wait, we will lose xEyes?
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2025
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No, thanks to XWayland.
but it doesn’t work perfectly, xeyes through XWayland only follows your cursor if it’s hovering another XWayland window
which makes it a fun way to see which apps use XWayland tho!
KDE has you covered. Someone made an applet that works on Wayland too: https://github.com/luisbocanegra/plasma-cursor-eyes
Hope they're gonna devote the development resources to making it actually work.
While it actually works, there are truly some missing features obviously. The hope is, when lot of major distributions and desktop environments stop supporting X11, then application developers and Wayland developers have to find a solution quicker. This will accelerate development of Wayland, at least the remaining issues.
One area where Wayland needs to improve is support for various accessibility features.
That does feel rther like jumping out of a plane and hoping you can finish making your paracute before it's too late.
The concept of moving on from X11 is a good one, but making Wayland just a protocol that every compositor has to implement separately, and having so many optional larts to the spec seems like a guarantee that the ecosystem around it will never properly mature.
The KiCad developers have a good article about some of the issues with Wayland here.
Oh wow. I am suddenly less excited about our Wayland future.
Damn yeah. Just the window managment issues are a complete no go for any productive work.
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This is big "if we break your old toys, you'll HAVE to play with the new ones" energy.
Tell me when they port FVWM. Seriously. FvwmButtons-- a pretty trivial dock except it can swallow other windows-- seems like it would be out-of-bounds on Wayland unless it was owned by the compositor itself to access the other windows. I don't see any of the new taskbar-tools used with Wayland compositors offering similar functionality (I could be wrong) and that seems an amazing loss of feature parity.
In what way does it not work?
Remote desktop support is buggy on gnome and nearly non-existant on other DE's, which speaks to how poor a job wayland does at managing functions between DE's, where each individual DE has to build their own solution for basic functions, further fragmenting development efforts.
Then there's accessibility functions, which wayland breaks almost by design by denying apps access to each other. Even something as simple as an on screen keyboard becomes nearly impossible to implement.
Any software thats being pushed to users as the "main" experience, should not break things as common and fundemental as remote desktop or onscreen keyboards. Great way to drive away potential users switching from windows 10.
I've been using remote desktop for work daily on wayland (kde) for the last 3 or 4 years... I have no idea what "buggy support" you are refering to
Then there’s accessibility functions, which wayland breaks almost by design by denying apps access to each other. Even something as simple as an on screen keyboard becomes nearly impossible to implement.
That's a side effect of just dumping everything into X11, once you switch from it you lose all the random kitchen sink warts it grew over the years.
Like an on-screen keyboard shouldn't be fiddling with a display protocol to fake keyboard inputs, it should be using the actual OS input layer to emulate them (So then it'd work with devices that read input directly and not go via X11). Same with accessibility, there's a reason other OSs use separate communication channels with their own protocol.
"i don't care about that. Hhit was working and now it's not" - the users
As someone who's a week into trying to switch from Windows to Linux, I don't even know what X11 or Wayland are. My biggest hurdle has been how the Linux community always just assumes everyone knows every little thing. This article is a perfect example. It would have taken a sentence or two to add "X11 does this, but is being phased out".
I spent at least an hour today trying to connect to a shared network printer! As a geek, I love Linux but it's still not ready for the masses. And that's referring to Mint.
I agree with your first part, but I dont think I've ever used a windows, osx or linux computer that hasnt had issues connecting to printers, the problem there isnt with the computer.
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Honestly, that's not something you should have to know about. Many Linux folks just care about the inner workings of everything so they can make it work how they want.
Of course, when things break it helps knowing what the reason is and how to fix it. But usually your distribution should handle everything so that nothing breaks.
X11 is the display server. Your desktop environment, like gnome, has a window manager managing your opened applications and tells the display server "please render this stuff on the actual screen".
X11 is ancient and sucks, because for example, it can't do fractional scaling well, which is important for screens that have a higher resolution, since everything appears tiny otherwise.
The display server also offers some functionalities that the desktop environment can make use of, like global hotkeys, or screen sharing.
