9 ms·

I really don't like Wayland, I recently (last Friday) had to revert back to X because somehow they messed up enough that in Zoom screensharing during a meeting

by belval 28d ago

I really don't like Wayland, I recently (last Friday) had to revert back to X because somehow they messed up enough that in Zoom screensharing during a meeting with XWayland can crash my audio drivers. At this point I don't know who it is for, but it's not for users.

smackeyacky 28d ago
Me too. I really wanted to like Cosmic but the hassles wayland causes with ordinary things like zoom is just not worth it. Plus all the progress with gaming that has been made on Linux, wayland ruins. I’m back to X and get off my lawn etc.
- esseph 28d ago
  > Plus all the progress with gaming that has been made on Linux, wayland ruins. You're way behind. Wayland is fine. Wayland + VRR is even better. XWayland otoh is quite bad. https://marco-nett.de/blog/measuring-input-latency-on-linux-x11-vs-wayland-vrr-dxvk/ https://marco-nett.de/blog/measuring-input-latency-on-linux-...
  - simoncion 28d ago
    > Wayland + VRR is even better. On AMD hardware, VRR works fine on xorg and has for quite a long while now... so long as you have either a single active monitor (or maybe the restriction is just "don't have any active non-VRR monitors"). [0] I don't have Intel or Nvidia hardware so I can't test, but the Arch wiki says that they both work fine with VRR. [1] The only Wayland feature that I've heard be commonly touted that xorg lacks is HDR support. [0] I don't know which is it because I haven't bothered to go out and buy a second VRR-capable monitor. [1] <https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php?title=Variable_refresh_rate&oldid=882551 https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php?title=Variable_refresh_...>
    - esseph 28d ago
      I am running Fedora 44 with a mix of monitors using vrr and and no vrr on AMD 9060 XT with mixed refresh rates. No issues.
      - simoncion 28d ago
        Ooh! Are you doing that with xorg or Wayland? If with xorg, have you verified that VRR is working? [0] If you've verified it, how'd you make it work? It'd be quite nice to have both multi-monitor and VRR... unless I have to make some terrible tradeoff to make it happen. [0] My go-to is using the "scrolling bars" mode of this LÖVE program [1] to make judder at update rates that aren't an -er- even fraction of the screen's refresh rate pretty easy to spot... but if you have something that works for you, that's good. [1] <https://github.com/Nixola/VRRTest/releases/tag/v2.0.0 https://github.com/Nixola/VRRTest/releases/tag/v2.0.0>
        esseph 28d ago
        Wayland, X was removed long ago. I game on this rig with proton. I would never, ever, ever, use X in 2026 for general use. There would have to be some kind of niche and important business reason. X, for all the teeth gnashing, is effectively a virtually dead, and virtually unsupported technology at this point. There are some small pockets here and there of people that really want or need it, and a few of those people are also working on tweaks and patches, but it's a tiny handful compared to the people and money and companies working on or with Wayland at this point. I know some people here are very upset about that. Years and years ago Wayland sucked ass. Now? Performance and stability have been great on modern distros with modern kernels and GPUs. If performance was substantially worse or more clumsy to use with Wayland vs X, then I'd certainly be using X, but that's just not the case for me in 2026.
- prmoustache 28d ago
  What is the issue with zoom on wayland? Granted I only use on a web browser but I have entered numerous zoom calls these last 6 months without any issue. Isn't the issue just the zoom desktop app?
  - dismalaf 28d ago
    > Isn't the issue just the zoom desktop app? Yup pretty much. Desktop sharing on Chromium based browsers is fine (probably others but I can't vouch for them), it's fine on OBS Studio, portals work, etc... But there's a contingent of Linux users that thinks anything new = bad so they'll find the most dogshit app that doesn't work and trot it out as proof that the new thing is bad.
    - upboundspiral 28d ago
      For me zoom works out of the box on kde + wayland. But an app as popular as zoom working correctly for everyone is table stakes. The fact some people are encountering issues just means that something in the transition wasn't perfect. Given the huge lift involved, it could have been a lot worse. I just wish there was clearer communication and strategies for transition from the wayland folks, and less fearmongering and entrenching from both sides.
      - esseph 28d ago
        > The fact some people are encountering issues just means that something in the transition wasn't perfect. There's thousands of Linux distros. I'd assume most of them are not super close to the Wayland folks.
  - smackeyacky 28d ago
    Screen share doesn’t work on my setup. Difficultly: nvidia
- vlod 28d ago
