As much as I want to support the idea of a well supported, modernised graphical protocol system, wayland simply isn’t ready yet. There’s so much shit that simply doesn’t work, and they’re all made up of little niche cases that will take substantially longer than a few months to resolve, and I still haven’t seen anything that suggests Wayland has a practical equivalent to xorg.conf.
Is Alma Linux rolling their own version of Plasma with x11? Or are they just sticking with an older version of Plasma? Is anyone else planning on hacking x11 back into the DE?
edit: To the people leaping down my throat, the last time I tried wayland was around five months ago. I have a substantial list of thi gs noted down somewhere that I was considering trting to work around or fix. off the top of my head:
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remote desktop is a fucking pain. remmina would not allow a multiple monitor remote session at all, and a single monitor session was frequently unstable. What I really wanted was something simple that I could start from a bash script, like XFreeRDP.
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nvidia drivers were spotty at best. I’m not too fussed about them being proprietary, but they never seemed to quite function properly. I have a 1660ti.
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applications in general felt sluggish
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it was hit/miss when attempting to disable desktop composition. sometimes it would cease, sometimes it would not. for skme full-screen applications, I require this as desktop composition can make input responses fairly latent. Trying to type out a class is unpleasant and somewhat halting when it takes 200ms for a character to appear after it is typed.
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lack of a pre-init config option. I currently use a xorgconf to set screen position, layout, and resolution (including a virtual resolution) before any graphical environment starts. this stops my vertical monjtor being displayed sideways before I log in. I have yet to see something similar for wayland, but this feels like it should exist - please prove me wrong.
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screen tearing. although the environment claims to be running my monitors at 60hz, a 60fps test sample revealed they were actually being driven at 50hz. thjs is not a hardware limitation, as all my monitors currently drive at 60hz.
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application and desktop sharing. this flat out didn’t work. I’m told it should work, but it doesn’t.
here’s the thing. I’m not arguing against the inclusion of wayland. I’m very pleased that we have new options. I’m arguing that we should have the choice to choose the most suitable option for some time yet. I like Plasma a lot h despite it being horribly bloated, unnecessarily complex, and somehow oddly lacking in some basic features whilst simultaneously having some fantastic built-ins such as window rules.
so no, this isn’t a “self report” as one profoundly inciteful respondent put it. this is me looking for any possible solution that will allow me to run a modern DE whilst retaining features that I require.
People complaining about Wayland always like to say that, but usually don’t give any specific examples.
If it really was so bad then all major distros and DEs wouldn’t be actively working to switch.
For what it’s worth, since a few years Wayland works better on my PC than X11 ever did, and with more features.
I’ve used Wayland exclusively for years, but here’s an example: https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2026-01-04-wayland-sway-in-2026/
tl;Dr the Wayland ecosystem has still not caught up in all edge cases, the weirder setup you have the more likely you’re affected
Ubuntu, which is all-in on Wayland, does not wake up from sleep with our nvidia 3060. We have to reset the machine. So, no, it’s not an edge case, we have a very, very popular Asus motherboard (the one everyone recommended on youtube 3 years ago), and still nothing. Even with newer versions of the driver, newer versions of ubuntu, same problem occurs.
i use x11 termux with xreal glasses for my travel rig. as far as i know, there is no wayland support for termux.
also when i use steam link from wayland it is very buggy. i tried again a couple months ago and had the same issue.
are these niche use cases? absolutely. but i have 2 different niche use cases that exclude using wayland. its a shame if ill have to quit using gnome (i know this thread is about kde) over this.
I’ve been quite happy with moonlight/sunshine on Wayland. Is that an option?
it can except when im away from home. dont get me wrong, i use wayland on a few other computers. im not hating on wayland, i just find i have to keep using x and its frustrating and sad to see it being phased out.
Look, if you’re gonna tell x11 folks to provide examples of how Wayland is not meeting their needs, you need to meet the same bar and give a few examples of what these features are.
This is honestly what is holding me back from going all in on wayland… I don’t see any benefit.
Xorg fans will not accept that people like Wayland better because it is a better experience: higher performance and less jank. But that is the main reason and the reason that 80 percent of new Linux desktop users start on Wayland and will never switch. It does not matter if you believe it.
And of course the “killer feature” of Wayland is that it runs Wayland apps. And Wayland-only desktop environments and compositors. This will matter more and more every day. I could live without foot and COSMIC but already the fact that I cannot use Niri on Xorg is all I need to know to be Wayland exclusive.
But if you need an itemized list:
Waypipe and WPRS are better than the X11 equivalents.
Oh, and inevitability.
I appreciate your response.
I am happy that keyboard and other I/o are being treated as separate from a security perspective.
I am not as impressed by this comment snippet.
I am not a “fan” of xorg, and you should absolutely stop looking at it this way. This isn’t a matter of having a favourite car manufacturer. I am not commenting to convince everyone that xorg is “better”.
I simply use xorg. I have work to do, I use Linux to do it. My most stable and predictable configuration is using xfce, it just stays out of the way. I don’t care about ricing. I don’t GAF about GPU accelerated terminal emulators, especially when they bonk trying to connect to Solaris tty. I don’t care about HDR. If you do care about these things, that’s great, I’m not trying to diminish that.
