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I switched from Arch to Fedora mainly because, although Arch LTS is mostly stable, there could one update that does funky things. I had sometimes issues and I managed to fix most issues that came after doing an update. I used Arch for 3 years and Arch is really fantastic and fun. But I don't have the time for it anymore. Which is why I moved to Fedora. It's up-to-date and stable. Atleast doing an update there won't remove my boot loader or mess up my audio driver 🙂

So if I understood this correctly, Wayland basically takes a chunk of an old X11 code, processes it, then outputs same X11 code?

Wayland? You are a physics PhD student. That means, Science, and you do not know what Wayland really present? No wander you have those issues. The name Charles Bishop Weyland will show you what the name Wayland really stands for, but let's try to help to get to the right mindset of how to approach this. Any OS (Operating System) must have compatible drivers so the OS will be able to communicate with third part software and hardware. Most of hardware and software are written for Mac and Windows. Not Linux. Macs come first for it's stability because when buying Mac, you get a running computer that everything is in it and it is tailored for your exact needs regardless the software. Windows give you much more freedom in that case, so while we can verity of things running on the pc, we also have risks. Still those two have the OS versions for certain period they have and that's it, and still, both can, and will crash here and there. Linux on the other hand, have many distro, and each distro fits its maker mindset, not the public. From time to time we see distros like Zorin OS that really made things easy and still, without a Linux software and drivers that were written on a specific Linux distro and third party software that ere written specifically on Linux and for Different Linux version, you will always run into problem with. You look like a Russian (your eyes) or something from that east Europe area, and you have some accent so you probably speak the language, you also speak English very well. What would happen if you suddenly appeared in Yemen where they only speak Arabic and nothing else and you do not know Arabic at all? Big problem!!! So let's Compared to computer language. Russian - Mac English - Windows Arabic - Linux The mindset is totally different. That's why we are close to WW3. The same with Wayland, and Linux in general. It is like WW3. different software and hardware do not agree with each other because there's no diplomat translator (Drivers) who know the cloture (programing) of all of those lands (OS and Distros). When you'll have this set up, you won't have any issue. There is a way to set it up, but no one will bother to do so right now because people chase after external things instead off benefiting humanity. Julia, I hope it was clear to understand. This is exactly what goes on with Wayland and Linux.

i finally switched to wayland and it is really really good now on nvidia with riverwm, i like it. they also managed to get wl-sunset running as an alternative to redshift which makes a big difference for me, i really like that wayland also has an integrated composite manager which works really well

Xfce user, so no Wayland. And I think that's a good thing as how many issues Wayland still has after such a long development.

Discord app screenshare only works on X too. I workaround by using Discord on the browser.

Thanks for talking "nerdy" to us! I enjoyed your video.

like others have noted, wayland has been great with gnome and fedora

Using sway and wayland keybindings works perfectly sway-atomic fedora 41. I also have 34keys keyboard nicenano with zmk firmware.

I really love KDE but krdp is the most broken thing they've ever released, I've never once got it to work, not on Wayland or x11. As far as I got was the login after that it breaks and refuses all further connections.

Force it - people will hate it and fight it tooth & nail but change is necessary. I guess it was the same with systemd.

Whats Wayland?

Running an all AMD system, Wayland has been flawless. I would not have been able to say that even two years ago. The only thing I am missing right now, is gamma control for display output. It's interesting to see what remains an issue from a comp/phy perspective.

Okay. I arrived here after watching your video explaining Wayland and most other Wayland-related videos after it. Congratulations on the work, I've really enjoyed them. When you were talking about moving to Wayland forcing faster migration of applications to it, it got me thinking: what is the big advantage of moving to Wayland? Is this performance difference so significant? Even more so as the faster hardware gets, the less we notice those differences. I'm probably missing some other advantages here. What other advantages are there? Couldn't anyone achieve those advantages on X11? I would like to have a better understanding of why distros choose to swap from very old but very tested, stable, and established software to one that will require so much work, not only from the Wayland developers but also for client application developers. My personal experience in Ubuntu 24.04 AMD + GNOME, where the Linux desktop should be the most work out of the box, screen sharing was a nightmare. I would also love to see you share some of your usage of those scientific applications and their problems. You mentioned in this video that one of them was bugging on zooming. I would like to see a screen recording of it.

It's mind-boggling how many people still think "X11 is the best" while it was experienced X11 developers decided they need to do Wayland instead of X12.

I've tried coding, I tend to get stuck at a certain level, I've never found a way to progress. But you give good advice here. Maybe I will get a Raspberry Pi and have another go.

Very interesting Julia. My own personal experience is mixed. Although I have just installed Fedora 41 Plasma and all is okay.

