[jasoneckert]

In short, this reads like a mix of valid historical pain points and outdated assumptions.

The post frames Wayland security as “you can’t do anything,” but that’s a misunderstanding. Even under X11, any app can log keystrokes, read window contents, and inject input into other apps. Wayland flips this to isolation-by-default: explicit portals/APIs for screen capture, input, etc.

Moreover, the performance argument is weak and somewhat contradictory. The author claims there is no clear performance win, and that it's sometimes slower and hardware improvements make it irrelevant. But Wayland reduces copies and avoids X11 roundtrips (architectural win). Actual performance depends heavily on compositor + drivers, and I've found that modern hardware has HUGE performance improvements (especially Intel, AMD, and Apple Silicon via the Asahi driver).

The NVIDIA argument is also dated. Sure, support was historically bad due to EGLStreams vs GBM, but this has improved significantly in recent driver releases.

Many cited issues are outdated too. OBS, clipboard, and screen sharing issues are now mostly (if not entirely) solved in the latest GNOME/KDE.

I've been using Wayland exclusively on Fedora and Fedora Asahi Remix systems for many years alongside Sway (and occasionally GNOME and KDE). Adoption has accelerated in many distros, and XWayland for legacy apps is excellent (although I believe using the word "legacy" here would be a trigger word for the author ;-).

There's no stagnation here... what we're looking at is a slow migration of a foundational layer, which historically always takes a decade or more in the Linux world.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Actual performance depends heavily on compositor + drivers, and I've found that modern hardware has HUGE performance improvements (especially Intel, AMD, and Apple Silicon via the Asahi driver)

Author’s argument is those hardware improvements could have been had for free with X11 upgrades. I’m not saying it’s a complete argument. But talking about architectural wins sounds like conceding the argument.

[joecool1029]

> Author’s argument is those hardware improvements could have been had for free with X11 upgrades.

I do NOT miss having tearing all the time with X11. There were always kludgy workarounds. Even if you stopped and said ok, lets not run nvidia, let's do intel they have great FOSS driver support, we look back at X11 2D acceleration history. EXA, SNA, UMA, XAA? Oh right all replaced with GLAMOR, OK run modesetting driver, right need a compositor on top of our window manager still because we don't vsync without it.

Do you have monitors with a different refresh rate? Do you have muxes with different cards driving different outputs? All this stuff X11 sucks at. Ok the turd has been polished well now after decades, it doesn't need to run as root/suid anymore, doesn't listen for connections on your network, but the security model still sucks compared to wayland, and once you mix multiple video cards all bets are off.

But yeah, clipboard works reliably, big W for X11.

[xbar]

It reads like a user that tried Wayland again last week, found the same issues and wrote a piece that tried to summarize why they remain sad after 17 years of waiting for Wayland to address its issues.

[tapoxi]

There is no "Wayland" to address these issues. It's like asking "web" to address its issues.

Wayland is a protocol with multiple different implementations.

[nickelpro]

But this is sort of the nature of the problem?

In X11, the problem was Xserver. Now, X11's design philosophy was hopelessly broken and needed to be replaced, but it wasn't replaced. As you correctly point out, there is no "Wayland", Wayland is a methodology, a description, of how one might implement the technologies necessary to replace X11.

This has led to hopeless fracturing and replication of effort. Every WM is forced to become an entire compositor and partial desktop environment, which they inevitably fail at. In turn application developers cannot rely on protocol extensions which represent necessary desktop program behavior being available or working consistently.

This manifests in users feeling the ecosystem is forever broken, because for them, on their machine, some part of it is.

There is no longer one central broken component to be fixed. There are hundreds of scattered, slightly broken components.

[genthree]

I maintain Red Hat backed it as part of a play to make it harder to develop competing distros that aren’t basically identical to Red Hat’s product.

Their actions on systemd, Wayland, plus gnome and associated tech, sure look like classic “fire and motion”. Everyone else has to play catch-up, and they steer enough incompatible-with-alternatives default choices that it’s a ton of work and may involve serious compromises to resist just doing whatever they do.

[wild_egg]

I miss the Unix philosophy

[nickelpro]

Wayland is far more aligned with the Unix philosophy than Xorg ever was. Xorg was a giant, monolithic, do everything app.

The Unix philosophy is fragmentation into tiny pieces, each doing one thing and hoping everyone else conforms to the same interfaces. Piping commands between processes and hoping for the best. That's exactly how Wayland works, although not in plain text because that would be a step too far even for Wayland.

