March 22, 2026
Welcome to the Wayland Wars
I Hate: Programming Wayland Applications
Programmer meltdown over Wayland: 'hostile!' vs 'just use a library'
TLDR: A developer’s rant about how hard it is to build apps on Wayland sparked a brawl: critics call it hostile, pragmatists say “use a library,” and users praise security while fretting about fragmentation. It matters because it shows why Linux’s future desktop feels great to use—but tough to build for.
A frustrated dev lit the fuse with a rant about how writing apps for Wayland — the modern Linux display system — is a “freaking nightmare,” wishing for the simpler (if ancient) days of X11 and even old-school Windows code. The crowd rushed in with pitchforks and popcorn.
On one side, the critics went full scorch-earth: one commenter blasted Wayland as built by “theoretical purists” and called it “developer/user hostile.” Another simply sighed, “I hate all GUI programming,” getting sympathy upvotes from every backend coder hiding from buttons and windows. The mood? Grumpy, meme-y, and very online.
But the counterpunch landed hard. The pragmatic crew rolled their eyes and said the quiet part loud: don’t talk to the raw system — use a library. It’s the “don’t hand-churn butter, buy it” school of software. Meanwhile, users chimed in to defend Wayland’s promise: better security than X11 and fewer screen glitches. Still, even fans worried that power is split across many “compositors” (think different window managers), meaning features like keyboard shortcuts get reinvented in messy ways.
Best quip of the thread? The terminal diehards bragging they “live in Neovim” and dodge the problem entirely. Verdict: it’s not just code — it’s culture war, with Wayland caught between idealism, pragmatism, and the eternal “works on my machine” meme.
Key Points
- •X11 is described as first released in 1984 and designed around a client–server model suited to earlier computing environments.
- •Wayland is described as first released in 2008, with design goals aligned to modern desktops and often cited for security and performance benefits.
- •The author uses the sway Wayland compositor; initial desktop recording/sharing issues were later resolved on their setup.
- •In past testing on Arch Linux, sway installation was easier than setting up i3/X11; XWayland enabled running X11 apps under Wayland.
- •The author reports that developing simple Wayland applications was difficult compared to using high-level libraries like raylib or the structured Win32 approach.