HACKER Q&A
📣 BlueLynxes

When do you think Wayland will be broadly supported?


I mean at this point high DPI laptops on small screens are common, and fractional scaling is necessary for a good experience... Yet Wayland support is not yet there, thinking of how Plex doesn't support it, due to Qt. Or of how VSCode Wayland compatibility has been broken.


  👤 MichaelCollins Accepted Answer ✓
I'll switch to Wayland as soon as Wayland works better than X in ways I care about, namely performance. I get 25-50% more FPS in games using X than Wayland.

The touted benefits of Wayland aren't manifest or relevant to me. Screen tearing? I don't get screen tearing when using kwin with compositing on my intel iGPU. I know what screen tearing looks like, I've experienced it before with other configurations, and it doesn't happen for me with this configuration. Security? My whole $HOME is readable and writeable to just about any application I run; using Wayland is like locking my windows but leaving my front door wide open. X being an abandoned project that is no longer supported? Well it's still performing better than Wayland for me.

If Wayland devs really want me to switch, they'll need to either make Wayland work much better, or make X work much worse. Until then, I won't switch.


👤 jeroenhd
The only Wayland problems I face are all nvidia related. I brought that on myself when I bought team green.

Wayland has solved more problems for me than it caused, but I'm bummed our that I can't use my laptop's external screen because of nvidia shenanigans (had to mess with some udev rules to even het the option!).

So, when it comes to my problems: when I buy a new AMD GPU for my desktop and replace my laptop in a couple of years. I'm not foolish enough to think that Nvidia is ever going to put effort into making Wayland work right on their hardware despite their "open" "driver". I'm sure there are people working for Nvidia that would like nothing more than to open the driver and just make Linux work with their hardware, but they're not the people who are allowed to decide to do so.


👤 dolni
Unfortunately, I think Wayland really botched things. That's a shame because it would have been a great improvement. Wayland and friends have taken far too long to build and the tradeoffs to me, an end user, are not convincing.

I tried to use Sway for a few months (as a regular user of i3) and I ran into too many frustrating issues to want to keep with it.

The greatest problem with the Wayland protocol is how much work a compositor has to do. Requiring every window manager to also have to take on tasks like processing keyboard and mouse input is a massive tradeoff for what Wayland offers.

IMO, we needed something not far off what X11 does. Really, X11 was fine but could use some rearchitecture for modern times and a purge of all the 80s drawing cruft nobody uses anymore. And address the input security stuff.


👤 seltzered_
I switched to an Linux a year ago from MacOS, and Wayland to me is good enough on a hiDPI display. The only issue has been with electron apps but that's been getting fixed.

On X11 I had issues with screen tearing when reading pdfs and gestures not feeling smooth, so I walked away from it pretty quickly.

Zoom issues? That's Zoom's fault, and you can use their webapp as a workaround.

Plex? Whatever, webapp version will suffice.

VSCode compatibility broken? How so?

Screenshot & recording issues? Gnome 42 resolved a lot of that with their redone screenshot tool.

Stating this as from a more 'new user' perspective Wayland has been fine enough for me.


👤 rincewind
Wayland will stop sucking when distros and Wayland developers stop dismissing these concerns by comparing them to people who didn't want to adopt systemd.

The worst part of this mindset is pointing to Xwayland. In my experience, Xwayland is more of a fig leaf than a real solution. Applications that need wayland-specific code and can't just use a newer version of GTK or SDL are usually apps that don't work with Xwayland anyway.

The second worst is pointing to Wayland-only apps as a replacement, when the previous apps were cross-platform, and not just X11 cross-platform, but Windows/Mac+Quartz/Linux+X11 cross-platform.

Wayland will stop sucking for people like you when distros and Wayland developers acknowledge that people like you have a point and real concerns, and that you are driven by something else than nostalgia and inertia. Until then, this discussion will always end with "you don't understand that Wayland is a much cleaner design than X11" and nothing will fundamentally change.


👤 nicolaslem
Mandatory link to https://arewewaylandyet.com

Now that distributions mostly default to wayland and pipewire I feel that the linux desktop is in a solid place.


