x11 when you try to use 2 monitors that don’t have the exact same atomic composition:
I lol’ed
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.
Weird. I have to switch all my machines to x11 in order to get multiple monitors working. Wayland just renders back screens on everything but main. Also makes remote desktop access buggy as fuck if it works at all.
Yeah, my multimonitor experience is better under x11, especially gaming (also Lutris has more features for x11 too in that regard). I only use it on that machine tho.
Wayland is the one thing that fixed a whole shit-ton of my problems overnight and now I find out nobody wants to use it under any circumstances.
¯\(ツ)/¯ Alrighty thenPlenty use it without knowing as it is what the Steam Deck uses in gaming mode.
Almost everyone uses it. We just never make posts about “our configuration works effortlessly, give us attention”
Only people with a bone to chew and shit to stir feel the need to post such things. Back in the day it was people who felt superior for debugging their steaming pile of init shell spaghetti, now it’s people who just can’t live without diving into X11 configuration files.
The people who use it happily don’t make memes about it. I do have some weird errors every now and then, it’s definitely not as stable for me as X11. However X11 wasn’t very smooth with my multi monitor setup, and Wayland improved the smoothness of my PC enormously, so the random issues every now and then are worth it
I’m fine with X. Which problems did you have?
It’s been some time, but the biggest pain point for me on X11 was 4k@144hz. Short of some xrandr tweaks I couldn’t manage to set, Wayland immediately worked perfectly.
I suspect I ran in to x11’s limit in that case.
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.
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.
I was an early adopter years back, so I reported bugs while I could still switch back when I needed to (which ended up being once to screen share with Zoom)
If you had done this, you wouldn’t be forced into a buggy environment now.
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.
The problem is many distros are going to stop shipping Xorg, because it is “not needed” anymore.
That’s where the adapt part comes in.
I had a friend who collected CRTs and VHS players right at the turn from DVD to bluray. He didn’t argue to kill LCDs, HD video or CDs. He didn’t wrote to Sony to complain that he couldn’t find VHS on Walmart anymore or that his hyper specific CC format didn’t work on DVD the exact same way it did on VHS. He accepted that tech culture shifted and that to keep his hobby up he had to take up a lot of the upfront work of maintaining old tech alive. He learned to repair old CRTs and VHSs and keeps them running for libraries. Even collaborating to digitize particularly niche historical content.
You should be able to compile it yourself though, even if upstream doesn’t provide it prepackaged
People who just complain and stay in some deprecated tech (instead of reporting bugs and working with the new way) will have a rude awakening when it’s just no longer supported.
I’m not saying everyone should be a early adopter, but this timeline was more than forgiving. People who did nothing but keep using the X11 GNOME session might run into Wayland session bugs now that they could have reported years ago.
Some may have bugs that fully break the session, and reporting bugs comes with a new problem: if you do, odds are someone will dismiss it, and/or tell you to fix it yourself.
Hmm, especially GNOME devs are definitely very opinionated, but “running a Wayland session on halfway-contemporary hardware” is definitely something all DE devs want to support.
So if you give them workable information, you won’t be dismissed.
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”.
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).
while they happily stick to the X they know
Aren’t there still maintained window managers that support X11?
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.
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.
The issue is that in the political landscape, that word has shifted away from its social meaning. “Conservatives” in the US and parts of Europe are actually reactionaries, i.e. people pushing back against the status quo wanting to “return” to some idealized past that never existed like that.
So using the word “conservative” in its original sense might not be understood by people.
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.
If you only live in the GUI layer, you aren’t the driver. The implementation details are abstracted away from you. Your software are the real uber drivers, you’re just being driven around.
I found that systemd actually simplified all the things I was doing on sysvinit. BUT, I did hold out until Debian testing stopped supporting sysvinit, and I think waiting gave me a better experience.
With X11 -> Wayland, the main thing holding me back finding a tiling compositor that will work under Plasma and is packaged for Debian and the learning at least the basics. My XMonad configuration isn’t that special, but I’m really quite used to not having to re-arrange my own windows, and being able to move/resize/refocus all with the home row and modifier keys. So, I’m probably going to wait until Debian testing ships a Plasma that doesn’t support X11, and have to do some learning then.
I’d have to change desktop environments, because my current one only has “experimental” support in the latest version, and my distro is years behind, anyway. Your choices are pretty much KDE, Gnome or building your own desktop with a standalone window manager, and I don’t like any of those options.
Fair, although I never understood why people choose Mint and so on.
Plasma is so configurable that you can just make it look and act like you want, right?
So I guess it’s getting the GNOME experience (everything is simple, no setup) but with a classic desktop paradigm?
Pretty much, yes. It also used to be lighter in resource use than GNOME, though IDK if that’s still true. XFCE and LXQt are definitely lighter than both Gnome and Plasma, they are a lot more stable in the sense that they don’t change that much from release to release, and they play nice with third party window managers (e.g. tiling WMs).
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.
Meanwhile I’m here on Wayland because it does things that x11 doesn’t.
Like wreck the playability of your games? ;)
If by “WRECK” you mean “improve” yes.
You must use a different Wayland than I do.
I play competitive multiplayer games with VRR on a 4k240 monitor in a tiling wm with direct scanout. Color management support (HDR, 10bit, anything beyond 8bit sRGB) is also coming along.
I’ve never had a better working setup than this. Everything on X was painful. Even just getting vsync to work properly used to be tricky in some cases.
