[shevy-java]

Wayland is a mess.

Perhaps https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver can revive the older ecosystem. Almost nobody writes for wayland. About two years ago I tried to switch, then gave up when I realised how many things are missing on wayland. And then I noticed that barely anyone wrote software for wayland. It feels like a corporate advertisement project really. GNOME and KDE push for wayland now.

[LeFantome]

What does “nobody writes for Wayland” mean?

If you write software using GTK, Qt, or FLTK then you are writing Wayland software.

The majority of Linux desktops are Wayland at this point. Nobody writes software for them?

The Steamdeck uses gamescope which is Wayland. GNOME, COSMIC, Budgie, Niri, and Hyprland are not just Wayland but Wayland only. KDE will be Wayland only soon. Cinnamon is switching to Wayland. XFCE is writing a Wayland compositor.

What percentage of Linux desktop users are not using one of the above? 10 at most?

[noselasd]

It just means "noone" uses the wayland APIs directly, but instead they leave the wayland complexity to GTK,Qt or FLTK, and they call their app a Qt app, not a Wayland app.

[simonh]

Was X11 any different in practice? Apart from ancient legacy stuff like XTerm. It would be like writing a Mac application in Quartz directly.

[sprash]

It was/is mostly the same practice except for the cases where it really counts. Window managers in general, xdotool, all kinds of input mapping and automation or the fact that you can write a screenshot tool in less than 500 LOC are only possible if you talk to X directly. And there the possibilities are almost limitless. And thanks to the xcb library it's actually somewhat convenient to use.

Also certain types of power tools for mac probably need use Quartz directly as well.

[kelnos]

> Window managers in general, xdotool, all kinds of input mapping and automation or the fact that you can write a screenshot tool in less than 500 LOC are only possible if you talk to X directly.

Honestly I think this is a pretty fair approximation of "no one". How many people are writing tools like this vs. the number of people writing regular applications? A very small number, I'd say.

And after working extensively with both libX11/libxcb and libwayland-client directly, I can say that none of them are particularly pleasant to work with. Actually, no, that's not true: libwayland-client wins, easily. Every single Wayland protocol has code generated for it that works exactly the same way. I suppose the same is (more or less) true of libxcb, but libX11 (and all the other libraries you might have to use, like libXrender, libXrandr, libXext...) are a complete mess.

And even then, libwayland-client has a much lower number of concepts you have to understand than libxcb does, simply because the Wayland protocol has a small number of concepts you need to understand. libxcb is definitely an improvement over libX11, but it can't magically make all the underlying X11 protocol concepts become unified.

[hparadiz]

Having written a new gtk program recently I had to implement Wayland and X -isms in the code. Off the top of my head X prefers using W_Class and Wayland prefers app-id with each window having a role set. Both are fine. I honestly think Wayland is nicer but realistically you code for both. To get a global hot key you register it with the compositor and it works. But you can run a background daemon to catch all keys if you really want.

[gf000]

And why should we optimize for "how many locs can I write a screenshot tool in"? I would prefer to having 1-2 decent ones that have all the necessary features and call it a day. They can then have a simple API so you can script whatever you want.

Why would I want to add more complexity to a display server?

[flohofwoe]

Creating a window and Vulkan context and receiving input events (e.g. what game-like applications need) is fairly trivial via Xlib but far worse in Wayland. The Xlib API also sucks compared to Win32 or Cocoa, but writing a Wayland client for something as trivial as creating and managing a window is much worse than on any other platform (see: https://www.p4m.dev/posts/29/index.html)

[gf000]

That's what stuff like SDL meant to abstract away.

[flohofwoe]

Sure, but SDL can also only do so much to plaster over missing or optional Wayland features:

https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/README-wayland

Basic window system functionality really needs to be provided by the OS, not by 3rd-party libraries. And there's no reason why simple things like creating a window should be drastically more code in an OS API than in a wrapper library like SDL.

[kelnos]

Then in that case, the point is moot, as a similar version of "no one" uses the X11 APIs directly anymore, either.

[rezonant]

No one who loved themselves wrote Xlib apps directly either.

[whizzter]

I actually wrote some stuff directly because I was young, poor and stupid.

First year in uni my windows laptop broke, had to lug around a heavy second hand underpowered ppc powerbook and wrote some application I needed that I didn't want "bloated".

