maybe 2~ years ago. I’ve found that I’m able to tailor the desktop experience (on desktop / laptop) to exactly what I need. No shitware getting in the way or annoying bundled programs.
My laptop has decent battery life and standby gives me no issues, perfect in my eyes.
I can’t stand windows anymore, and I’m not one to lash out and buy a macbook to just experience another desktop enviornment / user experience.
Admittedly there isnt any professional use just browsing / games with some codium usage.
I occasionally try it out. I do still think Mac is the worst by far, it’s fanbois I will never understand. Linux always has issues when I try it on laptop hardware. Obviously the standard response is “oh that specific hardware doesn’t work with Linux, but good news you can use this different hardware that isnt in your laptop, and also Linux supports so many more hardware types than windows; none of the ones you need, but like, in general, you know?”
It does seem like most people in Linux have had bad experiences with one distro or another, but eventually find one that works for them…then conveniently forget how much of a pain installing several different operating systems is.
You see this all the time in Linux forums (why did you use endeavor, didn’t you know arch is hard? Why did you use void, sure it’s one of the top rated distros on distrowatch but that’s for hardcore Linux users. Why did you use mint, it’s always super outdated. Why did you use suse, I’ve never had anything but issues with it and while yast was cool the whole distro was just weird. Why did you use debian, debian is super out of date. Why did you use Ubuntu, they are spyware and have snaps which suck…).
Last time I tried it for a month-ish and it was meh. I missed mpc-hc, none of the qt clones were quite good enough (and I ended up having to edit and rebuild myself just to get the behavior right even though cloning mpc-hc is literally the whole purpose). IR Camera driver didn’t work so no howdy support. Power management was a mess, it was constantly spinning up the fan to wild levels. The battery didn’t last particularly long. I tried fixing these things but it’s just not worth my time. In contrast with windows I install a crack to permanently bypass the online account nagging, open group policy and fully disable Cortana/copilot, install search everything to replace windows search with something good, pop open unigetui to install all the software I like, and I’m up and running.
There are still many things that don’t work on Wayland, which work perfectly fine on X11. If you don’t need any of them then Wayland is perfectly fine, but many people do need them.
For example programs can’t read from or interact with windows of other programs, so for example a time tracking application can’t work, or productivity scripts using xdotool don’t have a Wayland way to work.
I would love for you to dispel the problem I wrote about: how to find the list of open windows (and whether they are focused or not), for time tracking. I don’t believe kdotool can do that, from what I see.
I’m aware how buggy it was not that long ago when I first tried it, but once I switched my desktop over I need to use wayland unless I want to lock all my monitors to the same refresh rate. It’s fine. Not really had any issues in the last 6 months, and also enables HDR and freesync, though not at the same time because there’s a flickering issue with HDR and sync.
xx-zones, ext-tray and dbus_annotations are the only protocols I think add anything of value at this point, wayland is pretty close to feature complete, it’s on clients for the most part at this point
Man, I really don’t understand what the issues with Wayland are. Granted, I’m new here and a pretty basic user so there’s some underlying issue that seems to be breaking people’s setups, I guess I just haven’t encountered it. I went from using Mint for like a month before I switched to Arch. And I only did that because my second screen was acting goofy on Mint and I figured in for a penny in for a pound, let’s see why people are so afraid of this distro and haven’t had any serious issues in the past two years.
I’ve been using it on my laptop, and it’s been doing weird things that my X11 never did. It’s like rescaling or antialiasing or doing something with the fonts in my terminal while I’m using it. But, enough works that I’m gonna stick with it for now.
Also, I’m not able to use my preferred window manager XMonad under Wayland so far. Maybe at some point there will be a way to combine Wayland, KDE Plasma, and real window manager simply. (But, KDE Plasma has been getting more and more hostile to alternative window managers even on X11; I can’t been able to cleanly close my user session in months.)
There are little pockets of such things with everything I find. The “init wars” of systemd vs init/initd, Wayland vs xorg, Android vs iOS, Linux vs Windows/macOS, Xbox vs Playstation, Nintendo vs Sega, Vinyl vs everything not vinyl, RCS vs iMessage more recently to name a few.
When I was new here, it was XFree86 vs Xorg. (Showing my age).
There will be new technologies yet. And not all of them will successfully supplant/obsolete the older. Some of the older may even come back, despite (/ because of) the efforts made to eliminate them.
LMLLMTFY…
*shrug*. I guess that’ll do.
