Wayland is the one thing that fixed a whole shit-ton of my problems overnight and now I find out nobody wants to use it under any circumstances.
¯\(ツ)/¯ Alrighty thenPlenty use it without knowing as it is what the Steam Deck uses in gaming mode.
Almost everyone uses it. We just never make posts about “our configuration works effortlessly, give us attention”
Only people with a bone to chew and shit to stir feel the need to post such things. Back in the day it was people who felt superior for debugging their steaming pile of init shell spaghetti, now it’s people who just can’t live without diving into X11 configuration files.
The people who use it happily don’t make memes about it. I do have some weird errors every now and then, it’s definitely not as stable for me as X11. However X11 wasn’t very smooth with my multi monitor setup, and Wayland improved the smoothness of my PC enormously, so the random issues every now and then are worth it
I’m fine with X. Which problems did you have?
It’s been some time, but the biggest pain point for me on X11 was 4k@144hz. Short of some xrandr tweaks I couldn’t manage to set, Wayland immediately worked perfectly.
I suspect I ran in to x11’s limit in that case.
My kid (13) surprised me the other day and said he wanted to try Linux. He has seen me forever using it and got scared about W10 getting hacked or something so thought of trying it out.
I handed over to him my Fedora 43 (KDE plasma) install USB drive and once installed the problems began.
The monitor couldn’t be set to native resolution, and Steam didn’t want to run. Turns out that there is no wayland compatibility with the Radeon Polaris RX480. What a bummer, that card is perfectly fine for what he does on his PC.
We tried with the cinnamon version and that is working fine. He even has roblox running.
Tl;Dr: Wayland isn’t compatible with older hardware that most casual windows users are mostly going to be using.
If he wants to try plasma just install the x11 version on fedora:
sudo dnf install plasma-workspace-x11
Yup. Its not the default anymore (and for good reason), but it is still supported for now. This is a pretty straightforward solution to the problem.
Idk, especially when using the most recent version of Wayland compositors, it’s been great. Solved my display and touchpad issues.
I did have some Nvidia issues but that shouldn’t be surprising regardless of display protocol.
But like… use whatever software you want. Worst case you can always just nest a minimal Wayland compositor like cage or gamescope in your X session.
My child will never see more than 8-bit color
I’m sorry to hear about your child’s condition. Hope they can find a cure for it soon, wish you all the best.
I will happily switch over once libinput isn’t absolute ass with my touchpad! Or if I could adjust its settings in any meaningful way!! Or if you could let me use my old touchpad driver!!!
Until then you can attempt to pry x11 from my cold undead still-animated hands
Plasma devs are currently focusing on input devices. Ideal time to offer them to help test your device and get amazing support out of it.
Or you could sit on your ass and do nothing, which is essentially gambling that they’ll happen to support it (or your next device) when you’re forced to switch at some point in the future.
Problem with Wayland, is the liability of being to not able the use of some software, and not being able to foresee it.
X11 is also working well, and a lot of the “issues” people have with it is more about hearsay than real issues.
This is the reason why we have distro diversity: we can choose ! And laugh at innocent memes either way we feel about it
I need some context for the picture?
Zoom still doesn’t work right on Wayland.
Possibly, yet against their best efforts, their shit works better now, see the end of this comment. But first:
I’ve ranted about this before, but Zoom is bone-chillingly badly written software. It’s also the only piece of software that I’ve never seen the code of, but will make comments about code quality and development practice with 100% certainty.
Zoom has broken for me in so many many completely insane and creative ways that the only explanation is that they have nobody keeping things in check and just an army of interns hacking away at things half-assedly until they “work”.
If there are 3 nice and standard ways to do things that can be easily googled, Zoom does a given thing in 2 more ass-backwards ways that make no sense and are fragile as fuck. E.g. they did screen sharing using GNOME’s screenshot API, at a time when every tutorial told you to use the dedicated cross-DE screencast API. When called out, they switched to a different GNOME API.
