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this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2026
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Unrelated to your question but why do people hate Wayland?
It was not truly ready for end users until the latest years but was shipped despite. It also broke some kinds (I mean a lot of) software, I cannot imagine how many lines of code had to be rewritten because of Wayland. And it also lacks screensavers. And is more resource-demanding.
Wayland wants to avoid problems that X11, Windows, and MacOS have. It deliberately avoids some "features" that application developers expect. A lot of it relates to security and privacy.
An example is that a window does not know where it is positioned on your screen and it cannot choose where to place its windows. Personally, I love this behavior. It means I can open an open and it opens in a consistent location (for most Wayland compositors, that's centered on the screen). But others don't like that. They would like the app to control where it opens; for some apps (a niche nowadays) you may have an application window and multiple more supporting windows, but on Wayland, they would all just get opened on top of each other rather than being placed around the main window.
Second System Syndrome otherwise know as 'throwing the baby out with the bath water'.
X11 is old, extraordinarily old for software. As such, the problems it solves are not really problems anymore.
Rather than gradually evolving X11, into say X12, the whole thing got dumped on the trash pile and a brand new entirely incompatible thing called Wayland was started from scratch.
Replacing software with literally hundreds (if not thousands) of person-years of development devoted to it over it's lifetime is hard. Which meant that Wayland had an unfeasibly steep hill to climb, as such it's early days were tumultuous and it got a bit of a bad rap.
There is far more (qualitative and quantitative) history than will fit into this ~~margin~~ comment.
Well the other side of that is managing software with hundreds (if not thousands) of person-years of development over it's lifetime is also hard. There is a sunken cost fallacy with X11, and X11 was constantly extended to be what people needed it to be rather than the best design for the problems arising.
Having said that, I'm not sure Wayland is the ideal solution. X11 doesn't get in the way of solutions to problems, while Wayland really does. We needed a new and modern display server, but the Wayland project has decided to make that quite restricted - I personally think the security model is too far in the other direction from X11.