x11 when you try to use 2 monitors that don’t have the exact same atomic composition:
I lol’ed
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
It’s not a pain if you use a tiling WM, and doesn’t KDE remember and restore window positions yet?
alias hc=herbstclient # GIMP # ensure there is a gimp tag hc add gimp hc load gimp ' (split horizontal:0.850000:0 (split horizontal:0.200000:1 (clients vertical:0) (clients grid:0)) (clients vertical:0)) ' # load predefined layout # center all other gimp windows on gimp tag hc rule class=Gimp tag=gimp index=01 pseudotile=on hc rule class=Gimp windowrole~'gimp-(image-window|toolbox|dock)' \ pseudotile=off hc rule class=Gimp windowrole=gimp-toolbox focus=off index=00 hc rule class=Gimp windowrole=gimp-dock focus=off index=1it’s not a pain
Here’s the dozen lines of config I had to write and tweak and debug to make it tolerable
Uh huh. You do you.
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.
I could never get it to work.
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, I know of such “solution”. But what is the point of forcing the change when it doesn’t bring me tangible benefits, brings significant downsides, and only some of these downsides have half-useful workarounds?
I have no problem with whether wayland existing or it becoming the new standard, but forcing people to move in these circumstances seems a bit silly, especially when some issues stem from people having hardware from one manufacturer that represents around 75% of general consumer systems (according to Steam survey, which might or might not be representative but sure brings a lot of people).
Thankfully, at least with the distributions I use, switching back and forth is trivial. But given the circumstances, I don’t really understand the extremely heavy push.
I don’t think anyone’s forcing anyone to do anything. But not a lot of people are stepping to to maintain X
While it’s certainly winded down over time, XOrg is still maintained. Last fix was released in september 2025. Is it enough? It never is. But that’s not really an argument to move from “working” to “not working as well” for now.
I thought most of the maintenance went towards Xwayland, though I don’t follow it that closely
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
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.
Every single person has different problems and priorities, and until hyper specific use cases/workflows work on Wayland, many will stay on Xorg.
I understand and agree. Anyone who has a super specific use case that means they still use X11, go ahead, no one is stopping them. But to complain or trash Wayland on that basis is asinine. Every single change in paradigm breaks someone’s workflow, that’s impossible to avoid. But the responsible thing to do is to adapt either with new tools and resources, or with a slight change in workflow. They act like people are taking away their toy, when in reality it is just adding to the pile of available toys. But they are upset because their toy is old and won’t get repaired anymore, while the new toy is slightly different but a bit easier to clean and repair, so they get upset at the other kids for playing with it. Ignoring that the new toy doesn’t make the old toy disappear.
The problem is many distros are going to stop shipping Xorg, because it is “not needed” anymore.
You should be able to compile it yourself though, even if upstream doesn’t provide it prepackaged
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).
while they happily stick to the X they know
Aren’t there still maintained window managers that support X11?
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 thenAlmost 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
Plenty use it without knowing as it is what the Steam Deck uses in gaming mode.
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
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.
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.
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.
Idk, especially when using the most recent version of Wayland compositors, it’s been great. Solved my display and touchpad issues.
I did have some Nvidia issues but that shouldn’t be surprising regardless of display protocol.
But like… use whatever software you want. Worst case you can always just nest a minimal Wayland compositor like cage or gamescope in your X session.
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.
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.
I will happily switch over once libinput isn’t absolute ass with my touchpad! Or if I could adjust its settings in any meaningful way!! Or if you could let me use my old touchpad driver!!!
Until then you can attempt to pry x11 from my cold undead still-animated hands
Plasma devs are currently focusing on input devices. Ideal time to offer them to help test your device and get amazing support out of it.
Or you could sit on your ass and do nothing, which is essentially gambling that they’ll happen to support it (or your next device) when you’re forced to switch at some point in the future.
Zoom still doesn’t work right on Wayland.
no screen sharing software works on it.
Liar. Proof by contradiction: Everything I use works (KDE Plasma).
- Discord
- Slack
- Teams
- even Zoom, despite being a dogshit pile of hacks
You can include rust desk and jitsi as well
Yeh, zoom works on one of my two main machines on wayland…
See my rant about Zoom here: https://vger.to/lemmy.ml/comment/22183939
tl;dr: if there’s any issue with Zoom, you can always bet that it’s Zoom’s fault. Its bug density is just so much higher than anything else you run on a regular system.
I screen share on Slack with Wayland at work every day
As someone who uses many of its features for job interviews on a Wayland machine, what doesn’t work?
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.
My child will never see more than 8-bit color
I’m sorry to hear about your child’s condition. Hope they can find a cure for it soon, wish you all the best.
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
