I haven't used Linux desktop in 6 years but I remember when Wayland was new and started replacing X about 15 years ago and these were common complaints... I hope this is a joke and still isn't the case!
I've been using Wayland for some years (at least since Debian switched to it as their default) and not had any issues with it. I think complaints were more common about X, and Wayland has resolved a lot of it for the average user. For example my switch to Wayland was the first time I had 100% working video playback on Intel iGPUs without tinkering with conf files. I appreciate there are still some edge cases where X11 is still better -- but I think for 95-99% of users Wayland has just worked.
Is is a regular occurrence that students in my lab that use or switch to Wayland still run into problems. Switching back to X11 reliably works as a fix. The sad thing is that there is also no apparent advantage to Wayland, it is just pushed down to us via distributions.
I've been using Wayland for a while now on Debian as of 13, and the advantage is that it just works so much better.
Animations are much smoother, frames are dropped much less, and there's very little artifacts. It's almost uncanny how good desktop compositing looks right now.
Naturally, some people don't care or don't notice. I notice because I run everything at 240hz and I'm a freak. But, for me, so far everything has worked in wayland. I have not had to boot up an x11 session on Debian 13 with KDE. And, mind you, this is Debian - not bleeding edge. But, screen sharing works, audio works, everything.
It might matter to some but not to many, and in practice the pain imposed on many others could have been avoided by simply improving X. That developers already like to rewrite things is well known, but nobody should pay for this.
I imagine the 5% of issues are more likely to be related to Linux itself; then they hop back to a BSOD on Windows with forced updates or a buggy "stable" OS update on Mac.
Significantly less so than before, but it's unfortunately still the case. It's also just now getting features that people have been asking for for over a decade, and of course due to the nature of Wayland the implementations of these features are sporadic and inconsistent.
I think the main difference is that there aren't really any deal-breaker kind of bugs any more, and as far as features there are none missing that users care about compared to X11. It's mostly just annoying bugs and the usual "third party" (including KDE) apps looking off in GNOME because the devs can't reach an agreement on some things, users be dammed.
It's not. Wayland has really gotten its shit together in the last 5-ish years. A lot of the desktop ecosystem has matured in the last few years, actually.
I maintain that the Linux desktop in 2021 was actually less usable than it was in 2016. But things have really turned around since then.
I'm not particularly fond of X11 but barely working in 2026 is hardly an endorsement of the whole project.
A good replacement of X11 would have had a well designed local mode that abstracted modern hardware in all configurations and an actually good network protocol.
We're left with a barely-working local mode with awful X11 stuck on top.
And we've moved to it for purely political reasons.
The "purely political" reasons is that nobody wants to work on X.org implementation. Which, I guess, is technically political? Maybe? But it has real world consequences.
Like okay yeah we could all just stick to X. But in order to do that we need X to be developed, which it's not.
I'd say Wayland was "barely" working in 2021. When I say it works, I mean it works. Screen sharing (finally) works, remote desktop works, ICC profiles, etc etc.
I, for one, like Wayland's design. The problem was that it was incomplete and the implementations were buggy. Well, now the protocol is feature-complete and the implementations are solid.
Wayland is a bunch of amateurs trying to be strict and secure and the end result is everyone opening their own security holes to make it usable. It's working now, mostly.
KDE got some kind of video bridge recently which is an insane workaround for something that should've just worked.
You're worried that capturing Wayland screens from X11 applications requires additional software?
How is that a real complaint? The only way this would be possible without additional software is if Wayland itself was just another X11 Version, if Wayland was X12 which is X11 but with protocol changes that break backwards compatibility, you would run into exactly the same problem.
Your standard for something being insane is that it is not 100% identical to X11.
I agree: running simulated computers inside of Minecraft is a significantly more impressive technical feat than bolting on display surfaces to planes with a mod.
There's a big difference between something being compiled to run inside of Minecraft, versus running a sidecar that streams back a display. It's the difference between compiling and running on your machine, and streaming back a cloud machine using RDP.
Not like this makes a difference to users, who don't know how any of this works. But we are on Hacker News...
People not only built a functional computer in Minecraft, people have run Minecraft on that functional computer in Minecraft. Extremely slowly, obviously, but it did technically work.
I'm impressed by the coding skill to achieve a seamless integration and "usability".
But other than a demo "because we can" I'm confused on what this could ever be useful for. AR/VR prototyping? Virtual showroom?
Or maybe for an online presentation? Stream a video of playing Minecraft and get fancy slide transitions?
"let's go to the next slide" and "now we enter dangerous territory".. "over here I can show you how this program looks like in real life"
"In Minecraft" doesn't mean what it used to. When somebody wrote an 8-bit CPU literally "in Minecraft" it used to be badass. Now it's just a game addon.
Can't they just compete in separate categories? People have been making high-level computer mods years before even ComputerCraft, RedPower, or OpenComputers existed. And people will continue to make pure-redstone computers far into the future. Neither category is replacing the other :)
Not sure why people praise Minecraft for this. This is huge feat of Wayland, and was possible because devs took time to consider use cases outside of current norm, and why it took so long to migrate the ecosystem. People liked to bitch about the "Gnome blocking/not implementing essential protocols" part, but even that partially made this possible
a very near example would be immersed vr which is compatible with xorg and does essentially the same thing (2d windows pasted all over a 3d world), although not integrated into minecraft. also since their solution isn't wayland-centric it has ports to osx and windows.
>If you're reading this, you're likely in the same boat as me. You've discovered that Immersed can create virtual monitors for Windows and Mac, but on Linux, this feature is marked as "unsupported" on X11. This means you can't create virtual monitors directly through the Immersed agent. For now, the known workaround is to manually set up virtual monitors. If you use Wayland, now immersed offer support for native virtual displays on the Immersed agent on gnome Wayland. You can access this options in Immersed client menu -> Setting -> Configure virtual displays. Other Wayland DE/Compositors are not supported, but there are ways to create virtual monitors manually as we do on X11, please check the linux-help channel in the Discord server for more info.
Basically immersed vr doesn't support X11 windows, it only supports X11 screens, which means you would have to create a new screen manually for each window.
Wayland is far more minimal API than X11 that mainly cares about surfaces and inputs. So, it's understandable that it can be "easily" translated to a game engine.
X11 has an entire drawing API. It'd probably be easier to run through Xwayland.
I wonder how this would pair with a VR mod. It doesn't seem like Vivecraft supports the version this was posted for at the moment, but if they had the ability to play nice that seems like it would would be a fun way to experience software.
Yes, but part of the fun is doing it in Minecraft and using Minecraft's language for it (e.g. putting windows in your inventory, pulling them out of chests, etc)
Yeah the appeal to me would be the ability to have my desktop experience spread throughout an established home built in minecraft. I think in reality the added friction in a setup like that would be enormous but it's a pleasant thought.
Link to source: https://github.com/EVV1E/waylandcraft