Between that and the uutils-coreutils, Ubuntu 25.10 sounds like it'll be an interesting experience for users, especially those with accessibility and internationalisation needs.
I fully agree with you on the accessibility front. It's not even good on X11, but it's unusable on Wayland, from what I understand :( Accessibility on Linux needs a massive funding and development initiative, and it needed to be done a long time ago.
But uutils is pretty solid. I've swapped out my GNU coreutils entirely (on Arch, not Ubuntu, because I value my time too much to be troubleshooting broken snaps) and haven't run into any issues. I think people are underestimating how close the compatibility already is. I'm sure something I use at some point will try to invoke an option that doesn't exist in the uutils version, but it's been solid for me so far.
It’s not the viability of the rust replacement of uutils that is the core of my issue. My issue is that mature code that has been tested, audited, and is stable has been removed for no viable reason other than it could have bugs.
It's not for no viable reason. Rust is just safer than C. There absolutely are bugs with GNU coreutils, so it's not even a hypothetical like you implied. But beyond safety, some of the Rust equivalents are more performant than their C counterparts.
And uutils is already heavily tested against the GNU coreutils. It's not some fly-by-night rewrite that people aren't serious about. I don't know if it's been formally audited yet, but it absolutely will be when companies like Canonical (and hopefully SUSE and Red Hat, one day) want to start shipping them.
Well, they do recommend using LTS releases and the specifically change stuff more drastically on the release before the next LTS release.
Yeah, I think the fact that the next LTS will be 26.04 is the driver here, I just get the impression that things might get a little rocky and that they might've been better off had the next LTS been further into the future.
But it'll be a real smoke test release, at least. Hopefully they have enough resources to fix the issues that are uncovered, and don't wind up reverting for the LTS, or with a crummy LTS.
wait, we will lose xEyes?
No, thanks to XWayland.
but it doesn’t work perfectly, xeyes through XWayland only follows your cursor if it’s hovering another XWayland window
which makes it a fun way to see which apps use XWayland tho!
KDE has you covered. Someone made an applet that works on Wayland too: https://github.com/luisbocanegra/plasma-cursor-eyes
Hope they're gonna devote the development resources to making it actually work.
While it actually works, there are truly some missing features obviously. The hope is, when lot of major distributions and desktop environments stop supporting X11, then application developers and Wayland developers have to find a solution quicker. This will accelerate development of Wayland, at least the remaining issues.
One area where Wayland needs to improve is support for various accessibility features.
That does feel rther like jumping out of a plane and hoping you can finish making your paracute before it's too late.
The concept of moving on from X11 is a good one, but making Wayland just a protocol that every compositor has to implement separately, and having so many optional larts to the spec seems like a guarantee that the ecosystem around it will never properly mature.
The KiCad developers have a good article about some of the issues with Wayland here.
Oh wow. I am suddenly less excited about our Wayland future.
Damn yeah. Just the window managment issues are a complete no go for any productive work.
This is big "if we break your old toys, you'll HAVE to play with the new ones" energy.
Tell me when they port FVWM. Seriously. FvwmButtons-- a pretty trivial dock except it can swallow other windows-- seems like it would be out-of-bounds on Wayland unless it was owned by the compositor itself to access the other windows. I don't see any of the new taskbar-tools used with Wayland compositors offering similar functionality (I could be wrong) and that seems an amazing loss of feature parity.
In what way does it not work?
Remote desktop support is buggy on gnome and nearly non-existant on other DE's, which speaks to how poor a job wayland does at managing functions between DE's, where each individual DE has to build their own solution for basic functions, further fragmenting development efforts.
Then there's accessibility functions, which wayland breaks almost by design by denying apps access to each other. Even something as simple as an on screen keyboard becomes nearly impossible to implement.
Any software thats being pushed to users as the "main" experience, should not break things as common and fundemental as remote desktop or onscreen keyboards. Great way to drive away potential users switching from windows 10.
I've been using remote desktop for work daily on wayland (kde) for the last 3 or 4 years... I have no idea what "buggy support" you are refering to
Then there’s accessibility functions, which wayland breaks almost by design by denying apps access to each other. Even something as simple as an on screen keyboard becomes nearly impossible to implement.
That's a side effect of just dumping everything into X11, once you switch from it you lose all the random kitchen sink warts it grew over the years.
Like an on-screen keyboard shouldn't be fiddling with a display protocol to fake keyboard inputs, it should be using the actual OS input layer to emulate them (So then it'd work with devices that read input directly and not go via X11). Same with accessibility, there's a reason other OSs use separate communication channels with their own protocol.
"i don't care about that. Hhit was working and now it's not" - the users
I think it boils down to trade offs.
The major benefit to Wayland is that it has less overhead since apps talk directly to the desktop. Having desktops implement the protocols instead of relying on a external project means that the user experience is cleaner.
For smaller projects like window managers there are libraries that implement the core protocols. This allows for the minimal window managers Linux traditionally had as an option.
I won't argue that Wayland has issues with remote desktop. The problem currently is that it has to be implemented as a custom non standardized solution by every desktop. I don't think that there are any portals for doing session management which is unfortunate.
From a accessibility perspective I believe that has already been addressed.
I also don't see any reason to try to "market" Linux. Windows 11 is the successor to Windows 10. It isn't that bad compared to ever other version of Windows.
I guess we will see. Tiling WM on Wayland was, at my last check, totally limited to sway. As a dwm guy Wayland has yet to give me what I need.
Have you tried dwl?
I have not, I wasn't aware it existed until right now.
Sessions don't resume properly after sleep. Tools like Barrier don't fully work. Wayland is fine, but it's just not mature.
Ctrl+Shift+V in KeePassXC should autotype username and password in another window, but I believe is still broken out of the box on Wayland.
There may be some workaround that I haven't tried yet.
Here we are YEARS later and OpenBoard is STILL broken.
No, I don't want a fully contained, separate whiteboard application - As a teacher, I need to be able to DIRECTLY DRAW ON THE DESKTOP. Until this is a fully supported feature that software can implement, Wayland is completely broken for me.
Drawing directly on the desktop is a native feature of KDE Plasma. :)
How is wayland nvidia gaming at the moment?
Several months ago I tried gaming on wayland with nvidia and it was completely broken for me.
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