With the 2026.08 ISO release, Artix switched back to Xorg. The switch had been decided soon after the 2026.04 release, due to the unusually high amount of XLibre-related bug reports on our forum and started with our weekly ISO images. This resulted in backlash from XLibre and a veteran Artix developer, Artist, was targeted and harassed, which led to his resignation.
Those XLibre developers must be lovely people…
Wayland was rough a few years ago and people who tried it then before switching back to X11 think it’s still the same.
The Wayland devs have been hard at work hammering out all the edge cases and getting Nvidia’s drivers working properly, so a lot of stuff that didn’t work in 2022 or took effort to set up works out of the box now.
Do they have all of these yet? Save window positions; use global hotkeys; use global clipboards; use something like .XCompose or xmodmap to edit keyboard sequences; connect to the session with remote desktop software eg.: Teamviewer; have good graphical performance (Igor Ljubuncic published an interesting piece on that one); allow multi-window applications to correctly place their windows relative to each other; support accessibility features especially in a non-intrusive way; not require every app to implement the entire graphical stack on their own (wasn’t the point of a display server to avoid that???); not call basic composition features such as placing a window on top “niche”. I could go on, but hopefully the answer is I won’t have to.
KDE has nearly all of these now. Not all of them are official Wayland protocols (I think global keyboard shortcuts fall under that umbrella still). Some of the issues you’re complaining about I’ve never even seen a Wayland desktop have (eg not letting you set a window to stay on top, literally every wayland desktop I’ve ever used has had this).
And graphical performance for Wayland native apps has been on par with or superior to xorg for a while, however running software through XWayland does add some latency, so for very fast-paced games running in Wine, X11 is still the move.
Mostly, yeah.
I’ve never edited keyboard sequences, no idea. Same for accessibility features, really.
And every application has been implementing its own rendering for years, nobody’s using X11 to draw shapes and text like its the 80s.
I’m gaming on Wayland. Performance is good. The way freesync still works with a youtube video on a second screen is nice.
I also want to point out that the Wayland devs are, by and large, the exact same people as the X11 devs. These aren’t white monster fueled hotshots working for a FAANG with a massive case of Not Invented Here. The people who knew X11 best designed Wayland from the foundation up to be the better solution.
It turns out when the people who knew X11 best decided there was no more polishing this turd and it was time to start over, they knew what they were on about?