OrbitalMartian

Why I Use XOrg Over Wayland

📕 590 words ⏳ 4 min.

I have been using Linux for the last few years. Over that time, I have used both XOrg Desktop Environments and Window Managers as well as Wayland Desktops and Compositors. But no matter what I try using, I always end up back on X11 WMs — normally i3 or BSWPM — for a couple of reasons.

It Just Works

I know this might upset some of the Wayland shills but it’s true for me, X11 “just works”, everything I want to use works without having to do any hacky, scripty work arounds just to get basic functionality on Wayland; especially when on XOrg, I have had my X11 setup for years so moving it over to Wayland will require a major overhaul of how I do everything — the tools that I use. A lot of my configs use x tools, such as Nitrogen, xrandr, and a couple of others (can’t remember them as I’m away from my laptop all week 🫨).

This has got to be my biggest reason for keep coming back to X11, I like how I’ve got things setup (with minimal work and effort), moving to Wayland would predicate the need to rewrite everything from scratch, which I’m hesitant to do.

Apps - XWayland

Some of the apps I use, don’t work on Wayland - Chromium and Chromium based browsers don’t have native Wayland support and rely on XWayland — which, although does work, has its limitations. While I can get away with using a Firefox based browser (I have recently switched to using Floorp on my laptops and Firefox on my phone), I can’t get away with using XWayland for LibreSprite (a pixel art editor), doesn’t have native Wayland support and XWayland’s issues would hinder my pixel art workflow. XWayland has issues with drag-to-drop and (if memory serves correctly) has issues with file management in apps too (I could be wrong with this), but like LibreSprite has a built in file manager, I think Wayland has issues with that — also I don’t like the way XWayland windows have an odd black border around the app, when on X11, they look perfectly fine and as they should do.

Choices

I love the amount of options for what X11 window manager or desktop environment to choose from. There are hundreds (there probably are close to this to be completely honest), whereas Wayland only has a handful and if you want something decent, that will somewhat work as expected, you’re main options are KDE, Gnome or Hyprland. There are others like Sway (Wayland i3 clone — pretty much), Niri (Scrollable tiler) and DWL (Wayland DWM clone — essentially). But these are definitely for a specific niche of users, not for everyone.

Conclusion

The three reasons I use XOrg over Wayland are:

  1. It just works
  2. Apps - XWayland
  3. Choices

Other people use XOrg for other reasons, such as needing a certain piece of software that won’t work on Wayland, such as monitoring software; others for more “political” reasons, often that they don’t agree with the way things are going with the Wayland project, protocols and the implementation of these, etc. Whatever your reasons for using what you use, the biggest thing should be What works for you?

Have a good one and I’ll catch you in the next one. Byeeee!!!


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