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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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X11 is, to put it simply, not at all fit for any modern system. Full stop. Everything to make it work on modern systems are just hacks. Don’t even try to get away with “well, it just works for me” or “but Wayland no worky”.
I really don't know if there could be a more obnoxious opening than this. I guess Wayland fanatics have taken a page from the Rust playbook of trying to shame people into using it when technical merits aren't enough ("But your code is UNSAFE!")
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I find that usually when people write "Full stop", it's best to just stop reading there in most cases.
It comes off as "I am correct, how dare you think that for a moment I could be wrong".
I'd love to use Wayland, but until it works properly on Nvidia hardware like X11 is, then it's not a viable option for me. Of course, then someone always goes "Well then use an AMD card" but money doesn't grow on trees. The only reason I'm not still using a 970 is because a friend of mine was nice and gave me his 2080 that he was no longer using, along with some other really nice upgrades to my hardware.
Honestly it's one of the biggest issues I have with the Linux community. I love Linux and FOSS software but the people who go around and yell at anyone who isn't using Linux, and the people who write articles like this who try to shame you for your choices (something that is supposed to be a landmark of using open source software) only make Linux look bad.
There's a difference between someone kindly telling others that X11 is not likely to receive any new major features and bug fixes (which is the right thing to do, in order to inform someone something they may not know) - and then there's whatever the author of this quote is doing.
It happens all the time in the magical world of closed source, too.
Ever heard about the iOS vs Android fights? How people shame Android users for being green bubbles?
It's just the extension of the my camp vs theirs applied to the tech field, nothing new.
I laughed off reports about this kind of thing, thinking "omg who could possibly give a shit about what color their text bubble is in a group chat?" Later my gen Z office mate told me about how he uses an iPhone and cited this exact reason unironically. I was stunned into silence.
Ok but then how about the developers of X11 who decided it wasn't worth fixing the issues and to start a new project called Wayland where they could start from scratch to fix the issues. Does that change your mind at all?
This is literally the exact bad attitude of your average Wayland proponent. The thing which has worked for 20 years doesn't work you just hallucinated it along with all the show stopper bugs you encountered when you tried to switch to Wayland.
The ability to have multiple displays at different scales is a godsend when trying to use a laptop with a 4k display connected to 1080p monitors or vice versa
This already works on X and indeed has worked longer than Wayland has existed.
I can never get this to work properly... Do you have any resources?
I just passed scale to xrandr after computing the proper scale and then used the nvidia-settings gui to write current configuration to xorg.conf its not incredibly hard basically all you are doing is scaling lower DPI items up to the same resolution as your highest dpi item and letting it scale down the correct physical size. For instance if you have 27' monitors that are 4K and 1080p you just scale the 1080 ones by 2 if you have a 4k 27 and a 1080 24" its closer to 1.75. The correct ratio can be found with your favorite calculator app.
You can set this scaling directly in nvidia-settings come to think of it where you set viewport in and viewport out.
That's not at all the same thing. That requires downscaling some screens, which makes everything blurry and breaks subpixel AA.
Yeah, wherever someone says "X has/has had fractional scaling" I just ignore them because it's never actually true fractional scaling that doesn't look and act like utter crap.
I tried unsuccessfully to get this working for quite some time and broke my xrandr settings quite a few times
With Wayland/gnome I just click a button in the settings gui and it works flawlessly
Every time I try Wayland, something doesn't work. The time before last, subpixel DPI scaling was badly broken. This last time, there's some glitch where the screen jumps right a couple pixels (and back) every dozen seconds. I don't have any interest in spending my time trying to fix Wayland issues when X just works.
Replacing good legacy will always be a struggle. X11 works pretty well and has been stable for decades. Most of the things that suck about it already have workarounds.
The advantages of Wayland are not directly visible for the end user. The security part will be great once it's completely integrated on the distributions to give granular permissions to software. The simpler apis and greater performance will help libraries creators, but most developers don't touch X directly and won't touch Wayland either.
Being stable for a couple of months is not good enough. People will use it once distros trust it enough to make it default, and this will probably only happen once Wayland or its compatibility tools work with most software and major applications work significantly better on it.
I switched to wayland because of screen tearing and it fixed it. Idk if x is still glitchy on my new laptop but i dont really care. Also hyprland is really cool so im happy with wayland.
