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.
this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2025
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Yeah AFAIK the only two DEs that fully support Wayland are the big two - Gnome and KDE. and a few tiling window managers like Sway and Hyprland.
I look forward to a world where all modern DEs are fully supportive of Wayland like Cinnamon and Budgie and I know people love their xfce.
Yeah, i can't explain why I love xfce so much. It's very much like a windows 9x style desktop with some QOL improvements (press alt to click drag a window is such a great feature)
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to the unavoidable "it's been 15 years" comments: 15-year-old x11 was a piece of shit. the difference is that we had no alternative so we had to put up with it
I'm glad Wayland is maturing and taking over. Even most of the X11 devs hated X11 which tells you something.
You know Wayland will be ready when these threads don't get 100 comments
I think Wayland just attracts trolls in the same way as systemd does.
Yeah. Over on ~~Moronix~~ Phoronix, every article about Rust, systemd, Wayland or –to a lesser extent– GNOME is a troll fest.
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Wayland is already ready and majority of linux desktop users are using it without issue.
As an average desktop user, I've run into very little pushback on Wayland. Its made huge leaps in a short amount of time.
Yes it's been stable for some time with a couple of caveats - you need a decent graphics driver and not be using apps with edge cases.
Here is a simple example of an edge case and it's not hard to find people blaming Wayland even though with some thought this was a security issue - apps like Zoom, Discord, MS Teams want to do screen sharing which is easy in X11 because it has non existent security - just steal the screen bitmap. That's a problem.
Wayland (the protocol) provides no means for one app to grab the screen, or other apps. This is by design for security. Instead the app must be a good citizen and send a "i want to screen cast" message to the xdg-desktop-portal (a service provider implemented by GNOME, KDE etc.), the desktop asks for user consent and then the app gets a video stream. So it's a lot more secure but it requires the app and the WM do things properly.
Desktops and apps have matured and these issues are thankfully going away. I think the biggest hurdle left is proper graphics drivers, especially the problem of getting NVidia drivers working.
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yeah i think it was a couple of gnomes ago, i never noticed the chageover
Same. I booted up NixOS with Gnome around 5 months ago and it took a second for me to realize it was defaulting to Wayland. I was running it on an ancient Asus gaming laptop with nouveau drivers and the experience was overall smooth. Had it multi screened with my TV, too.
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I finally switched when I moved from Arch to Fedora and it's worked fantastically for me. This is where the Linux desktop is heading now for sure.
agreed, plenty of bug and issues with wayland in the past, but i can now comfortably use it for everything on amd/intel cards.
"rough start" is putting it mildly. 🤭
Rough start? It’s been over a decade and it’s still rough.
Whats rough?
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.
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.
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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.
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I wish Nvidia agreed.
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.
My biggest issue gaming under Wayland is the fact that certain games can't capture the mouse when run full screen with multiple monitors. I've got a number of games that exhibit the issue, but the easiest way to experience it is to try and run CS2 as wayland native (so not under xwayland - As the performance overheads running xwayland are notable running CS2) - Within 10 mins you'll be looking at the ground with the mouse pointer on your secondary monitor.
Furthermore, running gamescope doesn't fix the problem - And yes, I'm running the correct commands under gamescope.
I mean - This is basic functionality that should be an integral part of any modern OS. Under X11 running the same dual matched monitors everything works perfectly with great FPS.
i deleted the x session files so they don't show up in my greeter. They got annoying by now, for me. I used to shit on wayland, but it's inching closer and closer to being usable. and i use an nvidia gtx 1080, so that's saying something
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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.
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I have a shitload of bug/weird behavior with Wayland, I hope it gets better but for me it is not there yet.
Like what? (Curious)
Here is some of them (they are all intermitent) :
- Wrong sensitivity with the mouse
- wrong tiling of my windows with multiple screens, (like I do a full screen and the window will disapear or occupy half of the bottom of the screen for example.
- black screen after coming out of sleep
- some gtk applicatipn have random widgets not working (but some do in the same window/frame...)
- sometimes when I try to share my screen with a native wayland app it just goes to black (and sharing with an X app I have to select two times what I want to share on top of in the app)
- sometimes sub menus are just misplaced
- some of my appimages gets broken with wayland
- some x apps are blurry
I forget a lot, but it's a lot of minor issues that piles up and gets frustrating
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