> Who is forced to use it? Just use X11, as you said (many times) you do already.

This is my understanding of his actual concern - Linux corps are pushing Wayland as a replacement for X11 when it is full of issues.

Anecdotally my experience was the same. I'm a dev so I'm fine in a terminal, but trying to switch to KDE actually sent me BACK to Windows. Basic windowing stuff just does not work, and like the OP says, tons of stutters and crashes for a simple 2-monitor setup. Even something as simple as alt-tabbing lagged for seconds on an overpowered machine. Just does not feel like polished software which is a huge reputational risk for Linux right now.

> I don't understand the complaints about Wayland.

The last time a distro tried to sell me on it, it left me unable to drag/drop browser tabs to reorder them (a fundamental part of my daily workflow). Thankfully, Mint still has the option to use X11 so reverting was trivial. That won't always be the case because...

> Who is forced to use it? Just use X11, as you said (many times) you do already.

Which, like avoiding systemd, is becoming increasingly difficult as distributions prematurely switch. Like when some Linux distros made KDE4 the default (~20 years ago) before most graphics cards could actually handle KDE4's requirements. Switching distros after years, even decades, of use is not as trivial as distro-hoppers who swap out their distro every three weeks might like to think. Lots of know-how and muscle memory gets lost in the transition, both of which have to be rebuilt.

> Who is forced to use it? Just use X11, as you said (many times) you do already.

I can no longer use GNOME on X11, and the decision to remove support was a deliberate one. Users are definitely being forced.

> I actually think it's nice to have both

Options that are equivalent enough for most end users just cause confusion. There are also too many distros, and the Gnome vs. KDE competition set desktop Linux back another 10 years. That's three dimensions of big, important choices with not much downside if you pick the happy path and a whole lot of downside if you don't.

> Who is forced to use it? Just use X11, as you said (many times) you do already.

Recent versions of gnome session are compiled only with wayland support in archlinux. To change DE or distribution or use custom package is quite a stretch to call it's not forced.

> Who is forced to use it?

The people forcing Wayland are also the people who own and are trying to kill Xorg (stated explicitly) and also trying to cancel people who fork or implement their own X11. So yes, they are actively trying to prevent people from using X11

> Doesn't sound like a super informed way to look at security (not even mentioning that Wayland was started in 2008, and Rust was not a thing). One can also say that "as long as you run X11, there is no need to think about security because X11 just defeats it all".

Yeah, we're talking about completely different threat models here.

> > I also don't care for the "security" argument when parts of the core reference implementation are written in a memory-unsafe language.

> Doesn't sound like a super informed way to look at security (not even mentioning that Wayland was started in 2008, and Rust was not a thing). One can also say that "as long as you run X11, there is no need to think about security because X11 just defeats it all".

I think the argument is not that X11 defeats it all - but that for 99.9999% of users its security theater when deployed in the real world. Most commonly, as long as processes can read each other's memory/configuration/etc.

I'm sure there is a use-case for untrusted sharing of Wayland enabled GPU rendering or something - though AFAIK none of the enterprise remote desktop use it, and they have the resources to implement it themselves anyway.

I've been running Wayland for two years now. I still hit weird bugs with desktop sharing / obs tinkering; It's just not a critical use for me.

So it's fair to question the design wisdom of adding the complexity and UX pain points if it seems to be worth so little.

But maybe i'm overlooking some large group of people dependent on Wayland security boundaries?

The main problem of Wayland is fragmentation, technical problems could be solved by throwing work at it, but not as long as Wayland is "just a protocol". Designing it as a protocol (and with optional extensions on top!), instead of a traditional centralized implementation was a pretty stupid decision (and not just in hindsight).

Instead of bundling forces to improve a single implementation like it was the case with X11, now everybody and their mother writes their own incomplete implementation of the Wayland protocol, and badly. I don't understand how anybody thinks that this mess is a good thing. At least for X11 on Linux there was a single implementation that contributors could focus on, now the bugs are spread over dozens of projects. If I'd like to sabotage the entire desktop-Linux idea, this is exactly how I would do it ;(

This page linked in the bottom explains a lot:

https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support...

Yeap, it sounds like a big rant with multiple exclamation marks. Having both is a way to go. Recently I purchased a new laptop and thought should I go full Wayland? No way. I started with X11 and then added Wayland. Things break on Linux. You need a stable display server where you can still open a browser, and that is X11. Most of the time, I stay on Wayland until it breaks.

I've used linux desktop environments using Wayland and others using x11. No real problems with either.

