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.
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.
I lol’ed
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 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
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.
I would imagine a clean install, over just an update from x11 to wayland, might work better, since applications might still expect x11, and fail to render or work properly.
I used gnome with wayland and an Nvidia gpu maybe a couple years back, and it worked pretty well. I’d give it another go. mutter, gnome’s wayland compositor is actually pretty good compared to most others.
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 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”.
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.
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?)
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.
I kinda like being able to watch a video on one screen and not having to make sure that there are no animations going on anywhere else or the video framerate drops like it’s 1996.
Weirdly this happens on my work laptop (x11) but not any other Linux machine I’ve used including all the Wayland ones. I assume it’s due to video drivers.
Might be worth looking into and reporting as a bug. I use wayland and very commonly watch a high quality video on one monitor and whole games on my other just fine.
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.
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.
deleted by creator
My blocker is the Window Shade button on Plasma.
It worked fine in Wayland under Plasma 5, but somewhere early in the 6 transition support was removed.
For anyone not aware it minimizes the window to its own titlebar. I find it faster and more intuitive than minimizing to a dock, and it’s easier to keep track of things when you can actually read the whole titlebar.
Scroll-wheel rolls up windows for me on XFCE (labwc). I can understand it that might not be what you’re looking for, though.
I think you can even make it a button in the title bar, like the minimize button. Or you should be able to bind a keyboard shortcut to it too.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Thanks! there are a couple more wayland compositors that do have this feature, but other Plasma features are often lacking.
oh you’re right, it’s gone now. i didn’t even notice
tbh i only remember it working for non-Plasma apps, weirdly enough. stuff like Dolphin or Konsole wouldn’t work with it, but non-Plasma apps (that got decorated with the Plasma titlebar) would support it. maybe that’s why they removed it?
Yeah that was the case right before it got removed, but in P5 and for the first couple point releases of P6 KDE apps were working with it
The only thing keeping me off of Wayland is the fact that OBS window capture forces me to manually reselect every window every time.
Weird, it doesn’t make me do that, I have it installed with the flatpak.
for me its the god awful graphics when i go onto it. like everything seems blurry or streaky.
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.
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.
I’ve gotta be honest, the desktop environment situation on Linux does not impress me.
I’m on Cosmic which is decent, but there are all sorts of silly oversights in KDE and gnome, and windows have weird mixes of styles and toolbar display modes.
Is great that Linux is modular, but seriously gtk vs QT vs whatever else needs a heavy duty cleanup.
I agree, however Windows and macOS are even worse IMO. Everything is just totally inconsistent (Windows) and the window management features are very barebones (both). Using either one feels like going back 10 years or more.
The CSD trend might have some upsides but i find it mainly just makes apps ugly and any added functionality is almost always redundant.
Kvantum really helps make Plasma more consistent, not sure if there is a similar addon for GNOME
Edited for clarity
Apps should only use cad if they are really using the space like browsers with their tab bar. That gnome forces every app to provide them is really stupid.
Gotta love that thing on Windows when you mouse up to hard top right and click to close the window. In some situations it’ll focus and close a random window behind the one you’re wanting to kill.
Up to macOS 26 (the latest OS with Liquid Glass) consistency was great. You’d have to go back to the PowerPC era or X11 integration to find issues. Now I have windows with different toolbar button sizes and corner radii and it’s stupid as hell.
I agree on window management tools, but I used third party ones on Mac for a decade and they worked okay. Obviously not as good as i3 type ones.
Fair. i conflated two separate complaints about two different operating systems
macOS are even worse in this regard IMO. Everything is just totally inconsistent
Why do you mention macOS if you haven’t used 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
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
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.