  What are you using instead of Cosmic? (for X)
  - smackeyacky 28d ago
    Whatever environment Pop!Os defaults to if you tell it not to use wayland
- TiredOfLife 28d ago
  Majority of that gaming progress was made by Valve for Steam Deck. And Steam Deck uses Wayland
  - smackeyacky 28d ago
    So what are the Pop!Is guys doing wrong? Their plain X environment has none of the gaming issues wayland has
    - johnny22 28d ago
      they wrote a whole DE from scratch. It's gonna take awhile for it be up to snuff for everything.
    - TiredOfLife 28d ago
      You are using alpha level DE made by a tiny company in their free time.
soupspaces 28d ago
Try browser zoom
- pkulak 28d ago
  This. I even install a "Zoom Redirector" Firefox plugin so it automatically opens Zoom links in the web url. Screen sharing works great in Firefox. Zoom's native app just expects Xorg, and probably hasn't been tested at all on anything else. Crappy performance on Wayland is not really a Wayland problem.
cmiles74 28d ago
I'm not sure that Zoom is the highest quality software. I find it crashy and weird under either X or Wayland.
- yjftsjthsd-h 28d ago
  Yes, but if any application can break the entire system audio, that's a bug in more than just the application. (Granted, I'm curious why Wayland would trigger that, given that I would expect the audio stack to be the same regardless.)
  - stinkbeetle 28d ago
    Yes, though you'd be inclined to suspect the audio stack having the bug rather than the display compositor.
- serf 28d ago
  zoom users often have little choice but to use zoom. wayland doesn't have that need.
- epihelix 28d ago
  Not a fan of Zoom by any stretch - but I have to use it all the time for work, regularly use it on three different machines and over some questionable network connections, and it's never crashed on me once that I can recall. All on X, though. I appreciate the principles behind Wayland, but sadly not the implementation.
- rjzzleep 28d ago
  Yes, Zoom somehow turned into something like Skype, post acquisition. But, at the same time. A design that requires everyone to implement their own protocols and everyone to refix the same bugs in their own compositor is inherintly bad. I have been using Wayland as my daily driver. Some compositors lacked SHM support in their screen sharing, others have other issues. We only recently got proper text input support, and it took forever to fix in chrome and electron(it's been fixed for a few releases, but you'll still come across older electron software). How did they manage to make it so the cursor movement is dependent on the scaling mode in a way that client rendering library's need to be aware of it otherwise the cursor ends up in the wrong location by the way?. In X, if the WM crashes, X is still running, and you can just restart the WM. In Wayland, if you hit a bug it takes everything down with it. The first release was 14 years ago, we're still fixing screen sharing. I just learned that despite all the boasting of fractional scaling support in Wayland, one of the base protocols, wl_output actually returns the same scaling mode for two screens even if they have a different scaling setting. One thing I also never got is why the displays have to have absolute coordinates when you place them on a global coordinate system that is dependent on the scaling mode of the screen. Also, KDE is the only WM that has managed to properly implement scaled Xwayland windows.
panzi 28d ago
Yeah, I still use KDE with X11 because they somehow messed up their window management with Wayland. My problems aren't even about rendering or any those features, but for some reason kwin_wayland's window management is very buggy. I'm still on 6.6 on the distribution that I use, so I don't know if it's fixed in 6.7, but I doubt it since it is here for a long time. Reported it here: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=524083 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=524083
- badsectoracula 28d ago
  My main WM is Window Maker but i use KDE Plasma for secondary accounts when i want to try stuff without 'polluting' my main user account. I can only use X11 with KDE Plasma because, for some unfathomable reason, if i launch `startplasma-wayland` pressing ANY key on my keyboard causes it to crash. Like. How.
  - kps 28d ago
    Wayland's raison d'etre was “every frame is perfect.” Input was an afterthought.
    - hulitu 28d ago
      > every frame is perfect. They are a big Monty Python fan. Wait, you meant frame ?
gucci-on-fleek 28d ago
I've been screensharing using the Zoom web application (via Firefox) on Wayland for almost 5 years now, and it's always worked well for me personally.
- Spunkie 28d ago
  Does screen annotation work on it? It's loss in the wayland version of zoom has been a major pain for me at work. Not annotating when you yourself are screen sharing, but when someone else is screen sharing you can draw on their screen(aka annotating)?
  - gucci-on-fleek 28d ago
    Sorry, but I've never tried that before, so I'm not sure. (I didn't even know that Zoom had that feature at all!)
