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.
It's fucking weird people have such strong opinions about issues like X11 and systemd. They're meant to be working in the background away from the user, and that's exactly how I treat them. Actually systemd still provides some functions a user might have to interact with manually, for X11 I'm just baffled.
When I take an uber, I don't care whether the car has an automatic or manual transmission.
I used to use some features that only worked on x11. Slowly I found alternatives or workarounds on wayland. So I understand the sentiment. Imagine you book an uber but it's electric so they say you can't book a ride that's too long
Gnome forced me onto Wayland a few weeks ago and I've been dealing with issues ever since. Some issues even affecting the most basic level tasks like typing text, imagine dealing with that in 2025. Following your analogy, if the Uber with the fancy new transmission came to a halt every kilometre, you'd care too.
I think the average user wouldn't care, Linux just attracts nerds. And I think it's totally fine and even good that people care how their computer worksβit shows that users care about their software working for them, rather than just wanting to go along with whatever is given to them. I think a lot of the positions people take about these things are very silly, but I'd still prefer someone to have a silly opinion about X11/Wayland or pid 1 than to not have an opinion at all. It's nice that users are being actively involved in deciding what they want their system to be; it's a nice change from the average user who's like "well microsoft is screenshotting my screen every 5 seconds and feeding it into copilot now, guess I'm going along with that".
In my eyes, it's the same deal as conservatives coping with the changing world. There is a version where they just shut up and let the rest of the tech landscape improve while they happily stick to the X they know (X.org or even XLibre).
Not even always true. For me, Wayland is the only thing that runs decently on my Frankenstein monster of a setup, while X11 makes everything run insanely slow. I think everyone should try both at some point
I kinda like being able to watch a video on one screen and not having to make sure that there are no animations going on anywhere else or the video framerate drops like it's 1996.
Weirdly this happens on my work laptop (x11) but not any other Linux machine I've used including all the Wayland ones. I assume it's due to video drivers.
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.
Β―\(γ)/Β― Alrighty then
When I updated KDE and found that I had lost the cube desktop switcher effect I was fairly put off on Wayland and made a lot of effort to get the cube back in various ways which did not go well. Now that it's on Wayland, albeit slightly different, I am content with staying on Wayland. I can't thank the people who ported it enough. It may seem like a trivial graphic effect to some but that fraction of a second that it uses when switching desktops is something that helps my ADHD tremendously. If I'm getting frustrated with a project I can switch to something else and something about that visualization helps me keep everything organized mentally. I use 4 virtual desktops, each with it's own project subject matter, one for each side of the cube, excluding the top and bottom.
This meme imagary is from the movie Seven Psychopaths. It's a very good movie.
It worked fine in Wayland under Plasma 5, but somewhere early in the 6 transition support was removed.
For anyone not aware it minimizes the window to its own titlebar. I find it faster and more intuitive than minimizing to a dock, and it's easier to keep track of things when you can actually read the whole titlebar.
Correcto X11 just works for me, never had any issues, there is literally zero benefit for me swapping over.
Every time I am booted into a Wayland session, something doesn't feel, look or work right which causes me pain and suffering through my OCD which i don't have.
I'm planning on trying hyprland soon though because it can look very pretty so if I swap over to that then yes I'll be a wayland pleb, but in that case there's a real reason to me swapping.. not just for zero benefit.
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.
I've tried a few distros recently (Bazzite, Nobara, Debian...), all with Plasma+Wayland, and none of them work with my Wacom Intuos. Nobara with Gnome works fine (that's what I'm using in the meantime), albeit with a limited feature set: can't remap tablet area, can't use or remap the tablet buttons.
So, I've narrowed it down to something inbetween Plasma and Wayland. That's all I know for now
I use the tablet as a pointing device -using a mouse hurts my wrist after roughly 20mn (old injury). So it really is an accessibility issue...
I have said this a few times before, apologies, but I'm hammering it because it's not notorious enough.
Iβve gotta be honest, the desktop environment situation on Linux does not impress me.
Iβm on Cosmic which is decent, but there are all sorts of silly oversights in KDE and gnome, and windows have weird mixes of styles and toolbar display modes.
Is great that Linux is modular, but seriously gtk vs QT vs whatever else needs a heavy duty cleanup.
I agree, however Windows and macOS are even worse IMO. Everything is just totally inconsistent (Windows) and the window management features are very barebones (both). Using either one feels like going back 10 years or more.
The CSD trend might have some upsides but i find it mainly just makes apps ugly and any added functionality is almost always redundant.
Kvantum really helps make Plasma more consistent, not sure if there is a similar addon for GNOME
Apps should only use cad if they are really using the space like browsers with their tab bar. That gnome forces every app to provide them is really stupid.
I've considered switching several times in the past, but each time there was something I needed that was not supported (e.g. - this issue with Zoom screen sharing)
In the last of these times I found no such dealbreaker, but I did want to try a dualboot setup - or dual-login, actually, because I should be able to switch at the greeter - first, to make sure I'm not breaking anything I need for work. This required switching from LightDM to a display manager that supports both X11 and Wayland. I don't remeber which one I've chosen, but I do remember having hard time installing it (I think I couldn't get it to launch i3 for whatever reason)
I've just checked and is seems LightDM supports Wayland now, so maybe it's time to try the switch again. Being able to use my current DM means I'm not going to risk breaking anything. Probably.
top 50 comments