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A critical retrospective on Wayland after 17 years of development, arguing it has been a misallocation of resources that set the Linux desktop back. Key criticisms include: security restrictions that break common workflows (screen recording, copy-paste), unproven performance gains, fragmented protocol implementations leaving basic features like drag-and-drop in beta, and premature forced adoption by KDE and Red Hat before the ecosystem is ready. The author contrasts Wayland's slow 40-50% adoption over 17 years with PipeWire's near-complete audio replacement in ~8 years. Predictions include projects reverting to X11 and a new display protocol eventually displacing both.

Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years

The question is not whether Wayland is good or bad, the question is why people dropping X11 for Wayland? …and you have your answer to your question, it’s because X11 is stuck in the mud for the last two decades, full of security vulnerabilities and not really moving forward in any meaningful way.
And this happened because there were no other alternatives to X11 for a very long time, but if you want Linux to succeed on the desktop, you will want modern, performant, secure building blocks.
The author of the article is just frustrated that people decided to side-step X11s gatekeeping and chose an alternative.
Also, the title is clickbait.

<blockquote>
can’t copy-paste, and I can’t see window previews unless everything implements a specific extension to the core protocol.
</blockquote>
Lie and lie. I have sway and I can do both those things without issues
Only thing I discovered I’m not allowed is root GUI and I actually want this security fix

I’ve been using Wayland exclusively since 2020, and it works just fine.
I don’t miss X11, and honestly I really don’t get these X11 die-hards.

I totally get the frustration here, and it’s wild that in 2026 we’re still dealing with friction in basic stuff like the clipboard or screen sharing, but this take seems to skip over a few architectural realities that make X11 a literal dead end.
While the author mentions that Wayland’s threat model is baffling, the reality is that ‘security’ isn’t just paranoia. It’s about fundamental process isolation. In an X11 environment, any binary you run can execute an <code>XQueryPointer</code> or an <code>XGetImage</code> and grab your entire screen or log every keystroke without asking for permission. This means that in a world of Flatpaks and containers, X11’s ‘shared memory for everyone’ design has become a total sieve. Consequently, those OBS segfaults he’s seeing aren’t necessarily Wayland’s fault per se, but rather a byproduct of the transition to PipeWire and XDG-Portals. It’s a painful migration, for sure, but it’s the only way to have a modern desktop where a calculator app can’t scrape your browser passwords.
Furthermore, it’s important to recognize that X11 is essentially a zombie kept alive by pure momentum. Although the post argues that X11 has 40 years of ‘fixed bugs’, the truth is that it isn’t a healthy codebase anymore; it’s a pile of extensions like XRender and RandR duct-taped over a core that almost nobody alive fully understands. Devs didn’t jump ship to Wayland because they wanted a ‘new toy’, they left because maintaining the X server has become a nightmare. In fact, most modern drivers are now written for Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) and GBM, which Wayland uses natively, whereas X11 has to perform architectural gymnastics just to keep up with how modern hardware actually works.
Regarding the comparison to PipeWire, we are really looking at apples and oranges. PipeWire blew up quickly because it was able to emulate PulseAudio and JACK perfectly from day one, but Wayland can’t transparently emulate X11 for everything because their philosophies are polar opposites. Honestly, the success of XWayland is the only reason the Linux desktop stayed viable during this transition; without it, the migration would have tanked a decade ago.
Looking toward 2030, this is where I have to disagree most strongly with the author’s predictions. There is currently zero new development happening on X11, and since NVIDIA has finally caved on the standards and Valve has proven that Gamescope is more efficient for gaming, there’s no turning back. My bet is that we aren’t going back to X11, nor will there be a ‘third protocol’. Instead, libwayland will eventually become invisible as toolkits like GTK5 and Qt7 abstract everything so well that the average user won’t even know what’s running under the hood. Ultimately, while Wayland’s governance has been a fragmented mess, it remains the only infrastructure we have to keep the Linux desktop from being stuck in 1995.