- kelnos 28d ago
  I tried using the Zoom webapp on Firefox, on X11, for quite a while, but eventually I gave up and started using the native app. The web app is slow and burns CPU (and my laptop fans start going nuts), and for some reason the quality of the video that's coming out of my camera looks much worse on the webapp. (This isn't the case for Google Meet on Firefox, so it's something about Zoom's webapp.) If I were to switch to Wayland and have to go back to the webapp for Zoom, that would be annoying.
  - gucci-on-fleek 28d ago
    > The web app is slow and burns CPU (and my laptop fans start going nuts) Ah yeah, that's because codecs are (still) a mess on Linux. In Firefox, navigate to about:config, then make sure that the following are set: media.ffmpeg.disable-software-fallback=true media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled=true media.gmp.decoder.enabled=false media.gpu-process-decoder=true media.gpu-process-encoder=true media.hardware-video-decoding.force-enabled=true media.hardware-video-encoding.force-enabled=true media.webrtc.hw.h264.enabled=true media.webrtc.software_encoder.fallback=false (I'm not sure if all of those are necessary, but that's what I'm currently using.) Then in Linux, make sure that you have the full versions of all the codecs installed; in Fedora, you need to install "mesa-va-drivers-freeworld" and "ffmpeg" from rpmfusion (and uninstall "mesa-va-drivers" and "ffmpeg-free" from the regular repos); for other distros, the steps should be similar. But after all that, my Firefox uses only 20% of a single CPU to run Zoom, so my laptop is cool and the fan stays off. (I agree that it's really annoying that all of these steps are needed just to make video work well, but they're orthogonal to Wayland, and would be needed with X11 in the browser too.) > This isn't the case for Google Meet on Firefox, so it's something about Zoom's webapp. Google Meet probably uses VP9 or AV1 (since both are developed by Google), and those are both patent-free so should have no issues on Linux. Whereas Microsoft Teams and Zoom only use h264, which for patent reasons is limited to software-only by default [0]. I'm guessing that Zoom Linux application likely embeds the relevant codecs, which would be why it works there without any extra steps. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenH264 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenH264
keysersoze33 28d ago
A couple of points: - Pipewire or Pulseaudio has nothing to do with XWayland, let alone Wayland (Pulseaudio is somewhat legacy and may not be maintained as well as it used to be) - Zoom (the last time I checked, a while ago) wasn't really well implemented on Linux (came before xdg-desktop-portal, which has standardised screen sharing across DEs and only really prioritised the GNOME specific extensions. - The engineering effort to properly support screen sharing on Linux is a _bit_ more complicated than other platforms as we have many DEs - Browser based screen sharing is generally the best option on Linux imho
- veeti 28d ago
  > - The engineering effort to properly support screen sharing on Linux is a _bit_ more complicated than other platforms as we have many DEs It didn't have to be this way, but somehow the Wayland clique did not realize - or just dug their head in the sand - that things like screenshots or screen sharing are basic table stakes. Instead, they created an academic replacement for X11 and left it upon the community to plug the most obvious gaps. Understandably, actual users tend to get kind of pissed when you break their computer without offering any replacement except "just quit your job and don't use Zoom" or "wait 10 years for Gnome to add protocol foobar to support it, but they will force you to use this half baked crap beforehand anyway". Thankfully Windows and macOS have been doing their darndest to regress. Otherwise desktop Linux wouldn't stand a chance with such harebrained management. Only after a decade of biting teeth Wayland is finally ready for most.
  - preg_match 27d ago
    Wayland simplified it significantly. Screen sharing is now done through xdg, and it's standardized. Meaning, you don't need to rewrite frail screensharing code for multiple desktops. You just use xdg and then boom - it works across every distro, every window manager, every compositor, every GPU. Screensharing on X was hacky, and each application did their own thing to capture the screen. So sometimes it would work, sometimes it wouldn't, sometimes it would have horrible performance, sometimes your specific GPU would break it, etc. Some apps handled it better than others as well. Wayland solves this. Yes that does mean you need to use xdg standards instead of the old code that barely worked. Yes that does mean some apps will take forever to adopt it because they don't care. But it is actually a better system. And there's other really cool xdg protocols, too, that enable a type of cross platform design that was never possible on X.

