2y ago

The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

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In response to Wayland Breaks Your Bad Software

I say that the technical merits are irrelevant because I don't believe that they're a major factor any more in most people moving or not moving to Wayland.

With only a slight amount of generalization, none of these people will be moved by Wayland's technical merits. The energetic people who could be persuaded by technical merits to go through switching desktop environments or in some cases replacing hardware (or accepting limited features) have mostly moved to Wayland already. The people who remain on X are there either because they don't want to rebuild their desktop environment, they don't want to do without features and performance they currently have, or their Linux distribution doesn't think their desktop should switch to Wayland yet.

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The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

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The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

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The technical merits of Wayland are mostly irrelevant

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191 comments

I switched to Wayland over two years ago and these days I don't look back at all. I don't care if Wayland has full feature parity with X11 as long the features I actually use are supported which they are.
Clipboard sharing in VirtualBox doesn't work right now (though I'm relatively sure it could be implemented by VirtualBox right now with Wayland as it is) and neither does AutoTyping in KeePassXC (not sure if there's a mechanism for that on Wayland), though Autofill in the Browser works so it's no big deal to me.
In return I get 1:1 touch gestures, better multi monitor support and an overall smoother desktop on Plasma Wayland so I'll take it.
People often still make complaints about Wayland that have been fixed months or years ago and it's a bit tiring.
- Better multi monitor support and a smoother desktop? Very interesting…
  
  Yeah? Things like having a 60hz monitor and a 120hz monitor is basically non existent on X11, plus Wayland has this "perfect frame every time" + vsync philosophy which means no tearing and it feels much smoother to use than X11
- On the topic of auto-typing, the mechanisms for variations of it exist in Wayland since I am using it in my password scripts to automatically fill login boxes. (Using tools like ydotool or wtype.)
  So I would guess that KeePass hasn't integrated the necessary protocols/api for Wayland?

The ability to have multiple displays at different scales is a godsend when trying to use a laptop with a 4k display connected to 1080p monitors or vice versa
- This already works on X and indeed has worked longer than Wayland has existed.
  
  I can never get this to work properly... Do you have any resources?
  
  I tried unsuccessfully to get this working for quite some time and broke my xrandr settings quite a few times
  With Wayland/gnome I just click a button in the settings gui and it works flawlessly
  
  Sure but the thing is stuff that I have to edit files for install other programs just work with wayland out of the box.
- Never had a prob with this using MX Linux and Xfce AFAIK?

X11 is, to put it simply, not at all fit for any modern system. Full stop. Everything to make it work on modern systems are just hacks. Don’t even try to get away with “well, it just works for me” or “but Wayland no worky”.
I really don't know if there could be a more obnoxious opening than this. I guess Wayland fanatics have taken a page from the Rust playbook of trying to shame people into using it when technical merits aren't enough ("But your code is UNSAFE!")
- No, no, they've got a point. The architecture of Wayland is much more sane. Because of the way refresh events are driven its also much more power and memory efficient. I'll miss bspwm and picom but man there is a lot riding on simplifying the graphics stack under Linux. The X hacks, GLX, and all the other weird interactions X decided to take away from applications made things non-portable to begin with and a nightmare for any embedded devices that thought GLES was good enough.
- There are several remarks in that article that bothered me. I agree with their message overall and am a strong proponent of Wayland but...
  Unless your workflow (and hardware) comes from 20+ years ago, you have almost no reason to stick with Xorg
  There definitely are valid use cases that aren't 20 years old that will keep you on X11 for a little while longer. And hardware too: NVIDIA dropped driver support for Kepler GPUs and older before they added GBM support which is effectively a requirement for Wayland, so you can't use these older cards on Wayland with the proprietary drivers
  Of course, NVIDIA likes to do their own thing, as always. Just use Nouveau if you want to do anything with Xwayland, and you don’t have several GPUs.
  Uh, no. Nouveau is not a serious option for anyone who likes using their GPU for useful things. And on those older cards it will likely never work well.
  The author of that article seems extremely ignorant of other people's needs.
  
  NVIDIA dropped driver support for Kepler GPUs and older before they added GBM support which is effectively a requirement for Wayland, so you can’t use these older cards on Wayland with the proprietary drivers
  That's definitively the fault of people to buy NVidia hardware which only works fine on Windows. It's not the fault of Wayland developers that NVidia is a shit company that does not care to make their hardware properly run on Linux.
  