I’m >9000% more enthused for XLibre, and I utterly disregard the gaslighting associations some insist we believe about it, like community developed XLibre’s the fascist one, not Wayland spearheaded by a monopolistic corporation with nazi roots. XD
Edit:
PS, then I asked...
___
I wonder how much of its training data was feeding on all the pro-wayland advertising spiel.
My issue with Wayland is just that not everything supports it. I tried switching to Wayland this year and immediately I ran into issues with software that weren’t compatible, like Steamlink would not stream over Wayland, but switching back to X11 it streamed just fine. At least in my experience, Wayland itself is not the problem, but developers not supporting Wayland is the problem. The moment I run into just one program that I want to use that doesn’t work with Wayland, I am going to permanently switch back to X11. I think most users think that way. Most don’t want to switch back and forth to use a program, if a single program doesn’t work they will just revert to X11 and stay within X11.
Understandable, though in the case of Steamlink, I just stopped using Steamlink. Though my thought process was, I’d rather get a $30 dock for my Steam Deck then switch to X11 but I’m stubborn ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’m the same with systemd. I’m aware it gets a lot of hate from people but I dunno, seems fine to me. It’s never given me any trouble that I can think of.
Avoiding systemd has never given me any trouble that I can think of either. [1]
Amen for choice.
Contrasts to the noise from those who insist we all have to use systemd, and that there’s something wrong with everything else so severe that systemd had to be made.
OpenRC or runit are my faves.
Still got half a dozen others to explore daily driving. Dinit and s66 next on my radar.
But runit’s too nice. ;)
[1: afterthought… oh, that’s not entirely true… the systemd infestation does make it harder to avoid entirely than it needs to be. Its butt-prints persist even in non-systemd distros. But thanks to other developers who favour retaining init-freedom, it can be done, without feeling any irritation or sting.]
For most ”laymen” Wayland works just fine. I prefer Wayland because it has proper support for fractional scaling, which is a must for monitors with higher resolution than 1080p.
A must…?
I had two monitors at 1600x2560 and one at [(various resolutions, usually at)] 800x1280… for near a decade, with no wayland. What’s this “must” and “proper support for fractional scaling” I didnt have and thus was doing it wrong? :3
Every time I’ve tried ”fractional scaling” on X11 it’s just a blurry mess. Like as if it renders at a lower resolution and then scales it up by 125%. I don’t want all my text and icons to be tiny without having to configure every single application I’m using (with mixed results).
With Wayland it’s sharp even with 125% scaling.
I prefer Wayland because I use a 2-in-1 ThinkPad. No thanks X11, I don’t want a click on touch mouse pointer.
???
You cant configure your way around that?
Or maybe I’m completely misunderstanding what you mean by “click on touch mouse pointer”.
I’m not understanding why X11’s not wanted with a thinkpad. I’ve had various thinkpads (penabled, multi-touch, and no-touchscreen), since (iirc) 2007ish, and had no troubles.
What’s wayland doing for you? What’s the problem with X11?
I only have experience with Plasma, but on X11 when I tap on the screen, it emulates a mouse click where I tap. And it also does when I swipe my finger, like holding a clicked mouse and moving the pointer. And gestures don’t work, though I think that one can be fixed.
Wayland just works. When I want to select text, press and hold like on a phone. When scrolling something, I just swipe it like on a phone (except for LibreOffice, that one is an absolute mess on Wayland). Especially nice with drawing programs. Stylus acts just like what I described with finger on X11 - it controls mouse pointer.
In effect this means that with fingers I can move around and zoom, while with stylus I can draw or select text.
And then GTK 4.20 breaks Rnote and I can only use it via Xwayland…
Anyway, for a touchscreen device, I had more luck with Wayland.
Interesting. Thanks.
I just tried that on my multitouch X220T, and at first, it worked fine, no click, able to move cursor… but then somehow I lost the knack…
I guess I don’t use my touchscreens enough for it to matter to me.
When drawing, I typically pull out my proper wacom. Otherwise it’s nearly all trackpoint or mouse.
Wayland has been around for many many many many more years than Wayland has been good enough to use. I think that’s about it.
Arch is definitely the most stable and usable distro for me as well. Fedora and suse shit the bed constantly when I used them. I assume arch has the same image problem due to legacy. I know when I first tried Manjaro maybe 7-10 years ago because everyone said how great it was, doing a simple pacman update after install immediately bricked the computer. My experience with endeavor has been perfect, other than the poor spelling of the team.
