> KDE Linux is Wayland-only; there is no X.org session and no plan to add one.
Does this mean they're testing that all the Wayland bugs are fixed? I haven't updated to the new Debian stable quite yet but all the previous times I've switch to Wayland under promises of "it's working now" I've been burned; hopefully dogfood helps.
The issue is that you are using Debian stable. Software quickly becomes out of date, sometimes by years, with the exception of security fixes and occasional backports.
Wayland, KDE, and several other pieces of software evolve rapidly. What may be broken in one release will very likely be fixed a few releases after the last debian stable release.
I'll run Debian on a server if I need predictability and stability with known issues. I won't run Debian on a desktop or workstation for the same reason.
I've tried distros with faster cadences. All that means is that I get an endless stream of new bugs, rather than a few that I can find workarounds for (such as just reverting to the still-good X11).
I worked with a guy who railed against the conservatism of our company's releases. He said "new software has more bug fixes." Then again, he was maybe a kind of hardcore software quality guy -- not the sort to add "features" to a piece of infrastructure that had demonstrated its worth.
The only issue I have with software conservatism, like Debian, is that some new thing requires something newer. If you live in a world where you can do without the new thing, then it's really quite nice. Security patches are another matter, but are usually dealt with.
I like to be on the bleeding edge, but Debian was created for a reason. Only time can determine which configurations don't suck.
I used to "hate" Wayland, but that was because I was stuck on an ancient kwin_wayland implementation that didn't get updated for years on Ubuntu.
When it comes to big changes like Wayland and Pipewire, you really want the latest versions you can get. Like the OP, I only use rolling releases on my machines for that reason.
Even as of Ubuntu 24.04 there's still plenty of stuff that's just broken. Can't stream my screen from Discord, can't share my screen from Firefox. Weird color problems with my calibrated monitor. Switching to Xorg solved all of these issues.
I'm open to moving to Debian testing/unstable if Wayland can actually deliver. What do you run?
My CachyOS / KDE install with pure Wayland has been buttery smooth and recently got an update that finally lets me calibrate the max brightness of my HDR OLED monitor (which was the monitor's fault. Not even Windows could make it work properly for non-games until now). CachyOS is also the first distro I've used in years that does things close enough to way I like out of the box that I haven't bothered to update my system reinstall script in months.
I've also been giving Bazzite to some non-tech people who have not once asked for help. That one is immutable and Wayland only, so it's a further testament to how far Wayland has come if you're on an up-to-date-enough system.
Sadly, I'm stuck on older Ubuntu for my work laptop because the mandated security software won't run on anything better.
I get that this is the current LTS release, but clearly this isn't want the parent poster had in mind. Notably 24.04 never shipped Plasma 6, which carried a lot of critical Wayland fixes.
Yeah, I wouldn't even bother with Wayland on Ubuntu unless it works out of the box.
I'm on an unholy amalgamation of Arch/Cachy/Endeavour now, but I have been using screen sharing nearly everyday on calls via Firefox on Arch for about a year and it's worked without a problem.
I considered Debian testing, and it does work well on servers, but a true rolling release is more convenient. The software release and update loop is shorter, it's really nice to be able to pull fixes to packages in a reasonable amount of time after they're released.
None of this is a problem on Debian stable. I even run discord as a Flatpak - screen share works fine. I believe there's systems for that now (way pipe? xdg stuff?)
Ubuntu 24.04 is older than Debian stable currently.
Regardless, that's still a huge Linux usability issue when the user needs to know for sure the specific source to install a friggin web browser where screen sharing works.
Indeed, though not so much Linux but rather a Ubuntu-specific issue. Most (all?) other distributions don't distribute Firefox as a Snap, so screen sharing will work out of the box.
Oh I absolutely agree. I've seen way too many people fall into this trap, install Firefox from Snap, Zoom client from Snap, what could possibly go wrong? Turns out, quite a lot!
I’m sitting with SW acceleration in the browser today because some update broke it. I have had it working in the past but I’ve had like 2-3 updates in the past 2 years break it.
And for what it’s worth there was a really bad tearing bug because of the argument over implicit and explicit synchronization that neither side wanted to fix. I think it’s since been addressed but that was only like in the past 6 months or something. So it’s definitely not been “years” since it’s been working seamlessly. Things break at a greater rate than X because X basically is frozen and isn’t getting updates.
