I will preface that Xorg is obviously an unmaintainable mess of legacy decisions and legacy code, and I have both a machine that runs Hyprland and a machine that usually starts Plasma in Wayland mode so the Wayland situation getting to be more-or-less adequate with persistent irritations here and there… but Wayland is trauma-driven-development. It’s former xorg developers minimizing their level of responsibility for actual platform code, but controlling the protocol spec, and in the position to give up on X in time with their preferred successor.
Essentially all of the platform is being outsourced to other libraries and toolkits, who are all doing their own incompatible things (Which is why we have like 8 xdg-desktop-portal back-ends with different sets of deficiencies, because portals were probably designed at the wrong level of abstraction), and all have to figure out how to work around the limitations in the protocols. Or they can spend years bikeshedding about extensions over theoretical security concerns in features that every other remotely modern platform supports.
Some of that outsourcing has been extremely successful, like Pipewire.
Some attempts have been less successful, like the ongoing lack of a reasonable way to handle input plumbing in a Wayland environment (think auto-type and network kvm functionality) because they seem to have imagined their libinput prototype spun out of Weston would serve as complete generic input plumbing, and it’s barely adequate for common hardware devices - hopefully it’s not too late to get something adequate widely standardized upon, but I’m increasingly afraid we missed the window of opportunity.
Some things that had to be standardized to actually work - like session management - have been intentionally abdicated, and now KDE and Gnome have each become married to their own mutually-incompatible half solution, so we’re probably boned on that ever working properly until the next “start over to escape our old bad decisions” cycle… which, if history holds, isn’t that far away.
We’re 15 years in to Wayland, and only in the last few years has it made it from “barely a tech demo” through “Linux in the early 2000s” broken, and in the last year to “problems with specific features” broken … and it is only 4 years younger than the xf86->xorg fork.
Your issue is you’re assuming all things must be standardized in a monolithic fashion.
The whole point of Wayland is that monoliths are bad in an environment as diverse as the Linux desktop.
Either libinput will be improved or it will be replaced as needed.
I’d argue portals are deficient because Wayland implementations in general are not complete. An org like KDE or GNOME has a fair bit of man power but they’re still in a position where they need to keep X11 functional and they need to carry forward decades of features. Even if Wayland was flawless from the onset that’s a huge undertaking.
Wayland is one part of what needs to be a collection of specifications, but the point is to have a specification instead of an implementation. You can actually have implementations that make different trade-offs and optimize different use cases that way.
That doesn’t prelude something like mir or wlroots acting as a base layer for desktops that don’t want to build up from the specification … but it does allow KDE to write a compositor that does exactly what KDE needs/wants … instead of the X11 mess where you can “turn the compositor off” which results in effectively two classes of desktop, one of which is used for gaming, the other for general desktop use … or any of its various other issues.
So we’re calling just doing one thing “trauma-driven-development” now? Yeah, Wayland doesn’t do everything Xorg does. That’s a good thing. Xorg is a dying, dysfunctional mess because it does a thousand different totally unrelated things and nobody understands all of them and how they’re all tied together. We’re probably going to run into the same problem again eventually with systemd. Feature creep is toxic for open source software.
Wayland has problems, but not being X12 isn’t one of them.
For me, yes: Wayland doesn’t work at all and the only answer I can get is that it’s because of Nvidia. That’s stupid because until some update broke it, it worked. Most apps were just very buggy.
@Fleppensteijn @leopold its a Nvidia issue.
For years Nvidia tried pushing an alternative Linux driver called EGL, everyone told them it couldn’t support Wayland
Eventually Nvidia tried to implement EGL backends to Gnome and KDE (this resulted in the buggy apps). Nvidia then declared their new cards would support GBM.
This leaves the 10xx-30xx cards stuck on EGL with no one supporting the EGL backends. Nvidia have made it so GBM support can’t be added by outsiders to those cards either.
@Fleppensteijn @leopold @stevecrox
For troubleshooting, I recommend
For trouble shooting recommend https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland/Nvidia, checking whether all kwin backends are installed (kwin-wayland-backend-* on Ubuntu). Sometimes there’s also a problem with the missing OpenGL backends of Qt. An easy check to see whether there is a problem with the proprietary driver is to try out whether the problem also exists using nouveau.
Fantastic read
I switched a few months ago to see how bad it is. Never found anything not work so I’m still using it.
lokalize (Translation tool) is, only application for me, not working with Wayland at all (There is bug reported about it). I am using KDE with Wayland on my daily laptop.
as long as software I use daily doesn’t work on it as transparently as it did to me as an end user on xorg then yes, to me as the enduser, Wayland does break things and no, Wayland is not ready
I am an enduser. I don’t care about the specifics, I expect things to work and not suddenly break.
For all the “year of the linux desktop” shouting, nobody wants to truly really think about or consider non-dev daily driver endusers who just want things to continue to work like they always have