Note all of the arch stuff above is for servers. I can’t stand Linux for laptop use, it’s not worth the effort.
Words rarely seen in this arrangement.
As a counter example I installed void because it’s so well rated. They have a terminal only and UI build (xfce). I installed the UI build. On first boot, clean machine, clean drive, the UI wouldn’t load. I don’t like systemd much but it can load a window manager 🙄
For the curious, I did look for answers and basically the answer is debug runit scripts or try re-installing and see if that fixes it. Nothing concrete, but I’m also not alone in this bad experience.
I think that’s mostly it. When Wayland was first released, it was barely in an alpha state, with many major use cases not being supported at all. Since Wayland is a deep system component, it requires apps to adjust to them, and in the beginning this hadn’t happened at all so far, so really nothing worked.
And this didn’t change over night. That easily took a decade, and still today some use cases still don’t work well (e.g. accessibility/screen reader compatibility).
I’d been a windows user since the DOS / 3.1 days and converted to Linux maybe 2~ years ago. I’ve found that I’m able to tailor the desktop experience (on desktop / laptop) to exactly what I need. No shitware getting in the way or annoying bundled programs.
My laptop has decent battery life and standby gives me no issues, perfect in my eyes.
I can’t stand windows anymore, and I’m not one to lash out and buy a macbook to just experience another desktop enviornment / user experience.
Admittedly there isnt any professional use just browsing / games with some codium usage.
I occasionally try it out. I do still think Mac is the worst by far, it’s fanbois I will never understand. Linux always has issues when I try it on laptop hardware. Obviously the standard response is “oh that specific hardware doesn’t work with Linux, but good news you can use this different hardware that isnt in your laptop, and also Linux supports so many more hardware types than windows; none of the ones you need, but like, in general, you know?”
It does seem like most people in Linux have had bad experiences with one distro or another, but eventually find one that works for them…then conveniently forget how much of a pain installing several different operating systems is.
You see this all the time in Linux forums (why did you use endeavor, didn’t you know arch is hard? Why did you use void, sure it’s one of the top rated distros on distrowatch but that’s for hardcore Linux users. Why did you use mint, it’s always super outdated. Why did you use suse, I’ve never had anything but issues with it and while yast was cool the whole distro was just weird. Why did you use debian, debian is super out of date. Why did you use Ubuntu, they are spyware and have snaps which suck…).
Last time I tried it for a month-ish and it was meh. I missed mpc-hc, none of the qt clones were quite good enough (and I ended up having to edit and rebuild myself just to get the behavior right even though cloning mpc-hc is literally the whole purpose). IR Camera driver didn’t work so no howdy support. Power management was a mess, it was constantly spinning up the fan to wild levels. The battery didn’t last particularly long. I tried fixing these things but it’s just not worth my time. In contrast with windows I install a crack to permanently bypass the online account nagging, open group policy and fully disable Cortana/copilot, install search everything to replace windows search with something good, pop open unigetui to install all the software I like, and I’m up and running.
There are still many things that don’t work on Wayland, which work perfectly fine on X11. If you don’t need any of them then Wayland is perfectly fine, but many people do need them.
For example programs can’t read from or interact with windows of other programs, so for example a time tracking application can’t work, or productivity scripts using xdotool don’t have a Wayland way to work.
Both of these use cases are needed to me.
Major desktop environments have an override for global interaction.
xdotoolhas been ported to kwin viakdotool.Any other imaginary problems standing in your way I can help dispel?
there is also
ydotoolfor Wayland@aloofPenguin @chloroken it’s so stupid like trying replace xrandr with ddcutil…
I would love for you to dispel the problem I wrote about: how to find the list of open windows (and whether they are focused or not), for time tracking. I don’t believe
kdotoolcan do that, from what I see.My main issue is the lack of xdotool support. It can’t ever be supported because of the way Wayland isolates processes from each other.
See https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d1f2277
I’m aware how buggy it was not that long ago when I first tried it, but once I switched my desktop over I need to use wayland unless I want to lock all my monitors to the same refresh rate. It’s fine. Not really had any issues in the last 6 months, and also enables HDR and freesync, though not at the same time because there’s a flickering issue with HDR and sync.
xx-zones, ext-tray and dbus_annotations are the only protocols I think add anything of value at this point, wayland is pretty close to feature complete, it’s on clients for the most part at this point