It has been almost 20 years and Wayland JUST merged pointer warp support (literally like last week)--which is absolutely fundamental to both CAD and menu systems.
So, no, Wayland does not support some very important use cases.
If you've had 20 years and can't be better than what you claim you are replacing, what does that say about you as a programmer or organization?
In this case, there are some genuine arguments that what the Wayland developers are doing is, at the least, kind of anti-social and quite possibly harmful to the Linux ecosystem.
This was kicked off because KiCad (and other applications that use X11) wound up with a whole bunch of bug reports because Wayland developers broke mutter which broke XWayland which broke a whole bunch of apps. This wasn't a subtle bug; it made it very clear that RedHat doesn't even do basic application testing inside of XWayland.
So, a whole bunch of applications had to field a whole bunch of bug reports that weren't their fault simply because a "Linux" company with lots of money and resources can't be arsed to not cause collateral damage.
Consequently, people are starting to ask some really hard questions as to whether the overall Linux community would be better off without Wayland.
> i have yet to come across an X11 application that does not run despite using wayland.
That is both the good thing and the bad thing. Application software can seamlessly work on Wayland via XWayland. Anything that needs to touch things outside its own window - notably, a11y and automation tools (which in fairness are functionally the same thing) don't have it so easy.
Is it possible to run an X11 window manager in XWayland and have it manage Wayland windows and intercept keystrokes for all windows?
If not then it’s not really an upgrade path.
I do get it — no-one owes me anything. They don’t even, really, owe me the kindness of not breaking the software I use. In principle I could fork and maintain everything I want myself, or working with others. But …
that's not fair. window managers are not regular apps. wayland has a different architecture that changes how windows are managed. this also has to affect things like taking screenhots, screen sharing, recording, locking, screensavers, etc.
intercepting/sending keystrokes in particular had to be redesigned to make to make it more secure. without that there would not have been a point to wayland at all.
your actual apps that just display stuff on the screen and take your input all still work though.
> intercepting/sending keystrokes in particular had to be redesigned to make to make it more secure. without that there would not have been a point to wayland at all.
Sure, and I really would like to enjoy that security improvement. But would an evolutionary approach have been possible?
For example, would it have been possible to start by running Wayland with all programs in a privileged status, then migrate to using something like OpenBSD’s pledge(2) to spawn programs preferentially in an unprivileged status, then migrate to spawning some programs (e.g. legacy X11 display managers) in a privileged status?
It sure seems like Wayland requires a lot more work from software using it than X11 did. Wayland has been out for 16 years and still isn’t almost universal; 16 years after X11’s 1984 release it was well-nigh universal.
Again, I get that no-one owes me anything. But it seems to me that the Wayland developers committed the fundamental error of trying to replace a working system with vapourware. It’s still vapourware, in that in 2025 Wayland is still not a drop-in replacement for X11.
> your actual apps that just display stuff on the screen and take your input all still work though.
My display manager is an actual app that is a fundamental part of my workflow.
> It’s still vapourware, in that in 2025 Wayland is still not a drop-in replacement for X11.
If it was vapourware, nobody would find it useful. I have been using it for 4 years, it works. I wouldn't call that vapourware.
Question: how do you feel about systemd? Feels similar to me. Nobody forces me to use systemd (and I don't), but the evolution is such that more and more software assumes systemd and it hurts the minority who is not using it.
In order not to use systemd, I can choose a distro that supports something else. Aren't there distros out there that still support X11? Surely that must exist...
