So let’s talk about this Wayland thing

I&#x27;ve been using Wayland for about 10 years now, mainly because of superior hi-DPI support. If you have multiple monitors with different scale factors, X11 is just awful. Not to mention I usually have laptops with not-quite-4k displays that need to be scaled 1.25x or 1.5x in order to look reasonable.<p>That kind of stuff basically all works fine on Windows, and yet a lot of core Linux desktop devs seem to have an ideological distaste for fractional scaling. Sway supports fractional scaling, but it&#x27;s not recommended because &quot;your display does not have fractional pixels&quot;. I realize that is literally true, but Windows and Mac support it and it looks good. Feels like Linux is full of this kind of stuff, and the result is the mess you see today. Sad part is that Windows is starting to degrade so bad that Linux is starting to look better just due to that. Hopefully Valve and friends can apply some competitive pressure on Windows, and in the process make Linux much nicer.

I still don&#x27;t quite understand why Android and ChromeOS have seemingly good display systems on Linux with no drama or even any real identity to the display system, while X11 and Wayland have been churning on this stuff for so many years and don&#x27;t seem to be at the same level of quality.<p>I know I&#x27;m missing something... but I also suspect it&#x27;s the sort of something that&#x27;s worth missing.

&gt; Standard protocols now exist for just about everything anyone needs.<p>I have been OOTL with the Wayland ecosystem for a few years. Does it provide a way for users to create and use input macros (similar to Autohotkey and xdotool) yet? That (in addition to remote desktop and screen casting) was one of the main blockers for me in daily-driving it.

I can bag on Wayland for days for being broken at an architectural level ...<p>However, the real root problem is that the number of people who really give one iota of damn about &quot;desktop interaction semantics&quot; is vanishingly small.<p>Developers who want Unix and want their display to &quot;simply work&quot; switch to Apple. Consequently, the only people left behind are the very fractious minority on Linux who care about a zillion different edge cases.<p>I really don&#x27;t see a good way to fix things.

Great article, thanks. Until now did not understand why W was so slow to be accepted while systemd and pipewire took over quickly.<p>Personally hadn’t tried it until recently, though nothing against it. Had an extra laptop and wanted to try some new stuff so installed Fedora KDE on it.<p>Works quite well but unfortunately synergy&#x2F;barrier doesn’t work and folks don’t seem to think it ever can. That’s a deal breaker for me at my desk. Will be going back to mint&#x2F;cinnamon&#x2F;X shortly, and leave fedora as a travel laptop.<p>Kinda disappointing after so many years… fifteen! and still second fiddle.

i used to be upset that they took away x remoting because it was a cool party trick but then they gave me the ability to have monitors with different dpis and that&#x27;s how i learned to stop worrying and love the wayland.

It is unfortunate but forced vsync means I will never adopt Wayland. I do not want a frame+ delay when I&#x27;m gaming. I do not want v-sync lag when my framerate occasionally drops below my 240hz refresh rate.<p>I don&#x27;t even especially like X11, I just don&#x27;t want vsync forced on me.

My latest Wayland issue is devices that generate a lot of input events causing apps to crash.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=1743144" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bugzilla.mozilla.org&#x2F;show_bug.cgi?id=1743144</a>

Wayland works fine for me but it doesn&#x27;t seem to allow many applications to take screenshots or recording the screen, so I had problems with PyAutoGUI and Discord and I switched back to X11, if anyone knows a solution I would appreciate.

I’m having nice time with waylaid, have used it with plasma for a year, and a couple of weeks ago I re-emerged everything with -X -xorg etc and can’t compla

I love X and find it being in maintenance a good thing? It seems to work all the time and stays out of my way. That’s what I want.

&gt; The fact that Wayland’s minimal core protocol made it unable to fully replace the thing it aimed to replace was a bad architectural design decision on the part of its authors that crippled the prospect of its rapid adoption when it was released in 2008.<p>Maybe I missed it in the article, but what was this decision?

Doesn&#x27;t switching to Wayland also implicitly mean losing any input system other than libinput? Like Wayland libinput also does not currently have feature parity with the other input configuration tools that are available for X.

Wayland was working fine on Fedora 38... until I switched to Nvidia. Had to go back to X11. It seems their driver was developed for X11 and the Wayland support is a hack on top and has many issues.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arewewaylandyet.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arewewaylandyet.com&#x2F;</a><p>We are still not Wayland yet. And my setup is personally blocked by both Xs.

Wayland is nice and all, but I haven’t seen an end-to-end solution for “headless” remote login yet. Until there’s a working Xrdp replacement, I don’t have much use for it personally.

I&#x27;ve been a big fan of wayland until a few months ago when I tried to put my friend on KDE with a nvidia card. It was still completely unusable as a daily driver.

Does Wayland on Ubuntu work with NVidia GPUs yet?

Can we please just get to what OS X had twenty years ago. Please.

Let&#x27;s not

Has Wayland adoption really been so slow because of technical reasons, or because of its developers and advocates observably abysmal social skills?<p>Edit: I know that could kind of sound incendiary, but let&#x27;s consider the facts. We&#x27;re talking about a project that has been competing with a dead competitor for 15 years and is still struggling to get mainstream acceptance. There&#x27;s something seriously dysfunctional going on.