What’s the difference for a real user between using X11 or Wayland nowdays? I haven’t found anything useful on the internet, so I’m asking you. Internet articles on the topic (and about WMs too) seem to be advertising slop since they explain anything but the real things. Also, if anyone used the XLibre fork, I would love to hear about your experience with it.
There are still things that work on X11 that don’t work on Wayland but Wayland has more security, more features and is actually being developed now.
Pick your distros default, if something graphical doesn’t work switching might do the trick.
Common issues with wayland are mostly related to screen sharing or lower level thingies like programmatically pressing the mouse.
Common issues with X11 is VRR, HDR, fractional scaling and multi monitor configuration.
Multiple screens and clipboard changes. Wayland has a lot more security built in. Keeps applications from seeing what other applications are doing.
Scaling issues, again multi monitor.
The ones that affect me: Remmina RDP sessions using muliple monitors. I have to launch it with
GDK_BACKEND=x11 remminaLibreoffice displays terrible on any screen that is a different resolution than the one orginally launched.
It too can be forced to use x11 as a backend.
And so through the xwayland tools it really has been fairly painless even with these issues.
I still struggle with running GUI programs as root and cutting & pasting between windows in Wayland. Those are the big things holding me back from switching completely.
So you literally can not copy+paste something between different apps?
I think they’re saying that it happens when you run one app as root, then you can’t copy-paste to other apps. It’s not a problem when running graphical apps as your normal user account.
My Xpenguin won’t work in Wayland 😢
If you use a laptop with high dpi and a docking station with a screen with another resolution. Wayland is able to hotplug you running session.
The difference is that some things work on one and some things don’t work on the other.
For example: the literal whole way you’ve ever been able to use a computer will only work on x11. That’s because x11 comes directly from the lineage of human computer interface that you’re used to. Everything just works. Unless…
Counter example: new stuff is phasing out (or has already phased out) x11 support! Kde and gnome for example, are Wayland only in the most recent builds. That doesn’t mean your rich copying and accessibility tools still work. They just didn’t implement those parts.
If you believe that open source is an impenetrable monolith that cannot be changed then you’d better get on the Wayland ship now and figure out how to deal with its shortcomings before you’re left behind.
If you believe that open source projects can respond to their users and improve, stick with x11. It works and someone will support it.
I knew GNOME dropped support for x11 only but never heard of KDE doing the same. But that was expectable anyway
Security
When you use X11, you allow any program running on your computer to access anything on your screen and clipboard, collect your keystrokes and type. It’s trivial to implement a keylogger, for example. Do not buy into the whole “no viruses on Linux” thing, it’s not true and likely to become even less and less true, as desktop Linux is becoming popular.
Wayland at least tries to put some barriers in place against this.
Wayland is more secure than x11 by design and more concise in scope. Notably it supports contemporary display technologies like display independent scaling, VRR, colour space (HDR) and several others.
Wayland is made by the x11 people.
As some general advice: If you don’t know the specifics, just go with your Linux distribution’s defaults. They probably have this figured out for you. Wayland is the more modern approach. We had a long transitioning period and some things didn’t work for a while or were missing. I’d say it’s ready by now. And if your distro maintainers also think it’s time to supersede the old X server, it probably is.
We had a long transitioning period and some things didn’t work for a while or were missing. I’d say it’s ready by now.
Do things like xdotool and xinput still work?
Uinput and libinput are the proper tools and they both work.
Also, the keyboard configuration is done with xkb
There’s ydotool
The x is the clue in those programs. They are tools to interact with x11. There will be tools to interact with Wayland, or there will be hacks to get x programs to sort of work with Wayland.
There will be tools to interact with Wayland
I don’t really like the hypothetical sound of this.
xdotool is essential for keeping some of my basic hardware usable.