Font handling, shared memory backbuffers, network api, etc.. as I wrote in another comment. It is an API to solve over the wire graphics in the late 80s/early 90s era using idioms of that time, and already by year 2000 the problems (rasterization power) didn't exist nor is it even a suitable API surface (even less so 25 years later).

[pjmlp]

Athena widgets were great! /s

[throwaway27448]

> If you write software using GTK, Qt, or FLTK then you are writing Wayland software.

Why is it so complicated if it's just a common backend? Surely you don't need 1/10th the complexity just to render gnome or kde (never heard of fltk before).

[sprash]

It means that Wayland is the worst and most idiotic graphics API ever conceived. Talking to Wayland's "asynchronous object oriented protocol" directly is a fucking disaster [1]. Secondary and partly duplicated infrastructure in form of a dbus infested maze of "Desktop-Portals" is necessary to do things as simple as taking screenshots.

As such it essentially cements the GTK/Qt duopoly. Both are extremely subpar low-quality bloated toolkits that are also responsible for the fact that the Linux desktop is still not a thing in 2026.

1.: https://www.p4m.dev/posts/29/index.html

[grekand46]

Wayland isn't really a graphics API, it's just a protocol for clients to communicate with the compositor. Sure, there's a lot of boilerplate to get a window on the screen, but you also aren't supposed to use it directly if you want something super simple. It's really meant to be a low level interface for toolkits to be built on top of. Here are two disagreements I have with the linked article:

1. Comparison with raylib

This is imo comparing apples with oranges. Raylib sits at a much higher level than wayland, and it in fact supports using wayland as a backend.

2. Wayland is littered with callbacks because it's an object oriented protocol

It's more due to wayland being an asynchronous protocol. When you send a request to the compositor, chances are that you wont hear back from it immediately. But it's also likely that the app can do other things while waiting for the response. X11 is also in fact an asynchronous protocol, it's just that XLib creates a synchronous API on top of it (and as a result suffers from unnecessary roundtrip delays). In comparison, the newer XCB library is a lot more faithful in terms of preserving the asynchronous nature of the protocol and is used by, for example, Qt's X11 backend and even XLib itself. Of course that also makes it more difficult to use, not unlike libwayland, but the main takeaway here is that you can build a sync API on top of an async one if you wish and not vice versa.

I think some parts of the author's frustration is misplaced because they see libwayland as a toolkit, and in that case yeah it's pretty painful. But I really don't agree with the conclusion that this somehow makes it a bad foundation to build upon. As an analogy, making raw syscalls to the kernel is also painful, but that's why libraries exist.

(edit for better formatting)

[hparadiz]

Once you set permissions the screenshot taking program always has them and you don't have to do grants more than once.

[kelnos]

I agree the portals thing is a horrid mess, but you don't need them to take a screenshot unless you're a sandboxed application. Which is probably a good thing.

You can write a simple Wayland screenshot app with a few hundred lines of code[0], and a compositor that supports the ext-image-capture source and ext-image-copy-capture extensions implemented. (Or the older wlr-screencopy.)

I have plenty of criticism for Wayland and its ecosystem, but if you're going to criticize, don't spread FUD.

(I don't like being the guy who has to assert his credentials, but: I've implemented all three of those screenshot/screencast protocols in a Wayland compositor, just a month or so ago, and know how they work, and what it takes to talk to them from a client.)

Also I read through the link you posted. There's a lot of truth to many of those frustrations, but a lot of it is based on misunderstandings of what Wayland actually is. Yes, most people should be using a toolkit. No, it's not great that the main choices are GTK and Qt. I think there's absolutely room for a mid-level toolkit that lets you do the basics without requiring all the Wayland boilerplate. smithay-client-toolkit is one such effort, and I think it's a good start, though something even higher-level on top of it would be nice.

I also don't get the callback hate. I much prefer registering callbacks over a ginormous switch statement that has to dispatch every event under the sun. Toolkits use callbacks too; does the author hate all toolkits as well? You actually could talk to a Wayland compositor with a big switch statement if you wanted, though you'd need to modify libwayland-client to return events as you iterate its event queue rather than dispatch things to callbacks. That could be a fun project for someone who wanted to make Wayland event handling just like libX11 event handling. (See: just a fundamental misunderstanding of what Wayland is.)

And comparing raylib to libwayland-client is silly; they're fundamentally different things. And you can use raylib to talk to a Wayland compositor. It's just a bad-faith argument.

