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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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:
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…)
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.
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
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 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.
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.
If you use a feature complete Wayland compositor and compare it to equivalents (RIP velox), then Wayland basically offers more consistent pen and multitouch support and stuff, while being faster.
There’s no 2D acceleration in Wayland and that’s by design, it’s made for new GPUs that don’t have 2D anyway anymore. Programs either draw pixels or start up 3D.
XLibre is trying the opposite and is actually merging various 2D drivers for old and niche hardware, like ct65550 as found in the Toshiba Libretto 50ct among others. Most of these originate from distribution forks (NetBSD in this case). T2 Linux also maintains a patch to bring back lots of more ancient 2D drivers that were removed in 2012.
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.
Every time I setup my desktop up for Wayland I always go back to X11, I find Wayland sluggish compared to X11 and don’t have the time nor energy to troubleshoot applications that had no issues working on X11.
I did not have any problems with Wayland for 6 months on Arch (personal PC for hobby projects and gaming). I also don’t want to troubleshoot, it just works. Most applications are installed via flatpak.
also don’t want to troubleshoot, it just works. Most applications are installed via flatpak.
I’m not surprised Flatpaks work with Wayland without issue, however Flatpaks containerize the application which is something I don’t want to do for everything I download as it adds extra overhead for something that could’ve just been built and installed as a native package (.deb, .rpm).
To each their own though.
Yes. This is still an important point, you make!
Wayland has been the default for awhile, but open source software is maintained by volunteers.
Until each specific package has been updated by the original developers, it may not work well on Wayland.
So, for now, there’s also a trade-off:
- Love running brand new shiny software, better use Wayland. Wayland has been the usual default for awhile, so new code is unlikely to get tested for speed and smoothness on X11.
- Have a whole set of preferred older good enough software that hasn’t been updated lately? Consider using X11 for a bit longer until someone who loves those tools updates them.
one thing i noticed in trying both is x11 using more cpu in the same scenario (playing a youtube video, same resolution) and even the DP adapter i am using getting warmer when on x11 compared to wayland. in this scenario the difference wasn’t much despite being roughly double (~2.5W compared to ~4.5W in x11). idk how that scales in other scenarios.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Linux ecosystem would whither and die without the likes of Red Hat.
Is it even a debate at this point? x11 is on it’s way out and wayland transition is pretty much complete within the gnu/linux ecosystem. Vast majority of distros and desktop environments ship with wayland as the default and keep developing with wayland in mind, with holdouts like debian and mint that still use x11, I think. X11 is basically dinosaur software for legacy. Vast majority of end users will just take what is the default and that is Wayland and they don’t even notice.
I use Debian GNOME and Wayland is the default now, with GNOME on Xorg as an optional session in the login manager.
On most distros Wayland is trouble free and x11 is a thing of the past. X11 made some things simpler like screen share with somebody , but Linux is growing large enough that Wayland (that is secure) is the best choice. You don’t want your x11 screen duplicated on a malware attackers screen etc.
