I haven't used Linux desktop in 6 years but I remember when Wayland was new and started replacing X about 15 years ago and these were common complaints... I hope this is a joke and still isn't the case!
I've been using Wayland for some years (at least since Debian switched to it as their default) and not had any issues with it. I think complaints were more common about X, and Wayland has resolved a lot of it for the average user. For example my switch to Wayland was the first time I had 100% working video playback on Intel iGPUs without tinkering with conf files. I appreciate there are still some edge cases where X11 is still better -- but I think for 95-99% of users Wayland has just worked.
Is is a regular occurrence that students in my lab that use or switch to Wayland still run into problems. Switching back to X11 reliably works as a fix. The sad thing is that there is also no apparent advantage to Wayland, it is just pushed down to us via distributions.
I've been using Wayland for a while now on Debian as of 13, and the advantage is that it just works so much better.
Animations are much smoother, frames are dropped much less, and there's very little artifacts. It's almost uncanny how good desktop compositing looks right now.
Naturally, some people don't care or don't notice. I notice because I run everything at 240hz and I'm a freak. But, for me, so far everything has worked in wayland. I have not had to boot up an x11 session on Debian 13 with KDE. And, mind you, this is Debian - not bleeding edge. But, screen sharing works, audio works, everything.
It might matter to some but not to many, and in practice the pain imposed on many others could have been avoided by simply improving X. That developers already like to rewrite things is well known, but nobody should pay for this.
Do you want the indisputable advantage of Wayland? No dropped frames in the desktop, even at high framerates. Back in 2023 when I was still using X11 dropping frames was par for the curse, no matter the machine, the configuration or the DE. You could only hope to get a fluid presentation when using a full screen program that used DRI unredirection (or DRM or whatever it was called) because... it eschewed X completely. Now, it used to be even worse if you go back many years from that, so there was progress, but there were always these tiny drops impacting fluidity. It also got worse the more loaded the machine was, any task in the background consuming 40% of the machine could make it feel like you were using a 30hz monitor. Or, if you dared to use 120hz it felt more like a stuttery 70hz, even at idle.
That same year I decided to give Wayland my third shot and what you know... it not only was perfectly smooth all the time but it had finally reached a point where I could use it on my HTPC. Less than a year later and it was finally usable on my desktop and laptop, and since then I haven't really looked back.
This sounds more like random configuration problems with your drivers. The rendering model for modern X clients is the same as for Wayland, so the idea that there could be room for a fundamental improvement is based on misinformation.
Random? I saw it happen on every linux machine running X I came across over the last two decades, it wasn't just mine, it was colleagues machines and so on. Maybe if you combined KDE, AMDGPU drivers, the right distro and X from around 2022 and onwards you could get a mostly smooth experience, but the behavior when pushing the system a little bit or trying high refresh rate would prevail.
The point is, even if you could get a smooth experience it was at best an exception, specially across most of X11 life. There are many reasons why the Steam Deck shipped with Steam running through the gamescope micro compositor, and one of them was sidestepping some of the X11 jank.
Not my experience and we have lot of Linux machines. Drivers and hardware expectations of programs certainly change over time, but this has not much to do with Wayland vs X.
besides, even without using that, for the vast vast majority of users, there is no pain, they dont even realized they've switched to wayland, their distributions simply did it.
and people ARE paying a price staying with xorg, theres a reason projects like KDE are very happy about the change.
Well, I can only report from my experience and this is the pain I still see with Wayland but not really with X. If KDE wants to hurt some of their users, this is their decision.
what kind of thinking process is this? do you for real think any KDE project member has thought "yeah, I want to hurt some of our users".
this is not how it works. They have actual real data from real users about how many use wayland vs xorg, they also sit on the bugtracker, and they sit with the code. they also have very clear knowledge of how much time they can dedicate to make KDE better, both for themselves and EVERYONE.
They have decided that it is best for everyone to outphase X support. Several top contributors to KDE have also explained how several issues that people kept having under X, resulting in LOADS of bug reports, have more or less vanished now during wayland.
You might be having issues, others might too, but its arrogant to presume to think you know that most people are not better off than before, and of course those that at the end of the day matter most, the developers. This does not mean they want to hurt anyone.
