Can I start using Wayland in 2026?

Summary

Table of contents Wayland is the successor to the X server (X11, Xorg) to implement the graphics stack on Linux. The Wayland project was actually started in 2008, a year before I created the i3 tiling window manager for X11 in 2009 — but for the last 18 years (!), Wayland was never usable on my computers. I don’t want to be stuck on deprecated software, so I try to start using Wayland each year, and this articles outlines what keeps me from migrating to Wayland in 2026. Historical context For the first few years, Wayland rarely even started on my machines. When I was lucky enough for something to show up, I could start some toy demo apps in the demo compositor Weston. Around 2014, GNOME started supporting Wayland. KDE followed a few years later. Major applications (like Firefox, Chrome or Emacs) have been slower to adopt Wayland and needed users to opt into experimental implementations via custom flags or environment variables, until very recently, or — in some cases, like geeqie — still as of today. Unfortunately, the driver support situation remained poor for many years. With nVidia graphics cards, which are the only cards that support my 8K monitor, Wayland would either not work at all or exhibit heavy graphics glitches and crashes. In the 2020s, more and more distributions announced looking to switch to Wayland by default or even drop their X11 sessions, and RHEL is winding down their contributions to the X server. Modern Linux distributions like Asahi Linux (for Macs, with their own GPU driver!) clearly consider Wayland their primary desktop stack, and only support X11 on a best-effort basis. So the pressure to switch to Wayland is mounting! Is it ready now? What’s missing? Making Wayland start Hardware I’m testing with my lab PC, which is a slightly upgraded version of my 2022 high-end Linux PC. I describe my setup in more details in stapelberg uses this: my 2020 desk setup. Most importantly for this article, I use a Dell 8K 32" monitor (resolution: 7680x4320!...