Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

A rather big problem is that Wayland is just a protocol, not an implementation. There are many competing implementations, like Gnome, KDE and wlroots. The problems you have with one of them might not appear in another. The reference compositor, Weston, is not really usable as a daily driver. So while with Xorg you have a solid base, and desktops are implemented on top of that, with Wayland the each desktop is reinventing the wheel, and each of them has to deal with all the quirks of the graphics drivers. I think this is a big problem with the architecture of Wayland. There really should be a standard library that all desktops use. Wlroots aims to be one, but I don't see Gnome and KDE moving to it anytime soon.

I still don't know why I would want to use it. The benefits don't seem to outweigh the costs yet, and xorg is tried and true. So many Linux articles and forum posts about fixing problems with your desktop graphics start with "If you're using Wayland, go back to xorg, it'll probably fix the problem you're seeing."

You don't always have to replace something that works with something that doesn't but is "modern."

My guess is that we'll only start seeing Wayland adoption when distributions start forcing it or making it a strong default, like what happened with systemd.

>nVidia refused to support the API that Wayland was using, insisting that their EGLStreams approach was superior

This is a common mischaracterizarion of what happened. This API, GBM, was a proprietary API that was a part of Mesa. Nvidia couldn't add GBM to their own driver as it is a Mesa concept. So instead Nvidia tried to make a vendor neutral solution that any graphics drivers could use which is where you see EGLStreams come into the picture. Such an EGL API was also useful for other nonwayland embedded usecases. In regards to Nvidia's proprietary driver's GBM support, Nvidia themselves had to add support to the Mesa project to support dynamically loading new backends that weren't precompiled into Mesa. Then they were able to make their own backend.

For some reason when this comes up people always phrase it in terms of Nvidia not supporting something instead of the freedesktop people not offering a way for the Nvidia driver to work, which is a prerequisite of Nvidia following such guidance.

I've been using wayland with Gnome for years without a single issue.

Arguably my hardware is a lot simpler and I don't use Nvidia. But I just want to point out that, for all the flak wayland receives, it can work quite well.

I just recently switched to Linux since I had some weird Windows issues I couldn't fix. I've tried to switch a few times before, but the main problem at some point was that I didn't have proper fractional scaling on Linux. And that alone pretty much made Linux unusable for me on my specific hardware.

Wayland fixes that, so that part is a huge improvement to me. Unfortunately this also limited my choice of Distros as not all of them use Wayland. I landed on Ubuntu again, despite some issues I have with it. The most annoying initially was that the Snap version of Firefox didn't use hardware acceleration, which is just barely usable.

I've been using Wayland (wlroots/swaywm) for a few years now and it's been flawless, even with an eGPU.

But I'm also running all AMD hardware, that may be a factor. Life is too short for nvidia bullshit on Linux.

Heh, interesting seeing we use pretty much the same things, i3+NixOS+urxvt+zsh+Emacs+rofi+maim+xdotool, only differentiating in browser choice (it's Firefox for me) and (me) not using any term multiplexer.

>So from my perspective, switching from this existing, flawlessly working stack (for me) to Sway only brings downsides.

Kudos to Michael for even attempting it. Personally nowadays unless my working stack stops, well, working, or there're significant benefits to be found, don't really feel even putting the effort to try the shiny new things out.

I've been running Wayland on a Framework laptop and it just works. Droves my 4K external monitor, quickly switches to single screen, does fractional scaling well, runs all my apps without complaint.

I had an old Chromebook which had Lubuntu on it - screen tearing was driving me crazy so I switched to Wayland and it is buttery smooth. No mean feat given the decrepit hardware.

I'm sure someone will be along to tell me that I'm wrong - but I've yet to experience any downsides, other than people telling me I'm wrong.

I'm not switching to Wayland until my window manager supports it. It doesn't look like anybody has time to do the work, so I'll probably switch, grudgingly, to XWayland whenever X gets removed from Debian.

I feel like the biggest issue for Wayland is the long tail of people using alternative WMs. A lot of those projects don't have manpower to do what amounts to a complete rewrite.

