This post is in part a response to an aspect of Nate’s post “Does Wayland really break everything?“, but also my reflection on discussing Wayland protocol additions, a unique pleasure that I have been involved with for the past months.
Before I start I want to make a few things clear: The Linux desktop will be moving to Wayland – this is a fact at this point (and has been for a while), sticking to X11 makes no sense for future projects.
By switching to Wayland compositors, we are already forcing a lot of porting work onto toolkit developers and application developers. This is annoying, but just work that has to be done. It becomes frustrating though if Wayland provides toolkits with absolutely no way to reach their goal in any reasonable way.
Many missing bits or altered behavior are just papercuts, but those add up. And if users will have a worse experience, this will translate to more support work, or people not wanting to use the software on the respective platform.
What’s missing?
- Window positioning
- Window position restoration
- Window icons
- Limited window abilities requiring specialized protocols
- Automated GUI testing / accessibility / automation
I spent probably way too much time looking into how to get applications cross-platform and running on Linux, often talking to vendors (FLOSS and proprietary) as well. Wayland limitations aren’t the biggest issue by far, but they do start to come come up now, especially in the scientific space with Ubuntu having switched to Wayland by default. For application authors there is often no way to address these issues.
To me, saying “wayland breaks things” is putting it backwards: at this point, it should be “[thing] still doesn’t work on wayland”.
Yeah.
If I installed, say, a messenger app on my phone that supports Android 4.0 but not Android 13, my reaction wouldn’t be “Android breaks this app!!”, my reaction would be “wow, this app hasn’t been updated to support any modern Android version, they need to fix that”
If Wayland was brand new and X11 was going to be killed in the very short term, then I’d agree, but that’s not the case. Wayland is over a decade old. Prominent distros have had it as the default since 2016. Shit, Debian has had it as the default since 2019. And that’s Debian.
I use an app to control the mouse and keyboard of my home theater PC from my smartphone. Will that ever be able to work?
Can people who very clearly haven’t read the article stop commenting the equivalent of “works on my machine”, please? I know it’s a long article, but it’s worth a read. It’s not anti-Wayland and it’s definitely not pro-X11. It just outlines a few limitations of Wayland and problems with how Wayland is currently being developed. It’s a great follow up to Nate’s blog post, which was posted here a while back and got pretty popular.
I forced myself to use Wayland for a week.
Most of the applications worked out of the box. For some I had to manually change the settings and/or environment variables to make them work on Wayland… And single ones did not work at all.
If it weren’t for the fact of these “single ones” I would have stayed on Wayland.
However, as long as I can’t use my system fully functionally, I remain on XOrg.
yeah, at the end of the day there is zero reason to ditch a perfectly working setup while it’s still supported by distros… computers are for productivity I really do not understand why so many people insist everybody must migrate now :)
but they who? I will not change a bit of my setup because a random internet neckbeard mandates that lol :P
Unpopular opinion, maybe, but Wayland has been just fine for me. All amd system, single monitor, on fedora since f37. Even before that, on other distros like Manjaro it was fine. I don’t think I use anything that really cares what display management I use.
I can sympathize with those that this is an issue. As Wayland continues to becoming the standard.
I’ve been using Wayland since like 2016 and the only issues I’ve had have been with Discord and Steam’s in-home-streaming (and they still aren’t sorted).
Everything other than that for me has been smoother than X11 ever was.
If Discord and steam streaming were a deal-breaker to me though, then I’d obviously use X11 still. Apps need to have proper support.
Yea, my experience with Wayland has been that things work but most work through Xwayland so I may as well keep using X11 anyways. If things aren’t easy to port over it will hurt adoption.
