While I have always found GNOME to be extremely limiting and highly opinionated, I don't mind this change. Wayland has improved quite a bit and will only get better with time, x11 is an aging standard. It's natural that it will eventually be dropped in favor of a new one. Wayland too will be in this position as another display server replaces it as well.
this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2025
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For me the X11 era continues for now (until the next version of xfce I expect) and the era of GNOME ended 23 years ago.
Gnome is so bad it hurts. I was reading a blog post by factorios linux dev earlier.
Once Wayland support was implemented, I received a bug report that the window was missing a titlebar and close buttons (called "window decorations") when running on GNOME. Most desktop environments will allow windows to supply their own decorations if they wish but will provide a default implementation on the server side as an alternative. GNOME, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that all clients must provide their own decorations, and if a client does not, they will simply be missing. I disagree with this decision; Factorio does not need to provide decorations on any other platform, nay, on any other desktop environment, but GNOME can (ab)use its popularity to force programs to conform to its idiosyncrasies or be left behind
Ah yes, client-side decorations. One of their most controversial decisions (and for the GNOME project, that's really saying something). And yet, no amount of user feedback will ever break them out of their "we know your needs better than you do" attitude.
People just want things to never change. How many of those users do you think actually bothered to look into why GNOME won't implement SSDs?
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.
If you want to serve displays to multiple systems. Wayland will never do that.
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.
Gonna chime in and add that I have also not had this issue, Nobara Linux here. My discord voice comms work great in browser, and the various other versions I have run. Hope you figure it out!
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!
I'm on GNOME 42 with X11. Wayland kills mouse gestures, apparently, because there's no way to know which window is focused, or which window the mouse is hovering on. At least, not as easily as with X11.
So I'm not sure where I'll go after this. Mouse gestures per window is an extremely important feature to me. Doesn't help that easystroke has been abandoned for years.
KDE has an idea thread about it, but no one is working on it.
Don't know about the other things but "focus follows mouse" is possible on Wayland. Well, it's possible on river at least, not sure about KDE or GNOME. Could be a wlroots related feature though.
I wasn't specific enough, but I meant programmatically. In X11 we have stuff like xprop and xdotool. I can see where my mouse is, which window is underneath, activate or focus a window, etc. I mean these things in code, not visually on the desktop.
Wayland considers these things "security risks", and I get it, but at the same time... customization of my own OS is what drove me to Linux. 🤷🏻♂️
For example: A while ago I tinkered with easystroke plus a custom script using xprop + xdotool. The way it worked (easystroke does this natively, but I just wanted to learn how to do it myself, and the GUI is a bit clunky anyway) is that you assign a stroke/gesture, and execute your script with parameters. The script verifies where the mouse is at execution by grabbing window info with xprop, and runs a different command depending on that (more often than not, using xdotool to send keys). So if I do a flick upwards, the script sees Firefox in the background and sends CTRL+T to the window. A new tab is opened. But if VSCodium is in the background of the mouse, I send CTRL+N instead, to open a new text file (tab).
Unless something has drastically changed in the past few months, it's my understanding that none of that is possible with Wayland, and now it's up to the DEs (or whatever else) to come up with something that gives window info.
It is possible on both GNOME and KDE iirc. I never use that feature, but i am sure i saw it in the settings.
Yeah accessibility features tend to be last in line. The good news is that getting rid of x11 will put a fire under people to get it done.
I still have issues with wayland when using extensions inside other software that aren't compatible with wayland. They tend not to work even with xwayland. Well, I hope compatibility improves until I need to update...
Unless Wayland adds all feature X11 has, it's not a worthy replacement.
Counterpoint: X11 wasn't designed with today's security needs in mind, and developers were building based on the assumptions that those security holes would remain. We don't actually want everything that X11 had, we only want the good bits.
Or to put it another way, the switch from X11 to Wayland = https://xkcd.com/1172/