It is actually kind of wild that we're simultaneously in an era of people complaining that Wayland is destroying choice and also maybe the greatest number of high-quality desktop environments aimed at different use cases the free software world has ever had

I'm pretty fascinated about why this is happening and my gut feeling is that people have simply written better abstraction layers on top of Wayland than were possible on top of X and now people can just write shit without needing to care anywhere near as much about the sharp edges that exist everywhere

And yeah there's all sorts of cases where X exposes functionality that doesn't really exist in Wayland and I understand people wanting that but also I shared my desktop with some people today on a call and got a notification icon letting me know it was happening and I didn't have to rely on the client to behave correctly for that to be something I could rely on

@mjg59 i'm not sure possibility even factors into it to be honest, it's really just just that wlroots now exists and xroots didn't.

@mjg59 I have been a happy GNOME on Wayland enjoyer since 2020 now, and am increasingly struggling to understand the complainers (with the notable exception of those that rely on accessibility features that continue to be poorly supported). I saw a post recently titled something like "is it possible to get wayland working in 2026?" and I genuinely have no idea where this sort of thing comes from

@jsbarretto @mjg59 people have different computer needs! it's actually really trivial to find jank and problems. (this is not unique to wayland, everything has jank and problems, but when your starting point is "if i installed default gnome on the computer i'm typing with right now, a bunch of apps i rely on would be blurry", i think it's not actually hard to see why people wouldn't be big enjoyers)

@mjg59 On the one hand, people have wildly varying needs and wants, and I'm perfectly happy to assume Wayland is actually not a good fit for some people, even many people. That's true for X11 too, of course.

But the X11/Wayland discussions I see are mostly populated by people who dismiss one or the other without much explanation, or giving reasons that don't match my perception of reality at all.

As such, I've ended up ignoring the complainers a lot.

@dotstdy @mjg59 I don't want to deny that - I just never seem to hit the issues that seem to regularly evoke complaints. It's been a very long time since I've had something not just work as I expect on modern GNOME, and I hear the same is true of KDE and others nowadays. Compare that to 10 years ago when literally every update would break or even brick my XFCE + x11 desktop for incomprehensible reasons.

@jsbarretto @mjg59 Oh yeah, the Linux desktop is certainly not in a universally worse state today than it was yesterday. I've been using wayland for ages, on all my machines pretty much. But I have enough diversity of hardware to know many of the edge cases.

@dotstdy @mjg59 I'm sure a large part of this is the DE itself filling in for gaps in the underlying protocol, but I have COSMIC a spin recently, something I'd expect to be far too new to have plugged those holes, and everything continued to work nearly perfectly

@dotstdy @mjg59 Fair enough! I'm willing to believe that maybe I've just got lucky with my setups. I don't have a HDR or high pixel density screen, for example.

@jsbarretto @mjg59 yep, basically if you have a fancy modern laptop you have a much more fun time with scaling. if you have a relatively boring desktop the ootb behavior is generally pretty good (by linux standards anyway)

So: In the past the infrastructure was simpler, the underlying hardware was simpler, the number of use cases you had to satisfy was smaller. And now everything is fundamentally more complicated and you're competing with platforms that have millions of absolutely normal computer users using them. But we've also got greater avenues of sharing knowledge, collaboration, better understanding of how to build abstractions. Was the golden age 30 years ago, or is it now?

@mjg59 two words: fractional scaling

@rive You're not wrong and also it really feels like people are taking this as a moment to build their own stuff

@mjg59 I'm just grumpy because I never cared about any of the things Wayland fixes, but I do care that I've had a nice, usable, a credible working xmonad config for 11 years , and porting xmonad is, AIUI essentially impossible (if not literally, then by virtue of being an unapproachably massive task).
Old man hates change. Not much of a news story.

@tmcfarlane So keep running that there's literally infrastructure that exists to make that possible

@tmcfarlane And sorry that's kind of flippant but we're in this bizarre space where free software is supposed to meet the needs of users currently using proprietary software but also we're never supposed to change anything ever and there's really no way to manage all of this! But the beauty of free software is that if enough people care the old style can be maintained for as long as they keep caring which is something that just won't happen in the proprietary world

@mjg59 i honestly understand bugger all about the technical details but it does seem weird to me that a screensaver is apparently deep magic that cannot be comprehended by Wayland.

@sesquipedality Screen *locking* is actually pretty arcane magic and it's been very bound up in screen saving and as a result the complexity of both has become conflated

@jsbarretto @mjg59 anyway it's worth also keeping in mind that a lot of the complainers are doing the Anti-Woke show and dance, and then a lot of the Wayland adjacent folks posting are responding directly to that. Which unfortunately leads to a lot of people making a lot of words which don't necessarily match any kind of shared reality. plus the usual content creator contingent of outrage baiters.