That has been by experience. Browser seems fine for me.
With Arch, you have to read up ahead of time before updating software because it's a rolling release.
I remember one breaking change when I was switching from the previous Nvidia drivers to the new 'open' ones, but some breakge was expected with that change.
And yet i tried setting up manjaro to see what all the fuss was about with arch based systems. In less than ten minutes i understood the origin of all the krashes memes.
I've been running debian stable (with backports) as my desktop for a couple of years now, I find that KDE is updated enough, and wayland is stable enough (on my hardware, of course, a 13 year old macbook and a 8 year old NUC).. honestly, as a simple user, i haven't appreciated any difference between X and wayland sessions, so i just login into wayland.
While I appreciate all the folks singing our praises, as an upstream developer I think you deserve a better response than "you are holding it wrong" :)
We think that the Wayland session currently is the better choice for the majority of our users. It's more stable and polished, performs better on average, and has more features and enables more hardware.
That said there are still gaps in the experience, and non-latin input is one of them. In principle it's roughly on par witu X11, but it's still pretty crap, e.g. at the moment we give you a choice between having a virtual keyboard and having something like ibus active, when many users want both at the same time, and a lot of the non-latin setup stuff is still not part of the core product, which is very user-unfriendly.
The KDE Linux alpha in particular will definitely and unequivocably not serve you well as it currently doesn't ship any ibus/fcitx.
The good news is that this is something we are very actively working on in the background right now. We have an annual community-wide goal election process that made Input improvements one of our goals, and the topic has been all over our developer conference this year.
Another huge gap is accessibility. No wayland compositor has managed to implement screen reader support that works with existing applications yet. And no, GNOME's wayland compositor did not achieve this. In typical GNOME fashion they threw away all support for existing screen readers and accessibility and invented two entirely new GNOME only protocols that no software except theirs supports.
I'm in a similar boat - i tried the Wayland session in Debian 10 and 11 and lasted less than a day; in Debian 12 i toughed it out for about a week before hitting a showstopper; but this time in Debian 13 i've used it since release without a single nit to pick.
I think "most" are fixed. I use quotes because I've seen people say they have issues that I have never run into myself.
I'm currently stuck on Windows for some old school .NET work, but otherwise have been running Wayland on either arch or fedora for 8 or so years, no real problems specific to Wayland. With that said, I've also always had X to fall back to for the odd program that absolutely only worked in an X session. At this point, though, I don't even recall what they were (probably something that didn't like running under Swaywm because wlroots), so even that might not be an issue.
Has any distro ever promised that there are zero bugs in the software they use? I don’t particularly like Wayland but a lot of people have been using it for years at this point…
User adoption is not really a great metric when it ships as a default on common distros. Most people would rather deal with issues and wait for support than fix things in an unsupported way.
If it wasn't a default, it'd go back to barely being used.
Yes Microsoft too. Windows is by far the most stable and compatible desktop OS. The broken stuff you run into there isn't comparable to what you deal with on Linux, especially a niche distro.
Yep lol my experience on Windows 11 is that when opening a laptop, there's a realistic chance the taskbar will hang and have to restart itself (which takes a surprisingly long time)
This is my reality too and the taskbar takes some stuff down with it.
Also the taskbar is just broken in general. It'll pull tons of apps behind the '...' button even though there's plenty of room on the taskbar and it'll also put fake apps that aren't actually open on the taskbar.
If you're referring to the fact that new toolbar icons in Win11 are automatically hidden and that setting can't be changed for god knows what reason, I can recommend https://github.com/Aemony/NotifyIconPromote
I agree that it isn’t a great metric for, like, how good the desktop environments are in some overall sense. I’m just saying it has enough users that it isn’t some niche thing where a ton of bugs can easily hide.
So does Xorg. I actually switched my spare PC to Wayland (default Ubuntu) recently because Xorg (on Linux Mint) kept going black whenever my monitor would sleep/wake. Nothing too fancy, just an HP tower with Intel CPU and Nvidia GPU.
Idk what's even different between them, it was just obvious that I was in the non-default / minority of users territory, so I got out.