by belval 28d ago

smackeyacky 28d ago

Me too. I really wanted to like Cosmic but the hassles wayland causes with ordinary things like zoom is just not worth it. Plus all the progress with gaming that has been made on Linux, wayland ruins. I’m back to X and get off my lawn etc.

esseph 28d ago
> Plus all the progress with gaming that has been made on Linux, wayland ruins. You're way behind. Wayland is fine. Wayland + VRR is even better. XWayland otoh is quite bad. https://marco-nett.de/blog/measuring-input-latency-on-linux-x11-vs-wayland-vrr-dxvk/ https://marco-nett.de/blog/measuring-input-latency-on-linux-...
- simoncion 28d ago
  > Wayland + VRR is even better. On AMD hardware, VRR works fine on xorg and has for quite a long while now... so long as you have either a single active monitor (or maybe the restriction is just "don't have any active non-VRR monitors"). [0] I don't have Intel or Nvidia hardware so I can't test, but the Arch wiki says that they both work fine with VRR. [1] The only Wayland feature that I've heard be commonly touted that xorg lacks is HDR support. [0] I don't know which is it because I haven't bothered to go out and buy a second VRR-capable monitor. [1] <https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php?title=Variable_refresh_rate&oldid=882551 https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php?title=Variable_refresh_...>
  - esseph 28d ago
    I am running Fedora 44 with a mix of monitors using vrr and and no vrr on AMD 9060 XT with mixed refresh rates. No issues.
    - simoncion 28d ago
      Ooh! Are you doing that with xorg or Wayland? If with xorg, have you verified that VRR is working? [0] If you've verified it, how'd you make it work? It'd be quite nice to have both multi-monitor and VRR... unless I have to make some terrible tradeoff to make it happen. [0] My go-to is using the "scrolling bars" mode of this LÖVE program [1] to make judder at update rates that aren't an -er- even fraction of the screen's refresh rate pretty easy to spot... but if you have something that works for you, that's good. [1] <https://github.com/Nixola/VRRTest/releases/tag/v2.0.0 https://github.com/Nixola/VRRTest/releases/tag/v2.0.0>
      - esseph 28d ago
        Wayland, X was removed long ago. I game on this rig with proton. I would never, ever, ever, use X in 2026 for general use. There would have to be some kind of niche and important business reason. X, for all the teeth gnashing, is effectively a virtually dead, and virtually unsupported technology at this point. There are some small pockets here and there of people that really want or need it, and a few of those people are also working on tweaks and patches, but it's a tiny handful compared to the people and money and companies working on or with Wayland at this point. I know some people here are very upset about that. Years and years ago Wayland sucked ass. Now? Performance and stability have been great on modern distros with modern kernels and GPUs. If performance was substantially worse or more clumsy to use with Wayland vs X, then I'd certainly be using X, but that's just not the case for me in 2026.
prmoustache 28d ago
What is the issue with zoom on wayland? Granted I only use on a web browser but I have entered numerous zoom calls these last 6 months without any issue. Isn't the issue just the zoom desktop app?
- dismalaf 28d ago
  > Isn't the issue just the zoom desktop app? Yup pretty much. Desktop sharing on Chromium based browsers is fine (probably others but I can't vouch for them), it's fine on OBS Studio, portals work, etc... But there's a contingent of Linux users that thinks anything new = bad so they'll find the most dogshit app that doesn't work and trot it out as proof that the new thing is bad.
  - upboundspiral 28d ago
    For me zoom works out of the box on kde + wayland. But an app as popular as zoom working correctly for everyone is table stakes. The fact some people are encountering issues just means that something in the transition wasn't perfect. Given the huge lift involved, it could have been a lot worse. I just wish there was clearer communication and strategies for transition from the wayland folks, and less fearmongering and entrenching from both sides.
    - esseph 28d ago
      > The fact some people are encountering issues just means that something in the transition wasn't perfect. There's thousands of Linux distros. I'd assume most of them are not super close to the Wayland folks.
- smackeyacky 28d ago
  Screen share doesn’t work on my setup. Difficultly: nvidia
vlod 28d ago
What are you using instead of Cosmic? (for X)
- smackeyacky 28d ago
  Whatever environment Pop!Os defaults to if you tell it not to use wayland
TiredOfLife 28d ago
Majority of that gaming progress was made by Valve for Steam Deck. And Steam Deck uses Wayland
- smackeyacky 28d ago
  So what are the Pop!Is guys doing wrong? Their plain X environment has none of the gaming issues wayland has
  - johnny22 28d ago
    they wrote a whole DE from scratch. It's gonna take awhile for it be up to snuff for everything.
  - TiredOfLife 28d ago
    You are using alpha level DE made by a tiny company in their free time.