  The author is a Wayland fanboy which almost by definition makes them a moron. We are talking about folks who were singing the same song like 7 years ago when the crack they were promoting was outrageously broken for most use cases.
- I find that usually when people write "Full stop", it's best to just stop reading there in most cases.
  It comes off as "I am correct, how dare you think that for a moment I could be wrong".
  I'd love to use Wayland, but until it works properly on Nvidia hardware like X11 is, then it's not a viable option for me. Of course, then someone always goes "Well then use an AMD card" but money doesn't grow on trees. The only reason I'm not still using a 970 is because a friend of mine was nice and gave me his 2080 that he was no longer using, along with some other really nice upgrades to my hardware.
  Honestly it's one of the biggest issues I have with the Linux community. I love Linux and FOSS software but the people who go around and yell at anyone who isn't using Linux, and the people who write articles like this who try to shame you for your choices (something that is supposed to be a landmark of using open source software) only make Linux look bad.
  There's a difference between someone kindly telling others that X11 is not likely to receive any new major features and bug fixes (which is the right thing to do, in order to inform someone something they may not know) - and then there's whatever the author of this quote is doing.
  
  It happens all the time in the magical world of closed source, too.
  Ever heard about the iOS vs Android fights? How people shame Android users for being green bubbles?
  It's just the extension of the my camp vs theirs applied to the tech field, nothing new.
  
  It sounds like you need to be complaining to nvidia to do a better job with their drivers. If the drivers suck, it doesn't matter what wayland does.
- Ok but then how about the developers of X11 who decided it wasn't worth fixing the issues and to start a new project called Wayland where they could start from scratch to fix the issues. Does that change your mind at all?
  
  That would be a "technical merit", which the article author claims is irrelevant to the discussion.
  
  I have not had a single X11-related issue in the last decade.
- This is literally the exact bad attitude of your average Wayland proponent. The thing which has worked for 20 years doesn't work you just hallucinated it along with all the show stopper bugs you encountered when you tried to switch to Wayland.
  
  It's really not "working" per se. VRR was breaking on X11, sandboxing was breaking on X11, fractional scaling and mixed DPI were breaking on X11.
  How did we achieve HiDPI on X11? By changing Xft.dpi (breaking old things) or adding random environment variables (terrible UX - do you want to worsen Linux desktop's reputation even more?). Changing XRandR? May your battery life be long lasting.
  There's genuinely no good way to mix different DPIs on the same X server, even with only one screen! On Windows and Mac, the old LoDPI applications are scaled up automatically by the compositor, but this just doesn't exist on X11.
  I focus on DPI because this is a huge weakness of X11 and there is a foreseeable trend of people using HiDPI monitors more and more, there are tons of other weaknesses, but people tend to sweep them under the rug as being exotic. And please don't call HiDPI setups exotic. For all the jokes we see on the eternal 768p screens that laptop manufacturers like to use, the mainstream laptops are moving onto 1080p. On a 13" screen, shit looks tiny if you don't scale it up by 150%.
  You can hate on Wayland, you may work on an alternative called Delaware for all I care, but let's admit that X11 doesn't really work anymore and is not the future of Linux desktop.

Replacing good legacy will always be a struggle. X11 works pretty well and has been stable for decades. Most of the things that suck about it already have workarounds.
The advantages of Wayland are not directly visible for the end user. The security part will be great once it's completely integrated on the distributions to give granular permissions to software. The simpler apis and greater performance will help libraries creators, but most developers don't touch X directly and won't touch Wayland either.
Being stable for a couple of months is not good enough. People will use it once distros trust it enough to make it default, and this will probably only happen once Wayland or its compatibility tools work with most software and major applications work significantly better on it.

Every time I try Wayland, something doesn't work. The time before last, subpixel DPI scaling was badly broken. This last time, there's some glitch where the screen jumps right a couple pixels (and back) every dozen seconds. I don't have any interest in spending my time trying to fix Wayland issues when X just works.
- Amen.
  When something crashes on Wayland, my entire system goes down. When something crashes on X, I can at least kill it with a GUI. I refuse to use Wayland as long as it has the potential to freeze my entire machine.
  (This is on KDE Plasma.)
  
  I just don't think KDE will be worth it on plasma until KDE 6 / Qt 6. Basic components like SDDM supporting Wayland still have to be solved before KDR provides a first class experience. Try messing around with environments like sway, Hyprland, and Gnome the stability difference is night and day compared to KDE.

