Sometimes, I feel like the average Linux user is just on very old or at the very least pretty old hardware.
I know I am probably wrong, but it just seems odd that in X11 my 8 year old ultrawide 144hz 1080p monitor is literally a stuttery and jittery mess when moving windows, when animations play, and even moving the cursor around. I believe I tried playing a game, and it also being a stuttery mess, but I can’t remember as that was around 6-7 months ago.
Using Wayland, on the other hand, as soon as I logged in for the first time it was definitely noticeably NOT like it was in X11. Frame rate was 144hz, everything mentioned above just worked as I would expect. It even feels smoother than Windows which I still have to use every now and then. Gaming on it is a blast 99% of the time, and I game A LOT! (completed ~10 games on openSUSE Tumbleweed just this year!)
So, sometimes I just feel like I said, and as I also said, I’m probably wrong. I have never logged back into X11 except when I upgraded my graphics card a month or so ago because of the stuttery feeling of X11. Some things did work better under X11, I guess, but that is probably because of the stagnant adoption of Wayland?
Besides me using Linux since the beginning of this year until now, I am still a Linux noob, so my opinions are just that. I have no real knowledge of Linux that would qualify me to be any good source of info. I just don’t get the slow adoption is all!
About time. Wayland has worked great for several years on Intel and AMD systems. Nvidia is finally caring to catch up.
Its perpetually fixed the next common Xorg complaint, including disabling vsync, redirection outside of the DE for fullscreen apps, multi monitor scaling, fractional scaling, global keyboard shortcuts, a tiling wm implementation, HDR support, session restore, and soon remote access
The software that doesn’t support it and doesn’t want to support it will never adapt and have alternatives.
Its been ready, reliable, and a much better experience for so long. Ubuntu coming around is a testament to that.
I’ve been using Wayland since 2018 and not had any issues aside from when I briefly tested with an Nvidia card.
Wayland is more than ready for 99% of people, and has been for a while. Whenever I use Xorg it feels janky.
E: I also had issues with screen sharing, actually. I forgot about that because I rarely have to do it.
It wasn’t until recently where I’ve switched to Wayland and reached the point where I don’t even realize I’m using it.
That was the metric for a proper replacement.
I love wayland, but you can’t deny that it still lacks support and stability.
But maybe this is one of those chicken or the egg, maybe we need the transition to push the quality
I can deny it
Not sure what the hullabaloo is about, I’m on Ubuntu using Wayland and it’s fine. What use cases would people have for x11, and could it be solved by using another desktop environment like Mate or XFCE?
Mate and xfce are not on wayland yet, so yes, and the biggest things missing are accessibility protocols and xdotool functionality.
The only issue I have seen with Wayland is that Eclipse IDE crashes every few hours. And for those that say there are alternatives, sure, but why do I have to setup a new IDE and learn how to use it? Wayland does not add anything for me, so it is easier to just install X11 myself or stop using that distro.
I think most of us would consider that an eclipse bug, but yeah, until it’s fixed it’d make sense to work around it.
Kinda similarly, I have a mostly identical setup on several machines, and on one of them Firefox has a memory leak, which even showed up just recently. It also seems to manifest if I have certain pages open, the most noticeable of which is Reddit.
It’s the kind of stuff I could dig into, buuut it’s just a PITA.
Linux idiot here. What is wayland? And what is XOrg?
They are display server communication protocols. Essentially, the computer clients give the display server information, and then the display server processes that information and sends it to the screen. For example, a game might say, “The player is controlling a red guy with a hat and mustache” and the display server draws a Mario on the screen.
X Server is 40 years old. It’s tried and tested, but is not built on modern coding standards. For example, it has not kept up with modern security, allowing a bad actor to tell X to draw a bit of malicious code that tricks the display server into giving it control of other programs. For this reason, the developers of X are sunsetting it and have designed Wayland to replace it.
Wayland is a rewrite of X from the ground up, and is much more secure. It keeps each program in its own bubble, so if a rogue app tries to gain control of programs outside its bubble, it can’t. However, such a large change requires other programs to buy in, creating s vicious cycle where developers don’t want to switch to Wayland until it’s mature, and Wayland is unable to mature without developers buying in. That’s why this “new” protocol has been in progress for the past 16 years, and yet linux users still disagree on whether it is mature enough for wide adoption.
GNOME desktop environment has been at the forefront of Wayland adoption, and has announced plans to stop using X in a future release. Ubuntu, which uses GNOME by default, has announced they are dropping X so they can see how it works in their short-term release before pushing it to their 2026 long-term release. Essentially, they are doing it when the timing works best for them rather than wait until GNOME forces them to drop it.
Emphasis on the protocol part. There is only 1 implementation of X11 (Xorg). Wayland however is just protocols. There are several implementations of varying quality.
Depending on your DE, you could be using one of Weston (reference impl), Mutter (GNOME), Kwin (Plasma), wlroots (hyprland, sway), etc.
Two different frameworks for providing a graphical user interface. X is older.
ELIS5 version. Wayland and Xorg are what draw the screen on your monitor. Xorg is based on stuff that’s 40 years old and Wayland is meant to replace Xorg as a more modern way to draw on your monitor.
Me with Xubuntu with XFCE:
Hmmm how's the future of my Ubuntu flavour? 🤔Isn’t Wayland the husband from Everything, Everwhere, All at Once?
It’d helpful if the got Wayland to work first.
It doesn’t?
My experience has been less that stellar, but it’s always improving.
I’ve accepted it’s inevitable, but at the moment nobody’s forcing me to switch and I have zero motivation to. I haven’t had any issues with X in years.
