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Think twice about Wayland. It breaks everything!
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Wayland.md

Think twice before abandoning X11. Wayland breaks everything!

image

Source: https://x.com/LundukeJournal/status/1940441670098809093

Hence, if you are interested in existing applications to "just work" without the need for adjustments, then you may be better off avoiding Wayland.

Wayland solves no issues I have but breaks almost everything I need. Even the most basic, most simple things (like xkill) - in this case with no obvious replacement. And usually it stays broken, because the Wayland folks mostly seem to care about Automotive, Gnome, maybe KDE - and alienating everyone else (e.g., people using just an X11 window manager or something like GNUstep) in the process.

Update 06/2025: X11 is alive and well, despite what Red Hat wants you to believe. https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver revitalizes the Xorg X11 server as a community project under new leadership.

And Red Hat wanted to silence it.

As 2024 is winding down:

For the record, even in the latest Raspberry Pi OS you still can't drag a file from inside a zip file onto the desktop for it to be extracted. So drag-and-drop is still broken for me.

And Qt move() on a window still doesn't work like it does on all other desktop platforms (and the Wayland folks think that is good).

And global menus still don't work (outside of not universally implemented things like qt_extended_surface set_generic_property).

The Wayland project seems to operate like they were starting a greenfield project, whereas at the same time they try to position Wayland as "the X11 successor", which would clearly require a lot of thought about not breaking, or at least providing a smooth upgrade path for, existing software.

In fact, it is merely an incompatible alternative, and not even one that has (nor wants to have) feature parity (missing features). And unlike X11 (the X Window System), Wayland protocol designers actively avoid the concept of "windows" (making up incomprehensible words like "xdg_toplevel" instead).

DO NOT USE A WAYLAND SESSION! Let Wayland not destroy everything and then have other people fix the damage it caused. Or force more Red Hat/Gnome components (glib, Portals, Pipewire) on everyone!

Please add more examples to the list.

Wayland seems to be made by people who do not care for existing software. They assume everyone is happy to either rewrite everything or to just use Gnome on Linux (rather than, say, twm with ROX Filer on NetBSD).

Edit: When I wrote the above, I didn't really realize what Wayland even was, I just noticed that some distributions (like Fedora) started pushing it onto me and things didn't work properly there. Today I realize that you can't "install Wayland", because unlike Xorg, there is not one "Wayland display server" but actually every desktop envrironment has its own. And maybe "the Wayland folks" don't "only care about Gnome", but then, any fix that is done in Gnome's Wayland implementation isn't automatically going to benefit all users of Wayland-based software, and possibly isn't even the implementation "the Wayland folks" would necessarily recommend.

Edit 12/2023: If something wants to replace X11 for desktop computers (such as professional Unix workstations), then it better support all needed features (and key concepts, like windows) for that use case. That people also have displays on their fridge doesn't matter the least bit in that context of discussion. Let's propose the missing Wayland protocols for full X11 feature parity.

Edit 08/2024: "Does Wayland becoming the defacto standard display server for Linux serve to marginalize BSD?" https://fossforce.com/2024/07/the-unintended-consequences-linuxs-wayland-adoption-will-have-on-bsd/

Wayland is broken by design

  • A crash in the window manager takes down all running applications
  • You cannot run applications as root
  • You cannot do a lot of things that you can do in Xorg by design
  • There is not one /usr/bin/wayland display server application that is desktop environment agnostic and is used by everyone (unlike with Xorg)
  • It offloads a lot of work to each and every window manager. As a result, the same basic features get implemented differently in different window managers, with different behaviors and bugs - so what works on desktop environment A does not necessarily work in desktop environment B (e.g., often you hear that something "works in Wayland", even though it only really works on Gnome and KDE, not in all Wayland implementations). This summarizes it very well: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/issues/233

Apparently the Wayland project doesn't even want to be "X.org 2.0", and doesn't want to provide a commonly used implementation of a compositor that could be used by everyone: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland/-/issues/233. Yet this would imho be required if they want to make it into a worthwile "successor" that would have any chance of ever fixing the many Wayland issues at the core.