@liw @mjg59 I would be happy to enjoy Wayland if it was an option for me. As there is no ability to provide prior consent, Wayland is dead on arrival and I have to rip it out of perfectly functioning freshly installed computers just to get a basic feature to work.

https://www.edu4rdshl.dev/posts/solving-the-remote-unattended-access-problem-on-wayland/

This is both a complaint and a fact. I have dozens of computers to manage for work. They are located in a building miles away from home, hidden behind televisions or twelve feet up a ladder. Remote access is required to be able to operate these screens, and Wayland simply refuses to allow it. Somebody would have to go and connect a mouse to the computer to click a stupid prompt to allow me to access the system EACH TIME.

I get the security concerns. I would enable the feature on most of my personal devices (but not all, because then how would I remote into my own desktop???). The issue is that Wayland fails to offer the user any choice in the matter. Business relies on remote access, and Wayland told them “Nah. Go elsewhere.”

@ClickyMcTicker @liw This isn't fundamental to Wayland - whatever is asking for consent could have a pre-provisioned policy.

@mjg59 jwz says he can't port xacreensaver to Wayland and I guess he'd know. It's just so Linux for a bunch of people to go around saying "but we don't need (locking) screensavers any more" which (a) misses the (lack of) point spectacularly and (b) is arguably wrong in the case of OLED screens. I have no skin in the game really and will probably use Wayland when it makes its way into Mint, but it seems like something every other windowing systern can do and the design should have allowed for.

@sesquipedality Devolving locking to the desktop environment makes it harder to plug in a screensaver in the process, but that's also true back in the X days in terms of Gnome taking over screen locking - it's not inherently a Wayland thing (but also Wayland doesn't make it practical to have a separate app take that role on)

@mjg59 it is pretty much the same silly story as with systemd making no rational sense at all.

@mjg59 @tmcfarlane I thought free software was supposed to meet the needs of the people who use free software

@aeva @tmcfarlane Which of the four freedoms covers that

@mjg59 @tmcfarlane which of the four freedoms says we have to chase after the whims of people who don't use free software anyway?

@aeva @tmcfarlane None of them say we shouldn't, so that's a freedom that exists within free software

@mjg59 unfortunately (as you'll know better than me), just keeping the existing stuff going is only part of the battle. We'd have to keep X11 support going in toolkits, keep key apps on supported toolkits (chrome dropping X11 is not an unimaginable situation), and that's before we get to worrying about hardware.
I suspect I'll be able to keep a desktop system going for as long as I need one, but if users dying off before the code dies is not guaranteed.

@tmcfarlane everything that works now will continue working. The future may not, and that's kind of the fundamental nature of the future - when the people who do stuff choose to do stuff differently we either get to take on responsibility for what they left behind or we follow them

@mjg59 Having only used Wayland in my own very esoteric corner, but having read a lot about how it works, I'm honestly shocked by this, because my impression of whether, let's say, VNC was capable of working would rely on which of 17 different and incompatible "extensions" your particular desktop environment happened to implement.

@mjg59 It took a long time for Wayland to get to this stage; 5(?) years ago people were already telling people to switch to it, when it was still missing stuff that lots of people needed and when there weren't many DEs that worked. That put an awful lot of people off; waiting until it actually works before telling people it's time to move would have helped.
What surprises me, was that for a fresh design, how the common functionality was missing at the point people were told it was ready.

@sesquipedality @mjg59 Hot take but I don't see how screensavers would help with OLED screens.

Burn-in is caused by having static elements on display for long periods of time, as well as excessive brightness. For example Pixel 6 I got in 2022 already started having signs of burn-in (keyboard) in 2024.

Meanwhile KOHAKU (Samsung Galaxy Chromebook) that's been my daily-driver while on the go for the past 4 years has no signs of burn-in despite using KDE. I expected to have Plasma's panel to be burned-in at this point but somehow that's not the case.

I can only assume that being modest with brightness (usually 10 - 20%, it's so bright you don't need more unless you're trying to use the machine in direct sunlight) and automatic theme switching (bright during the day, dark during the night) minimised the impact so far.

@mjg59 @ClickyMcTicker @liw Indeed, Wayland explicitly isn't concerned with this problem (this is up to the compositor to define). The portal system (which is independent of Wayland) is where this is usually delegated and there's no universal method to handle this, but some backends offer it.

For example, @kde has this feature: https://develop.kde.org/docs/administration/portal-permissions/

@mjg59 sometimes you can't beat the fear of the unknown and the idea that's "if nothing's broken don't fix it" even if it's 40 years-broke and there are more workarounds than real applications.
Also there was in the past some "adoptions" of new technologies which were not ready for prime time yet (due to them or to applications) and someone got burnt.

@palin @mjg59 I do think a lot of it boils down to "stop changing things, I just want to use what I know" -- which, you know, is not an entirely unreasonable position.

Few people tend to express it that way, though - and it tends to be coupled with "don't change things *except* the things I perceive as being better" where users want the new shiny features X, Y, and Z, but want them piled on top of a 40-year-old foundation that doesn't pass inspection. "What do you mean I have to fix my roof before I can get solar panels?"