What’s always funny to me when someome brings up missing features of Wayland is how, apparently, the missing features of X11 are getting pushed under the table or somehow also blamed on Wayland in some twisted way. Like, holy shit, compare the display settings of KDE on a modern display between Wayland and X11. My laptop didn’t even show a third of all options anymore.
Sure, it will be nice once Wayland can do a few things (better), the current development push surely helps. But it’s not like X11 can do everything either.
I can’t copy/paste from a terminal program to a GUI program under wayland without jumping through hoops and configuring every individual program to use some variant of a DE-specific utility that bypass wayland’s model to peek/poke into the clipboard.
That’s not a minor feature to me. And in my (and probably some other people) case, trading basic copy/paste for not-yet-implemented differential DPI scaling does not sound too great.
Some people are adamant to not switch, but I swear some people are so adamant to force everyone else to switch without even considering that their use case might not match other people use case, it’s infuriating. It’s not like me staying on X will degrade everyone else’s experience of the new shiniest thing.
Distribution moving to wayland might be good in the very long term, but for now, when you have a 3080Ti (a relatively recent card) and it breaks basic desktop composition when switching to wayland, telling people “just throw it out and buy another card instead of keeping your currently working system” is not going to help anyone.
Thats not entirely true.
wl-copyexists and I use it, but it’s not fully there yet. Things like slackadays/clipboard are still fucking around with weird Wayland issues.I’d like better clipboard support, but
alias c=wl-copyis good enough most of the time for me. And it works in neovim as well.Yeah, I know of such “solution”. But what is the point of forcing the change when it doesn’t bring me tangible benefits, brings significant downsides, and only some of these downsides have half-useful workarounds?
I have no problem with whether wayland existing or it becoming the new standard, but forcing people to move in these circumstances seems a bit silly, especially when some issues stem from people having hardware from one manufacturer that represents around 75% of general consumer systems (according to Steam survey, which might or might not be representative but sure brings a lot of people).
Thankfully, at least with the distributions I use, switching back and forth is trivial. But given the circumstances, I don’t really understand the extremely heavy push.
I don’t think anyone’s forcing anyone to do anything. But not a lot of people are stepping to to maintain X
While it’s certainly winded down over time, XOrg is still maintained. Last fix was released in september 2025. Is it enough? It never is. But that’s not really an argument to move from “working” to “not working as well” for now.
I thought most of the maintenance went towards Xwayland, though I don’t follow it that closely
It mostly did, yes. But when a big issue pops up, X still gets the occasional patch.
And, since this is a bit of a hot topic it seems, that sounds fair to me. X is the past, wayland is the future. I’m just annoyed at people glossing over the reasons not everyone can move on.
What are you talking about? You can copy-paste from Terminal programs to GUI programs and vice-versa like everywhere else (with the terminal of course needing CTRL + SHIFT + C / V, which as we know is historical to Unix terminals). I’m doing that for years, so does my family. It works just fine.
And bringing up Nvidia now really is bending down backwards to paint Wayland as bad while it’s painfully obvious it’s the driver’s fault. We all know the classic Nvidia driver sucks in more ways than one and loves to break, even Nvidia knows that and works on a replacement. That’s not Wayland’s fault.
What are you talking about? You can copy-paste from Terminal programs to GUI programs and vice-versa like everywhere else (with the terminal of course needing CTRL + SHIFT + C / V, which as we know is historical to Unix terminals). I’m doing that for years, so does my family. It works just fine.
I’m not talking about copy/pasting from the terminal emulator, thank you very much. Just run VIM and have it copy/paste from the global clipboard without setting up esoteric, sometimes DE-dependent stuff, and you’ll understand.
And bringing up Nvidia now really is bending down backwards to paint Wayland as bad while it’s painfully obvious it’s the driver’s fault.
Sure. I did not say it was wayland fault. Or anyone else, really. I explained why some people could not “just move on to wayland already you nincompoop” with very tangible issues that still prevent them from doing so. Who is at fault is of no consequence here. If I switch to wayland, I lose features, I have a broken desktop, and throwing away thousands of equipment because “it’s the future” does not sound that great. It’s just a matter of fact. Whether it’s wayland’s fault, plasma’s implementation’s fault, nvidia’s fault, or anyone else’s is irrelevant to the user experience here.
