Post #4465918
2026-08-09 09:23 UTC
Replies (5)
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@deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz 2026-08-09 10:11
Second System Syndrome otherwise know as ‘throwing the baby out with the bath water’. X11 is old, extraordinarily old for software. As such, the problems it solves are not really problems anymore. Rather than gradually evolving X11, into say X12, the whole thing got dumped on the trash pile and a brand new entirely incompatible thing called Wayland was started from scratch. Replacing software with literally hundreds (if not thousands) of person-years of development devoted to it over it’s lifetime is hard. Which meant that Wayland had an unfeasibly steep hill to climb, as such it’s early days were tumultuous and it got a bit of a bad rap. There is far more (qualitative and quantitative) history than will fit into this margin comment.
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@novafunc@discuss.tchncs.de 2026-08-09 10:23
Wayland wants to avoid problems that X11, Windows, and MacOS have. It deliberately avoids some “features” that application developers expect. A lot of it relates to security and privacy. An example is that a window does not know where it is positioned on your screen and it cannot choose where to place its windows. Personally, I love this behavior. It means I can open an open and it opens in a consistent location (for most Wayland compositors, that’s centered on the screen). But others don’t like that. They would like the app to control where it opens; for some apps (a niche nowadays) you may have an application window and multiple more supporting windows, but on Wayland, they would all just get opened on top of each other rather than being placed around the main window.
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@wgs@lemmy.sdf.org 2026-08-10 05:27
Here’s my 2cts as someone who (used to) hate Wayland: The main reason is frustration. Using Xorg was simple. You install xorg-server (and its million dependencies), a window manager and you’re good to go. Fire up the server, and then run all the software you need. The window manager is just one of them (and is entirely optional). Wayland is another story though. You don’t “install Wayland”. It’s only a spec. Just like you don’t install HTTP to browse the web. You either install Firefox, epiphany or dillo, which all support a different amount of that spec. For example dillo is ultra light but doesn’t support javascript. It’s the same with Wayland compositors, except that the spec changes every week (or used to, back in Wayland’s early days). And it was so frustrating to come from Xorg where everything works to another system where you couldn’t even copy/paste between windows ! Wayland being only a protocol is it’s greatest strength and main weakness. It’s good because it’s extensible and everyone’s free to implement whatever extension they need. Unfortunately it went in all directions with everyone coming up with new extension everyday, causing fragmentation when there was barely 3 competitors (kde, gnome and wlroots). As a developer, it’s ultra confusing, just like on the web when you used to add support for chrome, mozilla and IE. And requires a lot of effort because the landscape is constantly changing. So if devs are lost, imagine users… Hopefully nowadays there’s some kind of consortium that’s voting Wayland extensions, which is a great thing. Things move at a pace that is okayish to keep up with, and most basic expected features are there (copy/paste, screen save/lock, desktop shells, etc…).
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@vas@lemmy.ml 2026-08-10 05:50
Besides the other comment, there are many reports and measurements that it’s worse for gaming (less responsive). Screensharing used to be a nightmare, IDK if now there’s already a common standard or gnome/kde/others do their own tricks.
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@pixeldaemon@sh.itjust.works 2026-08-09 13:41
It was not truly ready for end users until the latest years but was shipped despite. It also broke some kinds (I mean a lot of) software, I cannot imagine how many lines of code had to be rewritten because of Wayland. And it also lacks screensavers. And is more resource-demanding.