When was the last time you tried Wayland? I switched to KDE Plasma a couple years ago not knowing anything about display server protocols and haven't had a single issue.
The last time I tried it extensively was on Debian Bookwork (12.1 and later; I always wait for the first point release), released July 2023 but freezing sometime around February 2023.
Yes, this was a while ago now. But just as now, people said then "all the bugs are fixed and missing features added"; all that really means is "we're in the long tail". I might've put up with it if not for the fact that there were 2ish major bugs that directly affected my main workflow (e.g. temporarily swapping to non-Latin text input).
Same experience. I switched back to Linux a few months ago after a few years hiatus. Installed Arch and KDE Plasma. Literally didn’t even know I was using Wayland until I had to fiddle with something and realized X wasn’t even installed
I'm using Wayland exclusively for 4 years now on Archlinux (may be more, I forget). At this point, it is better than X11. It still has bugs, but then so does X11.
Fractional scaling is fixed in Plasma 6 though. So, if you need that, it has been good for 1 year now.
i dont want to call linux old fashioned but to still be working the kinks out of windowing system in 2025 boggles me... its almost as if there's a resistance to GUIs or something.
The window manager in windows is horribly buggy and extremely slow. Lots of animation flickering and snapping for seemingly no reason. Try maximizing Firefox while a video is playing and watch the animation - or, usually, lack thereof.
Wayland is, by far, the best windowing system I've ever used. No dropped frames, ever. Its actually kind of uncanny, it feels like you're using an iPhone.
GUIs are tough in open source because they need way more than just code.
You need UX designers, testers, feedback loops, and infrastructure — stuff most volunteer projects can’t sustain. That’s why devs can dogfood CLI tools but GUIs are a whole different beast.
Bugs in the window manager or shell (both shipped by KDE) are somewhat more common, but even if they are crashes, due to X11 being better-designed for isolated faults they are easily recovered-from without loss of session.
X11 not supporting modern display technologies is arguably a bug, and it's not likely to get resolved at this point (e.g. it can't do mixed DPIs, or VRR with multiple displays, or HDR in general).
I don't care about any of those things, since computers are about productivity for me.
But I'm pretty sure at least half of them actually do work under X11, it's just that some UI libraries refuse to use it on the grounds of "X11 is outdated, I won't support features even though it does".
(also, having played around with DPI stuff on Wayland, it's pretty broken there in practice)
Yep. I feel the same about all the various wayland compositors. Even 15 years on none of them have managed to implement accessibility support for existing linux applications. No screen readers support on any but GNOME's compositor and that doesn't work with existing applications; GNOME invented 2 new incompatible protocols that only their compositor works with (which doesn't work with existing applications).
No HDR or high DPI is an annoyance. Not supporting accessibility is real deal breaker. Especially for commercial settings where things like Americans with Disability Act compliance matters. And even more for me with my retinas slowly tearing apart and losing my eyesight: the entire waylands ecosystem is extremely inconsistent and buggy.
Not really, that is OP's point. Xorg maintainers don't really want to enhance X11 and add new features, only critical bug fixes. That is one of the reason there are now X11 forks like Xlibre.
That is a misconception. They added VR support to the Xorg server long after people started saying this. New features need to be well written and not break existing things, which is hard to do. The entire premise of Wayland was to make a clean state to avoid having to worry about existing things. However, they are not opposed to having new things added, as long as adding new things does not break existing things.
No. HDR will never come to X11. This is because the X protocol defines a pixel as a CARD32, that is an unsigned 32-bit integer. So the highest depth you could theoretically go is R10G10B10, and forget about floating-point HDR. Fixing this would require rewriting the entire protocol. Which has effectively already been done; it's called Wayland.
Perhaps people ought to listen to the Xorg devs when they say X11 is broken and obsolete, and you should be using Wayland instead. Every single one of them says this.
All sorts of things in X11 are "defined" as a particular thing in the base standard, then changed in protocol extensions. You really shouldn't be writing raw pixels anyway (and most people don't since breaks if your monitor is using 8-bit or 16-bit, for example).
X11 supports all sorts of obsolete pixel formats, including 1bpp mono, 4bpp and 8bpp indexed color, and 16bpp "high color" modes. In order to display an image in X11, you need to understand the pixel size, organization, and how colors are mapped to pixel values (all of which are available in a data structure called a visual).