I'm not an expert or anything, but I think it's about right like this.
Many thanks for the explaination!
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Sessions don't resume properly after sleep. Tools like Barrier don't fully work. Wayland is fine, but it's just not mature.
Ctrl+Shift+V in KeePassXC should autotype username and password in another window, but I believe is still broken out of the box on Wayland.
There may be some workaround that I haven't tried yet.
Is that a problem of Wayland or a problem of KeePassXC?
I'd be highly surprised if Wayland actually has a protocol for applications to just type across other applications, we barely even have global shortcuts (it's getting there but reaaaaaally slowly).
KPXC might be able to get around it by using whichever method ydotool does (by faking a device AFAIK) - probably needs root to do this though, and it would also need to implement the global shortcuts API to be able to respond to a key bind I believe.
So perhaps a bit of column A and column B.
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Here we are YEARS later and OpenBoard is STILL broken.
No, I don't want a fully contained, separate whiteboard application - As a teacher, I need to be able to DIRECTLY DRAW ON THE DESKTOP. Until this is a fully supported feature that software can implement, Wayland is completely broken for me.
Drawing directly on the desktop is a native feature of KDE Plasma. :)
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Between that and the uutils-coreutils, Ubuntu 25.10 sounds like it'll be an interesting experience for users, especially those with accessibility and internationalisation needs.
I fully agree with you on the accessibility front. It's not even good on X11, but it's unusable on Wayland, from what I understand :( Accessibility on Linux needs a massive funding and development initiative, and it needed to be done a long time ago.
But uutils is pretty solid. I've swapped out my GNU coreutils entirely (on Arch, not Ubuntu, because I value my time too much to be troubleshooting broken snaps) and haven't run into any issues. I think people are underestimating how close the compatibility already is. I'm sure something I use at some point will try to invoke an option that doesn't exist in the uutils version, but it's been solid for me so far.
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Well, they do recommend using LTS releases and the specifically change stuff more drastically on the release before the next LTS release.
Yeah, I think the fact that the next LTS will be 26.04 is the driver here, I just get the impression that things might get a little rocky and that they might've been better off had the next LTS been further into the future.
But it'll be a real smoke test release, at least. Hopefully they have enough resources to fix the issues that are uncovered, and don't wind up reverting for the LTS, or with a crummy LTS.
How is wayland nvidia gaming at the moment?
Several months ago I tried gaming on wayland with nvidia and it was completely broken for me.
EDIT: Two days on wayland nvidia now, both gaming and using NVENC in OBS. It's been amazing.
I've got an nvidia card and I've personally got no complaints about Wayland! been using it for some time to much success, I feel like x11 is just 'off' in comparison.
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Do you people ever think that Wayland is being sorta shoved down our throats ?
PipeWire wasn't
Waylands initial release was 2008... I don't think so at all...
Pipewire was released in like 2017 but the transition was a lot smoother than Wayland so that's probably way it feels like that.
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wayland is a major overhaul that massively improves things dev-side, security-side and hardware-support side, pipewire is not nearly as important of a change, and pulse wasn't nearly as horrible as x11
No it doesn't, at least not yet, it's half-complete & it's being pushed on us a little too aggressively inspite of the fact that again it's not fully mature & calling X11 horrible is a bit too dramatic on your part.
I can't put it in words but it seems a bit odd.
Half complete is a nonsense claim, all that's missing is better accessibility and some xdotool stuff. I'd go so far as to say that it's x11 that's half complete.
x11 is horrible... no way to support mixed refreshrate/dpi displays because it's fundamentally against the design, as well as no model whatsoever for security... yeah, wayland needs accessibility sure but at least it isn't fundamentally broken.
any app being able to keylog and screenread is my standard of a horrible model.
if you don't need accessibility stuff or an extremely small subset of xdotool functionality (see kdotool) it's better and safer in every way.
I’ve been waiting for Wayland to take over since like 2011 or some ancient time like that. I’m just glad it’s finally got some traction tbh.
Maybe we should wait until Wayland is more mature (Like having proper accesibility) ?
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