soupspaces 28d ago

Try browser zoom

pkulak 28d ago
This. I even install a "Zoom Redirector" Firefox plugin so it automatically opens Zoom links in the web url. Screen sharing works great in Firefox. Zoom's native app just expects Xorg, and probably hasn't been tested at all on anything else. Crappy performance on Wayland is not really a Wayland problem.

cmiles74 28d ago

I'm not sure that Zoom is the highest quality software. I find it crashy and weird under either X or Wayland.

yjftsjthsd-h 28d ago
Yes, but if any application can break the entire system audio, that's a bug in more than just the application. (Granted, I'm curious why Wayland would trigger that, given that I would expect the audio stack to be the same regardless.)
- stinkbeetle 28d ago
  Yes, though you'd be inclined to suspect the audio stack having the bug rather than the display compositor.
serf 28d ago
zoom users often have little choice but to use zoom. wayland doesn't have that need.
epihelix 28d ago
Not a fan of Zoom by any stretch - but I have to use it all the time for work, regularly use it on three different machines and over some questionable network connections, and it's never crashed on me once that I can recall. All on X, though. I appreciate the principles behind Wayland, but sadly not the implementation.
rjzzleep 28d ago
Yes, Zoom somehow turned into something like Skype, post acquisition. But, at the same time. A design that requires everyone to implement their own protocols and everyone to refix the same bugs in their own compositor is inherintly bad. I have been using Wayland as my daily driver. Some compositors lacked SHM support in their screen sharing, others have other issues. We only recently got proper text input support, and it took forever to fix in chrome and electron(it's been fixed for a few releases, but you'll still come across older electron software). How did they manage to make it so the cursor movement is dependent on the scaling mode in a way that client rendering library's need to be aware of it otherwise the cursor ends up in the wrong location by the way?. In X, if the WM crashes, X is still running, and you can just restart the WM. In Wayland, if you hit a bug it takes everything down with it. The first release was 14 years ago, we're still fixing screen sharing. I just learned that despite all the boasting of fractional scaling support in Wayland, one of the base protocols, wl_output actually returns the same scaling mode for two screens even if they have a different scaling setting. One thing I also never got is why the displays have to have absolute coordinates when you place them on a global coordinate system that is dependent on the scaling mode of the screen. Also, KDE is the only WM that has managed to properly implement scaled Xwayland windows.

panzi 28d ago

Yeah, I still use KDE with X11 because they somehow messed up their window management with Wayland. My problems aren't even about rendering or any those features, but for some reason kwin_wayland's window management is very buggy. I'm still on 6.6 on the distribution that I use, so I don't know if it's fixed in 6.7, but I doubt it since it is here for a long time. Reported it here: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=524083 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=524083

badsectoracula 28d ago
My main WM is Window Maker but i use KDE Plasma for secondary accounts when i want to try stuff without 'polluting' my main user account. I can only use X11 with KDE Plasma because, for some unfathomable reason, if i launch `startplasma-wayland` pressing ANY key on my keyboard causes it to crash. Like. How.
- kps 28d ago
  Wayland's raison d'etre was “every frame is perfect.” Input was an afterthought.
  - hulitu 28d ago
    > every frame is perfect. They are a big Monty Python fan. Wait, you meant frame ?

gucci-on-fleek 28d ago

I've been screensharing using the Zoom web application (via Firefox) on Wayland for almost 5 years now, and it's always worked well for me personally.

