Can I use Wayland in 2026?

Q: Can I use Wayland in 2026?

As of now, many Linux distributions are actively transitioning to Wayland as their default display server protocol. While some applications and desktop environments still have compatibility issues, the overall stability and compatibility of Wayland have improved significantly. If you're planning to switch to Wayland in 2026, it's likely that most major desktop environments like GNOME and KDE Plasma will have robust support for it.

pshirshov

6d ago

1 reply

Working fractional scaling

przmk

6d ago

4 replies

I would venture to say that there is little overlap between X11 users and people with high-DPI screens.

RealStickman_

6d ago

3 replies

Nobody's going to buy monitors where they need fractional scaling or multiple monitors with mixed DPI if they know it's broken.

physicles

6d ago

1 reply

Everyone’s so excited about the wave if windows users coming to Linux. Those people already have monitors.

I switched in 2018 and was surprised I couldn’t use fractional scaling on one monitor like I’d been doing for years on windows.

jsheard

6d ago

3 replies

Plus if a user wants a higher DPI monitor they will be naturally led to fractional scaling. The mainstream options which strike a good balance between value and features are 4K at 27" or 32", which lend themselves to running at around 150% scale.

toast0

6d ago

1 reply

Why not give up on high DPI?

Save money on the monitor, save money on the gpu (because it's pushing fewer pixels, you don't need as much oomph), save frustration with software.

jsheard

6d ago

4K monitors aren't a significant expense at this point, and text rendering is a lot nicer at 150% scale.

michaelmrose

6d ago

1 reply

The overwhelming majority of the low-DPI external displays at this point are 24-27 1080p

Most high-DPI displays are simply the same thing with exactly twice the density.

We settled on putting exactly twice as many pixels in the same panels because it facilitates integer scaling

jsheard

6d ago

That doesn't gel with my experience, 1080p was the de-facto resolution for 24" monitors but 27" monitors were nearly always 1440p, and switching from 27" 1440p to 27" 4K requires a fractional 150% scale to maintain the same effective area.

To maintain a clean 200% scale you need a 5K panel instead, which do exist but are vastly more expensive than 4K ones and perform worse in aspects other than pixel density, so they're not very popular.

rabf

6d ago

Fractional scaling is a really bad solution. The correct way to fix this is to have the dpi aware applications and toolkits. This does in fact work and I have ran xfce under xorg for years now on hi-dpi screens just by setting a custom dpi and using a hi-dpi aware theme. When the goal is to have perfect output why do people suddenly want to jump to stretching images?

vladvasiliu

6d ago

1 reply

I used to be like this. I actually ran a 14" FHD laptop with a 24" 4k monitor, both at 100%. Using i3 and not caring about most interface chrome was great, it was enough for me to zoom the text on the 4k one. But then we got 27" 5k screens at work, and that had me move to wayland since 100% on that was ridiculously small.

michaelmrose

6d ago

2 replies

Why not 200% and increase font size slightly in all 3 cases?

vladvasiliu

6d ago

1 reply

Because although I don't care much about the chrome, I sometimes have to use it. For example, the address bar in firefox is ridiculously small. Also, some apps, like firefox (again) have a weird adaptation of the scroll to the zoom. So if you zoom at 300%, it will scroll by a lot at a time, whereas 200% is still usable.

Also, 200% on an FHD 14" laptop means 960x540 px equivalent. That's too big to the point of rendering the laptop unusable. Also, X11 doesn't support switching DPI on the fly AFAIK, and I don't want to restart my session whenever I plug or unplug the external monitor, which happens multiple times a day when I'm at the office.

michaelmrose

5d ago

1 reply

14 fhd is 157 ppi 24 4k is 184 ppi

This really isn't this far off. If we imagined the screens overlayed semi-transparently an 16 pixel letter would be over a 14 pixel one.

If one imagines an ideal font size for a given user's preference for physical height of letterform one one could imagine a idealized size of 12 on another and 14 on the other and setting it to 13 and being extremely close to ideal.

>So if you zoom at 300%, it will scroll by a lot at a time, whereas 200% is still usable.

