I like XFCE because is simple and my PC is a toaster with an NVIDIA card so…whenever I have XFCE on Wayland I’ll switch to it.
rstudio and octave is holding me back T_T
This is what I am going to think about every time I am being stubborn and refusing to move until all my demands are met. “I shouldn’t back down, I’m Christopher fuckin’ Walken!”
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.
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.
I’ve considered switching several times in the past, but each time there was something I needed that was not supported (e.g. - this issue with Zoom screen sharing)
In the last of these times I found no such dealbreaker, but I did want to try a dualboot setup - or dual-login, actually, because I should be able to switch at the greeter - first, to make sure I’m not breaking anything I need for work. This required switching from LightDM to a display manager that supports both X11 and Wayland. I don’t remeber which one I’ve chosen, but I do remember having hard time installing it (I think I couldn’t get it to launch i3 for whatever reason)
I’ve just checked and is seems LightDM supports Wayland now, so maybe it’s time to try the switch again. Being able to use my current DM means I’m not going to risk breaking anything. Probably.
Yeah, so, switching to wayland still break copy/paste from terminal apps, still requires me to disable all hardware acceleration lest firefox freeze and plasma’s effects are visually broken, and it randomly swap my screen on each boot.
Meanwhile, no issue at all on X. I’ll still wait a bit.
I had the same thing. I think I solved it by installing xclip.
Wait, is wayland the reason copy paste doesnt work and inserts weird character and brackets all the time?
I think what you’re having is when the ‘pastee’ application is expecting shift-ctrl-v but you’ve used ctrl-v or vice versa.
That sounds more like escape sequence not being interpreted, but maybe? It’s a mess.
Basically, in some implementations (it’s true for at least KDE Plasma), the console app is never seen as “active” (the terminal emulator is), and as such can’t access the clipboard, something like that. There’s third party program you can use, and plugins for things like VIM, but when you get a step further with remote clipboard it’s even worse. And even when solutions exists, there’s weird caveat like “it will work all the time except if you’ve clicked somewhere in the past few seconds” or something.
I’m sure things will improve over time, but “we’re not there yet”.
Ok thanks, i quiet like kde but it is very annoying to not be able to copy paste without cleanup.
I miss screensavers :(
Me too… :((
Meanwhile I’m here on Wayland because it does things that x11 doesn’t.
Like wreck the playability of your games? ;)
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.
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
If by “WRECK” you mean “improve” yes.
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 think in on Wayland now.
But honestly I don’t know, I’m just doing updates as they come and it just works.
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.
When I take an uber, I don’t care whether the car has an automatic or manual transmission. But I care what MY CAR has! Especially since there isn’t a shop for my car and I have to do all my own maintenance. Like, init/systemd is a huge architectural change, it’s weird to you that people who depend on their computer to perform whatever function gives their life meaning and viability want to have a functional grasp of their system? That’s a big change to absorb for essentially no practical benefit to the problem domain.
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.
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”.
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.
Nvidia?
Not even, amd on both my laptop and desktop, but still lots of issues. None of them major, but it adds up.
In my eyes, it’s the same deal as conservatives coping with the changing world. There is a version where they just shut up and let the rest of the tech landscape improve while they happily stick to the X they know (X.org or even XLibre).
Bring in politics is a choice
You aren’t wrong though
Unless I’m terribly misunderstanding the word’s meaning (or anglophones once again redefined a word to reflect their current sensibilities), “conservative” doesn’t automatically imply politics, just that someone is resistant to new ideas. A person who only listens to music produced before the 20th century and goes into a rage when video game music composers are mentioned is a conservative, but not in terms of political views.
while they happily stick to the X they know
Getting left behind is the natural and inevitable consequence of obsolescence.
Huh, why do I hear someone shouting about Windows 11 requiring TPM?
Yes, the people who refuse to either upgrade to Win11-compatible hardware or move to an OS compatible with their existing hardware will eventually get left behind. Both in terms of security and compatibility. It’s happened many times, from the fall of AGP in favour of PCIE, to every time Intel inroduced a new CPU socket. X11 is the next.
I’d have to change desktop environments, because my current one only has “experimental” support in the latest version, and my distro is years behind, anyway. Your choices are pretty much KDE, Gnome or building your own desktop with a standalone window manager, and I don’t like any of those options.
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
I love your metaphor because it is exactly the kind of pedantry that is usually at play with X11 vs Wayland.
“I can’t take an electric uber because it has an effective range less than 400 miles!”
Who the fuck takes a uber to a destination over 4 hours away?
A normal person rents a car, takes a bus, catches a train or buys a plane ticket. Ain’t no one faring a uber for a long trip to another city. But that’s exactly the kind of complaints from people obsessively clinging to X11. They have a hyper specific use case or workflow that almost no one else uses.
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.
when endeavour switched over to wayland my session just completely stopped working. couldn’t get past the login screen. had to reinstall xorg from tty. not touching that again until i get new hardware.
