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Comments (303)

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  gsliepen
  A rather big problem is that Wayland is just a protocol, not an implementation. There are many competing implementations, like Gnome, KDE and wlroots. The problems you have with one of them might not appear in another. The reference compositor, Weston, is not really usable as a daily driver. So while with Xorg you have a solid base, and desktops are implemented on top of that, with Wayland the each desktop is reinventing the wheel, and each of them has to deal with all the quirks of the graphics drivers. I think this is a big problem with the architecture of Wayland. There really should be a standard library that all desktops use. Wlroots aims to be one, but I don't see Gnome and KDE moving to it anytime soon.
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  ryandrake
  I still don't know why I would want to use it. The benefits don't seem to outweigh the costs yet, and xorg is tried and true. So many Linux articles and forum posts about fixing problems with your desktop graphics start with "If you're using Wayland, go back to xorg, it'll probably fix the problem you're seeing."You don't always have to replace something that works with something that doesn't but is "modern."My guess is that we'll only start seeing Wayland adoption when distributions start forcing it or making it a strong default, like what happened with systemd.
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  charcircuit
  >nVidia refused to support the API that Wayland was using, insisting that their EGLStreams approach was superiorThis is a common mischaracterizarion of what happened. This API, GBM, was a proprietary API that was a part of Mesa. Nvidia couldn't add GBM to their own driver as it is a Mesa concept. So instead Nvidia tried to make a vendor neutral solution that any graphics drivers could use which is where you see EGLStreams come into the picture. Such an EGL API was also useful for other nonwayland embedded usecases. In regards to Nvidia's proprietary driver's GBM support, Nvidia themselves had to add support to the Mesa project to support dynamically loading new backends that weren't precompiled into Mesa. Then they were able to make their own backend.For some reason when this comes up people always phrase it in terms of Nvidia not supporting something instead of the freedesktop people not offering a way for the Nvidia driver to work, which is a prerequisite of Nvidia following such guidance.
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  joelthelion
  I've been using wayland with Gnome for years without a single issue.Arguably my hardware is a lot simpler and I don't use Nvidia. But I just want to point out that, for all the flak wayland receives, it can work quite well.
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  fabian2k
  I just recently switched to Linux since I had some weird Windows issues I couldn't fix. I've tried to switch a few times before, but the main problem at some point was that I didn't have proper fractional scaling on Linux. And that alone pretty much made Linux unusable for me on my specific hardware.Wayland fixes that, so that part is a huge improvement to me. Unfortunately this also limited my choice of Distros as not all of them use Wayland. I landed on Ubuntu again, despite some issues I have with it. The most annoying initially was that the Snap version of Firefox didn't use hardware acceleration, which is just barely usable.
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  lpcvoid
  I've been using Wayland (wlroots/swaywm) for a few years now and it's been flawless, even with an eGPU.But I'm also running all AMD hardware, that may be a factor. Life is too short for nvidia bullshit on Linux.
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  forgotpwd16
  Heh, interesting seeing we use pretty much the same things, i3+NixOS+urxvt+zsh+Emacs+rofi+maim+xdotool, only differentiating in browser choice (it's Firefox for me) and (me) not using any term multiplexer.>So from my perspective, switching from this existing, flawlessly working stack (for me) to Sway only brings downsides.Kudos to Michael for even attempting it. Personally nowadays unless my working stack stops, well, working, or there're significant benefits to be found, don't really feel even putting the effort to try the shiny new things out.
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  edent
  I've been running Wayland on a Framework laptop and it just works. Droves my 4K external monitor, quickly switches to single screen, does fractional scaling well, runs all my apps without complaint.I had an old Chromebook which had Lubuntu on it - screen tearing was driving me crazy so I switched to Wayland and it is buttery smooth. No mean feat given the decrepit hardware.I'm sure someone will be along to tell me that I'm wrong - but I've yet to experience any downsides, other than people telling me I'm wrong.
