I might switch to wayland when xfce starts to have decent support for it. I’m not a ride or die Xorg fan, I just want to keep using the DE I’m used to.
Same currently using xfce with opensuse
In this current state it’s currently only in a few des (kde and gnome and lxqt has it stable) and windows manager(wayfire and Sway and qtile has it stable) but maybe in the future it will be most des
I have a shitload of bug/weird behavior with Wayland, I hope it gets better but for me it is not there yet.
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.
I’m running Bazzite on KDE Wayland with the proprietary Nvidia drivers just fine. I think you’ve got another issue causing this.
That’s definitely possible. I’m not familiar with Bazzite. Did you get those drivers from Nvidia’s website? That’s my only issue with Debian 13 right now. Everything else is working as expected. Also the reason I had to get the drivers from the website is somehow I couldn’t enable some stuff (like amd-pstate) on the default Bookworm kernel and had to use a backported one (custom kernels don’t work with the drivers from apt).
No, they’re included with, and updated by, the OS. But they are the proprietary ones that are available on Nvidia’s website.
I’ll try again this weekend. But that’s the only thing I’ve changed before being unable to log in a wayland sessions. Hope it works though.
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.
Have you tried running your games with gamescope?
Edit: nevermind, I think gamescope doesn’t work with wayland
I think it does work, but from my understanding when nested inside another wayland session, thing like vrr don’t work, which brings me back to the xorg problem, but my current workaround works for me, so now it’s just a matter of hoping it will improve and become less tedious.
As an average desktop user, I’ve run into very little pushback on Wayland. Its made huge leaps in a short amount of time.
until you start using it and screenrecords dont work, multimonitor setups work once and then fail forever… systemd,wayland, unity, ubuntuOne and all that stupid shit can right f off.
I’ve never had a problem with multi monitor (knock on wood). I had to get around screen recording in the past, but I thought that was ironed out. I’ll check that out today.
The only hiccups I’ve run into so far is that the KDE color picker (the dedicated widget and the screenshot tool) is off by one shade. I grab #222222 and it gets #212121. I got around that by using Flameshot. And that’s more on KDE’s end afaik.
The other hiccup is constant alerts asking for input permissions when I use something like an autohotkey or autoclicker.
I’m not saying its perfect yet. I’m saying they’ve busted ass getting it to where it is in such a short amount of time. Its incredibly usable to me for how young Wayland is.
How can I fix the multi monitor thing?? Whenever I connect my TV screen everything freezes unless I unplug one of my desktop monitors.
Sorry but pipewire is shit and it works with Wayland (didn’t see anything Wayland uses pulseaudio) and I believe Wayland still not ready for use, It’s unstable for me because pipewire crackling like fire
Pipewire works fine on my Intel 5960x, Intel N3700, Intel 9900k, Intel 9700, AMD 4800HS and even my Intel ES Erying system. No pops or crackles from any inputs or outputs.
I’ve not tried with a dedicated sound card, just the onboard on all these systems.
Running KDE on one system along with Hyprland on another two with the remainder as headless systems.
You sure this issue isn’t somehow related to your hardware or something else?
No, pulseaudio working fine but pipewire isn’t, it’s a spare old PC HP COMPAQ 6005 pro SFF with AMD Phenom II X4 B97 ram 8GB ddr3 and its sound card SBx00 AZALIA Intel HDA Pipewire crackling while pulseaudio working without problems
Get your shit together. You make no sense.
I make perfect sense to people who actually read what I said. PipeWire issues aren’t imaginary.
“rough start” is putting it mildly. 🤭
agreed, plenty of bug and issues with wayland in the past, but i can now comfortably use it for everything on amd/intel cards.
At leasr it just works with tailsOS
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
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
hard disagree. if your software is missing baaic functions, you shut up about roles and permissions or even force that crap on others.
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 cobbled together code base 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.
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?
Need X-kill replacement.
Plasma and Hyprland already have one
Hm, I think that’s what Ctrl + Meta + Esc* does for me on KDE? Unless there’s more to x-kill than just killing windows/processes with a mouse click.
Edit: Originally said Ctrl + Esc, shame on my poor memory
TIL about Ctrl-Esc. I’ve been using Debian/KDE for years and only now find this out… sheesh.
Sorry, Ctrl + Win (or relevant OS button) + Esc, but yeah it’s been pretty useful in a pinch
You can use Meta or Super as a more agnostic term
I thought “Meta” was AltGr and Super is the “windows key”.
There is actually less to ’xkill’. It nukes the X window from orbit in a very violent manner. The owning process(-tree) will usually just instantly curl up and die.
The main benefit is that it doesn’t actually kill the process, it only nukes the window. As such, you can get rid of windows belonging to otherwise unkillable processes (zombies, etc).
Also, it’s fun. Just don’t miss the window and accidentally kill your WM. (Beat that Wayland)
Rough start? It’s been over a decade and it’s still rough.
Whats rough?
Not sure if it was a plasma 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.
the cursor locking still happens in a handful of games for me - most work perfectly fine but sometimes i do end up running something with gamescope with the --force-grab-cursor argument to fix it.
this is when running games with either steam or wine/bottles/lutris.
strange that it happens in virualbox, i would think it “virtualizing” an entire display would fix issues like that. does virtualbox itself “grab” the cursor, or allow it to go off the screen by default? sorry i don’t really know virtualbox, never used it much
I’ll bite. It’s getting better, but still a long way to go.
- No commercially viable remote desktop or thin client solutions. I’m not talking about just VNC, take a look at for example ThinLinc to see what I’m looking for - a complete solution. (Also, it took like ten rough years before basic unencrypted single user VNC was available at all.) Free multimillion dollar business idea right here folks!