People can’t go “stop using X and use wayland”, and ignore raised issues by saying “no, that issue you’re having is not a big issue”, “that issue you’re having is not wayland’s fault”, “that issue you’re having does not concern most people”, etc. And reading replies in this thread, it seems people have a hard time imagining circumstances beyond their own.
I’ve used this neovim keybind for years:
vim.keymap.set({'n', 'x'}, 'gy', '"+y') -- copy vim.keymap.set({'n', 'x'}, 'gp', '"+p') -- pasteI was able to copy/paste between nvim and other applications on sway, Hyprland, Niri and KDE on Wayland.
The global clipboard register + should also work in modern regular vim afaik.
Yeah. “Feature parity or get out”, like dude we’re long past feature parity.
Wayland supports so much more stuff than X11 does, and what does X11 have that Wayland doesn’t? X forwarding? Just use a modern remote desktop solution, all X forwarding was doing in “modern” times (read: the 21st century) was streaming pixels anyway, just less efficiently than modern remote desktop.
Multi window apps are still broken, and the wayland protocol guys have been dragging it for more than two years
Honestly which app do you use that makes use of multi window rendering?
The main one is KiCAD (electronics design).
They have a good article on the challenges they’re facing on Wayland, worth a read https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support/
Hold on, so I can’t run Transmission that has the torrent list in one window and torrent details in another window? Only one single window per app? What insanity is this.
Every app I know opens a window for the preferences, how is this solved in Wayland? Even just the typical Explorer-style file manager requires multiple windows to function.
Oh multi-window works, it is mostly just that applications cannot geometrically position them themselves. There are other small issues, but thay is the main one I hear. It is a non-issue for things like settings and Transmission, since you just open another window and do not really care exactly where it os relative to the other ones. It often ends up being on top. For multi-window Gimp it is worse, as it is toolbars and modules, and the app wants to place them precisely relative to one another. This is currently not working in Wayland, but they create new extensions all the time so it is only a matter of time IMO.
Thanks for the explanation. As it happens, one of my irks about the Windows version of Transmission is that it doesn’t remember the position of the torrent-properties window. I want the list on the left, the details on the right — particularly since Transmission reuses the details window, essentially treating it as a pane. This worked splendidly on MacOS.
I don’t, but some people like multi window GIMP, and apparetnly several applications in the automotive (kiCAD for example) and scientific field
People who like multi window gimp must be a very special kind of nerd. I used it before single window mode was added, but when it was I never looked back. Positioning each subwindow in a way that didn’t suck was such an absolute pain
It’s not a pain if you use a tiling WM, and doesn’t KDE remember and restore window positions yet?
alias hc=herbstclient # GIMP # ensure there is a gimp tag hc add gimp hc load gimp ' (split horizontal:0.850000:0 (split horizontal:0.200000:1 (clients vertical:0) (clients grid:0)) (clients vertical:0)) ' # load predefined layout # center all other gimp windows on gimp tag hc rule class=Gimp tag=gimp index=01 pseudotile=on hc rule class=Gimp windowrole~'gimp-(image-window|toolbox|dock)' \ pseudotile=off hc rule class=Gimp windowrole=gimp-toolbox focus=off index=00 hc rule class=Gimp windowrole=gimp-dock focus=off index=1it’s not a pain
Here’s the dozen lines of config I had to write and tweak and debug to make it tolerable
Uh huh. You do you.
But that pain was once. And then you shoved that config into your dotfile svn and never did it again. Mine has followed me since like 2010.
(This is not me taking part in the wl/X11 argument. I am just one of those multi-window gimp nerds)
I still use X forwarding.
It works just fine using xWayland, and X forwarding has always been so janky there is no chance to notice any difference caused from using xWayland instead of native.It will surely take many years and well established wayland native remote tunneling before anyone thinks of ditching xWayland.
Waypipe has worked very well for me.
I switched to Wayland. I think I have almost everything working except keepassxc’s global hotkey and autotype. Also certain apps like ardour, I have to manually break components off from the main window and move to different monitor to get the “multi monitor” functions going. This I know they have been trying for 2 years now, anyday now.
Yeah. “Feature parity or get out”, like dude we’re long past feature parity.
Ok, replace the xfce/KDE wm with something like i3 and then keybind all of the commands that aren’t wm specific through a global hotkey daemon like sxhkd.
If you’re waiting on Wayland to reimplement the thing that made X11 a monolithic unmaintainable mess, you’ll be stuck on your rotting platform from the 80s for a while.