Spunkie 28d ago
Does screen annotation work on it? It's loss in the wayland version of zoom has been a major pain for me at work. Not annotating when you yourself are screen sharing, but when someone else is screen sharing you can draw on their screen(aka annotating)?
- gucci-on-fleek 28d ago
  Sorry, but I've never tried that before, so I'm not sure. (I didn't even know that Zoom had that feature at all!)
kelnos 28d ago
I tried using the Zoom webapp on Firefox, on X11, for quite a while, but eventually I gave up and started using the native app. The web app is slow and burns CPU (and my laptop fans start going nuts), and for some reason the quality of the video that's coming out of my camera looks much worse on the webapp. (This isn't the case for Google Meet on Firefox, so it's something about Zoom's webapp.) If I were to switch to Wayland and have to go back to the webapp for Zoom, that would be annoying.
- gucci-on-fleek 28d ago
  > The web app is slow and burns CPU (and my laptop fans start going nuts) Ah yeah, that's because codecs are (still) a mess on Linux. In Firefox, navigate to about:config, then make sure that the following are set: media.ffmpeg.disable-software-fallback=true media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled=true media.gmp.decoder.enabled=false media.gpu-process-decoder=true media.gpu-process-encoder=true media.hardware-video-decoding.force-enabled=true media.hardware-video-encoding.force-enabled=true media.webrtc.hw.h264.enabled=true media.webrtc.software_encoder.fallback=false (I'm not sure if all of those are necessary, but that's what I'm currently using.) Then in Linux, make sure that you have the full versions of all the codecs installed; in Fedora, you need to install "mesa-va-drivers-freeworld" and "ffmpeg" from rpmfusion (and uninstall "mesa-va-drivers" and "ffmpeg-free" from the regular repos); for other distros, the steps should be similar. But after all that, my Firefox uses only 20% of a single CPU to run Zoom, so my laptop is cool and the fan stays off. (I agree that it's really annoying that all of these steps are needed just to make video work well, but they're orthogonal to Wayland, and would be needed with X11 in the browser too.) > This isn't the case for Google Meet on Firefox, so it's something about Zoom's webapp. Google Meet probably uses VP9 or AV1 (since both are developed by Google), and those are both patent-free so should have no issues on Linux. Whereas Microsoft Teams and Zoom only use h264, which for patent reasons is limited to software-only by default [0]. I'm guessing that Zoom Linux application likely embeds the relevant codecs, which would be why it works there without any extra steps. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenH264 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenH264

keysersoze33 28d ago

A couple of points: - Pipewire or Pulseaudio has nothing to do with XWayland, let alone Wayland (Pulseaudio is somewhat legacy and may not be maintained as well as it used to be) - Zoom (the last time I checked, a while ago) wasn't really well implemented on Linux (came before xdg-desktop-portal, which has standardised screen sharing across DEs and only really prioritised the GNOME specific extensions. - The engineering effort to properly support screen sharing on Linux is a _bit_ more complicated than other platforms as we have many DEs - Browser based screen sharing is generally the best option on Linux imho

veeti 28d ago
> - The engineering effort to properly support screen sharing on Linux is a _bit_ more complicated than other platforms as we have many DEs It didn't have to be this way, but somehow the Wayland clique did not realize - or just dug their head in the sand - that things like screenshots or screen sharing are basic table stakes. Instead, they created an academic replacement for X11 and left it upon the community to plug the most obvious gaps. Understandably, actual users tend to get kind of pissed when you break their computer without offering any replacement except "just quit your job and don't use Zoom" or "wait 10 years for Gnome to add protocol foobar to support it, but they will force you to use this half baked crap beforehand anyway". Thankfully Windows and macOS have been doing their darndest to regress. Otherwise desktop Linux wouldn't stand a chance with such harebrained management. Only after a decade of biting teeth Wayland is finally ready for most.
- preg_match 27d ago
  Wayland simplified it significantly. Screen sharing is now done through xdg, and it's standardized. Meaning, you don't need to rewrite frail screensharing code for multiple desktops. You just use xdg and then boom - it works across every distro, every window manager, every compositor, every GPU. Screensharing on X was hacky, and each application did their own thing to capture the screen. So sometimes it would work, sometimes it wouldn't, sometimes it would have horrible performance, sometimes your specific GPU would break it, etc. Some apps handled it better than others as well. Wayland solves this. Yes that does mean you need to use xdg standards instead of the old code that barely worked. Yes that does mean some apps will take forever to adopt it because they don't care. But it is actually a better system. And there's other really cool xdg protocols, too, that enable a type of cross platform design that was never possible on X.