(Yeah … more and more, I think I’m going to be a very late adopter of Wayland. I was planning on Debian Stable for my next install anyway…)
Which is on Wayland
What? Last I heard, Debian Stable was one of the last few holdouts that hadn’t gone Wayland yet.
According to https://wiki.debian.org/Xorg/ Wayland is the default since 10
Yeah, I mean x11 isn’t Wayland. They aren’t the same. Changing from x11 to Wayland will require change in multiple ways, but I believe once you have worked through the change, you won’t see much difference in day to day usage. But the beauty of Linux is you have the choice. You can use x11 if you prefer. Just be aware the majority are moving to Wayland, so x11 will get less development and Wayland more, and I imagine there will be a point in the distant future where x11 will be a lot of effort to run.
xdotool is essential for keeping some of my basic hardware usable.
That’s a good sign that you may not want to upgrade to Wayland on that hardware.
Nope. But you can find ydotool 🙄
X11 is still server-first and needs workarounds to run locally (like startx, sx), while Wayland can just be run. Unlike X, it isolates every processes access to other windows, but with slow adoption of protocols for things like screen-sharing, video conferences, accessibility tools. The tooling is not yet there imo.
That’s the main difference nowadays. Some people have issues with tearing or wrong-monitor with either of them.
Honestly, Wayland vs. X (and Flatpak) fit this perfectly:
X11 is dead don’t bother with it. The same people who wrote X11 are working on Wayland because X11 became to here maintain.
X11 is still being actively maintained. It isn’t an install risk or anything like that. It isn’t going to add any shiny new features, but not everyone needs shiny new features. (That being said, if Wayland works for you, go ahead and use it. Just don’t spread FUD, please.)
I wish the distributed computing utopia where we would send X windows over the network came true, but unfortunately it didn’t, and the whole X11 paradigm is inadequate for the modern tech reality
By real user, do you mean a nontechnical user? If that’s the case, the display server isn’t a choice to be made by such user, but by the distro maintainers. Most people won’t notice the difference, because it’s mostly stuff that happens under the hood.
I don’t think for tue average user it really matters much. If you’ve got multiple screens of different sizes or refresh rates, Wayland is the way to go. If you’ve got multiple identical screens that you want to treat as a single big screen, X11 is perfect for that.
I recently switched and I’m happy with how it runs. Even on Nvidia.
- for most people, use whatever your distro ships with and installs for you
- choosing desktop environments still starts heated discussions – high end, it’s a choice between Gnome and KDE – mid-tier has Xfce, LXQt, Mate, Cinnamon, and more – limited hardware go for IceWM, JWM, FLWM, or similar – want to get your hands dirty? go for a tiling window manager
- X11 is (effectively) abandonware at this point – it’s still getting security patches, but the devs left and started Wayland 17-ish years ago
- XLibre is more political than technical – and I’ll leave it at that
Why is XLibre political?
Mainly their readme being fully magat-pilled, talking about DEI and whatnot. They also waste time on things like renaming functions to own the libs. It’s not a project that i put any trust into and i’d rather use plain X11 if i had to go back.
How is DEI related to development and grahical servers at all?
Idk, you’ll have to ask the xlibre dev lol
If we ignore the deeply disturbing political views of the Creator the entire project is meant to be a statement. There’s a conspiracy theory that there was a grand plot to kill x11 by red hat and xlibre is built upon the idea that red hat was holding it back. This completely ignores the real issues that the codebase was pure spaghetti.
I heard that XLibre developers are working on cleaning the codebase. And I strongly believe we still need X11 at least until Wayland is polished enough, which still seems untrue even in 2026. The concerns about Red Hat are not conspiracy, a commercial corporation controlling important parts of Linux ecosystem is a serious threat, so having an alternative is never bad. Linux won’t have a future if everyone just uses Red Hat approved solutions.
