[QGIS-Developer] [Qgis-user] Announcing QEP 419: Improved Wayland compatibility

[Nyall Dawson]

On Mon, 13 Apr 2026 at 05:02, Greg Troxel via QGIS-User <
qgis-user at lists.osgeo.org> wrote:
>
> Nyall Dawson via QGIS-User <qgis-user at lists.osgeo.org> writes:
>
> > Over the last couple of years, most Linux distributions and desktop
> > environments have been transitioning from the legacy X11 display server
to
> > the Wayland standard. The transition has reached a stage where many
> > environments are now completely dropping support for the X11 server.
>
> I think it's entirely appropriate for qgis to work better on wayland
> because users have computers that are wayland and not X11.   But I think
> we should refrain from buying into and repeating wayland propaganda.

Heh. I'm certainly not a Wayland fanboy. You could probably read between
the lines in my proposal to see that I'm also frustrated by the decisions
made by Wayland designers. My first draft of the QEP was quite a bit more
opinionated, before I decided I'd better tone it down 😜

FWIW, https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support/ is
quite a good write-up and also very relevant to the Wayland shortcomings
affecting QGIS.

Their conclusion is very apt:

"We try to be pragmatic. We support what works, we document what doesn’t,
and we focus our development efforts where they’ll have most benefit for
our users. We will adjust our position as Wayland improves, but we won’t
compromise the reliability and functionality of KiCad."

We could just directly copy/paste that and replace KiCad with QGIS

Nyall


>
> I almost always object to the word "legacy"; it means "the standard
> thing that people do now, because I have declared some shiny new thing
> to be the way of the future".
>
> My impression is that pro-wayland people are trying to remove X11 not
> because that removal serves users, but because it's aligned with a
> decision that they want wayland to be the only way.
>
> So I'd rewrite
>
>   Many GNU/Linux distributions have added Wayland as a display server,
>   and some are de-supporting X11.  While qgis does not take a position
>   on this, we would like qgis to work well in a Wayland environment,
>   as well as continue to work well in an X11 environment.
>
> which refrains from endorsing any particular display server approach.
>
> > QEP 419 aims to address these limitations in the "best possible" way,
given
> > the (many!) constraints of Wayland.
>
> This is a very telling comment.  It suggests that this is the usual
> situation where proponents of ${SHINY_NEW_THING} are wanting others to
> overlook that it fails to do some of the things that
> ${LONGSTANDING_USEFUL_THING} does.   Again, off topic for qgis to judge.
>
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