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

[Greg Troxel]

Nyall Dawson <nyall.dawson at gmail.com> writes:

(For random background, I used X10 on a uVAX II, I think 1024x864 with
8-bit pseudocolor.)

> On Mon, 13 Apr 2026 at 05:02, Greg Troxel via QGIS-User <
> qgis-user at lists.osgeo.org> wrote:
>
> 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.

Wow.  I had no idea it was this bad.  That really argues for both not
endosing wayprop (what Orwell might have called it, perhaps :-), but
being careful about expending generic donated resources.  Perhaps Red
Hat and Ubuntu would like to fund Wayland accomodations/improvements,
because they are the ones turning it into an emergency.

(If there's an argument that removing X11 from RH and Ubuntu is in the
interests of users, please point me to it.)

The QEP, in the Conversation and in the text, still calls X11 legacy and
talks about "transition" as if that's agreed on by everyone and a good
thing.  I would really appreciate it if that text could be neutral and
not sound like wayland marketing text.  As it stands I am -1 (I know I
don't have a vote and that's ok) on the QEP as I see not supporting
propaganda as a big deal.

> 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

Their approach sounds wise.

I see your points about specific things for qgis.

An approach to color picker might be to have a color receiving API, and
say that Wayland people can write a color picker that sends to it, which
qgis could launch.

I would think dealing with wayland would be based on having the latest
qt6, and I personally would say if you are running on the experimental
wayland protocool instead of the standrd X11 approach :-) then you need
to have the latest formal qt6 release (latest branch and latest point)
before filing an issue.  As usual, LTS vendors can pay for wanting new
QGIS to accomodate old libraries.

>From the packaging viewpoint, none of this bothers me if it doesn't
degrade QGIS running on X11.  Wayland is gradually arriving in pkgsrc,
with really really zero discussion of removing X11, so I may be able to
try it in the not too distant future.