I think at this point they finally fixed it by actually using the API people told them to use years earlier, but who knows what other inane mistakes are still there to prevent things from working.
Hear hear. They can’t keeo up though, with standards changing every 20 years or so…
As someone who uses many of its features for job interviews on a Wayland machine, what doesn’t work?
For instance, screen sharing is broken on one of machines. It works once and then leaks the handle. Making it impossible to share again until rebooting.
It used to crash entirely when exiting sharing and their bugfix was to swallow the exception instead of a proper fix.
no screen sharing software works on it.
Liar. Proof by contradiction: Everything I use works (KDE Plasma).
- Discord
- Slack
- Teams
- even Zoom, despite being a dogshit pile of hacks
You can include Google meet, rust desk and jitsi as well
Yeh, zoom works on one of my two main machines on wayland…
See my rant about Zoom here: https://vger.to/lemmy.ml/comment/22183939
tl;dr: if there’s any issue with Zoom, you can always bet that it’s Zoom’s fault. Its bug density is just so much higher than anything else you run on a regular system.
Meet also works with screen sharing on Wayland, so I’ve no idea what the GP is about tbh
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Three-day suspension. Come back when you’ve learned to regulate your emotions.
Thank you!
You said “no screen sharing software”.
- That’s wrong
- It’s pretty much impossible that you don’t know that some screen sharing software works on Wayland
Consequently, that was a lie. Or you suck at expressing yourself and meant something different than what you wrote. But as written, definitely a lie.
Well… you just said no software works. They’ve given you counter examples, now you either have to cite examples of software not working with screen sharing or you’re the fool
- teams
- slack
- zoom
- Firefox browser capture for web screen share
never have I had any of these work for me, I’m not the only one either.
still doesn’t make me a liar and we can both be right.
Then you should have said “for me” or “on my machine”, but instead you said “no screen sharing software works on it” in a context where “it” can only be interpreted as Wayland in general.
And that’s wrong and you know it.
What you said is literally incorrect. There are screen sharing applications that work on Wayland. I just used one ten minutes ago.
so you’re sticking with “it works on my machine” then. cool.
also incorrect does not mean liar.
incorrect means not correct.
You said “no screen sharing software works on it”. If “it” is anything other than your POS laptop, then you’re a fucking liar
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I screen share on Slack with Wayland at work every day
This is your freedom, enjoy it.
You’re absolutely free to maintain X11 when no one else does
Club is a war crime. I rest my case.
When Debian Trixie with GNOME started with Wayland by default, I switched too. It’s not bad I guess.
Doesn’t Wayland slow to a crawl under CPU load? I get mouse updates like once a second if I dare to make this mini PC play a video.
No, it doesn’t.
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Been there for a year plus. Catch up
What’s always funny to me when someome brings up missing features of Wayland is how, apparently, the missing features of X11 are getting pushed under the table or somehow also blamed on Wayland in some twisted way. Like, holy shit, compare the display settings of KDE on a modern display between Wayland and X11. My laptop didn’t even show a third of all options anymore.
Sure, it will be nice once Wayland can do a few things (better), the current development push surely helps. But it’s not like X11 can do everything either.
Yeah. “Feature parity or get out”, like dude we’re long past feature parity.
Wayland supports so much more stuff than X11 does, and what does X11 have that Wayland doesn’t? X forwarding? Just use a modern remote desktop solution, all X forwarding was doing in “modern” times (read: the 21st century) was streaming pixels anyway, just less efficiently than modern remote desktop.
I still use X forwarding.
It works just fine using xWayland, and X forwarding has always been so janky there is no chance to notice any difference caused from using xWayland instead of native.It will surely take many years and well established wayland native remote tunneling before anyone thinks of ditching xWayland.
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It’s nice but a little janky. For me for example I have to hit ctrl+C twice after closing a session where I started a kde program.
Multi window apps are still broken, and the wayland protocol guys have been dragging it for more than two years
Honestly which app do you use that makes use of multi window rendering?
The main one is KiCAD (electronics design).