If you want to compare libwayland-client to something, you have to compare it to libX11 or libxcb. And while yes, getting a simple window on-screen is indeed simpler with libX11/libxcb, doing anything more complicated than that is on par with what you'd end up doing with libwayland-client.

[0] Not counting the protocol code that wayland-scanner will generate for you, because that's like saying you have to count the lines of code in libX11 to write an X11 screenshot app.

[Gigachad]

You have to go quite out of your way to not use Wayland. Pretty much all mainstream distros switched over long ago. This just feels like the systemd drama restarted. Some will complain and hold on to the past for as long as they can but the rest of the world moves on. Wayland is the better choice today.

[guenthert]

The MATE DE is fairly popular among the small (not so small in India) but growing (thanks to Windows 11 no doubt) Linux desktop market, isn't it? They strive for Wayland compatibility, but aren't quite there (such I take from their release notes; I myself use an ancient version of Ubuntu/Mate here, right now).

I'm not all that informed regarding Waylands benefits and shortcomings (just being puzzled when "performance" or "overhead" is quoted as reason to move away from X11, remembering that the latter didn't seem unbearable slow 30 years ago and that performance of computers in general and computer graphics in particular increased manifold since then). There are however some who should know, who don't seem all that excited: https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support...

[JollySharp0]

> You have to go quite out of your way to not use Wayland. Pretty much all mainstream distros switched over long ago.

Whether you use Wayland or not depends on what DE/Window Manager/Session Manager you are using and not what distro.

Cinnamon, XFCE don't really work with Wayland. Cinnamon just hangs on my system, and I don't believe XFCE even support. I am on Debian 13, so things may have changed on the latest versions.

Making Gnome using X was as simple as disabling Wayland. A one line change in GDM config somewhere and restart the session manager.

> This just feels like the systemd drama restarted. Some will complain and hold on to the past for as long as they can but the rest of the world moves on.

That because a similar things happen fairly regularly in Linux land. It seems every 5 years (or so it seems) There are things that are working perfectly fine, and then someone/some group decided that half of a particular stack needs rewriting/replacing at <large corp> and we go through a rigmarole of bugs, breakage, stability issues.

It isn't people being irrational. It is people not wanting to go through another 5 years of churn on their desktops. If people are happy with something that works fine in their opinion and it is replaced by something else that causes a lot of churn and it isn't substantially better a lot of people are going to be left pissed off about it and thus the drama and resentment.

This also causes issues for other operating systems e.g. BSDs/Solaris forks etc. Their users have to deal with all the Linuxisms.

> Wayland is the better choice today.

The problem is that a lot of stuff still doesn't work properly. I am using a modern AMD card. I get weird hang ups in Chrome/Brave that don't happen in X. Sometimes the windows "stick", other times the whole desktop just locks up. Doesn't happen in X at all. I am a web developer, so this is very annoying.

There is another problem and that is that I don't think Wayland even works on non-Linux *nix like FreeBSD.

The things that Gnome did well with Wayland is things like Different Refresh rates, display scaling etc. That all worked nicely. However the way Gnome works with Games can be a PITA.

When I was using Wayland BTW, I was using it with Gnome 48, GDM on Debian 13. I think they just released Gnome 50. I went to Cinnamon and can't really go back because I updated too many dependencies from back-ports to reinstall Gnome.

[gf000]

> That because a similar things happen fairly regularly in Linux land. It seems every 5 years (or so it seems) There are things that are working perfectly fine, and then someone/some group decided that half of a particular stack needs rewriting/replacing at <large corp> and we go through a rigmarole of bugs, breakage, stability issues.

You are free to use whatever you feel like, no one stops you.

At the same time, you are not free to request for/expect other people's free work in maintaining stuff forever for you. If you want it to continue to work, feel free to step up and maintain Xorg/your DE of choice, whatever.

Also, both systemd and Wayland are just factually better stuff than their predecessors. Not everything is NIH, there are legitimate technological advances we are better off adapting at one point - see git, not managing the complex process of system boot via hacky bash scripts, or package management (we are not yet ready, but nix is the future, all other package management systems are objectively worse).

It is just sometimes in an easier context to be replaced. Display stack is tightly depended on by all kinds of software and no matter how good an interop it has (xwayland), people will always find problems and blame the new tool. The network effect should not be underestimated.

[JollySharp0]

> You are free to use whatever you feel like, no one stops you.

I was merely explaining to the person why people become resentful as they didn't seem to grasp it.

It was neither condoning or condemning the position. Simply why it happens.