Let's instead get excited by all the new linux users coming in thanks to SteamOS and Valve. If the trend continues, we might start seeing larger software companies releasing native linux versions of their software -- and then, the year of the linux desktop will start becoming an actual possibility!

(I heard affinity suite is linux friendly now btw, and davinci resolve too -- not sure if proton is necessary or not, but either way, really cool)

for me it's just utilities that don't work workrave, activity watch, flameshot, polybar. (waybar is not as polished) automating stuff with xdotool. There is no way to get the current window focused. Even on windows there is a simple api to get that

I won't accept that "nobody was forced." Major mainstream desktops either already have or are very shortly dropping X11 entirely.

Microsoft is correctly being called out for forcing people onto Windows 11, even though it's entirely possible for users to remain on 10 with workarounds.

Gnome is forcing people onto Wayland, that you can stop using Gnome or choose to use an outdated OS doesn't really change that for me. I guess if you don't want to say they're being forced onto Wayland, they are definitely being forced to change their display setup: use Wayland, or don't use Gnome, starting with Ubuntu 26.04 next month.

"Who is forced to use it" is an extremely dated argument strategy that has absolutely no place whatsoever in modern computing. Linux is far too ubiquitous for such a notion to be taken seriously. It's not far from "who is forced to use Macs instead of Windows."

> Who is forced to use it?

Anyone who wants to continue using a modern, actively-developed desktop environment. GNOME has dropped X11; KDE has announced the transition. I would consider being told "use Wayland, or find a different desktop environment" being forced, even though nobody has actually put a gun to my head.

I have managed to make Wayland work for me, but only by patching away the hardcoded gestures. I also developed a means to start and stop XScreenSaver, although that is thankfully now obsolete thanks to some work by JWZ. Just yesterday I still had issues with an entire window of text gibbering up and down in VSCode at a certain scaling level (used to have that in Firefox, as well, but it was evidently fixed).

To put a positive conspiratorial spin on the recent Wayland push: maybe they think that taking away the option to fall back to X11 will finally get enough eyes on Wayland to fix its remaining issues.

It's pretty funny to see "copy/paste works" and "drag and drop works" presented like some kind of win. That's the absolute baseline for a desktop OS.. since at least Windows 3.x. Windows, bloated and ad-riddled as it is now, never had to be defended on the basis that basic GUI behavior still functioned. But this year surely will be the year of the Linux desktop!

Yes! Per-monitor fractional scaling on Fedora/Wayland finally allowed me to switch my default OS on my laptop from Windows 11 to Linux.

I had to give up on my previous attempt a couple years ago with Linux Mint/X11 because it was an exercise in futility trying to make my various apps look acceptable on my mixed DPI monitor setup.

Linux Mint with Wayland clearly was not getting a lot of attention at the time, and the general attitude when I looked up bugs seemed to be "just don't use Wayland", but maybe the situation has improved by now. It was also kinda off-putting reading Reddit/forum comments whose attitude towards per-monitor DPI scaling on Linux in general was basically "why would anyone need that" when it's been a basic Windows feature for a decade+.

Fedora on the other hand was literally just plug-and-play and has been very enjoyable to use as my daily driver.

That's probably just due to the older kernel.

I go back and forth between Fedora and Ubuntu a lot, and once you get past the snap/flatpak and the apt/dnf differences everything feels the same.

I usually format my Fedora disk ext4, add flatpak to my Ubuntu installs, manually override the fonts, add dash-to-panel.. the resulting experience ends up identical.

Separate scaling fractions on separate monitors doesn't work under X. Well, I lie: it does work under zaphod mode, but no applications other than Emacs support that.

You don't even need fedora - clean arch install, install vim gnome and Firefox, and boom your computer now just works.

I moved away from desktop Linux a few years back after getting a new development laptop with a hiDPI screen and running into fractional scaling issues. Windows wsl2 was just getting real good at the time, so I moved over on my desktop and laptop.

Nice to hear fractional scaling situation is better now. Tempted to try it out but.. Man Windows(Pro) is just such a nice desktop and host now, and I can still develop in "linux"..

I am on latest Fedora Gnome, and tab switching between windows randomly stucks. It's so annoying, i had to go back to X11, even if handles badly high dpi laptop; the alternative being to reboot randomoy in the middle of the work

It's really simple, then I have to use GNOME or KDE or any other thing that is on Wayland which I don't use. AwesomeWM, Xmonad, Fluxbox, OpenBox and many other interfaces just aren't on Wayland and have no intention to be because it just doesn't really do well what they want to and they don't feel like maintaining two versions.

