With more distros moving away from x11 and recently some removing it entirely I was curious if there's any timeline or hopeful release schedule for wayland support. I know it's already currently in the works just wondering how it's going.

Hey friend, I’ve been working with a Qt5-built Houdini on Fedora 43 under Wayland for several days now. The issues that used to bother me—such as the mouse wheel not working in the network editor and parameters disappearing when scrolling in the parameter pane—are all gone. I don’t know exactly what fixed them or who was responsible. I only know that I’m no longer encountering these problems, and I hope this information is helpful to you.

I'm running Rocky Linux 10.1 + Wayland + Houdini 21.0.596 and everything works great.

Thanks for the feedback, that's good news! I guess they've been quietly working on it in the bg. I'll give it a try and see how it goes.

tupapioso
I'm running Rocky Linux 10.1 + Wayland + Houdini 21.0.596 and everything works great.

Same... but I have to use the Qt5 of Houdini, not Qt6, since I have the exact same issue as guan9287.

Just a feedback, I am working on Fedora Wayland and Houdini 21.0.631 is very unstable it freezes time to time, I am circling around it going to a X11 desktop like Cinnamon but it is not ideal.

mzigaib
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Did you install QT 5 version? I am just curious.

Yes it is installed, even so Houdini keeps freezing from nowhere.

mzigaib
Yes it is installed, even so Houdini keeps freezing from nowhere.

same on Fedora 44 / Gnome 50 on Wayland by default, freezing randomely.
KDE is lifesaver in my case.

P.S.
my update on 5 Jun 2026:
Found that the reason of freezes is in 595* Nvidia drivers. Roll-back on 580* Nvidia version handled freezes! And now I'm normally working in H21.0.700 with QT6, on Wayland (Gnome 50).

Cheers!

oh baby. its coming!

found the solution on Fedora 44, Gnome 50 (Wayland by default):
rollback to 580* nvidia drivers. There are no more freezes in Houdini as it was on 595 drivers.

tupapioso
I'm running Rocky Linux 10.1 + Wayland + Houdini 21.0.596 and everything works great.

Well, I spoke too soon. I recently did a system update and now Houdini is pretty unstable. The UI freezes at random intervals. Other problems have popped up too, most importantly the audio system now starts screeching every few minutes and I have to reboot to stop it. I spend most of my day trying to troubleshoot with little success. Frustrating.

The esiest solution I found so far is to use X11 desktops the problem for me is that I like Gnome for all my other stuff and X11 for it is no more.

I had to downgrade my Linux distro from Rocky 10.1 to Rocky 9.8 to better support Renderman 27.3, best move I could make, it is so much more stable in the Hydra, UI, ML Interactive Denoiser.

Rocky Linux 9.8 - X11
KDE
Nvidia 610.43.02 ---Yes you can use latest drivers, no pauses
Houdini 21.0.729
Renderman 27.3 Daily Build

I have never been more stable with Solaris. I can only speak for myself, but I will not be going to any OS that is not part of the VFX Platform or "What the DCCs tell us they support..." lesson learned :-)

I've been using Pop!_OS with Houdini for a while now, and while it was exciting at first, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to rely on for production work.

For context, I'm still running X11, not Wayland. My system is a few generations old but still fairly capable: 16-core Ryzen CPU, 128 GB DDR4 RAM, RTX 3090, and Nvidia 580-series drivers. I specifically stayed away from the 590-series drivers after hearing about instability issues.

Even on X11, I've had to disable the Vulkan viewport entirely because it was causing frequent freezes regardless of driver version or other troubleshooting attempts. I'm also seeing a lot of crashes during rendering, particularly with XPU. On top of that, I've run into RAM issues, performance slowdowns, and general instability around the UI, viewport, and rendering workflows.

At this point, I'm honestly wondering whether I should switch back to Windows. So far, Linux hasn't inspired much confidence as a Houdini production platform for me.

That said, I've only tested Pop!_OS. Are there other distros that people are having better luck with for Houdini, Solaris, and Karma XPU?

chf
That said, I've only tested Pop!_OS. Are there other distros that people are having better luck with for Houdini, Solaris, and Karma XPU?

A large number of the developers here use Ubuntu 24.04 or Rocky Linux 9.

johnmather
A large number of the developers here use Ubuntu 24.04 or Rocky Linux 9.

Are the developers using Ubuntu and Rocky Linux on X11 or Wayland?
I'm trying to understand which display stack receives the most day to day testing, especially with NVIDIA and the Houdini Vulkan viewport.

chf
Are the developers using Ubuntu and Rocky Linux on X11 or Wayland?

I believe most are still using X11.

Most of our large customers take a long time to update their OSes, as it generally requires an entire rebuild of their entire tech stack, so it will be a while before we completely transition off of X11.

i had success running houdini on almost all distros i testet. i think the more deciding factor is weather you use x11 or not. I can run houdini with no problems under archlinux/nixos (unstable even) as long as it is on x11 environment or at least a container like xephyr that is basically x11 in a window.