I haven't used Linux desktop in 6 years but I remember when Wayland was new and started replacing X about 15 years ago and these were common complaints... I hope this is a joke and still isn't the case!
I've been using Wayland for some years (at least since Debian switched to it as their default) and not had any issues with it. I think complaints were more common about X, and Wayland has resolved a lot of it for the average user. For example my switch to Wayland was the first time I had 100% working video playback on Intel iGPUs without tinkering with conf files. I appreciate there are still some edge cases where X11 is still better -- but I think for 95-99% of users Wayland has just worked.
I imagine the 5% of issues are more likely to be related to Linux itself; then they hop back to a BSOD on Windows with forced updates or a buggy "stable" OS update on Mac.
Is is a regular occurrence that students in my lab that use or switch to Wayland still run into problems. Switching back to X11 reliably works as a fix. The sad thing is that there is also no apparent advantage to Wayland, it is just pushed down to us via distributions.
It might matter to some but not to many, and in practice the pain imposed on many others could have been avoided by simply improving X. That developers already like to rewrite things is well known, but nobody should pay for this.
Do you want the indisputable advantage of Wayland? No dropped frames in the desktop, even at high framerates. Back in 2023 when I was still using X11 dropping frames was par for the curse, no matter the machine, the configuration or the DE. You could only hope to get a fluid presentation when using a full screen program that used DRI unredirection (or DRM or whatever it was called) because... it eschewed X completely. Now, it used to be even worse if you go back many years from that, so there was progress, but there were always these tiny drops impacting fluidity. It also got worse the more loaded the machine was, any task in the background consuming 40% of the machine could make it feel like you were using a 30hz monitor. Or, if you dared to use 120hz it felt more like a stuttery 70hz, even at idle.
That same year I decided to give Wayland my third shot and what you know... it not only was perfectly smooth all the time but it had finally reached a point where I could use it on my HTPC. Less than a year later and it was finally usable on my desktop and laptop, and since then I haven't really looked back.
besides, even without using that, for the vast vast majority of users, there is no pain, they dont even realized they've switched to wayland, their distributions simply did it.
and people ARE paying a price staying with xorg, theres a reason projects like KDE are very happy about the change.
Well, I can only report from my experience and this is the pain I still see with Wayland but not really with X. If KDE wants to hurt some of their users, this is their decision.
Significantly less so than before, but it's unfortunately still the case. It's also just now getting features that people have been asking for for over a decade, and of course due to the nature of Wayland the implementations of these features are sporadic and inconsistent.
I think the main difference is that there aren't really any deal-breaker kind of bugs any more, and as far as features there are none missing that users care about compared to X11. It's mostly just annoying bugs and the usual "third party" (including KDE) apps looking off in GNOME because the devs can't reach an agreement on some things, users be dammed.
It's not. Wayland has really gotten its shit together in the last 5-ish years. A lot of the desktop ecosystem has matured in the last few years, actually.
I maintain that the Linux desktop in 2021 was actually less usable than it was in 2016. But things have really turned around since then.
I'm not particularly fond of X11 but barely working in 2026 is hardly an endorsement of the whole project.
A good replacement of X11 would have had a well designed local mode that abstracted modern hardware in all configurations and an actually good network protocol.
We're left with a barely-working local mode with awful X11 stuck on top.
And we've moved to it for purely political reasons.
I'd say Wayland was "barely" working in 2021. When I say it works, I mean it works. Screen sharing (finally) works, remote desktop works, ICC profiles, etc etc.
I, for one, like Wayland's design. The problem was that it was incomplete and the implementations were buggy. Well, now the protocol is feature-complete and the implementations are solid.
Wayland is a bunch of amateurs trying to be strict and secure and the end result is everyone opening their own security holes to make it usable. It's working now, mostly.
KDE got some kind of video bridge recently which is an insane workaround for something that should've just worked.
You're worried that capturing Wayland screens from X11 applications requires additional software?
How is that a real complaint? The only way this would be possible without additional software is if Wayland itself was just another X11 Version, if Wayland was X12 which is X11 but with protocol changes that break backwards compatibility, you would run into exactly the same problem.
Your standard for something being insane is that it is not 100% identical to X11.
I'm impressed by the coding skill to achieve a seamless integration and "usability".