My first serious brush of with Wayland was in 2022 on Nvidia. Since then the Drivers, Wayland but also KDe plasma (which i'm a big fan of) progressed so much that my production rig is usable on day to day. I had to forego some legacy X11 app, had also to forgo Plasma remembering some of my apps windows positions on the desktop (i use the tiling function to quickly assign my windows now so it is okaish). No real showstopper anymore and my multi monitors (multi refresh rates) set pup is now well managed by wayland (so i count it as a plus)

On the Raspberry Pi, old applications developed for X11 talk seamlessly with the X-Wayland compositor and works fine...

After 15 years you'd think that Wayland would be beyond the "alpha" stages and could get the usability and bugs under control. A MIB Fedora 40 / 41 install w/Wayland has issues with programs 7 years old. Forcing people from X11 to Wayland is like forcing users from a Volvo to a Pinto, Trabant, or Yugo. Volvo: "Were boxy but were good" vs "your safety isn't our problem" .

So from my perspective compatibility isn't really a problem of Wayland but a problem of the software not being compatible. Wayland is around for quite some time now. If developers don't want to port their software towards Wayland, there will be alternatives. Graphics and performance issues have pretty much mostly resolved in the last years. I mean we are already talking about dual GPU cases which aren't quite common. Those even require own specific optimizations in the kernel for power targets, scheduling and more. Not to mention applications need to handle multiple GPUs properly which APIs like OpenGL weren't even designed for. In the meantime you can usually deactivate one of the GPUs in the bios and workaround such an issue. Functionality issues are mostly solved or currently being solved using libportal. For example screen recording, capturing and streaming is all handled via libportal as well as remote sessions. So as long as your compositor implements libportal, you are good to go. The only thing missing at the moment is global shortcuts and an API for screen readers. The first one should end up in libportal too. The second one might not be planned to be part of libportal but I could be wrong with this. Hardware compatibility seems pretty much a question of proprietary drivers which can either be reverse-engineered, ported or the hardware can be replaced by more open or compatible options which usually exist. I'm using Wayland for years now and we are already at the stage of getting features that can't be matched with X11. For example HDR, VRR in multi-monitor setups and application window isolation of course. So at some point distros simply need to make the switch with its default if ever.

The 555 Nvidia drivers has finally added support for explicit sync, which you need Gnome 47 or Plasma 6+ to support. There was only 1-2 releases in the 555 drivers before they went to a new new feature branch driver(560) that had ONE release(which is problematic for me), before ANOTHER new feature branch set of drivers(565) that are still beta and will be for another month or two. The AMD open source drivers work well for gaming, but if you need ROCm support, that aint hte ticket, youre stuck with NVidia for GPU accelerated compute(and they do it well), its just a shame the drivers are a mess and they intentionally limit VRAM

X11 was 28 years old, when Wayland was released. Wayland is now 12 years old. And it was in development in 4 years prior release. So the point that X11 was just old is no longer valid. Wayland itself soon will be outdated and will require to be replaced with something modern - new and well designed from the beginning.

5:44 Security issues. If the Linux system is running as a single user desktop then why should security issues be a problem? Is it down to some belief that a program provided by one vendor will still some data from another program? Installing a program is like inviting someone to your home. If you can't trust them why invite them in? This an aspect I don't understand. It is understandable in the case of a shared server, but what relevance is to a single user desktop? It reminds of SPECTRE mitigations. If you trust the programs you are running on your personal laptop or desktop what is the use of these costly mitigations all the programs are for just yourself?

In short the transition to Wayland is like the transition to green energy. It sounds nice in theory but the reality doesn't match the promise and the hype. Very typical of our times🙄🤔😀😀

Yup, Zoom uses X API dedicated to screenshots to share the screen... This is the reason ScreenShare doesn't work on Wayland. They are working on the fix for almost the year now... My company will pay them anyway...

Really enjoyed this video, subscribed !

This is why W11 is the best, we don't have to deal with thus stuff.

I didn't have problems to adapt to systemd nor did I struggled so much to understand and use different distros but getting used to wayland and adapt all my workflow to it was quite challenging. I'm currently on Hyprland recompiled with xwayland option turned off so it became 100% wayland, as more and more applications are being ported it doesn't feel as alien as it used to be. I'd say that for my use cases wayland is doing just fine!

My biggest issue with X11 was network transparency. It is a feature that is helpful in some scenarios, especially in testing environments, offers a way to create compatibility with embedded or remote devices, but quickly becomes a security issue that can be exploited to log keys, and more. I hope it will remain an option in the future.

Well I use Ubuntu 24.10 Gnome 47 (wayland) and it works pretty good compared to Ubuntu 22.04 times. Some users might forget little things like with Google Chrome browser make sure you set the chrome://flags for OZONE Platform not auto but wayland cause it will use Xwayland by default and be slower less fps. One question why didn't they just called X12, wayland is a long name. BTW I am from Canada too. Another Canadian, A1RM4X proves for gaming wayland works good now for Nvidia, have to make sure you get the latest driverers plus recent Desktop environment.

