Techrights

Technical Reasons, Not Politics: With Wayland "it feels a lot like Linux from 20-25 years ago, which is horrendously frustrating, because it feels like we wasted one or two decades of progress and stability"

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 09, 2025

From our latest batch of Gopher and Gemini links:

I fell into the Wayland rabbithole these last few days.

Progress has been made, but there are many, many rough edges. This isn't ready, yet. A lot of stuff works, but there are so many little things that don't. This isn't just about "compositors" but also about toolkits and tools. It feels a lot like Linux from 20-25 years ago, which is horrendously frustrating, because it feels like we wasted one or two decades of progress and stability.

Lately, quite a few benchmarks were published to show Wayland compares poorly compared to what we had (hence, Wayland is worse for the planet, more energy wasted, new hardware may be needed), set aide compatibility issues.

As Igor put it: "Wayland is simply the wrong solution. If somehow, magically, it fixes all its problems tomorrow, then great, fantastic, thumbs up, I'm all for it. Only it won't, and it can't. And thus, as a threat to legitimate end user needs and important desktop functionality, it shouldn't be promoted or adopted. Not until it at least reaches functional parity with X11 (which it can't). But even then, it ought to surpass it, otherwise, what's the point of the last fifteen years?" █