They have a good article on the challenges they’re facing on Wayland, worth a read https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support/
I don’t, but some people like multi window GIMP, and apparetnly several applications in the automotive (kiCAD for example) and scientific field
People who like multi window gimp must be a very special kind of nerd. I used it before single window mode was added, but when it was I never looked back. Positioning each subwindow in a way that didn’t suck was such an absolute pain
ah that was so annoying, and nowadays using tiled windows, that’s something I don’t see myself doing anymore
But that pain was once. And then you shoved that config into your dotfile svn and never did it again. Mine has followed me since like 2010.
(This is not me taking part in the wl/X11 argument. I am just one of those multi-window gimp nerds)
It’s not a pain if you use a tiling WM, and doesn’t KDE remember and restore window positions yet?
alias hc=herbstclient # GIMP # ensure there is a gimp tag hc add gimp hc load gimp ' (split horizontal:0.850000:0 (split horizontal:0.200000:1 (clients vertical:0) (clients grid:0)) (clients vertical:0)) ' # load predefined layout # center all other gimp windows on gimp tag hc rule class=Gimp tag=gimp index=01 pseudotile=on hc rule class=Gimp windowrole~'gimp-(image-window|toolbox|dock)' \ pseudotile=off hc rule class=Gimp windowrole=gimp-toolbox focus=off index=00 hc rule class=Gimp windowrole=gimp-dock focus=off index=1it’s not a pain
Here’s the dozen lines of config I had to write and tweak and debug to make it tolerable
Uh huh. You do you.
Hold on, so I can’t run Transmission that has the torrent list in one window and torrent details in another window? Only one single window per app? What insanity is this.
Every app I know opens a window for the preferences, how is this solved in Wayland? Even just the typical Explorer-style file manager requires multiple windows to function. And of course, I always have a dozen Firefox windows open.
Oh multi-window works, it is mostly just that applications cannot geometrically position them themselves. There are other small issues, but thay is the main one I hear. It is a non-issue for things like settings and Transmission, since you just open another window and do not really care exactly where it os relative to the other ones. It often ends up being on top. For multi-window Gimp it is worse, as it is toolbars and modules, and the app wants to place them precisely relative to one another. This is currently not working in Wayland, but they create new extensions all the time so it is only a matter of time IMO.
Thanks for the explanation. As it happens, one of my irks about the Windows version of Transmission is that it doesn’t remember the position of the torrent-properties window. I want the list on the left, the details on the right — particularly since Transmission reuses the details window, essentially treating it as a pane. This worked splendidly on MacOS.
Yeah. “Feature parity or get out”, like dude we’re long past feature parity.
Ok, replace the xfce/KDE wm with something like i3 and then keybind all of the commands that aren’t wm specific through a global hotkey daemon like sxhkd.
I could never get it to work.
If you’re waiting on Wayland to reimplement the thing that made X11 a monolithic unmaintainable mess, you’ll be stuck on your rotting platform from the 80s for a while.
Having modular DEs is what:
made X11 a monolithic unmaintainable mess
?
https://lxqt-project.org/blog/2025/09/22/2-way-of-wayland/
https://lxqt-project.org/release/2025/11/05/release-lxqt-2-3-0/
I switched to Wayland. I think I have almost everything working except keepassxc’s global hotkey and autotype. Also certain apps like ardour, I have to manually break components off from the main window and move to different monitor to get the “multi monitor” functions going. This I know they have been trying for 2 years now, anyday now.
I can’t copy/paste from a terminal program to a GUI program under wayland without jumping through hoops and configuring every individual program to use some variant of a DE-specific utility that bypass wayland’s model to peek/poke into the clipboard.
That’s not a minor feature to me. And in my (and probably some other people) case, trading basic copy/paste for not-yet-implemented differential DPI scaling does not sound too great.
Some people are adamant to not switch, but I swear some people are so adamant to force everyone else to switch without even considering that their use case might not match other people use case, it’s infuriating. It’s not like me staying on X will degrade everyone else’s experience of the new shiniest thing.
