# wlroots

19 Hacker News commenters recommended wlroots and 7 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 5 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Free library that people use to build Wayland compositors, saving them from solving low-level problems themselves. Critics say its API changes often and its behaviour can be buggy.

## Why people recommend it

- Handles hard low-level work for you (3 comments): "It would have been much easier and cost-effective to use wlroots, which has a solid base and has ironed out a lot of problems." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46781224)) "First we got wlroots as a library that did most of the heavy lifting" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47395914)) "You’re not supposed to be solving these issues yourself." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47479291))
- Solid, well-tested base library (3 comments): "It would have been much easier and cost-effective to use wlroots, which has a solid base and has ironed out a lot of problems." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46781224)) "there are incredibly good libraries for making Wayland servers (wlroots, smithay, more)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46495869)) "a high-quality end-user library (wlroots) for writing compositors" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45944161))
- Community-run, no big corporate sponsors (2 comments): "wlroots are also real community projects with no big corporate sponsors" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46101603)) "if it wasn't for the wlroots people not much would have happened" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46000840))
- Basis for many desktop options (3 comments): "I like how we're getting more desktop options now thanks to wlroots." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50104531)) "But as a more flexible choice, there is wlroots." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46392876)) "Like you can build on top of wlroots just fine." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45794329))

## What people warn about

- Volatile API forces retooling on updates (2 comments): "It's also a moving target and you'll probably have to retool when wlroots updates." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47449504)) "the wlroots API is so volatile atm" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46383560))
- Same bugs fixed separately by each compositor (2 comments): "Every single one of them has to fix the same set of bugs in different ways even if they share a wm library like wlroots" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46497844)) "wlroots came pretty late so there was a lot of code duplication" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47452717))
- Bugs and random behaviour in dependents (2 comments): "2026 and you will still run into plenty of issues with random behaviour, especially if you run anything based on wlroots" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46487091)) "The wayland specific things such as wlroots, but also other things, just flat out suck." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46487340))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Smithay](https://hackerapproved.com/p/smithay.md): 9 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "wlroots", https://hackerapproved.com/p/wlroots/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).