Who said it will kill desktops? X11 desktops still work fine. And some specific tools like screen recorders are not workflows. Wayland had issues with some tools, those get solved and some people use it and are happy with it. Other people don't use it and are equally happy. Why try to invent some apocalypse when there's none?
this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2026
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X11 desktops work fine and will continue to work fine. But very few people will be using them in 5 years.
I don't know who cares. I will use X11 as long as it does everything I need it to do. I will switch when I have to do something that can only be done in Wayland. Doing anything else is just chasing fads or being stubborn.
Took a while, but Wayland is basically at a point now where it generally just works. I'm glad I don't really need to deal with weird tearing issues or the X server not starting for whatever esoteric reason after a driver update anymore.
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These just-so stories are easy to write, harder to write convincingly. I gladly use Wayland because I'm in a mixed-DPI setup, and didn't rely on anything that broke. But loads of people are still pissed off due to persistent incompatibility.
The way Wayland made everything the responsibility of non-existent compositors really fucked over anyone not using GNOME or KDE, basically.
It is a different ecosystem. It requires time to mature and yes, you have to migrate to it in order to use it.
Moving to Wayland was a bit like moving to a different operating system from an application point of view. The toolkits made that reasonably easy for most apps but they really do not help much if you are the window manager.
So yes, compositors had to be built. This was easy enough for the big projects like GNOME and KDE but a bigger ask for smaller players. But there are lots now: GNOME, Plasma, Hyprland, MangoWC, Niri, COSMIC, Budgie, LxQT, LabWC, Wayfire, Sway, DWL, River, Wayland Maker, etc. I am sure there are many more I don’t know or forgot. There will be lots more.
And yes, a Wayland compositor is a bit like the X server and window manager combined. So, they are harder to build. Except libraries have appeared to do that. There are wlroots, Smithay, aquamarine, Louvre, and SWC. There will be more. So, a Wayland compositor is not really that much harder anymore. And it will get easier.
The XFCE project is just starting a Wayland compositor project now. It will be built mostly by a single developer. They think they will have a dev release in a few months. They are using Smithay.
Building the Wayland ecosystem took time. But we are basically there. And it is only going to get bigger and better.
The transition would have been a lot less acrimonious if it had been attempted after wlroots was usable, or if people working on Wayland itself had made an effort to write something like wlroots.
This article reads like AI slop. Lots of repetitive vague exposition. No concrete examples. The concept is alright, but it lacks any technical meat.
I was getting that AI vibe a bit as well, but there are parts that also felt human enough that made me question my gut feeling. I'm not terribly familiar with the XDA site itself, but having looked it up just now, they seem to cover AI a lot in their articles in a positive light, so I'd say it's quite likely the writer used AI to write it, and then tweaked it a bit.
Knowing that, I'm considering deleting this post...
It got some good conversations going though.
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Damn that 30 year old protocol for sneaking up on people.
The title of this article is a refreshing take on the Wayland vs X thing. I’ve had Wayland on my lunar lake PC and battery life nearly doubles with Wayland installed. I can also have multiple monitor and resolution setups without issue at all.
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It's fine. There's still some quirks with Wayland I don't like. Either having to be in a game or have Discord focused in order for push to talk to work for example. Some mouse constraint issues with certain games that for whatever reason KDE has been able to figure out but every other wayland compositor hasn't.
Just in case it helps:
My Discord keybinds were having a struggle when I used 3rd party apps like armcord and vesktop. The actual Discord bin program is doing global keybinds correctly for my toggle mute microphone on my keyboard.
I use the Discord Nix pkg, not armcord or vesktop. I've always had this issue be it on arch, nixos, or fedora. I'm starting to lean towards "user error" as I just must not have something set up right. but yeah I've never used armcord, vencord, or vesktop.
Sorry I have never looked into the specifics, but I read some way for flatpaks to listen for specific keybinds even in the background, it's mostly a permissions thing IIRC.
Sorry I'm assuming bazzite Fedora as well.
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I've discovered this once on my own, I had a complex control remapper and that I had been evolving into a horrific bash hydra of hacks over many years. I briefly tried to get it working when I switched to Wayland. I don't remember which component broke me, but it went something like this:
"Hey, I wonder why doesn't this thing work in Wayland. I wonder if I can whip up a pale imitation."
10 minutes of stack overflow searches later...
"Oh... oh no."
"I tried to keylog myself and the system doesn't support keylogging." is a frustrating situation. Because it's neat from a security perspective and absolutely maddening from basically every other one.
Not sure that's a good thing.
It's my own system and I'm root of it, if I want to run a program that inspects every bit of thing, including keylog myself I should be perfectly able to do it.
This kind of limitations are fake security, because Wayland is as secure as the rest of the stack it lies on top, it can't add any more security than what Linux itself can guarantee. So yes, I can still read dev input and keylog myself anyway, it's just more frustrating.
I have been using OSX since it was born because it was an amazing UNIX system and a convenient user environment. I moved back to Linux as my daily driven when they started introducing a tons of blockers to whatever I wanted to do "for security reasons". "Oh you want to debug your own software?" "Nah, I can't allow you to trace state of another process, I don't care you are root" and so on...
Which desktop are you using and what are you trying to do?
KDE Plasma. I want context sensitive mouse button macros depending on the active window and, if its librewolf, the site in the active tab. I am currently using libratbag/ratbagctl for the remapping, but I'm changing ratbagctl profiles manually.
People use windows because it has decades of backwards compatibility sort of.
That should be:
People ~~use~~ used windows because it ~~has~~ had decades of backwards compatibility sort of.
Nowadays: it has current compatibility sort of.
Microsoft is a mess now, so it's no surprise that their current Windows version is also a mess.
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