I honestly don't have a preference between Wayland and X, but I feel very strongly about keeping my current WM. XWayland supposedly works, but I'm not in any hurry to add an extra piece of software and extra layer of configuration for something I already have working exactly the way I want. If Wayland offered some amazing advantages over X, it might be different, but I haven't seen anything to win me over.

This reminds me of when pulseaudio came on the scene. Bizarrely there was a short period when PA was superior to everything else. I could set per source and per sink volumes. It was bonkers. The perfect mixer. Then something else happened.

Don’t know what the deal is with Linux desktop experience. I have encountered various forms of perfection and had them taken away.

Once on my XPS M1330 I clicked to lift a window and then three finger swiped to switch workspace and the workspace switched and I dropped the window. It was beautiful. I didn’t even notice until after I’d done it what an intuitive thing it felt like.

Then a few years later I tried with that fond memory and it didn’t work. Where did the magic go?

Probably some accidental confluence of features broken in some change.

I don't think Wayland is fully ready, at least not with NVIDIA GPUs with limited GPU memory.

I have a 7,000 word blog post and demo videos coming out this Tuesday with the details but I think I uncovered a driver bug having switched to native Linux a week ago with a low GPU memory card (750 Ti).

Basically on Wayland, apps that request GPU memory will typically crash if there's no more GPU memory to allocate where as on X11 it will transparently offload those requests to system memory so you can open up as much as you want (within reason) and the system is completely usable.

In practice this means opening up a few hardware accelerated apps in Wayland like Firefox and most terminals will likely crash your compositor or at the very least crash those apps. It can crash or make your compositor unstable because if it in itself gets an error allocating GPU memory to spawn the window it can do whatever weird things it was programmed to do in that scenario.

I reported it here: https://github.com/NVIDIA/egl-wayland/issues/185

Some end users on the NVIDIA developer forums looked into it and determined it's likely a problem for everyone, it's just less noticeable if you have more GPU memory and it's especially less noticeable if you reboot daily since that clears all GPU memory leaks which is also apparent in a lot of Wayland compositors.

For me wayland offers only downsides, without any upsides. I feel the general idea behind it (pushing all complexity and work onto other layers) is broken. I'll stick to xorg and openbox for many years to come.

KDE Plasma switched to Wayland by default sometime last year, and so far the main issue I run into is that a few screen recording tools I like stopped working. (Mostly simplescreenrecorder, which seems to be entirely unmaintained at this point.) Other than some initial instability with accelerated rendering on my GPU, which was quickly addressed, it kinda just works. I mostly don't notice.

Actually, GPU acceleration was why I initially switched. For whatever reason, this GPU (Radeon VII) crashes regularly under X11 nearly every time I open a new window, but is perfectly stable under wayland. Really frustrating! So, I had some encouragement, and I was waiting for plasma-wayland to stabilize enough to try it properly. I still have the X11 environment installed as a fallback, just in case, but I haven't needed to actually use it for months.

Minor pain points so far mostly include mouse acceleration curves being different and screen capture being slightly more annoying. Most programs do this OS-level popup and then so many follow that up with their own rectangle select tool after I already did that. I had some issues with sdl2-compat as well, but I'm not sure that was strictly wayland's fault, and it cleared up on its own after a round of updates. (I develop an SDL2 game that needs pretty low latency audio sync to run smoothly)

Might be a stupid question, but what's wrong with Xorg?

I know that it wasn't originally conceived to do what it does today, but I've never had any problem using it, and when I tried Wayland I didn't notice any difference whatsoever.

Is it just that it's a pain to write apps for it..?

Note to people on this thread: the impression the discussions give is that Linux isn't ready for prime time desktop use. I thought Wayland was the latest and greatest, but folks here report issues and even refuse to ever use it.

Windows and Mac Os, for all their faults, are unquestionably ready to use in 2026. If you are a Linux on desktop advocate, read the comments and see why so many are still hesitating.

2026 is starting with half-baked NVidia drivers and missing functionality on linux? I am so surprised... did you try 17 different previous versions to get it running in true NV-Linux fashion?

This stuff has been flawless on AMD systems for a while a couple of years now, with the exception of the occasional archaic app that only runs on X11 (thus shoved in a container).

At this point the primary thing that's keeping me from switching to Wayland (KDE) is lack of support for remote desktop software, especially with multiple monitors...

