tl;dr: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet, and maybe never will. Hence, if you are interested in existing applications to "just work" without the need for adjustments, then you may be better of not using Wayland at this point.
Wayland solves no issues I have but breaks almost everything I need. And usually it stays broken, because the Wayland folks only seem to care about Gnome, and alienating everyone else in the process. DO NOT INSTALL WAYLAND! 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.
- 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-portalplugin (which is known to be Red Hat/Flatpak-centric, GNOME-centric, "perhaps" works with other desktops)
- 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.
- flathub/us.zoom.Zoom#22 Zoom ❌ broken since at least 4 Jan 2019. ("Can not start share, we only support wayland on GNOME with Ubuntu (17, 18), Fedora (25 to 29), Debian 9, openSUSE Leap 15, Arch Linux"). No word about non-GNOME!
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.
- https://gitlab.com/lestcape/Gnome-Global-AppMenu/-/issues/116 ❌ broken since 24 Aug 2018 ("because the lack of the Gtk+ Wayland support for the Global Menu")
-
https://blog.broulik.de/2016/10/global-menus-returning/ ("it uses global window IDs, which don’t exist in a Wayland world... no global menu on Wayland, I thought, not without significant re-engineering effort"). KDE had to do additional work to work around it. And it still did not work:
-
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=385880 ("When using the Plasma-Wayland session, the global menu does not work.")
Good news: According to this report global menus now work with KDE platformplugin as of 4/2022
- https://blog.broulik.de/2016/10/global-menus-returning/ ❌ broke non-KDE platformplugins. As a result, global menus now need
_KDE_NET_WM_APPMENU_OBJECT_PATHwhich only the KDE platformplugin sets, leaving everyone else in the dark
- 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).
- https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/redshift ❌ broken ("Redshift does not support Wayland since it offers no way to adjust the color temperature")
- albertlauncher/albert#309 ❌ broken since 7 Jan 2017 ("This is a security measure, but has the side effect of preventing applications from registering their own global hotkeys") YouTube video by René Rebe
See below.
See below.
- https://cfenollosa.com/blog/fed-up-with-the-mac-i-spent-six-months-with-a-linux-laptop-the-grass-is-not-greener-on-the-other-side.html ❌ broken since at least 02 Apr 2021 ("Screen tearing with the intel driver. Come on. This was solved on xorg and now with Wayland it's back.")
- 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
trussfor 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".)
- 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."
- 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.
- https://phabricator.kde.org/D16648#470609 ("Wayland clients can't raise or activate themselves"), ❌ broken since May 27 2019
- https://help.rescuetime.com/article/117-common-linux-issues ("One of the features of Wayland is that it prevents apps from doing precisely what RescueTime is trying to do—track activity in other windows.") ❌ broken since June 3, 2021
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.
- https://github.comelectron/electron#33226 ("skipTaskbar has no effect on Wayland. Currently Electron uses
_NET_WM_STATE_SKIP_TASKBARto 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
- Chris Titus Tech: Wayland vs Xorg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_MBJcD3SFI
- tildearrow: did somebody say "anti-Wayland horseshit"?