x11 when you try to use 2 monitors that don’t have the exact same atomic composition:
I think it took me 2 years to get six monitors on two GPUs working consistently under X11. Yes, I’m that fucking stubborn.
Wayland worked right from the start.
I still use X11 & will continue to do so for as long as possible. Wayland’s not bad, X11 just seems to works better…
It really just boils down to what you’re trying to do. Which is why choice is good, as always
Im on boring mint, and Wayland sucks on it. Literally disables my ctrl and shift keys, and volume keys, and backgrounds are only black. Unusable. And I have all amd, 13 year old cpu. Oh and it screws up video playback
Mint is pretty late to the Wayland party with Cinnamon. It’s probably one of the worst distros to try to use Wayland on.
I like XFCE because is simple and my PC is a toaster with an NVIDIA card so…whenever I have XFCE on Wayland I’ll switch to it.
I’ve tried a few distros recently (Bazzite, Nobara, Debian…), all with Plasma+Wayland, and none of them work with my Wacom Intuos. Nobara with Gnome works fine (that’s what I’m using in the meantime), albeit with a limited feature set: can’t remap tablet area, can’t use or remap the tablet buttons.
So, I’ve narrowed it down to something inbetween Plasma and Wayland. That’s all I know for nowI use the tablet as a pointing device -using a mouse hurts my wrist after roughly 20mn (old injury). So it really is an accessibility issue…
I have said this a few times before, apologies, but I’m hammering it because it’s not notorious enough.
libinput is a major component in that area. you should ask around here: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput also have a look at the existing open/closed issues
Thanks ! Wacom support just replied to me with a link to their linux packages repo, I have some reading ahead of me
I would post about it on the Fedora forums with details about what doesn’t work and details about your injury. (If you are willing)
Yes, I might do that, thanks for the advice.
I’ve considered switching several times in the past, but each time there was something I needed that was not supported (e.g. - this issue with Zoom screen sharing)
In the last of these times I found no such dealbreaker, but I did want to try a dualboot setup - or dual-login, actually, because I should be able to switch at the greeter - first, to make sure I’m not breaking anything I need for work. This required switching from LightDM to a display manager that supports both X11 and Wayland. I don’t remeber which one I’ve chosen, but I do remember having hard time installing it (I think I couldn’t get it to launch i3 for whatever reason)
I’ve just checked and is seems LightDM supports Wayland now, so maybe it’s time to try the switch again. Being able to use my current DM means I’m not going to risk breaking anything. Probably.
rstudio and octave is holding me back T_T
they should just work under wayland without supporting it. what’s the problem with them?
This is what I am going to think about every time I am being stubborn and refusing to move until all my demands are met. “I shouldn’t back down, I’m Christopher fuckin’ Walken!”
Meanwhile I’m here on Wayland because it does things that x11 doesn’t.
Like wreck the playability of your games? ;)
It actually does wreck the playability of games for me by disabling the ctrl and shift key. A known issue no one has bothered to look into. I cant complain tho, theyre working their butts off for free
If by “WRECK” you mean “improve” yes.
if variable high refresh rate on my game monitor while discord and YouTube run at 60hz on the other wrecks playability, then definitely
I’m not one of those people who loves tearing though, so its good enough for me
I miss screensavers :(
One of the things that keeps me on x11 is xscreensaver. I disable the desktop environments blanking and install xscreensaver each time I load a system for myself.
Me too… :((
Yeah, so, switching to wayland still break copy/paste from terminal apps, still requires me to disable all hardware acceleration lest firefox freeze and plasma’s effects are visually broken, and it randomly swap my screen on each boot.
Meanwhile, no issue at all on X. I’ll still wait a bit.
I had the same thing. I think I solved it by installing xclip.
It’s fucking weird people have such strong opinions about issues like X11 and systemd. They’re meant to be working in the background away from the user, and that’s exactly how I treat them. Actually systemd still provides some functions a user might have to interact with manually, for X11 I’m just baffled.
When I take an uber, I don’t care whether the car has an automatic or manual transmission.
I think the average user wouldn’t care, Linux just attracts nerds. And I think it’s totally fine and even good that people care how their computer works—it shows that users care about their software working for them, rather than just wanting to go along with whatever is given to them. I think a lot of the positions people take about these things are very silly, but I’d still prefer someone to have a silly opinion about X11/Wayland or pid 1 than to not have an opinion at all. It’s nice that users are being actively involved in deciding what they want their system to be; it’s a nice change from the average user who’s like “well microsoft is screenshotting my screen every 5 seconds and feeding it into copilot now, guess I’m going along with that”.
When I take an uber, I don’t care whether the car has an automatic or manual transmission. But I care what MY CAR has! Especially since there isn’t a shop for my car and I have to do all my own maintenance. Like, init/systemd is a huge architectural change, it’s weird to you that people who depend on their computer to perform whatever function gives their life meaning and viability want to have a functional grasp of their system? That’s a big change to absorb for essentially no practical benefit to the problem domain.
Gnome forced me onto Wayland a few weeks ago and I’ve been dealing with issues ever since. Some issues even affecting the most basic level tasks like typing text, imagine dealing with that in 2025. Following your analogy, if the Uber with the fancy new transmission came to a halt every kilometre, you’d care too.