👤 public_defender
Well, the cool thing about it is that you can really easily install X and Wayland at the same time and just test your experience in Wayland or hack on the configs in your spare time. I was on X with dwm and I installed sway to test it. In my case, I never switched back. All my initial problems could be solved with configuration.

👤 remix2000
Supported where? Wayland's original target platform were in-vehicle infotainment systems. I unfortunately have no clue about those. If we're however talking about FreeBSD desktop, I'd say Wayland won't become "mainstream" at least until Nvidia decides to support it in their driver.

👤 csdvrx
It's very clear to me that Wayland will be broadly supported on the year of linux on the desktop.

There 2 major software achievements may be all we need to finally get fusion (or economically efficient solar power) + economically efficient carbon sequestration


👤 wooque
Wayland is broken by design (https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/posts/2022-06-10-wayland-x...).

I also read a thread in some of the Firefox bugs, that because of unfortunate design decisions, compositing in Firefox on Wayland will never be as efficient and performant as on Mac or Windows.

Hopefully developers will find solutions and workarounds, but I don't think Wayland will be ready as replacement in the next 2-3 years.


👤 ivmoreau
Recently I found in my library an old Linux magazine (a real printed one!) from 2011 that my parents bought me in Sanborns. It included a cd with Ubuntu 11.04 which I (of course) installed in an old Pentium 4. I was 10 back then, so I didn't remember a lot about this magazine. But there is something that catch my attention (This is about Ubuntu 11.04):

>[...] y en cuanto a servidor gráfico incluido, decir que se trata de X.org 1.10.0. La próxima edición de Ubuntu, Oneiric Ocelot, que teóricamente saldrá en octubre posiblemente ya incluya Wayland. [...]

It says that Ubuntu 11.10 was probably going to include Wayland as a graphic server. But this is funny, since a few days ago, I tested the latest Ubuntu version on a laptop, but after all these years it still defaults to xorg.

I don't think that Wayland is a bad idea though. But it isn't there yet.


👤 Crysstalis
Qt and Electron both support it, so those applications just need to enable it. It is hard to understand what else fits your definition of broad support, because you have only listed two applications.

👤 greatgib
One first thing that has to be fixed is screensharing. Wayland users are really suffering. Like when you are in a meeting and want to share your full screen with Google meet.

👤 timmyandtommy
What makes VSCode broken on Wayland?

I’d guess adoption will continue to accelerate. My experience with Wayland has been nice so far with a few minor kinks. I don’t do anything complex though.


👤 rcarmo
Well, one of my daily annoyances is having to put up with Qt apps not taking on the right GNOME theme under Wayland (especially window decorations), and that has been going on since forever, so… I don’t expect that to be fixed anytime soon.

(Yes, the GNOME project’s obtuseness where it regards theming and “usability” is an entire sub-thread here, but the visual annoyances in the Linux desktop are a long way away from being fixed by Wayland alone…)


👤 nebul
For creative applications, it's still missing support for colour management. Work is underway to implement it but it's a complex topic.

Edit: I still use Wayland whenever I can despite these limitations because it feels really nice in day-to-day use. Smooth scrolling and fluid touchpad gestures come to mind.


👤 dekhn
I don't fully understand https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/wayland-and-qt.html but it would seem they have the fundamental support for wayland in place.

👤 Amezarak
The last I heard, Wayland doesn't support remote rendering and it's considered out of scope. This is a critical feature for me, which leads me to hope the answer is "never."

👤 aquova
I'm using Wayland on my laptop right now, and have been for months now. There are a few oddities here and there, but for the most part it works perfectly fine.

👤 rustqt6
I used to think 2025 tntio this year started but now i believe 2027 at the minimum, and 2030 if recession hits.

👤 worldshit
firefox is still full of nasty rendering bugs (menus) which I believe are happening only on wayland, though i'm too lazy to check

👤 modzu
id use it if it my apps would remember their window positions. that seems to be offloaded in wayland and it drives me nuts

👤 bamboozled
When it works with Zoom screen sharing