The real issue with Wayland and “setting back” isn't what the article says, but just that like 15 years was taken just to get Wayland on semi-decent feature-parity with X11 during which time development on X11 came to a standstill. That time could've been used to improve X11 and it's still not real feature parity.

And part of it was just the devs refusing to believe that people needed those features. I talked with them around 2010-ish and about some of the things they cut out claiming that no one ever used them. These were things related to mouse acceleration that is pretty essential to video games and image editing, certain forms of screen capture, various things with fonts and color management that are essential to many professionals and they actually believed that no one used those things. Eventually they came around and added many of those things back in, in doing so basically making many of the initial security promises complete void again but so much time has been put in what isn't much of an improvement to justify the time spent on it.

I recently had to go through several remote desktop apps before I found one that would work.

I already have stuff that works out of box (based on 24.04 as it happens), and from what I've seen of GNOME Desktop I really just don't like the design — and its maintainers generally just impress me as insufferable people any time a story comes up.

Overall I think it's much better that options exist. I'm even willing to tolerate GUI inconsistency across the Linux ecosystem in exchange.

My experience lately has been similar. Most things work well now.

But, I think the article has some valid points about how long it's taken to get even this far. And it just kinda sucks that some things are still broken or don't have alternatives (the #1 thing I miss right now is Barrier (Synergy) for using my macbook from my linux desktop). HDR gaming on linux is possible thanks to Valve but it's still nowhere near as simple as plugging in your HDR display and toggling one switch.

And it's been rough getting here, and it seems like there are still some things that are slow and hard to get right. I'm not a display protocol dev, so I don't really have educated opinions about the protocol. But I know it's been a rough transition relative to other projects I've adopted even when there was major pushback (systemd springs to mind).

I'll never understand it but Fedora just doesn't work ootb on my Asus laptop or Asus desktop.

Gnome 50 on Ubuntu 26.04 beta has served me okay in testing so far.

Yeah? Then try to drag out a tab of firefox or GNOME files to the upper direction, good luck. Then check how "awful" Blender 5.1 titlebar and window frame integrates to GNOME. Have fun trying to make Deskflow/Synergy working on GDM.

> Wayland flips this to isolation-by-default: explicit portals/APIs for screen capture, input, etc.

The problem is old (and even not so old) apps don't expose those APIs so interactions like UI automation on Wayland is limited, if not impossible. I'd love to grant a specific permission just for selected GUI apps, but I can't because they don't support it.

There's a reason why RPA software on Wayland is limited to web apps inside a browser. Or something extremely janky like taking screenshots of the entire desktop and doing OCR. But then you can't interact with unfocused apps.

> Actual performance depends heavily on compositor + drivers, and I've found that modern hardware has HUGE performance improvements (especially Intel, AMD, and Apple Silicon via the Asahi driver)

Author’s argument is those hardware improvements could have been had for free with X11 upgrades. I’m not saying it’s a complete argument. But talking about architectural wins sounds like conceding the argument.

It reads like a user that tried Wayland again last week, found the same issues and wrote a piece that tried to summarize why they remain sad after 17 years of waiting for Wayland to address its issues.

In my experience I have found the xdg-desktop-portal for whatever reason to be completely non functional on Arch/Hyprland. It must be an issue with my config but on x11 I never had to think about this

This reads like AI/FSD-bro speak: "no, that's all old news, you clearly haven't tried the new cutting edge model/build bro! it's all fixed now!".

> Wayland security

Okay, that's great, but why would I care? If you can implement those security wins transparently in the background, cool. Otherwise, what I care about is being able to take a screenshot, not about some theoretical "security threat" from already vetted programs I run on my machine.

> OBS, clipboard, and screen sharing issues are now mostly (if not entirely) solved in the latest GNOME/KDE.

Oh, the clipboard works mostly correctly now, after some 17 years of development? Could not have come up with a more damning statement. Complete misalignment of priorities.

Same thing with Pulse Audio

People cursed the name for years, because it exposed all of the terrible, glitchy audio hardware drivers and refused on general principle to work around the issues to the degree that previous audio solutions had. And the result was that while the experience was inconsistent and buggy for years, it did eventually drag the Linux audio stack into a better place.

That is fine. X11 needed fresh start. But they also failed to learn any lessons from X, just assuming "if X11 did it it must've been a bad idea, let's do it differently".

