[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.