TLDR: XFCE and Cinnamon devs are begging beginning to work on Wayland support.
The “TLDR” is sub heading is completely misleading. Cinnamon devs see they have to move, that’s the reason. “Begging to work” on Wayland is not at all what the article says. Before you downvote, read it. Nothing in that article or the link to one dev’s blog says anything even remotely like that.
As a Debian XFCE user, I will gladly switch to Wayland when it is available.
XFCE wants to be Wayland ready with XFCE 4.20, which should be released near the end of 2024. Cinnamon wants to have Wayland as default by 2026. So, in theory at least, XFCE should be Wayland-ready before Cinnamon.
Good. X11 has not been properly maintained and shouldn’t be the default for any distro. (Xorg, whatever.)
At least the Mint devs are being realistic on the time span needed for Wayland to have a chance at working for everyone, unlike Fedora, KDE, and Gnome that are jumping the gun.
Jumping the gun? It’s been working mostly without issue for most people for years now.
just this month I had multiple wayland issues forcing me to switch to an x11 session
Cinnamon and XFCE are outliers in that they try to be super stable, “complete” desktops, compared to GNOME and KDE that try to be bleeding edge and packed with new and changing features.
Benefits to both, but I can respect why Cinnamon and XFCE have been slow to adopt Wayland (to a fault, many would argue)
I feel like talk about Wayland being the next big thing, “coming soon” began back when I was using Linux as my daily driver over ten years ago.
It’s still not widely used?
It’s extremely widely used. It’s been the Gnome default (unless you used Nvidia) since 2016 or something.
Even in Debian on Gnome it’s been the default since 2019.
On KDE a bunch of distros use it too.
Wayland is the future. But for most it’s already the present too.
Nvidia has been decent on Wayland from my experience. Then again my experience has just been 5 days, but it feels snappier than X11 I kinda like the feel.
Nvidia on Wayland is usable but not much more than that. There are issues with Xwayland windows flickering and some general instabilities and glitches. But it works for the most part, and the 545 drivers supposedly fix lots of missing features and bugs for Wayland.
It’s a very slow moving project by design for better or for worse. There also hasn’t been a ton of developer interest in the DE space in supporting it until the last few years since it would necessarily take resources away from other work, and generally X has been “good enough” until recently. I don’t have anything to back this up but I suspect that the increased accessibility of gaming on Linux as well as HRR and HDR displays entering the mainstream had a lot to do with this renewed interest.
I’ve been using Wayland for about 8 years at this point. Some people (especially in the Linux world) are just really against change.
The discord thing can also be seen as a good thing (it’s a feature). Wayland is more secure and prevents apps like discord from spying on literally every keystroke you press. Especially if the app is discord, I don’t want it to be able to look at what I’m typing in real time
The video card thing, if talking about NVidia, really is wayland’s fault. The devs refuse to use the card and driver the way X did. I suspect it’s because they don’t like NVidia’s licensing of the driver, and they’re trying to make life a pain for NVidia users to for the business to make concessions.
Steamdeck’s KDE desktop doesn’t run Wayland, it’s still X11. That being said, Valve has said they want to move to Wayland at some point.
Not sure about their gamescope mode. I know it’s a custom compositor but beyond that I’ve got no idea what the underlying tech powers it.
Keep in mind their time line is like 2 years.
Is that satire? Wayland is pretty great, and there isn’t really a concept of “compatible app” as Xwayland handles that.
Obviously apps that perform X functions directly (clipboard managers, screen recorders, etc.) will need to be ported or rewritten, as it’s a brand new display manager, but that would be the case with any non-X platform.