X11 did chalk many lines of abstractions in absolutely the right places, it's just the implementation was crufty in places, and just not designed for modern hardware in some other places, while wayland just tried to kick as much as possible to the WM side, making it so instead one place where those things need a bunch of code (the display system/its plugins), now every WM have to repeat that work and (more importantly) add incompatibilities because of that

That really isn't his gripe. In fact near the end he describes would have been a good direction for starting fresh.

His pain is that it's been 17 years and some basic core functionality is either still broken or entirely missing. It's not my expertise so I don't know if it could have been planned any better, but 17 years and _basics_ still being broken doesn't sound great.

Anecdotal evidence: when using X11 years ago I could never avoid screen tearing despite trying various options, except with one option that seemed to replace it with random frame drops. (to be fair that's probably related to my GPU, which is also the reason why I could not use wayland for so long)

Wayland just fixed all that, making it at least usable for multimedia/gaming use with my GPU.

This is true, and it is also true that the maintainers of Wayland have done a terrible job of developing the replacement. It is mostly good enough now to replace X11, but based on what I've seen reported about different features, they frequently let "perfect be the enemy of done" when it comes to implementing critical features. I mean, just look at the drama around remembering the position of a window, its absolutely ridiculous that after years they haven't picked a "good enough" direction and implemented it.

Data point: On my current and previous work laptops (iGPU ThinkPads) I switched from the default Wayland back to X11 because of various bugs (hangs, stutters, resume failures), in X11 they don't happen, seems to work flawlessly.

Sometimes it's worse to live in a mess that is being constantly fixed I guess.

I'm just lurking in the comments with popcorn, but if what you said is true and the maintainers of X decided it was a lost cause and unfixable, well that is the most informed opinion of them all. Nobody knows better then the maintainers. Sure, the replacement might have feature gaps initially but that is a transient issue.

The people behind Plan 9 did a much better job than was done with X11 and that was completely ignored as a path forward from what I can tell.

It’s tiny, secure, graphics subsystem independent (it’ll work on just about anything with or without a GPU, I would expect, given the API is so damn simple) and already designed.

Maybe it wouldn’t work, but I bet it would have.

I believe most of the original committers and maintainers of X are long gone, if still around they could very well be in their late 70s and 80s.

I would agree if you said many of the Wayland Developers people started with Xfee86. But I think the 'complexity' of X has to do with the fact no one of this generation fully understand why X11 did things the way they did, so Wayland was started. That is OK, but here we are.

I think the main issue is proprietary video companies did not to release their specs. I think if the Wayland people told the GPU Companies (like Nvidia) they will not support your hardware unless you release full specs, they would be further along.

OpenBSD is getting along fine without companies like Nvidia, I wish Linux and Wayland would tell these companies their GPUs will never be supported until full documentation is provided.

> They did what they thought was best.

My problem with it is their proxy for "best" seemed to be "opposite of X11." This was not a solid engineering choice, and I think this post is trying to demonstrate, that had costs.

I'd probably be completely fine with Wayland if it didn't have this obsession with military style desktop security. If it was as open as extensible as X11 by default then we all would have switched. X11 isn't pretty to write code for, but when it works, it works exceptionally well. Wayland seems to have made the wrong sacrifices where it mattered most.

> clearly hasn't worked out for reasons that seem self-evident to me.

One reason is that Xwayland exist and works flawlessly for the majority of casual and professional applications. Better than native x11, in my anecdotal experience.

Ditto, same setup.

When I first grabbed my current setup about 2 years ago, the nvidia drivers had all sorts of annoying and painful bugs to work around. However, there were workarounds.

Now, everything mostly just works. The only thing I struggle with is sleep which seems to be permanently broke in the latest nvidia drivers.

Same setup here, minus Nvidia. Love KDE with Wayland. Super stable. Tried Gnome, but switched back. Gnome felt like it was 20 years ago in terms of functions tho UX was still posh.

Of course redhat is indirectly enforcing it, by having people in key roles of the KDE, GNOME,systemd and wayland development, who are making decisions, accepting or blocking ideas and commits. It all goes hand in hand and is mainly driven by the key "Sponsors".

Could the problem be COSMIC? Put differently, why do you assume that the issue is with Wayland rather than the work System76 did to support Wayland?

Because many other DMs and WMs do not have issues with Wayland.

Yeah I'm another pop os user.

Cosmic works great for a laptop. But it's a PITA for a desktop. It doesn't deal with multi monitor setups well. There's a recent new bug where the system hardlocks on monitor power state changes, which is unacceptable.