- Related to the above point - software rendered wayland is painful. To experience this yourselves, install any distro in VirtualBox or VMWare or whatever and compare the usability between a Xorg DE (with compositing turned off) and the same Wayland DE. Just look at the click-to-photon latency and weep. I’ve seen X11 perform better with VNC over WAN.
- ”We don’t need network transparency, VNC will save us”. See points above.
- ”Every frame is perfect” went just as well as can be expected, there is a reason VSYNC is an option in games and professional graphics applications. Thanks Valve.
- I’m assuming wlroots still won’t work on Nvidia, and that the Gnome/KDE implementations are still a hodgepodge, and that Nvidia will still ask me to install the supported Xorg drivers. If I’m wrong, it only took a decade or so to get a desktop working on hardware from the dominant GPU vendor. (Tangentially related - historically the only vendor with product lines specifically for serving GPU-accelerated desktops to thin clients)
- After over a decade of struggles, we can finally (mostly) share out screens in Zoom. Or so I’m told.
But what do I know, I’ve only deployed and managed desktop linux for a few thousand people. People were screaming about these design flaws back in 2008 when this all started. The criticisms above were known and dismissed as FUD, and here we are. A few architectural changes back then, and we could have done this migration a decade faster. Just imagine, screen sharing during the pandemic!
As an example, see Arcan, a small research project with an impressively large subset of features from both X11 and Wayland (including working screen sharing, network transparency and a functioning security model). I wouldn’t use it in production, but if it was more than one guy in a basement working on it, it would probably be very usable fairly fast, compared to the decade and half that RedHat and friends have poured into Wayland thus far. Using a good architecture from the start would have done wonders. And Wayland isn’t even close to a good architecture. It’s just what we have to work with now.
Hopefully Xorg can die at some point, a decade or so from now. I’m just glad I don’t work with desktops anymore, the swap to Wayland will be painful for a lot of organisations.
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 a solved problem with both explicit sync and open source kernel modules as the default from NVIDIA themselves.
RDP, 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. I did not think about it much at the time but, since you brought it up….
If that is your full list, I think you just made the case that Wayland is in good shape.
RHEL 9 defaulted to Wayland in 2022 and RHEL 10 will not even include Xorg as an option. Clearly the business world is transitioning to Wayland just fine.
GNOME and KDE both default to Wayland. So, most current Linux desktops do as well.
X11 will be with us a long time but most Linux users will not think about it much after this year. They will all be using Wayland.
Last I tried Rustdesk (two days ago) it was a buggy, glitchy mess and the shared screen was tearing immensely. Is that recent or did it use to be better?
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.
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.
I will never understand what is rough. Ive been using fedora kde for what … 2-3 years now? More?
2 years ago there were some issues with nvidia, but that is fixed now mostly.
I use it for work, there is an ocasional hiccup, that gets fixed next reboot, something like a terminal not resizing just right but … thats it?
People dont like change man, in the day and age when tech changes at breakneck speed, people dont like change
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.
Edit: I will say, one thing I still hate about wayland is the sleep behaviour. The 2 x11 systems I still use work well for this, none of my wayland systems want to wake up from sleep nicely.
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.
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
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.
screen sharing, screen recording, remote desktop
ive used all three on wayland without issues.
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.
All of those things function on Wayland using the right protocols. If they dont work for you, either the DE/WM you use has not implemented the protocols, or the app you’re using has chosen not to implement Wayland support yet.
For automation there is ydotool and wlrctl. Ive also seen a tool called Hawck which seems neat, but I haven’t tried it.
I’ve never seen an issue with screen recording, OBS has worked fine with Wayland for a long time. I use GPU Screen Recorder on Wayland everyday.
Screensharing portals have existed for a while now, I haven’t run into any apps that still haven’t implemented them. Ive used it just fine on Discord and through multiple browsers.
Remote desktop also has a portal that any remote desktop app could implement. Rustdesk has experimental Wayland support which has worked for me. GNOME and Plasma also have built in RDP.
god i wish. half of my X11 apps don’t work, some that used to keep breaking out of nowhere.
Steam works through the XWayland compatibility layer
unless you use an environment that doesn’t support XWayland, like niri. xwayland-satellite used to be the easier route in that case but that seems to be broken now.
edit: wow i always thought people were being obtuse when complaining about “wAyLaNd sHiLLs” in their replies when criticizing Wayland. but now i’m not so sure.
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.
issue closed != issue resolved though. it worked “a few” weeks ago for me too, and now it doesn’t. other people in fedi and one in that issue have the same problem, so it’s not like i’m alone with some weird setup here.
also i should note, although i did that in the linked issue, that other xwayland compositors do work. they’re just way more janky for running X11 apps seamlessly. so i’m not convinced the issue is elsewhere. i just didn’t press the issue out of respect for the maintainer and the only productive thing to do at this point would be to submit a patch if i am indeed right.
if one goes out of their way to use a system without xwayland, that’s on them not Wayland lol
but i do have xwayland. please read my comment again.
What issues do half of your X11 apps? Ive never had an issue with an X11 app running through Xwayland, although I also dont have many X11 apps left.
mostly windows going blank or straight up refusing to launch
“I set fire to my house damn why did my house burn down its the builders fault.”
xwayland-satellite is the recommended way to run X11 apps, which are unfortunately still many, on niri. is that “setting my house on fire”? really confused here.
at which part did they set the house on fire?
yeah really confused about that reply too. is using anything other than Gnome on Wayland “setting the house on fire”?