Wayland breaks screen recording applications

  • MaartenBaert/ssr#431 ❌ broken since 24 Jan 2016, no resolution ("I guess they use a non-standard GNOME interface for this")
  • https://github.com/mhsabbagh/green-recorder ❌ ("I am no longer interested in working with things like ffmpeg/wayland/GNOME's screencaster or solving the issues related to them or why they don't work")
  • vkohaupt/vokoscreenNG#51 ❌ broken since at least 7 Mar 2020. ("I have now decided that there will be no Wayland support for the time being. Reason, there is no budget for it. Let's see how it looks in a year or two.") - This is the key problem. Wayland breaks everything and then expects others to fix the wreckage it caused on their own expense.
  • obsproject/obs-studio#2471 ❌ broken since at least 7 Mar 2020. ("Wayland is unsupported at this time", "There isn't really something that can just be easily changed. Wayland provides no capture APIs")
  • There is a workaround for OBS Studio that requires a obs-xdg-portal plugin (which is known to be Red Hat/Flatpak-centric, GNOME-centric, "perhaps" works with other desktops)
  • phw/peek#1191 ❌ broken since 14 Jan 2023. Peek, a screen recording tool, has been abandoned by its developerdue to a number of technical challenges, mostly with Gtk and Wayland ("Many of these have to do with how Wayland changed the way applications are being handled")

As of February 2024, screen recording is still broken utterly on Wayland with the vast majority of tools. Proof

Workaround: Find a Wayland compositor that supports the wlr-screencopy-unstable-v1 protocol and use wf-recorder -a. The default compositor in Raspberry Pi OS (Wayfire) does, but the default compositor in Ubuntu doesn't. (That's the worst part of Wayland: Unlike with Xorg, it always depends on the particular Wayand compositor what works and what is broken. Is there even one that supports everything?)

Wayland breaks screen sharing applications

  • jitsi/jitsi-meet#2350 ❌ broken since 3 Jan 2018
  • jitsi/jitsi-meet#6389 ❌ broken since 24 Jan 2016 ("Closing since there is nothing we can do from the Jitsi Meet side.") See? Wayland breaks stuff and leaves application developers helpless and unable to fix the breakage, even if they wanted.

NOTE: As of November 2023, screen sharing in Chromium using Jitsi Meet is still utterly broken, both in Raspberry Pi OS Desktop, and in a KDE Plasma installation, albeit with different behavior. Note that Pipewire, Portals and whatnot are installed, and even with them it does not work.

Wayland breaks automation software

sudo pkg install py37-autokey

This is an X11 application, and as such will not function 100% on 
distributions that default to using Wayland instead of Xorg.

Wayland breaks Gnome-Global-AppMenu (global menus for Gnome)

Wayland broke global menus with KDE platformplugin

Good news: According to this report global menus now work with KDE platformplugin as of 4/2022

Wayland breaks global menus with non-KDE Qt platformplugins

Wayland breaks AppImages that don't ship a special Wayland Qt plugin

  • https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2018/03/unsetting-qt_qpa_platform-environment-variable-by-default/ ❌ broke AppImages that don't ship a special Wayland Qt plugin. "This affects proprietary applications, FLOSS applications bundled as appimages, FLOSS applications bundled as flatpaks and not distributed by KDE and even the Qt installer itself. In my opinion this is a showstopper for running a Wayland session." However, there is a workaround: "AppImages which ship just the XCB plugin will automatically fallback to running in xwayland mode" (see below).

Wayland breaks Redshift

Update 2023: Some Wayland compositors (such as Wayfire) now support wlr_gamma_control_unstable_v1, see https://github.com/WayfireWM/wayfire/wiki/Tutorial#configuring-wayfire and jonls/redshift#663. Does it work in all Wayland compositors though?

Wayland breaks global hotkeys

Wayland does not work for Xfce?

See below.

Wayland does not work properly on NVidia hardware?

Apparently Wayland relies on nouveau drivers for NVidia hardware. The nouveau driver has been giving unsatisfactory performance since its inception. Even clicking on the application starter icon in Gnome results in a stuttery animation. Only the proprietary NVidia driver results in full performance.

See below.

Update 2024: The situation might slowly be improving. It remains to be seen whether this will work well also for all existing old Nvidia hardware (that works well in Xorg).

Wayland does not work properly on Intel hardware

Wayland prevents GUI applications from running as root

  • https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1274451 ❌ broken since 22 Oct 2015 ("No this will only fix sudo for X11 applications. Running GUI code as root is still a bad idea." I absolutely detest it when software tries to prevent me from doing what some developer thinks is "a bad idea" but did not consider my use case, e.g., running truss for debugging on FreeBSD needs to run the application as root. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1323302 suggests it is not possible: "These sorts of security considerations are very much the way that "the Linux desktop" is going these days".)

