Look, the people over at Wayland made a solid protocol, sure. But for all the time and effort they’ve put into getting it to the state it’s in today, it’s going to take a long while for all the apps, DEs, and TWMs to be ready. It took so long for the Linux desktop to get to the state it is on X11, which, for all it’s flaws, seems to be easier to develop for than Wayland.
Wacom Drivers, Nvidia Drivers, DE-Agnostic screensharing, screenshot, eyedropper tools are all in various states of not working/sort of working/working on wayland. This simply isn’t the case with X11. They all just work. That’s kind of a big win for X11 over Wayland.
It doesn’t matter how light weight and more secure your protocol is if you can’t use the tools you need to get the jobs you need done, whatever those jobs are. That is literally what computers are for at the end of the day, not to lord our superiority over others because our choice of tools are somehow better.
Yes Wayland is the future, but to say “Wayland is ready” while also saying “many of the apps for Wayland are not ready” ends up meaning that wayland is NOT ready.
Until the transition between X and Wayland is seamless (no adjusting environment variables), saying we should all just move to Wayland cuz ”is the future" are engaging in the same FOMO tactics that crytpo and AI bros have been doing for years. Fuck that noise.
You are not somehow better because you use Wayland. And yeah yeah, shots fired, down votes incoming. Come at me tech daddy.
GTK, Qt, Firefoxes XUL, Electron (Chromium), Iced, and more support Wayland. You dont develop apps for Wayland, you develop them with a GUI toolkit.
Fair enough. All I know is to get something as simple and necessary to my workflow as using KeePassXC, I had to adjust a few QT flags in my environment variables. No big deal as I actually enjoy configuring my system, but it’s in my opinion Wayland will be “ready” when this sort of under the hood tweaking won’t be necessary by the user.
Here, I’ll pose a simple question that kind of gets at the heart of what I’m talking about. Libreoffice works great on Wayland right? Good, fantastic, kudos to Libreoffice, kudos to Wayland. Now, name me a 2nd office suite that works on Wayland. Just one. This is a genuine question and despite my decent google fu, I can’t find a one. I got Open Office to open on Wayland, but it doesn’t recognize the entire suite.
Now, this may seem like an unfair argument to make, as there were never many office suites available on Linux to begin with. And there’s always been people in the Linux community who will call for more uniformity, but I, like many others, love Linux for it’s extreme customizability (amongst other reasons). Wayland severely cuts down on my choices of what TWMs I can use, what DEs are available, and various widely used productivity tools like office suites.
The amount of knots Wayland enthusiasts tie themselves up in to say “but if you just configure this flag, if you just run this through xwayland/game scope, if you just don’t use nvidia, then wayland is ready” is just pointing to the fact that it’s straight up not.
And that’s not the fault of any one entity. Writing a protocol like Wayland is a massive endeavor and is needed. But developers across the board who want to provide support for Linux, are now scrambling to rewrite parts of their applications to conform to this new protocol because yes, they see the writing on the wall (especially with the latest lines in the sand drawn by Red Hat). But isn’t the fact that their scrambling to get this accomplished, and convert their apps to Wayland, an indicator that maybe, just maybe, that Wayland as a daily driver for, if not the majority, at least a reasonable part of the Linux community, not ready?
I’m not saying Wayland isn’t the future. What I’m saying is until discussions like these are the outlier, not the norm, Wayland isn’t ready.
.Uhm…
What did you need to set for KeepassXC? The flathub version and fedora RPM just work.
You can modify flatpak permissions easily in KDE or using Flatseal though, to remove a lot and especially restrict keepassXC to only readwrite one directory.
Uhm, what other Office Suite is there on Linux?
- Openoffice is discontinued and Libreoffice is the modern Openoffice.
- There is KDEs Calligra which can do stuff but I see no reason for it.
- WPSOffice is available as a Flatpak wrapper, the app should not be trusted but it runs on XWayland without problems. But really dont use it.
- online office suites work perfectly fine through a Browser (Collabora, Onlyoffice, Google cancer, Miscrosoft Cancer)
- I have no idea of Onlyoffice but isnt that just Libreoffice with the cloud integration? This is really useful, last time I used their version it was just a weird rebranded Libreoffice.
I have no idea why Wayland should cut down your choices. Use XOrg if you want, nobody stopping you, it is simply unmaintained for years pretty much.
There are TWMs for Wayland and they are said to work (have a look at wayblue), I use KDE and tried GNOME and both work. Use any weird old TWM through rootful XWayland if you really want to. This is not waylands problem, X.org is old spaghetticode that nobody wanted to maintain, and there still is no rise in contributions even with all those self-entitled Linux Experts complaining about their weird old nieche Desktop being abandoned.
Nearly (?) all development is done for XWayland, which is normally used in rootless mode, but you can use it rootfull too, and run a complete XOrg Window manager on a minimalist Wayland compositor. Brody Robertson made a video about that.
XWayland is automatically used for all Apps without Wayland support. I never used Gamescope but suppose this is nice, but I dont care about Gaming as I wasted way too much time of my life there. If you want to game, use uBlue Bazzite and call it a day. Its a modern Distro, based on Fedora, using Wayland, made for steamdecks and also PCs.
