Wayland is growing up. and now we don't have a choice

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

XLibre, politics, and HN moderation

  • XLibre (a fork of Xorg) is discussed as an attempted continuation of X11 development after the main Xorg maintainers largely moved on to Wayland.
  • Several comments describe the fork’s lead as controversial, with a history of problematic patches and inflammatory political messaging (e.g. slogans in the README), which many say is poisoning the project’s reception.
  • Others strongly dispute the “bad patches” narrative, framing the situation as corporate capture (Red Hat/IBM etc.), DEI politics, and deliberate attempts to kill X11 and smear the fork’s author.
  • HN users clarify that XLibre is not “banned” on the site; previous submissions were flagged by users for low substance and drama, not removed by moderators as policy.

Wayland vs X11: design, maturity, and missing pieces

  • Some see Wayland as “second-system effect”: simplistic core, many critical features (DMA/DRM integration, color management, scaling, screen capture, input quirks) added later as fragmented, often-staging extensions with uneven compositor support.
  • Others counter that X11’s networked, server-side drawing model is fundamentally mismatched to modern GPUs, and that “fixing X” would effectively mean designing a new protocol anyway.
  • There’s disagreement on whether Wayland meaningfully improves latency/tearing and whether compositors are sufficiently compatible and secure.

Nvidia and distros

  • Multiple users report Wayland + Nvidia failures (black screens, broken installs) on Debian; others say Wayland works fine with Nvidia on Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, and Tumbleweed.
  • One theme: Debian’s older packages lag Wayland/Nvidia improvements, so judging current Wayland support from Debian stable is seen as misleading by some but “stability over novelty” by others.

Accessibility concerns

  • The original article’s point is echoed: only GNOME has halfway-usable accessibility on Wayland today; other desktops lag badly.
  • Orca support on GNOME Wayland currently goes via a D-Bus protocol rather than a Wayland-native one, justified by GNOME devs as a sandboxing/security decision. Some see this as pragmatic; others think accessibility should be first-class in Wayland, not a side-band.
  • Disabled users describe facing ~100 hours of migration work (hotkeys, OCR workflows, gamma, magnification, Orca) and feeling treated as “edge cases” in a forced transition.

Xlib applications and XWayland

  • Developers relying on raw Xlib ask what happens under Wayland. Responses: standalone Xorg may fade, but XWayland will remain and can act as an X11 compatibility layer for some time.
  • There’s interest in leaner X servers or XWayland variants that modernize internals without full Wayland buy-in.

Remote desktop

  • A missing “grown-up” feature cited for Wayland: multi-user, fully in-memory accelerated remote desktop (Xrdp-style), not just screen sharing. Existing efforts (e.g., FreeRDP-based) are seen as immature.