Hopefully AnyDesk and Remmina will address this issue before KDE ends it's mainline X11 support next year.

I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 25.10, and decided to give Wayland another go since X.org isn't installed by default anymore.

Good news: My laptop (Lenovo P53) can now suspend / resume successfully. With Ubuntu 25.04 / Wayland it wouldn't resume successfully, which was a deal breaker.

Annoying thing: I had a script that I used to organize workspaces using wmctrl, which doesn't work anymore so I had to write a gnome-shell extension. Which (as somebody who's never written a gnome-shell extension before) was quite annoying as I had to keep logging out and in to test it. I got it working eventually but am still grumpy about it.

Overall: From my point of view as a user, the switch to Wayland has wasted a lot of my time and I see no visible benefits. But, it seems to basically work now and it seems like it's probably the way things are headed.

Edit: Actually I've seen some gnome crashes that I think happen when I have mpv running, but I can't say for sure if that's down to Wayland.

Glad to see a good write-up of Wayland issues. My day-to-day doesn't run into the vast majority of these problems so when I see people melt down over a single trivial seeming Wayland choice about window coordinates then I have a really hard time relating.

This post is a lot more relatable.

As an aside, regarding remote Emacs - I can attest that Waypipe does indeed work fantastically for this. Better than X11 ever worked over the network for me.

I, too, suffer from the pgtk is slow issue (only a 4k monitor though it's mitigable and manageable for me)

> Instead of my usual choice maim(1) , I tried grim(1) , but unfortunately grim’s -T flag to select the window to capture is rather cumbersome to use (and captures in 1x scale). >Does anyone have any suggestions for a good alternative?

You might want to give wayshot a "shot"? https://github.com/waycrate/wayshot

I'm not very familiar with Wayland, and the fact that XWayland exists means that I don't really have much sense for whether a given app is using Wayland or not. I also don't do anything very fancy. I have a single, sub-4k monitor and don't use HDR or other things. Am I using Wayland? Sometimes? Most of the time? I'm really not 100% sure.

I've been trying to switch to Wayland and KDE plasma for some time but it's just so glitchy. Graphics bugs such as the tasks switcher showing black or flickery preview thumbnails or Firefox bringing down the whole system when opening a single 4k PNG indicate that it's still unfortunately very much an alpha.

Maybe in another decade or so.

I must say:

1) Hugely enjoyable content - as usual - by Michael Stapelberg: relevant, detailed, organized, well written.

2) I am also an X11 + i3 user (and huge thanks to Michael for writing i3, I'm soooo fast with it), I also keep trying wayland on a regular basis because I don't want to get stuck using deprecated software.

I am very, very happy to read this article, if only because it proves I'm not the only one and probably not crazy.

Same experience he has: everytime I try wayland ... unending succession of weird glitches and things that plain old don't work.

Verdict: UNUSABLE.

I am going to re-iterate something I've said on HN many times: the fact that X11 has designs flaws is a well understood and acknowledged fact.

So is the fact that a new solution is needed.

BUT, because Wayland is calling themselves the new shite supposed to be that solution DOES NOT AUTOMATICALLY MEAN they actually managed to solve the problem.

As a matter of fact, in my book, after so many years, they completely and utterly failed, and they should rethink the whole thing from scratch.

And certainly not claim they're the replacement until they have reached feature and ease of use parity.

Which they haven't as Michael's article clearly points out.

My question is how long will it take for core necessities like push to talk in discord running in a background tab in my browser while I game with my 50+ closest friends to work under wayland. I hope I don’t develop a need for accessibility tooling the next couple of decades given the current progress.

Wayland smells like IPv6 to me. No need to switch, and it hurts when you try.

I’ve been using Wayland on Debian 12 since 2023. On an Apple Studio Display (5K) over thunderbolt (the built-in camera, speakers, etc work fine)

I screen share and video call with Slack and Google Meet.

I use alacritty/zsh/tmux as my terminal. I use chromium as my browser, vscode and sublime text as code editors.

Slack, Spotify, my studio mic, my Scarlett 2i2, 10gbe networking, thunderbolt, Logitech unifying receiver…. Literally everything “just works” and has been a joy to use.