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
Give me server-side decorations, or give me death!
(won’t add the whole of GTK as a dependency, so that my input handling can be handed over to whatever is GTK doing.)
What’s always funny to me when someome brings up missing features of Wayland is how, apparently, the missing features of X11 are getting pushed under the table or somehow also blamed on Wayland in some twisted way. Like, holy shit, compare the display settings of KDE on a modern display between Wayland and X11. My laptop didn’t even show a third of all options anymore.
Sure, it will be nice once Wayland can do a few things (better), the current development push surely helps. But it’s not like X11 can do everything either.
I can’t copy/paste from a terminal program to a GUI program under wayland without jumping through hoops and configuring every individual program to use some variant of a DE-specific utility that bypass wayland’s model to peek/poke into the clipboard.
That’s not a minor feature to me. And in my (and probably some other people) case, trading basic copy/paste for not-yet-implemented differential DPI scaling does not sound too great.
Some people are adamant to not switch, but I swear some people are so adamant to force everyone else to switch without even considering that their use case might not match other people use case, it’s infuriating. It’s not like me staying on X will degrade everyone else’s experience of the new shiniest thing.
Distribution moving to wayland might be good in the very long term, but for now, when you have a 3080Ti (a relatively recent card) and it breaks basic desktop composition when switching to wayland, telling people “just throw it out and buy another card instead of keeping your currently working system” is not going to help anyone.
What are you talking about? You can copy-paste from Terminal programs to GUI programs and vice-versa like everywhere else (with the terminal of course needing CTRL + SHIFT + C / V, which as we know is historical to Unix terminals). I’m doing that for years, so does my family. It works just fine.
And bringing up Nvidia now really is bending down backwards to paint Wayland as bad while it’s painfully obvious it’s the driver’s fault. We all know the classic Nvidia driver sucks in more ways than one and loves to break, even Nvidia knows that and works on a replacement. That’s not Wayland’s fault.
Thats not entirely true.
wl-copyexists and I use it, but it’s not fully there yet. Things like slackadays/clipboard are still fucking around with weird Wayland issues.I’d like better clipboard support, but
alias c=wl-copyis good enough most of the time for me. And it works in neovim as well.
Yeah. “Feature parity or get out”, like dude we’re long past feature parity.
Wayland supports so much more stuff than X11 does, and what does X11 have that Wayland doesn’t? X forwarding? Just use a modern remote desktop solution, all X forwarding was doing in “modern” times (read: the 21st century) was streaming pixels anyway, just less efficiently than modern remote desktop.
Yeah. “Feature parity or get out”, like dude we’re long past feature parity.
Ok, replace the xfce/KDE wm with something like i3 and then keybind all of the commands that aren’t wm specific through a global hotkey daemon like sxhkd.
If you’re waiting on Wayland to reimplement the thing that made X11 a monolithic unmaintainable mess, you’ll be stuck on your rotting platform from the 80s for a while.
Multi window apps are still broken, and the wayland protocol guys have been dragging it for more than two years
Honestly which app do you use that makes use of multi window rendering?
The main one is KiCAD (electronics design).
They have a good article on the challenges they’re facing on Wayland, worth a read https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support/
I don’t, but some people like multi window GIMP, and apparetnly several applications in the automotive (kiCAD for example) and scientific field
People who like multi window gimp must be a very special kind of nerd. I used it before single window mode was added, but when it was I never looked back. Positioning each subwindow in a way that didn’t suck was such an absolute pain
But that pain was once. And then you shoved that config into your dotfile svn and never did it again. Mine has followed me since like 2010.
(This is not me taking part in the wl/X11 argument. I am just one of those multi-window gimp nerds)
Hold on, so I can’t run Transmission that has the torrent list in one window and torrent details in another window? Only one single window per app? What insanity is this.
Every app I know opens a window for the preferences, how is this solved in Wayland? Even just the typical Explorer-style file manager requires multiple windows to function. And of course, I always have a dozen Firefox windows open.
Oh multi-window works, it is mostly just that applications cannot geometrically position them themselves. There are other small issues, but thay is the main one I hear. It is a non-issue for things like settings and Transmission, since you just open another window and do not really care exactly where it os relative to the other ones. It often ends up being on top. For multi-window Gimp it is worse, as it is toolbars and modules, and the app wants to place them precisely relative to one another. This is currently not working in Wayland, but they create new extensions all the time so it is only a matter of time IMO.
Thanks for the explanation. As it happens, one of my irks about the Windows version of Transmission is that it doesn’t remember the position of the torrent-properties window. I want the list on the left, the details on the right — particularly since Transmission reuses the details window, essentially treating it as a pane. This worked splendidly on MacOS.
I still use X forwarding.
It works just fine using xWayland, and X forwarding has always been so janky there is no chance to notice any difference caused from using xWayland instead of native.It will surely take many years and well established wayland native remote tunneling before anyone thinks of ditching xWayland.
Waypipe has worked very well for me.