Having modular DEs is what:
made X11 a monolithic unmaintainable mess
?
https://lxqt-project.org/blog/2025/09/22/2-way-of-wayland/
https://lxqt-project.org/release/2025/11/05/release-lxqt-2-3-0/
I could never get it to work.
This is your freedom, enjoy it.
You’re absolutely free to maintain X11 when no one else does
Correcto X11 just works for me, never had any issues, there is literally zero benefit for me swapping over.
Every time I am booted into a Wayland session, something doesn’t feel, look or work right which causes me pain and suffering through my OCD which i don’t have.
I’m planning on trying hyprland soon though because it can look very pretty so if I swap over to that then yes I’ll be a wayland pleb, but in that case there’s a real reason to me swapping… not just for zero benefit.
My kid (13) surprised me the other day and said he wanted to try Linux. He has seen me forever using it and got scared about W10 getting hacked or something so thought of trying it out.
I handed over to him my Fedora 43 (KDE plasma) install USB drive and once installed the problems began.
The monitor couldn’t be set to native resolution, and Steam didn’t want to run. Turns out that there is no wayland compatibility with the Radeon Polaris RX480. What a bummer, that card is perfectly fine for what he does on his PC.
We tried with the cinnamon version and that is working fine. He even has roblox running.
Tl;Dr: Wayland isn’t compatible with older hardware that most casual windows users are mostly going to be using.
If he wants to try plasma just install the x11 version on fedora:
sudo dnf install plasma-workspace-x11
Yup. Its not the default anymore (and for good reason), but it is still supported for now. This is a pretty straightforward solution to the problem.
Im on boring mint, and Wayland sucks on it. Literally disables my ctrl and shift keys, and volume keys, and backgrounds are only black. Unusable. And I have all amd, 13 year old cpu. Oh and it screws up video playback
Mint is pretty late to the Wayland party with Cinnamon. It’s probably one of the worst distros to try to use Wayland on.
x11 when you try to use 2 monitors that don’t have the exact same atomic composition:
I think it took me 2 years to get six monitors on two GPUs working consistently under X11. Yes, I’m that fucking stubborn.
Wayland worked right from the start.
Weird. I have to switch all my machines to x11 in order to get multiple monitors working. Wayland just renders back screens on everything but main. Also makes remote desktop access buggy as fuck if it works at all.
Yeah, my multimonitor experience is better under x11, especially gaming (also Lutris has more features for x11 too in that regard). I only use it on that machine tho.
I lol’ed
Wayland is the one thing that fixed a whole shit-ton of my problems overnight and now I find out nobody wants to use it under any circumstances.
¯\(ツ)/¯ Alrighty thenPlenty use it without knowing as it is what the Steam Deck uses in gaming mode.
I’m fine with X. Which problems did you have?
It’s been some time, but the biggest pain point for me on X11 was 4k@144hz. Short of some xrandr tweaks I couldn’t manage to set, Wayland immediately worked perfectly.
I suspect I ran in to x11’s limit in that case.
The people who use it happily don’t make memes about it. I do have some weird errors every now and then, it’s definitely not as stable for me as X11. However X11 wasn’t very smooth with my multi monitor setup, and Wayland improved the smoothness of my PC enormously, so the random issues every now and then are worth it
Almost everyone uses it. We just never make posts about “our configuration works effortlessly, give us attention”
Only people with a bone to chew and shit to stir feel the need to post such things. Back in the day it was people who felt superior for debugging their steaming pile of init shell spaghetti, now it’s people who just can’t live without diving into X11 configuration files.
rstudio and octave is holding me back T_T
they should just work under wayland without supporting it. what’s the problem with them?
ngl i only made this comment hoping someone would provide a solution lmao
majority of the features does work but when it comes to plotting in octave, nothing shows up. last time i checked it was something to do with qt(something).
for rstudio i dont remember what problems i had but booting into x11 solved these issues.
I see. maybe they are trying to be wayland compatible but failing at it? I have written some relevant advice here: https://sh.itjust.works/comment/21809713
I kinda like being able to watch a video on one screen and not having to make sure that there are no animations going on anywhere else or the video framerate drops like it’s 1996.
Weirdly this happens on my work laptop (x11) but not any other Linux machine I’ve used including all the Wayland ones. I assume it’s due to video drivers.