Two things, one as previously mentioned the codebase is a mess and even the best developers working on x11 tend to introduce regressions (the xlibre dev isn’t so this is amplified). Second it absolutely is a conspiracy because red hat did everything in the power to save x11 until eventually they just kept using it (tbh it needed to be replaced two decades ago). As for your last point linux won’t have a future if its aggressively held back by an army of enthusiasts who demand things never change and fragmented until software support is non-existent.
You know that “until Wayland is polished enough” is at least a year ago for the overwhelming majority of people, right?
A year ago I got a new PC, installed Ubuntu 24.04 which defaults to Wayland, and installed discord. Push to talk wouldn’t work unless discord had mouse focus. I spent a few hours researching and trying different things before switching to X11 where it just immediately works.
Tell me more about how polished Wayland is.
That is a feature. Allowing arbitrary programs to read any key press is how you get keyloggers.
Wayland has a protocol to request reading keys out of focus (which will ask the user for permission, as opposed to just read it like on xorg).
If the program was running in xwayland (which it probably was) of course it won’t use that protocol, and will just try to read it X11 style.
In some DEs (KDE) you can select if X11 apps are allowed to read keys.
“I switched to X11 and it immediately works”. I’ll give you another tip: if you run
chmod 777 -R /the file manager stops pestering about permissions and it immediately works.Yes, you clearly understand the problem, thank you. If there’s a problem with filesystem permissions you can use tools like
chmod,chown, andsetfaclto fix them in a variety of ways.How do you fix a wayland session if your app doesn’t properly support GlobalShortcuts? Where’s the
chmod 777equivalent that lets the user say “I know this means this can spy on everything I do but I’d prefer this work today instead of waiting on a bug fix.” Without something like this, the entire desktop ecosystem needs to mature before you can call Wayland “polished.”
Fam, if I may, I’ll be a bit abrasive and blunt for the sake of brevity. So, without further ado.
Ubuntu 24.04
(I’ll assume this is on GNOME.) First of, in terms of Wayland development, that build is from the Bronze Age. The associated issue tracker has been closed since last year, even if you don’t like the solution GNOME has come up with. Which, gets us to the second point; please don’t blame the Wayland ecosystem as a whole whenever you find a fault within a Wayland compositor. If, instead, you would have been on KDE Plasma back then, you’d have found that PTT was supported. Even if it was basically a hack for the sake of UX. Thankfully, KDE Plasma has recently merged a proper implementation that’s slated for its 6.7 release.
I’ll grant you that the Wayland ecosystem hasn’t fully matured yet. But it’s undeniable that it already provides a better experience than its predecessor for the vast majority of users.
Fair points all around. I wasn’t thinking about version locks for the LTS releases when I posted, and it looks like I wouldn’t have had an issue on GNOME 48.
I think the maturity of the ecosystem has a larger impact on user experience than you’re giving it credit for. I understand wayland and the rest of the desktop ecosystem will someday (maybe today for those living on the bleeding edge) provide meaningful benefits over X11 without drawbacks. I’ll welcome it when it does, but in the meantime I don’t want to deal with troubleshooting my discord keybinds, or figuring out why Spotify has a weird window border. I want my desktop environment to Just Work™. It’s immaterial if the fault lies with wayland, GNOME, or Canonical for shipping wayland as a default while GNOME support still needed improvements. The end result is that as a user the only way to easily fix my problem is to use an X11 session instead of wayland, which makes wayland look like the problem.
https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/pull/56
Here is the x11libre dev not understanding what the
^operand does in C. Would you trust running this person’s code as a display server?Sure. No one expects anyone to know everything from the start, and people improve with time. But this was metux’s understanding of C when he forked off xorg thinking he could do better than freedesktop.
He might have confused it with shell script
The Linux ecosystem would whither and die without the likes of Red Hat.
X11 has many features and some it will never have. Wayland has less features and it has compatibility issues for the ones it has. But if you need 4K or touchscreen then Wayland is the way to go. Default choice should probably be Wayland unless it doesn’t support that one thing you care about.