Only issues I’ve ever faced have been forcing an app to run native Wayland not xwayland (varies from app to app but usually a cli flag needed) and Bluetooth pairing with my Sony noise canceling which is unrelated to Wayland. Periodically I get into a dance where it won’t pair, but most of the time it pairs fine.

My experience is very similar. Just today, I was trying Wayland again but it didn't work out.

One of the obstacle that I faced is wrong resolution. On Xorg I could just add new mode and get up and running quickly. On Wayland, I have to either do some EDID changes or go through even worse.

Can anyone recommend an autoclicker they actively use on Wayland? I've been using ydotool but the daemon service is janky (fails to startup/shutdown frequently, also had issues where half my inputs don't work while it's running)

I've been using Wayland for 3 years now. First through Hyprland, now since August 2025 through Niri. Zero fundamental issues. Some developers don't want add Wayland support in their apps or can't because the app is using some framework and their devs don't want to support Wayland. But honestly ditching apps that don't support Wayland was one of the best decisions in my dev life (along with ditching MacOS and later Ubuntu). That's how I ended up using Neovim since Jetbrains needed ages to add Wayland support. 2.5 years into using Neovim Jetbrains finally added Wayland support. So I've accepted their offer to use Intelliji for free for 6 months. I barely opened it in 6 months, despite having been Jetbrains Evangelist for 7 years before switching to Neovim. That being said you can still use most of x11 apps through xwayland with a few limitations (primarily no fractional scaling) or in worst case through qemu.

Since there are many wayland compositors, wayland clients must be very conservative (don't be fancy) and most of all respect the dynamic discovery of the interfaces and features and must adjust (from core to stable interfaces).

For instance, a compositor may not support a clipboard, and the "data" related interfaces must be queried for availability (those interface are stable in core) and the client must disable such functionality if not there (for instance, wterm terminal is faulty because it forces a compositor to have such interfaces... but havoc terminal is doing it right). I don't know yet if libSDL3 wayland support "behaves" properly. wterm fix is boring but should be easy.

As wayland usage, it is probably almost everwhere (and Xwayland is there for some level of legacy compatibility).

(I am currently writting my own compositor for AMD GPUs... in risc-v assembly running on x86_64 via an interpreter)

I'm on macOS, and I use XQuartz [1] occasionally for Linux/Unix GUI apps: if something is 'written for' (?) Wayland, can I send its GUI windows across the network (over SSH)?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XQuartz

What a fantastic and timely post! Especially coming from i3 maintainer! Michael did such diligent analasys and saved me (and hopefully others) a lot of time. I was considering trying Wayland/sway and this post answered all my questions and showed me that it is not ready, at least for me, yet.

I just thought I'd summarise this article for anybody who doesn't have the time to read the whole thing:

No. Wayland still has hilariously terrible bugs and can't adequately do very basic things we have been doing for ~30 years on X, even in 2026, and because it's not compatible with anything it requires ditching all your stable, well-tested, solid software that you've been using for decades to replace it with incompatible software that doesn't work half the time.

To summarise the summary: it's in pretty much the same place as it was in 2025. And 2020. And 2016.

If somewm[1] continues to develop, why not? Otherwise I will not be sacrificing my decade-old work style with awesomewm.

[1] https://github.com/trip-zip/somewm

Recently had to reinstall my Linux (btw, Arch). Normally I’d just dd/mirror the NVMe, but this time I decided to stop putting off the switch to Wayland and just do it — moved from i3 to sway, etc. I’d been avoiding this for years.

Turns out: absolutely no problem. The tooling around Wayland and adjacent programs is way more modern and functional. Great experience. Can recommend switching in 2026.

For me, the unintuitive truth with Linux is: once you’re on a rolling release, most problems just vanish. I still love Debian for prod, but for experimenting and development, rolling release any day.

> Sometimes, keyboard shortcuts seem to be executed twice!

Sounds like someone made a listener that listens on key events, but didn't bother to check the state of the event, meaning it hits releases as well. Should be easy to verify by keeping them pressed long enough to trigger the key repeat events.

> I also noticed that font rendering is different between X11 and Wayland! The difference is visible in Chrome browser tab titles and the URL bar, for example:

Tab title display is not owned by wayland unless you are running with the client side decor extension, which Gnome is not. So looking at the application or GUI framework (GTK in this case) are really the two only choices.

