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.
Wayland is more secure than x11 by design and more concise in scope. Notably it supports contemporary display technologies like display independent scaling, VRR, colour space (HDR) and several others.
Wayland is made by the x11 people.
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?
Uinput and libinput are the proper tools and they both work.
Also, the keyboard configuration is done with xkb
There’s ydotool
Nope. But you can find ydotool 🙄
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 vs. X (and Flatpak) fit this perfectly:
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’m a bit surprised you didn’t find much searching the web, because this is one of the most hot topics in Linux and everyone has an opinion and discussions are endless.
I use Wayland for years by now and it improved vastly during that time. One of the advantages over X11 I appreciate is the better handling of multiple monitors, with different resolution, refreshrate and VRR in effect. This was simply not possible in X11 in this form. I like its more secure by design, in relation to keyboard input. X11 can read all keyboard input by any application at any time. Wayland works different here, but for the time being I enabled X11 compatibility for this in KDE, until a all applications support Wayland fully.
Think twice before abandoning X11. Wayland breaks everything! is more of an anti Wayland posting, but its good to have a view from all angles. So I post it here.
Have in mind that Wayland improved in recent years drastically. Searching the web is either full of Ai nonsense or old content about the old state of Wayland. Also it depends which desktop environment you are using, because some are better at Wayland than others; notably KDE is on the front regarding Wayland. So even if some Wayland features are already developed, does not mean that all desktop environments supports them already.
Jesus, there’s so much FUD in that gist. A lot of information out of date and emotional tone to the brim. Makes you wonder who’s putting that much time and effort to support an outdated system like x11 and what they gain from that.
The reality is that the main desktop managers, and by extension the most popular distros are abandoning x11, so that’s just a silly hill to die on.
X11 is dead don’t bother with it. The same people who wrote X11 are working on Wayland because X11 became to here maintain.
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.
On my 2014 PC I’m using Fedora 44 with KDE, which defaults to Wayland: not problems whatsoever, but some applications say “Wayland support is experimental, beware”.
I switched to X11 after a suggestion to debug some issues with a game. The issues was not fixed, all the other applications I’ve tried are still working flawlessly. PLUS the KDE night light feature is working (was not in Wayland). So I stayed with X11.
On my wife MacBook (2015) I installed Kinoite, defaults to Wayland. Everything works, but Rustdesk renders VERY small. I have not tried X11 on that, and will not try it.
Try both with all your applications and setups and choose the smoother experience. Make security a secondary priority: if it was the first you have less attack surface sticking to terminal only.
Wait, you installed Linux on a MacBook?
Yes: it was the only way to update the software inside. It was so old some pages refused to load, and was really slow. It was a painless and quick procedure and it has been working better than ever since then: decent hardware with (now) very good software.
This is… decent
You always could do that before the M chips
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…
As someone who has used X11 and Wayland, it doesn’t matter for the typical user. If you, like me, have a penchant for some smaller desktop environments like XFCE or window managers, you will be stuck with X11, but many are already working on porting to Wayland.
Couple edge cases for gaming, namely screen tearing on some X11 configurations and certain Nvidia hardware running into issues on Wayland. For multi-monitor or high DPI users, Wayland handles per-monitor DPI and fractional scaling far better than X11. Maybe a couple more edge use cases for remoting into the desktop, but Wayland support is also improving quickly on that end. In any case, Wayland is by design more secure than X11.
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.
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.
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.
Wayland is (part of) the modern solution to the problem that was previously tackled by X11. As such, it comes with improved security (read: keyloggers no longer have a field day) and features (read: HDR, VRR and no screen tearing) that one might expect in 2026. Furthermore, it breaks up the monolith of X11 and thus adheres better to the Unix Philosophy[1] (if that happens to be something you care about). Finally, Wayland has basically come (as part of the plan) to replace X11. So, it will continue to improve as a platform while X11 will remain stagnant.
In the current landscape in which Wayland has (finally) fulfilled (most of) its promises, X11’s lifeline are the edge cases in which (for a myriad of different reasons) the Wayland ecosystem hasn’t reached full feature-parity yet. And Wayland’s trajectory would suggest that it’s only a matter of time until those have been ironed out as well.
TL;DR: Use Wayland. Most of the ecosystem has already adopted it and what remains is actively in the process of doing so.
That is; Do one thing and do it well. ↩︎
Wayland has basically come (as part of the plan) to replace X11
As part of whose plan?
The very same people that actually worked on X11. Wayland is basically X12.
The project recognized that a complete redesign was required and they followed through.
The X11 developers
It depends heavily on your hardware and workflow.
Wayland can be a great experience and I personally enjoy how smooth it feels, but I acknowledge that many people run into some problems.