Suggested solution

Wayland is biased toward Linux and breaks BSD

  • https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/wayland_on_netbsd_trials_and ❌ broken since 28 Sep 2020 ("Wayland is written with the assumption of Linux to the extent that every client application tends to #include <linux/input.h> because Wayland's designers didn't see the need to define a OS-neutral way to get mouse button IDs. (...) In general, Wayland is moving away from the modularity, portability, and standardization of the X server. (...) I've decided to take a break from this, since it's a fairly huge undertaking and uphill battle. Right now, X11 combined with a compositor like picom or xcompmgr is the more mature option."

Wayland complicates server-side window decorations

  • https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2018/01/server-side-decorations-and-wayland/ ❌ FUD since at least 27 January 2018 ("I heard that GNOME is currently trying to lobby for all applications implementing client-side decorations. One of the arguments seems to be that CSD is a must on Wayland. " ... "I’m burnt from it and are not interested in it any more.") Server-side window decorations are what make the title bar and buttons of all windows on a system consistent. They are a must have_ for a consistent system, so that applications written e.g., Gtk will not look entirely alien on e.g., a Qt based desktop, and to enforce that developers cannot place random controls into window titles where they do not belong. Client-side decorations, on the other hand, are destroying uniformity and consistency, put additional burden on application and toolkit developers, and allow e.g., GNOME developers to put random controls (that do not belong there) into window titles (like buttons), hence making it more difficult to achieve a uniform look and feel for all applications regardless of the toolkit being used.

Red Hat employee Matthias Clasen ("I work at the Red Hat Desktop team... I am actually a manager there... the people who do the actual work work for me") expicitly stated "Client-side everything" as a principle, even though the protocol doesn't enforce it: "Fonts, Rendering, Nested Windows, Decorations. "It also gives the design more freedom to use the titlebar space, which is something our designers appreciate" (sic). Source

Wayland breaks windows rasing/activating themselves

Wayland breaks RescueTime

Wayland breaks window managers

Apparently Wayland (at least as implemented in KWin) does not respect EWMH protocols, and breaks other command line tools like wmctrl, xrandr, xprop, etc. Please see the discussion below for details.

Wayland requires JWM, TWM, XDM, IceWM,... to reimplement Xorg-like functionality

  • Screen recording and casting
  • Querying of the mouse position, keyboard LED state, active window position or name, moving windows (xdotool, wmctrl)
  • Global shortcuts
  • System tray
  • Input Method support/editor (IME)
  • Graphical settings management (i.e. tools like xranrd)
  • Fast user switching/multiple graphical sessions
  • Session configuration including but not limited to 1) input devices 2) monitors configuration including refresh rate / resolution / scaling / rotation and power saving 3) global shortcuts
  • HDR/deep color support
  • VRR (variable refresh rate)
  • Disabling input devices (xinput alternative)

As it currently stands minor WMs and DEs do not even intend to support Wayland given the sheer complexity of writing all the code required to support the above features. You do not expect JWM, TWM, XDM or even IceWM developers to implement all the featured outlined in ^1.

Wayland breaks _NET_WM_STATE_SKIP_TASKBAR protocol

  • https://github.comelectron/electron#33226 ("skipTaskbar has no effect on Wayland. Currently Electron uses _NET_WM_STATE_SKIP_TASKBAR to tell the WM to hide an app from the taskbar, and this works fine on X11 but there's no equivalent mechanism in Wayland." Workarounds are only available for some desktops including GNOME and KDE Plasma.) ❌ broken since March 10, 2022

Wayland breaks NoMachine NX

Wayland breaks xclip

xclip is a command line utility that is designed to run on any system with an X11 implementation. It provides an interface to X selections ("the clipboard"). Apparently Wayland isn't compatible to the X11 clipboard either.

This is another example that the Wayland requires everyone to change components and take on additional work just because Wayland is incompatible to what we had working for all those years.

Wayland breaks SUDO_ASKPASS

Wayland breaks auto-type in password managers

Wayland breaks X11 atoms

X11 atoms can be used to store information on windows. For example, a file manager might store the path that the window represents in an X11 atom, so that it (and other applications) can know for which paths there are open file manager windows. Wayland is not compatible to X11 atoms, resulting in all software that relies on them to be broken until specifically ported to Wayland (which, in the case of legacy software, may well be never).

Possible workaround (to be verified): Use the (Qt proprietary?) Extended Surface Wayland protocol casually mentioned in https://blog.broulik.de/2016/10/global-menus-returning/ "which allows you to set (and read?) arbitrary properties on a window". Is it the set_generic_property from https://github.com/qt/qtwayland/blob/dev/src/extensions/surface-extension.xml?

Wayland breaks games

Games are developed for X11. And if you run a game on Wayland, performance is subpar due to things like forced vsync. Only recently, some Wayland implementations (like KDE KWin) let you disable that.