This is because it's scrolling a fixed number of lines which occupy more space at 300% zoom notably this applies pretty much only to people running high DPI screens at 100% because if one zoomed to 300% otherwise the letter T would be the size of the last joint on your thumb and legally blind folks could read it. It doesn't apply to setting the scale factor to 200% nor the setting for Firefox's internal scale factor which is independent from the desktop supports fractional scaling in 0.05 steps and can be configured in about:config

layout.css.devPixelsPerPx

vladvasiliu

5d ago

Right, and 27" 5k is 218 ppi, which isn't that much more than the 24". But don't forget that viewing distance plays a big role in this, and my 14" laptop is much closer than a 27" monitor. Bonus points for our specific model having an absolutely ridiculous viewing angle, so if it's too close the outer border are noticeably dark.

pshirshov

6d ago

Why to have a home if you can sleep in a cardboard box?

wink

5d ago

That's a really odd thing to say.

I don't really care about this but here's an example:

I have 2 27" screens, usually connected to a windows box, but while working they're connected to a MBP.

Before the MBP they were connected to several ThinkPads where I don't remember what screen size or scaling, I don't even remember if I used X11 or Wayland. But the next ThinkPad that will be connected will probably be HiDPI and with Wayland. What will happen without buying a monitor? No one knows.

ruszki

6d ago

2 replies

We are under an article which tells you that you can have problems with Wayland and hiDPI screens. And for example I’m one of those people, who uses X11, because Wayland failed on many levels, like buggy video playing, crashing while changing monitors, or simply waking up my laptop with an external monitor, and I didn’t give more than a few days to fix these (cheers to the author to try this long), so I went back to X11. Which is still buggy, but on a “you can live with it level” buggy.

Btw, everybody who I know, and I too, changes the font size, and leaving everything else on 100%, or maybe 200% with the DPI scaling on X11.

pshirshov

6d ago

2 replies

> Btw, everybody who I know, and I too, changes the font size, and leaving the DPI scaling on 100%, or maybe 200% on X11.

Doesn't work if your screens are too different (e.g. 4k laptop screen and 32" desktop monitor).

michaelmrose

5d ago

You can scale down from a higher resolution to make the UI perceptively the same size. You can do this with xrandr --scale OR for example the GUI in Cinnamon on Mint after you check "fractional scaling" under X mind you.

AshamedCaptain

6d ago

It does work for Qt and KDE at least.

Zardoz84

6d ago

I have a setup with a high DPI monitor mixed with a normal DPI monitor and KDE over Wayland just works fine. The only issue that I found are with Libre Office doing weird over scaling and Chrome/Chromium window resizing his window to the oblivion.

michaelmrose

6d ago

2 replies

There is no particular reason for this theory to be true. X supports high DPI screens well and has for ages.

pshirshov

6d ago

1 reply

Maybe it supports it sure, the problem is that it doesn't work at all.

michaelmrose

6d ago

1 reply

It does work and has worked for over a decade. You can configure scaling under settings in Cinnamon or plasma for instance or via environmental variables in a simple environment like i3wm.

The post is from the Dev of i3wm an x11 window manager complaining among other things about how well his 8k monitor works under x11 and how poorly it works under Wayland.

You can also consult the arch wiki article on high DPI which is broadly applicable beyond arch

pshirshov

5d ago

1 reply

Yes, I know all that. Except it doesn't work. At all.

Ten years ago there were cursor clipping issues, cursor coordinates issues and crashes and I've been home-baking patches for that.

Also it was impossible for one X session to span across two GPUs. Dunno if that was improved.

Now it's bit better, but for sure your amdgpu will entertain you with little nice crashes when you run something heavy on a scaled display.

I'm not even talking about VRR, HDR and all that stuff.

michaelmrose

5d ago

In that time I've had Hidpi work perfectly on first on Nvidia then recently on AMD GPUs on several different distros and desktops all running on X on several distros. They all worked out of the box and were able to scale correctly once configured.

The totality of my education on the topic was reading the arch wiki on hidpi once.

AFAIK one cannot span one x session across multiple GPUs although AMD had something that it once referred to as "eyefinity" for achieving this.

It is rarely needed discreet GPU often support 3 or even 4 outputs

One may wonder if you tried this a very long time ago back when AMD sucked and Nvidia worked well in 2005-2015

przmk

5d ago

Fractional scaling is very common with high dpi screens. I don't I'd be able to have a 175% scaling on my 14" 3k screen with X11.

secure

6d ago

I’ve been using X11 with high-DPI screens since 2013, but with integer scaling (200% or 300%), never fractional scaling.

tormeh

6d ago

1 reply

I've had to dive into xorg.conf more than once. Switched to Wayland as soon as it became an (experimental) option in Ubuntu and never looked back. Probably helps that I've always had AMD cards when running Linux, but it has been smooth sailing nonetheless. I can vaguely remember something not working under Wayland in the early days.. Maybe something with Wine or Steam? Anyway, that has to be 10 years ago now.

jauntywundrkind

5d ago

1 reply

That's always what's missing from these threads. Wayland is boring actually. It just works. KDE, Sway, Niri, whatever, are all good.