Sure, they know best of course ;-) This is the arrogance and gas lightning we are talking about.
But I am not complaining about KDE, they can do whatever they feel best for their projec.t I do not use KDE and - if they make decisions like this - never will.
But please do not tell me my real world experience is an imagination because someone else decided what is best for me. This is like Microsoft telling me I need to like clippy.
Yes, I do not believe for a second that wayland is a net benefit for the majority. Every improvement one can have in Wayland could have been implemented in X without breaking compatibility, without causing all the regressions and limitations that are waived away so arrogantly, without fracturing the community, and also ten years earlier.
it couldnt have been done without breaking compatibility. not while actually solving problems.
This is what the actual X developers are saying, which coincidentally are also the wayland developers, and several downstream projects like gnome/kde.
SOME of the issues could have some solutions implemented, but far from all. just look at xlibre, before they even came to functionality they broke stuff in changing things - which they admittedly have fixed for now, but lets follow that and see how far they go.
on one side we have all the developers of Xorg etc saying one thing, and you(and others, that I presume are not involved with Xorg) saying another.
Wayland could have also been 10 years earlier, but because most people just coasted on xorg, which I agree has been kinda reasonable, nobody really took it serious until recently.
you are also moving the goalpost in regards of net benefit. Just because SOME things could be done in X, doesnt mean its not also a benefit to have it in wayland.
what is arrogant? that some features matter to some users? or that developers that work for free have things that matter to them in trying to develop better code?
It's not bragging - the commenter stated that Wayland has no advantage, which isn't true. It has many features which just are not possible in X. Many of these features are par for the course on Windows and MacOS. They do matter to some people, but not all of course.
No, it definitely does. Features like disparate refresh rates are very difficult to implement in X11 so they weren't. Bear in mind we have exactly one modern X implementation, x.org, and it's very hard to add new features. The codebase is old and complex.
The main strength of Wayland is that it encourages competing implementations. There are many Wayland compositors. That might be interpreted as a downside, but what it allows is innovation and incremental improvement. Something that was just not happening with X.
You could argue that it could have happened with X. What you can't argue is that it did, because it didn't and that's not up for debate. That's just the truth.
And, it doesn't even matter anymore, because x.org isn't being actively developed in any meaningful sense anymore.
No, I don't think this is true and just the usual nonsense used as justification. Some people continue to develop X, so I hope this is sufficient that I can continue to avoid Wayland.
so what you're basically saying is that with the exception of a very few individuals working on xlibre, the developers of xorg, KDE, GNOME and several others are essentially lying about the feasability of continuing with xorg? that, or too incompetent to make the same realization you did?
edit:
what are you gonna do if it turns out you cant avoid wayland? have you considered actually reporting the bugs you might see in wayland instead? because the future very much looks like A LOT of things are gonna go more and more wayland, its gonna be with reduced functionality to stay on X
I imagine the 5% of issues are more likely to be related to Linux itself; then they hop back to a BSOD on Windows with forced updates or a buggy "stable" OS update on Mac.
Significantly less so than before, but it's unfortunately still the case. It's also just now getting features that people have been asking for for over a decade, and of course due to the nature of Wayland the implementations of these features are sporadic and inconsistent.
I think the main difference is that there aren't really any deal-breaker kind of bugs any more, and as far as features there are none missing that users care about compared to X11. It's mostly just annoying bugs and the usual "third party" (including KDE) apps looking off in GNOME because the devs can't reach an agreement on some things, users be dammed.
It's not. Wayland has really gotten its shit together in the last 5-ish years. A lot of the desktop ecosystem has matured in the last few years, actually.
I maintain that the Linux desktop in 2021 was actually less usable than it was in 2016. But things have really turned around since then.
I'm not particularly fond of X11 but barely working in 2026 is hardly an endorsement of the whole project.
A good replacement of X11 would have had a well designed local mode that abstracted modern hardware in all configurations and an actually good network protocol.
We're left with a barely-working local mode with awful X11 stuck on top.
And we've moved to it for purely political reasons.
The "purely political" reasons is that nobody wants to work on X.org implementation. Which, I guess, is technically political? Maybe? But it has real world consequences.
