Wayland seems ready to me but the main problem that many programs are not configured / compiled to support it. Why is that? I know it’s not easy as “Wayland support? Yes” (but in many cases adding a flag is enough but maybe it’s not a perfect support). What am I missing? Even Blender says if it fails to use Wayland it will use X11.
When Wayland is detected, it is the preferred system, otherwise X11 will be used
Also XWayland has many limitations as X11 does.
Blender’s Wayland support is not great because they’re doing stuff from scratch. They’re not using an existing toolkit like GTK, Qt, Electron, or even something like SDL to get Wayland support.
But if you’re using an existing toolkit things are much easier and support is automatically there, you just need to do testing to ensure everything works.
The common biggest things that still use Xwayland are Chromium based apps and programs running under wine/proton. Chromium has an experimental Wayland mode that works well enough, but definitely has some bugs, especially around windowing. Wine Wayland is in the works.
Thanks for the insight.
Yeah Blender seems like an exception.
Also that means I play lots of Wine/Proton games and many web apps / Electron don’t care.
Wine and Proton have actually put a ton of work into Wayland support, it’s very far along. I wouldn’t be surprised for Proton to have a native Wayland version soon.
You’re asking the Linux community to agree on something
for better and worse, XWayland works perhaps too well
Because it doesn’t matter for most apps. XWayland works fine.
Even Blender says if it fails to use Wayland it will use X11.
What are you trying to say? Of course it does. Pretty much every Linux app still supports X11, because a lot of people are still using X11. Only exception I’m aware of is Waydroid.
I believe Wayland should be the default, but we should have the option to switch to X11 (using XWayland on Wayland) if desired.
Also XWayland has many limitations as X11 does.
If an app has only ever supported X11, then it probably doesn’t care about those limitations (the apps that do care probably already have a Wayland version). And if an app doesn’t care about the extra stuff Wayland has to offer, then there’s not really a reason to add the extra support burden of Wayland. As long as they work fine in XWayland, I think a lot of apps won’t switch over until X11 support starts dropping from their toolkit, and they’ll just go straight to Wayland-only.
Yeah I agree. Maybe some day X11 will be seen as something legacy that needs to be deprecated. But not now…
Plasma deprecated their X11 session in v6 pending removal in the future, and Redhat has already dropped it in Fedora & will do for EL in the next release.
Plasma didn’t deprecate X11. Though some developers hinted that the Xorg session will probably be dropped before Plasma 7 and before Qt drops X11. But nothing concrete.