Thankfully, I’m not in Ubuntu, so I don’t have anyone shoving their decisions down my throat (software-wise).
It’s funny people’s X and Wayland experiences are so varied. I could never stop screen tearing with X, on multiple machines, with Wayland I never had any tearing. It brought along different small issues, but never had tearing, which in my opinion was a better option than no issues and tearing. These issues got fixed with time, and now I’d hate to go back to X.
When’s the last time you used Wayland? I tried a few years back and there were quite a few paper cuts.
I’ve been using sway for about six months and there is one obnoxious paper cut, and one thing that just doesn’t work.
The paper cut for me is a java app that won’t render menus correctly. Most menus work, but there are a few that don’t draw properly.
The one thing that still doesn’t work is deskflow.
Screen sharing with zoom and Google meet and jitsi work fine. Keyboard input changes work fine, and most things are just hunky dory.
Oh, about 4 or 6 months ago? I had problems with font scaling and multiple monitors with different resolutions, and correct DPI handling. I hear that’s all been fixed, but I haven’t tried it yet.
I have no reason to try it. X works just fine for me. I have herbstluftwm set up the way I like it, and there’s only one Wayland window manager that looks at all similar in functionality to herbstluftwm (niri?). picom gives me all of the functionlity I find useful or attractive: dimming non-focused windows and light tranparency on terminals. Switching would be a lot of work, finding a bar to work like polybar, getting the WM set up, finding a good terminal to replace rio. And why? For what? X works well and reliably, and I don’t have any edge cases like I did in Wayland, so should I make the time and effort to switch? There’s no compelling reason, at the moment. There’s nothing I want, or need, from Wayland.
I’ll probably log in to Niri to play with it one of these days when I have nothing better to do. I’m curious if it does anything herbstluftwm doesn’t.
Eventually, I may be forced to switch, but at the moment I just see a bunch of unnecessary effort on my part to just get back to what I have under X now. Seriously, what’s the compelling reason for me to use Wayland?
I bought an AMD gpu to use sway, I feel like the fuckers owe me 50 usd now which is what I payed for the gpu.
https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/8000
https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/8001
https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/8002
https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/8191
And it’s devs are not willing to fix the most basic issues like correctly handing a fucking environment variable lmao
https://github.com/swaywm/sway/pull/7380#issuecomment-2453356422
Not to mention I have a different issue that I haven’t even bothered to report because I already know won’t be implemented:
I have 3 displays that right now I use xrandr to merge the 3 displays into one, this is not possible in any wayland compositor today, the closest thing I found was someone suggesting to use gamescope to make a window with the resolution of the 3 displays but that’s a hack and doesn’t work for me because I need the displays to be merged, not just span a single window across them.
There is also no universal
xdotoolor similar in wayland to query info about windows, so you have to learn to use the CLI tool provided by each DE/WM and then handle the data, which in the case of sway it is json formatted.So what used to be a simple
xdotool <args> | grepbecame needlessly overcomplicated and different for each wayland DE/WM.
Do you use Nvidia by chance?
No, never. I mean, sincerely I can’t remember ever owning an NVidia GPU.
For years, my main daily driver was a laptop which had an Intel GPU. When I swiched back to mostly a desktop a couple years ago, I went with AMDs – because I think they make better CPUs than Intel – and so am running Ryzen GPUs on the two desktop computers. All of the other computers in my house are headless micro-servers, ODroids, mainly.
Both the Intel i915 and the current Ryzens are rock-solid and fast under X. I haven’t had issues on Intel GPUs in years, and have never had to do any tweaking on Ryzen. Back in the early days of my XPSes (I’ve owned 3 models over the years) I used to have to muck around with the drivers, but not in the past 6 years. A couple years ago I installed Artix on the XPS and didn’t have to do anything with the drivers or X config – it just worked. Earlier this year I wiped Artix and installed EndeavourOS, and again, X worked and has been utterly solid without any tweaks.
I am aware that some people have issues with X – there’s this tearing thing I’ve read about, but I have never, in all the decades I’ve been running Linux, seen it myself. Even back when I was editing modlines and xorg.conf. In all those years I’ve seen a lot of issues with X – missing drivers, poor GL performance, difficult configuration – but never that tearing thing. I can imagine if I did, I’d be glad for a solution, and would be eager to switch.
I can’t log in or shutdown on Wayland. Switch to X and it works fine.
I’m sure it’s fixable, but why should I have to?
This is a wild question to ask about Linux lol
I want a computer that works, not a perpetually unstable Jenga tower. I don’t think that’s unreasonable!
You can fix it yourself by switching distros or desktop environments. Plasma 6 on Wayland is an amazing experience compared to Plasma 5 on X11.
Man… I’ve never even used anything but Xorg (I rarely use Linux; I just use it on a media server and I haven’t needed to touch that thing in so long). This Wayland thing must be pretty good.
If everything is right, you won’t notice any difference. XOrg is very old and insecure and Wayland isn’t. That’s the difference.
X isn’t really insecure.
Isn’t one of the problems with X that applications can log your keystrokes in other applications and record your screen? Obviously you shouldn’t be installing compromised software, but who knows if Borderlands 2 now includes some malicious code in its DRM or something.
Been using Ubuntu since 2008… looks like this will be the last year for me.
I’d be surprise if you notice the difference.
Other mainstream distros cannot even be installed by blind users because screen readers are broken on wayland
the ludwicks of Void Linux ftw!
i’d actually like to do something else with my lifetime besides constantly being tossed around for no apparent benefit. i’m sure there is a good excuse. There always is.