I never set a single flag for anything and have no idea how Wayland works, but I used it since at least 1½ years.
Wayland has nothing to do with NVIDIA. It was not ready when it “came out” so people where not giving it a chance for obvious reasons. They preferred to use extremely insecure and unmaintained but working Display management.
Now the pressure finally rises, NVIDIA already shipped a lot of updates for Wayland, but in the end it is their fault and you may not want to use hardware from a company that doesnt give a sh*t about FOSS on Linux. I have no idea why people would want to do that? There is literally the high likeliness of backdoors in your damn GPU driver, allowing the green team to see everything you do.
Why use Linux if you entire Graphics are using a proprietary black box?
Wayland is ready. I have no idea of developing Apps, but I suppose just using a good Toolkit is the start. If you are lazy just use Electron, but Qt works just as well cross-platform, if you are fancy use Slint. We can argue if developing apps for Linux is ready.
I think there are bigger problems like good easy IDEs (only GNOME has one) for Linux, or the packaging issue that is fixed by Flathub. Wayland is just a change.
I maintain a repo with a list of recommended, modern software
I have tested a lot of apps, and those are the best. Keep your system secure with modern apps following best practices, using portals, that are Wayland native.
And to be honest, people can just use old Software through XWayland forever. They often dont even need to change.
Projects like Bluerecorder are nice and very alpha on Wayland, here I agree they are struggling to make it work but it works. Using OBS for minimalist screen recording is huge bloat.
the calligra suite works fine too. open office is basically dead and replaced by libreoffice. I don’t know if any development is still happening. I can’t name another office suite Wayland or otherwise though
xwayland does just work though. I don’t even know how to explicitly run something under it
explicit flags are more of a problem, but they’re going away slowly, and for the most part people can just let things run under xwayland instead of dealing with flags. there are some apps that just won’t work, but for the most part it’s not a widespread issue in my experience
You are absolutely right, I use Wayland on KDE cause two different refresh rate monitores but duude, even on amd you have some hassles. It is ok if you change some env variables, not OK for the average Joe.
I’m so confused why other people are having so much trouble, I use two computers with AMD GPUs and one with Intel and I haven’t had any problems with wayland on Gnome, Plasma, Sway, or Hyprland in the past like two years. The only environment variable I ever changed was the one to make firefox use wayland before that was the default, but that wasn’t at all required for the average user, it works fine under xwayland.
Things like, scrensharing, OBS (recently was patched and now it works), discord, spectacle (is a little unstable), screen locking (only one screen or none of them turn off) and some xwayland games/emulators won’t work. All of this in a full amd setup with KDE.
With one Novideo 1660s my KDE panel frozen every 30 minutes.
If you only use linux for development or browsing you should find no problems.
Monitores
Brazilian detected
Also, I use two monitors with different refresh rates on Mint / Cinnamon / Xorg and it’s more than fine. I think you only need Wayland for variable refresh rate. But two static refresh rates seem to work just fine on X.
Brazilian detected
Damn, my camouflage didn’t work.
They are actually running in different refresh rates? The default is to cap the better monitor in the lower refresh rate. If I accept that it is fine to me as well. If I try to force different refresh rates on kwin , my games run with so much tearing, even with vsync on.
Wacom Drivers
Digimend works flawlessly. Also if you have a tablet you should be aware that you’re not exactly a typical user. Blender runs natively under wayland, btw,
Much of the griping you hear right now is because wayland got into a state where it does do everything the average user would ask for so the switchover is happening for real, meanwhile tons of projects have ignored the writing on the wall for a literal decade and invested zero effort so far and now are caught with their pants down.
My migration looked like this: About a year ago or so I read some wayland article, wondered for a brief second, logged out of my session, said “ah!” and selected “Plasma (wayland)” from the dropdown: NixOS installs both flavours when you tell it to give you KDE. Tried it out, found nothing wrong with it, grumbled a bit because it wasn’t the default session, found the config option to make it default, done.
Ever since then alt-tabbing from proton games is way better, mpv does a much better job at actually using VRR, the only problem I ever had with the setup is mouse cursor changing when hovering over firefox because dconf was missing and it couldn’t read the gtk theme that KDE sets to make everything look coherent. That’s literally it.
Solid. I do authentically look forward to Wayland working out of the box for as many use cases as X does right now.
Thanks for the tidbit about tablets I actually fo uee a wacom, so this is probably not what I’m looking for. Sway has a weird workaround specific to their wm, hopefully river can port that over. Otherwise there seems to be other solutions, but I have yet to install/configure them.
DE-Agnostic screensharing
Wayland runs some games I play much better. It does though for some reason after a while start to lag out with cpu usage off the charts. I found I don’t have that issue with xorg. I have amd, and some games with wayland will after a fresh restart have terrible frame rates but seems like five to ten minutes later they come back and it’s fine. (issue doesn’t happen in xorg) Depending on what game I’m playing or what I’m doing, depends on if run wayland or xorg. It’s as simple as logging out to change so it’s no big deal for me.