I agree that wayland does miss features compared to X but a lot of them are conscious design decisions and don’t affect me personally. For example running graphical applications remotely through e.g. SSH or the complete lack of security allowing any application to easily read my keyboard input.
Xorg never worked quite right for me with multiple displays of different resolutions, orientations and refresh rates. Even after extensive setup, I would get screen tearing effects all the time. In wayland, everything just works OOTB for me.
I set TearFree in the mesa driver settings (not sure if it’s amd only?) so there’s no tearing even without vsync, I have a small 50hz display and a 1080p 120hz without issues
According to the X11 devs, it’s all a pile of hacks to shoehorn in features like this. Some things would have never been properly possible with it. So why it might work for you, it’ll never work for everyone.
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
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
As someone else said: Linux Mint is late to the Wayland party, use a more robust DE when you want to talk about what “Wayland” can and can’t do.
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.
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.
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.
Vulnerable? Do you have examples? I’m not aware of any.
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?)
My kid (13) surprised me the other day and said he wanted to try Linux. He has seen me forever using it and got scared about W10 getting hacked or something so thought of trying it out.
I handed over to him my Fedora 43 (KDE plasma) install USB drive and once installed the problems began.
The monitor couldn’t be set to native resolution, and Steam didn’t want to run. Turns out that there is no wayland compatibility with the Radeon Polaris RX480. What a bummer, that card is perfectly fine for what he does on his PC.
We tried with the cinnamon version and that is working fine. He even has roblox running.
Tl;Dr: Wayland isn’t compatible with older hardware that most casual windows users are mostly going to be using.
If he wants to try plasma just install the x11 version on fedora:
sudo dnf install plasma-workspace-x11
Yup. Its not the default anymore (and for good reason), but it is still supported for now. This is a pretty straightforward solution to the problem.
When I updated KDE and found that I had lost the cube desktop switcher effect I was fairly put off on Wayland and made a lot of effort to get the cube back in various ways which did not go well. Now that it’s on Wayland, albeit slightly different, I am content with staying on Wayland. I can’t thank the people who ported it enough. It may seem like a trivial graphic effect to some but that fraction of a second that it uses when switching desktops is something that helps my ADHD tremendously. If I’m getting frustrated with a project I can switch to something else and something about that visualization helps me keep everything organized mentally. I use 4 virtual desktops, each with it’s own project subject matter, one for each side of the cube, excluding the top and bottom.
This meme imagary is from the movie Seven Psychopaths. It’s a very good movie.
Do the other effects for switching desktops, like the default slide, not accomplish the same thing? I also find that having no animation makes it harder to keep track of where things are, but just have the sliding one
I still have the slide as default and use it a lot. I have it set to slide when I mousewheel on the desktop and keep my taskbar shorter so there’s always some desktop showing in the corners. When I get frustrated with something though, I hit my key to activate the cube and the animation of it pulling away from the normal view works as like a disconnect from whatever I’m doing. Virtually stepping back basically.
Without the cube, I found I would get frustrated and instead of working on something else I would keep going and ultimately make mistakes and end up more frustrated. If I tried switching with the slide or fade to another project, the irritation stayed with me and I’d mess those other projects up too. The cube, for me, just worked.
I did have some success using the overview, however it was a lot more overwhelming with the way it shows everything, while the cube limits it to what’s on each cube face, without showing minimized windows at all.
I’m pretty sure you can get that effect in the desktop effects menu in kde settings
Yes now you can. But not initially. The old cube effect was removed and later re-implement
Look, I primarily use e-waste for my computing. I’ll use whatever display server I want. You’ll pull X11 out of my cold, dead hands.
Same!
I have an ancient laptop from 2013, it needs ancient nvidia 600 series driver version 470 someshit. Wayland doesn’t support old stuff, and nuaveu drivers can’t compete, creating random distorted image on fullscreen or crashing non stop.
And on my PC I have to use VMware for work, Wayland doesn’t work well with fullscreen VMs, the keystroke capture thingamajig fucks shit off bad.
X11 works just fine in both my use cases.
Likewise for Rustdesk clients and hotkeys.
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Idk, especially when using the most recent version of Wayland compositors, it’s been great. Solved my display and touchpad issues.
I did have some Nvidia issues but that shouldn’t be surprising regardless of display protocol.
But like… use whatever software you want. Worst case you can always just nest a minimal Wayland compositor like cage or gamescope in your X session.
My child will never see more than 8-bit color
I’m sorry to hear about your child’s condition. Hope they can find a cure for it soon, wish you all the best.
I will happily switch over once libinput isn’t absolute ass with my touchpad! Or if I could adjust its settings in any meaningful way!! Or if you could let me use my old touchpad driver!!!
Until then you can attempt to pry x11 from my cold undead still-animated hands
Plasma devs are currently focusing on input devices. Ideal time to offer them to help test your device and get amazing support out of it.
Or you could sit on your ass and do nothing, which is essentially gambling that they’ll happen to support it (or your next device) when you’re forced to switch at some point in the future.
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.
A lot of their components are actually already Wayland capable :). But if you want the exact same experience you should probably wait.
I miss screensavers :(
Me too… :((
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.
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
Input devices (including tablets) is one of the 3 current overarching Goals of the KDE project, so now might be a good time to get involved with testing.
https://community.kde.org/Goals/Input
https://kde.org/goals/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.
But I think that is wayland too, so I don’t think that’s the reason
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.