So: great for single screen laptop, not good for desktop or server

I'm absolutely in exactly the same position (Pop_OS 22.04) and unwilling to upgrade to 24.04. Which I tried for many months on two spare machines - a laptop and a desktop. The difference is quite stark, there are positive things, but it doesn't feel "my" desktop for many reasons. On top the stability is not there yet. At the end of 22.04 road I hope to find something of similar quality, but really don't like to be forced to rely only on Wayland as dependency. One of my critical pieces of software (barrier/deskflow/input leap KVMs) is not working well with Wayland.

I’ve been using COSMIC on a spare laptop, and enjoying it, but I’m stuck on 22.04 until their Iced rebase finishes and have IME working. [1]

Making a new DE plus compositor is a lot of work, but I do hope it works well for the Pop_OS developers.

[1] https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-epoch/issues/2174

I'm on the same boat. I wish I could use COSMIC with X11. I am now looking into installing a different Linux distribution on my System76 laptop.

I recently upgraded to Pop_OS 24.04 because I was sick and tired of being stuck with an outdated base.

But after trying the new Cosmic desktop, I basically ran screaming back to Gnome/X11 (with a couple of extensions to give me the old desktop experience from 22.04).

Once 26.04 drops, along with Cosmic Epoch 2, I may give it another serious try. Or I'll just go to KDE6/Wayland and see how that goes. (I do use KiCad from time to time, so I wonder how usable it'll be on Wayland down the line.)

(For reference, my biggest gripe with Cosmic right now is how it can't seem to figure out how to manage window focus. Modal dialogs can lose focus to their base window, and sometimes become covered by that base window. And focus-follows-mouse hasn't been done right ever. Both have issues written up, I just hope they get attention. Meanwhile, throngs of people seem to "swear" it "works fine for them.")

Did perl5 to perl6 actually happen? I feel like perl mostly fell out of favor along the way.

Not only that, the situation with Wayland also made me kind of afraid of the future of open source because it dawned on me that many of the figureheads in open source are actually simply put mentally unstable and extremely zealous and lack nuance. It didn't occur to me before but look at all the figureheads in free software: Theo de Raadt, Richard Stallman, Ulrich Drepper, Lennart Poettering, Linus Torvalds, Drew Devault. They are all kind of extremely uncompromising people who refuse to listen to reason with many of them even being known for vitriolic Twitter rants.

The issue is that free software is fundamentally a political thing and it seems to attract very political people who treat software like an ideology rather than a product who are out to wage war.

> and having accurate colors in my photo editing apps

Should've stayed in the terminal where the distro wants you to be!

I wasn't alive at the time NeXTSTEP was a thing, but I did look at a demo[0] to figure out what you were talking about (i love building/tinkering with window managers); it just looks like a regular old window manager?

Is there something I'm missing/something specific you're talking about?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf5o5liZxnA

Also, https://www.gnustep.org/

That reminds me, I should pull out my NeXT Cube and play with it. That machine is 33mhz of pure power. :-D None the less I still love it.

We basically have it, it's called Blink (and it's a dumpster fire for unrelated reasons).

Majority of the community does not care about XLibre or its developers. They are free to work on whatever they want, but the ship has sailed and no one is coming back to X11 except some fringe groups which always exist.

Sure, let’s throw some monke- I mean agents in a room and see if they can make something better than X11 and Wayland - each of which has had 10s of thousands of man hours put into them.

Take a look at Arcan, it supports both X11 and Wayland (and I think other protocols too).

https://arcan-fe.com/

If all the developers behind X can’t do it in a decade, what makes you think anyone else can?

Even if someone made something, are they really going to get buy in from all the major players?

It’s Wayland. It’s over.

There seem to be a lot of people in other places in these comments saying things work for them with Nvidia just fine.

But it also sounds like whether things work is heavily dependent on how up-to-date the distribution is. I’m not sure if that’s tied in with Nvidia or not.

What is this “massive fragmentation” you speak of?

Anecdotally, I’m using Plasma, and every Gnome or Gtk app I’ve tried appears to be working perfectly, and vice versa when I occasionally try out Gnome.

Much less so for DIY/BYOB desktops like Hyprland, but I feel like that’s what you sign up for there.

“I guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or an XFCE app unfortunately. I'm sorry that this is the case but it wasn't GNOME's fault that Ubuntu has started this fork. And I have no idea what XFCE is or does sorry.”

Prophetic words were once spoken and mocked long ere.