I switched to wayland because of screen tearing and it fixed it. Idk if x is still glitchy on my new laptop but i dont really care. Also hyprland is really cool so im happy with wayland.

I've been using it for a few years now, and it fixes a lot of little issues I have with X11, and at this point brings very few of its own. ALTHOUGH, I don't have any Nvidia GPUs, and people seem to think it works for crap on them. I keep hearing "Ah, this will finally fix it!", but I don't know what the actual status is. You have the hardware you have, so unless you are going to buy something different to try Wayland... eh... I guess it never hurts to try. It's pretty trivial to toggle on and off.
- I have a laptop with hybrid Intel+NVIDIA graphics, and I can say that offloading games and such to the dGPU while letting the iGPU handle everything else works with zero issues for me on Wayland.
  On desktops where the NVIDIA GPU handles everything I don't have that much experience on Wayland although when I did try it earlier this year it was surprisingly good, but with occasional dumb bugs like Plasma panels freezing or XWayland apps breaking in funny ways. Although honestly just a few years back running Plasma X11 on NVIDIA wasn't much better than Wayland now.
  
  Interesting. My laptop died a little while ago, and I needed to demo a game I'm working on at a local convention. My wife had a hybrid GPU machine and let me swap in my SSD to run it. The drive had PopOS on it without the NV drivers. It did seem to run wayland fine on the internal display, but the external display was picky. (I wanted to demo on a bigger display) The only way to get the game to run smoothly was to disable the internal display using X11, and run the game using GL instead of Vulkan. >_<
  So yeah, kinda mostly worked if I wanted it to be a laptop. I can see how it gets to be a pain if your needs are specific though.

When both NVIDIA and KDE work well with Wayland, most of the anti-Wayland energy will go away. The advocates will calm down too bar cause they will have won.
- I don't think the sentiment is 'anti-wayland'. Most people just don't care. I'm using Awesome WM and it doesn't support Wayland. As OP says, why would I rewrite all my plugins and config just to the sake of switching to Wayland? I would have to invest a lot of time and what will I gain? Absolutely nothing. On my work computer I have different distro and I'm using Cinnamon. I think it uses Wayland but I didn't even bother to check. It works exactly the same as Gnome on X11. Why would I care?
  
  The Cinnamon team didn't even consider Wayland yet.

Wayland on AMD is amazing
- Counterpoint, I have all AMD machines (CPU and GPU) and each time I've tried Wayland I've immediately run into bugs that make it unusable. Maybe it's because both my setups have multiple monitors with different resolutions, but I don't see why that use case is so hard to support. And I'm running the latest versions of Wayland and KDE so it's not an issue of me running outdated versions that already have bug fixes supplied upstream. If Wayland can't handle just basic desktop use with multiple resolutions why would I go through the effort to use it? Fix the basics first.
  
  My experience has been the opposite. I won't use x after using Wayland on AMD for years it just feels so much smoother. On arch with gnome Wayland has been fantastic.

People on Unix environments that don't have Wayland support.
That's a big one. All the *BSD folk will keep on using X at least until it gets proper support over there (which might never happen) and even then it will still be boycotted by some BSD users for other reasons.
People using mainstream desktop environments that already support Wayland ... [but their distro hasn't made the switch]
I agree about that. Many people don't care and will just use whatever their distro tells them to use. As you said, there's usually good reason for it.
People using desktop environments or custom X setups that don't (currently) support Wayland.
This is another one, and is actually one I kinda fall under. I use a tiling window manager. The tiling Wayland compositors are often times not as polished, and a big annoyance for me personally is the fact that most of them (River, Hyprland, DWL) don't come with a bar. Of my X Window Managers, AwesomeWM, DWM and Qtile already have their own bars. BSPWM is basically supposed to be used with Polybar, the same way XMonad and xmobar are basically made for each other. On Wayland, Somebar is made for DWL, but waybar and yambar work really well with it. Sway has swaybar, but waybar works perfectly with it. Both Waybar and yambar work great with River. And there's Waybar, and gBar, and other bars for Hyprland. And that's without mentioning EWW, which can be used to make a bar.
Another issue I have is that my touchpad doesn't get detected if I'm holding down a key. So if I'm playing Minecraft and I'm trying to turn around and run away from a zombie using my touchpad because my mouse's battery ran out, I have to do these actions one by one and hope I survive, or just let myself die. That's just an example, but I have noticed it in other games as well. No such issues on X. And I've also had Powerwash Simulator, ran through wine, just crash on me in some (Qtile or Hyprland), but not other compositors. In DWL, I couldn't turn all the way around and forbsome reason my movement was restricted to 270°, and in River I had 0 issues.
When you have a monopoly
You're saying this as if X didn't have a monopoly over Unix graphics.
- Another issue I have is that my touchpad doesn’t get detected if I’m holding down a key
  That's a libinput feature, meant to prevent you from accidentally using the touchpad when you're typing. You can disable it if you want.
  