I don't know what to do. The outpouring of negative energies are so severe. But I think it's so incredibly un-representative, is so misleading. The silent majority problem is so real. Come to the better place.

adastra22

5d ago

1 reply

How do I run a GUI application over ssh? This is what’s keeping me from switching.

ElectricalUnion

4d ago

1 reply

waypipe

adastra22

4d ago

Thank you.

jchw

6d ago

2 replies

There's no obvious reason for an end used to switch to Wayland if there isn't any particular problems with their current setup, the main improvements come down to things X11 never supported particularly well and are unlikely to be used in many existing X11 setups. My big use case that Wayland enabled was being able to dock my laptop and seamlessly switching apps between displays with different scale factors. And as an added bonus my experience has been that apps, even proprietary ones like Zoom, tend to handle switching scale factors completely seamlessly. It's not that high of importance, but I do like polish like this. (Admittedly, this article outlines that foot on Sway apparently doesn't handle this as gracefully. The protocols enable seamless switching, but of course, they can't really guarantee apps will always render perfect frames.)

OTOH though, there are a lot of reasons for projects like GNOME and KDE to want to switch to Wayland, and especially why they want to drop X11 support versus maintaining it indefinitely forever, so it is beneficial if we at least can get a hold on what issues are still holding things up, which is why efforts like the ones outlined in this blog post are so important: it's hard to fix bugs that are never reported, and I especially doubt NVIDIA has been particularly going out of their way to find such bugs, so I can only imagine the reports are pretty crucial for them.

So basically, this year the "only downsides" users need to at least move into "no downsides". The impetus for Wayland itself is mainly hinged on features that simply can be done better in a compositor-centric world, but the impetus for the great switchover is trying to reduce the maintenance burden of having to maintain both X11 and Wayland support forever everywhere. (Support for X11 apps via XWayland, though, should basically exist forever, of course.)

ryandrake

6d ago

5 replies

> having to maintain both X11 and Wayland support forever everywhere

I don't get why X11 shouldn't work forever. It works today. As you said, there's no obvious reason for an end user to switch to Wayland if there isn't any particular problems with their current setup. "Because it's modern" and "Because it's outdated" just aren't compelling reasons for anyone besides software developers. And "because we're going to drop support so you have to switch eventually" is an attitude I'd expect out of Apple, not Linux distributions.

hsbauauvhabzb

6d ago

2 replies

Sometimes gnome developers out-apple apple in their attitudes, fwiw.

mitchell209

6d ago

2 replies

That was the first thing I noticed when I recently went back to messing with Linux distros after 15 years. Booting into Ubuntu and having to use Gnome Tweaks or whatever it’s called for basic customizations was incredibly confusing considering Linux is touted as being the customizable and personal OS. I doubt I’ll ever give Gnome another try after that.

hsbauauvhabzb

6d ago

1 reply

I get the impression gnome3 is loosely a clone of osx, I much prefer a windows-esc desktop. I’ve never tried kde but feel pretty at home with xfce or openbox. YMMV, but if you have the time they’re worth trying if you’re a recent windows refugee.

cosmic_cheese

6d ago

GNOME is a much closer match for iPadOS than it is macOS due to how far it goes with minimalism, as well as how it approaches power user functionality (where macOS might move it off to the side or put it behind a toggle, GNOME just won’t implement it at all). Extensions can alleviate that to a limited extent, but there are several aspects that can’t be improved upon without forking.

newsoftheday

6d ago

Same, so I switched to KDE and life has been good.

mindcrash

6d ago

1 reply

Funny that you mention this, because broadly GNOME is seen as Linux' MacOS, and KDE as Linux' Android. At least in terms of user customization.

adastra22

5d ago

Last time I ran Linux as a daily driver, it was the opposite. Maybe my graybeard is showing.

yencabulator

4d ago

> I don't get why X11 shouldn't work forever.

Sure, assuming nothing else changes around it maybe. It'll work in the sense retrocomputing works.

However, the people who used to maintain Xorg are the ones who created Wayland. Xorg is largely neglected now, it still works mostly by luck.

simonask

6d ago

I mean, because maintaining software is hard and costly, and a lot of this is developed by enthusiasts in their spare time?

