Hey Community,

Since I just read a post about the X11 vs. Wayland situation I’m questioning if I should stay on X11, or switch to Wayland. Regarding this decision, I’m asking you for your opinions plus please answer me a few questions. I will put further information about my systems at the bottom.

  • What are the advantages of Wayland? What are the disadvantages?
  • I do mostly music production, programming, browsing, etc, but occasionally I’m back into gaming (on the desktop). How’s performance there? Anything that might break?
  • what would be the best way to migrate?
  • why have/haven’t you made the switch?

Desktop: Ryzen 3100, 16 Gig Ram, Rx 570 Arch Linux with KDE 144 hz Freesync Monitor and 60hz shitty monitor

laptop: Thinkpad L540 (iirc), i3 4100, 8 GB Ram intel uhd630 gfx (iirc) Arch Linux with heavily customized i3-gaps

  • @Bandicoot_Academic
    6•10 months ago

    What are the advantages of Wayland?

    The big one is proper support for diffrent refresh rate monitors and VRR. Also some security improvment and long term support (X11 probably has only a few years before development stops).

    What are the disadvantages?

    Its still a little buggy in some cases (especialy when using Nvidia hardware) but with an AMD or Intel GPU its more then usable. Some apps don’t play nice with Xwayland but its pretty rare.

    How’s gaming?

    I haven’t encontered any major issues with games. Some games might need launch parameters but usualy you can just google it and find the answer very quickly. Performance its exactly the same as on X (maybe even slightly better)

    What would be the best way to switch?

    On your desktop with KDE you can just select “KDE (Wayland)” in your display manager and KDE should just run like normal but with Wayland. On you laptop you’d need to switch to a diffrent WM since i3 dosen’t support Wayland. Your best bet would probably be Sway since its compatible with i3 configurations.

    Why have you made the switch?

    I wanted to check out how well Wayland works and found that it works fine for me, and so i decided to move. Also X was giving me issues with screen tearing and multiple monitors.

    • Tobias Hunger
      9•10 months ago

      X11 probably has only a few years before development stops

      Development has stopped. The only things that see updates still are those that are needed to run X11 apps on Wayland transparently.