[imiric]

You can't be serious. Wayland is the opposite of modular, and the concept of an extensible protocol only creates fragmentation.

Every compositor needs to implement the giant core spec, or, realistically, rely on a shared library to implement it for them. Then every compositor can propose and implement arbitrary protocols of their own, which should also be supported by all client applications.

It's insanity. This thing is nearly two decades old, and I still have basic clipboard issues[1]. This esoteric cutouts feature has no chances of seeing stable real-world use in at least a decade from now.

[1]: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=466041

[samiv]

Shh...you're not supposed to mention these things alas you be down voted to death.

I also have tremendous issues with Plasma. Things such as graphics glitching in the alt+tab task switcher or Firefox choking the whole system when opening a single 4k PNG image. This is pre-alpha software... So back to X11 it is. Try again in another decade or two.

[imiric]

The thing is that I'm not experiencing this clipboard issue on Plasma, but on a fresh installation of Void Linux with niri. There are reports of this issue all over[1][2][3], so it's clearly not an isolated problem. The frustrating thing is that I wouldn't even know which project to report it to. What a clusterfuck.

I can't go back to X11 since the community is deliberately killing it. And relying on a fork maintained by a single person is insane to me.

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/hyprland/comments/1d4s9bw/ctrlc_ctr...

[2]: https://old.reddit.com/r/tuxedocomputers/comments/1i9v0n7/co...

[3]: https://old.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/1jl6zv7/why_does_copyp...

[samiv]

Re X11 maintenance... I think it's mostly "done" and doesn't really need a lot of work. So not sure I see a problem there.

[imiric]

Far from it. The recent XLibre release[1] has a long list of bugfixes and new features.

Besides, isn't the main complaint from the Wayland folks that X11 is insecure and broken? That means there's still a lot of work to be done. They just refuse to do it.

To be fair, X11 has worked great for me for the past ~20 years, but there are obvious improvements that can be made.

[1]: https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/releases/tag/xlibre-xser...

[gf000]

> since the community is deliberately killing it

No one is killing it. No one willing to work on it is a very very different thing, and it's very bad faith and needlessly emotional to attribute malice to a lack of support.

[imiric]

What's in very bad faith is twisting the words of the people who work on these projects[1], and blaming me for echoing them.

It's very clear from their actions[2][3] that they have been actively working to "kill" X11.

There are still people willing to work on it, hence the XLibre fork. The fact that most mainstream distros refuse to carry it is another sign that X11 is in fact being actively "killed".

[1]: https://mastodon.social/@alatiera/114661446785833161

[2]: https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2025/06/08/the-x11-session-...

[3]: https://www.phoronix.com/news/RHEL10-Removing-X.Org

[bigyabai]

[1] is correct, though. You don't own Xorg, nor are you entitled to make distro maintainers support it. The Steam Deck doesn't support Xorg officially, but I don't see anyone rioting in the streets. If X11 has died, then it was a Darwinian process.

[imiric]

Nobody is claiming ownership over Xorg. That's ridiculous. If anything, it's the people who are deliberately trying to "kill" it. Some people simply want to keep working on it, many people still want to keep using it, yet they're being forced not to by egomaniacal children.

The job of distro maintainers is to make software accessible for their users. It's not to provide support for the software, nor to fix its bugs. Choosing to not package a specific software is user hostile.

[cosmic_cheese]

YMMV and all, but my experience is that Wayland smoothness varies considerably depending on hardware. On modernish Intel and AMD iGPUs for example I’ve not had much trouble with Wayland whereas my tower with an Nvidia 3000 series card was considerably more troublesome with it.

[samiv]

As a user...why would I care?

If my Ferrari has an issue with the brakes and I go to my dealer I don't care if the brakes were by Brembo.

Blaming the vendor and their drivers is just trying to shift the blame.

[cosmic_cheese]

Generally true, though this particular case is due to a single company deciding to not play ball and generally act in a manner that's hostile to the FOSS world for self-serving reasons (Nvidia).

[samiv]

I don't even think it's even that. These bugs seem like bog standard bugs related to correct sharing of graphics resources between processes and accessing with correct mutual exclusion.Blaming NV is likely just a convenient excuse.

[bigyabai]

> my tower with an Nvidia 3000 series card was considerably more troublesome with it.

I think you're describing a driver error from before Nvidia really supported Wayland. My 3070 exhibited similar behavior but was fixed with the 555-series drivers.

The Vulkan drivers are still so/so in terms of performance, but the smoothness is now on-par with my Macbook and Intel GNOME machine.

[gf000]

My 3080 still has the occasional hiccup, but from what I've read it's from vsync colliding with Nvidia's gsync?

[MarsIronPI]

You can see the same problem in the XMPP world, with a lot of the extensions implemented only by a few applications. But at least most XMPP extensions are designed to be backwards-compatible with clients that don't support them.

[zamadatix]

How can Wayland be the opposite of modular and too extensible at the same time?

[imiric]

Because one property doesn't guarantee the other. A modular system may imply that it can be extended. An extensible system is not necessarily modular.

Wayland, the protocol, may be extensible, but the implementations of it are monolithic. E.g. I can't use the xdg-shell implementation from KWin on Mutter, and so on. I'm stuck with whatever my compositor and applications support. This is the opposite of modularity.

So all this protocol extensibility creates in practice is fragmentation. When a compositor proposes a new protocol, it's only implemented by itself. Implementations by other compositors can take years, and implementations by client applications decades. This is why it's taken 18 years to get close to anything we can refer to as "stable".

[gf000]

> E.g. I can't use the xdg-shell implementation from KWin on Mutter, and so on.

Why not? It's open-source software. Depending on your architecture you may be able to reuse parts of it.

But as a more flexible choice, there is wlroots.

> and implementations by client applications decades.

Toolkits implement these stuff, so most of the time "support by client application" is a gtk/qt version bump away.

> This is why it's taken 18 years to get close to anything we can refer to as "stable".

Is it really fare to compare the first 10 years of a couple of hobby developers with the current "wide-spread" state of the platform? If it were like today for 18 years and fail to improve, sure, something must be truly problematic. But there were absolutely different phases and uptake of the project so it moved at widely different speeds.

[imiric]

> Why not? It's open-source software. Depending on your architecture you may be able to reuse parts of it.

"The system is not modular, but you can make it so."

What a ridiculous statement.

> But as a more flexible choice, there is wlroots.

Great! How do I use wlroots as a user?

> Toolkits implement these stuff, so most of the time "support by client application" is a gtk/qt version bump away.

Ah, right. Is this why Xwayland exists, because it's so easy to do? So we can tell users that all their applications will continue to work when they switch to Wayland?

> Is it really fare to compare the first 10 years of a couple of hobby developers with the current "wide-spread" state of the platform?

It's not fare, you're right. I'll wait another decade before I voice my concerns again.

[gf000]

> How do I use wlroots as a user

Why would you want to use it as a user? That makes zero sense.

> Is this why Xwayland exists, because it's so easy to do

I don't get your point. The reason it exists is backwards compatibility. There are binaries as well where changing a library is not so easy, and not every version change is equal within a toolkit.

But it's much different to go from X to Wayland then from Wayland to Wayland with one more protocol.

[codedokode]

Isn't this something KDE-specific and because of using third-party program to manage clipboard? On Gnome, there is no Klipper and copy-paste works.

[IshKebab]

Omg I thought I was going senile... copy & paste not working... I definitely pressed ctrl-c didn't I?

Bloody Wayland.

[gf000]

What do you mean it not working? It has been working forever.

[gf000]

> Every compositor needs to implement the giant core spec

Is it giant or modular now?