Wayland breaks xdotool

(Details to be added; apparently no 1:1 drop-in replacement available?)

Wayland breaks xkill

xkill (which I use on a regular basis) does not work with Wayland applications.

What is the equivalent for Wayland applications?

Wayland breaks screensavers

Is it true that Wayland also breaks screensavers? https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/09/wayland-and-screen-savers/

Wayland breaks setting the window position

Other platforms (Windows, Mac, other destop environments) can set the window position on the screen, so all cross-platform toolkits and applications expect to do the same on Wayland, but Wayland can't (doesn't want to) do it.

  • PCSX2/pcsx2#10179 PCX2 (Playstation 2 Emulator) ❌ broken since 2023-10-25 ("Disables Wayland, it's super broken/buggy in basically every scenario. KDE isn't too buggy, GNOME is a complete disaster.")

  • Wayland might allow the compositor (not: the application) to set window positions, but that means that as an application author, I can't do anything but wait for KDE to implement https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15329 - and even then, it will only work under KDE, not Gnome or elsewhere. Big step backward compared to X11!

Wayland breaks color mangement

Apparently color management as of 2023 (well over a decade of Wayland development) is still in the early "thinking" stage, all the while Wayland is already being pushed on people as if it was a "X11 successor".

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pq/color-and-hdr/-/blob/main/doc/color-management-model.md

Wayland breaks DRM leasing

According to Valve, "DRM leasing is the process which allows SteamVR to take control of your VR headset's display in order to present low-latency VR content".

Wayland breaks In-home Streaming

Wayland breaks NetWM

Extended Window Manager Hints, a.k.a. NetWM, is an X Window System standard for the communication between window managers and applications

Wayland breaks window icons

Update 6/2024: Looks like this will get unbroken thanks to xdg_toplevel_icon_manager_v1, so that QWindow::setIcon will work again. If, and that's a big if, all compositors will support it. At least KDE is on it.

Wayland breaks drag and drop

Wayland breaks ./windowmanager --replace

  • Many window managers have a --replace argument, but Wayland compositors break this convention.

Wayland breaks Xpra

Xpra is an open-source multi-platform persistent remote display server and client for forwarding applications and desktop screens.

  • Under Xpra a context menu cannot be used: it opens and closes automatically before you can even move the mouse on it. "It's not just GDK, it's the Wayland itself. They decided to break existing applications and expect them to change how they work." (Xpra-org/xpra#4246) ❌ broken since 2024-06-01

Wayland breaks multi desktop docks

  • "Unfortunately Wayland is not designed to support multi desktop dock projects. This is why each DE using Wayland is building their own custom docks. Plus there is a lot of complexity to support Wayland based apps and also merge that data with apps running in Xwayland. A dock isn't useful unless it knows about every window and app running on the system." zquestz/plank-reloaded#70 ❌ broken since 2025-06-10

Xwayland breaks window resizing

Workarounds

  • Users: Refuse to use Wayland sessions. Uninstall desktop environments/Linux distributions that only ship Wayland sessions. Avoid Wayland-only applications (such as PreSonus Studio One) (potential workaround: run in https://github.com/cage-kiosk/cage)
  • Application developers: Enforce running applications on X11/XWayland (like LibrePCB does as of 11/2023)

Examples of Wayland being forced on users

This is exactly the kind of behavior this gist seeks to prevent.

Summary what is wrong with Wayland, by one of its contributors

image

Source: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/issues/179#note_2965661

History

  • 2008: Wayland was started by krh (while at Red Hat)
  • End of 2012: Wayland 1.0
  • Early 2013: GNOME begins Wayland porting

Source: "Where's Wayland?" by Matthias Clasen - Flock 2014

A decade later... Red Hat wants to force Wayland upon everyone, removing support for Xorg

What now?

Following the professional application KiCad's advice:

Recommendations for Users

For Professional Use

If you use KiCad professionally or require a reliable, full-featured experience, we strongly recommend:

Use X11-based desktop environments such as:

XFCE with X11 KDE Plasma with X11 MATE

Traditional desktop environments that maintain X11 support

Install X11-compatible display managers like LightDM or KDM instead of GDM if your distribution defaults to Wayland-only

Choose distributions that maintain X11 support - some distributions are moving to Wayland-only configurations that may not meet your needs

Source: https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support/#

Similarly, for Krite: https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1030/debian-12-kde-plasma-2024-install-guide#d-krita-as-appimage

References

@reaperx7
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Are you done trying to be smarter than a GNU/Linux system administrator of 20+ years?

wow ... you way older than me 🤣🤣🤣

Darn tootin' sonny. 🤪

what do you mean ?

