Screen saver? At least I haven't found one yet for Gnome. Or is this a gnome issue?
this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2026
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KDE doesn't have them either, and they're something I sorely mess. Whenever I emulate or virtualize Windows, sometimes I like to let it go idle and just watch its screensavers.
Unless I'm mistaken, Wayland can't rotate your display by 22 degrees.
This sounds like something KDE randomly adds in 5 years because why not.
Asychronous design of Wayland protocol implies it technically can do everything X11 could. But it requires a lot of development.
Honestly so many tiny annoyances I used to have with x11 have just gone with Wayland. Multi monitor especially seems so much easier to work with.
Show me a Wayland screensaver. I'm honestly interested if one actually honestly exists.
KWin doesn't support them, and the KDE devs in their stubbornness see no reason to. I really have a love/hate relationship with this DE.
Same. Unfortunately a few family members decided it was what they wanted for their first foray into linux and I have to try to support it for them.
There's no timed desktop lock?
The technical reasons for a screensaver pretty much vanished 10+ years ago, the security aspects are stronger than ever.
Sometimes you just want to have a screen showing you pretty colours on a random rotation. kde's plasma just goes dark and kicks back to login, and kwin then crashes 9 out of 10 times on resume. Problems I never had with xscreensaver on openbox.
I like photo slideshows... never had too much trouble with the various things that do that... A lot of times I'll just have a rotating desktop wallpaper, if I want to watch the photos I just minimize my apps.
Neither of which are drop-in replacements for screensavers. xscreensaver-gl has a whole heap more than just photo slideshows.
Sure, and what's standing in the way of a vibe-coded port?
Why would anyone want ai slop?
Honestly, most people just don't care as long as they have something that works.
That's good for most people. I'm not most people.
If the screen savers work like they did before, why would you care?
Principles. Some people still have them.
Isn't there a version of xscreensaver that works with Wayland? Besides that, there's Wayfire's rotating cube.
I haven't been able to get xscreensaver to work with kde's plasma. It's the only wayland desktop I have run so far, as I maintain systems with openbox otherwise.
In general, it’s things that Wayland chose not to do so as to have a better security model.
For instance multi window apps can’t tell the compositor where to put their windows such as snapping a window to another or following a window. Apps can’t read other windows. It’s a good thing for security but it breaks some older tools and workflows.
There’s others like multiple mouse cursors, registering global hotkeys, overscan correction etc but many of these things are being addressed and new standards are being drafted, it just takes time.
I moved to Wayland very early on and, honestly, I’ve not had any problems but I don’t have a complicated or special setup.
There’s others like multiple mouse cursors
Wayland has actually supported multiple seats from the beginning, it's apps and DEs that don't support it well.
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No global hotkeys is a dealbreaker for me, though.
Once you get used to using custom global hotkeys as part of your workflow, you can never go back.
It's not about creating global hotkeys, it's about registering them from a running program. There is nothing preventing you from creating a compositor-level keybinding, but an app cannot do that unless it figures out what compositor you are running and then handles the configuration for each and every compositor in existence.
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For instance multi window apps can’t tell the compositor where to put their windows
They can have positions lf existing windows saved and restored (still rolling out), and I think can ask for some details of initial placement outside of that too.
Of course still very limited and not handling the specific cases you mentioned.
registering global hotkeys
Setting up hotkeys is possible, just in a very different way. You have to have the desktop environment forward it, and for now specifics differ from de to de. Generally they can all bind actions though. A safe minimum-viable way should be to add shortcuttable actions to the desktop file I think, though the qt shortcut stuff should also generally work I think.
overscan correction
kwin at least has had that for a while
Personally for me I used to have a script invoked by tilting the sceoll wheel that'd send a shortcut (e.g. ctrl+page-up/down) to the window under the cursor without focussing it, letting me change tabs of unfocussed windows.
I think I did that by quickly changing input focus, sending it, then changing it back, with xdotool etc..
On wayland I've tried implementing that via kwin scripting a few times, but found it so hard to debug and to work with in comparison I never managed to recreate that simple tool.
Having universal posix-like tools to affect the window manager and user input from console is definitely something I miss occasionally.
Largely this is just a lack of wayland tools I am sure. And I must admit it's been a while since I last tried.
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A lot of 3d software has problems with tablets on Wayland. Stuff like ZBrush, Substance Painter and even their recent AI clones:
Can Wayland do ssh -X?
You will need to do ssh --way for that
There seems to be https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Waypipe which I've never used (unlike ssh -X which I once needed for a university course).
Run on older video cards.
My home server has a basic Quadro K420. Since the latest KDE forced it onto Wayland, it's unusable even for the short remote sessions I need the GUI for. Chrome hangs if I don't disable HW acceleration, within minutes Firefox leaks memory to the point where the kernel panics, Transmission's window gets garbled like I'm watching a coded PayTV channel.
Installed xfce and everything is back to normal. Of course nVidia shares some of the blame here, but it's clearly working on one windowing system and not on the other.
Drag & drop, cut n paste, and screen-recording are very iffy, even though they technically work.
I'm on Wayland and have literally never had any issues with those features. Are these problems you've previously had or do you have recent examples where they don't work as expected?
I've had them previously, and I still have them. A lot depends on your compositor, distro, and the specific programs you use.
I've had zero issues with these on wayland, where is this happening?
Talon Voice and other accessibility tools like cursorless. I am destroying my hands because I can't do handless input on Wayland.
For me it's Steam Remote Play. I can't say Wayland is unable to do it, but it's always been so problematic I switch back to x11.
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- Run Birdtray
- Not obnoxiously throw up W whenever it can't find an icon for a program during alt tabbing
- Not need extra extra handholding to run games properly without diagonal tears
Legit the generic W icon is fucking terrible
does it need to be replaced by the WU TANG?
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Work with Pynput
Support for stylus / pen writing on screen.
Automated window positioning through tools like wmctrl and xdotool. There are replacements on Wayland but they're either missing features or are tied to a specific window manager.
I use Xfce, and I like writing bash scripts that can work anywhere.
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