I haven’t booted into an X11 environment in maybe 4 years. Wayland has been fine (Fedora + Gnome, Fedora / Arch + Niri). I think this is one of those issues where hardcore users overestimate how much anyone else cares or will notice.
> I think this is one of those issues where hardcore users overestimate how much anyone else cares or will notice.
I don't think users that rely on accessibility featurescount as 'hardcore', and the majority of X->Wayland complaints i've heard center around all of that stuff.
I used X when I started with Linux in my high school. When I finally stopped tolerating macOS almost a decade ago, I started with Wayland only, and never looked back. I even ditched Krita in favour of Gimp, solely because Gimp supports Wayland (from version 3, and on 2.99 before that). To this day, I don’t understand X, like at all. It’s all some super complicated pile to me. While I don’t understand Wayland either, it’s super simple to interact with as a user. That’s all I care about, especially given that Wayland is better with security, multiple displays, has a smaller code base, and whatnot. Each time I see someone says Wayland is unusable to them, I wonder whether that’s some edge case they have, or is it just some habit. I’m happy I don’t need X for anything, so I just wait till most apps would support Wayland.
Remember x11 was initially a client server model, where multiple clients could access a single x11 server. This brought a lot of complexity we don’t use these days
On my end I'm still waiting on several critical-for-me things to be fixed. (first and foremost noticeable mouse pointer lag, but also clipboard over-security, and missing XInput analog)
In my experience Wayland always had problems, so depending on how XWayland works, I'd probably have to drop Gnome if there's no X11 support that's functional and I imagine a lot of others would need to do so (until X11 support is reinstated)
What are some better Gnome alternatives that support X11?
>Wayland breaks everything! It is binary incompatible, provides no clear transition path with 1:1 replacements for everything in X11, and is even philosophically incompatible with X11
Being binary compatible is a moot point, 1:1 replacement for "everything in X11" are not an issue if the subset you need works or has good replacements, and being "philosophically incompatible" is part of the point of using it.
>Even the most basic, most simple things (like xkill) - in this case with no obvious replacement
Yes, you can't use Xkill to kill a Wayland-based application- wasn't that a given. You can use regular kill or whatever means your DE provides (several do).
If your workflows depend on regular use of xkill, you have bigger problems than it not being available for Wayland.
Gnome has been going in this direction for many years now, where it seems to ship based on the principle of "works on my machine." Gnome is also the driving force behind Wayland. Go figure.
I've been using Gnome for years, but, honestly, it just isn't good: seems like it's optimized for very basic use. Something as simple as adding launcher to a panel now requires an extension.
Also Wayland has some problem on my system (Thinkpad / Intel Xe) where it randomly just goes slow, this makes it an easy choice to try things other than Gnome.
As discussed earlier on HN, KDE these days has been the most usable desktop for many users. It is mostly stable, feature rich and can be customized easily.
Yes, fuly agree. And enough time has passed with it being robust and performant that the old bores who used to go on about KDE performance have finally given up bleeting on about that.
I wouldn't bash GNOME as clearly plenty of work goes into it and having two decent DE is good for the ecosystem, but for me GNOME never struck a chord compared to the elegance of KDE - it just feels like the Duplo version compared to KDE
Alright, I tried KDE again - and it's really good. Seems like Chrome-in-Wayland problem I had before is resolved now. And otherwise KDE accumulated all the goodies one should expect from DE over years.
I tried KDE on several different occasions this year, and each time the bottom panel froze on me when trying to configure it, usually within the first minute or two. It felt a bit like I was still using KDE4 when it was first released.
To me a larger version number doesn't signify a more mature codebase, it signifies less mature developer and developer culture, that doesn't care about backward compatibility and semantic versions.
I was working on a carousel library a few months ago. I had made a few stress-test demos so that I could catch obvious issues while I was adding things and tweaking things.
One carousel there had 16K slides.
On Windows both Chrome and Firefox managed that fine. They scrolled from start to end and back without issue and you could see, I think, all the frames in my 60Hz screen.
On GNOME and X11 (dual boot, so same hardware) Chrome was fine but there were issues with Firefox. I was curious so I logged out and logged in with Wayland. On Wayland Firefox was fine too, indistinguishable from Chrome.
I don’t understand hardware, compositors, etc., so I have no idea why that was, but it was interesting to see.
Firefox remains very conservative on enabling modern features on X11. Some distributions force them on, but otherwise it's up to the user to figure out how to do that.
It's likely that some hwaccel flag in about:config wasn't turned on by default. Similarly, if you want smooth touchpad scrolling, you need to set MOZ_USE_XINPUT2
My main Firefox in that setup is from the Mozilla repos, rather than the ESR version that is the default in Debian stable. So, it could very well be that. I will have to check to see what the ESR Firefox from the Debian repos does.
> Firefox remains very conservative on enabling modern features on X11.
So old school throthling if you don't use the "right" version (Apple batterygate, Microsoft wordperfectgate). They could blame it on testing though (we only use Wayland and we are too lazy to test the X11 version)
If you want that feature, then the display server doesn't need to be the one to support it when the display server lets applications obtain and control window positions.