Some stuff should not follow the Unix philosophy, PID 1 and the compositor are chief examples of things that should not. It is better to have everything centralized for these processes.

[uecker]

In X you have server, window manager, compositing manager, and clients and all is scoupled by a very flexible protocol. This seems nicely split and aligned with Unix philosophy to me. It also works very well, so I do not think this should be monolithic.

[hysan]

This is quite wrong? There are some features that get blocked from being implemented because Wayland refused to define a protocol for everyone to implement. Window positioning being a recent example of how progress can get blocked for many years due to Wayland.

[AlienRobot]

This is same cop out people use to talk about "Linux."

"No, Linux isn't bad, your distro/DE is bad, if you used XYZ then you wouldn't have this problem." And then you waste your time switching to XYZ and you just find new problems in XYZ that you didn't have in your original distro.

I'm genuinely tired of this in the Linux community. You can't use the "Wayland" label only for the good stuff like "Wayland is good for security!" and "Wayland is the future" and then every time someone complains about Wayland, it is "no, that's not true Wayland, because Wayland isn't real."

[tapoxi]

But that's what we signed up for in the Linux wirld. Linux systems are smorgasbord of different components by design, and that means being specific. I'm using KDE Plasma 6, that's a different experience than someone using Cosmic or Sway.

[fluffybucktsnek]

Furthermore, Wayland is, first and foremost, a protocol, not a standalone software like the Linux kernel. Wayland is no more than an API format transmitted over the Wire protocol. So properly criticizing Wayland is about criticizing the abstraction this API creates and the constraints introduced by it.

[Mawr]

Could you briefly explain in simple terms, why I as a user would care about any of that? I want stuff to work. With Wayland, it largely doesn't. I don't terribly care about the semantics of it.

[duckmysick]

> Wayland flips this to isolation-by-default: explicit portals/APIs for screen capture, input, etc.

The problem is old (and even not so old) apps don't expose those APIs so interactions like UI automation on Wayland is limited, if not impossible. I'd love to grant a specific permission just for selected GUI apps, but I can't because they don't support it.

There's a reason why RPA software on Wayland is limited to web apps inside a browser. Or something extremely janky like taking screenshots of the entire desktop and doing OCR. But then you can't interact with unfocused apps.

[hyperbolablabla]

In my experience I have found the xdg-desktop-portal for whatever reason to be completely non functional on Arch/Hyprland. It must be an issue with my config but on x11 I never had to think about this

[Mawr]

This reads like AI/FSD-bro speak: "no, that's all old news, you clearly haven't tried the new cutting edge model/build bro! it's all fixed now!".

> Wayland security

Okay, that's great, but why would I care? If you can implement those security wins transparently in the background, cool. Otherwise, what I care about is being able to take a screenshot, not about some theoretical "security threat" from already vetted programs I run on my machine.

> OBS, clipboard, and screen sharing issues are now mostly (if not entirely) solved in the latest GNOME/KDE.

Oh, the clipboard works mostly correctly now, after some 17 years of development? Could not have come up with a more damning statement. Complete misalignment of priorities.

[antisol]

  > "no, that's all old news, you clearly haven't tried the new cutting edge model/build bro! it's all fixed now!"

Exactly. And it's standard rhetoric for the wayland fanboys. "The fix for this was committed 15 minutes ago! You just need to check out the unstable branch and recompile!"

  > what I care about is being able to take a screenshot, not about some theoretical "security threat" from already vetted programs I run on my machine.

Yeah, the security theatre thing is also part of their standard rhetoric. It's a good bit of rhetoric because it scares people who don't know better. They all love to talk about how it's just so insecure to allow us to do things that every desktop environment has been able to do for 30+ years.

But strangely, in decades, I've never seen a single example of anyone taking advantage of this horrible security design and it becoming a widespread problem in the wild. I keep asking the wayland bros to give me an example of this happening in the wild and causing a problem that's even mildly widespread. Strangely when I ask that question they always seem to forget to respond to that part of my post and move on to their next piece of standard rhetoric.

  > Oh, the clipboard works mostly correctly now, after some 17 years of development? Could not have come up with a more damning statement. Complete misalignment of priorities

Tsk tsk, now you're just being cynical. We should be celebrating that wayland has managed to kinda-sorta get a feature working which was working just fine in X11 by ~1998, and which worked just fine in Windows <3.1, and which worked just fine in Mac OS in the 1980s. And they've managed to do it in only ~3 years longer than it took to get Duke Nukem Forever into stores! Yay them!