alt Hacker NewsFor those who switched in the past few years: Has Wayland given you trouble? I was on a journey this morning after testing my software. It's a GUI CAD-style program for structural biology. I test it on Linux periodically to make sure it's cross-platform. The checks usually pass, with some subtlety regarding linking Cuda. Today, I observed that mouse + keyboard inputs to the 3D portion stopped working.
Root cause: Ubuntu and some other distros recently switched to a GUI backend called Wayland. I don't remember upgrading, but maybe it happened during a system update? It has disabled low-level device inputs except for mouse movement. You can use window-based events instead, but IMO this is a mistake. An OS-level function shouldn't block hardware access. I want the OS to facilitate software and hardware; not create friction.
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Hi, I make a Wayland-based desktop environment and ship a few million cars a year using Wayland.
Feel free to get in touch if you want to talk to someone (for free advice) about this porting problem you're having.
Wayland had been around for a while, but I feel your pain.
Overall it seems much more performant if that makes it any better
The interplay between X11 and Wayland is still bad in my experience- if you don't have all of the XDG-portal stuff setup or force all of the constituent drivers and applications to render on Wayland there will be issues.
> For those who switched in the past few years: Has Wayland given you trouble?
No, since I'm on Mint, and thus still on X11.
I keep hearing about Wayland problems, and I pray they don't reach me when Mint switches; that the relevant problems will have been fixed by them time Mint does switch.
Wayland was turned on by default in ubuntu 21.04 xorg (the x11 server) was removed from ubuntu in ubuntu 25.10.
Desktops like gnome have dropped support for x11 so you can expect that wayland will be the only way to do things from here on out.
There is a compatibility layer called "xwayland" that should work, but there's definitely some rough edges between x11 apps and wayland apps. x11 gave all apps a pretty large ability to intercept information from across the system. Wayland locks that down pretty significantly.