from Hacker News

KiCad and Wayland Support

by xvilka on 6/17/25, 9:58 AM with 228 comments

  • by magicalhippo on 6/17/25, 10:34 AM

    These problems exist because Wayland’s design omits basic functionality that desktop applications for X11, Windows and macOS have relied on for decades—things like being able to position windows or warp the mouse cursor. This functionality was omitted by design, not oversight.

    We do not investigate or support bug reports related to Wayland-specific issues.

    For now, if you need to use KiCad on Linux, use X11.

    Can totally understand their position. I've developed cross-platform applications and it was enough work without the extra headache they describe Wayland brings.

    I've been thinking about ditching Windows as my primary OS for some years, but Wayland has been really detrimental to the Linux desktop. Over a decade later and it's still not production ready, at least in my tests. Yet X11 is dying it seems, with GNOME and KDE dropping support soon[1][2].

    From where I stand, the intentional fragmentation of the ecosystem seems like an especially poor decision.

    [1]: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/05/gnome-dropping-x11-suppo...

    [2]: https://linuxiac.com/kde-x11-support-to-continue-until-plasm...

  • by reisse on 6/17/25, 8:13 PM

    I have a harsh opinion - the real problem with Wayland is that its authors and/or maintainers are *nix geeks, who never used anything more complex than X11 on an IBM Thinkpad with a maybe second 4:3 monitor attached. And they daily drive a few dozen terminal windows, Firefox and maybe Thunderbird.

    I really have no other plausible explanation how they could miss so many potential usecases while rebuilding the display management ground-up: screen sharing, fractional scaling, different scaling factor for different screens, color profiles, HDR, toolbars and docking, window positions, and whatever else.

    In the Wayland GitLab, there are comments in the spirit of "who would ever want to use this?" for a feature requests of something present in literally any sane WM...

  • by arghwhat on 6/17/25, 5:04 PM

    A significant portion of the problems listed, e.g. performance, "unpredictable focus", glitches, freezes, etc., will generally be purely KiCad bugs.

    Others are feature requests that there were recently released protocols for e.g. window restoration and cursor warping, but with adoption needing to pick up.

    Nothing negative towards KiCad team as they and the community sort things out, but it's easy for others to read this and conflate "problems with application's Wayland support" as "problems with Wayland". It's a new platform for them, and support for a new platform will always have some growing pains.

    Xwayland is also under continued development, and these distribution are not dropping X11 support through Xwayland, just native X11 sessions.

  • by poulpy123 on 6/17/25, 5:28 PM

    I don't have the knowledge to judge these specific issues, but the transition from X11 to Wayland was the worse I've ever seen. Worse than the python 2 to 3 debacle, and it seems even worse than the Perl 5 to 6 transition (that was resolved by not doing the transition)

  • by DominoTree on 6/17/25, 5:06 PM

    I've been using KiCad on Wayland for years and didn't even know I was missing out

  • by workethics on 6/17/25, 5:03 PM

    This reminds me that I was recently using tracy to profile a program and found their own list of valid grievances, altough it's a bit more GNOME inflicted: https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy/issues/505#issuecomment-136...

  • by duped on 6/17/25, 4:55 PM

    Can anyone explain succinctly why basic window management and pointer warping is absent on Wayland, what it would take to fix, and how to get involved fixing it?

    I've been hearing about these problems for years and if all that's missing is someone to own up to fixing it, it's worth finding out.

    edit: looks like pointer warping was added to the protocol last week: https://lore.freedesktop.org/wayland-devel/aEw0AP7h6T8l11ug@...

  • by Vilian on 6/17/25, 3:09 PM

    Xwayland isn't going to die in 10 years, it's fine to keep using that, thise bugs happens with KiCad running as Wayland or in xwayland?

  • by walterbell on 6/17/25, 5:54 PM

    June 2025, "The X.Org Server just got forked (announcing XLibre)", 190 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44199502

  • by jchw on 6/17/25, 6:20 PM

    Many of these limitations are in fact not Wayland issues and just limitations in KiCad (and probably more generally, wxWidgets) under native Wayland. For example, you can definitely do draggable widgets that dock and undock using xdg-toplevel-drag. What's changing with Wayland is that Wayland is no longer giving the developers the tools to implement features like session restore and docking/undocking entirely on their own, but instead forcing them to go through specific protocols. This is a point of contention that involves one's own ideals and unlikely to be resolved any time soon, but either way, this post is grossly misrepresenting the state of Wayland in general because of KiCad issues, that they are admitting they have no interest in triaging or working on anyways. That's fine, but it's still wrong.