About the beginning of the article: Wayland is an alternative, not a successor, of X11.

The way this article styles the name of the GPU company "nVidia" is really distracting! The company has always referred to itself in all capitals, as in NVIDIA, and only their logos have stylized a lowercase initial n, which leads to perhaps nVIDIA if you want, or nᴠɪᴅɪᴀ for those with skills or, for normal people, just nvidia. But "nVidia" is a mixture of mistakes.

Try using Zoom client with screen sharing. Doesn't work and so on many applications limited by functionality. People say its year of Linux 2026 and xorg is dead. But its not even close to make it work for basic functionality. You can blame on vendors but as long as user functionality is not working, its never a working solution

Removing X from a distribution, and making it hard to switch from Wayland to X, makes things really difficult for developers such as myself who is maintaining 30+ year old X applications.

> But rather quickly, after moving and resizing browser windows, the GPU process dies with messages like the following and, for example, WebGL is no longer hardware accelerated:

Is this specific to the WM he used or does HW acceleration straight up not work in browsers under Wayland? That to me seems like a complete deal breaker.

For me a no-go for wayland is no support in LXDE and Xfce, which are very good lightweight out of the box user friendly DEs. There is LXQt and Xfce initiated the migration but until then it doesn't worth. Other hurdles are less important like multiscreen, multi-seat, Nvidia.

I often see comments of "everything works perfect in wayland" which makes me wonder how many features some people use. I've tried wayland a few times now and have always noticed small quirks. A few current examples: shading a window actually leaves an invisible section that can't be clicked where the window was, shading and other window activities being inconsistent across various window types (terminal, file manager, etc.), picture-in-picture mode of browsers doesn't maintain aspect ratio, picture-in-picture doesn't maintain "always on top" or position when enabling it (I've managed to fix the "always on top" by writing a rule to apply to windows with "Picture in picture" as the title, at least)

Does anyone have a workaround to get i3 fullscreen behaviour in sway?

And is it possible to get fullscreen but within a container (e.g. get rid of browser gui to see more in a small container)

Does hot plugging work right yet? Was quickly discouraged when KVM caused crashes and the open issue said "you're holding it wrong, buy edid emulators"

Wayland being contemporary with the financial crisis makes sense in my head but I'll probably spend the rest of today processing that it's 18 years ago.

It's fun how most of the complaints are like "it works fine on Gnome but I will still blame Wayland because my tiling WM doesn't support it". So maybe try using a proper Wayland implementation

The Chrome crashes when resizing a window doesn't makes any sense, apart from being a WM fault. The Xwayland scaling, again, has native scaling support on Gnome. Same for the monitor resolution problem (which he acknowledged). Same for font rendering. Idk.

I have nothing to add other than I use bazzite for everything now. Windows gone.

X.org picked the right level of abstraction (even if implementation could use a rewrite). No WM should care about handling raw inputs or forced to be proxy between driver and the app for the output (it could be, if it needed/wanted, but there is no reason to add another layer of abstraction and cycle-wasting for most use cases). And it shows in complexity and even in power use. Wayland basically failed to learn the lessons from X11

The real problem with post X compositors is that the Wayland developers assumed that the compositor developers will develop additional working groups (an input protocol, a window management protocol, etc) on top of the working group that exclusively focuses on display aka Wayland. Wayland was supposed to be one protocol out of many, with the idea being that if Wayland ever turns out to be a problem it is small in scope and can be replaced easily.

People who are thinking of a Wayland replacement at this stage, mostly because they don't like it, will waste their time reinventing the mature parts instead of thinking about how to solve the remaining problems.

There is also a misunderstanding of the ideology the Wayland developers subscribe to. They want Wayland to be display only, but that doesn't mean they would oppose an input protocol or a window protocol. They just don't want everything to be under the Wayland umbrella like systemd.

I use it as my daily driver. I used Sway for a very long time, tried Hyprland for a bit and am now running niri as my daily driver. Sway and niri are wlroots based, Hyprland at some point rolled its own because they didn't want to wait for wlroots protocol extensions. Sometimes I have to switch to Gnome to do screen sharing.