I am using Fedora 41 (upgrade from 40) on Wayland and I have no issues with it. I don't understand the mindset of folks who are so emotionally attached to X11, like it's being betrayed by Wayland. Wayland compositor is better for modern displays and more secure. X11 was created decades ago and it getting no updates. Why stay with it unless you have a serious show-stopping feature or issue with Wayland? I don't know, frankly.

Fedora 41 was just released on October 29th. The Workstation edition now only includes Wayland-based GNOME packages by default. X11 packages are still available in Fedora repositories but they might not be in future versions.

Most of the time it's a skill issue

Endeavour has Wayland by default. I didn't notice this at first. I have no problem with the Jitsi meeting software. Some versions of LibreOffice still have a strange selection of outdated icons for Wayland.

I haven't had many (or any?) issues using XWayland. It keeps my x11/xlib apps running, and I don't have to mess around with Xorg.conf or anything like that. I'm not sad to see X11 go, but I do feel like it's still too early for me to be genuinely excited about Wayland yet because there are so few "pure" Wayland apps out there.

hihihi 2100 :)

My current thought process is that Linux is plagued with reproducibility issues, much like science. Not only are there issues with compatibility of Linux with hardware, the software present on the machine may not work nicely with each other. There are several methods seeking to improve reproducibility and minimizing breakage - immutable setups, declarative configurations, each with their pros and cons. Even with these strategies, it matters little if the display protocol is buggy. i do remember seeing others saying that distros switching to Wayland by default is speeding up Wayland development simply through prioritization. There are also the issues of standardization of Wayland protocols and the ecosystem. Even when the time comes that Wayland is robust, I hope that X11 is still maintained. It's healthier for Linux as a whole to have multiple ways of doing a specific thing.

The same foo Fedora-Wayland-Gnome

I use Fedora-Wayland-Gnome because it is one of the two very stable desktops on linux, the other one being Mint-X11-Cinnamon. I still don't use Wayland on Mint as I have no time enough to 'solve' issues with Wayland. AFAIK Fedora is the only desktop linux on which Wayland works with hardly any issues. At least not annoying to me. Also as a regular user, when no doing scientific computing, I can easily find youtubes or a thread on forums.linuxmint where users help you out. I found those a pleasant read and audio. Cent OS I haven't tried so far due to me being largely ignorant indeed about it's current role in the linux world. Thank you for clearing that, Julia.

I'm a regular Wayland user but I can definitely say that there are still some issues regarding 3rd party apps which do not make the effort of properly handling XDG portals or Wayland protocols. One common example is Discord which is half broken right now with desktop sharing, so you have to use alternative clients like Vencord to palliate with this. Some apps which are X11 exclusive also struggle to capture the mouse, but this is more of a X11 -> Wayland translation problem with Xwayland. Another example would be the Unreal Engine editor which does not respect the user's preference regarding fractional desktop scaling, so you have to compensate in the editor to get back to a usable interface. I have to say that Gnome feels smoother and more reactive on Wayland than on X11, and I happen to get better performance on it than on X11. I think users like me which have an Intel iGPU + NVIDIA dGPU in a mux configuration do not have as much problems as those who only have an NVIDIA dGPU though, or at least that's my personal observation based on what I've read online.

I really hope not. I have not had a pleasant experience with Wayland, but I think it is a transitional phase. I also rely on Linux for research computation. Nice to see others in a field talk about Linux.

You have described my frustrations with Linux in the first 3 minutes :( I love Open Source and Linux, but sometimes it makes me feel so unproductive at work. I mean, troubleshooting something that doesn't have anything to do with my actual job is just tiring. Specially GUI issues! I work as a Machine Learning Engineer btw, and I like to consider myself a Physics enthusiast :) Your channel is awesome!

Personally, I am an X11 boy for life.

What an amazing history, loved your vídeo

Nice

Did I just listen to woman explain me what wayland is?

I started programming in 2020. I was learning R programming language for data analysis field. Then I moved to Python and grasped the basics very well (the language is super easy to learn, depending on the teaching style of a book and the author). After that, I started to learn HTML5 and CSS3. Currently, I am learning PHP, JavaScript, MySQL, and React. Last but not least, I plan to learn C++ for GD. So, the languages I learned have almost the same structure. In the beginning, it may seem hard to grasp but in a few months, it will be easy. The key point is to learn a programming language based on your aim.

Thank you so much for this. I really appreciate it. I'm currently learning python and hearing this gives me hope

I wanted to be a programmer when I took BASIC programming in high school 20ish years ago. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Now at 44 I bought a book on C programming and I could confidently write a command line tool if I needed it. Then I wanted to get into writing apps with a GUI and so I started watching videos about C++ and quickly found out that OOP is a big bunch of nonsense complexity that I don't need in my life and so I stopped. Never really learned python since its not compiled and so never got my respect. But I really don't see the point in programming anything because literally everything has already been made it seems so why reinvent the wheel. I have no clue what I would even use ANY of it for.