I switched to Linux about 1.5 years ago now when replacing my old Macbook Pro with a Tuxedo Infinity Book. I am super happy with the transition, and for the most part my digital life has severely improved as a result of it. There’s one thing in particular though that I haven’t fully grasped or understood despite all the talk about it, and that really has mostly caused confusion on my part, and that is Xorg/X11 (I don’t know the difference…) vs. Wayland.
I started out with Tuxedo OS 1 and 2 running KDE Plasma 5.x.x, and thus have been on X11 for the most part since switching to Linux. I never dared switching to Wayland myself. However, they somewhat recently started offering optional upgrades to Tuxedo OS 3 running KDE Plasma 6 where Wayland is the default, and I took the plunge. The only real difference I noticed was small annoyances that I had to fix. Glitching windows running on XWayland and having to configure some .desktop-files to force apps to launch natively in Wayland. Apps not showing the correct desktop icons but the generic Wayland logo instead, making Alt+Tabbing a bit more difficult because it is harder to tell applications apart. Annoying smooth scrolling (I don’t want scrolling to have as much friction as polished ice) activated in all kinds of applications that I seem to have to turn off individually. Nothing breaking (though I haven’t dared booting with my Nvidia dGPU yet in fear of breaking something irreversibly…), but I haven’t noticed any improvements either, and I find it a bit frustrating not knowing where to make the necessary changes and always having to search for it seemingly on a case by case basis.
Now for instance I was updating FreeTube to a new version, and the flags I previously added to the ́.desktop’-file suddenly doesn’t work anymore (--enable-features=UseOzonePlatform,WaylandWindowDecorations --ozone-platform-hint=auto). The application won’t launch unless I remove them, but then it launches under XWayland instead. Not that I have any issues so far running it like that, but I guess I would prefer to run everything natively in Wayland if I can.
The biggest benefits of Wayland over Xorg are to the developers maintaining it, not to the end user.
The Xorg project has become difficult to modify for new features and fixes and so they’ve decided to rewrite it.
As a result users will eventually see some benefits as Wayland implements features that were difficult to do in Xorg over time. But in the meantime it’s causing everything to be rewritten to support the new standard. And it’s a pain in the ass.
If your application works as you want on Xwayland there’s no reason to try to get it to work on Wayland native. Xwayland won’t be going away anytime soon. Eventually those applications will just switch over to Wayland and you shouldn’t need to think about it.