  How? Would that be in the compositor input rules or somewhere else?
- If I run Satisfactory via Vulkan on X, it causes my entire desktop to flicker until I close the game, on all screens. Annoying, but at least I can make it go away.
  If I run Satisfactory via Vulkan on Wayland, it crashes Wayland and my entire computer freezes until I hard reboot it by pressing the power button. That is absolutely unacceptable.
  (Satisfactory on DX12 works fine for both, but the point is Wayland is still much more likely to fail catastrophically.)
  
  NVIDIA?

What has kept me away from Wayland is the tendency to be dependent on the compositor for so much.
I use my preferred X11 window manager for largely aesthetic reasons, but by and large, I can swap it out and the rest of the software doesn't give a damn. At most, you might have to tweak a RC file to fix missing custom assumptions (i. e. disabling decorations on full-screenified Proton games)
It seems like on Wayland, there's a lot more of a "if you aren't using GNOME or KDE, the odds something meaningful breaks are much higher." Aside from the perceived bulk of these environments, they're highly opinionated-- I suspect it would be a major production number to hammer them into a shape that looked like FVWM or WindowMaker, even if you only wanted to match a single theme's aesthetics (as opposed to, say, FVWM's dynamic configurability).
- If you find a Wayland compositor that's based on wl-roots, you basically get that ability for swapping out the window manager.
  The wl-roots project aims to be a common library that any project can pull in without having to implement the required Wayland protocols themselves.
  
  But even that's a relatively high bar. Wl-roots is self-described as "60000 lines of code you don't have to write yourself", and any arbitrary compositor may not use it or may not be up-to-date with it. In X11, you don't need 60,000 lines of code to be functional. Hell, the example Window Manager that was printed as a couple of chapters in the old X11R5 reference books works well enough especially considering its size.
  I feel like I missed the historic genesis of this particular quagmire. Knowing that a composer was essential, you'd expect developers would want to make very robust core functionality-- a super-rich libweston or something like wl-roots, so that "real" compositors would just be paper-thin extensions that answered the opinionated parts. Did early Wayland design get bogged down on embedded-style use cases where such features were seen as too expensive (compare: no built-in printf in C), or was it a deliberate territory grab by early compositor developers, trying to turn it into a place they could to gain competitive advantage?

Wayland's major "technical merits", as far as I can tell, are a lack of screen tearing, slightly faster rendering under some circumstances and better handling of touchscreens. That's it. If you don't have a touchscreen and aren't a gamer (few non-gamers care all that much about tearing or about framerates above 60Hz), Wayland has no real advantages to the user that I'm aware of.
X is network-transparent, more widely compatible, and arguably more extensible. Most users don't care about those things either.
Wayland has an advantage in attracting developers because it has less accumulated technical debt and general code cruft. That doesn't make it better for users, though. Most Wayland evangelists I run into seem to be devs who are more interested in the design of the graphics stack than whether it makes a difference in the real world.
So, as with so many things, "merit" is in the eye of the beholder. People should use what works for them.
- Also better isolation of applications and better support for multiple screens.
  
  I'll give you the multiple screens (not a use case I have myself, so I don't pay attention to support quality). Isolation of applications is another thing that most users don't really care that much about, I would say.
  
  And don't forget 1:1 gestures and the Crash-Resilient Wayland Compositing that keep the application alive even tho the "compositor" crash, so it does restart without any data loss.
  Edit: forgot to mention the lockscreen protocol, because on xorg if the lockscreen crash then you view the desktop and you have the device unlocked!

I literally don’t care. I don’t have any issues with X11 on PopOS and I will switch when System76 decides it’s time.

The utilities that replace the utilities you're used to on X11 work great, so do the utilities that already work on X11.
That's um... not the best motivation.