It means you ain't old enough to understand.😎... Yet

@xgui4
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xgui4 commented Jul 16, 2025

Are you done trying to be smarter than a GNU/Linux system administrator of 20+ years?

wow ... you way older than me 🤣🤣🤣

Darn tootin' sonny. 🤪

what do you mean ?

It means you ain't old enough to understand.😎... Yet

understand what ?

@JRRandall
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JRRandall commented Jul 16, 2025 •
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pkill should work fine for any process owned by the user, but I find it ironic that people who feel learning config files is too complicated for the average user would expect those same users to fire up a terminal and ps -ux etc and pkill the offending application. What we really want is feature parity with what we already have in X11, and that is xkill and click on the offending application. Since the server is the compositor, now we’re gonna have a disjointed user experience because each compositor is gonna decide what and how they implement of the protocol. Do the Wayland devs understand the insane fragmentation they’re causing with this standard and the “design by committee” bureaucratic bloat like client side decorations?!

@probonopd
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Precisly. On my system, I have a Ctrl-SHift-Esc as a global shortcut (can Wayland do these nowadays without Portals and stuff?) mapped to xkill. Which means even a non-technical user can easily kill hanging applications by just pressing that key combination and clicking the stuck window.

On Wayland, no one has shown me how to do this yet. It is so "secure" it can't even do the most basic stuff!

@reaperx7
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reaperx7 commented Jul 16, 2025 •
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Precisly. On my system, I have a Ctrl-SHift-Esc as a global shortcut (can Wayland do these nowadays without Portals and stuff?) mapped to xkill. Which means even a non-technical user can easily kill hanging applications by just pressing that key combination and clicking the stuck window.

On Wayland, no one has shown me how to do this yet. It is so "secure" it can't even do the most basic stuff!

Exactly. There's too many distributions with too much variance in packaging norms. Most FHS stuff operates around a unified /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, and /usr/sbin all being symlinked, but there's a lot of hold out distributions still using the older FHS non-symlinked stuff for tighter security in the system.

Just because you can pkill on one distribution doesn't mean it's the same elsewhere. Even then, what if some admin disables pkill for a user in a networked environment to control the system? Xkill is entirely an X userspace tool. Pkill is a system tool that can be locked down.

Wayland feels like Ubuntuisms where you the user should be limited even though it's YOUR system, locked out of root, shoved into sudo, and then told if you have a problem ask us, but don't ask about root access because you don't deserve it.

Imagine being the IT guy on call. You're asleep. It's 3am and you get a call from the dingus in Accounting who says his application locked up. He's using Plasma desktop over wayland. He needs you to login and kill the task because he can't and doesy know how to. Mind you again, it's 3am and you've dealt with this idiot a dozen times over. You tell him, "just run pkill gnucash and hit enter on the black box looking thingy I showed you last week" for example. He does and says, "it popped up a screen that says enter my credentials. I tried my username and password but it didn't work". You get a notification via email some unauthorized tried to access critical resources. So now, get out of bed, fight the urge to sleep, you have to get on your laptop, you have to login, find out what exact application is running and then execute the remote pkill as admin and you've now lost around 45 minutes of sleep because dumb dumb didn't know what to do and the network was being slow. Mind you this is Monday morning and you have to be up at 8am to make it to the office at 9:30am.

All because xkill couldn't be ran by the user.

When like stated above you could have said "Just hit Ctrl + Alt + Esc" and you'll get a box that says please click the application to close and you click it and it's done. Easy peasy, but no. That no longer exists.

By next week, it's happened several more times.

By next month, I'd be installing Xlibre or Xorg and saying screw it. Lock out the wayland session for users, map the keys, and then let them do their own work.

@JRRandall
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Yup the common recurring theme here is cybersecurity bros issuing CVEs, distros pushing out patches and the IT teams of the world being judged by how quickly they can patch the systems, not realizing or worse not caring that they’re impacting the users ability to do their jobs with every patch. God help you if you have an IDE that’s Java based. You end up like me going insane. CVEs pour from the sky like vengeful locusts. Each one a ticking time bomb. Each patch a risk - for who knows what it breaks? The kernel is now 400 versions ahead of the one your vendor tools support. The SDK is broken. Your driver doesn’t compile. Your soul is in init 1.

@lukefromdc
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And here's another problem...

pkill is a root level access only tool.

You're welcome.

killall isn't and killall -9 works almost every time. If it doesn't the program is ignoring all signals. I don't know enough about pkill to know if it can forcibly terminate something this degree of stuck or not.