Wayland on AMD is amazing
Counterpoint, I have all AMD machines (CPU and GPU) and each time I've tried Wayland I've immediately run into bugs that make it unusable. Maybe it's because both my setups have multiple monitors with different resolutions, but I don't see why that use case is so hard to support. And I'm running the latest versions of Wayland and KDE so it's not an issue of me running outdated versions that already have bug fixes supplied upstream. If Wayland can't handle just basic desktop use with multiple resolutions why would I go through the effort to use it? Fix the basics first.
My experience has been the opposite. I won't use x after using Wayland on AMD for years it just feels so much smoother. On arch with gnome Wayland has been fantastic.
When both NVIDIA and KDE work well with Wayland, most of the anti-Wayland energy will go away. The advocates will calm down too bar cause they will have won.
I don't think the sentiment is 'anti-wayland'. Most people just don't care. I'm using Awesome WM and it doesn't support Wayland. As OP says, why would I rewrite all my plugins and config just to the sake of switching to Wayland? I would have to invest a lot of time and what will I gain? Absolutely nothing. On my work computer I have different distro and I'm using Cinnamon. I think it uses Wayland but I didn't even bother to check. It works exactly the same as Gnome on X11. Why would I care?
Wayland's major "technical merits", as far as I can tell, are a lack of screen tearing, slightly faster rendering under some circumstances and better handling of touchscreens. That's it. If you don't have a touchscreen and aren't a gamer (few non-gamers care all that much about tearing or about framerates above 60Hz), Wayland has no real advantages to the user that I'm aware of.
X is network-transparent, more widely compatible, and arguably more extensible. Most users don't care about those things either.
Wayland has an advantage in attracting developers because it has less accumulated technical debt and general code cruft. That doesn't make it better for users, though. Most Wayland evangelists I run into seem to be devs who are more interested in the design of the graphics stack than whether it makes a difference in the real world.
So, as with so many things, "merit" is in the eye of the beholder. People should use what works for them.
Also better isolation of applications and better support for multiple screens.
I'll give you the multiple screens (not a use case I have myself, so I don't pay attention to support quality). Isolation of applications is another thing that most users don't really care that much about, I would say.
users shouldn't have to care about security. it should be the baseline.
It's legitimately important if you want to be able to pull random software from places and not have your system compromised, a la smartphone OSes.
It's not the whole story -- things still aren't entirely sandboxed aside from that -- but without it, the GUI is a big security hole.
I've been using it for a few years now, and it fixes a lot of little issues I have with X11, and at this point brings very few of its own. ALTHOUGH, I don't have any Nvidia GPUs, and people seem to think it works for crap on them. I keep hearing "Ah, this will finally fix it!", but I don't know what the actual status is. You have the hardware you have, so unless you are going to buy something different to try Wayland... eh... I guess it never hurts to try. It's pretty trivial to toggle on and off.
What has kept me away from Wayland is the tendency to be dependent on the compositor for so much.
I use my preferred X11 window manager for largely aesthetic reasons, but by and large, I can swap it out and the rest of the software doesn't give a damn. At most, you might have to tweak a RC file to fix missing custom assumptions (i. e. disabling decorations on full-screenified Proton games)
It seems like on Wayland, there's a lot more of a "if you aren't using GNOME or KDE, the odds something meaningful breaks are much higher." Aside from the perceived bulk of these environments, they're highly opinionated-- I suspect it would be a major production number to hammer them into a shape that looked like FVWM or WindowMaker, even if you only wanted to match a single theme's aesthetics (as opposed to, say, FVWM's dynamic configurability).
If you find a Wayland compositor that's based on wl-roots, you basically get that ability for swapping out the window manager.
The wl-roots project aims to be a common library that any project can pull in without having to implement the required Wayland protocols themselves.
I've not even heard of what the technical merits are. It seems to just break shit like systemd.
Eventually I'll be dragged across by the distro, but until then I do not care.
Same. I'm sure its great, but I'm not motivated to spend my time and energy on it. I remember when PulseAudio first came out, it had growing pains too. I jumped on board early because it solved problems I needed to solve. I was a younger nerd back then, and I don't have the patience for the cutting edge anymore.
I hear it does indeed work with Nvidia now, so I guess I'll give it another shot next time I distro-hop.
As someone who constantly checks in on the Nvidia + Wayland combination every time there is a Nvidia driver update, it "works" but only by the loosest definition unfortunately.
Only reason I'm not using it is Nvidia. Missing night light in particular.
The utilities that replace the utilities you're used to on X11 work great, so do the utilities that already work on X11.
That's um... not the best motivation.