But other than a demo "because we can" I'm confused on what this could ever be useful for. AR/VR prototyping? Virtual showroom?
Or maybe for an online presentation? Stream a video of playing Minecraft and get fancy slide transitions?
"let's go to the next slide" and "now we enter dangerous territory".. "over here I can show you how this program looks like in real life"
I agree: running simulated computers inside of Minecraft is a significantly more impressive technical feat than bolting on display surfaces to planes with a mod.
There's a big difference between something being compiled to run inside of Minecraft, versus running a sidecar that streams back a display. It's the difference between compiling and running on your machine, and streaming back a cloud machine using RDP.
Not like this makes a difference to users, who don't know how any of this works. But we are on Hacker News...
People not only built a functional computer in Minecraft, people have run Minecraft on that functional computer in Minecraft. Extremely slowly, obviously, but it did technically work.
"In Minecraft" doesn't mean what it used to. When somebody wrote an 8-bit CPU literally "in Minecraft" it used to be badass. Now it's just a game addon.
Can't they just compete in separate categories? People have been making high-level computer mods years before even ComputerCraft, RedPower, or OpenComputers existed. And people will continue to make pure-redstone computers far into the future. Neither category is replacing the other :)
Not sure why people praise Minecraft for this. This is huge feat of Wayland, and was possible because devs took time to consider use cases outside of current norm, and why it took so long to migrate the ecosystem. People liked to bitch about the "Gnome blocking/not implementing essential protocols" part, but even that partially made this possible
a very near example would be immersed vr which is compatible with xorg and does essentially the same thing (2d windows pasted all over a 3d world), although not integrated into minecraft. also since their solution isn't wayland-centric it has ports to osx and windows.
>If you're reading this, you're likely in the same boat as me. You've discovered that Immersed can create virtual monitors for Windows and Mac, but on Linux, this feature is marked as "unsupported" on X11. This means you can't create virtual monitors directly through the Immersed agent. For now, the known workaround is to manually set up virtual monitors. If you use Wayland, now immersed offer support for native virtual displays on the Immersed agent on gnome Wayland. You can access this options in Immersed client menu -> Setting -> Configure virtual displays. Other Wayland DE/Compositors are not supported, but there are ways to create virtual monitors manually as we do on X11, please check the linux-help channel in the Discord server for more info.
Basically immersed vr doesn't support X11 windows, it only supports X11 screens, which means you would have to create a new screen manually for each window.
I wonder how this would pair with a VR mod. It doesn't seem like Vivecraft supports the version this was posted for at the moment, but if they had the ability to play nice that seems like it would would be a fun way to experience software.
Yes, but part of the fun is doing it in Minecraft and using Minecraft's language for it (e.g. putting windows in your inventory, pulling them out of chests, etc)
This is amazing. And it's all done in 8 KLOC – half of it Java, half of it Rust.
Link to source: https://github.com/EVV1E/waylandcraft
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I can't wait to have windowing bugs and UI issues but in Minecraft!
Jokes aside, I've grown to love "XYZ in Minecraft". It's like a newer (still 2011 was a long time ago!) version of "Doom on XYZ".
My humble addition is an Alacritty-based terminal emulator in Minecraft, not particularly ready for release to the public
https://anvil.fangorn.io/fangorn/huorn-minecraft
I haven't used Linux desktop in 6 years but I remember when Wayland was new and started replacing X about 15 years ago and these were common complaints... I hope this is a joke and still isn't the case!
I've been using Wayland for some years (at least since Debian switched to it as their default) and not had any issues with it. I think complaints were more common about X, and Wayland has resolved a lot of it for the average user. For example my switch to Wayland was the first time I had 100% working video playback on Intel iGPUs without tinkering with conf files. I appreciate there are still some edge cases where X11 is still better -- but I think for 95-99% of users Wayland has just worked.
I imagine the 5% of issues are more likely to be related to Linux itself; then they hop back to a BSOD on Windows with forced updates or a buggy "stable" OS update on Mac.
Is is a regular occurrence that students in my lab that use or switch to Wayland still run into problems. Switching back to X11 reliably works as a fix. The sad thing is that there is also no apparent advantage to Wayland, it is just pushed down to us via distributions.