Supporting legacy stuff is universally difficult, and makes it significantly harder to implement new things.

jchw

6d ago

X11 as a protocol will probably continue to work ~forever.

X11 as a display server will continue to work ~forever as long as someone maintains a display server that targets Linux.

KDE and GNOME will not support X11 forever because it's too much work. Wayland promises to improve on many important desktop use cases where X.org continues to struggle and where the design of X11 has proven generally difficult to improve. The desktop systems targeting Linux want these improvements.

> "Because it's modern" and "Because it's outdated" just aren't compelling reasons for anyone besides software developers.

I can do you one better: that's also not really compelling to software developers either most of the time. I beg you to prove that the KDE developers pushed Wayland hard because they badly wanted to have to greatly refactor the aging and technical debt heavy KWin codebase, just for the hell of it. Absolutely not.

The Wayland switchover that is currently ongoing is entirely focused on end users, but it's focused on things they were never able to do well in X11, and it shows. This is the very reason why Wayland compositors did new things better before they handled old use cases at parity. The focus was on shortcomings of X11 based desktops.

> And "because we're going to drop support so you have to switch eventually" is an attitude I'd expect out of Apple, not Linux distributions.

Yeah. Except Apple is one of the five largest companies in the United States and GNOME and KDE are software lemonade stands. I bet if they could they would love to handle this switchover in a way that puts no stress on anyone, but as it is today it's literally not feasible to even find the problems that need to be solved without real users actually jumping on the system.

This isn't a thing where people are forcing you to switch to something you don't want under threat of violence. This is a thing where the desktop developers desperately want to move forward on issues, they collectively picked a way forward, and there is simply no bandwidth (or really, outside of people complaining online, actual interest) for indefinitely maintaining their now-legacy X11-based desktop sessions.

It actually would have been totally possible, with sufficient engineering, to go and improve things to make it maintainable longer term and to try to backport some more improvements from the Wayland world into X11; it in fact seems like some interested people are experimenting with these ideas now. On the other hand though, at this point it's mostly wishful thinking, and the only surefire thing is that Wayland is shipping across all form factors. This is no longer speculative, at this point.

If you really want to run X.org specifically, that will probably continue to work for a decently long time, but you can't force the entire ecosystem to all also choose to continue to support X.org anymore than anyone can force you to switch to Wayland.

zamalek

6d ago

At the end of the day these developers are almost entirely volunteers. Codebases that are a mess, ie X11, are not enjoyable to work on and therefore convincing people to use their discretionary time on it is more difficult. If there wasn't Wayland the current set of developers on Wayland might not have been doing DE work at all.

Attracting new contributors is an existential problem in OSS.

guywithahat

5d ago

This was my motivation for switching too; better screen size management. Things don't scale weirdly when I plug a 4k laptop into a 1080p monitor. Otherwise I'm not sure I'd advise people switch

t_mahmood

6d ago

2 replies

I prefer Wayland, as I feel Wayland's performance is much smoother than Xorg. Though, I have no use for VRR, and I hate the slight lag that is introduced due to font scaling, so I do not use it either.

But, I am stuck on Xorg only because of one app that I have to use to work.

> 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.

This is already happening. in my knowledge, Archlinux, Ubuntu already switched to Gnome 49, which do not support X without recompilation. So most likely, any distro using Gnome 49 upwards will not provide Xorg by default. KDE also going to do it soon.

Xorg is going away pretty soon

I believe its step to the right direction, only issue is some annoying app holding us back

cogman10

6d ago

2 replies

This is the real reason to make the wayland switch.

It doesn't really matter if you like or dislike wayland, the major DE have decided they don't like X11 and they are making the switch to wayland. X11 code is actively being removed from these desktop environments.

If you want to use X11, you can either stay on an old unmaintained DE or switch to a smaller one that supports X11. But you should realize that with wayland being the thing major DEs are targeting, your experience with X11 will likely degrade with time.

hakfoo

4d ago

I guess I don't quite understand what the selling point of a "desktop environment" is. I use a grab-bag of random software but generally don't bother with the KDE and GNOME-specific stuff.

It reminds me of things like the pack-in software you get with Windows. It's convenient because it all comes in one place and more or less works together, but not much of it is particularly best-of-breed.

I guess they've sucked a lot of air out of some niches though-- I suspect a lot of utilities for things like system configuration and file management have turned into parts of the desktop environment rather than standalone tools.

t_mahmood

6d ago

Yes, and besides, developers not having to support two servers, can focus on improving the DE where it actually matters. And with that, fixing issues, adding features becomes much faster.

