KiCad and Wayland Support

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

KiCad’s stance and reactions

  • KiCad’s blog says essential features for its workflows (window positioning, cursor warping, multi-window coordination) are missing or unreliable under Wayland; they won’t debug Wayland-specific bugs and recommend X11.
  • Many commenters sympathize: cross‑platform GUI work is already hard, and Wayland adds platform‑specific complexity and regressions, especially for complex multi-window tools like CAD/EDA.

Wayland design: security vs capabilities

  • Wayland intentionally hides global window state and input from clients to prevent keylogging, clickjacking, and focus stealing.
  • This breaks long‑standing patterns: apps can’t freely position windows, read window coordinates, or warp the pointer; screen capture and synthetic input require special protocols and often user prompts.
  • Some argue this is the right long‑term security/UX direction and such behaviors were “broken by design” in X11; others say many legitimate workflows (multi-window tools, automation, accessibility, text expanders, screen recorders) are collateral damage.

Protocols, fragmentation, and compositor behavior

  • Wayland is “just a protocol”; behaviors live in many compositors (GNOME, KDE, wlroots-based, etc.) plus a growing pile of extensions (screen capture, toplevel-drag, window restore, new pointer-warp, color management, HDR).
  • Critics say this has produced fragmentation: features exist only on some compositors, in “staging” protocols, or behind non‑standard extensions; app authors must detect compositor capabilities and branch code.
  • GNOME is repeatedly called out as resisting or delaying certain extensions (window positioning, richer APIs), which then discourages app developers from investing in Wayland support.

X11, Xwayland, and the “next system”

  • Several see X11 as ugly but proven and fixable; others insist X.org is effectively unmaintainable and can’t realistically be modernized for DPI, VRR, HDR, color management, etc.
  • Xwayland is widely viewed as the practical bridge: most X apps “just work” under Wayland via Xwayland, though edge cases (e.g., KiCad’s cross-window cursor warping, remote X forwarding) still fail.
  • Some predict a third system or a cleaned‑up X (e.g., XLibre) may eventually displace both; others think Wayland will slowly accrete the missing 5–15% of desktop features.

User experience split

  • Positive reports: smoother rendering, fewer glitches, better HiDPI and gestures, less tearing; many users say their whole desktop (plus Xwayland apps) is stable.
  • Negative reports: broken input, shortcuts, multi‑monitor quirks, theming, accessibility, and professional workflows; some tried Wayland repeatedly over years and always had to revert to X11.