Distribution moving to wayland might be good in the very long term, but for now, when you have a 3080Ti (a relatively recent card) and it breaks basic desktop composition when switching to wayland, telling people “just throw it out and buy another card instead of keeping your currently working system” is not going to help anyone.
What are you talking about? You can copy-paste from Terminal programs to GUI programs and vice-versa like everywhere else (with the terminal of course needing CTRL + SHIFT + C / V, which as we know is historical to Unix terminals). I’m doing that for years, so does my family. It works just fine.
And bringing up Nvidia now really is bending down backwards to paint Wayland as bad while it’s painfully obvious it’s the driver’s fault. We all know the classic Nvidia driver sucks in more ways than one and loves to break, even Nvidia knows that and works on a replacement. That’s not Wayland’s fault.
What are you talking about? You can copy-paste from Terminal programs to GUI programs and vice-versa like everywhere else (with the terminal of course needing CTRL + SHIFT + C / V, which as we know is historical to Unix terminals). I’m doing that for years, so does my family. It works just fine.
I’m not talking about copy/pasting from the terminal emulator, thank you very much. Just run VIM and have it copy/paste from the global clipboard without setting up esoteric, sometimes DE-dependent stuff, and you’ll understand.
And bringing up Nvidia now really is bending down backwards to paint Wayland as bad while it’s painfully obvious it’s the driver’s fault.
Sure. I did not say it was wayland fault. Or anyone else, really. I explained why some people could not “just move on to wayland already you nincompoop” with very tangible issues that still prevent them from doing so. Who is at fault is of no consequence here. If I switch to wayland, I lose features, I have a broken desktop, and throwing away thousands of equipment because “it’s the future” does not sound that great. It’s just a matter of fact. Whether it’s wayland’s fault, plasma’s implementation’s fault, nvidia’s fault, or anyone else’s is irrelevant to the user experience here.
People can’t go “stop using X and use wayland”, and ignore raised issues by saying “no, that issue you’re having is not a big issue”, “that issue you’re having is not wayland’s fault”, “that issue you’re having does not concern most people”, etc. And reading replies in this thread, it seems people have a hard time imagining circumstances beyond their own.
I’ve used this neovim keybind for years:
vim.keymap.set({'n', 'x'}, 'gy', '"+y') -- copy vim.keymap.set({'n', 'x'}, 'gp', '"+p') -- pasteI was able to copy/paste between nvim and other applications on sway, Hyprland, Niri and KDE on Wayland.
The global clipboard register + should also work in modern regular vim afaik.
Thats not entirely true.
wl-copyexists and I use it, but it’s not fully there yet. Things like slackadays/clipboard are still fucking around with weird Wayland issues.I’d like better clipboard support, but
alias c=wl-copyis good enough most of the time for me. And it works in neovim as well.Yeah, I know of such “solution”. But what is the point of forcing the change when it doesn’t bring me tangible benefits, brings significant downsides, and only some of these downsides have half-useful workarounds?
I have no problem with whether wayland existing or it becoming the new standard, but forcing people to move in these circumstances seems a bit silly, especially when some issues stem from people having hardware from one manufacturer that represents around 75% of general consumer systems (according to Steam survey, which might or might not be representative but sure brings a lot of people).
Thankfully, at least with the distributions I use, switching back and forth is trivial. But given the circumstances, I don’t really understand the extremely heavy push.
I don’t think anyone’s forcing anyone to do anything. But not a lot of people are stepping to to maintain X
While it’s certainly winded down over time, XOrg is still maintained. Last fix was released in september 2025. Is it enough? It never is. But that’s not really an argument to move from “working” to “not working as well” for now.
I thought most of the maintenance went towards Xwayland, though I don’t follow it that closely
It mostly did, yes. But when a big issue pops up, X still gets the occasional patch.
And, since this is a bit of a hot topic it seems, that sounds fair to me. X is the past, wayland is the future. I’m just annoyed at people glossing over the reasons not everyone can move on.