Wayland doesn't let you do that, and it's a deliberate choice.
I love Linux and vastly prefer it to Windows, but whenever people tell me Linux is vastly more stable than Windows, I think of the whol X11/Wayland saga.
I still scarcely know what these are. In fact I actively don't want to know about compositors and whatnot. When I want GUIs, I just want to see them.
I can list many crappinesses of Windows, but stuff like this kinda just works.
Linux is extremely stable. There are some exploits for it, but generally you are very unlikely to accidentally get a virus on it. If you don't update your software, it could potentially run for YEARS without a reboot on Linux. Maybe that is possible on Windows but I have yet to see it really.
If you mean API/ABI stability, the question is far more nuanced. I think most Linux software you are likely to use will run on any Linux distro equally well, although you may require it to be rebuilt for your particular distro. In the worst case there is always Docker. Statically linked programs can work for a VERY long time across distros. Microsoft probably has a bigger commitment to backward compatibility right now, but Linux binary software can be carried forward for many years as well with few/no changes. The Wayland thing is going to upset this stability, but in theory XWayland should make the old stuff keep working.
Most popular distros on common hardware "just work" these days and can be used easily by normal people. You might be confused if you tried to migrate a binary executable forward or between distros and it didn't work, but it is mostly developers and admins who think about such things.
what's the drive to use a nix but 'actively dont want to know' about things?
just need to fulfill some software necessity?
The two most major OSs out there specialize in catering to users that don't want to know how the thing works -- it seems like you're swimming against the current a little bit, no?
also I don't think that anyone has ever called any nix stable and had software politics and human-stuff in mind ; what's meant is that it doesn't crash and burn when you're trying to use it.
Modern unix gives me the choice to know a lot about some parts and stay ignorant about others. I don't think there's anything wrong with being real into, say, the network stack and wanting other nerds to handle the GUI for you.
Everyone deserves freedom. Tinkerers and regular users, software engineers and grandmas, artists and Paint users.
Linux obviously has this nerdy root culture because it hardly cannot. But the freedom it brings is for everyone.
This is especially important in a time where MS has clearly stopped caring about Windows in the way they did in the 90s and 2000s, they largely don't care about consumer windows anymore, as long as Excel and all the enterprise shit stays locked in. So there's nothing stopping them from shoving ads and spyware (windows account) into every inch of the OS because they hope most users won't do anything, and if some small % switch to something else, oh well.
And macOS has clearly also stopped being cared for - most of apples revenue is iPhones and services. They mostly just want to sell overpriced hardware to corpos who need Xcode and to users who are in their walled garden.
We need to respect these users and bring the freedom to them that we all deserve.
Also - I'm a software engineer myself, and if I may be so bold, I like to think im a pretty good one. Certainly well positioned to understand how Linux works. And indeed I have spent enough time debugging weird shit that I suspect I know more than the average Linux bear.
And I STILL have no patience for X vs wayland bullshit. Draw the pixels or get the fuck out of my face. I literally don't care except which one lets me use 2 hiDPI monitors + the laptop display with fractional scaling and closing and reopening the laptop lid isn't some kind of bizarre edge case event. Wayland managed to get that right on Gnome for me as of late. I have a vague understanding of why, but largely just want Gnome to figure this crap out for me so I can run IntelliJ, PyCharm and vscode at the same time without weird artifacting.
This stuff just kinda works on Linux too. This discussion is for distro maintainers (think of them like OS packagers) and power users. If you just install Ubuntu or Bazzite or whatever, it should just work
I mean if you are a normal user and most people are, you absolutely do not need to care about both Wayland and X11. Distributions ship with working configurations. It just works.
Most of the people complaining about the transition just like to nitpick about low level pieces of technology which don’t actually impact their usage at all. It was the same with systemd for at least a decade.
Readit News
[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/file-roller/-/issues/4
I don't think users that rely on accessibility featurescount as 'hardcore', and the majority of X->Wayland complaints i've heard center around all of that stuff.
Little of it has been remediated last I checked.
On my end I'm still waiting on several critical-for-me things to be fixed. (first and foremost noticeable mouse pointer lag, but also clipboard over-security, and missing XInput analog)
David (UI details) beats Goliath.
Wayland and SDL got support this summer.
And Xwayland has had support for past 10 years: https://www.phoronix.com/news/XWayland-Pointer-Confinement
"Think twice before abandoning X11. Wayland breaks everything!"
https://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d...
In my experience Wayland always had problems, so depending on how XWayland works, I'd probably have to drop Gnome if there's no X11 support that's functional and I imagine a lot of others would need to do so (until X11 support is reinstated)
What are some better Gnome alternatives that support X11?
>Wayland breaks everything! It is binary incompatible, provides no clear transition path with 1:1 replacements for everything in X11, and is even philosophically incompatible with X11
Being binary compatible is a moot point, 1:1 replacement for "everything in X11" are not an issue if the subset you need works or has good replacements, and being "philosophically incompatible" is part of the point of using it.