> Perhaps people ought to listen to the Xorg devs when they say X11 is broken and obsolete, and you should be using Wayland instead. Every single one of them says this.
This is incorrect. Alan Coopersmith does not share this view and he is a Xorg developer. Anyone repeating this propaganda is arguing from ignorance.
That said, I have used both X11 and Wayland. X11 does its job well in many applications and honestly, we would have been better off had Wayland just been a X11 extension. As for things being broken, I have encountered far more brokenness when using Wayland than when using X11 exclusively. Wayland has gotten better of late, especially in desktop applications, but I do not consider it a replacement in general.
Just recently, I built a display based on a CM4 at work that uses X11 and I can remotely view and interact with the screen using x11vnc, which is fantastic for remote development and debugging. That is a convenience I simply do not have with Wayland. I have tried to do steam remote play by streaming from a desktop to my Steam Deck. If the desktop is running a Wayland session, a pop up appears on the physical display asking if I want to permit remote access and I currently have no way of clicking it without being physically present. This ruins the remote play experience, which I want to use when I am physically not present. A X11 session does not have this problem. If a tool like x11vnc existed for Wayland, it would be useless if it does what Steam Remote Play does with Wayland. :/
> we would have been better off had Wayland just been a X11 extension.
That would have never happened. From a functionality standpoint, Wayland is "the parts of X11 modern toolkits actually use". Give clients a buffer, have them locally render into that buffer, then composite the buffers together into a final display. Xorg can do all this. It's just a question of, do we want the maintenance burden of all the other stuff that Xorg has, like obsolete graphics primitives, obsolete visuals, etc.? And do we want the architectural decisions of X11, which seemed sensible in the 80s, but make far less sense in light of modern GPUs and modern applications with modern display needs?
The point of Wayland always was to start from scratch.
> So the highest depth you could theoretically go is R10G10B10, and forget about floating-point HDR.
R10G10B10 matches most HDR displays out there, AFAIK even Windows uses that outside of DirectX (where FP16 is used).
But beyond that...
> Fixing this would require rewriting the entire protocol.
...most of the protocol does not have to do with color values. X11 is extensible and an extension can be used that allows alternative functions that use more advanced color values where that'd make sense. For example, assuming you want to use "full" range color values for the drawing functions like XFillPolygon, etc, you'd want to add have the extended range state in graphics contexts, introduce extended commands for changing it (with the existing commands simulating an SDR color for backwards compatibility). That is assuming R10G10B10 is not enough of course (though because for decades many applications assumed 8bit RGB, it is a good idea to do sRGB/SDR simulation for existing APIs and clients regardless of the real underlying mode of the monitor unless a client either opts-in to using extended color or uses the new APIs).
Another thing to keep in mind is that these are really needed if you want to use the draw primitives using extended color / HDR. However most HDR output, at least currently, is either done using some other API (e.g. Vulkan) or via raw pixel data. In which case you need to configure the window output (a window region, to allow for apps with mixed color spaces in a single window - e.g. think Firefox showing a SDR page with an HDR image) to use a specific color space/format and then rely on other APIs for the actual pixel data.
This is something i wanted to look into for a while now, unfortunately other stuff always end up having more priority - and well, my "HDR" monitor is only HDR in name, it barely looks any different when i try to enable HDR mode in KDE Plasma under Wayland for example :-P. I do plan on getting an HDR OLED monitor at some point though and since i do not plan on changing my X11-based environment, i might take a look at it in the future.
Again. This is a thing the xorg devs have already looked at. Their conclusion? "Nope. Too much work. Just use Wayland."
Once again, every... last... one of the Xorg devs is of the opinion that you should be using Wayland instead. Even if you had changes to propose to Xorg, they will not make it into a release. If you insist on soldiering on with X, your best bet is probably to contribute to Wayback, likely to be the only supported X11 display server in the near future, and see if you can add a protocol to the compositor to allow "overlay" of an HDR image displayed using Wayland "on top of" an X window that wants to do HDR.
I wish it was that easy to switch to Wayland, but I have always ran into serious issues. Granted it has been a year since I last tried, so who knows.
