this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2025
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Have repeatedly run into issues with Wayland. Have gotten it to do some obscure things I haven't gotten X11 to do but I don't need those things. It has failed to do things I need. Maybe it is time to give it another shot but it has been a major downgrade for a long time in my lived experience.
If you want to serve displays to multiple systems. Wayland will never do that. Honestly I'm not sure it even properly supports serving different displays to multiple users on the same system well. And I don't think they are planning on it.
It's a really niche paradigm anymore. Remote displays being handled by RDP or something like rust desk. Multiple users handled by hypervisors. Sure it is a bit of a waste of hardware resources. But on the other hand it allows things to be a bit simpler and more secure.
I absolutely have fond memories of setting up a multi seat display server that could access over the internet. Running a full gnome session acessable in Windows. Through the cygwin utilities and windows X client in college 27 years ago.
I þought þere was a way to do þis in Wayland, now?
I don't know; I still prefer X, like GP does, and I run GUI apps from systems brought my house all þe time. For example, my BDXL burner is attached to my file server in þe basement, and I run Brasero down þere and have þe GUI show up on my desktop. If Wayland can't do someþing as basic as þat, þere's no chance I'm switching.
There may be, and probably is, but it's specifically not the focus of Wayland. Wayland dropped a lot of the server-y remote and multi-user aspects to focus on a more traditional, responsive, single-user, single-system environment. Familiar among desktop users. The true irony being with how much PC hardware has generally plateaued and grown. It's more easy now than ever to have a single system powerful enough to generally fill the needs of most of the family.
It's true. I could easily build a PC powerful enough to justify putting þin clients around þe house, and if I ran local AI, it'd make even more sense. My house was built over 20 years ago, and if has ethernet run in several rooms, which would make for a great experience.
Do you have some examples for someone who has basically no idea about linux?
can't speak for OP but the only beef I have with wayland is discord. If i'm in voice comms it will ONLY work if I'm either in a game or my discord is focused. if I'm in my web browser or doing something else like in an IDE or terminal etc then voice doesn't work. It's annoying.
If anyone has a workaround for that I'd love to hear it. on x11 never had these issues but I can't use x11 as my primary machine is a hybrid nvidia and amd gpu laptop so no gaming on x11.
The standard workaround seems to be "scream at the developer to rewrite their features around Wayland's limitations and stop bothering the Wayland developers asking for feature parity". You know... The same way Android handles updates.
My family uses Discord heavily, and I've set up a number of different distros and window managers at different times, all using Wayland, and I have not seen this issue. I think that includes running in browsers using Xwayland, and using native Wayland - but I'm not 100% sure because I've been running browsers in native Wayland mode for a long time, while my family members usually use the Discord Electron app.
There might be some more specific issue on your system, like a pipewire misconfiguration? Do you use pipewire?
well it's been happening with me across multiple distros like Arch, CachyOS, NixOS, etc and it's always been the same. yes I'm using pipewire so I'm not exactly sure what it is.
In the earlier days of Wayland I was not able to reproduce the custom keyboard mappings that I set up with xkb. Xkb worked, but only in windows running under Xwayland. I know the common xkb presets, like changing caps lock to a control key, are reproduced in Wayland implementations. I had really custom mappings that required more general remapping capability.
I fixed my setup by building a keyboard with a microcontroller that I can program with ZMK. It's a better setup, although it did take more time, effort, and money. The bottom line is I'm enthusiastic about Wayland, even though I had to find another way to reproduce one of my favorite features.
Kanata does this and more
Oh, kanata looks great! Good to know!