Showdown 2024: X11 vs Wayland

28 thoughts on “Showdown 2024: X11 vs Wayland”

• I am seeing a number of comments from viewers about Wayland being slower than X11. Becareful when you are measuring performance of one against the other. First the timings between the two systems are going to be close, and what I am saying is a native X11 application running over the X11 protocol is slower than an Wayland native application running over Wayland. If you run X11 applications on Wayland you will be calling the XWayland translator, and that will add additional time (Linux has to schedule its execution) and that sits between the Wayland protocol and your application, so you incur the time it takes to execute the XWayland translator plus the execution of the Wayland protocol, so yeah its gonna be slower. My comment on speed is measuring two applications written for each protocol stack, and not using the XWayland translator,

• I like Wayland on my Ubuntu that I use on my TV to watch Youtube and stuff. It's the only way to get 4k @60Hz and a smooth experience.
  However on my Ubuntu PC for work I still have to use X because I've got some weird problems with 4 monitors connected to it, I was not able to make screenshots, OBS also had issues capturing video, and I am not able to use Barrier to remote control mouse and keyboard because there seem to be some features missing that enable mouse control from a user space application. I don't know any more about the details here. But yeah, unfortunately it's still no alternative for me although I really like it on my TV Ubuntu. Maybe I should try it again when I have upgraded to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS in a few months.

• Sorry, Wayland, the lack of network transparency is showstopper for me. Once you learn the joys of remote execution, it's hard to go back.

• There's so much wrong with wayland, I don't know where to begin. Half of my Linux workflow just do not work under wayland, and probably never will.

• At the moment I'd rather stick with tried and trusted (?) X11. Just because X11 is old doesn't make it rubbish just as because Wayland is "new", doesn;t make it better.

• Ubuntu budgie has begun also transitioning to Wayland

• Linux is a Wasteland.

• So, XWayland is the WINE of Wayland?

• Honestly if Wayland was called X12 I bet most people complaining about Wayland would be much more supportive of it. There's just not enough understanding of WHY Wayland is necessary.

• My laptop has wayland because waydroid. I could not find anything to replace the applet I use in waydroid unless I want to try a windows app and use wine… I should write a native linux application I know but I have other things to do right now. All the rest are X11 because I use too many X11 native applications… one in particular that has trouble with wayland the odd time.

• Based upon the comments on this video… someone needs to check on the X11 users, they are not alright 😂😂

• Thank´s for making this video. Your amount of knowledge and experience is very much needed. Just one question. OpenBSD forked Xorg many years ago and they call it "Xenocara" and uses it´s own DM called "Xenodm". Being OpenBSD it has to be very security focused. And one thing I know it solves is the X11 problem with it having to run as root. Now, my question is why we don´t hear anything about distros looking at Xenocara for an X11 replacement. Is it just that they don´t know about it? I mean OpenBSD is the birthplace of many good things that developer like to use, for example OpenSSH, LibreSSL, Doas etc (Google "OpenBSD innovations" and you find a long list).

  I am much to uninformed about the details about X11 vs Wayland. But as a hardcore FVWM lover I will probably be stuck with X11. I don´t think FVWM ever will work under Wayland and I guess most of the contents in my .xsession won´t fly on Wayland (?). Heck I still use Xclock. And occasionally I use X11 forwarding too.

  So before this get any longer, do you have any ideas if OpenBSD´s X implementation should be something distromakers should at least be aware of? (and please excuse any quirks in my English. I´m not a native speaker)

• As always thanks DJ👍!

• Another big showstopper for me, no global hotkeys. I just tried out a few programs on sway, deadbeef (my musicplayer) indeed doesn't have supporting global hotkeys even though I set those and it works flawlessly on X11.

• I've been using Debian for many years and Gnome for most of that time but recently my display got reduced to lower resolution with updates so I tried updating my Nvidia drivers but that led to not having a desktop anymore! I have two computers and it happened to both of them. Everything works in Wayland except rendering in cycles in blender and as soon as I install Nvidia it never boots to a desktop again. I tried Arch and had little trouble getting everything to work. Even several updates later, and Arch updates a lot more often than Debian stable, it's still fine even though I'm not well versed in Arch. It seems rather malicious to me that a distro that prides itself on stability pushed that hard. Especially since I don't bother updating very often and apparently didn't half to on my own for this to happen… I just hope Arch continues to be as slick as it is so far.

• I think there would be less resistance to Wayland if the compatibility hadn’t been trashed with older programs and they’d just developed the same features into a new X12 instead. I think that would have changed everything.

  If I could have the same functionality / compatibility of X11 and cleaner and more secure, I’d take it in a heartbeat.

  I’m very frustrated about the security issues in X11, and its horrid architecture and bloat, but Wayland gives me Microsoft styled vibes. I don’t like who are aligning with them as it’s all the wrong people and groups. I feel another systemd moment is coming not too far down the road and people’s choice will yet again be taken away from them.

  It’s probably the end of Linux as we know it if there’s another big split like this again.

• Using Debian with Wayfire (WM) for 2 years and so far for my use it works good except for some portal problems that still need work, but I think wayland still is not a good replacement for X11.

• The Donald Sutherland of Linux! Keep up the great work!

• There is one simple reason why I won't be using Wayland in the next years. There is no tiling window manager compatible with Wayland which is as good for me as the one which I currently am using on X11 (dwm), that is a showstopper. So I will stay on X11 as long as I can, if eventually gaming would get better on Wayland (which is not generally the case yet) then I might use one windowmanager for gaming and the other for all the rest.

• Thanks!

• The X developers went on designing and developing Wayland. There's no contest.
  I've had a tear-free, artifact-free, smooth, scalable, color-calibrated desktop for years thanks to Wayland.
  And even more improvements are coming like HDR.

  X11 Has not had real network transparency for connections with enough latency, as the clients just move bitmaps and events back and forth using a protocol that's not optimized for this use case.

• First SteamOS that Valve released was based on Debian, and it was an OS for home consoles to be displayed on big TVs. Current SteamOS that runs on the steamdeck is an immutable snapshot of Arch.

• I don't care about network transparency, there is already rdp or vnc ,if Wayland offers proper functionality for desktop, then Wayland it is. X11 isn't even being updated anymore except for security patches. So if my distri that wants X11, they will have to go the openbsd route and maintain it themselves. Everyone is whining about Wayland, but are also whining that X is old. Well eventually the bandaid will have to be ripped.

• 2024 is the year of the Linux desktop.

• I'm on the fence about this lighthouse keeper look.

• Great breakdown sir. I was curious about my X11 forwarding, so its not for me, at this time, I have a couple boxes where we use linux apps on our windows PC via X11 – Same at home, I dont want a VM, I want an actual hardware box

• Mouse gestures with Easystroke is cereal to my experience – since Opera, then Firefox… then X11…

• Hi Santa Claus! I know that evdev file in your first diagram. It use to manipulate it to transfer key signals to other keys. E.g. CTRL is on my ö key. Btw. I am using Debian/Gnome on a macbook-air from 2010.

Comments are closed.