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.
Thanks for taking the time writing this up, it is very helpful for my understanding (and I imagine many others’ as well)! For the things I don’t completely understand for now, this also gives me a lot of additional pointers for what to learn more about to get a better grasp. So it goes straight into my notes for future reference.
Sounds like I should dare to activate my dGPU and reboot to check it out now then :) My biggest worry was that it would be so severely broken that I wouldn’t be able to switch back, but I know that is just an irrational fear - no way Tuxedo would’ve switched to Wayland by default if it broke their own laptops. But I’ve been a little twitchy about larger updates since I deleted KDE accidentally from not properly reading/understanding the prompts during update.
Well in the worst case you can always enter a tty or ssh and try to fix from there. But you can be sure the system will be recoverable.
I took a simplistic approach on some of the things I talked about, but you can use it as a pointer for a deeper dive. Also I realized now that I wrote the comment in really bad English, apologies.
I really do believe the future of the Linux desktop will be exciting, and that’s also thanks to Wayland.