It's actually very simple; it's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law in practice. There is no "Linux" operating system, only an endless assortment of independent people and sometimes companies, each of which builds whatever they want, and sometimes they assemble some of those pieces into a working operating system. Every time someone makes a distro, they have their own vision and they run with it. Every time someone doesn't like a component, they fork it or make their own thing. There is nobody who can impose a single order, because it's just a loose collection of separate groups, several of which are actively feuding at any given moment.

Why not use a third-party locker, like the suckless one?

https://tools.suckless.org/slock/

well if some way is found to crash wayland the attacker also gets access...

I don’t blame the developers.

I do wonder what the BSDs will do. The Wayland developers were the X developers. The problems with X all still exist.

How big a share of the desktop market do the BSDs have compared to Linux? I imagine it’s quite small, unfortunately.

Another perspective, even though anecdata: I’ve been daily driving a Linux desktop using Sway for five years and I can’t really complain. I haven’t experienced any of the issues TFA mentioned.

The open source developers can definitely force you to do a lot of work.

Whenever they make changes to the program that they are maintaining, which break backwards compatibility, for which an example is replacing X11 with Wayland in the Linux distribution that you may have used for many years, then that forces the users affected by the changes to do potentially a lot of work, in order to find alternatives.

For some special application that you use from time to time, finding an alternative and switching to it may be simple, but when the incompatible changes affect a fundamental system component, which must be used all the time and without which nothing works, e.g. Wayland or systemd, then you must change not some single application, but the entire Linux distribution, and that can be time-consuming, because you may have to learn to do a lot of things in a different way than you are accustomed to.

So obviously, users are not happy about such changes that push work on them without any benefits.

The better Linux distributions may offer their users choices even for such important components like X11 vs. Wayland or OpenRC vs. systemd, for example Gentoo, but the most popular Linux distributions tend to not offer choices for this kind of system components, so when they replace such a component, the users must either accept the change or stop using that Linux distribution, and both choices are bad, because they must adapt their workflow.

There certainly is a paranoid style in Linux politics (where "they" are out to get you.)

they just agreed to move forward on the protocol to do that thing.

> Wayland was designed exclusively i3 style compositors

I'm a dyed-in-the-wool i3 (now sway) user. I don't even use floating windows. Wayland has still been an awful experience, broke a bunch of workflows for me

And this is a case where there's a long tail of "niche issues" that they end up becoming major issues when taken in aggregate.

You still have X11. Why are you crying?

People worked - for free - on what they wanted to work on, and that is wayland. Who are you upset at?

> weird Linux conspiracy theories floating around these days

There is this MAGA Linux Youtuber that is something to be studied on this topic, especially the community around it (some overlap with HN too), its basically just hate posting about woke, rust, systemd, python, mozilla, wayland, ubuntu, it goes on and on - https://www.youtube.com/bryanlunduke

I don't know why some hackers turned so reactionary it's so strange, I used to associate hacker culture more with leftism/anarchism/punks not conservative authoritarians or ancaps/libertarians.

To be fair, it’s pretty dumb that seemingly every article and LLM suggested using Pop!\_OS, which uses the Cosmic Desktop by default. At the time of writing, it is nowhere near ready for prime time. Whether that’s LTT’s fault or the community’s lack of self-awareness, I couldn’t tell you.

He clearly doesn't care about using Linux, he should just ignore it. It's fine.

I think your hope touches on what I think the issue partly is: a lack of empathy for any type of user that doesn’t resemble themselves. I think the deeper into tech you go, the more you find it. And Linux devs/fans are very deep into tech.

The commercial force behind SteamOS is largely the financial motivation to deeply care about the user who doesn’t get an apt about the technical details. They’re not there to do computers, they’re there to play a game or watch a movie or whatever. And the Linux community may benefit from the result of that goal, despite likely being salty about not being the audience.

I mean, the obvious point here is that none of these people are selling linux (or wayland or whatever). You could argue some of these projects over promise in terms of features and so forth, but again, it's not like people are paying for it.

You can certainly be unhappy with a piece of software regardless of if you paid for it, and there's an argument to be made that linux users benefit from it becoming more popular, but we're still mostly talking about volunteers creating software for themselves and then choosing to share it with others.

Clickbait channels like LTT can't get flamed enough.

No.

X11's problems were rooted in the abstractions presented by the X11 core protocol and its extension mechanisms. The interface, not merely the implementation.

Wayland was correct in first focusing on replacing this interface. The problem is the effort stopped there and left the ecosystem to figure out the implementation part.