    Furthermore, XWayland is not going away. If you are unwilling to support native Wayland, the way to go is somehow disable native Wayland, like by unsetting WAYLAND_DISPLAY early on in the code before initializing the toolkit or something. Krita does this and it works just fine, although it's not ideal since features like HDR or display scaling will suffer. (But does that even matter for KiCad?)

    Tl;dr: reads more like developers not happy about the direction of Wayland than an actual reasoned position. Seems confused about the implications of the Wayland session. I wouldn't worry about this. You're still going to prefer the Wayland session sooner rather than later.

  • by dmitrygr on 6/18/25, 4:14 PM

    "We do not investigate or support bug reports related to Wayland-specific issues"

    Well put, guys! This is the way. It wasn't broken, nobody needed to "fix it". Now they "fixed it" & it IS broken, it is not your job to pick up the pieces! I tip my hat to you for having the balls to just plainly state so.

  • by ur-whale on 6/18/25, 1:56 AM

    Over the many years Wayland has been promising to be a better toaster, I have tried to use it.

    Every single time, I had to go back to X11 because shit simply don't work.

    At this point, I am dead convinced that Wayland is simply broken by design.

    As a matter of fact, they justify their existence by systematically pointing out how broken the architecture of X11 is and how a "modern" replacement is severely needed.

    True, X11's architecture is indeed bad and creates lots of problems.

    However, unlike Wayland, it DOES WORK.

    Also, and very unfortunately for Wayland, the team working on it seem oblivious to the fact that trying to replace a badly designed system does not automatically make the replacement any better.

    At this point, I would call Wayland a complete failure.

    Worse, they've been at it for over 15 years and it is still fundamentally unusable.

    The fact that Ubuntu is planning to deprecate X11 is, at this point in time, a catastrophe as far as I'm concerned.

  • by imtringued on 6/19/25, 8:19 AM

    I have literally never had any issues with Wayland beyond the absence of screen sharing in the early days and I've been using it since 2016.

    I've also felt no need to use KiCAD whatsoever. There are better open source EDA tools out there.

  • by shmerl on 6/17/25, 5:58 PM

    > warp the mouse cursor

    Wasn't cursor warping protocol just merged?

    https://wayland.app/protocols/pointer-warp-v1

  • by IshKebab on 6/17/25, 5:34 PM

    > Cursor/pointer warping: Essential for many CAD operations

    Err no. I don't know why EDA guys have this weird idea that cursor warping is totally normal. DesignSpark PCB does this too - when you zoom it warps the cursor! Wtf is that?

    Kicad has pretty awful UX so I guess this crazy view isn't that surprising.

    > things like being able to position windows or warp the mouse cursor. This functionality was omitted by design, not oversight.

    Yeah again... I'll give you window positioning, but an app should never warp my cursor. It's mine. Get your stupid hands off it.

  • by LocalH on 6/18/25, 11:06 AM

    Wayland was designed by people who didn't quite grok the X way and decided to forge a different path. That's fine, but people also shouldn't expect Wayland to be a drop-in replacement for X in all cases. Thus a mature X-based project like KiCad is doing the right thing by focusing their efforts. If you need KiCad? You need X. If not? Run free with Wayland.

  • by pomerange on 6/17/25, 5:56 PM

    Distros are not dropping Xwayland, just say "run our app trough xwayland". Recommending X11 distros or compositors is not good advice. X11 on its own is dead, and things like KDE do very little development on their X11 version.

    Some if not most of these bugs are 100% application bugs, very few actually used wayland compositors have performance bugs for example (but your app running in wayland native might).

    With what a dumpster fire X11 has been lately its a bit weird to bet on it for your application.

  • by znpy on 6/17/25, 5:08 PM

    And again, in the year of the lord 2025, the year of linux on the desktop is next year.

  • by amelius on 6/17/25, 5:34 PM

    I installed kicad on an ubuntu system using flatpak (because snap was a nightmare). But now I'm running into a strange issue with X11 cookies. Anyone who's seen the same? (Using X11 of course)