Ubuntu Joins the Movement: X11 Officially Being Phased Out
Ubuntu Joins the Movement: X11 Officially Being Phased Out
Ubuntu 25.10 "Questing Quokka" removes Xorg-based sessions, fully embracing Wayland as the new default for GNOME.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
EDIT: Two days on wayland nvidia now, both gaming and using NVENC in OBS. It's been amazing.
I've got an nvidia card and I've personally got no complaints about Wayland! been using it for some time to much success, I feel like x11 is just 'off' in comparison.
I've been gaming with a 2080ti in Wayland for about a year now. I can't say I've had any issues related to my graphics card at all. The only hiccups I've had are with a couple of games, maybe two, that I had to tweak to run. They were known issues with public fixes. It's been a great experience.
There was an issue a few months back with multi monitor setups. Anytime I changed a monitor input, it would hard lock. It's fixed now.
Several months ago I had a similar experience. Even just running plasma with Wayland+Nvidia was enough to cause problems.
This was my experience. I could barely even get my machine to run.
Depends on the desktop environment in my experience. On Fedora Gnome it was an unstable mess with my Nvidia RTX card but Fedora KDE Plasma has been stable.
It was mainly on Nobara but I guess my negative experience also followed me from troubles in debian early 2024.
Games worked for me on Kubuntu, but a lot of other things were seriously broken. Compositor/Desktop effects did not work at all, weird screen artifacts, Taskbar crashes, Discord lags terribly and has display problems. I don't know, if that is going to be the new Desktop experience, we're gonna have a problem.
It works just fine for me on my RTX 3060 Ti. No significant performance decrease or stuttering at all (except in Cities Skylines II but that's not Wayland's fault)