@reaperx7
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And here's another problem...
pkill is a root level access only tool.
You're welcome.

killall isn't and killall -9 works almost every time. If it doesn't the program is ignoring all signals. I don't know enough about pkill to know if it can forcibly terminate something this degree of stuck or not.

Almost... I never like "almost" as an admin. I like it does or it doesn't.

Call me a Dark Lord of the Sith as an IT admin and I'll smile at you and pass you a soda from my stash. I deal in absolutes.

@xgui4
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xgui4 commented Jul 17, 2025

Ubuntuisms

🤣🤣🤣🤣 why do you have invented a new ism word ????

@xgui4
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xgui4 commented Jul 17, 2025

Call me a Dark Lord of the Sith as an IT admin and I'll smile at you and pass you a soda from my stash. I deal in absolutes.

dont worry you are not a sith (at least i dont think so)

@reaperx7
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Ubuntuisms

🤣🤣🤣🤣 why do you have invented a new ism word ????

I'm surprised it hasn't been a word yet... 🤔

@reaperx7
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Yup the common recurring theme here is cybersecurity bros issuing CVEs, distros pushing out patches and the IT teams of the world being judged by how quickly they can patch the systems, not realizing or worse not caring that they’re impacting the users ability to do their jobs with every patch. God help you if you have an IDE that’s Java based. You end up like me going insane. CVEs pour from the sky like vengeful locusts. Each one a ticking time bomb. Each patch a risk - for who knows what it breaks? The kernel is now 400 versions ahead of the one your vendor tools support. The SDK is broken. Your driver doesn’t compile. Your soul is in init 1.

All the reason why the company I work at for IT has an experimental ArchLinux system that runs all the corporate software on a daily perpetual update cycle using a timer script that also reloads and reinstalls Grub.

Interestingly, we only hit a single snag with it a month ago when it complained about an old package that got removed.

@alerikaisattera
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I have a Ctrl-SHift-Esc as a global shortcut (can Wayland do these nowadays without Portals and stuff?) mapped to xkill. Which means even a non-technical user can easily kill hanging applications by just pressing that key combination and clicking the stuck window.

How can you be so delusional to believe that xkill actually kills after being told that it doesn't at least 4 times?

@probonopd
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probonopd commented Jul 17, 2025 •
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Because I actually use it almost every day exactly like I described. Press the key combo, click into a window, the window of the hung application disappears, and so does the process that created it.

@alerikaisattera
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Because I actually use it almost every day exactly like I described. Press the key combo, click into a window, the window of the hung application disappears, and so does the process that created it.

It doesn't actually work this way. xkill doesn't terminate, it merely severs the connection to to the X server. Whether or not to terminate in this situation is decided by the program itself. A stuck program is especially likely to not terminate even if it has been designed to

@myownfriend
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myownfriend commented Jul 17, 2025 •
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Precisly. On my system, I have a Ctrl-SHift-Esc as a global shortcut (can Wayland do these nowadays without Portals and stuff?) mapped to xkill. Which means even a non-technical user can easily kill hanging applications by just pressing that key combination and clicking the stuck window.

Why would global shortcuts be part of the display server when the whole point of them is to circumvent the input routing that a display server does? It literally has nothing to do with the windowing system.

On Wayland, no one has shown me how to do this yet. It is so "secure" it can't even do the most basic stuff!

Xkill disconnects the client from the X server but it doesn't necessarily kill the application. It can still run in the background. Why would that be good for security? If you want to terminate the process then terminate the actual process and the server will disconnect afterwards.

Edit:

xkill doesn't terminate, it merely severs the connection to to the X server

Beat me to it but one minute! lol

@myownfriend
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How can you be so delusional to believe that xkill actually kills after being told that it doesn't at least 4 times?

You can tell him a million times and it won't stick with him. He'll appear to be responsive to taking in new information for a second but once it scrolls up the page he conveniently "forgets".

@dm17
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dm17 commented Jul 17, 2025 •
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CVEs pour from the sky like vengeful locusts. Each one a ticking time bomb ... who knows what it breaks?

Yet another inversion; as we know this social engineering and "help" from "compsec experts" can be considered an attack in and of itself. Reminiscent of that 'Simple Sabotage Field Manual' or whatever.

Honestly, I've never seen so many sane comments within such a large software scope before... I'll put it to you like this: if a bunch of you were admins in an IRC or discord (sorry; or zulip), then I'd be a proud member! And perhaps create some sort of relevant Turing Sanity Test to screen for sane members and filter saboteurs.