I have been using Linux for almost 30 years, professionally for almost 25. I have been through Mir. I have somehow made it through alsa transition to pulseaudio, which sucked. I have been through Unity, the ffmpeg debacle, systemd, ndis wrappers, netplan, etc. Some of these new tooling options are better than previous ones, some aren’t. They effectively get the job done, and that’s the bottom line.
Never in my Linux experience have I seen such a sudden push to not only move everyone to new tooling, but to cast everyone using the old tools as somehow “refusing to move on”, especially in the last 2 or 3 years.
There will come a time when you will see your current tooling will be left behind and you’ll be in my situation. Have some grace about it.
And stop calling me an xorg “fan”.
Um.
First, I am not trying to recruit you to Wayland. Do what you want. I am responding to your demand to explain what is better about it and your implication that the answer is “nothing”.
Apparently you like Xorg. You like it enough that you see nothing better about Wayland. Given that, getting bent out of shape about the word “fan” appearing in my response is a bit excessive. Protest too much? Christ.
And I did not even apply that term to you specifically. I just answered your bloody question. A question that was grumpy to start with. Grace you say?
Finally, I have been using Linux since well before 1.0 when I had to spend all night on a Sun workstation downloading floppy images. And half the next day guessing mode lines for my monitor to make XFree86 work and fixing build scrips for whatever I was trying to run on it. I moved straight from OS/2 to Linux though I installed BSD/386 before that. I own both SGI and Sun (Solaris era) hardware.
My preferred Linux distro does not use Glibc, GCC, GNU utils, or systemd.
I doubt if there are many Linux technologies you have encountered that I have not. So I am not sure what point you think you are making.
That said, it sounds like you used Ubuntu a whole lot more than I did. I better walk around these egg shells before I ask if you liked it.
Fractional scaling w/ HiDPI displays, especially when the monitors are different resolutions, works so much better in Wayland than X11
That is a good point, fair enough. I don’t really need this, so it doesn’t cross my radar.
One benefit is it’s the future and my DE is going to drop X soon.
Another is it’s more secure. Not just any window can read the clipboard or the keys you press. Of course, I had to turn that protection off because Steam is still X and my controllers back paddles popped up a permission dialog whenever I hit them.
Am I doing a good job convincing you? Anyway, I switched to Plasma Wayland and it was fine for me, with a few tweaks needed.
No doubt about that. It’s been “the future” for more than a decade. But even 5 years ago, Wayland was a complete dumpster fire if you strayed outside average use. So yeah, I’ve heard this before.
I understand that this is a real sticking point with some use cases, I hope this is resolved soon. I’m definitely fuzzy on the workings of portals, compositors, input, etc.
This is the overwhelming response to my questions about Wayland, and it’s weird. Wayland isn’t a fancy new car I need to use to stay relevant. I work in terminals and a browser, Xfce is fine.
As I mentioned in another response, I am not trying to use the newest coolest thing, I work every day in Linux and I need my setup to be stable and predictable.
And no one needs to convince me, when xfce is finally discontinued or unusable, I’ll have to find a similar Wayland alternative. Nothing compels me to switch yet.
I am not trying to suggest that the old way is better, we have needed to move on from x11 years ago.
This just sounds bothersome. A clipboard should really be machine-wide, that’s the purpose of it. Although I can understand the reticence there, what with password managers. I would argue that, to achieve that sort of security, there should be a separate, “secure” clipboard that only enrolled applications can access - and enrollment should be left up to the user, not the application developer.
For me it’s been such a night and day experience it’s hard to imagine needing to explain why Wayland has been better. But I’ll try.
The big thing that got me to switch was actual multi-monitor support. X has a bunch of hacks that “work” but it’s a mess and constantly broke for me. I’d just randomly log in and it was broken and I’d spend a day in xrand a x11 conf files re-building it from scratch for no apparent reason. Wayland multi-monitor has just worked for years now. It’s also real mutlidisplay support and really quite good.
Ive seen complaints about Nvidia but even with them dragging their heels I’ve had a better experience with their drivers on Wayland. Probably tied again to multi monitor bit it’s just been smoother and I notice if I accidentally log in to an X session even on a single monitor setup because things are clunky and features missing.
Anecdotally DEs feel like they start faster and work smoother. I saw fewer crashes after switching as well. The crashing might be better these days then but I don’t see a reason to test it.
For the sake transparency, it’s not perfect. Compatibility really has been great and I struggle to tell what’s not native. But I mean this is Linux desktop and there are challenges regardless of your choices.
I enjoyed guake terminal. It’s a bit troublesome to make work well.
The one other thing that’s been troublesome is some screen capture stuff. Honestly the screen sharing in Wayland lovely and so much better when it work.
But some programs do their own thing and want full desktop control and that’s a struggle. For example moonlight/sunshine require what seems to be some extra tinkering. Similarly screen collaboration apps that try to do the full control thing tend to not work well or at all.
Thanks for the response!
I don’t really understand what you mean here, sounds like you’re describing a vibe, but that’s valid.
I have a multi-monitor setup with xfce and while it’s nothing to write home about, it works. Of course, I don’t need HDR. I guess my use case isn’t very demanding that way.
I have a wayland/gnome tablet because touchscreen, and I don’t see an appreciable difference in startup time, bit I have no empirical data on this.
I’m laughing in Systemd.
You lost years ago. Time to come in from the cold.
5/5