I see it as a win for both developers and users in the long run.

yjftsjthsd-h

6d ago

1 reply

> But, I am stuck on Xorg only because of one app that I have to use to work.

Does XWayland help?

t_mahmood

5d ago

Unfortunately no. The app takes automatic screenshots, and the developers are simply not interested to fix it.

thanatos519

6d ago

1 reply

I have essential workflows using x2x, xev, and xdotool. Apparently this kind of stuff is contrary to Wayland's security model, so I'm stuck on Xorg, and I'm ok with that.

Phelinofist

6d ago

2 replies

Out of curiosity, what are these workflows?

com

6d ago

1 reply

I don’t use x2x but use xev and xdotool for automated regression testing of GUI tools.

I can’t find a low-effort, high-portability, low-menory way to do it with Wayland.

Local and also in CI pipelines.

charmicat

5d ago

1 reply

wev+ydotool?

com

5d ago

I might be in the wrong Wayland desktop environment; I couldn’t get it to work reliably. Headless Wayland was really complicated when I last tried it, and quite memory heavy.

I’ll try again this month!

Solarsail

6d ago

Not the GP, but I recall the KeePass password manager using xdotool for its autotype feature. I struggled to get xdotool to work correctly back in 2014 on a Debian 7 personal computer. Not familiar with 'x2x' or 'xev'

zouhair

6d ago

1 reply

For me mainly better HDR implementation.

shadowpho

5d ago

Does X even support hdr yet? When I looked last time the answer was none

BoredPositron

6d ago

1 reply

Different refresh rates on different displays is just a killer feature for me.

2001zhaozhao

5d ago

Wayland just has the best multi display support hands down. (I am using Cosmic DE but KDE is similar)

Windows:

- Per-display scaling can be set to multiple of 25% (you can set more precise scaling ONLY if you apply it to all displays)

- Windows across monitors with different scaling look weird

- Mouse cursor movement across monitors based on screen pixels rather than scaled, which is inaccurate to physical distances when using monitors with different DPI

- Under the hood handles all monitors with one rectangular logical monitor, which renders a lot of unnecessary pixels in any multi monitor setups where the monitors don't form a perfect rectangle

- All monitors use the underlying refresh rate of the primary monitor for everything other than the mouse cursor (for example, if you have a secondary 60Hz monitor, timings on it will not be smooth unless your primary monitor refresh rate is a multiple of 60)

Wayland:

- Per-display scaling can be set to multiple of 5%

- Windows do not span across monitors. This can be a downside in case you want to span a window across multiple monitors with the same scaling, but is mostly an upside

- Mouse movements across screen boundaries based on actual scaled distance, so you can tune it perfectly to the physical screen distances

- Each monitor can have its own refresh rate, and windows in each monitor actually update at the refresh rate of that monitor

- Each monitor is logically separate, no unnecessary pixels rendered

MacOS:

- Similar to Wayland but per-display scaling is much more restrictive for external displays, sometimes there isn't any way to set a scale between 100% and 200% without blurring the screen

- Apple Silicon hardware also limits number of total monitors supported, so it is impossible to use big multi-monitor setups on all but the most expensive hardware

amelius

6d ago

1 reply

The main reason I could imagine is security.

Right now with X11, IIRC, if one application has access to your display they can read what is going on in other applications running on the same display.

If browser tabs were able to do that, all hell would break loose. So why do we accept it from applications?

Anyway, despite this, I still use X11 instead of Wayland because of all the shortcomings.

MarsIronPI

6d ago

1 reply

> If browser tabs were able to do that, all hell would break loose. So why do we accept it from applications?

Because I don't run random untrusted apps all the time. Whereas I do visit random untrusted websites all the time.

amelius

6d ago

But Snap and Flatpak have an advanced permission system, designed so you _can_ run random applications that you don't trust.

gf000

5d ago

> "If you're using Wayland, go back to xorg, it'll probably fix the problem you're seeing."

Well, I will be honest, I have had enough "edit this xorg.conf files to boot to a black screen" for a lifetime, so that's not the rebuttal you think it is.

If anything, the (gnu/)linux desktop has certainly matured over the years and on well-selected hardware it more often than not "just works" nowadays, which was certainly not something you could tell before.

haukesomm

6d ago

That leads to technical debt in the long term. Yes, it might be working well for now but the more outdated it becomes, the harder it will be to maintain later.

redeeman

6d ago

it already is default in many places, and is used by a large percentage

Can I use Wayland in 2026?

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