Which should I use, x11 or wayland?

I hope this is the right place to ask this. If not please feel free to move it.

I just use my computer as a personal home desktop. Which is better for me, x11 or wayland?

Only you can answer that, and your graphics hardware may influence that decision anyway.

To share graphics details run

inxi -Ga

Which destkop environment are you leaning towards? With KDE and Gnome at least, both environments are supported, and you can easily choose to launch either a Wayland or X11 session at the display manager login screen.

I am using Wayland. It is pretty smooth so far. This is my graphics setting.

Graphics:
  Device-1: AMD Ellesmere [Radeon RX 470/480/570/570X/580/580X/590]
    vendor: Sapphire driver: amdgpu v: kernel arch: GCN-4 code: Arctic Islands
    process: GF 14nm built: 2016-20 pcie: gen: 3 speed: 8 GT/s lanes: 16
    ports: active: DP-2,HDMI-A-1,HDMI-A-2 empty: DP-1,DVI-D-1 bus-ID: 08:00.0
    chip-ID: 1002:67df class-ID: 0300 temp: 48.0 C
  Device-2: Logitech HD Pro Webcam C920 type: USB
    driver: snd-usb-audio,uvcvideo bus-ID: 5-4:4 chip-ID: 046d:082d
    class-ID: 0102 serial: 64F1B95F
  Display: wayland server: X.org v: 1.21.1.4 with: Xwayland v: 22.1.5
    compositor: kwin_wayland driver: X: loaded: modesetting unloaded: fbdev,vesa
    dri: radeonsi gpu: amdgpu d-rect: 4920x1920 display-ID: 0
  Monitor-1: DP-2 pos: center res: 1080x1920 size: N/A modes: N/A
  Monitor-2: HDMI-A-1 pos: primary,left res: 1920x1080 size: N/A modes: N/A
  Monitor-3: HDMI-A-2 pos: right res: 1920x1080 size: N/A modes: N/A
  API: OpenGL v: 4.6 Mesa 22.3.5 renderer: AMD Radeon RX 570 Series
    (polaris10 LLVM 15.0.7 DRM 3.49 5.14.21-150500.53-default)
    direct render: Yes

Hard to say.

Personally, I am using X11 with KDE (Plasma). I occasionally try Wayland, and it works pretty well. There are just a few minor things that cause me to prefer X11. I don’t think I have tried KDE/Wayland yet since moving to Leap 15.5.

I occasionally login to Gnome, which I also have installed. And I normally use Wayland with Gnome.

How well Wayland works might also depend on your graphics card. I’m using Intel graphics.

1 Like

Give them both a try and find out :slight_smile: I found Wayland cleaner in some ways, but for some things it made the text look blurry and unbearable, some features such as Night Light being unavailable, and some programs have plain refused to run (for me on KDE, other environments may vary). It also depends on which release you use, Leap will have any problems you encounter for some time, but maybe not so much in Tumbleweed.
Aside from the general overview, I prefer X11 myself, it’s just worked better for me.

1 Like

For Leap users wanting to test/use Gnome or KDE Wayland, I recommend using current Gnome or KDE environments provided by the pertinent repos described here:

https://en.opensuse.org/GNOME_repositories
https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:KDE_repositories

Yeah, I just wanted to know if it was mature and everything worked right. It’s always had a bug or two for me, plus I don’t know if there is some advantage to using it for a single desktop non server user.

Is x going eventually going away?

I am also using X11, though I did tried Wayland.

I did read that people say Wayland is more secure and modern than old X11, but this does not points to the fact that X11 is not usable.
One can easily continue to use X11 without any troubles.

To me, it seems that when GNOME first made Wayland as default compositor, then other DE like KDE also began to rush to adapt the Wayland, even though X11 didn’t pose any issue in usage.


Since X11 is older than Wayland, hence majority of software/applications would have been designed for X11 only. And X11 can be made compatible with Wayland via XWayland, but Wayland is still not completely backward compatible with X11.
The best thing will be if there exists a complete replacement for X11.


I recommend that you should try both of the compositors, and continue with which you got better user experience !

:grinning:

It is fair to say it is ‘maturing’, and for me it works without issue. Some legacy X11 applications may present issues of course, (I don’t tend to use such applications), and some users experience issues with multi-monitor display environments, especially with mixed display resolutions, (again not something I have to deal with). In short, test and decide for yourself. Bugs are actively being squashed when reported, and there are some significant improvements offered over X11-based desktops now.

1 Like

That’s an issue I encountered too with chromium based apps and browsers using GNOME and fractional scaling. Putting it back to 100% fixes it but makes everything so small on my laptop screen.

Worth considering while starting the session :slight_smile:

I have recently switched to Gnome. I have found that I really enjoy Gnome. My introduction has also introduced me to Wayland. Wayland is incredible. I love it. Alas I must admit that at least two of the wine applications I tried to run would not act as expected in this environment and I switched to an X11 environment. I have had to sacrifice some of the former appreciated functionality and that sucks.
My point is that Wayland works great and if you don’t use wine then you should use it.

1 Like

If you want to use your computer for gaming and you have a Nvidia-card, X11 is still the better option.
If you do not use your computer for gaming and you are happy with GNOME, Wayland might be a better choice.

Next major version of Wine should be Wayland native, so in some months the problem will go away.

Wayland is cool. I use it sometimes when I’m on KDE, but I have some applications that I use on a daily basis that has no wayland support so until the time that all are supported that’s the time that I will use wayland probably when in KDE 100%.

Lotta good answers here. I don’t think we’re quite ready for each other but it sounds like it’s getting there.