Only reason I'm not using it is Nvidia. Missing night light in particular.
- Only reason I’m not using it is Nvidia.
  Don't buy Nvidia GPUs. NVidia's broken Linux support is a well-known fact since at least a decade.
  
  For gaming AMD is as good as NVIDIA or even better. For anything else tho it's a dumpster fire. Amf still isn't on par with nvenc, rocm is pure garbage and they are basically useless for any compute task
- it should not. the 1st one should be that it is not opensource and 100% the cause of a X blackscreen on upgrades.
  AMD plays the game (no pun intended), so let's go with it. If you need nvidia for CUDA for ML, standard are on the way to allow to use any GPU.
  
  I already do ml on amd, and it works great. There's usually a few extra steps that need doing as binaries aren't always available, but that, too, will improve with time.

I want to use Wayland, but it currently doesn't work with my Ubuntu 23.04/Nvidia/Steam. It was working under old steam big picture mode but the new big picture mode broke it.
Hope they fix it because I do believe Wayland is the future.
- It may be related to Nvidia. Most bugs I met in Wayland is related to it. Such as no dmabuf export support, and vulkan init will fail because a bug in nvidia prime implementation...
  \ As Linus said, so Nvidia, fuck you...

I’m not leaving xmonad. It’s such a bummer that Waymonad didn’t really take off.
- And I'm over here crying over Way-Cooler that was supposed to give us AwesomeWM on Wayland.

I won't mind moving to Wayland but really , X11/xorg just works to me with all the feat. (hidpi, multi-monitor etc...) I don't need fractional scaling, my 27" monitor is UHD but with right ppi set, everything looks good BUT I understand the interest.
And I do understand the need to move away from X because of Elon... just kidding. Yes, we need to move to a better architecture but it must 1:1 in term of feat/stability, at least.

I have software dating back to 2003 that I need to support. X11 isn't going anywhere.
- Xwayland has already been mentioned but this is an important point that not everybody may be familiar with. Xwayland is an Xserver ( actually a specialized version of Xorg itself ) that runs on top of Wayland instead of talking directly to hardware.
  If you are running Xwayland, you can run X clients ( x11 software dating back to 2003 for example ) and they will appear on your desktop.
  There can obviously be specific considerations around advanced software but moving to Wayland does not mean losing access to software written to target X. Qt and GTK support Wayland and will run native. Applications using other toolkits may still be running over X. As a normal user, you may not even know which applications are still using X and which are not.
  This is for regular applications. Moving to Wayland requires a Desktop Environment or Window Manager that supports Wayland. So, GNOME and KDE users are fine but Cinnamon or WindowMaker users would need to switch.
  
  Neat. There's hope in the world yet :-)
- it's likely to be working thru Xwayland.

I still don't know why people are willing to give up remoting so willingly. With X it was always easy to send your accelerated video securely over the network. Didn't Wayland drop this? How are people remoting securely into Wayland desktops now?
- You mean something like waypipe? https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/
  
  This seems good. Is there a preferred solution for headless Wayland desktops?
- I mean, I think most people use xwayland to keep this functionality.
  Agreed completely though, we need a better replacement for remoting, it's too useful.
- Do a significant amount of people using wayland even want or need to remote exactly like in X?
- There is a variety of remote desktop applications that support Wayland, Brodie talked about them in his video regarding Wayland's lack of network transparency. Wayland does not need network transparency to be able to support remote desktop.

Yea, I'm currently using Wayland because Manjaro comes with it but like 90% of the programs I use launch with xwayland anyway. I'm not a developer but can't they just give it proper support for all programs? Like run those programs like they do on X11. Seems pointless if nothing works on it.
Not to mention my laptop with Nvidia graphics, that is just so broken on Wayland I ended up switching it to X11 and I'm very lazy.
- Most programs you use (provided they are FOSS) probably already support Wayland, they just don't do it by default. The following list of environment variables can go a long way in making your system largely Wayland-native.
  undefined
  
  GDK_BACKEND=wayland QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 #SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland # this one is dangerous if you play games
  
  My desktop is basically just used for gaming so like nothing there is FOSS. My laptop is used for work which requires a ton of remoting so again Wayland would not work.
- manjaro switched to Wayland??!
  i installed it a couple of years ago... should i search on how to switch it to Wayland?
  
  I would not bother, Wayland doesn't have many advantages, at least not from my point of view. I would honestly switch my install to X11 if I wasn't lazy.

