Wayland has been a broad misdirection and misallocation of time and developer resources at the expense of users. With more migration from other operating systems, the pressure to fix fundamental problems has become more prominent. After 17 years of development, now is a good time to reflect on some of the larger promises that have been made around the development of Wayland as a replacement for the X11 display protocol.

If you're not in this space, hopefully it will still be interesting as an engineering post-mortem on taking on new greenfield projects. Namely: What are the issues with what exists, why can they not be fixed, what do we hope to achieve with a new project, and how long do we expect it to take?

If you're already familiar with X11 and Wayland feel free to skip to the next part.

For people not familiar with Linux, here's a quick rundown of the terms in this space, roughly in the order of highest-level to lowest-level:

• Applications
  • These are the things you want to run
  • Examples: Chrome, Steam, OBS
• Desktop Environment (DE)
  • This is what manages things like window theming, notifications, task bars, etc.
  • Examples: KDE, GNOME
• Compositor
  • This is what layers windows on top of each other and does animations, graphical effects, etc.
  • Examples: Compiz, KWin (for KDE), Sway, i3
• Display Server
  • This is the thing that manages the display, it also abstracts away some of the hardware details so all the above work on NVidia, AMD, Intel, etc.
  • Examples: X11, Wayland
• Kernel / Operating System
  • The lower-layer thing that manages hardware resources, for us this is Linux
  • Examples: Linux, FreeBSD

The above is not a complete list, but it's enough to give some framing for understanding that X11 is a fundamental piece of most Linux environments.

X11 is currently still the most common popular display server in the Linux ecosystem. It was developed in the mid-1980s and, as legacy projects tend to do, has accumulated functionality that makes it difficult to maintain, according to the developers.

So, in 2008, Kristian Høgsberg started the project that became known as Wayland. Wayland (in theory) replaces the display server, as well as some parts of the compositor and desktop environment with a simpler display protocol and reference implementation. The original conceit behind Wayland is to only implement what is needed for a simple Linux desktop. The original implementation was a little over 3,000 lines of code.

Sounds great!

It's 2026, and Wayland has reached a market share of around 40-50%, or closer to 50-60% depending on your source. I would argue a product that has taken 17 years to gain substantial marketshare has issues hindering adoption. Compare the development of Wayland to a similar project for managing audio: PipeWire. Within ~8 years, every alternative has been mostly replaced. It's been adopted as the default in Ubuntu since 22.04, roughly 4 years after it first launched!

These are the most common issues I have seen from the perspective of a user, so I will try to stay light on what I consider to be mostly irrelevant technical details and instead focus on larger issues around the rollout and design of Wayland.

# Wayland is more secure (which means I can't do anything)

The reason I use Linux and other Unix-likes is that they give me the ability to do whatever I want on my system, including making mistakes! So why is my display server telling me that certain applications that I installed and chose to run aren't allowed to talk to each other in the name of security?

There are multiple cases of this: OBS can't screen record (it segfaults instead), I can't copy-paste, and I can't see window previews unless everything implements a specific extension to the core protocol.

The actual "threat model" here is baffling and doesn't seem to reflect a need for users. Applications are not able to see each other's windows, but they're not able to interact in any other way that could potentially cause problems?

I also don't care for the "security" argument when parts of the core reference implementation are written in a memory-unsafe language. To be clear, I am not saying that software written in C is bad, I'm specifically calling out that making a security arugment about software then repeating decisions of the previous (40-year-old) implementation is a bad look.

# Wayland is more performant (as long as you don't use NVidia)

Several of the design decisions that Wayland makes are claimed in the name of performance. Namely, collapsing many layers is supposed to reduce the number of copies when moving data between different components.

However, whatever the reason, these performance gains haven't materialized, or are so anecdotal in either direction that it's difficult to claim a clear win over X11. In fact, you can find examples showing roughly a 40% slowdown when using Wayland over X11! I'm sure there are similar benchmarks claiming Wayland wins and vice versa (happy to link them as well if provided).

The problem is that, even if Wayland was twice as fast, it doesn't compare to improvements in hardware over the same period. It would've been better to just wait! The performance improvements would have to be much more substantial for this to be a reasonable argument in favor of Wayland. The fact that the question even exists as to whether one or the other is faster after a substantial period is an obvious failure.

Additionally, those performance gains don't matter if I'm not able to make use of them. For example, if I'm using the most popular graphics card vendor in my system, I shouldn't expect things to work out of the box.

# Wayland isn't just "one thing" (because Wayland doesn't do anything)

One rebuttal I've heard is that it's not an issue with Wayland, it's an issue with the compositor/extension/application. After all, "Wayland" isn't a piece of software, it's a simple protocol that other software chooses to implement!

Of course, what this means in practice is that there are multiple (usually incompatible) implementations of multiple different standards. Maybe this would be fine if the concept of a desktop operating system was completely new and unknown, but users balk when discovering things like drag and drop or screen sharing are not natively supported and are essentially still in "beta" status.