2026 and you will still run into plenty of issues with random behaviour, especially if you run anything based on wlroots. Wine apps will randomly have pointer location issues if you run multiple displays. Crashes, video sharing issues with random apps, 10 bit issues. Maybe in 2027 we'll finally make it. But I feel like these 20 years of development could have been better spent on something that doesn't end up with 4 or more implementations.

> The problems you have with one of them might not appear in another.

Because both have their own portal implementation/compositor with their own issues and service spec implementations. KDE has xdg-desktop-portal-kde, and GNOME has xdg-desktop-portal-gnome. On top of that each (still) has their own display server; KDE has KWin, and GNOME has Mutter.

> The reference compositor, Weston, is not really usable as a daily driver.

Weston is probably good for two things: Running things in Kiosk mode and showcasing how to build a compositor.

That's why you should at least use xdg-desktop-portal if you are not running KDE or GNOME. But this is a vanilla compositor (without implementations of any freedesktop desktop protocols), and as-is has no knowledge of things like screenshots or screensharing.

If you run any wlroots based compositor except Hyprland you should run xdg-desktop-portal-wlr which does implement the desktop protocols org.freedesktop.impl.portal.Screenshot and org.freedesktop.impl.portal.ScreenCast.

If you use Hyprland you should run its fork xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland instead which additionaly has things like file picking built in. Additionally you can/should run xdg-desktop-portal-gtk and/or xdg-desktop-portal-kde to respectively get GTK ("GNOME") and QT ("KDE") specific implementations for desktop protocols. And you absolutely should use xdg-desktop-portal-gtk instead of xdg-desktop-portal-gnome, because xdg-desktop-portal-gnome really doesn't like to share with others.

> With Wayland the each desktop is reinventing the wheel

Not really true, as I mentioned earlier there's still a DE specific display server running in the background (like Mutter and KWin-X11 for X11), and graphics in each compositor is driven directly by the graphics driver in the kernel (through KMS/DRM).

In fact, on paper and in theory, the architecture looks really good: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/architecture.html. However, in practice, some pretty big chunks of functionality on the protocol level is missing but the freedesktop contributors, and the GNOME and KDE teams will get there eventually.

Technically, X is also just a protocol. But there was just one main implementation of the server (X.org), and just a couple implementations of the client library (xlib and xcb).

There isn't any technical reason we couldn't have a single standardized library, at the abstraction level of wlroots.

> all the quirks of the graphics drivers

This should ideally be solved at the kernel level - and I would argue it is solved there. Linux has the DRM abstraction for this very reason. Wayland actually builds on top of this abstraction, while Xorg was sitting in a strange position, not squarely in userspace.

Every major DE had its very own compositing implementation back in X11, so what was "easy" got to be more standardized, and what was hard remained so.

Does hot plugging work right yet? Was quickly discouraged when KVM caused crashes and the open issue said "you're holding it wrong, buy edid emulators"

I've been using wayland with Gnome for years without a single issue.

Arguably my hardware is a lot simpler and I don't use Nvidia. But I just want to point out that, for all the flak wayland receives, it can work quite well.

Me too. But first with Sway in 2016, then with KDE Plasma 6. Everything works flawless, everything runs in native Wayland except Steam games. I prefer AMD or Intel hardware over NVIDIA since forever.

I've maybe used Wayland on Gnome for 1-2 years at this point, always with nvidia hardware. Works OK now, but didn't 2 years ago, and before that, used to be very janky, today is smoother than Xorg. But at this point, I don't think there is a single blocker left for me. Took some time to rewrite some programs that I have to control their own window position and wants to see what other applications are running, but was easy to work around with a Gnome Shell Extension in the end, as the design of Wayland doesn't really "allow" those sort of things.

I'm having more issues with games/websites/programs that didn't take high display refresh rate into account, than Wayland, at this point.

I remember having a gentleman over I think to fix something or other and when he walked into the living room he explained my crt monitor was misconfigured and to his perception had a visible flicker. We checked it and it was indeed misconfigured although I couldn't see it but it was such an aberration to him that he took time away from his actual job to make the flicker go away.

You will also note many items in the post above are papercuts that might go unnoted like input feeling a little worse or font issues.