Same here. All amd. 13 year old cpu. Wayland has a ton of issues and 0 noticeable improvements for me.
Nvidia?
Not even, amd on both my laptop and desktop, but still lots of issues. None of them major, but it adds up.
There are still existing issues with wayland that do not exist on X11. I’m talking, using last-gen consumer grade hardware that will break basic applications like, who knows, a web browser. Meanwhile the “upside” are extremely marginal to a lot of people. Different screen scaling isn’t implemented using proper DPI on most implementations, variable refresh rate is not something most people care about (I sure don’t care that my second monitor is capped at 120Hz instead of 144Hz because of my first monitor), etc.
So, yeah, for some people, it’s not a matter of preference, it’s a matter of having a stable, working system vs. a broken system where basic features are not a given.
If you took an uber and the car was a horse-driven carriage and your seat was a hole in a rotted plank, you’d complain.
I used to use some features that only worked on x11. Slowly I found alternatives or workarounds on wayland. So I understand the sentiment. Imagine you book an uber but it’s electric so they say you can’t book a ride that’s too long
I love your metaphor because it is exactly the kind of pedantry that is usually at play with X11 vs Wayland.
“I can’t take an electric uber because it has an effective range less than 400 miles!”
Who the fuck takes a uber to a destination over 4 hours away?
A normal person rents a car, takes a bus, catches a train or buys a plane ticket. Ain’t no one faring a uber for a long trip to another city. But that’s exactly the kind of complaints from people obsessively clinging to X11. They have a hyper specific use case or workflow that almost no one else uses.
Or maybe they’re developers that are tired of the wheel being reimplemented?
Eg.
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/06/wayland-screenshots/Every single person has different problems and priorities, and until hyper specific use cases/workflows work on Wayland, many will stay on Xorg.
I understand and agree. Anyone who has a super specific use case that means they still use X11, go ahead, no one is stopping them. But to complain or trash Wayland on that basis is asinine. Every single change in paradigm breaks someone’s workflow, that’s impossible to avoid. But the responsible thing to do is to adapt either with new tools and resources, or with a slight change in workflow. They act like people are taking away their toy, when in reality it is just adding to the pile of available toys. But they are upset because their toy is old and won’t get repaired anymore, while the new toy is slightly different but a bit easier to clean and repair, so they get upset at the other kids for playing with it. Ignoring that the new toy doesn’t make the old toy disappear.
In my eyes, it’s the same deal as conservatives coping with the changing world. There is a version where they just shut up and let the rest of the tech landscape improve while they happily stick to the X they know (X.org or even XLibre).
Bring in politics is a choice
You aren’t wrong though
Unless I’m terribly misunderstanding the word’s meaning (or anglophones once again redefined a word to reflect their current sensibilities), “conservative” doesn’t automatically imply politics, just that someone is resistant to new ideas. A person who only listens to music produced before the 20th century and goes into a rage when video game music composers are mentioned is a conservative, but not in terms of political views.
while they happily stick to the X they know
Getting left behind is the natural and inevitable consequence of obsolescence.
Huh, why do I hear someone shouting about Windows 11 requiring TPM?
Yes, the people who refuse to either upgrade to Win11-compatible hardware or move to an OS compatible with their existing hardware will eventually get left behind. Both in terms of security and compatibility. It’s happened many times, from the fall of AGP in favour of PCIE, to every time Intel inroduced a new CPU socket. X11 is the next.
IMO Wayland surpassed X11 a long time ago… As it doesn’t shit in the pants with tearing on video play or touchscreens with multi-screen.
Man, I always read people bitching about screen tearing, but I haven’t seen it since, like, 2008. I’m starting to believe I have tremendous luck.
Woah, I had to do that weird textfile trick on every single computer I installed for all my family members for years until the first Debian KDE with Wayland session (was it 12?)
Is it perfect? No. But X11 isn’t perfect either.
X11 is heavily outdated and vulnerable, but it features one thing Wayland doesn’t: it works with everything.
So, if Wayland checks your points, go Wayland. If something breaks - X11 is there to back you up.
Vulnerable? Do you have examples? I’m not aware of any.
Not even always true. For me, Wayland is the only thing that runs decently on my Frankenstein monster of a setup, while X11 makes everything run insanely slow. I think everyone should try both at some point
Interesting
When I first got into linux, I was having trouble with sound issues, and my track pad had pointer acceleration and was always the wrong speed.
Wayland apparently had a fix for the trackpad settings not taking, so I switched to logging in with Wayland before it was the distro default, and almost all of my problems disappeared instantly. The only real issue I had then was screen sharing, which is fixed now.
X11 has only given me problems. I’m sure it was great at one point, but it certainly did not back me up.
Correcto X11 just works for me, never had any issues, there is literally zero benefit for me swapping over.
Every time I am booted into a Wayland session, something doesn’t feel, look or work right which causes me pain and suffering through my OCD which i don’t have.
I’m planning on trying hyprland soon though because it can look very pretty so if I swap over to that then yes I’ll be a wayland pleb, but in that case there’s a real reason to me swapping… not just for zero benefit.
Give me server-side decorations, or give me death!
(won’t add the whole of GTK as a dependency, so that my input handling can be handed over to whatever is GTK doing.)