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  jlarocco
  I'm not switching to Wayland until my window manager supports it. It doesn't look like anybody has time to do the work, so I'll probably switch, grudgingly, to XWayland whenever X gets removed from Debian.I feel like the biggest issue for Wayland is the long tail of people using alternative WMs. A lot of those projects don't have manpower to do what amounts to a complete rewrite.I honestly don't have a preference between Wayland and X, but I feel very strongly about keeping my current WM. XWayland supposedly works, but I'm not in any hurry to add an extra piece of software and extra layer of configuration for something I already have working exactly the way I want. If Wayland offered some amazing advantages over X, it might be different, but I haven't seen anything to win me over.
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  jgb1984
  For me wayland offers only downsides, without any upsides. I feel the general idea behind it (pushing all complexity and work onto other layers) is broken. I'll stick to xorg and openbox for many years to come.
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  zeta0134
  KDE Plasma switched to Wayland by default sometime last year, and so far the main issue I run into is that a few screen recording tools I like stopped working. (Mostly simplescreenrecorder, which seems to be entirely unmaintained at this point.) Other than some initial instability with accelerated rendering on my GPU, which was quickly addressed, it kinda just works. I mostly don't notice.Actually, GPU acceleration was why I initially switched. For whatever reason, this GPU (Radeon VII) crashes regularly under X11 nearly every time I open a new window, but is perfectly stable under wayland. Really frustrating! So, I had some encouragement, and I was waiting for plasma-wayland to stabilize enough to try it properly. I still have the X11 environment installed as a fallback, just in case, but I haven't needed to actually use it for months.Minor pain points so far mostly include mouse acceleration curves being different and screen capture being slightly more annoying. Most programs do this OS-level popup and then so many follow that up with their own rectangle select tool after I already did that. I had some issues with sdl2-compat as well, but I'm not sure that was strictly wayland's fault, and it cleared up on its own after a round of updates. (I develop an SDL2 game that needs pretty low latency audio sync to run smoothly)
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  altern8
  Might be a stupid question, but what's wrong with Xorg?I know that it wasn't originally conceived to do what it does today, but I've never had any problem using it, and when I tried Wayland I didn't notice any difference whatsoever.Is it just that it's a pain to write apps for it..?
• renewiltord
  This reminds me of when pulseaudio came on the scene. Bizarrely there was a short period when PA was superior to everything else. I could set per source and per sink volumes. It was bonkers. The perfect mixer. Then something else happened.Don’t know what the deal is with Linux desktop experience. I have encountered various forms of perfection and had them taken away.Once on my XPS M1330 I clicked to lift a window and then three finger swiped to switch workspace and the workspace switched and I dropped the window. It was beautiful. I didn’t even notice until after I’d done it what an intuitive thing it felt like.Then a few years later I tried with that fond memory and it didn’t work. Where did the magic go?Probably some accidental confluence of features broken in some change.
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  nickjj
  I don't think Wayland is fully ready, at least not with NVIDIA GPUs with limited GPU memory.I have a 7,000 word blog post and demo videos coming out this Tuesday with the details but I think I uncovered a driver bug having switched to native Linux a week ago with a low GPU memory card (750 Ti).Basically on Wayland, apps that request GPU memory will typically crash if there's no more GPU memory to allocate where as on X11 it will transparently offload those requests to system memory so you can open up as much as you want (within reason) and the system is completely usable.In practice this means opening up a few hardware accelerated apps in Wayland like Firefox and most terminals will likely crash your compositor or at the very least crash those apps. It can crash or make your compositor unstable because if it in itself gets an error allocating GPU memory to spawn the window it can do whatever weird things it was programmed to do in that scenario.I reported it here: https://github.com/NVIDIA/egl-wayland/issues/185Some end users on the NVIDIA developer forums looked into it and determined it's likely a problem for everyone, it's just less noticeable if you have more GPU memory and it's especially less noticeable if you reboot daily since that clears all GPU memory leaks which is also apparent in a lot of Wayland compositors.