@reaperx7
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reaperx7 commented Jul 17, 2025 •
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I have a Ctrl-SHift-Esc as a global shortcut (can Wayland do these nowadays without Portals and stuff?) mapped to xkill. Which means even a non-technical user can easily kill hanging applications by just pressing that key combination and clicking the stuck window.

How can you be so delusional to believe that xkill actually kills after being told that it doesn't at least 4 times?

I do the same. I have apps hang occasionally too. Works like a charm. And yes, it does kill the process. How do I know? Simple...

Open a game on Steam. Alt+Tab out of it, run xkill, target the game window and click it. Steam will say the app has closed and now can be restarted...

Now for Steam, itself, it won't kill the process because Steam is a userland service. Services will disconnect, but restart. Standard applications will terminate.

@probonopd
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probonopd commented Jul 17, 2025 •
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How can you be so delusional to believe that xkill actually kills after being told that it doesn't at least 4 times?

It factually killed every application I tried this with so far. I don't care about its inner workings, I care about that in the end the window and the process are gone. This is what I describe as "killed". I am just a user. What the exact mechanism for the termination is ("severing the connection") is not my business, as long as it works.

The question is: How can I reliably get the same result on Wayland, in a way that works across ALL Wayland implementations. Again, it can use a totally different mechanism under the hood, but the user experience must be the same.

@myownfriend
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myownfriend commented Jul 17, 2025 •
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It factually killed every application I tried this with so far.

That's because the applications detects that it's been disconnected from the X server and most choose to close themselves but that's only true for well-functioning apps. If the application decides not to do close it's self or, more likely, the app frozen, it will continue running in the background.

I don't care about its inner workings,

Yes you do. You're very concerned with the inner workings of things otherwise you wouldn't care if Wayland is providing capture and global shortcut functionality or if you're getting that functionality with portals.

Weird how selective you are about this kind of shit.

I care about that in the end the window and the process are gone. This is what I describe as "killed". I am just a user. What the exact mechanism for the termination is ("severing the connection") is not my business, as long as it works.

And it doesn't end the process, the process ends itself because the connection was severed. It's unreliable and definitively less secure.

You have a working server and frozen client yet you're relying on the client to work correctly.

The question is: How can I reliably get the same result on Wayland, in a way that works across ALL Wayland implementations.

Just kill the actual process and the server will terminate the connection. That's true under Wayland or X11 and also applies to processes that don't have windows.

Display servers are not operating systems as much as you want to them to be. You have kernel interfaces to kill processes, they're the same ones used by task managers which is how most typical users would kill processes that are frozen.

Again, it can use a totally different mechanism under the hood, but the user experience must be the same.

So you're demanding the user experience of killing processes the less reliable and ass-backwards way remain the same? That's dumb.

@myownfriend
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Actually it does. Wayland application isolation affects how the tools in the system work.

No they don't. Wayland clients just have no way through the Wayland protocol to see and manipulate other Wayland clients. They're not isolated from the kernel and the rest of the system.

That's why I've repeated that Wayland doesn't determine what an app can or can't do, it just defines what the app can or can't do through Wayland.

So either do it, or your lying about it. Nice you tried it on an Xorg application. Now do it on wayland... We're all waiting.

How do you think task manager applications kill processes on both Xorg and Wayland?

@myownfriend
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xkill

"Unlike Kill, xkill does not request that the client process, which may be running on a different machine, be terminated. In fact, the process can continue running without an X connection. Most clients, however, do abort when their X connections are unexpectedly closed."

https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/man/man1/xkill.1.xhtml
https://linux.die.net/man/1/xkill

"This command does not provide any warranty that the application whose connection to the X server is closed will abort nicely, or even abort at all. All this command does is to close the connection to the X server. Many existing applications do indeed abort when their connection to the X server is closed, but some can choose to continue. "

https://linuxcommandlibrary.com/man/xkill

"Using xkill is a destructive action; unsaved work in the targeted application will be lost. Be cautious when the cursor changes, as clicking the wrong window can terminate critical components of your desktop environment (e.g., your panel, file manager, or even the entire desktop shell). It terminates the X client's connection, which may not always kill the underlying process cleanly, potentially leaving a zombie process or other orphaned resources. It's a tool of last resort and should be used carefully."

@myownfriend
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@xgui4

Why are you trying to learn about Wayland from people who don't know about Wayland on a topic that's clearly made by an idiot?

@reaperx7
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It factually killed every application I tried this with so far.

That's because the applications detects that it's been disconnected from the X server and most choose to close themselves but that's only true for well-functioning apps. If the application decides not to do close it's self or, more likely, the app frozen, it will continue running in the background.