I don't see the problem, I also don't see how this is a novel situation.
The technical merits of system level protocols only really affect the user insofar as they make it easier for userspace application writers to make their software. This is why we have the distinction, so that users never have to change the underlying software, and when they choose to it's because everything just works.

I couldn't get OBS working. X11 works for it, so I keep using it. Hopefully eventually, I won't need to, but I don't have the time to spend hours researching and troubleshooting. I tried, failed, but x11 Just Works TM. I'm part of the problem, I guess.
- FYI you need pipewire, xdg-desktop-portal and xdg-desktop-portal-$COMPOSITOR for OBS to work on Wayland. No configuration needed other than installing the packages and relogging in.
  
  I've saved your comment and will give it another try when I get chance. Thanks.

There a synergy/barrier replacement working on Wayland yet?
No?
Then I guess Wayland isn't ready yet.
- Waynergy works for me.
  https://github.com/r-c-f/waynergy
  
  I haven't tried it yet because it appears to be a client, and my Linux machine is the synergy server in my setup (work windows laptop is the client).
  
  rerequisites
  undefined
  
  wayland, including wayland-scanner and the base protocols libxkbcommon libtls (either from libressl, or libretls) A compositor making use of wlroots, or (on an experimental basis) KDE, or (if all else fails) the willingness to run questionable networking utilities with the privileges to access /dev/uinput wl-clipboard for clipboard support (only works on wlroots, not KDE/GNOME)
  ...
  In my case, a 'uinput' group is created, and a udev rule is used to modify the permissions appropriately:
  /etc/udev/rules.d/49-input.rules, in my case
  KERNEL=="uinput",GROUP:="uinput",MODE:="0660"
  From here, one could assign one's users to this group, but doing so would open up uinput to every program, with all the potential issues noted in the first paragraph. The safest approach is probably setgid:
  as root -- adjust path as needed
  chown :uinput waynergy chmod g+s waynergy
  If this doesn't still doesn't seem to work (as in #38) be sure that the uinput module is loaded properly. This might be done by creating a file /etc/modules-load.d/uinput.conf with the contents of uinput
  This is compared to just installing synergy which takes 7 seconds. I'm not sure why anyone imagines this is a credible alternative.
- https://github.com/htrefil/rkvm
  
  Client machine is a Windows box, and I can't change that, unfortunately.

clickbait title

I keep trying it but for me its not ready yet. Finally, in 2023 I can actually boot into it, but I get random freezes for up to a few minutes at a time. So it's closer, but not stable yet. Hoping that Plasma 6 will be good to go.

The big reason why I'm still on Xorg and will be for a while is XFCE. I've tried everything from KDE Neon to Sway but they are either missing features I want or were too buggy to bother. Should try Budgie again when 11 comes out though, that seems to be close to XFCE in terms of scope and is supposed to work well with Wayland by then.

The only reason I use Wayland is because I have two monitor with different refresh rate. In X, the monitor with the highest refresh is capped to the lowest one and I never figured out how to fix it. In Wayland it just work. Hoverwise I will still be on X.

I won't switch to Wayland until the compositor is separated so that when GNOME Shell crashes (as it does a few times a month), I can restart it without losing all my running apps.

I've been trying Wayland for quite some time, but Wayland is a chore to work with and most applications still needs to use the xwayland compatibility solution anyway. After a long time of using it I decided to just switch to X11 and save myself the stress. However after seeing this and reading some comments I decided to try it out yesterday (maybe stuff has changed?) and then turned off my PC and went to bed, then today kwin_wayland started crashing for no reason. For a supposedly superior display server, it sure has a lot of issues and low adoption.
Maybe the Wayland developers should consider it a failed project and work on X11 instead?
- most applications still needs to use the xwayland compatibility solution
  Not true.
  then today kwin_wayland started crashing for no reason.
  The reason is that Wayland support in Plasma will only be finalized by 6.0, therefore you're using an experimental feature.
  low adoption.
  Again factually wrong. Gnome changed defaults years ago. Hardy anyone noticed.
  Maybe the Wayland developers should consider it a failed project and work on X11 instead?
  Wayland developers are X11 developers. Wayland if the official successor to X11 because its developers agreed that X11 is too broken to be worth it.
  