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  officialchicken
  2026 is starting with half-baked NVidia drivers and missing functionality on linux? I am so surprised... did you try 17 different previous versions to get it running in true NV-Linux fashion?This stuff has been flawless on AMD systems for a while a couple of years now, with the exception of the occasional archaic app that only runs on X11 (thus shoved in a container).
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  kallistisoft
  At this point the primary thing that's keeping me from switching to Wayland (KDE) is lack of support for remote desktop software, especially with multiple monitors...Hopefully AnyDesk and Remmina will address this issue before KDE ends it's mainline X11 support next year.
• AndreasBackx
  > Instead of my usual choice maim(1) , I tried grim(1) , but unfortunately grim’s -T flag to select the window to capture is rather cumbersome to use (and captures in 1x scale). >Does anyone have any suggestions for a good alternative?You might want to give wayshot a "shot"? https://github.com/waycrate/wayshot
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  glimshe
  Note to people on this thread: the impression the discussions give is that Linux isn't ready for prime time desktop use. I thought Wayland was the latest and greatest, but folks here report issues and even refuse to ever use it.Windows and Mac Os, for all their faults, are unquestionably ready to use in 2026. If you are a Linux on desktop advocate, read the comments and see why so many are still hesitating.
• Joeboy
  I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 25.10, and decided to give Wayland another go since X.org isn't installed by default anymore.Good news: My laptop (Lenovo P53) can now suspend / resume successfully. With Ubuntu 25.04 / Wayland it wouldn't resume successfully, which was a deal breaker.Annoying thing: I had a script that I used to organize workspaces using wmctrl, which doesn't work anymore so I had to write a gnome-shell extension. Which (as somebody who's never written a gnome-shell extension before) was quite annoying as I had to keep logging out and in to test it. I got it working eventually but am still grumpy about it.Overall: From my point of view as a user, the switch to Wayland has wasted a lot of my time and I see no visible benefits. But, it seems to basically work now and it seems like it's probably the way things are headed.Edit: Actually I've seen some gnome crashes that I think happen when I have mpv running, but I can't say for sure if that's down to Wayland.
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  zeendo
  Glad to see a good write-up of Wayland issues. My day-to-day doesn't run into the vast majority of these problems so when I see people melt down over a single trivial seeming Wayland choice about window coordinates then I have a really hard time relating.This post is a lot more relatable.As an aside, regarding remote Emacs - I can attest that Waypipe does indeed work fantastically for this. Better than X11 ever worked over the network for me.I, too, suffer from the pgtk is slow issue (only a 4k monitor though it's mitigable and manageable for me)
• everdrive
  I'm not very familiar with Wayland, and the fact that XWayland exists means that I don't really have much sense for whether a given app is using Wayland or not. I also don't do anything very fancy. I have a single, sub-4k monitor and don't use HDR or other things. Am I using Wayland? Sometimes? Most of the time? I'm really not 100% sure.
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  samiv
  I've been trying to switch to Wayland and KDE plasma for some time but it's just so glitchy. Graphics bugs such as the tasks switcher showing black or flickery preview thumbnails or Firefox bringing down the whole system when opening a single 4k PNG indicate that it's still unfortunately very much an alpha.Maybe in another decade or so.
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  thevinchi
  Wayland smells like IPv6 to me. No need to switch, and it hurts when you try.
• rand846633
  Recently had to reinstall my Linux (btw, Arch). Normally I’d just dd/mirror the NVMe, but this time I decided to stop putting off the switch to Wayland and just do it — moved from i3 to sway, etc. I’d been avoiding this for years.Turns out: absolutely no problem. The tooling around Wayland and adjacent programs is way more modern and functional. Great experience. Can recommend switching in 2026.For me, the unintuitive truth with Linux is: once you’re on a rolling release, most problems just vanish. I still love Debian for prod, but for experimenting and development, rolling release any day.
• mithcs
  My experience is very similar. Just today, I was trying Wayland again but it didn't work out.One of the obstacle that I faced is wrong resolution. On Xorg I could just add new mode and get up and running quickly. On Wayland, I have to either do some EDID changes or go through even worse.
