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.
Multi window apps are still broken, and the wayland protocol guys have been dragging it for more than two years
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.
Multi window apps are still broken, and the wayland protocol guys have been dragging it for more than two years
Meanwhile I’m here on Wayland because it does things that x11 doesn’t.
IMO Wayland surpassed X11 a long time ago… As it doesn’t shit in the pants with tearing on video play or touchscreens with multi-screen.
Is it perfect? No. But X11 isn’t perfect either.
X11 is heavily outdated and vulnerable, but it features one thing Wayland doesn’t: it works with everything.
So, if Wayland checks your points, go Wayland. If something breaks - X11 is there to back you up.
Man, I always read people bitching about screen tearing, but I haven’t seen it since, like, 2008. I’m starting to believe I have tremendous luck.
Woah, I had to do that weird textfile trick on every single computer I installed for all my family members for years until the first Debian KDE with Wayland session (was it 12?)
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.
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.
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.
Might be worth looking into and reporting as a bug. I use wayland and very commonly watch a high quality video on one monitor and whole games on my other just fine.
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.
Do the other effects for switching desktops, like the default slide, not accomplish the same thing? I also find that having no animation makes it harder to keep track of where things are, but just have the sliding one
I still have the slide as default and use it a lot. I have it set to slide when I mousewheel on the desktop and keep my taskbar shorter so there’s always some desktop showing in the corners. When I get frustrated with something though, I hit my key to activate the cube and the animation of it pulling away from the normal view works as like a disconnect from whatever I’m doing. Virtually stepping back basically.
Without the cube, I found I would get frustrated and instead of working on something else I would keep going and ultimately make mistakes and end up more frustrated. If I tried switching with the slide or fade to another project, the irritation stayed with me and I’d mess those other projects up too. The cube, for me, just worked.
I did have some success using the overview, however it was a lot more overwhelming with the way it shows everything, while the cube limits it to what’s on each cube face, without showing minimized windows at all.
Look, I primarily use e-waste for my computing. I’ll use whatever display server I want. You’ll pull X11 out of my cold, dead hands.
Same!
I have an ancient laptop from 2013, it needs ancient nvidia 600 series driver version 470 someshit. Wayland doesn’t support old stuff, and nuaveu drivers can’t compete, creating random distorted image on fullscreen or crashing non stop.
And on my PC I have to use VMware for work, Wayland doesn’t work well with fullscreen VMs, the keystroke capture thingamajig fucks shit off bad.
X11 works just fine in both my use cases.
Likewise for Rustdesk clients and hotkeys.
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 nowI 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.
I would post about it on the Fedora forums with details about what doesn’t work and details about your injury. (If you are willing)
Yes, I might do that, thanks for the advice.
The only thing keeping me off of Wayland is the fact that OBS window capture forces me to manually reselect every window every time.
Weird, it doesn’t make me do that, I have it installed with the flatpak.
Same. Might be an issue with the legacy install method, the Flatpak OBS works like a charm.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Give me server-side decorations, or give me death!
(won’t add the whole of GTK as a dependency, so that my input handling can be handed over to whatever is GTK doing.)
I just don’t want to switch out my window manager and all the helper programs that make it work as a full desktop. Currently I just use LXQt+i3wm, and LXQt will take quite a while until it’s anywhere near feature parity with Wayland, and AFAIK i3wm doesn’t even have plans for a Wayland port.
It’s possible that it’s not actually that much work, but I currently don’t care to find out.
Sway is build to he a drop in replacement for i3