Like okay yeah we could all just stick to X. But in order to do that we need X to be developed, which it's not.
I'd say Wayland was "barely" working in 2021. When I say it works, I mean it works. Screen sharing (finally) works, remote desktop works, ICC profiles, etc etc.
I, for one, like Wayland's design. The problem was that it was incomplete and the implementations were buggy. Well, now the protocol is feature-complete and the implementations are solid.
Wayland is a bunch of amateurs trying to be strict and secure and the end result is everyone opening their own security holes to make it usable. It's working now, mostly.
KDE got some kind of video bridge recently which is an insane workaround for something that should've just worked.
You're worried that capturing Wayland screens from X11 applications requires additional software?
How is that a real complaint? The only way this would be possible without additional software is if Wayland itself was just another X11 Version, if Wayland was X12 which is X11 but with protocol changes that break backwards compatibility, you would run into exactly the same problem.
Your standard for something being insane is that it is not 100% identical to X11.
I agree: running simulated computers inside of Minecraft is a significantly more impressive technical feat than bolting on display surfaces to planes with a mod.
There's a big difference between something being compiled to run inside of Minecraft, versus running a sidecar that streams back a display. It's the difference between compiling and running on your machine, and streaming back a cloud machine using RDP.
Not like this makes a difference to users, who don't know how any of this works. But we are on Hacker News...
People not only built a functional computer in Minecraft, people have run Minecraft on that functional computer in Minecraft. Extremely slowly, obviously, but it did technically work.
I'm impressed by the coding skill to achieve a seamless integration and "usability".
But other than a demo "because we can" I'm confused on what this could ever be useful for. AR/VR prototyping? Virtual showroom?
Or maybe for an online presentation? Stream a video of playing Minecraft and get fancy slide transitions?
"let's go to the next slide" and "now we enter dangerous territory".. "over here I can show you how this program looks like in real life"
"In Minecraft" doesn't mean what it used to. When somebody wrote an 8-bit CPU literally "in Minecraft" it used to be badass. Now it's just a game addon.
Can't they just compete in separate categories? People have been making high-level computer mods years before even ComputerCraft, RedPower, or OpenComputers existed. And people will continue to make pure-redstone computers far into the future. Neither category is replacing the other :)
Not sure why people praise Minecraft for this. This is huge feat of Wayland, and was possible because devs took time to consider use cases outside of current norm, and why it took so long to migrate the ecosystem. People liked to bitch about the "Gnome blocking/not implementing essential protocols" part, but even that partially made this possible
a very near example would be immersed vr which is compatible with xorg and does essentially the same thing (2d windows pasted all over a 3d world), although not integrated into minecraft. also since their solution isn't wayland-centric it has ports to osx and windows.
>If you're reading this, you're likely in the same boat as me. You've discovered that Immersed can create virtual monitors for Windows and Mac, but on Linux, this feature is marked as "unsupported" on X11. This means you can't create virtual monitors directly through the Immersed agent. For now, the known workaround is to manually set up virtual monitors. If you use Wayland, now immersed offer support for native virtual displays on the Immersed agent on gnome Wayland. You can access this options in Immersed client menu -> Setting -> Configure virtual displays. Other Wayland DE/Compositors are not supported, but there are ways to create virtual monitors manually as we do on X11, please check the linux-help channel in the Discord server for more info.
Basically immersed vr doesn't support X11 windows, it only supports X11 screens, which means you would have to create a new screen manually for each window.
Wayland is far more minimal API than X11 that mainly cares about surfaces and inputs. So, it's understandable that it can be "easily" translated to a game engine.
X11 has an entire drawing API. It'd probably be easier to run through Xwayland.
I wonder how this would pair with a VR mod. It doesn't seem like Vivecraft supports the version this was posted for at the moment, but if they had the ability to play nice that seems like it would would be a fun way to experience software.
Yes, but part of the fun is doing it in Minecraft and using Minecraft's language for it (e.g. putting windows in your inventory, pulling them out of chests, etc)
Yeah the appeal to me would be the ability to have my desktop experience spread throughout an established home built in minecraft. I think in reality the added friction in a setup like that would be enormous but it's a pleasant thought.
Link to source: https://github.com/EVV1E/waylandcraft