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.
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.
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 stable and maintained but not getting new features. It will generally work well for most people but over time it will and is drifting to obsolesence.
Wayland has some flaws but is not basically stable and feature rich enough for most people to use. It is not a complete drop in for X11 and won’t necessairly ever will be but for the vast majorory of desktop users it is.
The problem with Wayland is that there are still issues for people with graphics drivers. Nvidia in particular has had serious issues with it although they are improving.
I personally still use X11 with my KDE set up because i still have problems woth Wayland. Thwyre not as bad as they were but its still not quite stable above for me.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I mean the ELI5 for the uninitiated is that X11 is older, and Wayland was made as the successor to X11. It aims to address issues that a lot of people had with X11. X11 is not in active development whereas Wayland is, and for support for modern tech, it’ll be added to Wayland but not X11. These days I’d advise to go with Wayland unless you either have hardware that doesn’t place nicely with it or you have a specific use-case for X11, i.e. Wayland unless you have a reason not to. Although most “beginner” distros choose for you without prompting you to pick, in which case go with the default (it’s probably Wayland anyway).
If you mean to explain the debate, basically some people have particular things they want to do, or they want to do something a certain way, and it’s not supported by Wayland, usually by design due to things like security concerns or philosophical differences with X11. X11 will continue to work for a long time but it’s not getting new features, so if these issues are a concern with you, you could stick to X11 for the foreseeable future.
The average user is not supposed to notice a difference (apart from maybe QoL differences like performance, screen tearing, etc)—that’s the goal of both projects. It should just display your desktop.
Some things still don’t work on Wayland.
(Like screen sharing with Anydesk, as an example I ran into yesterday)
But at this point, I just replace the thing that still requires X11 with an alternative, or find a different solution.
X11 is dead tech. Wayland has its own issues, but it’s better than X11 in almost every way now, actively maintained, and it’s the current standard.no screensharing seems to work, at least none of those i tested, not even jitsi meet. i get the point of “being maintained”. but but what does it actually do better?
Test better.
- Discord works
- Teams works
- OBS works
- Sunshine works like a charm
- Built-in VNC/RDP servers work
- I think zoom also works
Of course you can expect things with names like “Xultra-Xold-Xscreen-Xsharing-Xtool-11” to not work. Trying any of those and complaining it doesn’t work is just disingenuous and facetious.
Edit: I forgot you had a real question after the misinformation. Here’s some things Wayland does better
- It supports HDR
- It doesn’t tear
- It’s by design more efficient
- It’s more secure
- It actually support track pads with kinetic scrolling (if you think kinetic scrolling works on X11 it means you don’t know how it works)
- To crash the screensaver you need to crash the whole desktop, which means you don’t get unauthorized access to it
- It actually supports multiple monitor (with different resolutions, different scales and different refresh rates)
- They just merged actual support for multiple GPUs (xorg doesn’t have that)
- It supports explicit sync (xorg supports just enough to run inside Wayland)
- It’s supported by Nvidia GPUs (for X11 you need to use Nvidia’s closed source bespoke implementation of xorg)
But it’s just to name a few, you know…
What you listed is heavily dependent on compositor. Screensharing for my wayland setup meant setting up 6 deamons that talk among eachother. It’s not difficult once set up, but still…
Yup. Zoom works, so does google meet.
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 (and Flatpak) fit this perfectly:
Honestly, on a running system with average hardware, the average user won’t notice any difference. Depending on your de/wm of choice on x11, you may have to swap to something similar but different, but there it. Depending on what you used, something will require different solutions, like screenshots, but 90+% of stuff, there is no difference.
I’d like to chime in on the “average hardware” claim.
The idea that Wayland is more demanding to run than X11 is a misconception.
Mutter (Gnome’s compositor) and kwin (KDE’s compositor) are more demanding than xorg plus a simple window manager. Usually that’s what people used to compare when they said that Wayland is demanding, and now they just keep repeating it.
In actuality, the Wayland protocol is more efficient by nature. So a light Wayland compositor (e.g. labwc) will run better on limited hardware, than a light X11 window manager.
Tho, Wayland requires proper EGL support, which you might not have on some old exotic hardware (e.g. a Tegra 2/3/4 tablet).
The example I usually make is:
- Dig up an old intel atom netbook (it’s old and
- Try using regular lxqt on x11
- Now try lxqt on labwc
- See which one you’d rather use
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.
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?
There’s ydotool
Uinput and libinput are the proper tools and they both work.
Also, the keyboard configuration is done with xkb
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…)
Which is on Wayland
Nope. But you can find ydotool 🙄
One thing that’s annoying in Wayland is new window placement where app can’t control it at all*. Wayland would place it on a screen it wants. This gets hugely annoying when you have more than one monitor and/or virtual desktops and you’d want to restore billion of browser windows, for example.
- A solution is being worked on, luckily
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.
