About time. Wayland has worked great for several years on Intel and AMD systems. Nvidia is finally caring to catch up.
Its perpetually fixed the next common Xorg complaint, including disabling vsync, redirection outside of the DE for fullscreen apps, multi monitor scaling, fractional scaling, global keyboard shortcuts, a tiling wm implementation, HDR support, session restore, and soon remote access
The software that doesn’t support it and doesn’t want to support it will never adapt and have alternatives.
Its been ready, reliable, and a much better experience for so long. Ubuntu coming around is a testament to that.
I love wayland, but you can’t deny that it still lacks support and stability.
But maybe this is one of those chicken or the egg, maybe we need the transition to push the quality
I can deny it
I can absolutely deny that Wayland has stability issues. Plasma 6 under Wayland is the most stable desktop I have used.
In any Wayland discussion, I think people using Debian or older NVIDIA drivers (pre-555 for sure) need to identify themselves. They seem to be the ones most convinced that Wayland does not work yet (because they are still experiencing what it was like years ago).
As for “support”, that is desktop environment dependent as it mostly depends on protocol and XDG desktop portal maturity. KDE has the most complete support (not a bias-just a fact), then GNOME, then Hyprland and the Wlroots based environments, with MATE and Cinnamon not quite there yet, and XFCE totally trailing.
Tried wayland on arch with modern drivers on a few different DEs and everytime I eventually switched back to Xorg.
One simple example, manually configuring the resolution of a monitor with a mode that is “not compatible” with the monitor. Xorg does it pretty easily with xrandr, wayland seems to have no option for the user to do that.
Linux idiot here. What is wayland? And what is XOrg?
They are display server communication protocols. Essentially, the computer clients give the display server information, and then the display server processes that information and sends it to the screen. For example, a game might say, “The player is controlling a red guy with a hat and mustache” and the display server draws a Mario on the screen.
X Server is 40 years old. It’s tried and tested, but is not built on modern coding standards. For example, it has not kept up with modern security, allowing a bad actor to tell X to draw a bit of malicious code that tricks the display server into giving it control of other programs. For this reason, the developers of X are sunsetting it and have designed Wayland to replace it.
Wayland is a rewrite of X from the ground up, and is much more secure. It keeps each program in its own bubble, so if a rogue app tries to gain control of programs outside its bubble, it can’t. However, such a large change requires other programs to buy in, creating s vicious cycle where developers don’t want to switch to Wayland until it’s mature, and Wayland is unable to mature without developers buying in. That’s why this “new” protocol has been in progress for the past 16 years, and yet linux users still disagree on whether it is mature enough for wide adoption.
GNOME desktop environment has been at the forefront of Wayland adoption, and has announced plans to stop using X in a future release. Ubuntu, which uses GNOME by default, has announced they are dropping X so they can see how it works in their short-term release before pushing it to their 2026 long-term release. Essentially, they are doing it when the timing works best for them rather than wait until GNOME forces them to drop it.
Emphasis on the protocol part. There is only 1 implementation of X11 (Xorg). Wayland however is just protocols. There are several implementations of varying quality.
Depending on your DE, you could be using one of Weston (reference impl), Mutter (GNOME), Kwin (Plasma), wlroots (hyprland, sway), etc.
I’ve been using Wayland since 2018 and not had any issues aside from when I briefly tested with an Nvidia card.
Wayland is more than ready for 99% of people, and has been for a while. Whenever I use Xorg it feels janky.
E: I also had issues with screen sharing, actually. I forgot about that because I rarely have to do it.
Not sure what the hullabaloo is about, I’m on Ubuntu using Wayland and it’s fine. What use cases would people have for x11, and could it be solved by using another desktop environment like Mate or XFCE?
Sometimes, I feel like the average Linux user is just on very old or at the very least pretty old hardware.
I know I am probably wrong, but it just seems odd that in X11 my 8 year old ultrawide 144hz 1080p monitor is literally a stuttery and jittery mess when moving windows, when animations play, and even moving the cursor around. I believe I tried playing a game, and it also being a stuttery mess, but I can’t remember as that was around 6-7 months ago.
Using Wayland, on the other hand, as soon as I logged in for the first time it was definitely noticeably NOT like it was in X11. Frame rate was 144hz, everything mentioned above just worked as I would expect. It even feels smoother than Windows which I still have to use every now and then. Gaming on it is a blast 99% of the time, and I game A LOT! (completed ~10 games on openSUSE Tumbleweed just this year!)
So, sometimes I just feel like I said, and as I also said, I’m probably wrong. I have never logged back into X11 except when I upgraded my graphics card a month or so ago because of the stuttery feeling of X11. Some things did work better under X11, I guess, but that is probably because of the stagnant adoption of Wayland?
Besides me using Linux since the beginning of this year until now, I am still a Linux noob, so my opinions are just that. I have no real knowledge of Linux that would qualify me to be any good source of info. I just don’t get the slow adoption is all!
I use Plasma 6 on Wayland on devices as old as 2009 and as new as 2020. Apple laptops to Intel desktops with GPUs from Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA.
Wayland is better than Xorg on every machine I run.
Isn’t Wayland the husband from Everything, Everwhere, All at Once?
Been using Ubuntu since 2008… looks like this will be the last year for me.
I’d be surprise if you notice the difference.
Other mainstream distros cannot even be installed by blind users because screen readers are broken on wayland
the ludwicks of Void Linux ftw!
i’d actually like to do something else with my lifetime besides constantly being tossed around for no apparent benefit. i’m sure there is a good excuse. There always is.