Might be worth looking into and reporting as a bug. I use wayland and very commonly watch a high quality video on one monitor and whole games on my other just fine.
My blocker is the Window Shade button on Plasma.
It worked fine in Wayland under Plasma 5, but somewhere early in the 6 transition support was removed.
For anyone not aware it minimizes the window to its own titlebar. I find it faster and more intuitive than minimizing to a dock, and it’s easier to keep track of things when you can actually read the whole titlebar.
oh you’re right, it’s gone now. i didn’t even notice
tbh i only remember it working for non-Plasma apps, weirdly enough. stuff like Dolphin or Konsole wouldn’t work with it, but non-Plasma apps (that got decorated with the Plasma titlebar) would support it. maybe that’s why they removed it?
Yeah that was the case right before it got removed, but in P5 and for the first couple point releases of P6 KDE apps were working with it
Scroll-wheel rolls up windows for me on XFCE (labwc). I can understand it that might not be what you’re looking for, though.
I think you can even make it a button in the title bar, like the minimize button. Or you should be able to bind a keyboard shortcut to it too.
I think in on Wayland now.
But honestly I don’t know, I’m just doing updates as they come and it just works.
I just don’t want to switch out my window manager and all the helper programs that make it work as a full desktop. Currently I just use LXQt+i3wm, and LXQt will take quite a while until it’s anywhere near feature parity with Wayland, and AFAIK i3wm doesn’t even have plans for a Wayland port (though I know that there’s decently similar tiling WMs for Wayland). I don’t think any of the oldschool low-resource-intensity desktop environments I’d consider using have a decently feature-complete Wayland port right now.
It’s possible that it’s not actually that much work to cobble together a new configuration with a Wayland-compatible tiling WM and a bunch of separate applications for screenshots, clipboard management etc., but I currently don’t care to find out.
Sway is build to he a drop in replacement for i3
I’ll switch when it fucking saves session data. It’s still not ready for mainstream.
It does have session restore (after crash)
I’ve gotta be honest, the desktop environment situation on Linux does not impress me.
I’m on Cosmic which is decent, but there are all sorts of silly oversights in KDE and gnome, and windows have weird mixes of styles and toolbar display modes.
Is great that Linux is modular, but seriously gtk vs QT vs whatever else needs a heavy duty cleanup.
I agree, however Windows and macOS are even worse in this regard IMO. Everything is just totally inconsistent and the window management features are very barebones. Using either one feels like going back 10 years or more.
The CSD trend might have some upsides but i find it mainly just makes apps ugly and any added functionality is almost always redundant.
Kvantum really helps make Plasma more consistent, not sure if there is a similar addon for GNOME
macOS are even worse in this regard IMO. Everything is just totally inconsistent
Why do you mention macOS if you haven’t used it?
Up to macOS 26 (the latest OS with Liquid Glass) consistency was great. You’d have to go back to the PowerPC era or X11 integration to find issues. Now I have windows with different toolbar button sizes and corner radii and it’s stupid as hell.
I agree on window management tools, but I used third party ones on Mac for a decade and they worked okay. Obviously not as good as i3 type ones.
Apps should only use cad if they are really using the space like browsers with their tab bar. That gnome forces every app to provide them is really stupid.
Gotta love that thing on Windows when you mouse up to hard top right and click to close the window. In some situations it’ll focus and close a random window behind the one you’re wanting to kill.
When I updated KDE and found that I had lost the cube desktop switcher effect I was fairly put off on Wayland and made a lot of effort to get the cube back in various ways which did not go well. Now that it’s on Wayland, albeit slightly different, I am content with staying on Wayland. I can’t thank the people who ported it enough. It may seem like a trivial graphic effect to some but that fraction of a second that it uses when switching desktops is something that helps my ADHD tremendously. If I’m getting frustrated with a project I can switch to something else and something about that visualization helps me keep everything organized mentally. I use 4 virtual desktops, each with it’s own project subject matter, one for each side of the cube, excluding the top and bottom.
This meme imagary is from the movie Seven Psychopaths. It’s a very good movie.
I’m pretty sure you can get that effect in the desktop effects menu in kde settings
Yes now you can. But not initially. The old cube effect was removed and later re-implement
Do the other effects for switching desktops, like the default slide, not accomplish the same thing? I also find that having no animation makes it harder to keep track of where things are, but just have the sliding one