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  ur-whale
  I must say:1) Hugely enjoyable content - as usual - by Michael Stapelberg: relevant, detailed, organized, well written.2) I am also an X11 + i3 user (and huge thanks to Michael for writing i3, I'm soooo fast with it), I also keep trying wayland on a regular basis because I don't want to get stuck using deprecated software.I am very, very happy to read this article, if only because it proves I'm not the only one and probably not crazy.Same experience he has: everytime I try wayland ... unending succession of weird glitches and things that plain old don't work.Verdict: UNUSABLE.I am going to re-iterate something I've said on HN many times: the fact that X11 has designs flaws is a well understood and acknowledged fact.So is the fact that a new solution is needed.BUT, because Wayland is calling themselves the new shite supposed to be that solution DOES NOT AUTOMATICALLY MEAN they actually managed to solve the problem.As a matter of fact, in my book, after so many years, they completely and utterly failed, and they should rethink the whole thing from scratch.And certainly not claim they're the replacement until they have reached feature and ease of use parity.Which they haven't as Michael's article clearly points out.
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  OsrsNeedsf2P
  Can anyone recommend an autoclicker they actively use on Wayland? I've been using ydotool but the daemon service is janky (fails to startup/shutdown frequently, also had issues where half my inputs don't work while it's running)
• FoolsTech
  I've been using Wayland for 3 years now. First through Hyprland, now since August 2025 through Niri. Zero fundamental issues. Some developers don't want add Wayland support in their apps or can't because the app is using some framework and their devs don't want to support Wayland. But honestly ditching apps that don't support Wayland was one of the best decisions in my dev life (along with ditching MacOS and later Ubuntu). That's how I ended up using Neovim since Jetbrains needed ages to add Wayland support. 2.5 years into using Neovim Jetbrains finally added Wayland support. So I've accepted their offer to use Intelliji for free for 6 months. I barely opened it in 6 months, despite having been Jetbrains Evangelist for 7 years before switching to Neovim. That being said you can still use most of x11 apps through xwayland with a few limitations (primarily no fractional scaling) or in worst case through qemu.
• vzaliva
  What a fantastic and timely post! Especially coming from i3 maintainer! Michael did such diligent analasys and saved me (and hopefully others) a lot of time. I was considering trying Wayland/sway and this post answered all my questions and showed me that it is not ready, at least for me, yet.
• sylware
  Since there are many wayland compositors, wayland clients must be very conservative (don't be fancy) and most of all respect the dynamic discovery of the interfaces and features and must adjust (from core to stable interfaces).For instance, a compositor may not support a clipboard, and the "data" related interfaces must be queried for availability (those interface are stable in core) and the client must disable such functionality if not there (for instance, wterm terminal is faulty because it forces a compositor to have such interfaces... but havoc terminal is doing it right). I don't know yet if libSDL3 wayland support "behaves" properly. wterm fix is boring but should be easy.As wayland usage, it is probably almost everwhere (and Xwayland is there for some level of legacy compatibility).(I am currently writting my own compositor for AMD GPUs... in risc-v assembly running on x86_64 via an interpreter)
• throw0101c
  I'm on macOS, and I use XQuartz [1] occasionally for Linux/Unix GUI apps: if something is 'written for' (?) Wayland, can I send its GUI windows across the network (over SSH)?[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XQuartz
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  simonra
  My question is how long will it take for core necessities like push to talk in discord running in a background tab in my browser while I game with my 50+ closest friends to work under wayland. I hope I don’t develop a need for accessibility tooling the next couple of decades given the current progress.
• whalesalad
  I’ve been using Wayland on Debian 12 since 2023. On an Apple Studio Display (5K) over thunderbolt (the built-in camera, speakers, etc work fine)I screen share and video call with Slack and Google Meet.I use alacritty/zsh/tmux as my terminal. I use chromium as my browser, vscode and sublime text as code editors.Slack, Spotify, my studio mic, my Scarlett 2i2, 10gbe networking, thunderbolt, Logitech unifying receiver…. Literally everything “just works” and has been a joy to use.Only issues I’ve ever faced have been forcing an app to run native Wayland not xwayland (varies from app to app but usually a cli flag needed) and Bluetooth pairing with my Sony noise canceling which is unrelated to Wayland. Periodically I get into a dance where it won’t pair, but most of the time it pairs fine.
