Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager

3/16/2026 at 7:08:17 AM

I don't get the frustration with wayland (the protocol) in the comments. This project shows that having a separate window manager was always possible. First we got wlroots as a library that did most of the heavy lifting, and now we got river as an even higher level abstraction.

Sure I agree that wayland (the project) could have provided these abstractions much earlier. But anyone else could have done it, too. We get all of this for free, so we shouldn't complain if other people don't do the work that we could do just as well.

by ximm

3/16/2026 at 10:18:57 AM

> I don't get the frustration with wayland (the protocol) in the comments.

They took a firm principled stance against screenshots to start with, which set them up for the COVID WFH wave. Then we've got this questionable design that seems hard to make accessible since accessibility is a security risk and we're heading right into Agentic AI which will be interesting. I've been avoiding the Wayland ecosystem for as long as I can after the initial burn and it'll be curious to see how well it supports bringing in new AI tooling. Maybe quite well, I gather that Pipewire is taking over the parts of the ecosystem that Wayland left for someone else and maybe the community has grown to the point where it has overcome the poor design of Wayland's security model by routing around it.

My guess is the frustration is coming from a similar perspective because it is a bit scary seeing Wayland getting picked up everywhere as a default and the evidence to date is they don't really consider a user-friendly system as a core design outcome. Realistically Wayland is 2 steps forward even if there is a step back here or there. The OSS world has never been defined by a clean and well designed graphics stack.

by roenxi

3/16/2026 at 3:19:51 PM

> Then we've got this questionable design that seems hard to make accessible

I'm not a fan of ADA ambulance chasers on principle, but I wouldn't shed a tear see them be able to go after the bigcos that made this mess (e.g. IBM).

by kps

3/16/2026 at 3:23:59 PM

ADA seems like bullshit until something happens that costs you sight, hearing, manual dexterity, etc. Then it is significantly less funny overall, I assure you.

by salawat

3/16/2026 at 12:25:58 PM

I'm not sure I get the link between being against screenshots and working from home during COVID ?

by stuaxo

3/16/2026 at 1:08:02 PM

[dead]

by paulryanrogers

3/16/2026 at 11:01:11 AM

I think wayland is OK as a user. But Wayland is just not really that UNIX.

As ordinary user, I actually don't care about any of this. However, from another perspective, I think this is a bad thing—open source projects have become product-centered, defaulting to the assumption that users are ignorant fools. This isn't how community projects should behave, but those projects is not that community-driven anyway.

After all, for a long time, so-called security has only been a misused justification—never letting users make mistakes is just a pretty excuse, meant to keep users from being able to easily access something, and eventually from ever accessing it at all.

by evolighting

3/16/2026 at 12:44:29 PM

Mostly agree, but X11 does not fit well into the unix model either.

by allreduce

3/16/2026 at 1:33:28 PM

First they said we couldn’t have screenshots because they were insecure. Then they added them back in.

Next, it was accessibility APIs and I guess copy paste is still flaky.

Now, it’s window managers.

What’s next, Remote Desktop?

The whole reason given for wayland’s replacement of x11 was that those things are all fundamentally bad ideas.

It’s been 15 years. Linux desktops are more fragmented than ever, and they’re still going forward with mass deletion of legacy x11 applications.

The only benefits to end users are things like HDR, or backporting a compositor feature or two, which X11 could easily be extended to support.

Instead we get two decades of the digital equivalent of book burning for reasons no one understands.

by hedora

3/16/2026 at 7:54:34 PM

Color management (not just HDR which needs it) was also an afterthought. Calibration is still an issue.

> for reasons no one understands

Reasons are sadly typical for FOSS: from the start the devs were focused on their favorite use cases with no communication with end users to figure out theirs.

by orbital-decay

3/16/2026 at 2:37:42 PM

> like HDR

And variable refresh rate, better fractional scaling (and per-monitor scaling), atomic updates, native touch & gestures. And the isolation/sandboxing is important. The problem is Wayland didn't have portals in the beginning (hence the screenshot issue).

Wayland isn't the problem. The pace at which distros (and GNOME, lets be real who is behind the push here) started stripping out X11 was too fast, and too early.

by thewebguyd