>Even the most basic, most simple things (like xkill) - in this case with no obvious replacement
Yes, you can't use Xkill to kill a Wayland-based application- wasn't that a given. You can use regular kill or whatever means your DE provides (several do).
If your workflows depend on regular use of xkill, you have bigger problems than it not being available for Wayland.
Gnome has been going in this direction for many years now, where it seems to ship based on the principle of "works on my machine." Gnome is also the driving force behind Wayland. Go figure.
Deleted Comment
Also Wayland has some problem on my system (Thinkpad / Intel Xe) where it randomly just goes slow, this makes it an easy choice to try things other than Gnome.
I wouldn't bash GNOME as clearly plenty of work goes into it and having two decent DE is good for the ecosystem, but for me GNOME never struck a chord compared to the elegance of KDE - it just feels like the Duplo version compared to KDE
Dead Comment
I think GTK is version 5, so they have to converge somewhere.
This is an old trick from SW developers to show a suppose maturity: bump the version number.
One carousel there had 16K slides.
On Windows both Chrome and Firefox managed that fine. They scrolled from start to end and back without issue and you could see, I think, all the frames in my 60Hz screen.
On GNOME and X11 (dual boot, so same hardware) Chrome was fine but there were issues with Firefox. I was curious so I logged out and logged in with Wayland. On Wayland Firefox was fine too, indistinguishable from Chrome.
I don’t understand hardware, compositors, etc., so I have no idea why that was, but it was interesting to see.
It's likely that some hwaccel flag in about:config wasn't turned on by default. Similarly, if you want smooth touchpad scrolling, you need to set MOZ_USE_XINPUT2
My main Firefox in that setup is from the Mozilla repos, rather than the ESR version that is the default in Debian stable. So, it could very well be that. I will have to check to see what the ESR Firefox from the Debian repos does.
So old school throthling if you don't use the "right" version (Apple batterygate, Microsoft wordperfectgate). They could blame it on testing though (we only use Wayland and we are too lazy to test the X11 version)
Wayland doesn't let you do that, and it's a deliberate choice.
See e.g.:
https://wayland-book.com/xdg-shell-in-depth/interactive.html
"However, a deliberate design trait of Wayland makes application windows ignorant of their exact placement on screen or relative to other windows."
And: https://hackaday.com/2025/11/11/waylands-never-ending-opposi...
I still scarcely know what these are. In fact I actively don't want to know about compositors and whatnot. When I want GUIs, I just want to see them.
I can list many crappinesses of Windows, but stuff like this kinda just works.
If you mean API/ABI stability, the question is far more nuanced. I think most Linux software you are likely to use will run on any Linux distro equally well, although you may require it to be rebuilt for your particular distro. In the worst case there is always Docker. Statically linked programs can work for a VERY long time across distros. Microsoft probably has a bigger commitment to backward compatibility right now, but Linux binary software can be carried forward for many years as well with few/no changes. The Wayland thing is going to upset this stability, but in theory XWayland should make the old stuff keep working.
Most popular distros on common hardware "just work" these days and can be used easily by normal people. You might be confused if you tried to migrate a binary executable forward or between distros and it didn't work, but it is mostly developers and admins who think about such things.
just need to fulfill some software necessity?
The two most major OSs out there specialize in catering to users that don't want to know how the thing works -- it seems like you're swimming against the current a little bit, no?
also I don't think that anyone has ever called any nix stable and had software politics and human-stuff in mind ; what's meant is that it doesn't crash and burn when you're trying to use it.
Linux obviously has this nerdy root culture because it hardly cannot. But the freedom it brings is for everyone.
This is especially important in a time where MS has clearly stopped caring about Windows in the way they did in the 90s and 2000s, they largely don't care about consumer windows anymore, as long as Excel and all the enterprise shit stays locked in. So there's nothing stopping them from shoving ads and spyware (windows account) into every inch of the OS because they hope most users won't do anything, and if some small % switch to something else, oh well.
And macOS has clearly also stopped being cared for - most of apples revenue is iPhones and services. They mostly just want to sell overpriced hardware to corpos who need Xcode and to users who are in their walled garden.
We need to respect these users and bring the freedom to them that we all deserve.
Also - I'm a software engineer myself, and if I may be so bold, I like to think im a pretty good one. Certainly well positioned to understand how Linux works. And indeed I have spent enough time debugging weird shit that I suspect I know more than the average Linux bear.
And I STILL have no patience for X vs wayland bullshit. Draw the pixels or get the fuck out of my face. I literally don't care except which one lets me use 2 hiDPI monitors + the laptop display with fractional scaling and closing and reopening the laptop lid isn't some kind of bizarre edge case event. Wayland managed to get that right on Gnome for me as of late. I have a vague understanding of why, but largely just want Gnome to figure this crap out for me so I can run IntelliJ, PyCharm and vscode at the same time without weird artifacting.
Most of the people complaining about the transition just like to nitpick about low level pieces of technology which don’t actually impact their usage at all. It was the same with systemd for at least a decade.