Instead of providing a better way of doing something, common features are not supported at all, and instead it's the job of everyone else in the ecosystem to agree on a standard. That's not a stunning argument in favor of replacing something that already exists and that has already been standardized in X11!

# Wayland is still under active development

Wayland has been around for only 17 years, while X11 has closer to 40 years of development behind it. Things are still under development and obviously will get better, so why complain about issues that will inevitably get fixed?

Because it's been 17 years and people are still running into major issues!

I was unpleasantly surprised when using KDE Plasma that the default display server had been changed to Wayland. I noticed very quickly on startup when I encountered enough graphical hitches to realize I was running Wayland and quickly switch back. Anecdotal experience is not enough to say this is a broad issue, but my point is that when an average user encounters graphical issues within 60 seconds of using it, maybe it's not ready to be made the default! It was only within the last 6 months that OBS stopped segfaulting when trying to launch on Wayland. I assume I'm in decent company when even the developer of a major compositor is still not able to use Wayland in 2026.

The number of "simple" utilities that seem partially supported or half-baked is incredible and seems to be a massive duplication of effort. The tooling around X11 that has been developed over the last 40 years seems to have been completely dropped and no alternative has been provided. Instead of providing an obvious transition path, Wayland has introduced even more fragmentation.

Older software that has a ton of "legacy cruft" has been tested and bugs have long since been fixed. I fully believe with another 20 years of development things will be better. The problem is that I am being forced to make the switch now. See: The push from KDE and RedHat to Wayland and dropping support for older technologies.

# Opinion of Wayland developers

This post probably best encapsulates the developer opinion towards users trying to migrate to the next iteration of the Linux desktop:

Maybe Wayland doesn’t work for your precious use-case. More likely, it does work, and you swallowed some propaganda based on an assumption which might have been correct 7 years ago. Regardless, I simply don’t give a shit about you anymore.

...

We’ve sacrificed our spare time to build this for you for free. If you turn around and harass us based on some utterly nonsensical conspiracy theories, then you’re a fucking asshole.

It's even more ironic compared to the post made a week later, expressing the same frustration with the Rust community that people have with Wayland!

Drew has since deleted this post, so I understand if he no longer stands by those opinions. However, it's a representative slice of developer sentiment towards users that are now being forced to use unfinished software. Entitlement and bullying of open-source maintainers is not appropriate, and it's understandable that the developers lash out after feeling beaten down by entitled users. However, to have some sympathy on the user side, it's likely born out of frustration of being forced to use the new hotness and then encountering breaking bugs that are impossible for the average user to work around.

It is not the fault of the original developers for building what they wanted to build. I think it's important to keep in mind that they didn't necessarily choose for Wayland to become as popular as it has or the foundation for the desktop of the future. See the diagram below:

Having Wayland as a developers-only playground is fine! Have fun building stuff! But the second actual users are forced to use it expect them to be frustrated! At this point I consider Wayland to be a fun toy built entirely to pacify developers tired of working on a finished legacy project.

# Things to be excited about

Since most of this post has been overwhelmingly negative against the development of Wayland, it's instead better to learn as much as possible and look forward towards "what would I want to be able to do". Windowing technology is absolutely not "done", and instead of following other operating systems, it would be fantastic if Linux could do things no other environment could do.

For example, being able implement non-rectangular windows, exposing context actions (similar to MacOS), or making it easier to automate or script parts of the desktop environment would be incredibly exciting!

It's difficult to overstate the amount of progress in support for gaming, new (and old) hardware, as well as the amount of overall "polish". Every developer should be proud to be a part of that!

After 17 years, Wayland is still not ready for prime time. Notable breakage is being documented, and adoption has been correspondingly slow.

For some users the switch is seamless. For others (including myself), they tend to bounce off after encountering workflow-breaking issues. I think it's obvious at this point that the trade-offs have not been worth the hassle.

My prediction is that within the next 5 years the following will be true:

1. Projects will drop Wayland support and go back to X11
2. There will be a new display protocol that displaces both X11 and Wayland
3. The new display protocol will be a drop-in replacement (similar to XWayland)
4. Fragmentation will still be an issue (this one's a freebie)

See you in 2030 for the year of the Linux Desktop.

# Additional reading

Included are some of the links referenced in this post as well as some additional reading.

• Think twice before abandoning X11. Wayland breaks everything!

• Wayland is flawed at its core and the community needs to talk about it

• Going all-in on a Wayland future

• Unpopular Opinion: Linux world felt stable until Wayland/GTK4 arrived

• On Abandoning the X Server

• I'm tired of this anti-Wayland horseshit (deleted)

• Move fast and break things as a moral imperative (deleted)

• Can I finally start using Wayland in 2026?

• KiCad and Wayland Support

• Wayland Finally Gains Ground: Why 2025 is the Year of Desktop Linux Migration

• What is the true adoption rate of Wayland

• Simplified history of X Hector Martin

• Wayland breaks your bad software

• on abandoning the X server