For those who switched in the past few years: Has Wayland given you trouble? I was on a journey this morning after testing my software. It's a GUI CAD-style program for structural biology. I test it on Linux periodically to make sure it's cross-platform. The checks usually pass, with some subtlety regarding linking Cuda. Today, I observed that mouse + keyboard inputs to the 3D portion stopped working.

Root cause: Ubuntu and some other distros recently switched to a GUI backend called Wayland. I don't remember upgrading, but maybe it happened during a system update? It has disabled low-level device inputs except for mouse movement. You can use window-based events instead, but IMO this is a mistake. An OS-level function shouldn't block hardware access. I want the OS to facilitate software and hardware; not create friction.

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cogman10 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Wayland was turned on by default in ubuntu 21.04 xorg (the x11 server) was removed from ubuntu in ubuntu 25.10.

Desktops like gnome have dropped support for x11 so you can expect that wayland will be the only way to do things from here on out.

There is a compatibility layer called "xwayland" that should work, but there's definitely some rough edges between x11 apps and wayland apps. x11 gave all apps a pretty large ability to intercept information from across the system. Wayland locks that down pretty significantly.

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sho_hn 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Hi, I make a Wayland-based desktop environment and ship a few million cars a year using Wayland.

Feel free to get in touch if you want to talk to someone (for free advice) about this porting problem you're having.

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stratosmacker 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Wayland had been around for a while, but I feel your pain.

Overall it seems much more performant if that makes it any better

	▲	the__alchemist 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		More performant is good! Of interest, I was able to insert a workaround (a few lines of `unsafe` which alter local env vars) into the program to have it use Xorg instead.

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Pfiffer 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The interplay between X11 and Wayland is still bad in my experience- if you don't have all of the XDG-portal stuff setup or force all of the constituent drivers and applications to render on Wayland there will be issues.

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Telaneo 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> For those who switched in the past few years: Has Wayland given you trouble?

No, since I'm on Mint, and thus still on X11.

I keep hearing about Wayland problems, and I pray they don't reach me when Mint switches; that the relevant problems will have been fixed by them time Mint does switch.

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SchemaLoad an hour ago | parent [-]

Wayland has been pretty much a solved problem for a while now. Most distros have been shipping it by default for many years now.

	▲	Telaneo 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The fact that I keep hearing people have issues because it's now the default doesn't fill me with confidence. It's probably a minority of people having these issues, and I imagine the problems with screensharing and the like are gone by this point, but accessibility tools which need access to everything X gave them are never going to be compatible without being completely rewritten with Wayland in mind. I'm also not filled with confidence by posts like this[1], which confirm that Wayland was still deeply broken in many ways just in 2024. Two years is not a short amount of time, but given it took Wayland 10+ years to be anywhere close to usable for desktop usage, I'm not placing my bets on the pace having gone up so fast that long-standing issues are solved yet. That post takes somewhat of an extreme position, but kernel of truth is that it breaks a lot of things, many of which apparently still aren't solved. This post[2] has a better outlook I believe. I.e. that things are broken today (since it is for accessibility), but that there is real potential and that it can be fixed. It just has to be done. Shame that doing that is hard and that accessibility ends up taking a back seat. [1] https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d... [2] https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-want-to-love-linux-it-d...