• seqizz
  If somewm[1] continues to develop, why not? Otherwise I will not be sacrificing my decade-old work style with awesomewm.[1] https://github.com/trip-zip/somewm
• yxhuvud
  > Sometimes, keyboard shortcuts seem to be executed twice!Sounds like someone made a listener that listens on key events, but didn't bother to check the state of the event, meaning it hits releases as well. Should be easy to verify by keeping them pressed long enough to trigger the key repeat events.> I also noticed that font rendering is different between X11 and Wayland! The difference is visible in Chrome browser tab titles and the URL bar, for example:Tab title display is not owned by wayland unless you are running with the client side decor extension, which Gnome is not. So looking at the application or GUI framework (GTK in this case) are really the two only choices.
• enricotr
  About the beginning of the article: Wayland is an alternative, not a successor, of X11.
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  jeffbee
  The way this article styles the name of the GPU company "nVidia" is really distracting! The company has always referred to itself in all capitals, as in NVIDIA, and only their logos have stylized a lowercase initial n, which leads to perhaps nVIDIA if you want, or nᴠɪᴅɪᴀ for those with skills or, for normal people, just nvidia. But "nVidia" is a mixture of mistakes.
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  nitinreddy88
  Try using Zoom client with screen sharing. Doesn't work and so on many applications limited by functionality. People say its year of Linux 2026 and xorg is dead. But its not even close to make it work for basic functionality. You can blame on vendors but as long as user functionality is not working, its never a working solution
• blackfawn
  I often see comments of "everything works perfect in wayland" which makes me wonder how many features some people use. I've tried wayland a few times now and have always noticed small quirks. A few current examples: shading a window actually leaves an invisible section that can't be clicked where the window was, shading and other window activities being inconsistent across various window types (terminal, file manager, etc.), picture-in-picture mode of browsers doesn't maintain aspect ratio, picture-in-picture doesn't maintain "always on top" or position when enabling it (I've managed to fix the "always on top" by writing a rule to apply to windows with "Picture in picture" as the title, at least)
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  diath
  > But rather quickly, after moving and resizing browser windows, the GPU process dies with messages like the following and, for example, WebGL is no longer hardware accelerated:Is this specific to the WM he used or does HW acceleration straight up not work in browsers under Wayland? That to me seems like a complete deal breaker.
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  tsoukase
  For me a no-go for wayland is no support in LXDE and Xfce, which are very good lightweight out of the box user friendly DEs. There is LXQt and Xfce initiated the migration but until then it doesn't worth. Other hurdles are less important like multiscreen, multi-seat, Nvidia.
• anon
  undefined
• hainkind
  Does anyone have a workaround to get i3 fullscreen behaviour in sway?And is it possible to get fullscreen but within a container (e.g. get rid of browser gui to see more in a small container)
• nijave
  Does hot plugging work right yet? Was quickly discouraged when KVM caused crashes and the open issue said "you're holding it wrong, buy edid emulators"
• Kon5ole
  Wayland being contemporary with the financial crisis makes sense in my head but I'll probably spend the rest of today processing that it's 18 years ago.
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  edu4rdshl
  It's fun how most of the complaints are like "it works fine on Gnome but I will still blame Wayland because my tiling WM doesn't support it". So maybe try using a proper Wayland implementationThe Chrome crashes when resizing a window doesn't makes any sense, apart from being a WM fault. The Xwayland scaling, again, has native scaling support on Gnome. Same for the monitor resolution problem (which he acknowledged). Same for font rendering. Idk.
• Sparkyte
  I have nothing to add other than I use bazzite for everything now. Windows gone.
• anon
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• cramcgrab
  I’ve been using Wayland exclusively for about 2 years. It’s great. And when it’s not it gets fixed. X11 isn’t a project anymore, it’s a nightmare of empty meetings and discussions, no coders.
