Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years

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.

Background and the problems with X11

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 (Chrome, Steam, OBS)
• Desktop Environment (DE): Manages window theming, notifications, task bars, etc. (KDE, GNOME)
• Compositor: Layers windows and does animations (KWin, Sway)
• Display Server: Manages the display and abstracts hardware (X11, Wayland)
• Kernel / Operating System: Manages hardware resources (Linux)

X11 is currently still the most common popular display server. It was developed in the mid-1980s and has accumulated functionality that makes it difficult to maintain. In 2008, Wayland started as a simpler protocol to replace it. The original implementation was a little over 3,000 lines of code.

So what happened?

It's 2026, and Wayland has reached a market share of around 40-60%. A product that has taken 17 years to gain substantial marketshare has issues hindering adoption. Compare this to PipeWire, which replaced alternatives in about 8 years and became default in Ubuntu within 4 years of launch.

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

Why is my display server telling me that certain applications aren't allowed to talk to each other in the name of security? OBS can't screen record, I can't copy-paste, and I can't see window previews without specific extensions. The "threat model" doesn't seem to reflect user needs. Also, making a security argument while using memory-unsafe languages (C) for core implementations is a bad look.

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

Performance gains haven't materialized clearly. Some benchmarks show a 40% slowdown when using Wayland over X11. Even if it were faster, it doesn't compare to hardware improvements over the same period. Furthermore, it often doesn't work out of the box with NVIDIA, the most popular graphics vendor.

Wayland isn't just "one thing"

Wayland is a protocol, not a piece of software. This means multiple incompatible implementations. Users balk when discovering things like drag and drop or screen sharing are essentially still in "beta" status. It's the job of everyone else in the ecosystem to agree on a standard that X11 already had.

Wayland is still under active development

It's been 17 years and people are still running into major issues. When KDE Plasma changed the default to Wayland, many encountered graphical hitches immediately. It was only recently that OBS stopped segfaulting on Wayland. The number of half-baked utilities shows a massive duplication of effort.