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.
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.
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
By real user, do you mean a nontechnical user? If that’s the case, the display server isn’t a choice to be made by such user, but by the distro maintainers. Most people won’t notice the difference, because it’s mostly stuff that happens under the hood.
On most distros Wayland is trouble free and x11 is a thing of the past. X11 made some things simpler like screen share with somebody , but Linux is growing large enough that Wayland (that is secure) is the best choice. You don’t want your x11 screen duplicated on a malware attackers screen etc.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
it’s 2026. OP probably only found useless AI slop articles after a couple searches before getting discouraged and asking here
You can’t imagine how sad your comment makes me feel.
I realized this later in my reply too and answered that to myself. Should have read it in full before pressing the reply button, as my thoughts changed a bit during a research phase. I realized its Ai bullshit all over the place when doing research to give links.
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.
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.
I like how you slightly poison the well there ("more of an anti Wayland posting) rather than pointing out that Wayland has very real problems even after >10 years of development.
You accuse me of poison? What nonsense is this? The author is anti Wayland and the entire post is about reasoning why you should not use Wayland. This is anti Wayland, not my opinion, no poisoning, nothing. I don’t agree with that person but still included it here, so we can see others perspectives too. I did not include any opinion or judge of me about that article, so nobody is poisoned by my opinion before reading it.
rather than pointing out that Wayland has very real problems even after >10 years of development.
Why don’t you do that? As you clearly know more than me.
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.
- for most people, use whatever your distro ships with and installs for you
- choosing desktop environments still starts heated discussions – high end, it’s a choice between Gnome and KDE – mid-tier has Xfce, LXQt, Mate, Cinnamon, and more – limited hardware go for IceWM, JWM, FLWM, or similar – want to get your hands dirty? go for a tiling window manager
- X11 is (effectively) abandonware at this point – it’s still getting security patches, but the devs left and started Wayland 17-ish years ago
- XLibre is more political than technical – and I’ll leave it at that
Why is XLibre political?
If we ignore the deeply disturbing political views of the Creator the entire project is meant to be a statement. There’s a conspiracy theory that there was a grand plot to kill x11 by red hat and xlibre is built upon the idea that red hat was holding it back. This completely ignores the real issues that the codebase was pure spaghetti.
I heard that XLibre developers are working on cleaning the codebase. And I strongly believe we still need X11 at least until Wayland is polished enough, which still seems untrue even in 2026. The concerns about Red Hat are not conspiracy, a commercial corporation controlling important parts of Linux ecosystem is a serious threat, so having an alternative is never bad. Linux won’t have a future if everyone just uses Red Hat approved solutions.
I personally haven’t really seen much difference between the two except Wayland eating more CPU and being rather tedious for hybrid (Ryzen/Nvidia) setups (still haven’t resolved it crashing when I change TTY). I’d personally say stick to whatever default your desktop environment runs on…XWayland helps with the whole compatibility concerns at least.
Just my experience though, yours could be different depending on your machine and general setup
Waylad is technically a better idea, the progression of X11, more secure and should be faster and smoother when it’s ready…
But I run into so many incompatabilities still and often janky support via xWayland that I really don’t think Wayland is ready to be the default just yet.
It will be, I’m sure, but for now I spend more time fighting it than I do using it. A bit of snazz in KDE and Waydroid seem to be the only things that actually need it, for me, and so many legacy things just nope right out and crash without going back to x by force.
There is a workaround to run Waydroid on X11, so you can still run it even if Wayland doesn’t support your window manager.
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. ↩︎
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.
I thought I’d never have to care about X11 or Wayland if I was a typical user. I thought it was just a debate for really passionate Linux user.
I turned out to be false since the reason I had bad playback on my HTPC, was the fact that Wayland was preventing the refresh rate of my TV to be adjusted to the content.
Switching to a distro using X11 solved the issue and apparently Wayland doesn’t plan on changing anything about this issue.
Wayland doesn’t plan on changing anything about this issue.
This seems to be a common pattern with the Wayland team. They seem very focused on some technical ideology for how “things should work” to the point of ignoring or dismissing real-world issues.
Perhaps in another 20 years they’ll get around to addressing it.
You can run either. The truth is depending on what you want to do, what hardware you running, and software versions you have available, your experience will be very different.
Personally I run X11 because I’m used to it. It’s extremely stable and the failure points are well known.
The waylandism design really bothers me, and so does the attitude of waylandists. Throwing stuff that works away for no reason, chasing some sort of Android trash ecosystem dream that’s never going to happen.
Whatever man, you’re taking xgamma away from me over my dead body. cocks shotgun. Come and get it.
