X11, or the X Window System, lets your graphical desktop environment display and control windows. Wayland is a replacement for X11. It’s designed to be faster and more secure. Here’s what you need to know about them.
Xorg server is de-facto abandon ware.
Most of the major (commercial) Linux distribution will switch sooner rather than later and they are taking their paid developers with them to work on Wayland.
Xorg cannot muster enough interest to be able to push out regular releases, I think its pretty safe to assume noone will invest energy into support for new hardware at this stage either. The best you can hope fore is that security issues get patched somewhat timely.
So yeah, there’s “no need to switch” because for most users, their distribution will make the choice for them within the next release or two.
The compositor works way more precisely. The tearing is gone, font rendering and high resoltution images are way better displayed. Multi monitor setups are better, including different scales for different monitors.
I think there are more, but these are the improvements on wayland I recognised during the last half a year.
Unfortunately in production use Wayland feels like X.org from around 2000 (before the renaming). I was told not to worry about ‘corner cases’ but when small bugs pop up daily I just can’t drive Wayland on my main office machine, although I’d really like to.
My trouble is the Wayland Desktop session in Ubuntu LTS or openSuSE-Leap silently failing ever so often on different machines after a Wayland update. On production machines that’s not something I can tolerate nor have the time to investigate, with my employees waiting.
I’ve been using Wayland almost exclusively for around 2 years now and have had a way more stable and enjoyable experience than with X. Especially mixed refresh rate, VRR and scaling work way better, and the added security gives me peace of mind that sketchy / insecure apps aren’t spying on me.
Tldr: No need to switch yet.
I admire the endurance of the wayland devs though.
Edit: added tldr
Xorg server is de-facto abandon ware. Most of the major (commercial) Linux distribution will switch sooner rather than later and they are taking their paid developers with them to work on Wayland. Xorg cannot muster enough interest to be able to push out regular releases, I think its pretty safe to assume noone will invest energy into support for new hardware at this stage either. The best you can hope fore is that security issues get patched somewhat timely.
So yeah, there’s “no need to switch” because for most users, their distribution will make the choice for them within the next release or two.
If you’re using KDE, the improvement will be amazing.
Would never switch back
I do. What’s the difference?
The compositor works way more precisely. The tearing is gone, font rendering and high resoltution images are way better displayed. Multi monitor setups are better, including different scales for different monitors.
I think there are more, but these are the improvements on wayland I recognised during the last half a year.
It is so much smoother in literally everything, even on insanely powerful hardware.
Smoother? Can you give a specific example?
Try dragging windows on x, then try on wayland. It’s a very clear difference.
It’s standard on Fedora already. But I remember first hearing about Wayland many years ago. So, definitely Kudos to the Devs 🙂
Unfortunately in production use Wayland feels like X.org from around 2000 (before the renaming). I was told not to worry about ‘corner cases’ but when small bugs pop up daily I just can’t drive Wayland on my main office machine, although I’d really like to.
Give examples? Apart from RDP not being functional I don’t see any reason for a simple office box.
My trouble is the Wayland Desktop session in Ubuntu LTS or openSuSE-Leap silently failing ever so often on different machines after a Wayland update. On production machines that’s not something I can tolerate nor have the time to investigate, with my employees waiting.
LTS is just bad when you need up to date systems.
I’ve been using Wayland almost exclusively for around 2 years now and have had a way more stable and enjoyable experience than with X. Especially mixed refresh rate, VRR and scaling work way better, and the added security gives me peace of mind that sketchy / insecure apps aren’t spying on me.
Yeah, you gonna need to give more context!
Your comment has no baseline.
That was not a statement of my own, I just rephrased the conclusion of the article.