I use X11 features such as highlight to copy and then using middle mouse button and/or Shift-Insert to paste its contents (just to mention one), and I use xclip extensively to copy contents of files (and stdin) to it. I use scrot, I use many other applications specifically made for Xorg, and so forth. I have a custom Xorg config as well which may or may not work with Wayland.
Thus, I do not think I could realistically switch to Wayland.
> and I use xclip extensively to copy contents of files (and stdin) to it.
I won't say anything against your other points (and in fact I am typing this comment on Xorg because I have my own list of reasons), but https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard is almost drop-in for xclip/xsel.
> Again. This is a thing the xorg devs have already looked at. Their conclusion? "Nope. Too much work. Just use Wayland."
My comment isn't about how much work something would need, but about how it can be done.
> Once again, every... last... one of the Xorg devs is of the opinion that you should be using Wayland instead.
Good for them, but i have my own opinions.
> Even if you had changes to propose to Xorg, they will not make it into a release.
Maybe or maybe not. AFAICT the official stance has been that nobody wanted to work on these things, not that they are against it, they just do not want to do it themselves.
But if they do not make it into a release, there is also the XLibre fork or there might be other forks in the future, it isn't like Xorg is some sort of proprietary product. I'd rather stick with Xorg as it seems more professional but ultimately whatever works.
> see if you can add a protocol to the compositor to allow "overlay" of an HDR image displayed using Wayland "on top of" an X window that wants to do HDR.
TBH this sounds like an incredibly ugly and fragile hack. There are two main uses for HDR support: embedded HDR (e.g. in a firefox window) and fullscreen HDR (e.g. for videos/games). For the latter there is no point in an overlay, just give the server the full screen. For the former such an overlay will require awful workarounds when you want more than just a self-contained rectangle, e.g. you want it clipped (partially visible image) or need it to be mixed with the underlying contents (think of a non-square HDR shape that blends into SDR text beneath or wrapped around it).
From a pragmatic perspective the best approach would be to see how toolkits, etc, use HDR support in Wayland and implement something similar under X11/Xorg to make supporting both of them easy.
> But really, consider switching to Wayland.
I've been using Window Maker for decades and have no interest in something else. Honestly i think that adding Wayland support to Window Maker or making a Window Maker-like Wayland compositor are both more of an effort and harder than adding HDR support to Xorg. Also i am sometimes trying KDE Plasma Wayland for various things and i have several programs having small but annoying issues under Wayland.
That said, from a practical perspective, one can use both. The only use for HDR i can think of right now is games and videos and i can keep using my Xorg-based setup for everything while switching to another virtual terminal running KDE Plasma Wayland for games/videos that i want to see in HDR. Pressing Ctrl+Alt+Fn to switch virtual terminal isn't any different than pressing Win+n to switch virtual desktop.
Ultimately it doesn't matter now, because Xorg is kind of in a state of "active abandonment", that is to say, the only maintenance being done is to ensure that no more bugs are being fixed aside from critical security issues on distros Red Hat still supports. In open source, you go where the developer energy is, and right now that's Wayland.
If you're about to tell me that XLibre is a viable alternative, no you're not because it isn't.
I've been using KDE since before Wayland was a twinkle in RedHat's eye, so trust me when I say that Wayland has always come across as an afterthought from KDE. I'm not saying it was, but given all the issues KDE users have had with Wayland over the years it sure looked that way. If somebody I loved was having trouble with KDE the first thing I'd ask is if they had accidentally switched to Wayland (usually because of an upgrade). The majority of the time they'd check, sigh, and say yes. Switching back their problems would go away.
Reading this thread makes me want to try KDE/Wayland again, so probably on my next install I'll give it another shot. If it's still crap I think it's time to switch off of KDE.
I have had minimal problems with KDE 6 and Wayland, but I dislike the idea that both cannot co-exist. There is no reason to force people to Wayland. There are applications that benefit from Wayland’s tighter security model while there are applications that benefit from X11’s looser security model. If I make an appliance and I want to remotely debug, X11 is great since I can use X11vnc. If I want to run malicious software in a sandbox environment, Wayland is great since it can be properly isolated. They both have their uses. X11 is far more mature too and thus has fewer problems.
