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.
X11 is dead don’t bother with it. The same people who wrote X11 are working on Wayland because X11 became to here maintain.
X11 is still being actively maintained. It isn’t an install risk or anything like that. It isn’t going to add any shiny new features, but not everyone needs shiny new features. (That being said, if Wayland works for you, go ahead and use it. Just don’t spread FUD, please.)
I wish the distributed computing utopia where we would send X windows over the network came true, but unfortunately it didn’t, and the whole X11 paradigm is inadequate for the modern tech reality
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?
Nope. But you can find ydotool 🙄
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.