I guess things like HDR support, high bitdepth, per-screen refreshrate/scaling, and all those things are just "no apparant advantage" to you.
Thats okay, just understand that it DOES matter to some people.
what also matters is the actual developers doing the work, which GREATLY prefer wayland
It might matter to some but not to many, and in practice the pain imposed on many others could have been avoided by simply improving X. That developers already like to rewrite things is well known, but nobody should pay for this.
Do you want the indisputable advantage of Wayland? No dropped frames in the desktop, even at high framerates. Back in 2023 when I was still using X11 dropping frames was par for the curse, no matter the machine, the configuration or the DE. You could only hope to get a fluid presentation when using a full screen program that used DRI unredirection (or DRM or whatever it was called) because... it eschewed X completely. Now, it used to be even worse if you go back many years from that, so there was progress, but there were always these tiny drops impacting fluidity. It also got worse the more loaded the machine was, any task in the background consuming 40% of the machine could make it feel like you were using a 30hz monitor. Or, if you dared to use 120hz it felt more like a stuttery 70hz, even at idle.
That same year I decided to give Wayland my third shot and what you know... it not only was perfectly smooth all the time but it had finally reached a point where I could use it on my HTPC. Less than a year later and it was finally usable on my desktop and laptop, and since then I haven't really looked back.
a great many people use external displays.
besides, even without using that, for the vast vast majority of users, there is no pain, they dont even realized they've switched to wayland, their distributions simply did it.
and people ARE paying a price staying with xorg, theres a reason projects like KDE are very happy about the change.
Well, I can only report from my experience and this is the pain I still see with Wayland but not really with X. If KDE wants to hurt some of their users, this is their decision.
Significantly less so than before, but it's unfortunately still the case. It's also just now getting features that people have been asking for for over a decade, and of course due to the nature of Wayland the implementations of these features are sporadic and inconsistent.
I think the main difference is that there aren't really any deal-breaker kind of bugs any more, and as far as features there are none missing that users care about compared to X11. It's mostly just annoying bugs and the usual "third party" (including KDE) apps looking off in GNOME because the devs can't reach an agreement on some things, users be dammed.
It's not. Wayland has really gotten its shit together in the last 5-ish years. A lot of the desktop ecosystem has matured in the last few years, actually.
I maintain that the Linux desktop in 2021 was actually less usable than it was in 2016. But things have really turned around since then.
I'm not particularly fond of X11 but barely working in 2026 is hardly an endorsement of the whole project.
A good replacement of X11 would have had a well designed local mode that abstracted modern hardware in all configurations and an actually good network protocol.
We're left with a barely-working local mode with awful X11 stuck on top.
And we've moved to it for purely political reasons.
I'd say Wayland was "barely" working in 2021. When I say it works, I mean it works. Screen sharing (finally) works, remote desktop works, ICC profiles, etc etc.
I, for one, like Wayland's design. The problem was that it was incomplete and the implementations were buggy. Well, now the protocol is feature-complete and the implementations are solid.
Wayland is a bunch of amateurs trying to be strict and secure and the end result is everyone opening their own security holes to make it usable. It's working now, mostly.
KDE got some kind of video bridge recently which is an insane workaround for something that should've just worked.
I'm not sure I get your complaint?
You're worried that capturing Wayland screens from X11 applications requires additional software?
How is that a real complaint? The only way this would be possible without additional software is if Wayland itself was just another X11 Version, if Wayland was X12 which is X11 but with protocol changes that break backwards compatibility, you would run into exactly the same problem.
Your standard for something being insane is that it is not 100% identical to X11.
I'm impressed by the coding skill to achieve a seamless integration and "usability".
But other than a demo "because we can" I'm confused on what this could ever be useful for. AR/VR prototyping? Virtual showroom?
Or maybe for an online presentation? Stream a video of playing Minecraft and get fancy slide transitions? "let's go to the next slide" and "now we enter dangerous territory".. "over here I can show you how this program looks like in real life"
This is a “because I can” type of project.
Could have an office Minecraft world with a seminar room instead of Teams?
Minecraft is becoming DOOM in terms of crazy technical feats.
I love it.
Interestingly they're opposites really, people try to run DOOM on anything, while they try to run anything in Minecraft.
