The video highlights significant shortcomings and inherent design limitations of Wayland that negatively impact applications like KiCad and KeePassXC, leading to degraded user experience, security concerns, and fragmented support across desktop environments. It urges users and Linux distributions to continue supporting X11 until Wayland matures, cautioning against premature adoption that compromises stability, functionality, and security.
The video discusses the ongoing challenges and limitations of Wayland, the modern display server protocol intended to replace X11 on Linux systems. It centers around a recent blog post by the KiCad development team, an open-source electronic design software, which highlights significant issues with Wayland support in their application. Despite Fedora and Ubuntu planning to drop X11 support in favor of Wayland, KiCad developers report that Wayland’s current state results in a degraded user experience due to fundamental protocol limitations and inconsistent implementations across different desktop environments. These issues include window management problems, input handling difficulties, performance instability, graphical glitches, and unreliable clipboard functionality, all of which are beyond the developers’ ability to fix at the application level.
The video emphasizes that these problems are not bugs to be patched but are inherent design choices in Wayland, which omits certain functionalities that X11 and other operating systems have supported for decades, such as precise window positioning and cursor warping. The fragmentation of Wayland protocols among various compositors like GNOME and KDE further complicates development, making it unsustainable for application developers to maintain compatibility across all environments. As a result, KiCad has chosen to prioritize development on X11, recommending users who need a reliable and full-featured experience to stick with X11-based desktop environments and avoid Wayland for professional use.
The discussion extends to other applications, such as the popular password manager KeePassXC, which also faces significant limitations on Wayland. Features like autotyping passwords into other applications are not supported natively on Wayland due to the lack of a standardized protocol. Workarounds involve complex setups and introduce serious security vulnerabilities by requiring access to low-level input devices, which undermines Wayland’s touted security benefits. This situation illustrates a broader problem where the absence of essential features forces users to adopt insecure practices or abandon Wayland altogether.
Security concerns are a major theme in the video, highlighting that while Wayland aims to improve security, the lack of necessary APIs forces users into risky workarounds that can compromise system integrity, especially on multi-user systems. The video argues that forcing users to switch to Wayland prematurely, before these fundamental issues are resolved, risks degrading the overall Linux desktop experience and alienating users who rely on stable, secure workflows. The author expresses frustration with distributions like Fedora and Ubuntu moving to Wayland-only configurations, particularly for long-term support releases, which may leave many users with a subpar and potentially insecure environment.
In conclusion, the video takes a pragmatic stance, acknowledging that Wayland has potential and will improve over time but is not yet ready to fully replace X11 for all users. It praises developers like those of KiCad for prioritizing user productivity and stability over adopting new technologies prematurely. The video encourages users to remain on X11 where possible and calls on the Linux community and distributions to reconsider dropping X11 support until Wayland matures. The overall message is a caution against rushing the transition to Wayland, emphasizing the importance of maintaining a reliable and secure user experience on Linux desktops.