That said, I am probably preaching to the choir, as I think we are both moderates as far as the X11 vs Wayland debate is concerned.
I recently switched to hyprland but before that I was running a mixed HDR/SDR, mixed VRR/no VRR, mixed refresh rate setup with icc profiles applied under KDE wayland. No issues here tbh.
Wayland works great for me. I use a rolling update distribution so everything is the latest version and I only use Firefox, a terminal, and emacs. Debian tends to be pretty far behind.
I installed Debian 13 on my laptop from 2014. It's got an NVIDIA K1100M. The latest proprietary driver supporting it is 390 which is not supported by Debian 13. It was by Debian 11. I skipped 12. I run Nouveau and Wayland and everything that didn't work with Wayland on Debian 11 works now, with one unfortunate exception: backlight control is broken, which means that I'm stuck with 100% brightness. That's probably a problem with the kernel or the driver because it happens with X11 too.
X11 has a workaround for that because I can use gamma correction to simulate brightness control and make it work with night light. There was no way to do it in Wayland: they stomp on each other and undo whatever the other software did. So I'm back to X11 and frankly I don't notice any difference.
If you have more luck with your graphic card you'll be probably OK with Wayland. Anyway the X11 session is there, logout from Wayland and login using X11.
Nvidia likely will back port Debian 13 support to their driver if you ask nicely in an email to their Linux bugs email address, although you would probably wait 3 to 6 months for it. They periodically back port support for newer systems to older drivers that they maintain.
Alternatively, it is theoretically possible to forward port their driver yourself since their kernel compatibility shims are open source and you can see what changes they made in newer versions to support newer kernels. This is likely a masochistic exercise however.
I'm still dual booting. Debian 11 to work and Debian 13 to finish setting up everything.
With Debian 11, kernel 5.10.0-35-amd64
I was sure that I was using the NVIDIA driver 390 but I run dpkg -l before replying to you and I found out that actually I'm running the 470.256.02 driver. I definitely run the NVIDIA card because NVIDIA X Server Settings is telling me that X Screen 0 is on "Quadro K1100M (GPU 0)". I see it also in /var/log/messages and
cpuinfo reports that my CPU is an i7-4700MQ CPU @ 2.40GHz which according to the Intel web site has an internal Intel® HD Graphics 4600. I think that I never used it. NVIDIA X Server Settings does not report it but it's a NVIDIA program so I would not be surprised if it does not see it. Anyway, the kernel module for Intel should be i915 and it's not there. Maybe I have to load it but I'm phasing out this version of the OS. I'm pretty sure I never installed anything to switch between the two GPUs. There used to be something called bumblebee. Is that what you are using now?
Apparently I can install the 470 driver in Debian 13 https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=163756 but it's from the unstable distribution and if Nouveau works I'm fine with that. I'm afraid that the NVIDIA driver and Wayland won't mix well even on 13 so I'll be on X11 anyway.
Very interesting. Thanks a lot for this! I will experiment and see if I can get it working.
I use older Thinkpads with Optimus switching, so using the Intel GPU is not opotional: it is always on, but the OS offloads GPU-intensive stuff to the nVidia GPU.
In my testing with Debian 12, I could not get my nVidia chips recognised at all. In some distros, this has the side-effect of disabling the Displayport output, which is a deal-breaker as I use an external monitor and the machines do not have HDMI.
I just pointing this out in the other comment. So no, bugs are still there, plenty of system level graphics glitches in all but most trivial circumstances.
I hope it also means they've managed to do what no wayland compositor has managed in the past 15 years: have working accessibility (screen reader support, etc) that works with existing applications. Otherwise this is just another toy/demo distro.
And no, gnome's wayland compositor did not achieve it either. They threw away all accessibility support and then invented two new gnome-only protocols for it that no software except gnomes own compositor supports.
Works fine in current KDE master branch, and it's been working for quite a while so it should be in the current release. Note that I run Teams in MS Edge for Linux, which is my dedicated Teams runtime environment and sandbox.
Does this mean they're testing that all the Wayland bugs are fixed? I haven't updated to the new Debian stable quite yet but all the previous times I've switch to Wayland under promises of "it's working now" I've been burned; hopefully dogfood helps.