• voodooEntity
  So im using linux desktops for decades now, and bout 2 years ago i finally ditched my for gaming only windows install to go onto linux only setups for gaming also.I mean, it works alot better than it did before, still i wouldn't recommend it for someone who isn't ready to tinker in order to make stuff work.The point why i mention this is, while most normal desktop/coding stuff works okay with wayland, as soon i try any gaming its just a sh*show. From stuff that doesn't even start (but works when i run on x) to heavyly increased performance demands from games that work a lot smoother on x.While i have no personal relation to any of both, and i couldn't technically care less which of them to use - if you are into gaming, at least in my experience, x is rn still the more stable solution.
• OtomotO
  If I could in 2020.... Maybe?
• poulpy123
  Do we have any choice ?
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  shevy-java
  The article already begins with a wrong claim:"Wayland is the successor to the X server "Wayland is primarily a protocol, but most definitely not a "success" to the xorg-server. This is why it does not have - and will never have - the same feature set. So trying to sell it as "the new shiny thing" after almost 20 (!!!!!) years, is simply wrong. One should instead point out that wayland is a separate way to handle a display server / graphics. There are different trade-offs.> but for the last 18 years (!), Wayland was never usable on my computersI can relate to this a bit, but last year or perhaps even the year before, I used wayland via plasma on manjaro. It had various issues, but it kind of worked, even on nvidia (using the proprietary component; for some reason the open-source variant nouveau works less-well on my current system). So I think wayland was already usable even before 2025, even on problematic computer systems.> I don’t want to be stuck on deprecated softwareI don't want to be stuck on software that insinuates it is the future when it really is not.> With nVidia graphics cards, which are the only cards that support my 8K monitor, Wayland would either not work at all or exhibit heavy graphics glitches and crashes.I have a similar problem. Not with regards to a 8K monitor, but my ultra-widescreen monitor also has tons of issues when it comes to nvidia. I am also getting kind of tired of nvidia refusing to fix issues. They are cheap, granted, but I'd love viable alternatives. It seems we have a virtual monopoly situation here. That's not good.> So the pressure to switch to Wayland is mounting!What pressure? I don't feel any pressure. Distributions that would only support wayland I would not use anyway; I am not depending on that, though, as I compile everything from source using a set of ruby scripts. And that actually works, too. (Bootstrapping via existing distributions is easier and faster though. As stated, trade-offs everywhere.)> The reason behind this behavior is that wlroots does not support the TILE property (issue #1580 from 2019).This has also been my impression. The wayland specific things such as wlroots, but also other things, just flat out suck. There are so many things that suck with this regard - and on top of that, barely any real choice on wayland. Wayland seems to have dumbed down the whole ecosystem. After 20 years, having such a situation is shameful. That's the future? I am terrified of that future.> During 2025, I switched all my computers to NixOS. Its declarative approach is really nice for doing such tests, because you can reliably restore your system to an earlier version.I don't use NixOS myself, but being able to have determined system states that work and are guaranteed to work, kind of extends the reproducible builds situation. It's quite cool. I think all systems should incorporate that approach. Imagine you'd no longer need StackOverflow because people in the NixOS sphere solved all those problems already and you could just jump from guaranteed snapshot to another one that is guaranteed to also work. That's kind of a cool idea.The thing I dislike about NixOS the most is ... nix. But I guess that is hard to change now. Every good idea to be ruined via horrible jokes of an underperforming programming language ...> So from my perspective, switching from this existing, flawlessly working stack (for me) to Sway only brings downsides.I had a similar impression. I guess things will improve, but right now I feel as if I lose too much for "this is now the only future". And I don't trust the wayland-promo devs anymore either - too much promo, too few results. After 20 years guys ...
• 0xedd
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• krautburglar
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• outreachCSOAI
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  xerxes901
  Was expecting some real unproductive and entitled whining based on the title, but was pleasantly surprised - someone actually investigating and debugging their wayland issues rather than putting their head in the sand and screaming “X11 FOREVER!!!”