This is closer to PSDoom:
https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/chi/chi.html
Becoming? crazy stuff has been done in Minecraft for the longest time. Someone built a functional CPU and computer in Minecraft in 2010.
I agree: running simulated computers inside of Minecraft is a significantly more impressive technical feat than bolting on display surfaces to planes with a mod.
There's a big difference between something being compiled to run inside of Minecraft, versus running a sidecar that streams back a display. It's the difference between compiling and running on your machine, and streaming back a cloud machine using RDP.
Not like this makes a difference to users, who don't know how any of this works. But we are on Hacker News...
Just because someone has done a more impressive project in Minecraft doesn't mean this one isn't interesting
People not only built a functional computer in Minecraft, people have run Minecraft on that functional computer in Minecraft. Extremely slowly, obviously, but it did technically work.
Now if only someone could make doom run on Minecraft, that would be the ultimate flex.
Pretty sure this has been accomplished on redstone. It was definitely a demake and sped up >10000x not realtime but I believe it was done.
Finally, I can escape to paradise and work remote.
If its not written with blocks its not real.
"In Minecraft" doesn't mean what it used to. When somebody wrote an 8-bit CPU literally "in Minecraft" it used to be badass. Now it's just a game addon.
There are multiple ways that something can be "in minecraft"
It was more fun when people implemented gates. :)
Can't they just compete in separate categories? People have been making high-level computer mods years before even ComputerCraft, RedPower, or OpenComputers existed. And people will continue to make pure-redstone computers far into the future. Neither category is replacing the other :)
You speak as if this isn't neat in its own way.
Is Minecraft dethroning Emacs as the new weird OS that can do everything but probably shouldn't? Can I check my email in minecraft yet?
With this compositor I’d think it could do anything at this point.
For the real emacs experience you could use this mod to render an IDE in Minecraft editing the mod that renders the IDE.
emaception.....
Emacs can do everything and probably should though
If it handles text, it is in the realm of things you can reasonably prefer to do in emacs
you can open the web browser in that mod, so yes you can
Not sure why people praise Minecraft for this. This is huge feat of Wayland, and was possible because devs took time to consider use cases outside of current norm, and why it took so long to migrate the ecosystem. People liked to bitch about the "Gnome blocking/not implementing essential protocols" part, but even that partially made this possible
Is there any reason that you couldn't implement this on Xorg?
absolutely not.
a very near example would be immersed vr which is compatible with xorg and does essentially the same thing (2d windows pasted all over a 3d world), although not integrated into minecraft. also since their solution isn't wayland-centric it has ports to osx and windows.
wayland deserves credit but not for this concept.
https://github.com/augustoicaro/Immersed-Linux-Virtual-Monit...
>If you're reading this, you're likely in the same boat as me. You've discovered that Immersed can create virtual monitors for Windows and Mac, but on Linux, this feature is marked as "unsupported" on X11. This means you can't create virtual monitors directly through the Immersed agent. For now, the known workaround is to manually set up virtual monitors. If you use Wayland, now immersed offer support for native virtual displays on the Immersed agent on gnome Wayland. You can access this options in Immersed client menu -> Setting -> Configure virtual displays. Other Wayland DE/Compositors are not supported, but there are ways to create virtual monitors manually as we do on X11, please check the linux-help channel in the Discord server for more info.
Basically immersed vr doesn't support X11 windows, it only supports X11 screens, which means you would have to create a new screen manually for each window.
xserver only takes about 10 lines of code, that doesnt sound as impressive as 8,000
I wonder how this would pair with a VR mod. It doesn't seem like Vivecraft supports the version this was posted for at the moment, but if they had the ability to play nice that seems like it would would be a fun way to experience software.
There are already VR overlay applications that do this on top of any game, not just Minecraft.
Yes, but part of the fun is doing it in Minecraft and using Minecraft's language for it (e.g. putting windows in your inventory, pulling them out of chests, etc)
A friend sent this to me yesterday - I was very disappointed that the video didn't show off Minecraft in Minecraft.
It is minecraft, even if you open Minecraft it will not work.
Video demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTkEM7b0IQw
I was hoping Wayland pixels would be Minecraft blocks, so you could make gigantic Wayland screens, or use one block as a 1x1 pixel Wayland screen.
Finally
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