I don't care about its inner workings,

Yes you do. You're very concerned with the inner workings of things otherwise you wouldn't care if Wayland is providing capture and global shortcut functionality or if you're getting that functionality with portals.

Weird how selective you are about this kind of shit.

I care about that in the end the window and the process are gone. This is what I describe as "killed". I am just a user. What the exact mechanism for the termination is ("severing the connection") is not my business, as long as it works.

And it doesn't end the process, the process ends itself because the connection was severed. It's unreliable and definitively less secure.

You have a working server and frozen client yet you're relying on the client to work correctly.

The question is: How can I reliably get the same result on Wayland, in a way that works across ALL Wayland implementations.

Just kill the actual process and the server will terminate the connection. That's true under Wayland or X11 and also applies to processes that don't have windows.

Display servers are not operating systems as much as you want to them to be. You have kernel interfaces to kill processes, they're the same ones used by task managers which is how most typical users would kill processes that are frozen.

Again, it can use a totally different mechanism under the hood, but the user experience must be the same.

So you're demanding the user experience of killing processes the less reliable and ass-backwards way remain the same? That's dumb.

How is it less secure to stop an application by closing the connection if the process ends? X apps require a connection to execute. You severe the connection, the application closes and the process stops.

The only time it doesn't do this is if it's a perpetual service running on top of X, like Steam, Libreoffice, VLC media player, and such if they're loaded as a perpetual service.

We know full well services stay running, and applications do not. Do you think we're stupid to not know the difference between which does what?

@reaperx7
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@xgui4

Why are you trying to learn about Wayland from people who don't know about Wayland on a topic that's clearly made by an idiot?

Did he seriously reference Wikipedia? My God, even as a college graduate we were always told never use Wikipedia as a reference regardless of how factual the information is. 🙄

@myownfriend
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Did he seriously reference Wikipedia? My God, even as a college graduate we were always told never use Wikipedia as a reference regardless of how factual the information is. 🙄

Wikipedia is often the first thing that comes up when you search for something and is a fine starting point. It's a great thing to reference when you're demonstrating how unobsure particular information. That's why I included it: the demonstrate how lazy you all are when it comes to look up information about anything you're talking about.

The more important part of that post is that I linked to three other sources that all say the same thing including the documentation for the utility in question. You either ignored that or you were to lazy to read past the beginning of the post.

@myownfriend
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myownfriend commented Jul 17, 2025 •
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How is it less secure to stop an application by closing the connection if the process ends?

Because if the entire reason you stopped the application was because it was doing something you didn't want it to do, it can potentially continue doing that after that fact.

X apps require a connection to execute.

Applications that use X11 require an X11 connection to interact with a the X server but they don't necessary require an X server connection to run. If you have an application that just file operations (move, compress, delete, etc) , it needs an X server connection display a window with GUI and status on the operations it's doing but it doesn't rely on the X server to do the file operations. It can continue doing them after the X11 connection is closed if it wants.

You severe the connection, the application closes and the process stops.

The application closes only if it's made to terminate itself when it's not connected to an X server. You're relying on an unreliable side-effect to close the process when you could just terminate the actual process directly.

The only time it doesn't do this is if it's a perpetual service running on top of X, like Steam, Libreoffice, VLC media player, and such if they're loaded as a perpetual service.
We know full well services stay running, and applications do not. Do you think we're stupid to not know the difference between which does what?

I'm not talking about a service. There's nothing that forces an application to only run with a window or only run as a service. There are applications that can be run with a GUI or in the command line. Nothing prevents them from switching to their cli mode when their connection to an x server is severed.

I swear sooo many X apologists rely just assume that all apps behave exactly as they expect them, too. It's ridiculous. The actual documentation for xkill is saying that it just severs the connection with the X server and that it's unreliable at actually ending the process and you're here denying that.

@guiodic
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guiodic commented Jul 17, 2025

You see this is the problem, you are focusing on the implementation instead of the protocol. xkill does not terminate the process? True, but you can write a version that does. In fact, a process can know the pid of that window and not only close the connection with X, but also kill the process. In fact, there is a special windows property on X11 that returns the pid and is recommended by freedesktop precisely to kill processes: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/1.5/ar01s05.html#id-1.6.14

Can this be done in wayland? No.

@guiodic
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guiodic commented Jul 17, 2025

Not only that you can even suspend an app with xstop: https://github.com/Brx86/Xstop/blob/main/xstop
only 22 python lines of code. Can you do this in wayland? No.

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