Wayland killed my parents.
Wayland brought the xenomorph to earth!
Wayland ate my homework.
I have the deepest sympathy for people with disabilities and I can’t begin to imagine what life’s like for folks who ain’t got what I take for granted.
having said that, the reality is there is no lusciously funded corporation or collective doing development with paid focus groups and well paid Q&A teams working hard and dilligent with extensive (and expensive) testing so that all "i"s are dotted, "t"s are crossed, etc. etc. the meager funds, if there are any, are better spent on infra and dev efforts.
therefore, changes have to be forced on users in order to test and fix em in vivo and advance the platform and it’s def a “build a plane while flying it” type of deal. there’s immense pushback for every new tech forced on users - systemd, pipewire, wayland, etc. - ignoring the reality of the landscape. yes, full feature parity is absent, but it will never be achieved without this premise.
a way around it is to not be on a bleeding-edge distro, like Fedora and friends; what the author dreads (“waylands is coming!”) I’m running since Fedora 35 (we’re on 42 atm).
nobody is forcing you off bookworm and xfce and whatever, and you can rock that for the next decade if you choose so, without any significant issues.
therefore, changes have to be forced on users in order to test and fix em in vivo and advance the platform and it’s def a “build a plane while flying it” type of deal. there’s immense pushback for every new tech forced on users - systemd, pipewire, wayland, etc. - ignoring the reality of the landscape.
Bullshit. You can simply look at the reality around you and know about some of the important things to expect, without (or at least, before) needing to treat your (production) userbase as actually a bit below than interns / unpaid workforce. There was no way the devs would not have known eg.: clipboard would have been an issue as this would have been become apparent as soon as anyone went “but what if I want to use my password manager with this?”.
I can’t work without talon. I had no idea it would have so many issues on Wayland.
However, wouldn’t talon still work normally under xwayland?
It should still work with other applications that are also running under XWayland.
Things such as querying what windows are available, their titles, what window is focused, emulating keyboard input, querying for the mouse position.
It might run, but these features wouldn’t work, by design.
That would mean essentially everything. You can’t switch focus, can’t type text, can’t use mousegrid…
Talon is not open source so I have no idea how they’ll work around it either…
Just getting my password manager being able to type text into other windows was a bit of a pain in Wayland in CachyOS. That’s a common thing everyone should be using these days.
bUw waYlAnD iS tHe FuTurE!
(tbf, then bring it in in the future, when it’s ready)
like any opensource project, it largely depends on how much widely adopted it is. OP’s case is actually a good example, as as they brought attention towards the problems with this certain software, it’s now more likely that someone will get to fixing the issue.
Also, there still are lots of well-maintained x11 wms and this fact doesn’t seem to be changing any time soon.
I didnt read the article yet, but people choosing to not support it till it’s perfect is what got us here.
People treating Wayland as a “finished beta” (more like a finished alpha, really) and forcing it unto release / production distros is what got us “here”.
Start by supporting it in devel / testing / closed beta / whatever. Then get to production.
There were years of announcing the sunsetting of X, and many large projects and companies simply refused to work on it. Nvidia is a good example. Eventually, after pushing off the sunsetting multiple times, it had to happen.
, and many large projects and companies simply refused to work on it.
Which made sense at the time! Wayland was (and still is) barely vaporware, a “mission and vision” doc essentially saying “here’s what we want Linux desktop to be like, now all of you you go and build it for us”.
I get what you’re saying but am going to push back on calling it vaporware. It’s definitely real.
At this point Wayland is basically “winning” because of sunk cost. Just because X11 is the wrong answer doesn’t make Wayland the right one.
We could stop and say “here’s what we learned was problematic from both X11 and Wayland and how people actually use computers in 2025, how would we solve these problems knowing that?” But then we’d have to start again from square 1, and nobody with the clout to make it happen is pushing for that.
the infuriating thing is I’m on wayland because I have to be on wayland but given the option I would use x11 simply because the choices for WM’s are better and overall I prefer x11 even though I know it’s “dying”.
The problem is on my specific main laptop which I use for work and everything it’s a dual amd/nvidia GPUs. Nvidia being the main GPU and AMD being secondary. x11 does NOT like this at all. So some programs will completely crash out if left unfocused for more than 2minutes. i.e. i’m testing something and need to move away from that workspace and if I go back the thing is graphically unresponsive. on Wayland it’s not an issue. Gaming on x11? forget about it, it’s a no go.
Now there are things on Wayland that just infuriate me. For example Discord. If i’m on a call with someone on discord I HAVE to keep that discord workspace active otherwise I can’t use the keybinds to push to talk or anything. on x11? not an issue. So i’m constantly having to switch my WM’s from a wayland one to an x11 one for the dumbest reasons.
Well, in this case there was literally one standard, X11, in use since the late 80s. Now we have two, and the new one makes my mouse disappear when it hovers over any sort of map in firefox.
The problems with Wayland are not inherent to Wayland. They are a lack of features that could be added to Wayland without any particular technical difficulty. The problem is that the major players behind Wayland do want many of those features to exist. A second issue is that the standardization process for new Wayland features is slow at best.
None of these issues are helped by replacing Wayland.
