Some more on X vs Wayland discussion

Cuppa n' Brew
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I wholeheartedly agree with the following article

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I fall more on the skeptical side of the X11Libre fork; such as Libre Arts - Weekly recap — 8 June 2025

It doesnt fill me with much confidence; happy for others to run the gauntlet of X11Libre but if UM goes down that path I'll switch to a Wayland desktop-based distribution.

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I'm hoping that all the issues related to Wayland "falling short" with respect to X11 scope of functionality at both local and remote Desktop, will have been resolved before Ubuntu commits to switching for Wayland as core integrated engine.

That way, we would all have the best of both worlds! :slight_smile:

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If anyone's interested in KDE's stance on X11 support. Nate published a blog post about it today.

I admire their approach to the transition; but especially:

Our plan is to handle everything on that page such that even the most hardcore X11 user doesn’t notice anything missing when they move to Wayland.

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Today, I decided to switch my work (KDE) laptop from Wayland back to X11. Not bad for 2 months.

It was the little bugs like:

  • Dragging files between apps to open them, did nothing.
  • After unlocking and the monitor was asleep, Electron apps are blurry until resized.
  • When sharing the screen in Firefox, it doesn't integrate that well any more. Firefox lets me share the "Use operating system" window, which opens a portal window to actually select the screen/window. Too many clicks.
  • CTRL+SHIFT dragging didn't create the symlink as it should, it copied files.
  • Menu rolling (click & hold over menus) didn't work in GTK apps, unless I used GDK_BACKEND=x11.
  • My Git GUI client crashed with autocompletion pops up (Qt bug?), so ironically, QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb to use X11 backend. Sometimes the window misplaced itself, depending where I started the app.

I'm happy to trade these nibbles for one bigger X11 (AMD?) bug affecting that machine: When locked, there is a chance the fans spin up because the compositor goes haywire with CPU. The workaround is to restart or stop the compositor - sounds good to me!

Granted, some/most of these are compositor (KWin) bugs. I'm sure they'll get fixed with time.

I haven't tried Wayland on other desktops (well, maybe briefly on Ubuntu/GNOME, but not serious work) so I am curious how things will pan out when MATE gains support. Rather then X11 being the thing everyone has in common, it's now largely the compositor's role to take care of this stuff.

Also: a link back to the original topic and a new x11-wayland tag to track this stuff!

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