I’m not leaving xmonad. It’s such a bummer that Waymonad didn’t really take off.
I have software dating back to 2003 that I need to support. X11 isn't going anywhere.
Xwayland has already been mentioned but this is an important point that not everybody may be familiar with. Xwayland is an Xserver ( actually a specialized version of Xorg itself ) that runs on top of Wayland instead of talking directly to hardware.
If you are running Xwayland, you can run X clients ( x11 software dating back to 2003 for example ) and they will appear on your desktop.
There can obviously be specific considerations around advanced software but moving to Wayland does not mean losing access to software written to target X. Qt and GTK support Wayland and will run native. Applications using other toolkits may still be running over X. As a normal user, you may not even know which applications are still using X and which are not.
This is for regular applications. Moving to Wayland requires a Desktop Environment or Window Manager that supports Wayland. So, GNOME and KDE users are fine but Cinnamon or WindowMaker users would need to switch.
I want to use Wayland, but it currently doesn't work with my Ubuntu 23.04/Nvidia/Steam. It was working under old steam big picture mode but the new big picture mode broke it.
Hope they fix it because I do believe Wayland is the future.
It may be related to Nvidia. Most bugs I met in Wayland is related to it. Such as no dmabuf export support, and vulkan init will fail because a bug in nvidia prime implementation...
As Linus said, so Nvidia, fuck you...
People on Unix environments that don't have Wayland support.
That's a big one. All the *BSD folk will keep on using X at least until it gets proper support over there (which might never happen) and even then it will still be boycotted by some BSD users for other reasons.
People using mainstream desktop environments that already support Wayland ... [but their distro hasn't made the switch]
I agree about that. Many people don't care and will just use whatever their distro tells them to use. As you said, there's usually good reason for it.
People using desktop environments or custom X setups that don't (currently) support Wayland.
This is another one, and is actually one I kinda fall under. I use a tiling window manager. The tiling Wayland compositors are often times not as polished, and a big annoyance for me personally is the fact that most of them (River, Hyprland, DWL) don't come with a bar. Of my X Window Managers, AwesomeWM, DWM and Qtile already have their own bars. BSPWM is basically supposed to be used with Polybar, the same way XMonad and xmobar are basically made for each other. On Wayland, Somebar is made for DWL, but waybar and yambar work really well with it. Sway has swaybar, but waybar works perfectly with it. Both Waybar and yambar work great with River. And there's Waybar, and gBar, and other bars for Hyprland. And that's without mentioning EWW, which can be used to make a bar.
Another issue I have is that my touchpad doesn't get detected if I'm holding down a key. So if I'm playing Minecraft and I'm trying to turn around and run away from a zombie using my touchpad because my mouse's battery ran out, I have to do these actions one by one and hope I survive, or just let myself die. That's just an example, but I have noticed it in other games as well. No such issues on X. And I've also had Powerwash Simulator, ran through wine, just crash on me in some (Qtile or Hyprland), but not other compositors. In DWL, I couldn't turn all the way around and forbsome reason my movement was restricted to 270°, and in River I had 0 issues.
When you have a monopoly
You're saying this as if X didn't have a monopoly over Unix graphics.
Another issue I have is that my touchpad doesn’t get detected if I’m holding down a key
That's a libinput feature, meant to prevent you from accidentally using the touchpad when you're typing. You can disable it if you want.
There a synergy/barrier replacement working on Wayland yet?
No?
Then I guess Wayland isn't ready yet.
Yea, I'm currently using Wayland because Manjaro comes with it but like 90% of the programs I use launch with xwayland anyway. I'm not a developer but can't they just give it proper support for all programs? Like run those programs like they do on X11. Seems pointless if nothing works on it.
Not to mention my laptop with Nvidia graphics, that is just so broken on Wayland I ended up switching it to X11 and I'm very lazy.
clickbait title
I still don't know why people are willing to give up remoting so willingly. With X it was always easy to send your accelerated video securely over the network. Didn't Wayland drop this? How are people remoting securely into Wayland desktops now?
You mean something like waypipe? https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/
No one needed Wayland, what everyone needed was X12.
Wayland basically is X12. X11 was extremely different from X10 to my knowlesge, they just wemt for a shiny new name and a new technical model. X12 was gonna break things too.
I couldn't get OBS working. X11 works for it, so I keep using it. Hopefully eventually, I won't need to, but I don't have the time to spend hours researching and troubleshooting. I tried, failed, but x11 Just Works TM. I'm part of the problem, I guess.