  The reason is that Wayland support in Plasma will only be finalized by 6.0, therefore you’re using an experimental feature.
  Okay so I need to use X11 because you think the Wayland support for KDE Plasma isn't finalized? Well consider the fact that on Linux no support is ever "finalized". Even something that should be mature like pipewire still causes issues from time to time. Or even bash itself. Most likely Wayland will still not work consistently past Plasma 6.0. I don't put much faith into your claim.
  I think that you're factually wrong about me being wrong about Wayland support. Most applications I use still run xwayland. Steam for example cannot be run in Wayland, Discord and some other applications only works through Electron which I admittedly don't know a lot about but doing so seems like running it through yet another compatibility layer. Therefore I wouldn't consider an application run through Electron as Wayland compatible either.
  Your post paints the picture that Wayland is "just a thing for Gnome", but I'm not going to change to Gnome to run Wayland. Of course nothing ill meant toward Gnome users but I think Gnome is ugly as sin and hard to work with. Maybe my negative perception of Wayland would change if it had better support for KDE. Or if KDE had better Wayland support as this could also be an issue with the kWin rather than Wayland. I have to admit, I've never liked kWin either. I mean as much as I love Plasma, I think the compositor coupled with it is generally dogshit and unstable and it's a travesty KDE pushes kWin so hard down my our throats.
  Wayland developers are X11 developers. Wayland if the official successor to X11 because its developers agreed that X11 is too broken to be worth it.
  Of course I know that, but if Wayland has such low support and low adoption and "just a thing for gnome" then maybe Wayland isn't so successful after all is what I'm saying. Kind of a bad result to work on a display server that only really works well on Gnome and leaving KDE out in the dark.
- In my experience, Wayland has been the one that "just works." No disabling compositing, higher than 60 refresh rate on my monitors, screen share portals, and a few other things that annoyed me about x11. From what I hear, x11 is ancient and wasn't designed to be used as it is today. Waiting on a couple features but never had any stability issues, hopefully more app devs realize it's existence and switch from x11 like all it's devs did.
  
  I'm on nvidia, have 2 screens mixed resolutions and mixed framerates with kde plasma at the moment. I use jetbrains a lot which only really works through xwayland. I've tried every nvidia friendly DE there is and nothing ended up working consistently. I had been on wayland for more than a year on my previous Intel gpu machine but I had to go back now to x11 for stability and haven't really had any issues ever since. Think whatever you wish but nvidia still has a large market share so until wayland works solidly with nvidia then lot of people will have issues with it. I imagine it works great on amd same as it does on Intel. (yes I know it's debatably nvidia's fault for this mess)
- Run Gnome never had an issue with Wayland for awhile. Wayland is the successor to X11 being worked on by the same people, would it make you feel better if it was called X12?
  
  I run KDE Plasma and very rarely have issues with wayland either. Maybe I am imagining it but it feels smoother than X11. I love that in wayland I can use adaptive sync with multiple monitors connected. X11 can't do that. My main issue with it is that anything involving screenshare doesn't work properly. So steamplay (as host, client is fine), slack screenshare (again, as the sharer) don't work. I don't understand all the people having issues, maybe it's a hardware/driver thing? On my AMD GPU it is practically flawless.
  
  No it would make me feel better if Wayland ran properly.

No one needed Wayland, what everyone needed was X12.
- Wayland is X12. The people who worked on Wayland were X11 developers too.
- Wayland basically is X12. X11 was extremely different from X10 to my knowlesge, they just wemt for a shiny new name and a new technical model. X12 was gonna break things too.
- X12 on ext5

I've not even heard of what the technical merits are. It seems to just break shit like systemd.
Eventually I'll be dragged across by the distro, but until then I do not care.
- Same. I'm sure its great, but I'm not motivated to spend my time and energy on it. I remember when PulseAudio first came out, it had growing pains too. I jumped on board early because it solved problems I needed to solve. I was a younger nerd back then, and I don't have the patience for the cutting edge anymore.
  I hear it does indeed work with Nvidia now, so I guess I'll give it another shot next time I distro-hop.
  
  As someone who constantly checks in on the Nvidia + Wayland combination every time there is a Nvidia driver update, it "works" but only by the loosest definition unfortunately.
  
  just check out a compatible desktop environment/window manager. you don't need to do a full distro change.
  if the base is the same (ie. debian, arch, etc) there is no point in changing distros anyways.

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/etc/udev/rules.d/49-input.rules, in my case

as root -- adjust path as needed