> At the same time, you are not free to request for/expect other people's free work in maintaining stuff forever for you. If you want it to continue to work, feel free to step up and maintain Xorg/your DE of choice, whatever.

1) I wasn't doing anything of the sort. I am also allowed to criticise anything I like and for any reason I like. I don't expect anyone to take any notice of it either. Statements such as this is done by people simply to shut people up.

2) You and I both know that isn't possible for the vast majority of people. Further more even if it were, it is basically a second full time job, which most people don't have the time to do.

Therefore I treat statements such as this as disingenuous.

> Also, both systemd and Wayland are just factually better stuff than their predecessors.

So says you. The fact that there is a huge amount of disagreement and discussion over it would suggest otherwise.

All I will say is that. I was using Linux distros way before Wayland and SystemD were even conceived and things worked about as well as they do now, outside of hardware support.

I use Debian 13 that comes with Wayland and SystemD as default. So I don't care what I use, as long as it works.

> Package management (we are not yet ready, but nix is the future, all other package management systems are objectively worse).

Thomas Sowell is often quoted as saying "there are no solutions, only tradeoffs". When people make statements like this, I honestly don't think they fundamentally understand what Engineering is really about. Every solution has a bunch of trade offs.

I don't know much about NixOS, but spending 5 minutes searching there are a bunch of trade offs you have to make when using it. Which means it is at best not objectively better. Not mentioning those makes me think you are a fanboy, and you can never get an honest assessment from fanboy.

> It is just sometimes in an easier context to be replaced. Display stack is tightly depended on by all kinds of software and no matter how good an interop it has (xwayland), people will always find problems and blame the new tool.

People will blame the replacement if it doesn't substantially offer anything new, while introducing news defects and limitations.

That is the issue. Not that they are just curmudgeon. It is a completely rational and correct to be critical of change when the perceived benefit at best marginal.

[gf000]

> there are no solutions, only tradeoffs

Sure, but we are talking about desktop OSs which do specify a set of requirements to fulfill, and in that scenario I do believe both systemd and especially nix brings a whole lot of benefits at the price of insignificant/small tradeoffs.

I also agree with you that one should be critical of change, especially change of change's sake. But at the same time it does get old, similarly to when you are surrounded by people still using an FTP server with .V2.4.final.beforeRelease suffices instead of learning git. It took time to make git the default and people naturally resist change. But not always for a good reason.

[JollySharp0]

> Sure, but we are talking about desktop OSs which do specify a set of requirements to fulfill, and in that scenario I do believe both systemd and especially nix brings a whole lot of benefits at the price of insignificant/small tradeoffs.

I can buy SystemD as it IIRC it ties into the whole Desktop spec that most DEs use now.

NixOS and general discussions about packaging is IMO is bikeshedding. Most of the distros these days have reasonably decent packaging systems and are "good enough". I don't need my desktop OS configuration to be declared in a configuration file somewhere. It is unnecessary. In other contexts, I think it is probably really useful.

> I also agree with you that one should be critical of change, especially change of change's sake. But at the same time it does get old, similarly to when you are surrounded by people still using an FTP server with .V2.4.final.beforeRelease suffices instead of learning git. It took time to make git the default and people naturally resist change. But not always for a good reason.

Equating people not using Source control to those that are isn't a valid analogy.

A more valid analogy would be more like someone wondering why they should use Git when they are perfectly happy with SVN. If SVN is working fine for you and your team, why would you wish to move to git?

[Nursie]

You pretty much just have to use an Xfce distro, as I don't think Xfce fully supports Wayland yet.

As I am an Xfce user, I'm happy to wait.

[Gormo]

I'm currently using XFCE on Arch, and have no incentives or motivation to use Wayland at all. I have no issues whatsoever with Xorg.

[eikenberry]

I think Wayland is basically waiting for a higher level abstraction to fully replace X11, at least for the desktop. I'm currently playing with the River Wayland compositor (https://codeberg.org/river/river) which separates the window manager from the compositor and I think it could fill this gap left in the transition. Not as sure about non-toolkit (gtk,qt) application development...

[moondev]

Things like this remind me how much I love open source software. Choice is amazing shout out to all the contributors!

[redeeman]

lol, has it ever occoured to you that the ones who ACTUALLY do write software, such as for example KDE, GNOME, actually prefer wayland?

not to mention GTK and Qt, both supporting wayland.

Most software vendors never talked to X directly either. You seem extremely misinformed